Anthony Wood (businessman)

Anthony J. Wood (born 1965) is an English-born American billionaire businessman who is the founder, chairman and CEO of Roku, Inc. In April 2021, he owned 15% stake in Roku, and had a net worth of US$7.2 billion.

Personal life
Wood was born and grew up in Manchester, England, followed by the State of Georgia in the U.S. At the age of 13, he moved to the Netherlands with family, and then lived in Texas in the U.S.

In 1984, when Wood was a teenager, he published "Lunar Lander" in the Ahoy! magazine. Wood earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Texas A&M University. He met his wife Susan at this university, where Susan studied environmental design. They have three children, and live in Palo Alto, California.

Career
While in college, Wood founded his first company, "AW Software", to sell computer programs. He also founded "SunRize Industries" while studying engineering, developing software and hardware for the Amiga. After graduating, he founded SunRize version 2. Later, in 1995, Wood launched another company, iBand, which was bought by Macromedia for $36 million. Wood became the vice president of Internet authoring at Macromedia.

Wood left Macromedia in September 1997 to launch ReplayTV, a digital video recorder (DVR) maker. Wood began working on the DVR development reportedly after being "frustrated" at missing episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Features introduced by ReplayTV included ad-skipping, rewinding and pausing live television. Wood sold ReplayTV in 2002 to SONICblue Incorporated for US$42 million.

In 2002, Wood founded Roku, Inc., his sixth startup, to market home digital devices. "Roku" means “six” in Japanese. In 2007 Netflix, Inc. employed Wood as the vice president of Netflix's "Internet TV", directly under Reed Hastings. Wood continued to be the CEO of Roku in this period. At Netflix, he built a team which developed a Netflix-streaming player as well as applications allowing PC users to stream Netflix onto their computers. Netflix later spun Wood’s engineering team back out to Roku.

Philanthropy
In 2021, Wood and his wife, Susan, donated $48.2 million to create the "WoodNext Foundation", a Texas based philanthropy. Its priorities include mental health, homelessness, scientific and biomedical research, disaster recovery, and economic opportunity with a focus on addressing root causes. Wood made $71 million in charitable commitments in 2022, and appeared on the Chronicle of Philanthropy's list of America’s 50 biggest donors. In 2023, the WoodNext Foundation granted $14.3 million to the University of Pittsburgh for the study of heart disease and dementia, and $1.25 million to establish the BrightEdge Entrepreneurship Fellows Program through the American Cancer Society.