Hastings is staying at the Parker Meridien, a sleek midtown-Manhattan hotel, but he shuns the power-breakfast spot in the lobby, which is studded with young media types from nearby News Corp. and Time Warner in their slim-cut suits. Instead, in a gray button-down and pair of brown khakis, he sips a coffee at the local Pain Quotidien. He’s in town for a board meeting of the charter-school network into which he pours millions. Education reform is where he concentrates his philanthropic efforts—he even served on the California State Board of Education when Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor. He could probably dominate the board of his alma mater, Bowdoin, the small liberal-arts college in Maine, probably have a building named after him by now, but that just seems, well, pointless. He’d rather disrupt a large system bound by archaic traditions and shoddy technology. Or rather, a second one.

"You have to focus on one thing where you’re clear on what kind of impact you want to have," he says. "Otherwise you never get anything done."

Back in his hotel room, he’s assembling the material for a December retreat in the Arizona desert with his top lieutenants. Amid strategy sessions on topics like the new "meta-filters," the Kayak-like websites that could erode Netflix loyalty by letting consumers compare which services have the shows they want at the best prices, there will be Hobbes on nature, Jefferson on government, Yeats on the good life. And there’s sure to be something in the program about resilience; Hastings still wrestles with guilt over mistakes he’s made, especially the Qwikster debacle. "You have to learn not to self-flagellate endlessly, to forgive yourself, but it’s hard. In a creative business like this, you have to take risks, and sometimes you’re wrong. You have to move on. I work a lot on that."

These days Netflix is legendary in Silicon Valley for its so-called Culture Deck, the company’s constitution. Nearly 3 million people have viewed it—it’s accessible on the Internet—and it’s a brilliant recruiting tool. Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, where Hastings holds a board seat, says it’s the reason Facebook’s directors pursued him. "It may well be the most important document ever to come out of the Valley," she says.

The highlights: no limit on vacation days at Netflix, ditto for sick days. No one tells you when to come and go or clocks you when you do. Doing B-level work despite A-level effort will get you a severance package. (Annual attrition is a chilling 20 percent.) A-level work with minimal effort? More money and responsibility. Hastings tells me he has no idea how much vacation his people take on average, and he insists he doesn’t care. Sure, there are times when people stay late, and there’s plenty of e-mailing from home, but a typical day ends at six. (Hastings has no office on the company’s five-building campus; he just floats around with his iPhone, checking in on people, pulling someone into a vacant conference room for a face-to-face.) "You don’t have to give up your life to do your job incredibly well," he says.

Which isn’t to say that Netflix is a laid-back place to work. Every employee, and most of all Hastings, is obsessively conscious of the mortal challenges the company faces—but that doesn’t stop him from sometimes making light of them. In late 2010, after Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes publicly dismissed Netflix as no more of a threat than the Albanian army, Hastings had Albanian army berets made for senior staff.

Will Arnett, who reprised his role as Gob Bluth for the new season of Arrested Development, gazes out from the curtained-off VIP area as the soldiers of the Netflix army stream into the back lot of Fox Studios in Century City. Nearly 1,000 strong, with geek flags flying, they wear plaid short-sleeve shirts over surf tees and tiny backpacks bulging with devices and chargers. They gawk at the taco truck parked under the giant mural of Tom Ewell fondling Marilyn in The Seven Year Itch, scoop chocolate-covered bananas from the portable freezer, queue up at the open bar, and gleefully scamper to the top of the Bluth "stair car," iconic to Arrested Development groupies, for a photo op.