Netflix is reinventing its business. From video games to live sports, these 10 insiders are building Netflix 3.0
In its 27-year history, Netflix has gone through a major transformation from its origins as a DVD-rental-by-mail service into a streaming platform that's watched—and binged—by more than 260 million people today.
Now, with advances in technology and changes to the competitive landscape, Netflix is in the process of experiencing its next big evolution.
Netflix executives are cautious in sharing too many details about their long-term plans for the company, now helmed by co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters. But hints of Netflix 3.0 are apparent in the business segments in which it’s investing. At its core, the strategy involves expanding the Netflix universe beyond its current catalog of streaming content by offering live experiences, products, and games, as well as developing new forms of distribution and monetization.
To execute this strategy, Netflix is tapping longtime company veterans as well as new recruits with specialized skills and experiences. Fortune took a look at Netflix’s newest businesses and projects, and at the insiders leading the charge. Here are some of the key people building the next version of Netflix.
1. Brandon Riegg
Title: Vice President, Nonfiction Series
Year joined Netflix: 2016
As vice president of unscripted, documentary, and sports series, Brandon Riegg manages all nonfiction material in Netflix's content slate. Titles that fall under his purview include Queer Eye, Formula 1: Drive to Survive, and Take Care of Maya. In recent years, Riegg’s responsibilities have grown with Netflix’s expansion into live programming.
Riegg leads the division working on live specials like the Chris Rock stand-up show and the Love Is Blind reunion, the latter of which faced technical difficulties that halted the program. He also oversees Netflix’s foray into live sports programming, which includes last year’s golf tournament between Formula 1 drivers and PGA tour golfers, and the upcoming tennis match between Rafael Nadal and Carlos Alcaraz.
Riegg’s television expertise comes from years spent in executive roles overseeing alternative programming. At ABC, he helped develop the breakout hit Wipeout and managed Dancing With the Stars. At NBCUniversal, he was in charge of series including The Voice, America's Got Talent, and American Ninja Warrior. When Riegg joined Netflix in 2016, it was as director of alternative programming. He advanced to a vice president position managing unscripted originals and acquisitions in 2018 before settling into his current position a year later.
2. Gabe Spitzer
Title: Vice President, Nonfiction Sports
Year joined Netflix: 2018
Reporting to Riegg, Gabe Spitzer also played a huge role in organizing the live golf tournament and tennis slam. As vice president of nonfiction sports, a position he took in April, Spitzer has directed Netflix’s sports strategy, which has largely consisted of producing docuseries following professional athletes through their seasons. Since Spitzer stepped into the role, the division premiered Tour de France: Unchained and Quarterback. It also announced new series on professional runners and the Boston Red Sox Major League Baseball team, following the likes of Formula 1: Drive to Survive and Break Point, the series on pro tennis.
“We want to engage the sports junkie, but we also want to engage a casual viewer or a non-fan by telling the stories that are beyond [those of] a live game,” Spitzer previously told Fortune.
In addition to inking the recent blockbuster deal to stream WWE content, Netflix has negotiated for or expressed interest in rights for Formula 1, cycling, and women’s tennis, according to reports from Deadline and the Wall Street Journal. Netflix is also interested in the NBA rights coming up for grabs in the next year, according to the Sports Business Journal. These reports and the company’s previous practice hosting live events set it up to compete in the world of live sports.
Spitzer has worked in sports television throughout his career. Before Netflix, he served as senior vice president of original programming at Fox Sports, where he oversaw both original and acquired content. He also produced, directed, and showran sports-related documentaries and shorts for ESPN 30 for 30 and HBO. Before advancing to his vice president position at Netflix last year, Spitzer worked as the company’s director of documentary series starting in 2018.
3. Amy Reinhard
Title: President, Ads
Year joined Netflix: 2016
Following the departure of Jeremi Gorman last year, Amy Reinhard became president of ads, in charge of building Netflix’s advertising business into a revenue-driving force. She joined the company in 2016, previously working as vice president of studio operations and vice president of content acquisitions and consumer products.
In just over one year, Netflix has amassed 23 million subscribers to its advertising tier. While it is still a small business relative to Netflix's total subscribership of 260 million, the company has an opportunity to earn big because of the platform’s high engagement, AllianceBernstein analyst Laurent Yoon previously told Fortune. Executives have boasted a “crawl, walk, run” approach to the business, and it is very much still in the former stages. The company is currently working to expand its ad format options for marketers.
Prior to working at Netflix, Reinhard spent 12 years at Paramount Pictures in business development and content distribution roles. She has degrees from Harvard Business School and Harvard’s undergraduate college.
4. Peter Naylor
Title: Vice President, Global Advertising Sales
Year joined Netflix: 2022
Netflix hired Naylor away from social media company Snap in 2022 to help launch the streamer’s ad-supported tier. In his short time at Netflix, Naylor has already seen his former Snap colleague Jeremi Gorman depart, and now reports to Reinhard.
“Building the Netflix business over the last year has been an incredible journey and we’ve done it using the same playbook that has made Netflix the global leader in streaming,” Naylor said at an Advertising Week event in October. “You have to put together the right team and then set the right strategy… We’re not trying to offer what everyone else is offering.”
With Amazon having recently added an ad-supported tier to its Prime streaming service, Naylor will now face increasing competition in his role directing the Netflix advertising sales strategy. Fortunately, he has experience to lean on: Before his two years at Snap, Naylor worked as Hulu’s senior vice president of advertising sales, where he guided the company past the $1 billion ad revenue threshold for the first time in 2017. For seven years at NBCUniversal, he also sold digital advertising across the company’s portfolio of online products, including NBC, CNBC, MSNBC, and Today.
5. Eunice Kim
Title: Chief Product Officer
Year joined Netflix: 2021
Chief product officer since October, Eunice Kim is responsible for the user experience of Netflix. She manages the consumer-facing aspects of the streaming app, including pricing and plan structure, which have undergone changes in recent months and are expected to continue evolving in the coming years. Kim is continuing the company’s global crackdown on password sharing, which executives have credited with adding some of the company’s 22 million new subscribers. New app features are also under Kim’s purview, like the expanded ad formats that Netflix colleagues Reinhard and Naylor are pitching to marketers.
Kim recently opened up to Fortune about potential features coming to the app. She spends a lot of time thinking about how Netflix can utilize the “second screen,” or how users can simultaneously engage with the app on a television and phone, she said. Subscribers could view Emily in Paris on a television and browse the characters’ onscreen styles on a mobile device, for example. They could watch a reality competition show and vote using the Netflix phone app.
Netflix hired Kim away from YouTube in 2021 to lead its Consumer Product Innovation team. She had previously spent 10 years in product director roles between YouTube and Google Play. For more than a decade, she has also served on the board for Cure CMD, a nonprofit working to advance research on congenital muscular dystrophy, a muscle weakness disorder that one of her children lives with. Kim graduated with degrees from Columbia University and the business school at the University of Chicago.
6. Elizabeth Stone
Title: Chief Technology Officer
Year joined Netflix: 2020
Netflix promoted Elizabeth Stone to the C-suite at the same time it did Kim, with whom she works in tandem to deliver new products and features to Netflix users. As chief technology officer, Stone oversees the data science and engineering teams that build Kim’s features, conduct internal and consumer research, and analyze the performance of Netflix content. She also manages the research and development of machine learning models within Netflix. The company isn’t overly vocal about its work in artificial intelligence, but it does use machine learning to recommend titles and personalize subscribers’ feeds.
Stone didn’t start in the tech world, but in economics. After graduating from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she worked as an equity derivatives trader at Merrill Lynch before pursuing a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford. She then held roles as the vice president of financial consulting firm Analysis Group, chief operating officer of health care technology company Nuna, and vice president of science at Lyft. Netflix hired her away from Lyft in 2020 to work as vice president of product data science and engineering. The company promoted her to vice president of data and insights before she took the chief technology role last year.
7. Greg Lombardo
Title: Vice President, Head of Live Experiences
Year joined Netflix: 2019
Lombardo was previously the CEO of Offshore Surf, a venture by American Wave Machines focused on indoor surfing pools. Now at Netflix, he’s hoping to make waves by shaking up the lucrative theme parks business dominated by entertainment industry rivals Disney and Warner Bros.
“We believe live experiences are an incredible way to fuel and sustain fandom,” Lombardo said at an Advertising Week event in New York in October. “People want to experience [our stories] in more deep and immersive ways, especially in those periods of time between new season launches.”
Instead of roller coasters and Ferris wheels, Lombardo’s strategy to lure crowds revolves around Netflix House, a chain of brick-and-mortar locations that will offer dining, merchandise, and live experiences based on the streaming giant’s content. The houses, set to open in 2025, will leverage Netflix’s hit franchises like Stranger Things and Squid Game, rotating exhibits based on whatever is popular at the time. And unlike with theme parks, Netflix expects fans to visit locations multiple times each year, co-CEO Ted Sarandos said during the company’s October earnings call.
8. Josh Simon
Title: Vice President, Consumer Products
Year joined Netflix: 2020
Josh Simon leads Netflix’s efforts to extend its onscreen hits to the real world, from retail shelves to live events. A Harvard graduate who has worked stints at Disney and Function Drinks, Simon was most recently vice president of product and merchandising strategy at Nike before joining Netflix in 2020.
In 2022, Simon’s team leaned into Netflix’s popular Bridgerton series by creating a custom makeup line with Pat McGrath Labs and a pop-up shop with Bloomingdale’s, which sold themed dresses, crystal glasses, tea, and perfume. The company also produced The Queen’s Ball: A Bridgerton Experience, an event that rotated through major North American cities where fans dressed in Regency-era gowns, listened to live music, and watched a dance performance. In the strategy and launch, Simon’s team worked with Shondaland, the Shonda Rhimes–led production company that is behind the series.
“We’re not just looking to create more stuff,” Simon said in an internal interview in 2022. “We ask ourselves whether a given product line or experience allows a viewer to explore the world more deeply, express their fandom, or extends the story in compelling ways."
9. Mike Verdu
Title: Vice President, Games
Year joined Netflix: 2021
With 30 years of experience in the gaming industry, Mike Verdu is in charge of building Netflix’s video games business into something that can have a material impact on the company. Verdu joined as vice president of games in 2021 from Facebook, where he oversaw the developers making virtual reality apps for the Oculus VR headset. Previously, he worked in executive positions at video game companies Electronic Arts, Zynga, and Kabam. With a degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, he also founded three companies—software developer Paragon Systems, PC game publisher Legend Entertainment, and mobile game studio TapZen—all of which were acquired.
Growth is on the agenda for the games segment. “Our current scale—and frankly, our current investment—are both very, very, very small relative to our overall content spend and engagement,” co-CEO Greg Peters said during Netflix’s October earnings call. “We want to really grow our engagement by many multiples of where it is today over the next handful of years.”
Netflix hasn’t disclosed how many users engage with its games, but in October, a third-party data firm pegged it at 2.2 million people, or 0.9% of the platform’s user base at that time. By the end of 2023, user engagement with games tripled from the year prior, executives said in the company’s January earnings call.
At the end of the year, Netflix offered 86 games in its catalog, with nearly 90 more in development. It makes games from its own intellectual property, including Stranger Things, The Witcher, and The Queen’s Gambit. It also offers popular titles like Grand Theft Auto, Oxenfree, and Heads Up.
The games don’t currently contain ads or in-app purchases. Like Netflix’s live events business, games are meant to keep fans engaged in between seasons, which can help drive hype for new launches, co-CEO Ted Sarandos said in the October earnings call.
10. Bela Bajaria
Title: Chief Content Officer
Year joined Netflix: 2016
For other executives to excel, Bela Bajaria must first do her job well. As chief content officer since January 2023, Bajaria is in charge of all the films and television shows that hit Netflix’s platform around the world. Netflix titles have routinely dominated Nielsen’s most watched lists, with Young Sheldon, Fool Me Once, and American Nightmare as recent hits. The company must continue to produce buzzy, fandom-driving content to merit its strategy to build out story universes through games, live experiences, and products. In the coming months, Netflix is releasing season 3 of Bridgerton, a second Rebel Moon film, and Lindsay Lohan’s Irish Wish. Bajaria also spearheaded Netflix’s recently announced deal to stream live professional wrestling for the next decade.
Before Bajaria’s promotion earlier this year, she worked as head of global television and vice president of content at Netflix. She was responsible for greenlighting Squid Game, the Korean drama that broke company viewership records, won six Emmy awards, and inspired a reality spinoff. Before her time at Netflix, Bajaria served as president of the Hollywood Radio and Television Society, a professional industry association of which she is still a board member. She has also worked at CBS, Warner Bros. Television Studios, and Universal Television.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
