Netflix was founded before Google. Netflix dates its founding to August 29, 1997; Google Inc. was incorporated on September 4, 1998—just over a year later. The surprising part is that Netflix began long before streaming movies was practical. Its first customers picked DVDs online and waited for them to arrive by mail.
Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph built Netflix around a simple question: could people rent a movie without visiting a store? In 1997, they tested whether a DVD would survive a trip through the mail. It did. Netflix opened its online DVD rental store on April 14, 1998, months before Google became a company. Customers could rent or buy discs through the website, but they watched the movies on DVD players, not in a browser. Netflix’s announcement from opening day captures just how new that idea was.
Meanwhile, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were developing the search project that became Google. There is a small wrinkle in comparing birthdays: Google celebrates on September 27, but says it was incorporated on September 4, 1998. Either date puts the company after Netflix. Google explains the distinction in its look back at its founding.
Netflix’s early business looked nothing like its later streaming service, which arrived in 2007. That gap is what makes the dates so memorable: a company we associate with watching instantly started out by sending physical discs through the postal system. For another glimpse of that DVD era, read about Netflix’s proposed sale to Blockbuster in 2000. Google and Netflix both became familiar internet names, but their founding dates tell a less familiar story: the DVD-by-mail company came first.