Mitch Lowe

Co-Founding Executive of Netflix, CEO of Movie Pass, Former President of Redbox

Expert on

  • Leadership
  • CEO
  • Business Growth
  • Team Building
  • Workplace Culture

Fee Range

$40,000–$60,000

Travels from

CA, US

Biography

Mitch Lowe has been a leader in some of the most influential and disruptive companies in the entertainment business.

Mitch never graduated from high school. After a youth spent smuggling goods and money in Europe, he invested in and eventually ran video stores in the 1980s and 1990s. He was a cofounding executive of Netflix. After leaving Netflix, he became an executive at McDonald’s, eventually creating the DVD kiosk business that would become Redbox. Under his leadership as president and COO, Redbox became the third largest video rental company in America, growing to 35,000 locations and $1.5 billion in revenues.

Mitch invested in and became CEO of MoviePass, a movie theater subscription service that acquired three million subscribers in eight months. While MoviePass never succeeded, it significantly influenced the trajectory of the business of movie theatrical exhibition.

Lowe uses his experience from working with successful startups like Netflix, Redbox, and MoviePass to teach entrepreneurs how to simplify their business and to create winning product ideas using intuition, perseverance, analytical thinking, and love.

FROM NETFLIX TO THE METAVERSE

Netflix’s evolution from a “movies by mail” to the #1 Streaming company in the world tracks the evolution of the internet from Web 1.0 to 2.0 and now as we all are entering the Metaverse and Web 3.0 the story of Netflix is extremely informative as companies explore and evaluate the opportunities, challenges, and risks in the Metaverse.

In Mitch’s presentation “From Netflix to the Metaverse” he shares the similarities and challenges you should consider as we enter this new world. After sharing those thoughts Mitch shares stats and facts about the current state of the Meta and the next few years of opportunities.

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.

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.

BUILDING TEAMWORK TO ACHIEVE INNOVATION

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.

HOW I FORGOT ALL THE LESSONS I LEARNED WHILE RUNNING MOVIEPASS

Moviepass was one of the fastest-growing entertainment subscription services ever. Growing from 20,000 subscribers to 3.1 million in less than 8 months, Moviepass set out to do for Cinemas what Netflix did for home entertainment but failed. In this presentation, Mitch will explore the ways fast growth can undermine success and if not managed lead to failure.

SO MANY CHOICES

Entertainment and the various ways we get content are evolving rapidly. We started with cave drawings, Homer, medieval traveling plays, 12th century chivalric odes, Shakespeare, opera, and silent theaters. Then, we moved on to movies, TV, VHS and DVD. Now, we have streaming platforms like TikTok, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and international companies like Shahid and Rakutan.

These days, new apps and platforms are being created one after another, to the extent that it’s hard to keep up – There are just too many choices. In this keynote, Mitch will discuss:

  • The history of storytellers
  • The state of the entertainment industry today
  • How Tiktok could replace Netflix as THE entertainment site and how shorter attention spans play a role in that
  • The democratization of content creation and and how anyone with an iPhone can create a series on Netflix
  • The technology that is helping consumers discover new content