Episode Details

Alix and Marta were the people who had to make Netflix's culture work outside America. Alix moved from the US to build the Amsterdam office and Netflix's European headquarters from a handful of desks; Marta, a Venezuelan-born recruiter who had just scaled Booking.com from 5,000 to 15,000 people, read the Netflix culture deck and assumed it was "American BS" until she flew in to interview and find out. Together they built the HR function for EMEA during the company's fastest international expansion.

In this episode of Truth Works, Jessica Neal and Patty McCord sit down with both of them to talk about what happened when a Silicon Valley operating system met European labor law, "work to live" and a workforce that expected HR to keep the peace.

We get into:

- Why the culture deck was never a values poster: it was the practical rulebook for how you behaved or got fired
- The first time "adequate performance gets a generous severance" was said out loud in Europe, and the reaction it got
- Alix's first real piece of constructive feedback, delivered to a senior male executive with Patty sitting in the room
- Being "too American": the well-intended US executives who piled onto EMEA and stalled local agency for years
- Why the fix was slowing down and explaining behaviour with examples rather than pushing harder
- Same destination, different path: how Amsterdam, Tokyo, India, Silicon Valley and Hollywood each got there differently
- The people who wanted Netflix to admit the culture didn't scale, and why it did
- Whether European regulation is holding back the continent's startup ecosystem, and why Spotify is the exception
- Why culture change fails unless the founder or CEO personally drives it
- Their consulting firm, two years in, and why they refuse to sell the beautiful transformation deck
- Why every consultant is now an "AI transformation expert" and nobody knows the future of work

Truth Works is hosted by Jessica Neal, former Chief Talent Officer at Netflix.

This episode is sponsored by Manifest Law, the AI-native immigration law firm.