Anthony Wood

Anthony Wood
Born	Manchester, England
Nationality	American
Education	Texas A&M University (B.S., electrical engineering)
Occupation	Businessman
Company	Roku, Inc.
Title	Founder, chairman, president and chief executive officer
Spouse	Susan Wood

Anthony Wood (born 1965) is an American businessman. He is the founder, chairman, president and chief executive officer of Roku, Inc., a company that makes streaming media devices and operates the the company television platform.

Before founding Roku in 2002, Wood built and sold two earlier technology companies, iband.com, an internet authoring company acquired by Macromedia, and ReplayTV, an early digital video recorder maker acquired by SONICblue Incorporated. Between leaving ReplayTV and founding the company, and again for a year while he ran the company privately, Wood spent a period as an executive at Netflix, Inc., where he led the team that built Netflix's first streaming set-top box before that engineering group was spun back out to become part of the company.

Wood has served as Roku's chief executive officer since October 2002, its chairman since February 2008 and its president since July 2011, making him one of relatively few American technology founders still leading, as chairman, president and chief executive, the company he started more than two decades earlier. Roku's dual-class share structure gives Wood outsized control of the company: as of the company's 2026 proxy statement he held 98.7 percent of Roku's Class B common stock, which carries ten votes per share, giving him roughly 55.5 percent of the total voting power of the company he founded. Under his leadership Roku went public on the Nasdaq Global Select Market in October 2017, grew into the leading streaming platform by hours streamed in the United States, weathered a sharp advertising-driven downturn and round of layoffs beginning in late 2022, and returned to full-year profitability for the first time in fiscal 2025.

With his wife, Susan Wood, he directs the WoodNext Foundation, a philanthropy administered through the Greater Houston Community Foundation that has funded biomedical, mental health and climate research at universities and medical research organisations in the United States and the United Kingdom. Wood has also been a significant individual donor to Republican-aligned political committees in Texas and nationally.

Early life and education

Wood was born in Manchester, England, in 1965. His family later moved to the U.S. state of Georgia, and while he was still a teenager they relocated again to the Netherlands, where Wood attended the American School of the Hague and taught himself computer programming from a BASIC language guide. As a child he showed an entrepreneurial streak, at one point collecting and reselling golf balls and building structures such as treehouses. The family subsequently settled in Texas.

Wood enrolled at Texas A&M University in 1983 to study electrical engineering. During his junior year he founded his first company while still a student, AW Software, which sold computer programs, and he went on to found SunRize Industries, which developed audio hardware and software for the Commodore Amiga computer. SunRize grew to fourteen employees before Wood closed it so that he could finish his degree. It was at Texas A&M that Wood met Susan, who was studying environmental design; the two later married. Wood graduated from Texas A&M in 1990 with a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering and moved to California.

Career

iband.com and Macromedia, 1995 to 1997

In June 1995, Wood founded iband, Inc. (also styled iband.com), an internet software company that built web authoring tools, and served as its chief executive officer. In March 1996, iband was acquired by Macromedia, Inc., and Wood joined Macromedia as vice president of Internet authoring, a role he held until September 1997. The Roku company later disclosed that this was Wood's first period working as an employee under someone else's direction, following a decade of running his own ventures.

ReplayTV, 1997 to 2001

Wood left Macromedia in September 1997 to found ReplayTV, Inc., a maker of digital video recorders, and served the company in a series of roles including president and chief executive officer, chairman of the board and president of products. According to Fortune, Wood began the project after growing frustrated at missing episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and he self-financed the company before bringing in angel investors, including Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen. ReplayTV's devices let viewers skip advertisements, and pause and rewind live television, features that put it in direct competition with TiVo during the early years of the DVR industry, and the product won a Best of Show award at the Consumer Electronics Show in 1999.

On 1 August 2001, SONICblue Incorporated completed its acquisition of ReplayTV under a merger agreement first signed on 23 March 2001, later amended twice; SONICblue issued approximately 15.5 million shares of its own common stock, plus options and warrants, in exchange for all of ReplayTV's outstanding equity, with a portion of the shares held back in escrow against potential breaches of ReplayTV's representations. Fortune later reported that the sale price ultimately came in below the amount of outside capital ReplayTV had raised, and that SONICblue itself collapsed into bankruptcy within about two years of the deal.

Founding Roku, 2002 to 2007

Wood organised Roku, originally as a limited liability company in Delaware, in October 2002, roughly a year after the ReplayTV sale closed; the company was later incorporated in Delaware in February 2008. He has served as Roku's chief executive officer continuously since the company's founding in October 2002, and was also its president from October 2002 to February 2010, its chief financial officer from October 2002 to July 2010 and its secretary from February 2008 to February 2011. According to InfluenceWatch, Wood settled on the company's name, the Japanese word for the number six, while dining at a Japanese restaurant with his wife, reflecting that Roku was his sixth company. Wood has described his motivation in frank terms, telling Fortune, "I didn't grow up very rich... these guys start businesses and they get rich. That sounds great," while adding that such a motive "is not an honorable motivation, but it does work."

Netflix: vice president of Internet TV, 2007 to 2008

From April 2007 to January 2008, Wood served as vice president of "Internet TV" at Netflix, Inc., reporting directly to Netflix co-founder and chief executive Reed Hastings, while continuing to serve as Roku's chief executive officer. At Netflix, Wood built an engineering team that developed both a dedicated Netflix streaming player and software that let personal-computer users stream Netflix content; Netflix subsequently spun this team back out into Roku, providing the technical foundation for Roku's first set-top streaming players.

Building Roku as a private company, 2008 to 2017

After leaving Netflix, Wood continued to lead Roku as it launched its own line of set-top streaming players. In September 2010, Roku transferred the assets of its digital signage business to a newly formed company, BrightSign LLC, under a contribution agreement; Wood became chairman of BrightSign's board and its majority stockholder, a role and stake he still held as of Roku's 2017 initial public offering. Roku also provided BrightSign with administrative services under a transition services agreement between September 2010 and June 2014, for fees that started at $35,000 a month and were twice reduced, ultimately to $3,000 a month, before the arrangement expired on its own terms. By March 2012, Roku had sold more than 2.5 million streaming boxes, was growing sales at an average of 132 percent a year, and had reported around $100 million in sales in 2011; Wood told VentureBeat at the time that Roku positioned itself as "the non-Apple alternative" and that keeping products simple was the industry's most common failure point, saying "the most common mistake tech companies make with TV is they make it too complicated." By 2016, under Wood, Roku and BrightSign together employed roughly 500 people, the company's own revenue had passed $300 million, its streaming players had around ten million active monthly accounts, and the company held about eight percent of the smart-TV market by licensing its operating system to television manufacturers.

Taking Roku public, 2017

Wood took Roku public on 28 September 2017. The company priced 15,668,000 shares of Class A common stock at $14.00 a share, with Roku itself selling 9,000,000 new shares and existing "selling stockholders" selling a further 6,668,000 shares; the offering raised total gross proceeds of $219,352,000, of which approximately $117.18 million went to Roku after underwriting discounts, with the balance going to selling stockholders. Roku's Class A shares began trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker "ROKU." The prospectus disclosed that Roku operated a dual-class capital structure in which Class B shares carried ten votes each against one vote for Class A shares, and that, following the offering, Wood alone would control roughly the same order of voting power as the company's directors and officers combined, giving him what the filing called "significant influence over our management and affairs... for the foreseeable future."

Chief executive of a public company, 2017 to present

Since the 2017 listing, Wood has continued as Roku's chairman, president and chief executive officer, standing for re-election to Roku's board in 2026 as one of three Class III directors for a term running to the company's 2029 annual meeting. Under his leadership the company expanded into advertising technology, restructured amid a downturn in streaming and connected-television advertising beginning in late 2022, and, in the year to 31 December 2025, recorded net income of $88.4 million on net revenue of $4.74 billion, its first full year of profitability as a public company. As of the company's fiscal 2025 annual report, Roku employed approximately 3,600 full-time employees across 15 countries.

Leadership and management style

Colleagues and journalists covering Wood have repeatedly described him as a repeat, self-financed founder who reinvests the proceeds of one venture into the next rather than retiring on a single success; Fortune quoted Roku executive Steve Shannon describing Wood as a "double-down kind of guy." Wood has framed his management approach around a small number of consistently repeated priorities. Discussing Roku's product strategy with VentureBeat in 2012, he said Roku's advantage over rivals rested on affordability, simplicity and quality content, and that the "most common mistake tech companies make with TV is they make it too complicated." He has also described business itself as a form of problem-solving, telling Fortune, "I like solving problems, and businesses are like multidimensional puzzles."

Wood has kept Roku's dual-class ownership structure and his own board seat in place through the company's transition from a private start-up to a Nasdaq-listed company generating billions of dollars in annual revenue, a structure that Roku's own securities filings acknowledge concentrates governance authority in his hands even as the board has otherwise moved toward a majority-independent composition. Roku's most recent proxy statement discloses that named executive officers, including Wood, are permitted to elect to take a reduced annual base salary in exchange for monthly grants of fully vested stock options of equivalent value, though the filing states that no executive officer chose to participate in that programme for fiscal 2025. Wood's own cash salary was in fact reduced twice in three years even as his total reported compensation rose, from $1,200,000 in 2023 to $1,118,579 in 2024 to $1,000,000 in 2025, with the difference made up chiefly through stock and option awards.

Major deals and strategic decisions

Several of the defining transactions of Wood's career took place before Roku's founding. His sale of iband to Macromedia in 1996 gave him both capital and his first experience as a corporate vice president rather than a founder, and the 2001 stock-for-stock sale of ReplayTV to SONICblue, in which SONICblue issued roughly 15.5 million of its own shares for all of ReplayTV's equity, ended Wood's first venture into consumer video hardware roughly a year before he founded Roku.

At Roku, the September 2010 spin-out of the company's digital signage business into BrightSign LLC allowed Roku to concentrate on consumer streaming devices while Wood retained an ownership and governance stake in the spun-out business as its chairman and majority stockholder. Roku's October 2017 initial public offering, priced at $14.00 a share for total gross proceeds of $219.35 million, was the company's largest single capital-markets transaction under Wood and set the trading base from which its later market value was built. In one of Roku's largest acquisitions, the company agreed on 22 October 2019 to acquire the advertising-technology company Dataxu, Inc. through a merger completed on 8 November 2019, adding programmatic advertising capability that Roku used to expand its Platform advertising business.

Beginning in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2022, Roku undertook a multi-year restructuring in response to a slowdown in streaming and advertising demand, consolidating office space, reviewing its content portfolio, and reducing headcount growth; the company recorded restructuring charges of roughly $356 million in fiscal 2023, $31.0 million in fiscal 2024 and $3.1 million in fiscal 2025 as the programme wound down. More recently, on 9 May 2025, Roku acquired Frndly TV, Inc., a subscription streaming service offering more than 50 live television channels, on-demand video and cloud-based digital video recording, for total purchase consideration of $169.8 million, consisting of $103.6 million in cash and up to $75.0 million in additional contingent consideration tied to performance milestones over the following two years; the company said the deal was intended to grow its Platform revenue and its base of Roku-billed subscriptions.

Financial and market performance

Roku's revenue and profitability during Wood's tenure as a public-company chief executive have moved through distinct phases. Total net revenue was $3.48 billion in fiscal 2023, $4.11 billion in fiscal 2024 and $4.74 billion in fiscal 2025, a 15 percent increase in the most recent year. Profitability followed a steep recovery: Roku recorded a net loss of $709.6 million in fiscal 2023, a narrower net loss of $129.4 million in fiscal 2024, and net income of $88.4 million, or $0.59 a diluted share, in fiscal 2025, the company's first full year of positive net income as a public company. As of the mid-point of fiscal 2025, the measurement date used on the cover of Roku's annual report, the aggregate market value of Roku common stock held by non-affiliates of the company (that is, excluding shares held by Wood and other insiders) was approximately $9.7 billion.

Wood's own reported compensation as chief executive has fluctuated with Roku's use of equity awards. In fiscal 2016, his final full year running Roku as a private company, his total reported compensation was $785,635, made up of a $750,000 salary, $22,380 in option awards and $13,255 in other compensation. As a public-company chief executive his total reported compensation was $20,218,958 in fiscal 2023, $27,697,846 in fiscal 2024 and $26,565,120 in fiscal 2025, the more recent figures driven mainly by large annual grants of stock and stock options rather than salary. Roku's 2026 proxy statement disclosed that the ratio of Wood's total fiscal 2025 compensation, as reported in the company's Summary Compensation Table, to the pay of Roku's median employee was approximately 99 to 1.

According to that same proxy statement, Wood beneficially owned 2,649,308 shares of Roku Class A common stock, or about 2.0 percent of that class, and 16,293,111 shares of Class B common stock, or about 98.7 percent of that class, giving him approximately 55.5 percent of Roku's total voting power as of the 2026 annual meeting record date.

Board memberships and outside roles

Wood has served as a director of Roku since February 2008 and as its chairman since the same date; he was re-nominated in 2026 to serve as a Class III director for a term running to Roku's 2029 annual meeting of stockholders. He has also served as chairman of the board of directors of BrightSign LLC, a maker of digital signage media players, since September 2010, when BrightSign was spun out of a Roku business unit, and Roku's securities filings have identified him as BrightSign's majority stockholder. Roku's 2017 prospectus noted that this relationship meant Wood was not considered an "independent" director under Nasdaq's listing standards, given his position as Roku's chief executive, and that fellow Roku director Jeffrey Hastings was likewise not independent because he served as BrightSign's chief executive while Wood chaired BrightSign's board and held a majority stake in it.

Controversies

The clearest governance issue documented in Roku's own securities filings is the set of related-party relationships between Roku, Wood and BrightSign LLC described above: Roku's prospectus and subsequent disclosures record that Wood, as Roku's chief executive and BrightSign's chairman and majority owner, and fellow director Hastings, as BrightSign's chief executive, were both excluded from Roku's board's independent-director count because of those overlapping roles, and that BrightSign paid Roku under a transition services agreement and later for products and services, including $314,000 in fiscal 2015 and $414,000 in the first half of 2017. Roku disclosed these arrangements as related-party transactions rather than as findings of wrongdoing, and no regulatory or legal action against Wood personally was identified in the sources reviewed for this article.

Separately, Roku's own financial disclosures document a period of financial strain and job losses during Wood's tenure as chief executive: beginning in the fourth quarter of 2022, amid a broader slowdown in streaming and advertising spending, the company reduced headcount growth and recorded restructuring charges that totalled roughly $356 million in fiscal 2023 alone, a period in which Roku's overall net loss reached $709.6 million. Wood's political giving has also drawn scrutiny from advocacy researchers: InfluenceWatch, a nonprofit that tracks the funding of political and policy organisations, has catalogued Wood's contributions to Republican-aligned candidates, party committees and super political action committees, describing him as a supporter of conservative causes including school-choice advocacy.

Personal life

Wood met his wife, Susan, while both were students at Texas A&M University, where she studied environmental design; she graduated in 1989, a year ahead of Wood's own graduation in 1990. The couple direct their philanthropy jointly through the WoodNext Foundation.

Philanthropy

Wood and his wife, Susan, direct their charitable giving through the WoodNext Foundation, a fund administered by the Greater Houston Community Foundation whose stated mission is to advance human progress and remove obstacles, including disease and economic hardship, that stand between people and a fulfilling life; its stated funding priorities include scientific and biomedical research, mental health, homelessness, disaster recovery and economic opportunity. Tax filings for the Greater Houston Community Foundation's WoodNext fund, compiled by ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer, show total revenue of about $220.4 million in the 2022 filing period and $7.9 million in the 2023 filing period, with total functional expenses of about $22.4 million in 2023 and total assets of roughly $231.0 million at the end of that period.

The foundation's disclosed grants include $14.3 million to the University of Pittsburgh, announced in February 2023, to support an interdisciplinary research programme linking inflammation to both heart disease and dementia, on top of an earlier $6.3 million awarded to Pittsburgh researchers. In May 2023, the foundation gave £1.9 million to the University of Southampton's School of Ocean and Earth Science to support Turing Fellow Tom Gernon's research into how orbital cycles and other drivers have combined to produce severe ice ages over the past billion years of Earth's history. In January 2025, the foundation granted more than £1 million to the University of Dundee's School of Life Sciences to fund two research projects into disease-causing protein kinase mutations, one relating to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and the other to ROSAH syndrome, a rare inherited condition that causes blindness in young adults.

The foundation has also supported psychiatric and cancer research in the United States. In 2021 it joined the Founders Circle of the American Cancer Society's BrightEdge venture-philanthropy initiative with an initial $1 million commitment, and in February 2023 it gave a further $1.25 million to launch the ACS BrightEdge Entrepreneurship Fellows Program, a twelve-month programme offering mentorship, professional development and investor access to early-career researchers seeking to commercialise cancer-focused research. In March 2025, the foundation committed $5 million over five years to the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation's Distinguished Investigator Grants programme, funding senior scientists studying opioid use disorder, depression in pregnancy, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and the effects of psychedelic drugs on perception; the first year of that commitment funded $1 million in grants to ten scientists, including Yale School of Medicine psychiatry professor Christopher Pittenger, who received $100,000 to study a genetic mouse model of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Recognition

Sourcing available for this article documents recognition of products Wood built rather than personal awards to Wood himself: ReplayTV, the digital video recorder company he founded and led, won a Best of Show award at the Consumer Electronics Show in 1999. No further personal honours or awards for Wood were identified in the sources reviewed for this article.

See also

• Roku, Inc.
• Reed Hastings
• Netflix
• BrightSign

External links

• Official website
• Roku, Inc. filings at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission