Hastings: stop calling your company a family

Reed Hastings used to describe Netflix as a family. He stopped after the company made an early round of layoffs, and he has since said companies are not families at all.

His reasoning is blunt. You do not remove children from a family when money gets tight.

The distinction matters because the family framing makes a promise no employer can keep. Redundancy is a normal event in a company's life and an unthinkable one in a family's.

Hastings' preferred alternative is a team. A team selects for the position, pays for the position, and changes the line-up when the position needs someone else.

Airbnb's Brian Chesky and Shopify's Tobi Lütke have reached the same conclusion, according to Inc., which reported Hastings' remarks.

For a founder, the practical consequence sits in what you say at offer stage. Language used to recruit becomes the standard you are judged against on the day you have to let someone go.

Promise family and a layoff reads as betrayal. Promise a team and it reads as a decision, which is what it is.

None of this makes the conversation pleasanter. It does make it consistent, which is the only part of a redundancy a founder controls.

Hastings has not set out, in the account of his remarks, a specific policy on pay or hiring that follows from the team model. Founders adopting the framing are on their own for the detail.