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Mitch Lowe        

Former Co-founding Executive of Netflix; Former President of RedBox; Former CEO of MoviePass

Mitch Lowe is a top business and entertainment speaker, former president of RedBox, and founding executive at Netflix, Inc., serving as Netflix’s Entertainment Domain Expert and Vice President of Business Development & Strategic Alliances from 1998 to 2003. He was also the CEO of MoviePass, a subscription service that charged members a monthly fee for movie tickets at cinemas.

Lowe began opening video rental stores in the mid-1980s, building a chain of 10 locations in Northern California. While running his stores, he was a board member and president of the national trade association representing the burgeoning video entertainment retail industry.

Early on, Lowe recognized that physical delivery of content was only an interim stage and needed to evolve with technology. Therefore, in the early 1990s, along with one of the cofounders of Autodesk, he founded a startup aimed at providing internet store services and marketing to video stores around the US.

In the late 1990s, Lowe met Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings who wanted to start a DVD Mail Order business and were looking for expertise in the rental industry. Mitch joined what became Netflix in 1998 and led Business Development and Strategic Alliances for its first five years. Lowe was a member of the small Executive Leadership team that devised the “All You Can Eat” subscription service and played a key role in building the culture that has led to the primary way we now consume entertainment.

A year after Netflix went public, Lowe was recruited by McDonald’s to help them with a project to introduce automated DVD rental kiosks at their restaurants. Lowe led Redbox for eight years, first as COO and later as president, growing the company to over $1.5B in revenue and 35k kiosks across the US.

Lowe has made many personal investments in start-ups, primarily in the entertainment, blockchain, and social spaces. He is passionate about the success and business fulfillment of people in large businesses as well as first-time entrepreneurs. Lowe sits on the board of Cantaloupe Systems, Booxby, and Vidbox.

Speech Topics


Disrupt or be Disrupted

If you want to be the leader of your industry, you need to disrupt your market. Mitch Lowe is an expert in disruption. As a chief executive officer of Netflix, Redbox, and MoviePass, Lowe has disrupted the movie industry three times: two times he disrupted how we rent movies (by mail and by kiosk) and is in the process of disrupting how we pay for our movie theater experience. In this exciting and informative talk, Lowe will share the behind-the-scenes secrets of how he built a culture that disrupted movie watching and how you can build your own culture to disrupt your own industry.

Building Teamwork to Achieve Innovative Results

Innovation requires unwavering commitment and support throughout the entire organization, which is often difficult to achieve for two reasons: one, the financial commitment and, two, getting everyone onboard for disruptive work. In this presentation, Mitch details the processes to get the whole team on board to work together towards innovative results.

Creating a Winning Culture

Theory and strategy are important, but execution is absolutely crucial. Sharing stories from his experiences at Netflix and Redbox, Mitch reveals the framework for designing and implementing a positive and winning culture.

The culture that developed in the early days of Netflix played a large role in the success of the company, and when Mitch took over as Redbox President he brought that culture with him. While, Redbox—a Chicago based company with midwest values–was a very different company than the Silicon Valley-based Netflix, Mitch was able to implement the framework of the successful Netflix culture and customize it to fit Redbox’s goals and company values.

In this presentation, Mitch shows how a winning culture can be customized to align with any company’s unique philosophy to create an exceptional working environment that you and your employees will be proud of.

Facing Tough Leadership Decisions

Remember when Netflix decided to increase their monthly fee by 60% or when Redbox raised their rental prices higher than $1 per night? Drawing on instances from his time at Netflix and Redbox, Mitch explains decisions made when the companies faced existential and strategic crises, providing reasoning behind those decisions and their effects—for better and/or worse.

Mitch discusses the wrong ways to make a decision and which factors are actually not helpful in the decision-making process. He then details how to make a well-informed decision by looking holistically at the pros and cons, the processes and resources through which a decision is implemented, and the likelihood of success. This, along with Mitch’s other presentations, can be tailored to the audience, whether they be marketing, sales, operations, strategic-based.

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