I was reading about Reed Hastings’ management philosophy at Netflix when I noticed something that kept showing up in interviews but rarely got the attention it deserved. Before Stanford, before Pure Software, before Netflix, Hastings spent two years teaching high school math in a rural part of Swaziland as a Peace Corps volunteer. He was 22 years old, freshly graduated from Bowdoin College, and about as far from Silicon Valley as a person can get.

What does teaching teenagers in southern Africa have to do with building a $300 billion streaming company? As it turns out, everything.

A College Graduate in Rural Africa

Reed Hastings graduated from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, with a degree in mathematics. He could have gone straight to graduate school or taken an entry-level engineering job. Instead, in 1983, he joined the Peace Corps and was posted to Swaziland, a small landlocked kingdom in southern Africa now known as Eswatini.

His assignment was straightforward: teach high school math. The reality was anything but.

“There were no rules at all. Just use your initiative.” – Reed Hastings, on the Peace Corps experience

The students Hastings encountered had very uneven preparation. Some arrived with solid foundations in arithmetic and algebra. Others had enormous gaps. There was no standardized curriculum that accounted for this variation. No teaching assistant. No department chair down the hall to consult. Hastings had to figure it out himself.

Resourcefulness by Necessity

I wondered what a 22-year-old math major from Maine actually did with his days in rural Swaziland beyond the classroom. The answer paints a picture of someone who was already wired to solve problems by doing, not by asking for permission.

Hastings built a water tank for his community. He took up beekeeping. These were not assignments handed down by Peace Corps administrators. They were things he saw needed doing, so he did them. No approval chain. No project proposal. No committee review.

This might sound like a small detail, but I think it explains something fundamental about the way Hastings would later approach company building. He learned, at a formative age, that autonomy and resourcefulness are not luxuries reserved for senior leaders. They are basic human capabilities that emerge naturally when you strip away the bureaucratic structures that suppress them.

The Classroom as a Leadership Laboratory

Teaching is one of the purest forms of leadership. You stand in front of a room full of people with different abilities, different motivations, and different expectations, and your job is to move all of them forward. You cannot fire a student who is struggling. You cannot restructure the classroom org chart. You have to work with what you have and find ways to reach every person in the room.

What did Hastings learn from two years of doing this in one of the most resource-constrained environments imaginable?

First, that context matters more than control. You cannot force a teenager to learn math. You can only create the conditions where learning becomes possible and let the student’s own curiosity do the rest. This principle would later become one of the pillars of Netflix’s culture: context, not control. Leaders set the strategic direction and share all the relevant information. Then they step back and let talented people execute.

Second, that uneven preparation is the norm, not the exception. Hastings’ students in Swaziland did not arrive as a uniform cohort ready for the same lesson plan. They arrived as individuals with wildly different starting points. The best response was not to standardize everything but to raise expectations and provide support where it was needed. At Netflix, this translated into a culture that judged people by output rather than by conformity to process.

Third, that showing up matters. Hastings was not there for a two-week voluntourism trip. He committed two full years. He lived in the community. He built infrastructure. He earned trust through sustained presence. The Netflix leadership principle of freedom and responsibility only works when leaders demonstrate genuine commitment, not performative engagement.

From Swaziland to Stanford

Hastings returned to the United States in 1985 with something that is hard to quantify but easy to recognize: confidence born from constraint. He had operated for two years with minimal resources, minimal supervision, and maximum responsibility. Starting a company felt, in his own words, “less daunting” after the Peace Corps.

He enrolled at Stanford University and completed his Master of Science in Computer Science in 1988. The transition from rural African classroom to one of the world’s premier engineering programs was dramatic, but the core disposition carried over. Hastings was someone who preferred to figure things out rather than follow instructions.

The Peace Corps didn’t teach Hastings how to write code or build a business. It taught him something more fundamental: that people do their best work when they are trusted to use their own judgment.

This insight would take years to fully crystallize. At his first company, Pure Software, Hastings actually violated it. He layered process on top of process as the company grew, stifling the very autonomy he had thrived on in Swaziland. It was only after Pure Software collapsed under its own bureaucracy that Hastings connected the dots and built Netflix on the principles he had first experienced as a young teacher in Africa.

The Teacher Who Never Stopped Teaching

I find it telling that even after becoming one of the wealthiest people in technology, Hastings kept returning to education. Not as a side interest. As a mission.

In 2020, Hastings donated $120 million to historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), specifically to the United Negro College Fund, Morehouse College, and Spelman College. The donation was directed toward scholarships, with a focus on creating opportunities for students who, like his pupils in Swaziland, might have uneven access to resources but no shortage of potential.

In 2025, he gave $50 million to Bowdoin College, his alma mater, the place where his journey to Swaziland began. The gift was one of the largest in Bowdoin’s history.

Decades later, Hastings would give away billions to education — the teacher never stopped teaching. These are not the charitable gestures of a billionaire looking for a tax write-off. They are the actions of someone whose identity as a teacher never faded, even as his identity as a CEO grew. Hastings has served on the California State Board of Education. He has advocated for charter schools. He co-authored a book, “No Rules Rules,” that is essentially a teaching document, a 300-page lesson plan for building a culture of freedom and responsibility.

The Through Line

When I look at the arc of Hastings’ career, the Peace Corps is not a footnote. It is the foundation. The autonomy he experienced in Swaziland became the freedom half of “freedom and responsibility.” The resourcefulness he developed building water tanks and keeping bees became the bias toward action that defined Netflix’s early engineering culture. The empathy he built teaching students with uneven preparation became the generosity of Netflix’s severance philosophy, the recognition that good people sometimes need to move on, and that parting should be done with dignity.

What a 22-Year-Old in Swaziland Can Teach Us

I keep thinking about the distance between a math classroom in rural Swaziland and the headquarters of a company that changed how the world consumes entertainment. The physical distance is vast. The philosophical distance is surprisingly small.

The same principles apply in both places. Trust people. Give them context instead of commands. Remove obstacles instead of adding rules. Show up consistently. And never assume that someone’s current circumstances define their potential.

Hastings did not learn these things in a Stanford lecture hall or a Silicon Valley boardroom. He learned them standing in front of a chalkboard, trying to teach algebra to teenagers who had walked miles to get to school, in a country most of his peers could not find on a map.

For anyone wondering whether their early experiences, especially the unconventional ones, will ever matter in their professional life, the Hastings story offers a clear answer. The experiences that seem most disconnected from your career ambitions are often the ones that shape your leadership instincts at the deepest level. That 22-year-old Peace Corps volunteer did not know he was preparing to build Netflix. He was just trying to be useful. And that impulse, the desire to be genuinely useful rather than merely successful, became the foundation of everything that followed.