14 ms·

I see lot of comments along the lines of "silicon valley hubris", but how much of Quibi's $1.75B actually came from silicon valley? > In 2018, the startup (the

by whack 6y ago

I see lot of comments along the lines of "silicon valley hubris", but how much of Quibi's $1.75B actually came from silicon valley? > In 2018, the startup (then called “New TV”) announced that it had raised $1 billion in funding. Among the initial investors were a who’s who of Hollywood studios: Disney, NBCUniversal, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Viacom, AT&T’s WarnerMedia, Lionsgate, MGM, ITV and Entertainment One (now part of Hasbro). Tech investors include China’s Alibaba Group. That funding round was led by VC firm Madrone Capital Partners; other investors were Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and John Malone’s Liberty Global. The Katzenberg-founded WndrCo investment vehicle also is a Quibi investor. It sounds like a bunch of old-school media companies and Hollywood studios trying to play Silicon Valley, and thinking they can build a Decacorn by spending lots of money and hiring famous celebrities, instead of doing small-scale MVPs and market-validation. There's a lot of non-techies outside of SV who seem to think that developers/designers/product-managers are just doing the menial plumbing of building out other people's ideas, and that anyone can do the same thing if they just had access to capital. Maybe this debacle will convince them that there's more to building a successful business than just capital and "an idea".

raverbashing 6y ago
Though, interestingly enough, Disney just threw money at the problem and came up with Disney+. Though to be fair there were probably a lot of lessons learned and hiring of very experienced people. Edit: my point is, yes, it's easy in hindsight to think it would be a success (and surely, a lot of things help). But HBO Go enjoys much less success (and has a lot of technical issues) Tidal was built to compete with Spotify, see where it went.
- vxNsr 6y ago
  Disney+ isn’t a novel idea. All they really did was give everyone access to their entire library of videos. Quibi was interesting bec it was trying to be something that no one else was doing, that requires more than an s3 bucket behind a Netflix clone.
  - Crespyl 6y ago
    The only (good/interesting) thing Quibi was doing that no one else was doing was the switchable view thing. All the other things they tried were foolish and self-defeating: mobile-only (can't watch on my laptop or TV, which makes it harder to watch with a friend), no screenshots (no sharing/memes to promote conversation about the app or content), etc. There is an ocean of short-form content creators on YouTube, many of them quite talented, who are increasingly desperate for some kind of alternative platform. It would've been so much cheaper and more effective to scoop up a handful of the better ones to create exclusives than to bank the farm on the waning star-power of establishment Hollywood folk. I don't really understand who the target audience is supposed to be. I feel bad for the handful of decent shows (there must be a few right?) that are stuck on this weird patronizing-feeling platform. "I, just like you fellow kids, enjoy Music-Band and short-form video content on the Cell-Phone, and Celebrities!" platform.
- albntomat0 6y ago
  Did Disney+ do anything new? It took the established model of Netflix and the established content of the Disney empire, and threw them together. From my understanding, Quibi is a unique usage model, with unproven content, neither of which has initially panned out.
  - bryanlarsen 6y ago
    Disney+ is an interesting contrast. They threw a lot of money at proven technology (BAMTech) as well as proven content producers (in-house). That's the entire point. You don't throw billions at something new -- you prove it out first and then throw billions at it.
  - mensetmanusman 6y ago
    They list all their content in alphabetical order.
- tinco 6y ago
  Disney didn't have to do any market testing. It's very obvious that people will pay for access to their portfolio. I bet they're more worried the service cannibalizes their DVD/Blu-ray sales than that the service itself isn't popular enough. And since they already had the content and the marketing channels, the only thing they had to spend real money on is engineering. There's also a lot of cachet attached to working for Disney so I bet hiring talent was not an issue.
  - jdxcode 6y ago
    They also didn’t try to build the product with in-house engineers, they bought the (very good) company BAMTech.
  - cbsks 6y ago
    > I bet they're more worried the service cannibalizes their DVD/Blu-ray sales than that the service itself isn't popular enough. I'm guessing they would love for Disney+ to replace DVD/Blu-ray sales. Rather than making a one time sale, the customer pays for it every month! Forever!
    - projektfu 6y ago
      A lot of customers are probably very happy to pay a monthly fee just to avoid having their DVD wear out while the movie is “in the vault”. Children play these things like 10 times per day.
      - lozaning 6y ago
        Does optical media really wear out?
        cbsks 6y ago
        When kids are involved, yes :)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- CoffeeDregs 6y ago
  Disney bought BAMTech for this. Wasn't too much of a leap to expect that a giant content producer/owner (+ distributor) when combined with a huge content distributor would be successful...
spaetzleesser 6y ago
“There's a lot of non-techies outside of SV who seem to think that developers/designers/product-managers are just doing the menial plumbing of building out other people's ideas, and that anyone can do the same thing if they just had access to capital.” That’s pretty much the idea of supply side and “trickle down“ economics. People with capital are the most important players. People who do the work are not important and replaceable.
- 6AA4FD 6y ago
  Reminds me of the "great man" theory of history and Randian leadership myths.
  - spaetzleesser 6y ago
    "Job creators" is also a good term.
- kelvin0 6y ago
  I did not know the definition of 'trickle down' economics, thanks for that. I had a vague idea of bread crumbs falling off the table of the 'lords' to be consumed by the 'populace'. My idea was : someone buys a multi-million Yacht, well they need a captain, cook and other staff to maintain their ship. The wealth (from buying a luxury item) trickles down to the employees. Of course, this was a simple intuition and the idea had no formal definition for me.
  - monknomo 6y ago
    You may enjoy horse and sparrow economics - to feed the sparrows, simply give the horse oats. Eventually the birds will get some
  - dmix 6y ago
    Just to be clear no economist has ever used the phrase "trickle down economics" to describe an economic policy. It's always been a derisive term used in politics. > Years ago, this column challenged anybody to quote any economist outside of an insane asylum who had ever advocated this "trickle-down" theory. Some readers said that somebody said that somebody else had advocated a "trickle-down" policy. But they could never name that somebody else and quote them. https://www.creators.com/read/thomas-sowell/01/14/the-trickle-down-lie https://www.creators.com/read/thomas-sowell/01/14/the-trickl...
cletus 6y ago
Thank you for clarifying that. That is interesting. I think I first heard of Quibi from their superbowl ad. That right there is a red flag. There's a certain class of people who think the thing that they happen to do is the most important thing in the world. You have MBA types who argue "good managers can manage anything" (ie you don't need domain knowledge). You have marketers who think that any success is purely a function of the marketing put into it. Worse, any successful launch (eg Disney+) will be seen as a success for marketing. Time and time again we've seen throwing money at marketing fail to sell a bad product. The whole focus on celebrities for Quibi I find interesting, particularly in light of this comment about where the money came from. I'm imagining people who are just horribly out of touch in that they come from an era when celebrity endorsements can sell anything. Or maybe it's people who just want to hang out with celebrities. What better way than to run a "studio"? I mean, Reese Witherspoon getting paid $6m to do a voice over for a show about cheetahs? Wow. The more I see about Meg Whitman the more I'm convinced she's just an idiot who happened to be in the right place at the right time (with HP). Like I'm honestly shocked eBay went anywhere with her at the helm. Because what else has she done? Tried to buy political office (and failed). Quibi. RIP.
- SilasX 6y ago
  Yikes! Didn't know that bit about Witherspoon. From the article: >>Staffers reportedly “seethed”[1] at Reese Witherspoon’s $6m salary ... (Witherspoon’s husband Jim Toth is the head of talent and content acquisition at the company.) Nepotism, much? [1] https://pagesix.com/2020/06/02/quibi-staffers-seethe-at-reese-witherspoons-6m-payday-amid-layoffs/ https://pagesix.com/2020/06/02/quibi-staffers-seethe-at-rees...
  - mywittyname 6y ago
    Hollywood being Hollywood.
    - SilasX 6y ago
      Yeah but that still seems like a severe overpayment. I mean, I get that connections will make a big difference in getting the role, but I never expected it would allow someone to get away with overpaying to such a connection.
jdxcode 6y ago
Meg Whitman seems to get a lot of undeserved credit for some reason. If I had run eBay and HP I think I’d be trying to hide that from my resume.
- NotSammyHagar 6y ago
  Those companies had problems but there aren't that many people who have experience leading large companies across different industry segments. Who has run HP well? Or IBM. Those companies were in legacy industry segments in a sense and lost their innovative sense. Sure, my view as an outsider and non-executive dev is that hp fumbled one thing after another (pa-risc, getting so much money and pissing off customers from printers, etc), then terrible combinations and buyouts except maybe compaq. But as I get more leadership roles over the years, I see my own limitations in leadership. Companies and funders go back to these people with opportunities because they understand some parts of the market that people like me don't (finance, how to make these top level connections). I think like F Scott Fitzgerald kind of said,"Let me tell you about the ... [Ceos]. They are different from you and me". [1] It's fun to switch up that quote, but I do think they think of companies and strategies a lot differently than I do. I think about what is good technology, what will programmers use to build solutions. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10367-let-me-tell-you-about-the-very-rich-they-are https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10367-let-me-tell-you-about...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - hkmurakami 6y ago
    Least bad was probably Mark Hurd. When I worked at HP Labs everyone hated Fiorina.
- jariel 6y ago
  She grew EBay from something small to one of the largest and well known brands in the world. We don't talk about it a lot bit it's a behemoth.
  - 6y ago
A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
In their defense, this is how Hulu started. I initially dismissed based on that, but it proved to be a solid rival for Netflix. But now the market is verrmy different. You are either going for niche ( educational, documentaries, animal planet.. you name it ) or attempt to compete with big boys, which invariably means heavy investment in licensing deals. I personally think someone did not do their research.
- dopamean 6y ago
  I think part of the reason it worked for hulu is that it was a less crowded market for streaming services when they launched. People are pretty happy with the services they have now and so something like Quibi doesn't stand out as something they should try.
- CydeWeys 6y ago
  Hulu has always had a massive catalog of mainstream TV shows from large TV networks that aren't available elsewhere unless you pay for TV (or maybe watch broadcast TV at the right times). That's the same strategy as e.g. Disney+, which also provides exclusive access to a huge catalog of already-desired video. Quibi is different in that they tried to make a bunch of new content from scratch, and no one cared. They weren't tapping into an already existing well of demand for specific content.
  - sitkack 6y ago
    Quibi should have been premium content that was displayed on other channels that already have viewers payment information.
  - emeraldd 6y ago
    On top of that, the advertising tried to sell the platform itself. That might work if the platform already has content people want. Since people want the content, they want the platform. Instead, there wasn't anything there that people already knew about/wanted. Consequently, there was no reason for people to want the platform. (i.e. Why do I want to pay for this new thing?!?) Personally, I found Quibi's advertising so annoying and pointless that I would likely never be interested in looking past it to see what the platform was all about. On the other hand, if they had started pushing shows/creators as an anchor for the platform (with something like an "only on Quibi ..." branding say) it might have been more interesting. I.e. make the platform secondary to the content, convince people they want the content, and that gives them a reason to look at the platform in the first place. Basically, the consumers don't care about the platform itself so much as they care about what it provides them.
zantana 6y ago
I keep thinking about all the philosophy of the Mythical Man Month and proverbial PM who thinks nine women can make a baby in one month, when it comes to this idea that entertainment scales linearly.
paxys 6y ago
Completely agree with this. In fact, I'd say it is the same for a lot of massively overvauled "silicon valley" startups, which actually get little to no funding from the silicon valley ecosystem. A lot of these companies get a fancy-sounding HQ address, hire some engineers from established companies, then go attract investors from other, more traditional industries or foreign countries by selling themselves as the next big tech startup. Theranos is a very famous example of this as well. The company was a joke in the normal SV investment circles since day 1.
majormajor 6y ago
IF Youtube-style short form content ever fully "grows up" into something like Quibi, the existing Hollywood system has a lot at risk. So trying to do it first isn't necessarily insane - try to beat the organic disruption there, so they can capture the result. I'm just not convinced the market for "short [currently free] shit to watch while killing time on my phone" is ever really going to grow into a TV-and-movie-killing Netflix/Hollywood replacement, as compared to a smaller more casual market with smaller returns.
- sukilot 6y ago
  YouTube short form already grew up into something like Quibi. You could make a more compelling offering than Quibi simply by curating existing content. That's why no one cares about Quibi -- they already have YouTube.
  - majormajor 6y ago
    You couldn't get away with charging a subscription fee there, and I don't think you're significantly eating into the 20+min streaming market. You could possibly pull off more premium ad rates, though... but you could really only do this from inside Google.
    - chillfox 6y ago
      Charging a subscription for curated YouTube content is literally the business that Nebula [1] and Floatplane [2] is in. It's just not a $1.75B business or anything close to it. [1] https://watchnebula.com/ https://watchnebula.com/ [2] https://www.floatplane.com/ https://www.floatplane.com/
- lobf 6y ago
  I used to work at Maker Studios, and the expectation by a lot of the bosses was that their YouTube videos would replace the traditional Hollywood production model. They were wrong. People want high quality, professional content.
slg 6y ago
>There's a lot of non-techies outside of SV who seem to think that developers/designers/product-managers are just doing the menial plumbing of building out other people's ideas, and that anyone can do the same thing if they just had access to capital. Maybe this debacle will convince them that there's more to building a successful business than just capital and "an idea". The problems with Quibi had nothing to do with the developers, designers, or product managers. The only real app specific problems, such as forcing it to be mobile only, likely came directly from the executive team. The undertaking was flawed from the start and lots of people in the entertainment industry believed it was a monumental waste of cash well before the service launched and anyone had a look at the actual tech.
rwhitman 6y ago
I've been a tech consultant in LA for more or less 15 years at this point. A very large portion of well funded, early stage startups that crash and burn in LA are typically because media people have a hard time conceptualizing lean startup, and rapid iteration etc. Over the years I've accepted it's not so much hubris as it is entertainment is just a different industry with a different way of doing business and people who found success in entertainment think that method they achieved translates to tech startups, when it unfortunately doesn't. In Hollywood you put all this time and money into one big event like a film, or an album or a pilot and people scoop it up due to marketing. They consume it, then they are done. If they like it they ask for more. So if you have the money you spend all of the money at once to make the best thing possible, put as much marketing and PR against it as possible and people will consume it anyway. Usually you make some of your money back. If consumers ask for more, that's a bonus. Then you go out and raise more for the sequel or the next album or whatever. Of course tech is different - you can't put all that money into the first iteration and expect it to pay off. You need to stretch it out over many experiments and control burn over years. It's just a totally different financial model and business plan. There are so so many Quibis out there that never got past private alpha / beta. The execs spend YEARS crafting that perfect alpha, open it up privately to friends and family, it flops and then they throw in the towel just like that. I've seen it more times than I can count now
- xeromal 6y ago
  Your comment makes me wonder if the tech agile model would work in movies or TV. Imagine if you got bites of a show every week and based on your feedback, the show evolved it's direction. Sounds interesting and strange.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 6y ago
    This is more or less how TV series work. You put out a season, you get feedback, then you develop the next season. I doubt it's practical for individual episodes yet. You would likely need a month between episodes to do this, and people would just forget about your show in that time.
hcarvalhoalves 6y ago
> There's a lot of non-techies outside of SV who seem to think that developers/designers/product-managers are just doing the menial plumbing of building out other people's ideas, and that anyone can do the same thing if they just had access to capital. Maybe this debacle will convince them that there's more to building a successful business than just capital and "an idea". This is interesting. It's probably hard to distinguish companies w/ entirely different culture and talent from the outside, it might be easy to lump any new company into the same category of "disruptive" or something. If you had to draw this distinction - which signs would you look for?
kevc 6y ago
A good friend was recruited by Meg in Quibi's early days (under 20 employees). Her report to me: 0 customer validation, experimentation, research, etc. She ran for the hills and predicted this outcome for years. They had a giant vision from the execs and set out to build it with huge piles of cash. Never stopped to see if consumers actually wanted it along the way. If people's jobs weren't at stake, I would say there is some kind of dark humor here. As a startup, they built the exact type of company startups are great at disrupting.
listenallyall 6y ago
It's less hubris and more FOMO. The tech landscape is changing rapidly, execs (in many industries, not just entertainment) are increasingly disconnected with young, diverse customer bases, and therefore nobody knows for sure what will become the next big thing. There's no downside for a CEO who invests in a failed new venture like Quibi. Very easy to explain away. All his peers did the same, it was an investment in the future, attempt to diversify, outside the box thinking, etc. There is MAJOR downside for NOT investing in a new idea that takes off like a rocket ship, that CEO will look like a fool and "the world passed him by" to investors, peers, employees, talent, etc. Think in terms of "reputation expected value" of the various CEOs and the multitude of major investors makes total sense.
artsyca 6y ago
I thought all unicorns had to ship with wings now, standard.. Is a Decacorn a unicorn with ten heads or just ten horns?
ir7rrhrh 6y ago
It's hard for to believe that Quibi was anything other than a convoluted scam. There's lots of shortcomings and criticisms that could be lobbied Quibi's way but at the end of the day its weakness was that it hit the ground running with a miniscule content library that was a smattering of garbage in all directions. Mobile only was an okay idea even if a lot of folks are still rolling their eyes at it, but you don't get to then charge big kid subscription prices while releasing new content at a snail's pace. Quantity is king and it's baffling that a bunch of Hollywood types couldn't see that.
- jessaustin 6y ago
  Yes, this seemed poorly thought-out: ...a Quibi subscription is $4.99 a month with ads and $7.99 a month without...

by whack 6y ago

raverbashing 6y ago

Though, interestingly enough, Disney just threw money at the problem and came up with Disney+. Though to be fair there were probably a lot of lessons learned and hiring of very experienced people. Edit: my point is, yes, it's easy in hindsight to think it would be a success (and surely, a lot of things help). But HBO Go enjoys much less success (and has a lot of technical issues) Tidal was built to compete with Spotify, see where it went.

vxNsr 6y ago
Disney+ isn’t a novel idea. All they really did was give everyone access to their entire library of videos. Quibi was interesting bec it was trying to be something that no one else was doing, that requires more than an s3 bucket behind a Netflix clone.
- Crespyl 6y ago
  The only (good/interesting) thing Quibi was doing that no one else was doing was the switchable view thing. All the other things they tried were foolish and self-defeating: mobile-only (can't watch on my laptop or TV, which makes it harder to watch with a friend), no screenshots (no sharing/memes to promote conversation about the app or content), etc. There is an ocean of short-form content creators on YouTube, many of them quite talented, who are increasingly desperate for some kind of alternative platform. It would've been so much cheaper and more effective to scoop up a handful of the better ones to create exclusives than to bank the farm on the waning star-power of establishment Hollywood folk. I don't really understand who the target audience is supposed to be. I feel bad for the handful of decent shows (there must be a few right?) that are stuck on this weird patronizing-feeling platform. "I, just like you fellow kids, enjoy Music-Band and short-form video content on the Cell-Phone, and Celebrities!" platform.
albntomat0 6y ago
Did Disney+ do anything new? It took the established model of Netflix and the established content of the Disney empire, and threw them together. From my understanding, Quibi is a unique usage model, with unproven content, neither of which has initially panned out.
- bryanlarsen 6y ago
  Disney+ is an interesting contrast. They threw a lot of money at proven technology (BAMTech) as well as proven content producers (in-house). That's the entire point. You don't throw billions at something new -- you prove it out first and then throw billions at it.
- mensetmanusman 6y ago
  They list all their content in alphabetical order.
tinco 6y ago
Disney didn't have to do any market testing. It's very obvious that people will pay for access to their portfolio. I bet they're more worried the service cannibalizes their DVD/Blu-ray sales than that the service itself isn't popular enough. And since they already had the content and the marketing channels, the only thing they had to spend real money on is engineering. There's also a lot of cachet attached to working for Disney so I bet hiring talent was not an issue.
- jdxcode 6y ago
  They also didn’t try to build the product with in-house engineers, they bought the (very good) company BAMTech.
- cbsks 6y ago
  > I bet they're more worried the service cannibalizes their DVD/Blu-ray sales than that the service itself isn't popular enough. I'm guessing they would love for Disney+ to replace DVD/Blu-ray sales. Rather than making a one time sale, the customer pays for it every month! Forever!
  - projektfu 6y ago
    A lot of customers are probably very happy to pay a monthly fee just to avoid having their DVD wear out while the movie is “in the vault”. Children play these things like 10 times per day.
    - lozaning 6y ago
      Does optical media really wear out?
      - cbsks 6y ago
        When kids are involved, yes :)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
CoffeeDregs 6y ago
Disney bought BAMTech for this. Wasn't too much of a leap to expect that a giant content producer/owner (+ distributor) when combined with a huge content distributor would be successful...

spaetzleesser 6y ago

“There's a lot of non-techies outside of SV who seem to think that developers/designers/product-managers are just doing the menial plumbing of building out other people's ideas, and that anyone can do the same thing if they just had access to capital.” That’s pretty much the idea of supply side and “trickle down“ economics. People with capital are the most important players. People who do the work are not important and replaceable.

6AA4FD 6y ago
Reminds me of the "great man" theory of history and Randian leadership myths.
- spaetzleesser 6y ago
  "Job creators" is also a good term.
kelvin0 6y ago
I did not know the definition of 'trickle down' economics, thanks for that. I had a vague idea of bread crumbs falling off the table of the 'lords' to be consumed by the 'populace'. My idea was : someone buys a multi-million Yacht, well they need a captain, cook and other staff to maintain their ship. The wealth (from buying a luxury item) trickles down to the employees. Of course, this was a simple intuition and the idea had no formal definition for me.
- monknomo 6y ago
  You may enjoy horse and sparrow economics - to feed the sparrows, simply give the horse oats. Eventually the birds will get some
- dmix 6y ago
  Just to be clear no economist has ever used the phrase "trickle down economics" to describe an economic policy. It's always been a derisive term used in politics. > Years ago, this column challenged anybody to quote any economist outside of an insane asylum who had ever advocated this "trickle-down" theory. Some readers said that somebody said that somebody else had advocated a "trickle-down" policy. But they could never name that somebody else and quote them. https://www.creators.com/read/thomas-sowell/01/14/the-trickle-down-lie https://www.creators.com/read/thomas-sowell/01/14/the-trickl...

cletus 6y ago

Thank you for clarifying that. That is interesting. I think I first heard of Quibi from their superbowl ad. That right there is a red flag. There's a certain class of people who think the thing that they happen to do is the most important thing in the world. You have MBA types who argue "good managers can manage anything" (ie you don't need domain knowledge). You have marketers who think that any success is purely a function of the marketing put into it. Worse, any successful launch (eg Disney+) will be seen as a success for marketing. Time and time again we've seen throwing money at marketing fail to sell a bad product. The whole focus on celebrities for Quibi I find interesting, particularly in light of this comment about where the money came from. I'm imagining people who are just horribly out of touch in that they come from an era when celebrity endorsements can sell anything. Or maybe it's people who just want to hang out with celebrities. What better way than to run a "studio"? I mean, Reese Witherspoon getting paid $6m to do a voice over for a show about cheetahs? Wow. The more I see about Meg Whitman the more I'm convinced she's just an idiot who happened to be in the right place at the right time (with HP). Like I'm honestly shocked eBay went anywhere with her at the helm. Because what else has she done? Tried to buy political office (and failed). Quibi. RIP.

SilasX 6y ago
Yikes! Didn't know that bit about Witherspoon. From the article: >>Staffers reportedly “seethed”[1] at Reese Witherspoon’s $6m salary ... (Witherspoon’s husband Jim Toth is the head of talent and content acquisition at the company.) Nepotism, much? [1] https://pagesix.com/2020/06/02/quibi-staffers-seethe-at-reese-witherspoons-6m-payday-amid-layoffs/ https://pagesix.com/2020/06/02/quibi-staffers-seethe-at-rees...
- mywittyname 6y ago
  Hollywood being Hollywood.
  - SilasX 6y ago
    Yeah but that still seems like a severe overpayment. I mean, I get that connections will make a big difference in getting the role, but I never expected it would allow someone to get away with overpaying to such a connection.

jdxcode 6y ago

Meg Whitman seems to get a lot of undeserved credit for some reason. If I had run eBay and HP I think I’d be trying to hide that from my resume.

NotSammyHagar 6y ago
Those companies had problems but there aren't that many people who have experience leading large companies across different industry segments. Who has run HP well? Or IBM. Those companies were in legacy industry segments in a sense and lost their innovative sense. Sure, my view as an outsider and non-executive dev is that hp fumbled one thing after another (pa-risc, getting so much money and pissing off customers from printers, etc), then terrible combinations and buyouts except maybe compaq. But as I get more leadership roles over the years, I see my own limitations in leadership. Companies and funders go back to these people with opportunities because they understand some parts of the market that people like me don't (finance, how to make these top level connections). I think like F Scott Fitzgerald kind of said,"Let me tell you about the ... [Ceos]. They are different from you and me". [1] It's fun to switch up that quote, but I do think they think of companies and strategies a lot differently than I do. I think about what is good technology, what will programmers use to build solutions. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10367-let-me-tell-you-about-the-very-rich-they-are https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10367-let-me-tell-you-about...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- hkmurakami 6y ago
  Least bad was probably Mark Hurd. When I worked at HP Labs everyone hated Fiorina.
jariel 6y ago
She grew EBay from something small to one of the largest and well known brands in the world. We don't talk about it a lot bit it's a behemoth.
- 6y ago

A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago

In their defense, this is how Hulu started. I initially dismissed based on that, but it proved to be a solid rival for Netflix. But now the market is verrmy different. You are either going for niche ( educational, documentaries, animal planet.. you name it ) or attempt to compete with big boys, which invariably means heavy investment in licensing deals. I personally think someone did not do their research.

dopamean 6y ago
I think part of the reason it worked for hulu is that it was a less crowded market for streaming services when they launched. People are pretty happy with the services they have now and so something like Quibi doesn't stand out as something they should try.
CydeWeys 6y ago
Hulu has always had a massive catalog of mainstream TV shows from large TV networks that aren't available elsewhere unless you pay for TV (or maybe watch broadcast TV at the right times). That's the same strategy as e.g. Disney+, which also provides exclusive access to a huge catalog of already-desired video. Quibi is different in that they tried to make a bunch of new content from scratch, and no one cared. They weren't tapping into an already existing well of demand for specific content.
- sitkack 6y ago
  Quibi should have been premium content that was displayed on other channels that already have viewers payment information.
- emeraldd 6y ago
  On top of that, the advertising tried to sell the platform itself. That might work if the platform already has content people want. Since people want the content, they want the platform. Instead, there wasn't anything there that people already knew about/wanted. Consequently, there was no reason for people to want the platform. (i.e. Why do I want to pay for this new thing?!?) Personally, I found Quibi's advertising so annoying and pointless that I would likely never be interested in looking past it to see what the platform was all about. On the other hand, if they had started pushing shows/creators as an anchor for the platform (with something like an "only on Quibi ..." branding say) it might have been more interesting. I.e. make the platform secondary to the content, convince people they want the content, and that gives them a reason to look at the platform in the first place. Basically, the consumers don't care about the platform itself so much as they care about what it provides them.

zantana 6y ago

I keep thinking about all the philosophy of the Mythical Man Month and proverbial PM who thinks nine women can make a baby in one month, when it comes to this idea that entertainment scales linearly.

paxys 6y ago

Completely agree with this. In fact, I'd say it is the same for a lot of massively overvauled "silicon valley" startups, which actually get little to no funding from the silicon valley ecosystem. A lot of these companies get a fancy-sounding HQ address, hire some engineers from established companies, then go attract investors from other, more traditional industries or foreign countries by selling themselves as the next big tech startup. Theranos is a very famous example of this as well. The company was a joke in the normal SV investment circles since day 1.

majormajor 6y ago

IF Youtube-style short form content ever fully "grows up" into something like Quibi, the existing Hollywood system has a lot at risk. So trying to do it first isn't necessarily insane - try to beat the organic disruption there, so they can capture the result. I'm just not convinced the market for "short [currently free] shit to watch while killing time on my phone" is ever really going to grow into a TV-and-movie-killing Netflix/Hollywood replacement, as compared to a smaller more casual market with smaller returns.

sukilot 6y ago
YouTube short form already grew up into something like Quibi. You could make a more compelling offering than Quibi simply by curating existing content. That's why no one cares about Quibi -- they already have YouTube.
- majormajor 6y ago
  You couldn't get away with charging a subscription fee there, and I don't think you're significantly eating into the 20+min streaming market. You could possibly pull off more premium ad rates, though... but you could really only do this from inside Google.
  - chillfox 6y ago
    Charging a subscription for curated YouTube content is literally the business that Nebula [1] and Floatplane [2] is in. It's just not a $1.75B business or anything close to it. [1] https://watchnebula.com/ https://watchnebula.com/ [2] https://www.floatplane.com/ https://www.floatplane.com/
lobf 6y ago
I used to work at Maker Studios, and the expectation by a lot of the bosses was that their YouTube videos would replace the traditional Hollywood production model. They were wrong. People want high quality, professional content.

slg 6y ago

>There's a lot of non-techies outside of SV who seem to think that developers/designers/product-managers are just doing the menial plumbing of building out other people's ideas, and that anyone can do the same thing if they just had access to capital. Maybe this debacle will convince them that there's more to building a successful business than just capital and "an idea". The problems with Quibi had nothing to do with the developers, designers, or product managers. The only real app specific problems, such as forcing it to be mobile only, likely came directly from the executive team. The undertaking was flawed from the start and lots of people in the entertainment industry believed it was a monumental waste of cash well before the service launched and anyone had a look at the actual tech.

rwhitman 6y ago

I've been a tech consultant in LA for more or less 15 years at this point. A very large portion of well funded, early stage startups that crash and burn in LA are typically because media people have a hard time conceptualizing lean startup, and rapid iteration etc. Over the years I've accepted it's not so much hubris as it is entertainment is just a different industry with a different way of doing business and people who found success in entertainment think that method they achieved translates to tech startups, when it unfortunately doesn't. In Hollywood you put all this time and money into one big event like a film, or an album or a pilot and people scoop it up due to marketing. They consume it, then they are done. If they like it they ask for more. So if you have the money you spend all of the money at once to make the best thing possible, put as much marketing and PR against it as possible and people will consume it anyway. Usually you make some of your money back. If consumers ask for more, that's a bonus. Then you go out and raise more for the sequel or the next album or whatever. Of course tech is different - you can't put all that money into the first iteration and expect it to pay off. You need to stretch it out over many experiments and control burn over years. It's just a totally different financial model and business plan. There are so so many Quibis out there that never got past private alpha / beta. The execs spend YEARS crafting that perfect alpha, open it up privately to friends and family, it flops and then they throw in the towel just like that. I've seen it more times than I can count now

xeromal 6y ago
Your comment makes me wonder if the tech agile model would work in movies or TV. Imagine if you got bites of a show every week and based on your feedback, the show evolved it's direction. Sounds interesting and strange.
- onlyrealcuzzo 6y ago
  This is more or less how TV series work. You put out a season, you get feedback, then you develop the next season. I doubt it's practical for individual episodes yet. You would likely need a month between episodes to do this, and people would just forget about your show in that time.

hcarvalhoalves 6y ago

> There's a lot of non-techies outside of SV who seem to think that developers/designers/product-managers are just doing the menial plumbing of building out other people's ideas, and that anyone can do the same thing if they just had access to capital. Maybe this debacle will convince them that there's more to building a successful business than just capital and "an idea". This is interesting. It's probably hard to distinguish companies w/ entirely different culture and talent from the outside, it might be easy to lump any new company into the same category of "disruptive" or something. If you had to draw this distinction - which signs would you look for?

kevc 6y ago

A good friend was recruited by Meg in Quibi's early days (under 20 employees). Her report to me: 0 customer validation, experimentation, research, etc. She ran for the hills and predicted this outcome for years. They had a giant vision from the execs and set out to build it with huge piles of cash. Never stopped to see if consumers actually wanted it along the way. If people's jobs weren't at stake, I would say there is some kind of dark humor here. As a startup, they built the exact type of company startups are great at disrupting.

listenallyall 6y ago

It's less hubris and more FOMO. The tech landscape is changing rapidly, execs (in many industries, not just entertainment) are increasingly disconnected with young, diverse customer bases, and therefore nobody knows for sure what will become the next big thing. There's no downside for a CEO who invests in a failed new venture like Quibi. Very easy to explain away. All his peers did the same, it was an investment in the future, attempt to diversify, outside the box thinking, etc. There is MAJOR downside for NOT investing in a new idea that takes off like a rocket ship, that CEO will look like a fool and "the world passed him by" to investors, peers, employees, talent, etc. Think in terms of "reputation expected value" of the various CEOs and the multitude of major investors makes total sense.

artsyca 6y ago

I thought all unicorns had to ship with wings now, standard.. Is a Decacorn a unicorn with ten heads or just ten horns?

ir7rrhrh 6y ago

It's hard for to believe that Quibi was anything other than a convoluted scam. There's lots of shortcomings and criticisms that could be lobbied Quibi's way but at the end of the day its weakness was that it hit the ground running with a miniscule content library that was a smattering of garbage in all directions. Mobile only was an okay idea even if a lot of folks are still rolling their eyes at it, but you don't get to then charge big kid subscription prices while releasing new content at a snail's pace. Quantity is king and it's baffling that a bunch of Hollywood types couldn't see that.

jessaustin 6y ago
Yes, this seemed poorly thought-out: ...a Quibi subscription is $4.99 a month with ads and $7.99 a month without...