I quote it because your comment made me think, "where have I recently heard that before?" :-)
Anyone who can start a local pizzeria and make it consistently profitable is a better businessperson than any of the people associated with MoviePass are. But our culture rewards bigness, whether in success or in failure, much more lavishly than smallness, so the MoviePass alums find the doors of the VC world flung open to them, even though the only thing they're known for is failing.
After all, you probably spend more time in the theater than interacting with the moviepass service.
This is the new VC-funded business model: you use cash as a kind of anti-gravity machine, letting you do things no competitor would do because they aren't economically rational. The bet is that, if by defying gravity you can reach a monopoly position, you'll end up making back all that cash and more. But as MoviePass demonstrated, once the cash dries up and gravity starts applying to you again, if you haven't reached that monopoly position, the fall is quick and painful.
the next decade will be defined by the failure of these anti-gravity tricks
Patience. Someone deliberately loosing money on every transaction will go out of business very quickly.
(And, apparently this is what happened to Moviepass.)
Remember, Moviepass bought the tickets from the theaters, so it's not like the theaters lost money waiting for Moviepass to go out of business.
In the case of MoviePass, the only concern I'd have is if they closed shop suddenly after I've already paid for a month of service. But if they stayed open long enough, it doesn't matter. I might have lost $5 but I saved $50 over the course of my membership.
In reality, it's not worth my time to argue if my taxes go up 25c per year or only go up 10c per year. Just writing this short comment has cost me more in dollars-per-hour than the difference in public pension fund taxes would.
I'm not against arguing about things I can't control (check my comment history or just ask dang) but it's purely entertainment. If you or I want to affect change in that regard, MoviePass or even the VCs who fund it is the exact opposite of where that argument needs to start.
A person getting mugged on the street and then not being able to pay his rent is worth worrying about. A billionaire being scammed out of $100,000 is not. The users of MoviePass being scammed would be terrible. The VCs being scammed is the cost of doing business.
MP has consistently lied to their customers about movie availability and made it extremely difficult/impossible to cancel subscriptions. They are also a publically traded company with no viable business model.
There are victims.
But I a lot of people paid for a year and then got 1-2 months service before being cut off. That's basically a scam unless you claim VC immunity.
People who don't want to encourage fraud, e.g. con-men telling people about some great opportunity to invest in, and then living off of their dollars, while selling the rest for 75 cents to buy time and appear as "successful"?
And being a reader I definitely thought it was an enjoyable read.
Broadly speaking, when average Joe investors get burned, the public tends to pick up the tab. Whether through public prosecution, unemployment benefits, or the other consequences of a nuked nest egg. MoviePass didn’t get to those levels, but there is a rational reason to be wary of things that look like fraud in our system.
If the artists negotiated taking 0.01% of the revenues from it, with the subscription services taking 30%, and the record label taking the other 69.99%, that's not exactly my problem. I don't pick which record label said artists sign with.
Maybe they make it up on volume but I'm certainly getting a better deal now than I ever did back in the day.
I am concerned about the significant scale at which this is happening.
2) When companies like Uber can go public, after years of economic analysis saying they can never be profitable, and companies like MoviePass get positive press, it shows that either something is broken, or there is an opportunity chasm opening for those in the know.