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It seems to me quite common in silicon valley (read: Paul Graham) to excuse obvious and continued miscalculations as just "bad bets". Accoridng to one group of

It seems to me quite common in silicon valley (read: Paul Graham) to excuse obvious and continued miscalculations as just "bad bets". Accoridng to one group of people, we should applaud the bets because some pay off and others don't. But it's not like all bets are equal. Not all start ups are equal. Some people are doing something unique and innovative, and some people are doing a crap version of something everyone else already tried and failed. As well as this, there's a whole load of strategy that is specifically designed by startups to minimize wasting resources - fail fast. Building an enormous platform (for which you're being sued) and investing billions before you show it to your customer....well that's going to fail fast. But not really want we meant. And not only do you want to fail fast, but a $10m launch doesn't need to be that successful, if you're launching with billions in investment then you need an absolute home run, and to a large extent that's what happened here. The investment was so big that you needed to immediately capture a top 3 spot in the market. I have a lot of respect for someone who can say "Ok, we see other people exist, and here's why we're different/here's why we'll succeed where they failed". But that wasn't Quibi. Quibi was more "I'm going to spend $2Bn failing where others failed before"

ghaff 6y ago
On the one hand, I would never claim my intuitions about media consumption extend to GenZ (or whatever). On the other hand, I see very little original content, competition with "traditional" media like Netflix etc., competition with YouTube, and it's really hard to see what the pitch here is.
eindiran 6y ago
I think Paul Graham would respond that after having watched the startup world for a few decades, you start to have serious questions with your bad bet meter, as such a huge percentage of groundbreaking ideas seem like such bad bets beforehand. So when people undertake what seems like a bad bet and they fail, that’s okay. You don’t need to gloat that your bad bet meter was correct this time because most bets fail anyway.
- Retric 6y ago
  I have seen plenty of bad bets become temporary unicorns, but I can’t think of any that became giant successful aka profitable companies. What in your mind makes that list?
  - monoideism 6y ago
    Dropbox, famously. And what's your definition of a "temporary unicorn".
    - scarface74 6y ago
      Even now Dropbox is cash flow negative and it appears that Jobs was right. DropBox is a feature not a product. I can buy the entire Office Suite with a combined 6TB of storage for Dropbox’s 2TB plan. The same price for GSuite. I’ll consider DropBox successful when it is consistently profitable and cash flow positive.
    - Retric 6y ago
      Dropbox was and is an obvious niche that just comes down to execution. “Temporary Unicorn” is a valuation in the billions without profit to back that up. Tesla for example could still fail, but it’s made 100+M in profit for multiple quarters which seems like a safe objective benchmark.
      - eindiran 6y ago
        This is my point exactly: Dropbox isn't a super obvious niche. The top-rated comment from the release on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 > I have a few qualms with this app: > For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software. Now that Dropbox is a unicorn (and there are dozens of other competing products, some of them unicorns in their own right), it's easy to pass this off as an obvious idea. But plenty of people at the time thought it was a bad bet.
kjcharles 6y ago
> Quibi was more "I'm going to spend $2Bn failing where others failed before" This is what makes it especially ridiculous. Verizon had just failed with a huge splashy launch for go90. It takes a ton of arrogance to then decide to do the same without any real innovation. Rotating between landscape and portrait is a feature not an entire product. And especially not the basis for a media company. The average startup founder would never be in the position to pitch an idea like this AND still receive $2B in funding. This wasn't just a bad bet it was a stupid one.
- herval 6y ago
  Pretty sure some exec with 3 MBAs used TikTok as an example of "Making a YouTube with short vertical videos works, therefore let's make a Netflix of short vertical videos" to convince them to pony up :)

ghaff 6y ago

On the one hand, I would never claim my intuitions about media consumption extend to GenZ (or whatever). On the other hand, I see very little original content, competition with "traditional" media like Netflix etc., competition with YouTube, and it's really hard to see what the pitch here is.

eindiran 6y ago

I think Paul Graham would respond that after having watched the startup world for a few decades, you start to have serious questions with your bad bet meter, as such a huge percentage of groundbreaking ideas seem like such bad bets beforehand. So when people undertake what seems like a bad bet and they fail, that’s okay. You don’t need to gloat that your bad bet meter was correct this time because most bets fail anyway.

Retric 6y ago
I have seen plenty of bad bets become temporary unicorns, but I can’t think of any that became giant successful aka profitable companies. What in your mind makes that list?
- monoideism 6y ago
  Dropbox, famously. And what's your definition of a "temporary unicorn".
  - scarface74 6y ago
    Even now Dropbox is cash flow negative and it appears that Jobs was right. DropBox is a feature not a product. I can buy the entire Office Suite with a combined 6TB of storage for Dropbox’s 2TB plan. The same price for GSuite. I’ll consider DropBox successful when it is consistently profitable and cash flow positive.
  - Retric 6y ago
    Dropbox was and is an obvious niche that just comes down to execution. “Temporary Unicorn” is a valuation in the billions without profit to back that up. Tesla for example could still fail, but it’s made 100+M in profit for multiple quarters which seems like a safe objective benchmark.
    - eindiran 6y ago
      This is my point exactly: Dropbox isn't a super obvious niche. The top-rated comment from the release on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 > I have a few qualms with this app: > For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software. Now that Dropbox is a unicorn (and there are dozens of other competing products, some of them unicorns in their own right), it's easy to pass this off as an obvious idea. But plenty of people at the time thought it was a bad bet.

kjcharles 6y ago

> Quibi was more "I'm going to spend $2Bn failing where others failed before" This is what makes it especially ridiculous. Verizon had just failed with a huge splashy launch for go90. It takes a ton of arrogance to then decide to do the same without any real innovation. Rotating between landscape and portrait is a feature not an entire product. And especially not the basis for a media company. The average startup founder would never be in the position to pitch an idea like this AND still receive $2B in funding. This wasn't just a bad bet it was a stupid one.

herval 6y ago
Pretty sure some exec with 3 MBAs used TikTok as an example of "Making a YouTube with short vertical videos works, therefore let's make a Netflix of short vertical videos" to convince them to pony up :)