I knew this moment was coming, and yet I wasn't ready for it. Hulu — as a standalone brand, as a specific kind of company, as the place that made me — is effectively gone now, absorbed into Disney's content machinery in a way that makes it unrecognizable from what it was when I joined in 2007.
I joined Hulu when it was genuinely weird. Not weird in a startup-cool way — weird in a "we're not sure if this is legal" way. The television industry had not yet decided whether streaming was an opportunity or an existential threat, and Hulu existed in the gap between those two positions. It was funded by the networks that were most afraid of it and built by people who thought those networks were wrong.
What I learned there — and this is the thing I've carried into every job since — is that there's a difference between a good idea and a product people will actually use. The early streaming wars were full of good ideas that nobody used. Hulu survived because it built something with a real wedge: the back catalog, the next-day episodes, the experience that was just good enough to make you stop torrenting.
What being early actually means
Being early to a platform shift is not the same as being smart. A lot of people were early to streaming. What being early at Hulu gave me was a front-row seat to what happens when an industry has to reinvent itself faster than it wants to — and a set of instincts about where the real leverage is in those moments that I've used ever since.
The thing about formative experiences is that you don't know they're formative until much later. I knew Hulu was interesting. I didn't know it was the education.