7 ms·

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

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.
  - catgary 6y ago
    Aren't TV pilots individual episodes?
    - lobf 6y ago
      They are, but there's a lot of lead time that goes in to shooting the pilot, and then even more in planning the rest of the season if it gets picked back up. They end up released at the same time, but that doesn't mean that a year hasn't passed since they started pre production on the pilot. It's simply infeasible to adjust a show to fan feedback on a weekly basis I think. You'd need either a really small show, or one where most of the elements (sets, lighting, wardrobe, etc.) stay pretty consistent between episodes, then the work would just be a matter of tweaking the story, rather than figuring out how to get the whole crew out to all the locations required to make a traditional tv show.
      - walshemj 6y ago
        From listing to some of the director/producers commentary on episodic tv there is a lot of prep work that goes into a show and then you have 7 days to shoot the episode. So you cant really change that much week to week.
        lobf 6y ago
        Yup, exactly. I work in production, and you need so much time to prep all of the aspects of a single day of production, and then working each day in to a rational schedule to get everything you need. You can't just change everything on a whim. (not without lots of time and money)
  - nogabebop23 6y ago
    not as common as ordering an entire season but lots of mid-season launches are 6-10 episode orders. Also, they don't put out the entire season before feedback, hence many mid-season cancelations. I think this is a hold-over from when the airtime had a lot of value, where as now the broadcast bandwidth for your typical cable timeslot is effectively zero and the content is actually valuable. Async, on-demand consumption has pretty much killed the concept of prime time...
- karthikb 6y ago
  Youtube works this way to some extent.
  - cosmodisk 6y ago
    I was thinking about this model as some sort of extension for film trailers:instead of giving out 2-4 min trailer to audience, producers could give 10-15 min,which hopefully be enough to understand whether audience finds it good enough and if it is,a full film is made. However,I can't see it working with all genres.
    - drfuchs 6y ago
      In the first half of the 1900's, there were "race films" from Black-owned studios that were actually financed like this. The studio would create a trailer that they'd then show to theater-owners. Exhibitors who liked the trailer would pay an advance against the box office, and if enough signed on, the film would get made and distributed to them. Kind of like authors getting an advance on a book they're writing.
      - flir 6y ago
        Do any of them (films or trailers) survive? I've never heard of black-owned studios and I'd like to know more.
        drfuchs 6y ago
        Some do, but not many. Wikipedia has a good entry for “race film”, and http://dhbasecamp.humanities.ucla.edu/afamfilm/ http://dhbasecamp.humanities.ucla.edu/afamfilm/ looks like a great resource. Also check out https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6845-black-cinema-at-its-birth https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6845-black-cinema-at... and https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/features/short-history-black-us-indie-cinema https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/features/short-... and other Google hits on “black cinema”.
        6y ago
- ohhhlol 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_101 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_101
- Apocryphon 6y ago
  Quick bites of a TV show? Sounds like a $1.75 billion idea.
  - xeromal 6y ago
    haha, I do sound like a jackass when you put it that way
- yomly 6y ago
  Sounds like being a Youtuber
- jameshart 6y ago
  This is actually more or less how Andy Weir wrote The Martian - and as a product development model it really did build a story of a kind that otherwise wasn’t getting built by the market. There’s definitely something to this. Consider also the way standups hone material over many performances building up their set. So there are incremental feedback models in entertainment - but they’re rare. I guess remakes and reboots are a crude model of iteration as well, although it’s not like each new iteration of Spider-Man is a refinement of the last based on audience feedback - it’s still speculative ‘here’s that same thing repackaged in a way new audiences will love!’ thinking, rather than creeping towards product-market-fit
- rwhitman 6y ago
  I'd imagine the inception of Quibi in the first place probably was a conversation like that? This situation is emblematic of the fundamental conflict it would face. On the one side the desire to produce rapid cheap bite-size content to iterate on for a metrics-based tech company, on the other blowing all the cash for said content on the Hollywood tactic of putting star power on the red carpet
- hipshaker 6y ago
  Some shows do actually have a bit of agility as you put it. In its simplest form, you have cahracters written in and out of shows based on popularity. There might also be story paths explored based on fan reponse. This is not the norm of course. But neither is doing a whole season blind-folded like netflix. Things do get tweaked a bit. But there’s a balance to this. You can’t really do great storytelling based on viewer-stats. That’s like a ship steered by wild monkeys. Certainly an interesting voyage, but ultimately not a rewarding one. A captain is needed to steer the passangers on a guided path that will culminate in good experience or not for the majority.
- artsyca 6y ago
  It doesn't even work in tech, bro.
- jwdavidson 6y ago
  This is literally the soap opera model. Soaps actively solicit fan feedback and run productions with composable sets and flexible casts.
- mech422 6y ago
  This has been done in a very real sense [0]... Defiance was a video game/tv show combo where actions in the game influenced the next episode of the TV show. This included things like 'which side was winning' and who lived/died, etc. [0]https://en.wikipedia.or/wiki/Defiance_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.or/wiki/Defiance_(video_game)
100-xyz 6y ago
Good analysis on the thought process difference between SV and Hollywood!
dr_dshiv 6y ago
> 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. This condition needs a name. I've done it myself too many times to count. The first time was back in 2004 with a Facebook rival at Yale University. We had all this great social photo and media sharing but it wasn't growing against the simplicity of Facebook. So, after a couple months of not being Facebook, we gave up and got jobs <face palm>
- tschwimmer 6y ago
  Though the term are almost meaningless, this can be described as waterfall product development. Waterfall isn't always bad (like when you're building a space shuttle or a smart watch) but for consumer product it's almost always wrong. Even if you're able to pick the correct idea to build far in advance, if you develop a giant scope without releasing anything it likely took longer and was more risky than releasing and iterating. And let me tell you, in the vast majority of cases your original idea is far from correct.
  - toast0 6y ago
    I think it all comes down to what's the cost to change the design. You can't easily change the design of the space shuttle after you built it, so you better get it right. Consumer hardware isn't quite so permanent, you can always recall the whole thing (samsung phones, early famicom), if you have the money. But a website is easy to change -- there's no sense making it perfect before you know if people will use it.
    - dr_dshiv 6y ago
      > But a website is easy to change -- there's no sense making it perfect before you know if people will use it. But this sentiment is exactly this issue! "Before you know if people will use it" -- the point is that when people don't use it, is it because it was a bad idea to compete with Facebook or because the design wasn't right? When to give up and when to iterate?
- 6y ago
gdilla 6y ago
It's because the media world is hit driven. Big expensive productions get thrown away all the time because one huge hit will make your career (or your bottom line). This might work for movies but it doesn't work with companies. The Lean approach is to learn and iterate, but the movie people never learn.
sbarre 6y ago
In my experiences working in tech for the entertainment industry, I also found that big-budget movies and TV used to be built on "hunches" and "gut decisions".. There wasn't a ton of market research, iteration or testing, at least not up front. Executives would green-light a project and budget based on their personal experience and/or biases and opinions about what will work and what won't.. Not sure if that's still the case (this was ~10 year ago), but that rarely works in tech.
- harrydehal 6y ago
  "The Player" (1992), starring Tim Robbins and directed by Robert Altman, is a good watch if anyone wants a deeper dive into the lifestyles of studio execs who have the authority to greenlight (or trash) projects. Great film! https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105151 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105151
- endymi0n 6y ago
  You know what‘s even worse than gut feelings and hunches? Greenlighting processes that are number and „AI“ driven. While there‘s a limited subset of AI like GANs that I‘d actually call creative, the usual tabular models are none of these. So what do you do to maximise chances for a box office success? Do a sequel to (or remake of) a well known movie, hire a star, use the standard playbook (never skip the „all is lost“ moment for dramatic effect) and add a love scene. If you ever wondered why 2020 Hollywood feels like the same boring stuff in 8k UHD over and over again. I think Netflix did pretty well with just hiring some known creative people and telling them „whatever you do, just use your gut feeling and we‘ll buy it“.
  - sbarre 6y ago
    Pretty sure there's lots of viable options between "gut feeling" and "number-driven".. But I get your point, either extreme can potentially produce less than great results.
  - reedwolf 6y ago
    >Do a sequel to (or remake of) a well known movie, hire a star, use the standard playbook (never skip the „all is lost“ moment for dramatic effect) and add a love scene That's been going on since the first wagons rolled into Hollywood. I'm pretty sure even Shakespeare was doing a 16th Century, theatrical equivalent.
vmception 6y ago
Exactly, what primary distinction with "tech" company versus what it actually does is its investors. If the investors are known for hockey stick growth tech startups, your company is a tech company even if you are just long real estate.
clairity 6y ago
there isn't a big structural difference between the tech and entertainment industries vs., say, healthcare or construction. they're both IP-driven and largely virtual, with lots of winner-take-all dynamics and potential economies of scale and scope. most ventures fail, whether it's in tech or entertainment. tech has billion dollar flameouts too--webvan, theranos, etc. entertainment has startups that hit big too--parasite for example. founders who exit successfully can more easily raise the next time around, just like directors and producers who have a hit. each industry thinks it's unique and different, but that's due mainly to ego, not to (many) true differences. even cultures largely overlap. people with gobs of money can (and if warranted, should) fail too.
- rwhitman 6y ago
  I used to agree with the idea that entertainment and tech are similar, but I've had a paradigm shift in my perspective over the last 2 years and it's helped quite a bit.. easy to forget that the internet business is in its infancy. It only feels like a hits-driven IP business right now because there is still room left for innovation and land-grabs. That won't last forever..
  - clairity 6y ago
    i'd be interested to hear more about the bigger differences, but what you pointed out before didn't strike me as all that different. for instance, the movie (and tv) business more readily lends itself to a repetitive process constrained on storytelling, which is more focused, on a macro scale, than tech. it would be akin to tech companies settling on only building web businesses over and over again, albeit with different twists. the video game sector has possibly hit that kind of stride. i don't know that this affects their ability to succeed though, well-funded or not.
    - rwhitman 6y ago
      Fundamentally I see the web business from the lens of "data is the new oil". The internet industry is a utility and infrastructure business, period. Content is just one of many things that can be monetized through commodity web technology. Streaming video for example has more or less stopped producing viable venture startups on the B2C side. Successful new ventures in streaming, the ones who will actually make money, are folks like Disney and Warner with IP. Their business advantage is horizontal integration, rent seeking for content with killer margins over company-controlled pipes. Disney Plus, HBO Max apps have zero notable tech innovations. The only criteria to the consumer is that the content is exclusive and the app stays in the background and doesn't fail. OTT video, as a vertical for consumer innovation, is over. Same goes for SaaS, ecommerce, social networks, gaming, music, news etc. Maybe we'll get some standout disruptions from time to time as hardware evolves. But the tech is all about plumbing from here on out..

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.
- catgary 6y ago
  Aren't TV pilots individual episodes?
  - lobf 6y ago
    They are, but there's a lot of lead time that goes in to shooting the pilot, and then even more in planning the rest of the season if it gets picked back up. They end up released at the same time, but that doesn't mean that a year hasn't passed since they started pre production on the pilot. It's simply infeasible to adjust a show to fan feedback on a weekly basis I think. You'd need either a really small show, or one where most of the elements (sets, lighting, wardrobe, etc.) stay pretty consistent between episodes, then the work would just be a matter of tweaking the story, rather than figuring out how to get the whole crew out to all the locations required to make a traditional tv show.
    - walshemj 6y ago
      From listing to some of the director/producers commentary on episodic tv there is a lot of prep work that goes into a show and then you have 7 days to shoot the episode. So you cant really change that much week to week.
      - lobf 6y ago
        Yup, exactly. I work in production, and you need so much time to prep all of the aspects of a single day of production, and then working each day in to a rational schedule to get everything you need. You can't just change everything on a whim. (not without lots of time and money)
- nogabebop23 6y ago
  not as common as ordering an entire season but lots of mid-season launches are 6-10 episode orders. Also, they don't put out the entire season before feedback, hence many mid-season cancelations. I think this is a hold-over from when the airtime had a lot of value, where as now the broadcast bandwidth for your typical cable timeslot is effectively zero and the content is actually valuable. Async, on-demand consumption has pretty much killed the concept of prime time...
karthikb 6y ago
Youtube works this way to some extent.
- cosmodisk 6y ago
  I was thinking about this model as some sort of extension for film trailers:instead of giving out 2-4 min trailer to audience, producers could give 10-15 min,which hopefully be enough to understand whether audience finds it good enough and if it is,a full film is made. However,I can't see it working with all genres.
  - drfuchs 6y ago
    In the first half of the 1900's, there were "race films" from Black-owned studios that were actually financed like this. The studio would create a trailer that they'd then show to theater-owners. Exhibitors who liked the trailer would pay an advance against the box office, and if enough signed on, the film would get made and distributed to them. Kind of like authors getting an advance on a book they're writing.
    - flir 6y ago
      Do any of them (films or trailers) survive? I've never heard of black-owned studios and I'd like to know more.
      - drfuchs 6y ago
        Some do, but not many. Wikipedia has a good entry for “race film”, and http://dhbasecamp.humanities.ucla.edu/afamfilm/ http://dhbasecamp.humanities.ucla.edu/afamfilm/ looks like a great resource. Also check out https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6845-black-cinema-at-its-birth https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6845-black-cinema-at... and https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/features/short-history-black-us-indie-cinema https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/features/short-... and other Google hits on “black cinema”.
        6y ago
ohhhlol 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_101 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_101
Apocryphon 6y ago
Quick bites of a TV show? Sounds like a $1.75 billion idea.
- xeromal 6y ago
  haha, I do sound like a jackass when you put it that way
yomly 6y ago
Sounds like being a Youtuber
jameshart 6y ago
This is actually more or less how Andy Weir wrote The Martian - and as a product development model it really did build a story of a kind that otherwise wasn’t getting built by the market. There’s definitely something to this. Consider also the way standups hone material over many performances building up their set. So there are incremental feedback models in entertainment - but they’re rare. I guess remakes and reboots are a crude model of iteration as well, although it’s not like each new iteration of Spider-Man is a refinement of the last based on audience feedback - it’s still speculative ‘here’s that same thing repackaged in a way new audiences will love!’ thinking, rather than creeping towards product-market-fit
rwhitman 6y ago
I'd imagine the inception of Quibi in the first place probably was a conversation like that? This situation is emblematic of the fundamental conflict it would face. On the one side the desire to produce rapid cheap bite-size content to iterate on for a metrics-based tech company, on the other blowing all the cash for said content on the Hollywood tactic of putting star power on the red carpet
hipshaker 6y ago
Some shows do actually have a bit of agility as you put it. In its simplest form, you have cahracters written in and out of shows based on popularity. There might also be story paths explored based on fan reponse. This is not the norm of course. But neither is doing a whole season blind-folded like netflix. Things do get tweaked a bit. But there’s a balance to this. You can’t really do great storytelling based on viewer-stats. That’s like a ship steered by wild monkeys. Certainly an interesting voyage, but ultimately not a rewarding one. A captain is needed to steer the passangers on a guided path that will culminate in good experience or not for the majority.
artsyca 6y ago
It doesn't even work in tech, bro.
jwdavidson 6y ago
This is literally the soap opera model. Soaps actively solicit fan feedback and run productions with composable sets and flexible casts.
mech422 6y ago
This has been done in a very real sense [0]... Defiance was a video game/tv show combo where actions in the game influenced the next episode of the TV show. This included things like 'which side was winning' and who lived/died, etc. [0]https://en.wikipedia.or/wiki/Defiance_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.or/wiki/Defiance_(video_game)

100-xyz 6y ago

Good analysis on the thought process difference between SV and Hollywood!

dr_dshiv 6y ago

> 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. This condition needs a name. I've done it myself too many times to count. The first time was back in 2004 with a Facebook rival at Yale University. We had all this great social photo and media sharing but it wasn't growing against the simplicity of Facebook. So, after a couple months of not being Facebook, we gave up and got jobs <face palm>

tschwimmer 6y ago
Though the term are almost meaningless, this can be described as waterfall product development. Waterfall isn't always bad (like when you're building a space shuttle or a smart watch) but for consumer product it's almost always wrong. Even if you're able to pick the correct idea to build far in advance, if you develop a giant scope without releasing anything it likely took longer and was more risky than releasing and iterating. And let me tell you, in the vast majority of cases your original idea is far from correct.
- toast0 6y ago
  I think it all comes down to what's the cost to change the design. You can't easily change the design of the space shuttle after you built it, so you better get it right. Consumer hardware isn't quite so permanent, you can always recall the whole thing (samsung phones, early famicom), if you have the money. But a website is easy to change -- there's no sense making it perfect before you know if people will use it.
  - dr_dshiv 6y ago
    > But a website is easy to change -- there's no sense making it perfect before you know if people will use it. But this sentiment is exactly this issue! "Before you know if people will use it" -- the point is that when people don't use it, is it because it was a bad idea to compete with Facebook or because the design wasn't right? When to give up and when to iterate?
6y ago

gdilla 6y ago

It's because the media world is hit driven. Big expensive productions get thrown away all the time because one huge hit will make your career (or your bottom line). This might work for movies but it doesn't work with companies. The Lean approach is to learn and iterate, but the movie people never learn.

sbarre 6y ago

In my experiences working in tech for the entertainment industry, I also found that big-budget movies and TV used to be built on "hunches" and "gut decisions".. There wasn't a ton of market research, iteration or testing, at least not up front. Executives would green-light a project and budget based on their personal experience and/or biases and opinions about what will work and what won't.. Not sure if that's still the case (this was ~10 year ago), but that rarely works in tech.

harrydehal 6y ago
"The Player" (1992), starring Tim Robbins and directed by Robert Altman, is a good watch if anyone wants a deeper dive into the lifestyles of studio execs who have the authority to greenlight (or trash) projects. Great film! https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105151 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105151
endymi0n 6y ago
You know what‘s even worse than gut feelings and hunches? Greenlighting processes that are number and „AI“ driven. While there‘s a limited subset of AI like GANs that I‘d actually call creative, the usual tabular models are none of these. So what do you do to maximise chances for a box office success? Do a sequel to (or remake of) a well known movie, hire a star, use the standard playbook (never skip the „all is lost“ moment for dramatic effect) and add a love scene. If you ever wondered why 2020 Hollywood feels like the same boring stuff in 8k UHD over and over again. I think Netflix did pretty well with just hiring some known creative people and telling them „whatever you do, just use your gut feeling and we‘ll buy it“.
- sbarre 6y ago
  Pretty sure there's lots of viable options between "gut feeling" and "number-driven".. But I get your point, either extreme can potentially produce less than great results.
- reedwolf 6y ago
  >Do a sequel to (or remake of) a well known movie, hire a star, use the standard playbook (never skip the „all is lost“ moment for dramatic effect) and add a love scene That's been going on since the first wagons rolled into Hollywood. I'm pretty sure even Shakespeare was doing a 16th Century, theatrical equivalent.

vmception 6y ago

Exactly, what primary distinction with "tech" company versus what it actually does is its investors. If the investors are known for hockey stick growth tech startups, your company is a tech company even if you are just long real estate.

clairity 6y ago

there isn't a big structural difference between the tech and entertainment industries vs., say, healthcare or construction. they're both IP-driven and largely virtual, with lots of winner-take-all dynamics and potential economies of scale and scope. most ventures fail, whether it's in tech or entertainment. tech has billion dollar flameouts too--webvan, theranos, etc. entertainment has startups that hit big too--parasite for example. founders who exit successfully can more easily raise the next time around, just like directors and producers who have a hit. each industry thinks it's unique and different, but that's due mainly to ego, not to (many) true differences. even cultures largely overlap. people with gobs of money can (and if warranted, should) fail too.

rwhitman 6y ago
I used to agree with the idea that entertainment and tech are similar, but I've had a paradigm shift in my perspective over the last 2 years and it's helped quite a bit.. easy to forget that the internet business is in its infancy. It only feels like a hits-driven IP business right now because there is still room left for innovation and land-grabs. That won't last forever..
- clairity 6y ago
  i'd be interested to hear more about the bigger differences, but what you pointed out before didn't strike me as all that different. for instance, the movie (and tv) business more readily lends itself to a repetitive process constrained on storytelling, which is more focused, on a macro scale, than tech. it would be akin to tech companies settling on only building web businesses over and over again, albeit with different twists. the video game sector has possibly hit that kind of stride. i don't know that this affects their ability to succeed though, well-funded or not.
  - rwhitman 6y ago
    Fundamentally I see the web business from the lens of "data is the new oil". The internet industry is a utility and infrastructure business, period. Content is just one of many things that can be monetized through commodity web technology. Streaming video for example has more or less stopped producing viable venture startups on the B2C side. Successful new ventures in streaming, the ones who will actually make money, are folks like Disney and Warner with IP. Their business advantage is horizontal integration, rent seeking for content with killer margins over company-controlled pipes. Disney Plus, HBO Max apps have zero notable tech innovations. The only criteria to the consumer is that the content is exclusive and the app stays in the background and doesn't fail. OTT video, as a vertical for consumer innovation, is over. Same goes for SaaS, ecommerce, social networks, gaming, music, news etc. Maybe we'll get some standout disruptions from time to time as hardware evolves. But the tech is all about plumbing from here on out..