Netflix is a behemoth worth more than $60 billion, but the idea for the company stemmed from a textbook engineering example, according to its co-founder.

During a session at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, on Monday, Reed Hastings, the company's CEO, discussed how the idea of Netflix came about.

Hastings talked about Andrew Tanenbaum, a computer scientist who wrote a math problem asking students to work out the bandwidth of a station wagon carrying tapes. It required someone to work out how many tapes could fit in the station wagon, how much data the tapes could hold and then how quickly the station wagon could get to the destination.