Netflix's Ken Florance: The Man Who Keeps the Video Streaming

Ken Florance wasn’t born in Northern California, but his biography reads like a CliffsNotes version of the area’s countercultural history. He dropped out of school and, in between Grateful Dead concerts and acid trips, made a pilgrimage to the Oregon home of Ken Kesey, the novelist and proponent of psychedelia. In the 1980s and ’90s, Florance taught himself IT and eventually worked his way into the first dot-com boom, managing large websites and learning the inner workings of the Internet. Now 51, he shuffles barefoot each morning into the garage of his Santa Cruz home to kneel before a Buddhist shrine and meditate for an hour before heading to work. His office is in the headquarters of Netflix, where Florance is the vice president for content delivery.

The streaming company accounts for about a third of North America’s Internet traffic on a typical evening, and Florance’s team of 50 is charged with keeping the movies and TV shows rolling. It’s an enormous responsibility. On July 21 the company said its subscriptions had crossed the 50 million mark, accounting for $1.15 billion in revenue for the second quarter, up from $837 million in the same period last year. Florance, a happy-go-lucky pacifist with a cackle of a laugh, is now defending Netflix’s interests in one of the nastiest fights in online history: the battle with Internet service providers (ISPs) and regulators over the fundamental structure of the Web.