That's not a knock. Plenty of company locations have been decided by less. But it does complicate the narrative that Silicon Valley's geography is some kind of optimized innovation cluster. Netflix is worth roughly $270 billion as of this writing. It employs thousands. And it's based in a town most Bay Area residents associate with the Vasona Lake trail and not much else.

The piece leans on Hastings's origin story, which is well-documented at this point: he co-founded Netflix in 1997 with Marc Randolph, built it through the DVD-by-mail era, and shepherded a pivot to streaming that most media analysts initially dismissed. What the Standard story is gesturing at — though it doesn't fully land the argument — is how anchor companies shape regional identity. Los Gatos is now, functionally, a company town.

The Reddit thread attached to this story is, charitably, not about Netflix. It appears to be documentation of a Bay Area scavenger hunt or geocache — rusted coins, a waterlogged box, coordinates spotted from Battery Spencer. It's genuinely unclear how this got clustered with streaming industry coverage, algorithmically speaking.

What's verifiable: Netflix's Los Gatos campus has been its HQ for over two decades. The company has gone through significant layoffs in 2022 and continues to restructure its content spending. Whether the suburb "became the center of streaming" is a stretch — most of the actual streaming infrastructure, content deals, and competitive pressure plays out well beyond city limits.