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It is crazy that they doubled down on the mobile-only strategy instead of trying harder to iterate, the pandemic has been going on for months. You're telling me

It is crazy that they doubled down on the mobile-only strategy instead of trying harder to iterate, the pandemic has been going on for months. You're telling me they raised all of that money and couldn't stand up a basic web client just to see what would happen? The leadership says quite a bit about it IMO. Meg Whitman has had a legendary career, but even she doesn't appear to have experience founding a tech company. She started at P&G and then went to eBay when it had 30 employees and $4M in revenue[0]. And the founder came from Hollywood, neither of them had real founder experience. I would love to read an insiders account of what happened between the company's formation in August 2018 to April 2020, when the product launched. It looks like they got tons of media deals lined up before the app launched, I wonder how much product development and discovery they were doing during that time. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meg_Whitman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meg_Whitman

smegger001 6y ago
legendary? she drove HP into the ground, to the point wear Bloomberg named her the most underachieving ceo at ebay she purchased skype for 4 billion then turned around and sold it for 2.
- axaxs 6y ago
  Don't forget that it sold for 4x that a short time later. It sounds like something from a sitcom.
- save_ferris 6y ago
  I'm not saying that everything she touched turned to gold, but I am saying that she's one of the most high-profile executives in America. Princeton undergrad, Harvard MBA, SVP at Bain, CEO at eBay, HP, primary candidate in a gubernatorial race. That's absolutely a stellar career that most people can only dream of.
  - simonsarris 6y ago
    I think most people's idea of a stellar career is not a collection of titles but a collection of accomplishments.
  - smt88 6y ago
    Leadership in management consulting is a negative mark on a resume, not a positive one.
    - arbitrary_name 6y ago
      Ugh, this is a trite and worthless comment. You can't shake a stick in business without hitting ex-MBB leadership. Some of them suck, some of them are mediocre, some of them are spectacularly good. But thanks for sharing, I guess?
      - smt88 6y ago
        > You can't shake a stick in business without hitting ex-MBB leadership. I don't work with any. I exclusively work on early-stage startups, so all my companies have teams of 3-20. They're also mostly bootstrapped. I've tried partnering with ex-consultants in the past, but they add no value. They don't have deep industry contacts to sell to. They don't have hands-on experience actually building anything. They make nice PowerPoint presentations, and that's literally it. They constantly over-promise and under-deliver. They also often demand high salaries at early stages, because they're used to making $300-500k, but that's a whole other issue. I wasn't being trite. I consider having management consulting (especially MBB) to be a negative on a resume of someone I'm considering working with. It's essentially a disqualifying issue for me after many bad experiences. Maybe the next person is the exception, but it's not worth the risk for me anymore. Being in leadership is even worse, because you're complicit in destroying so much shareholder value. You charge $100M for something that delivers no real value and costs your firm $10M. Why is that something we should admire? > Some of them suck, some of them are mediocre, some of them are spectacularly good. What are they spectacularly good at, though? I completely agree that many of them are brilliant, but what skills are they honing, exactly? Brilliance by itself is not enough to make me want to work with someone. Experience is much more useful. The experience gained tt consulting firms seems to be sales (of a very specific type), making beautiful presentations, and bending data to fit whatever narrative people want it to. Maybe they do some legwork gathering data or running some regressions, but they're usually starting with a preconception of where they should end up. I have a friend who's a partner at Accenture, and he feels exactly the same way about management consulting that I do: it's bullshit. Another friend at McKinsey described his analyst job as "knowing how to wear a suit and be on time". I've heard of so many disasters caused by management consultancies. Where are the success stories? At best, they just give a company's managers some data that validates what the company already wants to do, but maybe it's a little too risky. Somewhere in the middle, perhaps they find a way to sneakily kill a pension program or fire 10,000 people. They're creating value for the company, but it's not exactly work your family will write about in your obituary. At worst, they burn through piles of cash and accomplish absolutely nothing.
  - plankers 6y ago
    >Princeton undergrad, Harvard MBA, SVP at Bain, CEO at eBay, HP, primary candidate in a gubernatorial race You just listed the standard elitist silver spoon CV. She had a stellar career because she was born into it. Her track record at all of these institutions speaks to her actual talent. Meritocracy, my ass.
    - hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
      I think Meg Whitman is a pretty horrible CEO, not to mention she appears to treat people like shit. This article by Rob Enderle (from back in August mind you) gives a good overview of her poor leadership: https://techspective.net/2020/08/07/meg-whitman-and-predicting-the-failure-of-quibi/ https://techspective.net/2020/08/07/meg-whitman-and-predicti...
    - Hnrobert42 6y ago
      One does not necessarily beget the next. That is, there are plenty of folks who went to Princeton who didn’t make it to Harvard MBA. And many Harvard MBAs who dont become SVPs at major firms. And so on. In fact, under your philosophy, how could one be successful at all and not have you scoff at their success? Does the person have to literally go from rags to riches? I do not deny that each step in her journey made it easier to take the next step. They made it easier because they were necessary. They are also hard work and long hours. It’s not a life I would volunteer for. Now, if you want to talk about folks plopped into plumb positions by family members of powerful politicians, cough Hunter Biden, cough Jared Kushner, then you can talk about silver spoon elitism all you want.
      - wpietri 6y ago
        Plenty of people work hard. Most of them do it for peanuts. I guarantee plenty of people at eBay worked harder than Whitman, for example; that place was an exploitative sweatshop in her era. I expect her maids worker harder than her, too. Sure, she was good at working the system that her elite upbringing put her on track for. Among the managerial caste, she was unusually good at ladder-climbing. And she was certainly lucky to join a dot-com success story at the right moment. But being good at managerialist skills and selling one's self aren't all that it takes to succeed at business. Indeed, that can be a real handicap, because being good at working other Harvard MBAs doesn't mean a thing when it comes to pleasing people you want to pay $4.99 a month.
  - nevertoolate 6y ago
    I see the pattern there. I’m from Europe but worked with US management. They came with previous titles, and with good understanding on the importance of self marketing even after hired. All their focus was on delivering the low hanging fruits after that only smoke&mirrors. Then after getting C level position they were fired, and started at another company at an elevated position. I’m not saying this is bad, but not something I would call a stellar career. It elevates people on a ladder but but not in a way Children dream of...
    - ackbar03 6y ago
      Why was this downvoted? I feel this is very true. Having worked a few years in a corporate environment, suits and ties, especially higher up the management chain, are almost exclusively about self promotion, bullshitting, and smoke and mirrors. Throw them out into the wild and they wouldn't have a single idea of how to make a living or business except to get another job with their bs skills. Only wierd part of this is the comment of how "children dream of"
    - wpietri 6y ago
      Exactly. And they're responding to the incentives in the system we've built. CEO tenure has dropped dramatically over the decades, while CEO compensation has skyrocketed. I can't find a measure elsewhere, but I'm sure sub-CEO executive position tenure is way shorter. So if one is playing to maximize cash, the optimal strategy is to be very good at bullshit, self-promotion, and generating impressive short-term metrics without regard to long-term impact. You have to look good, and then you have to avoid the long-term consequences of your choices. Then when you get to the top, it's even more important to juke the stats so that executive compensation is maximized. Because by then you're standing on top of a pyramid of bullshitters with little devotion to the workers or the customers.
  - sizzle 6y ago
    This has privilege written all over it. It's evident when you study her upbringing and family connections.
  - AlexandrB 6y ago
    > SVP at Bain Bain Capital, the PE raider made (in)famous thanks to the 2012 Mitt Romney campaign? Sounds more like everything she touched turned to shit.
  - skinnymuch 6y ago
    So much of that is pure elitism. Didn’t she spend the most money ever on her race? And lost? How Is that stellar? I’d be ashamed of that. Not the losing part. The trying to buy your way in part. otherwise all you’re saying from the get go is she had her foot in the right doors and was able to get good jobs at P&G and Bain. Do you think she truly earned the jobs or was truly the best candidate for those jobs out of everyone? Her eBay tenure is not destroying the company, but instead letting it do its own thing without actually doing anything else. You can see the results for yourself over the past decade. You’re right most people can only dream of such things because dreams usually contain thinking about luck, lucky breaks, winning capitalism, though not necessarily out of skill and talent.
  - cultus 6y ago
    And people wonder why social mobility is so low in the US... Your comment is emblematic how how inefficient our oligarchical system is. It's like saying someone would be a good general because his father is an important feudal lord. That's the way it was throughout the vast majority of history, but we pretend it is different now.
- vaxman 6y ago
  Meg is part of a generation that treated devs (originally called “implementors” when she was young) like interchangeable technicians or “plumbers”. Jobs, was also part of that generation, except he was way “cooler” about it (in order to squeeze more productivity out of his plumbers than say, his original employer HP). Some of Jobs’ peers learned to do the same thing with their plumbers achieving varying degrees of success but a lot of FAILURE. To her credit, I think Meg always has understood you don’t give cash to some half-baked hipster because of their black turtleneck and story about a low barrier to market, but due to her limited perspective (she is not GenX), she didn’t know the proper balance to grow something like eBay into something like $3,000/share Amazon. I do think she is a winner and was a wise choice to get Katz’s mobile-first content out the door..the failure is due to mobile not being a thing during the Shelter In Place orders.
  - simonh 6y ago
    Your comments on Jobs are weirdly off the mark. He had huge respect for engineering and said top engineers could be 10x or more as productive as the average. He certainly didn’t think they were all interchangeable. He said he hired the best engineers because he wanted them to tell him what needed doing or how to do it. Also he never worked for HP.
    - AlanYx 6y ago
      I agree with you. But technically Steve Jobs did work for HP once... he had a summer job at HP at age 12, which he landed after calling Bill Hewlett asking for some spare parts to build a frequency counter.
  - BigJono 6y ago
    I don't think this is a generation thing. The strategy of treating devs as interchangeable cogs is still absolutely thriving in management circles. The only differences now are that it's often glammed up with a bunch of lip service that seems to suggest the opposite approach (but no actions to follow that up), and that there's very successful pockets not using that approach, that aren't representative of the majority of the industry. I don't think either approach is necessarily 'wrong' either, because I've seen tons of companies have great success with staggering numbers of thoroughly mediocre devs and lots of turnover. But you very likely have to commit to one strategy or the other, the absolute shittest places I've worked are the ones where they're kidding themselves, unsure what they're trying to do, or half way through a transition from one approach to the other. As dumb and unintuitive as it sounds, I think you can run a big bank very successfully with 200 engineers siloed into small teams of experts, or with 3000 engineers shoveled into big "tribes" (or whatever the buzzword of the day is) of distributed responsibility. But I'm wary of anyone that's trying to do it with 800 engineers, especially the "we only hire the best!" variety. (those three numbers obviously scale with the size of the business and a bunch of external factors).
- anxman 6y ago
  At eBay she also purchased PayPal which added more than $50b in market cap to eBay. Can’t win em all. At HP, market cap also grew significantly on her watch. I feel like implying that she is a failure is almost borderline sexist.
  - nicbou 6y ago
    Unless there is any implication that her gender has something to do with it, it's not sexist. It's just incorrect.
    - croon 6y ago
      It's sexist if it's critique she wouldn't have gotten if she were a man, regardless of if the critique focuses on gender. It's impossible to determine this what-if scenario though, so I agree it's best to leave out the speculation.
      - newswasboring 6y ago
        > It's impossible to determine this what-if scenario though, so I agree it's best to leave out the speculation. What are you talking about, CEOs get criticism all the time. Especially on HN where people are aggressive about their opinions. Just because you can't do alternate reality simulation doesn't mean you can't say anything about this.
        croon 6y ago
        Sure, and if you want to do a meta-analysis on HN CEO-criticism based on gender, adjusted for some metric of performance, I'll concede.
        mkohlmyr 6y ago
        I mean might hope the requirement to provide said meta-analysis would fall on the person making the claim that the criticism is sexist, not on the person saying it might not be?
- chemmail 6y ago
  Katzenberg is more of the legend. I'm not a hollywood person, but recognized the last name immediacy. He is responsible for producing The Little Mermaid, Beauty & The Beast, Aladin, and Lion King. Basically the best Disney masterpieces ever, and the only other company to fight Pixar on the big screen. Quibi has always been a terrible idea. I hope he find great success in his next endeavor, maybe a classic USA hand drawn animation studio !!!
  - ackbar03 6y ago
    That idea will probably bring him to bankruptcy immediately... I'm not expert in the industry but apparently hand-draw animations as an industry are in a serious dump. The animators are seriously overworked and underpaid, especially in japan, so much so that the majority of it nowadays are already being outsourced to places like India and Indonesia. You'll probably burn cash faster than you can literally burn cash if you try to run a business like that in the USA
    - pfranz 6y ago
      I can't imagine Katzenberg doing this (I don't think his interests are actually animation or anything "traditional"), but hand drawn animation is just "out of fashion" and the business people don't think the ROI is enough. Look at the budget for Princess and the Frog or other hand drawn projects around that time compared to CG films. Hand drawn cost around $80-100 million while CG is closer to $150 million (a large chunk for both is usually voice talent). Disney had tossed their old animation system CAPS (and I'm pretty sure all their old desks) and they built a brand new pipeline around off the shelf software for the production--subsequent productions would have been cheaper.
      - WorldMaker 6y ago
        DreamWorks Animation, as one existing example, is still doing a lot major 2D projects (though certainly not "traditional hand drawn" as technology has shifted a lot post-Flash) as the animation house brand for Netflix these days. (She-Ra and Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, as two recent examples.) At least in "TV budgets" 2D animation is seen as more than competitive again (though it was a much briefer period where all TV projects seemed to be CG, and 2D never really "died" in TV like it did in features) and it's likely just a matter of time and aesthetic drive before someone (maybe even Disney) tries it again at the feature level. (Supposedly Rastetter was still pushing for it at Disney Feature Animation even after Princess and the Frog and right up to his ouster. Who knows when a successor will champion it as a priority.) It probably won't be DreamWorks Animation today unless Netflix has some reason they want to do an animated feature. (It is an Oscar category they could compete in, if they need the motivation to push. Maybe less controversy in that category for winning as a streaming site than their battles over streaming versus theater in other categories.) (ETA: Oh and I just remembered that Fox, the crazy Australian company not the parts of Disney formerly known as Fox, and its subsidiary Bento Box do have a full Bob's Burgers feature film release on their schedule. Not that it entirely compares to the prestige of a classic DFA fairy tale based film, but there's at least one attempt at a 2D animated feature film in the near future.)
- gruturo 6y ago
  Ebay is often touted as her success credentials, but I really see it as another failure. There was no Amazon when Ebay was big. They could have BEEN Amazon. Also she bought Skype, but forgot to check that the IP was actually included in the purchase. I am honestly astonished she is seen in an even minimally positive light these days.
  - webel0 6y ago
    Wow, I wasn’t aware of the Skype IP battle [1]. In that case EBay licensed the underlying IP from the founders. It is especially interesting in the context of quibi because it appears that most of their content deals allowed the content creators to own the underlying content but require a 2 year exclusive license to the service. [1] https://www.theregister.com/2009/07/31/skype_joltid/ https://www.theregister.com/2009/07/31/skype_joltid/
redis_mlc 6y ago
I worked at ebay. Every conversation about Meg went like this, "Meg, who got 10 cent options ..."
- burner831234 6y ago
  I also worked at eBay and never heard that said.
clairity 6y ago
it was less a matter of experience, but rather hunger. she wasn't solving a problem she felt for herself (how many shows did she watch on her phone for pleasure?), which then practically compelled her to iterate to a (self-)satisfying solution. she wanted power, esteem, and an empire instead, and she got exactly that, for however short a time.
filmgirlcw 6y ago
> And the founder came from Hollywood, neither of them had real founder experience. Quibi was a disaster and Whitman was probably the wrong person to lead it — and Katzenberg the wrong person to lead the creative — but to suggest Jeffrey Katzenberg doesn’t have real founder experience is just wrong. He was a founder of what was then known as DreamWorks SKG (he’s the K) and its DreamWorks Animation division. DreamWorks was the most audacious studio since United Artists, and although DreamWorks Pictures ultimately failed, DreamWorks Animation lives on even now. But regardless, to say that he doesn’t have founded experience is flat wrong. He co-founded one of the most high-profile media companies of the last thirty years. Quibi was a disaster and we can all have a good laugh at how much it missed the mark but Katzenberg is a founder — and I would argue a damn good one — and one of the most successful producers in Hollywood history.
- bredren 6y ago
  I disagree. Katzenberg is who he is because of what he did for Disney Animation. The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and Lion King. Yes, he did well with dreamworks animation but that was much more a Hollywood studio focused on content than a technology product. It just happened to require a lot of good tech. He’s a creative producer of long form content with a ton of Hollywood cachet that is the opposite of what upstart mobile video is today. The other letters in SKG, Spielberg and Geffen seem to know better than to wade into tech. Only time software or app appears on their Wikipedia entries is a 1989 collaboration and an article about Geffen blocking public beach access. I get why a mogul like Katzenberg would want to try at the app game, others have before him. But I am not surprised he’d fail to be successful with this company. If anyone is interested in learning about Katzenberg and some of the insane power politics from his time at Disney, I recommend The Operator: David Geffen Builds, Buys, and Sells the New Hollywood.
  - girvo 6y ago
    > Yes, he did well with dreamworks animation but that was much more a Hollywood studio focused on content than a technology product. It just happened to require a lot of good tech. I am not seeing the distinction, personally, I'd love some more input on this. The tech they built was their moat, from my understanding, and one of the reasons they could deliver on their creative vision in a way that few other companies did?
bambax 6y ago
> Meg Whitman has had a legendary career Meg Whitman was lucky enough to ride the eBay rocket at the right moment. Everything she touched after that, went wrong.
- zwieback 6y ago
  I've been at hp through the Whitman years and I would characterize it as stabilizing a gigantic mess her predecessors left behind. Certainly not a visionary but I feel like she did an okay job, for the employees at least.
skinnymuch 6y ago
How are you using the word “legendary”? It seems like Whitman has had one okay thing and three failures. EBay being okay. Though the company is pretty small now and never expanded out of its core feature. Skype ordeal cost billions and was ridiculous. Her record breaking campaign, HPQ, and Quibi are all negatives. If she had at least one for sure success, that’d be one thing.

smegger001 6y ago

legendary? she drove HP into the ground, to the point wear Bloomberg named her the most underachieving ceo at ebay she purchased skype for 4 billion then turned around and sold it for 2.

axaxs 6y ago
Don't forget that it sold for 4x that a short time later. It sounds like something from a sitcom.
save_ferris 6y ago
I'm not saying that everything she touched turned to gold, but I am saying that she's one of the most high-profile executives in America. Princeton undergrad, Harvard MBA, SVP at Bain, CEO at eBay, HP, primary candidate in a gubernatorial race. That's absolutely a stellar career that most people can only dream of.
- simonsarris 6y ago
  I think most people's idea of a stellar career is not a collection of titles but a collection of accomplishments.
- smt88 6y ago
  Leadership in management consulting is a negative mark on a resume, not a positive one.
  - arbitrary_name 6y ago
    Ugh, this is a trite and worthless comment. You can't shake a stick in business without hitting ex-MBB leadership. Some of them suck, some of them are mediocre, some of them are spectacularly good. But thanks for sharing, I guess?
    - smt88 6y ago
      > You can't shake a stick in business without hitting ex-MBB leadership. I don't work with any. I exclusively work on early-stage startups, so all my companies have teams of 3-20. They're also mostly bootstrapped. I've tried partnering with ex-consultants in the past, but they add no value. They don't have deep industry contacts to sell to. They don't have hands-on experience actually building anything. They make nice PowerPoint presentations, and that's literally it. They constantly over-promise and under-deliver. They also often demand high salaries at early stages, because they're used to making $300-500k, but that's a whole other issue. I wasn't being trite. I consider having management consulting (especially MBB) to be a negative on a resume of someone I'm considering working with. It's essentially a disqualifying issue for me after many bad experiences. Maybe the next person is the exception, but it's not worth the risk for me anymore. Being in leadership is even worse, because you're complicit in destroying so much shareholder value. You charge $100M for something that delivers no real value and costs your firm $10M. Why is that something we should admire? > Some of them suck, some of them are mediocre, some of them are spectacularly good. What are they spectacularly good at, though? I completely agree that many of them are brilliant, but what skills are they honing, exactly? Brilliance by itself is not enough to make me want to work with someone. Experience is much more useful. The experience gained tt consulting firms seems to be sales (of a very specific type), making beautiful presentations, and bending data to fit whatever narrative people want it to. Maybe they do some legwork gathering data or running some regressions, but they're usually starting with a preconception of where they should end up. I have a friend who's a partner at Accenture, and he feels exactly the same way about management consulting that I do: it's bullshit. Another friend at McKinsey described his analyst job as "knowing how to wear a suit and be on time". I've heard of so many disasters caused by management consultancies. Where are the success stories? At best, they just give a company's managers some data that validates what the company already wants to do, but maybe it's a little too risky. Somewhere in the middle, perhaps they find a way to sneakily kill a pension program or fire 10,000 people. They're creating value for the company, but it's not exactly work your family will write about in your obituary. At worst, they burn through piles of cash and accomplish absolutely nothing.
- plankers 6y ago
  >Princeton undergrad, Harvard MBA, SVP at Bain, CEO at eBay, HP, primary candidate in a gubernatorial race You just listed the standard elitist silver spoon CV. She had a stellar career because she was born into it. Her track record at all of these institutions speaks to her actual talent. Meritocracy, my ass.
  - hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
    I think Meg Whitman is a pretty horrible CEO, not to mention she appears to treat people like shit. This article by Rob Enderle (from back in August mind you) gives a good overview of her poor leadership: https://techspective.net/2020/08/07/meg-whitman-and-predicting-the-failure-of-quibi/ https://techspective.net/2020/08/07/meg-whitman-and-predicti...
  - Hnrobert42 6y ago
    One does not necessarily beget the next. That is, there are plenty of folks who went to Princeton who didn’t make it to Harvard MBA. And many Harvard MBAs who dont become SVPs at major firms. And so on. In fact, under your philosophy, how could one be successful at all and not have you scoff at their success? Does the person have to literally go from rags to riches? I do not deny that each step in her journey made it easier to take the next step. They made it easier because they were necessary. They are also hard work and long hours. It’s not a life I would volunteer for. Now, if you want to talk about folks plopped into plumb positions by family members of powerful politicians, cough Hunter Biden, cough Jared Kushner, then you can talk about silver spoon elitism all you want.
    - wpietri 6y ago
      Plenty of people work hard. Most of them do it for peanuts. I guarantee plenty of people at eBay worked harder than Whitman, for example; that place was an exploitative sweatshop in her era. I expect her maids worker harder than her, too. Sure, she was good at working the system that her elite upbringing put her on track for. Among the managerial caste, she was unusually good at ladder-climbing. And she was certainly lucky to join a dot-com success story at the right moment. But being good at managerialist skills and selling one's self aren't all that it takes to succeed at business. Indeed, that can be a real handicap, because being good at working other Harvard MBAs doesn't mean a thing when it comes to pleasing people you want to pay $4.99 a month.
- nevertoolate 6y ago
  I see the pattern there. I’m from Europe but worked with US management. They came with previous titles, and with good understanding on the importance of self marketing even after hired. All their focus was on delivering the low hanging fruits after that only smoke&mirrors. Then after getting C level position they were fired, and started at another company at an elevated position. I’m not saying this is bad, but not something I would call a stellar career. It elevates people on a ladder but but not in a way Children dream of...
  - ackbar03 6y ago
    Why was this downvoted? I feel this is very true. Having worked a few years in a corporate environment, suits and ties, especially higher up the management chain, are almost exclusively about self promotion, bullshitting, and smoke and mirrors. Throw them out into the wild and they wouldn't have a single idea of how to make a living or business except to get another job with their bs skills. Only wierd part of this is the comment of how "children dream of"
  - wpietri 6y ago
    Exactly. And they're responding to the incentives in the system we've built. CEO tenure has dropped dramatically over the decades, while CEO compensation has skyrocketed. I can't find a measure elsewhere, but I'm sure sub-CEO executive position tenure is way shorter. So if one is playing to maximize cash, the optimal strategy is to be very good at bullshit, self-promotion, and generating impressive short-term metrics without regard to long-term impact. You have to look good, and then you have to avoid the long-term consequences of your choices. Then when you get to the top, it's even more important to juke the stats so that executive compensation is maximized. Because by then you're standing on top of a pyramid of bullshitters with little devotion to the workers or the customers.
- sizzle 6y ago
  This has privilege written all over it. It's evident when you study her upbringing and family connections.
- AlexandrB 6y ago
  > SVP at Bain Bain Capital, the PE raider made (in)famous thanks to the 2012 Mitt Romney campaign? Sounds more like everything she touched turned to shit.
- skinnymuch 6y ago
  So much of that is pure elitism. Didn’t she spend the most money ever on her race? And lost? How Is that stellar? I’d be ashamed of that. Not the losing part. The trying to buy your way in part. otherwise all you’re saying from the get go is she had her foot in the right doors and was able to get good jobs at P&G and Bain. Do you think she truly earned the jobs or was truly the best candidate for those jobs out of everyone? Her eBay tenure is not destroying the company, but instead letting it do its own thing without actually doing anything else. You can see the results for yourself over the past decade. You’re right most people can only dream of such things because dreams usually contain thinking about luck, lucky breaks, winning capitalism, though not necessarily out of skill and talent.
- cultus 6y ago
  And people wonder why social mobility is so low in the US... Your comment is emblematic how how inefficient our oligarchical system is. It's like saying someone would be a good general because his father is an important feudal lord. That's the way it was throughout the vast majority of history, but we pretend it is different now.
vaxman 6y ago
Meg is part of a generation that treated devs (originally called “implementors” when she was young) like interchangeable technicians or “plumbers”. Jobs, was also part of that generation, except he was way “cooler” about it (in order to squeeze more productivity out of his plumbers than say, his original employer HP). Some of Jobs’ peers learned to do the same thing with their plumbers achieving varying degrees of success but a lot of FAILURE. To her credit, I think Meg always has understood you don’t give cash to some half-baked hipster because of their black turtleneck and story about a low barrier to market, but due to her limited perspective (she is not GenX), she didn’t know the proper balance to grow something like eBay into something like $3,000/share Amazon. I do think she is a winner and was a wise choice to get Katz’s mobile-first content out the door..the failure is due to mobile not being a thing during the Shelter In Place orders.
- simonh 6y ago
  Your comments on Jobs are weirdly off the mark. He had huge respect for engineering and said top engineers could be 10x or more as productive as the average. He certainly didn’t think they were all interchangeable. He said he hired the best engineers because he wanted them to tell him what needed doing or how to do it. Also he never worked for HP.
  - AlanYx 6y ago
    I agree with you. But technically Steve Jobs did work for HP once... he had a summer job at HP at age 12, which he landed after calling Bill Hewlett asking for some spare parts to build a frequency counter.
- BigJono 6y ago
  I don't think this is a generation thing. The strategy of treating devs as interchangeable cogs is still absolutely thriving in management circles. The only differences now are that it's often glammed up with a bunch of lip service that seems to suggest the opposite approach (but no actions to follow that up), and that there's very successful pockets not using that approach, that aren't representative of the majority of the industry. I don't think either approach is necessarily 'wrong' either, because I've seen tons of companies have great success with staggering numbers of thoroughly mediocre devs and lots of turnover. But you very likely have to commit to one strategy or the other, the absolute shittest places I've worked are the ones where they're kidding themselves, unsure what they're trying to do, or half way through a transition from one approach to the other. As dumb and unintuitive as it sounds, I think you can run a big bank very successfully with 200 engineers siloed into small teams of experts, or with 3000 engineers shoveled into big "tribes" (or whatever the buzzword of the day is) of distributed responsibility. But I'm wary of anyone that's trying to do it with 800 engineers, especially the "we only hire the best!" variety. (those three numbers obviously scale with the size of the business and a bunch of external factors).
anxman 6y ago
At eBay she also purchased PayPal which added more than $50b in market cap to eBay. Can’t win em all. At HP, market cap also grew significantly on her watch. I feel like implying that she is a failure is almost borderline sexist.
- nicbou 6y ago
  Unless there is any implication that her gender has something to do with it, it's not sexist. It's just incorrect.
  - croon 6y ago
    It's sexist if it's critique she wouldn't have gotten if she were a man, regardless of if the critique focuses on gender. It's impossible to determine this what-if scenario though, so I agree it's best to leave out the speculation.
    - newswasboring 6y ago
      > It's impossible to determine this what-if scenario though, so I agree it's best to leave out the speculation. What are you talking about, CEOs get criticism all the time. Especially on HN where people are aggressive about their opinions. Just because you can't do alternate reality simulation doesn't mean you can't say anything about this.
      - croon 6y ago
        Sure, and if you want to do a meta-analysis on HN CEO-criticism based on gender, adjusted for some metric of performance, I'll concede.
        mkohlmyr 6y ago
        I mean might hope the requirement to provide said meta-analysis would fall on the person making the claim that the criticism is sexist, not on the person saying it might not be?
chemmail 6y ago
Katzenberg is more of the legend. I'm not a hollywood person, but recognized the last name immediacy. He is responsible for producing The Little Mermaid, Beauty & The Beast, Aladin, and Lion King. Basically the best Disney masterpieces ever, and the only other company to fight Pixar on the big screen. Quibi has always been a terrible idea. I hope he find great success in his next endeavor, maybe a classic USA hand drawn animation studio !!!
- ackbar03 6y ago
  That idea will probably bring him to bankruptcy immediately... I'm not expert in the industry but apparently hand-draw animations as an industry are in a serious dump. The animators are seriously overworked and underpaid, especially in japan, so much so that the majority of it nowadays are already being outsourced to places like India and Indonesia. You'll probably burn cash faster than you can literally burn cash if you try to run a business like that in the USA
  - pfranz 6y ago
    I can't imagine Katzenberg doing this (I don't think his interests are actually animation or anything "traditional"), but hand drawn animation is just "out of fashion" and the business people don't think the ROI is enough. Look at the budget for Princess and the Frog or other hand drawn projects around that time compared to CG films. Hand drawn cost around $80-100 million while CG is closer to $150 million (a large chunk for both is usually voice talent). Disney had tossed their old animation system CAPS (and I'm pretty sure all their old desks) and they built a brand new pipeline around off the shelf software for the production--subsequent productions would have been cheaper.
    - WorldMaker 6y ago
      DreamWorks Animation, as one existing example, is still doing a lot major 2D projects (though certainly not "traditional hand drawn" as technology has shifted a lot post-Flash) as the animation house brand for Netflix these days. (She-Ra and Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, as two recent examples.) At least in "TV budgets" 2D animation is seen as more than competitive again (though it was a much briefer period where all TV projects seemed to be CG, and 2D never really "died" in TV like it did in features) and it's likely just a matter of time and aesthetic drive before someone (maybe even Disney) tries it again at the feature level. (Supposedly Rastetter was still pushing for it at Disney Feature Animation even after Princess and the Frog and right up to his ouster. Who knows when a successor will champion it as a priority.) It probably won't be DreamWorks Animation today unless Netflix has some reason they want to do an animated feature. (It is an Oscar category they could compete in, if they need the motivation to push. Maybe less controversy in that category for winning as a streaming site than their battles over streaming versus theater in other categories.) (ETA: Oh and I just remembered that Fox, the crazy Australian company not the parts of Disney formerly known as Fox, and its subsidiary Bento Box do have a full Bob's Burgers feature film release on their schedule. Not that it entirely compares to the prestige of a classic DFA fairy tale based film, but there's at least one attempt at a 2D animated feature film in the near future.)
gruturo 6y ago
Ebay is often touted as her success credentials, but I really see it as another failure. There was no Amazon when Ebay was big. They could have BEEN Amazon. Also she bought Skype, but forgot to check that the IP was actually included in the purchase. I am honestly astonished she is seen in an even minimally positive light these days.
- webel0 6y ago
  Wow, I wasn’t aware of the Skype IP battle [1]. In that case EBay licensed the underlying IP from the founders. It is especially interesting in the context of quibi because it appears that most of their content deals allowed the content creators to own the underlying content but require a 2 year exclusive license to the service. [1] https://www.theregister.com/2009/07/31/skype_joltid/ https://www.theregister.com/2009/07/31/skype_joltid/

redis_mlc 6y ago

I worked at ebay. Every conversation about Meg went like this, "Meg, who got 10 cent options ..."

burner831234 6y ago
I also worked at eBay and never heard that said.

clairity 6y ago

it was less a matter of experience, but rather hunger. she wasn't solving a problem she felt for herself (how many shows did she watch on her phone for pleasure?), which then practically compelled her to iterate to a (self-)satisfying solution. she wanted power, esteem, and an empire instead, and she got exactly that, for however short a time.

filmgirlcw 6y ago

> And the founder came from Hollywood, neither of them had real founder experience. Quibi was a disaster and Whitman was probably the wrong person to lead it — and Katzenberg the wrong person to lead the creative — but to suggest Jeffrey Katzenberg doesn’t have real founder experience is just wrong. He was a founder of what was then known as DreamWorks SKG (he’s the K) and its DreamWorks Animation division. DreamWorks was the most audacious studio since United Artists, and although DreamWorks Pictures ultimately failed, DreamWorks Animation lives on even now. But regardless, to say that he doesn’t have founded experience is flat wrong. He co-founded one of the most high-profile media companies of the last thirty years. Quibi was a disaster and we can all have a good laugh at how much it missed the mark but Katzenberg is a founder — and I would argue a damn good one — and one of the most successful producers in Hollywood history.

bredren 6y ago
I disagree. Katzenberg is who he is because of what he did for Disney Animation. The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and Lion King. Yes, he did well with dreamworks animation but that was much more a Hollywood studio focused on content than a technology product. It just happened to require a lot of good tech. He’s a creative producer of long form content with a ton of Hollywood cachet that is the opposite of what upstart mobile video is today. The other letters in SKG, Spielberg and Geffen seem to know better than to wade into tech. Only time software or app appears on their Wikipedia entries is a 1989 collaboration and an article about Geffen blocking public beach access. I get why a mogul like Katzenberg would want to try at the app game, others have before him. But I am not surprised he’d fail to be successful with this company. If anyone is interested in learning about Katzenberg and some of the insane power politics from his time at Disney, I recommend The Operator: David Geffen Builds, Buys, and Sells the New Hollywood.
- girvo 6y ago
  > Yes, he did well with dreamworks animation but that was much more a Hollywood studio focused on content than a technology product. It just happened to require a lot of good tech. I am not seeing the distinction, personally, I'd love some more input on this. The tech they built was their moat, from my understanding, and one of the reasons they could deliver on their creative vision in a way that few other companies did?

bambax 6y ago

> Meg Whitman has had a legendary career Meg Whitman was lucky enough to ride the eBay rocket at the right moment. Everything she touched after that, went wrong.

zwieback 6y ago
I've been at hp through the Whitman years and I would characterize it as stabilizing a gigantic mess her predecessors left behind. Certainly not a visionary but I feel like she did an okay job, for the employees at least.

skinnymuch 6y ago

How are you using the word “legendary”? It seems like Whitman has had one okay thing and three failures. EBay being okay. Though the company is pretty small now and never expanded out of its core feature. Skype ordeal cost billions and was ridiculous. Her record breaking campaign, HPQ, and Quibi are all negatives. If she had at least one for sure success, that’d be one thing.