Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings founded Netflix on August 29, 1997 in Scotts Valley, California. Randolph worked as a marketing director for Hastings's company, Pure Atria. Randolph had co-founded MicroWarehouse, a computer mail-order company; Borland International later employed him as vice president of marketing. Hastings, a computer scientist and mathematician, sold Pure Atria to Rational Software Corporation in 1997 for $700 million in what was then the biggest acquisition in Silicon Valley history. The two came up with the idea for Netflix when commuting between their homes in Santa Cruz and Pure Atria's headquarters in Sunnyvale while waiting for government regulators to approve the merger, although Hastings has given several different explanations for how the idea came about.