The Netflix culture deck is a slide presentation, "Netflix Culture: Freedom & Responsibility", that Reed Hastings posted on SlideShare in August 2009. Written with Patty McCord, Netflix's chief talent officer from 1998 to 2012, it set out how the company hired, paid, managed and let people go. It became one of the most widely read documents in business, and the model most HR leaders are asked about. Netflix replaced it with a written memo in 2017 and has rewritten that memo twice since.
What the 2009 deck said
The deck ran to 128 slides when it was uploaded (125 in the copy online today), under seven headings:
- Values are what we value. Nine behaviours: judgment, communication, impact, curiosity, innovation, courage, passion, honesty and selflessness.
- High performance. "Adequate performance gets a generous severance package." And: "We're a team, not a family."
- Freedom and responsibility. "Responsible people thrive on freedom, and are worthy of freedom."
- Context, not control. Managers set context; employees make the decisions.
- Highly aligned, loosely coupled. Teams agree on goals and work independently.
- Pay top of market. Pay each person at least what a competitor would.
- Promotions and development. Growth comes from working with excellent colleagues, not from a career ladder.
Two practices made it famous. The keeper test asked managers: "Which of my people, if they told me they were leaving for a similar job at a peer company, would I fight hard to keep at Netflix?" Those they would not fight for "should get a generous severance now". And Netflix had no vacation policy: until 2004 it gave a standard number of days; after that, "there is no policy or tracking".
How it changed
Netflix's own 2024 post says the document had been "revised four times". Dated from Internet Archive captures, the public versions are:
| Version | Date | Form | What changed |
|---|---|---|---|
| First deck | August 2009 | ~128 slides | The original |
| Second deck | 2011 | 126 slides | Minor; the seven aspects unchanged |
| Prose memo | June 2017 | About 4,300 words | Slides became ten pages of prose, with suggestions from about 1,000 employees; added emphasis on inclusion and working globally. A footnote promised severance of at least four months' pay |
| "Seeking excellence" | May 2022 | About 3,900 words | The four-month severance footnote and the "adequate performers" line came out; "a professional sports team, not a family" |
| "The best work of our lives" | June 2024 | About 2,250 words | Half the length; two keeper-test questions ("would I fight to keep them?" and "would I hire them again?"); no mention of severance |
The current memo is on Netflix's jobs site; Netflix explained the 2017 rewrite in "Netflix culture: always trying to improve" and the 2024 one in "Sharing our latest culture memo". The 2009 deck is still on SlideShare.
What moved out
Counting the words by topic, as our HR Models paper on Netflix does for all eleven dated versions, shows what the company stopped saying. Pay took about 16% of the words in the 2009 deck and none in the 2024 memo. Structure fell from about 10% to none. Values rose from about 4% to 22%. Autonomy, the "freedom" in freedom and responsibility, is the largest topic in every version.
The pay promise did not disappear from practice: Netflix's proxy statements still say it aims to pay employees at their personal top of market. It disappeared from the culture document, along with the generous exit terms, as the company grew from 1,883 full-time employees at the end of 2009 to about 16,000 at the end of 2025.
Who wrote it, and the books that followed
- Patty McCord, chief talent officer 1998–2012, wrote "How Netflix Reinvented HR" for Harvard Business Review (January–February 2014) and the book Powerful (2018).
- Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer wrote No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention (Penguin Press, September 2020), the fullest account of how the model works in practice.
Does it work outside Netflix?
The keeper test depends on being able to let people go quickly with generous pay. That is a business choice in California. In Japan it runs into the law: dismissal requires an objectively reasonable cause and must be socially appropriate, and courts expect redeployment and other efforts before a dismissal for poor performance. A Japanese "keeper test" ends in a negotiated exit package, which is slower and costs more. Freedom in expenses, travel and leave travels more easily, as long as working-hours and leave law is respected: unlimited vacation does not remove the legal duty in Japan to make sure employees take at least five days of paid leave a year.
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What fifteen years of culture documents, nineteen years of filings and two peer panels say about freedom, the keeper test and pay at the top of the market. And whether any of it transfers. See the white paper (PDF, 50 pages, $49)
Questions
What is the Netflix culture deck?
A slide presentation, "Netflix Culture: Freedom & Responsibility", published by Reed Hastings on SlideShare in August 2009. It describes how Netflix hires, pays, manages and lets people go, and introduced the keeper test and Netflix's no-vacation-policy approach to a wide audience.
What is the keeper test?
A question Netflix asks managers: if this person told me they were leaving for a similar job elsewhere, would I fight hard to keep them? People the manager would not fight for are offered a generous severance. The 2024 memo adds a second question: would I hire them again?
Does Netflix still use the culture deck?
No. It replaced the deck with a written memo in 2017, rewrote the memo in 2022 and again in 2024. The current version is on jobs.netflix.com/culture.
Who wrote the Netflix culture deck?
Reed Hastings, Netflix's co-founder, published it, and Patty McCord, chief talent officer from 1998 to 2012, wrote it with him.
Related guides
By Yan Sen Lu, Managing Director of Makana Partners and Editor of The Hardest Market.
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