“We rode around in golf carts, had a tour, and I saw that President Nixon had a gold-coloured toilet seat,” Hastings told The Times in 2006.

After Hastings graduated from high school, he did a year-long stint as a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman before enrolling in Bowdoin College. Hastings joined the Marine Corps while still in school, but later petitioned to join the Peace Corps instead because “[I] found myself questioning how we packed our backpacks and how we made our beds” and “questioning wasn‘t particularly encouraged”, per The Times.

Hastings later earned a graduate degree from Stanford. “I didn't get into my first choice, which was MIT,” he told The Times.

Netflix isn’t Hastings’ first company

Hastings launched Pure Software with co-founders Raymond Peck and Mark Box in 1991 when Hastings was 31 years old, per The New York Times. Hastings described its flagship product to Inc. as a “debugging tool for engineers”.

“I was doing white-water kayaking at the time, and in kayaking if you stare and focus on the problem you are much more likely to hit danger,” Hastings told The Times of his experience running Pure Software. “I focused on the safe water and what I wanted to happen. I didn't listen to the sceptics.”

The company was very successful, and doubled its revenue every year before going public in 1995, Hastings told Inc. Now-defunct Rational Software acquired the company in 1997 for US$750 million. The sale “gave me the means to start Netflix”, Hastings told Inc.

The idea for subscription-based film rentals came from a bad experience with a traditional rental store

“I had a big late fee for Apollo 13,” he told The New York Times in 2006. “It was six weeks late and I owed the video store US$40. I had misplaced the cassette. It was all my fault. I didn’t want to tell my wife about it. And I said to myself, ‘I’m going to compromise the integrity of my marriage over a late fee?’ Later, on my way to the gym, I realised they had a much better business model. You could pay US$30 or US$40 a month and work out as little or as much as you wanted.”

The idea laid the groundwork for Netflix, which Hastings co-founded with serial entrepreneur Marc Randolph in 1997, per Bloomberg. Hastings hasn’t always been the company’s CEO, however. Randolph held the top spot before leaving the company in 2002.

The company received 239,000 subscribers in its first year alone, according to Inc. Users maintained a queue of DVDs they’d like to see on Netflix.com, and the company mailed them out one at a time in then-iconic red envelopes. Subscribers could keep the films for as long as they wanted with no late fees.

Netflix is now one of America‘s most powerful tech companies, but it hasn’t been easy

Netflix went public in 2002, and shares of the company reached a new high in 2011, before Hastings made what former Forbes reporter Brian Solomon called “a series of questionable decisions”. The CEO divided Netflix‘s traditional DVD subscription and its then-fledgling streaming business into separate services with separate fees, sending the company into a crisis.

“We want to be ready when video-on-demand happens,” Hastings had previously told Inc. in 2005. “That’s why the company is called Netflix, not DVD-by-Mail.”

However, Hastings may have been ready for that change long before Netflix’s subscribers were. Customers were outraged by the new subscription options and Netflix’s stock price fell 75 per cent by the end of 2011, per Forbes. Netflix’s subscriber base slowly recovered thanks in part to its critically acclaimed original content, and the entertainment giant now boasts 193 million paid memberships across the globe.

Hastings’ net worth has continued to grow alongside Netflix’s stock price which surged in 2014, and the billionaire CEO was added to the Forbes 400 list of the richest people in America in 2017. He owns about one per cent of Netflix, per Forbes. They now estimate his fortune to be US$5 billion.

Hastings is known for his hands-off management style

Hastings shares the daily responsibilities of running the company with fellow Netflix executive Ted Sarandos, who was promoted to co-CEO in July.

“Incredible people don’t want to be micromanaged,” Hastings once said, per Forbes. “We manage through setting context and letting people run.”

As a part of his strategy, Hastings says he often takes six weeks of holiday time annually. “I take a lot of holiday, and I’m open about it internally,” Hastings said during a 2015 appearance at The New York Times’ DealBook Conference. “Just as you would expect, you often do your best thinking [when] you’re off hiking on some mountain or something and you get a different perspective … or you’re reading something that’s not connected to work.”

Hastings and his family live in Santa Cruz

Hastings and his wife Patty Quillin have two children, per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Despite valuing time off work, Hastings says he doesn’t have any hobbies to fill his downtime. “Unfortunately, and weirdly, I have almost no hobbies,” Hastings told The New Yorker. “I don’t sail, I don’t fish. I’m a pitiful failure as a Renaissance man.” Hastings does enjoy swimming and snowboarding, however, he told The New York Times in 2006.

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Hastings is, though, an animal-lover. The family pets include four rescued dogs, four Nigerian dwarf goats, and 10 chickens, according to a 2014 profile of Hastings in The New Yorker.

Hastings is a major financial backer of the Democratic Party

The CEO spent a total of US$8.1 million on political donations in California between 2001 and 2011, according to the Silicon Valley Business Journal.

More recently, Hastings donated US$2,800 to former vice-president Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign. Hastings is one of 137 billionaires to donate to Biden.

Before backing Biden, Hastings gave thousands of dollars to former Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s failed presidential bid, according to records obtained by the Center for Responsive Politics. Records also show that Hastings gave half a million dollars to Senate Majority PAC earlier this year, a group that aims to achieve a Democratic majority in the Senate.

He also donated US$5,000 to former President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, according to the Silicon Valley Business Journal.

He also spends millions on philanthropy

In 2012, Hastings and Quillin signed The Giving Pledge, the philanthropy pact founded by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett mandating that billionaire signatories give away most their fortunes.

Why hasn’t Jeff Bezos donated as much to charity as other billionaires?

“It’s an honour to be able to try to help our community, our country and our planet through our philanthropy,” Hastings and Quillin said in a statement at the time. “We are thrilled to join with other fortunate people to pledge a majority of our assets to be invested in others. We hope through this community that we can learn as we go, and do our best to make a positive difference for many.”

In 2020 alone, Hastings and Quillin gave US$120 million to fund scholarships for African-American students through a partnership with two historically Black colleges and the United Negro College Fund and bankrolled a luxury training camp for teachers in Colorado.

His pursuits in the field aren’t limited to just providing funding, however. Hastings joined the California State Board of Education in 2000 and spent three years as its president, according to the Silicon Valley Business Journal.

“Being an entrepreneur is about patience and persistence, not the quick buck, and everything great is hard and takes a long time,” Hastings told Inc. in 2005.

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This article originally appeared on Business Insider.