Netflix's first home offered room service | Executive of the Year 2013

Originally posted in the Silicon Valley Business Journal

The Scotts Valley Best Western offers reasonable rates and complimentary breakfasts. It also boasts this unique selling point: It was the first home of Netflix Inc.

The hotel at 6020 Scotts Valley Drive is where the streaming-media service rented its first “office space,” in the form of a conference room. Netflix paid by the week.

Call it Netflix’s version of Silicon Valley’s humble-origins myth. It might not be the Hewlett Packard garage in Palo Alto (now a California Historical Landmark), but it fits the bill well enough: Today, Netflix is the largest corporate tenant (and employer) in Los Gatos, with about 250,000 square feet there and 1,000 workers packed into multiple buildings.

It was no accident that Neflix started in Santa Cruz. Co-founder Marc Randolph had originally moved to Scotts Valley to work for Borland, but later commuted to work in Silicon Valley. “So when I was deciding to start my own business, I was completely committed to actually putting in the same town I lived in for a change,” Randolph said in an email.

Read the rest of the story here in the Silicon Valley Business Journal