Inside Netflix’s unusual co-CEO arrangement—and why it works

In January 2023, Reed Hastings stepped down from his job as co-CEO of Netflix. It was a title he’d been sharing for about three years with Ted Sarandos. In announcing his move to become the company’s executive chairman, Hastings made clear that Sarandos would remain in place, but would now be joined by the streaming giant’s former chief operating officer, Greg Peters.

“Ted & Greg are now co-CEO’s,” Hastings tweeted. “After 15 years together we have a great shorthand & I’m so confident in their leadership. Twice the heart, double the ability to please members & accelerate growth.”

Ever since, skeptics have wondered: Does this dual-CEO arrangement really work? And if so, how? After all, companies like Salesforce and Oracle have famously tried—then scrapped—similar leadership models. Sure, Hastings and Sarandos had already been co-CEOs together, but that arrangement had felt unique because Hastings, as a cofounder of the company, was clearly in the dominant position. Now, with two smart, ambitious executives sharing the top job, it felt more than possible, to outsiders at least, that egos could get in the way.

Over the summer, as I was reporting a story about Sarandos for Fast Company, Hastings himself acknowledged that the co-CEO structure was what he called “a high performance technique. It’s not for most situations and most companies. But if you’ve got two people that work really well together and complement and extend and trust each other, then it’s worth doing.” He added this caveat, though: “You’ve got to have a very supportive culture.”

More than a year into their partnership, Sarandos and Peters each told me that for them, sharing the top job makes sense. (Sarandos’s role includes running point on marketing, legal, communications, and publicity; Peters takes the lead on product and tech, advertising, human resources, finance, and gaming.) “Having someone to talk to who is not an employee or a board member—who is your peer— is so helpful,” Sarandos said, adding that having Peters as a partner helps combat something all CEOs experience, but few talk about publicly: “It is that lonely-at-the-top thing. The saying came from somewhere.”

Peters agreed. “When there’s a space where we disagree, but then we ultimately defer to each other’s area of expertise, I think we get to better decision-making,” he said. “We have yet to find a real example where, by bringing both of our perspectives and working through it and chewing through it together, we actually haven’t ended up in the same place.”

There have indeed been disagreements, as reported in March by the Wall Street Journal. But as the headline on that piece concluded, “Netflix’s Co-CEOs Are Nothing Alike. That’s a Good Thing.”

Here’s how they appear to have succeeded as co-CEOs where others have failed:

They’ve developed a unified voice

Sarandos, 60, and Peters, who is in his 50s, are very different people. Sarandos, who is based in Los Angeles, grew up in Arizona, went to community college, and worked in video distribution before landing a job at Netflix in 2000. A TV buff, movie lover, and natural schmoozer, he was previously Netflix’s chief content officer (Bela Bajaria stepped into that job in 2023). Peters, who is based 335 miles north in Los Gatos, moved around as a kid—Minnesota and Kansas were among the places he called home. He is all about data. On the way to becoming co-CEO, he was Netflix’s chief product officer and COO. While Sarandos can quote lines from the routines of even obscure stand-up comedians, Peters—who double-majored in astronomy and physics at Yale—prefers to parse the fine points of a full-bodied red wine (he once worked as an engineer at Wine.com).

But the two men respect one another’s strengths and seem to understand that their professional alliance sends an important message—that Netflix is a company built on two equal pillars: entertainment and technology. “People who work in this building think they work at the greatest entertainment company on the planet. And they do,” Sarandos told me as we sat in Netflix’s Icon building in the heart of Hollywood. “And the folks who work in our engineering centers think that they work at the greatest tech company on the planet. And they do.”

They lean on company culture

Sarandos and Peters told me that one thing, more than any other, sets Netflix apart from its rivals: its carefully constructed culture. Its tenets are set forth in a constantly evolving memo, which was most recently updated (with input from all 13,000 employees) in June. The document lays out “how we behave with each other,” Sarandos explained, when I asked him to summarize it. “We don’t have any entrenched camps. We’re honest, we’re curious, we’re candid.” Employees are encouraged to be selfless (putting the company’s interests above their own), to “farm dissent,” and to be the “captains” of their own ideas. Errors are tolerated (you can’t push boundaries without a few mistakes), and decision-making is decentralized (“I’m sure everybody in the Rome office knows more about Italy than everyone in this office,” said Sarandos, explaining why decisions about Italian programming are made there, not in L.A.). By articulating a clear ethos, Netflix seeks to attract employees who will thrive inside a nimble, innovation-friendly workplace. Both men called Netflix’s culture its “competitive advantage.”

As Peters put it, “It gives us a set of behaviors and a set of touchstones that we can use to talk to each other about how we are doing at the meta process of working together to seek excellence. We can think about how we’re giving feedback, and how feedback is received, and [whether we’re] using operating models like informed captaincy to be effective,” he said, referencing a company policy Netflix defines in its culture memo like this: “For every significant decision, we identify an informed captain who’s responsible for making a judgment call on the right way ahead.”

It is within this corporate milieu that the co-CEO approach particularly seems to flourish. Hastings noted to me that one of the reasons he had such faith in Sarandos and Peters’s partnership is that both men had been with the company for years (24 for Sarandos, 16 for Peters). “The three of us have worked through a lot of issues, long before this,” Hastings said, adding that “they both 90% care about the company and 10% care about themselves. So as long as you have people who are very company-first, which is coming back to the culture, then you’ve got a shot at making it work. And then when it works, it’s beautiful because Ted can get tied up in something, and Greg can take over or vice versa. They help each other out.”

They consult a trusted outsider

Netflix’s two co-CEOs confer with a trained professional who helps keep their relationship healthy. Netflix says that the man (whose name they would not share) is an executive coach, one who has also advised Disney Chief Bob Iger and Leonard Lauder, an heir to the Estée Lauder cosmetics fortune.

Whoever he is, he has clearly been helpful to everyone at the top of Netflix. Sarandos said that Hastings first brought the coach in several years ago as he was beginning to ponder succession. “Founder succession is emotional,” Sarandos said. “I think that’s an overlooked thing.” The move was a signal of “Reed having the kind of foresight to know: This is gonna be hard for me.”

It didn’t come completely out of the blue. Hastings has often attributed Netflix’s success, at least in part, to marriage counseling. As Hastings tells it, years ago a therapist taught him and his wife the importance of radical candor—a tenet that’s still highly prized at Netflix. So when Hastings first brought in this coach to talk about the company’s future, Sarandos said, those early conversations were instrumental in helping them think through why other companies’ succession plans “didn’t work, why succession is so difficult, and how bad it is for the business for it to go poorly.”

But since Hastings stepped down, handing the reins to Peters and Sarandos, the coach continued to play an important role. Sarandos described his approach as “light touch,” but “very helpful.” “Remember,” Sarandos said, recalling Hastings’s departure and Peters’s ascension, “you’ve got a founder pulling away. You have a board that has had an incredible shorthand with Reed—and with me too, at the end.” The coach helped Sarandos and Peters think about creating that same sense of confidence with the board. To this day, he still gives feedback to Peters and Sarandos as needed.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise, given Sarandos’s reputation as a cinephile, that while describing how the coach has aided him and Peters, a film popped into his mind: the 2004 documentary Metallica: Some Kind of Monster. “Did you ever see that movie?” he asked, explaining the film’s central plot line: The heavy metal group Metallica, beset by tensions, decides to “bring in a family therapist so the band could get together for the tour.” I hadn’t seen it, but by the size of the grin on his face, I vowed that I would, as soon as possible. “It’s so good,” Sarandos continued. “I’m not a Metallica fan. It’s not that I don’t like Metallica. I just don’t like the head banging. I’m sure they’re the best at it . . . but the film is so great.”

Clearly, this is a man who appreciates the complexity of workplace collaboration (not to mention how satisfying, and profitable, it can be when people work in synch). The next time I had a chance, I dutifully signed into Netflix, only to discover—and this rarely happens to me—that this particular therapeutical headbanger documentary, though once featured on Netflix, was no longer available. Maybe that’s a problem he and Peters can solve together.