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Comment by whack | Hacker News Reader

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".

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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

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.

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.

Aren't TV pilots individual episodes?

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.

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.

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)

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...

I think it's practical in a very narrow, definitely-non-scalable sense.

Some folks on Patreon are experimenting with it. One of my favorite series Astartes[0] puts out episodes every rare once and awhile, but we all clamor for them nonetheless.

You couldn't run a normal show this way, for sure. But it is interesting to see the results of it in the small.

https://www.patreon.com/astartesfilm

Youtube works this way to some extent.

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.

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.

Do any of them (films or trailers) survive? I've never heard of black-owned studios and I'd like to know more.

Some do, but not many. Wikipedia has a good entry for “race film”, and http://dhbasecamp.humanities.ucla.edu/afamfilm/ looks like a great resource. Also check out https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6845-black-cinema-at... and https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/features/short-... and other Google hits on “black cinema”.

Thanks, I appreciate the links.

video games have worked this way for a while, especially since the focus on mega-budget blockbusters. Some Kickstarter media projects also reflect this: someone makes a small short to fundraise, then commits to make a "fuller" length version based on the funds raised, linking the planned scope with available resources - sounds a lot like an agile software project!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_101

Quick bites of a TV show? Sounds like a $1.75 billion idea.

haha, I do sound like a jackass when you put it that way

Sounds like being a Youtuber

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

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

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.

It doesn't even work in tech, bro.

This is literally the soap opera model. Soaps actively solicit fan feedback and run productions with composable sets and flexible casts.

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)

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

> 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

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.

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.

> 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?

In a way, this is yet another derivative of Dunning-Kruger IMO. It's all derived from either: (1) overestimating one's abilities (esp. when transferring from one domain to another), or (2) the corollary of underestimating the difficult/complexity of a given problem because you think you already have enough skills/expertise/resources to tackle it based on your prior successes.

- "I'm a rich/powerful/successful media person. I had success in my industry doing business a certain way, so why shouldn't I be able to translate that into running a tech startup too?"

- "I'm a good programmer and I don't see any reason why Zuckerberg would be smarter than me. What's so special about Facebook? We can beat them."

- "I'm in touch with what most people want, and this product idea totally makes sense to me. All I need to do is polish it up, and I'm sure I'll find users who are as excited about it as I am."

Or, the flip side of the same coin is really about ego. One of the hardest lessons of the lean/agile/tech-y start-up culture (in its idealized form), is to not let ego interfere with learning, but also to be able to let go of ego-centrism without giving up confidence or competence (i.e. you don't have all the answers and you should be fundamentally humble and curious, BUT you should not forget or overlook your existing skills or competencies either).

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.

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.

"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

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“.

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.

>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.

Pretty much. There's somewhere between 7-12 story archetypes. We've settled on ~36 different dramatic situations. "All is lost" is quite literally the entire second act in the classic three-act story.

That's your toolkit. Build from there. And that' been true since we're telling stories, more or less.

> 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“.

Those Netflix decisions about who to hire are extremely data-driven - much moreso than Hollywood. House of Cards was their proof of concept in 2013:

> Sarandos says their wealth of data on user viewing habits proved there's a large audience for Fincher, Spacey and political thrillers.

https://web.archive.org/web/20130126061225/http://www.huffin...

While initial commissioning might be, what projects get investment in marketing to really succeed is much more based on market research, testing and metrics about trailers etc.

Really initial production is only half your production costs, and is a tricky process where what's greenlit often doesn't bear much relation to what comes out the other end. So the market research and metrics work better when you know a bit more about what the final product is.

What I learnt working at a large Hollywood Studio years ago:

- Movies begin as risk assessments and cash flow analysis in the finance dept based on historical data.

- The revenue graph for a movie is a function of release month, the number of celebrity actors in the film, the box office receipts, followed by DVD sales, followed by TV release and a long tail of syndication (airlines, cable etc).

- Studios know, for example, that a romantic comedy in Feb staring Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler will make a guaranteed $35 million at the box office regardless of what the movie is. A summer blockbuster with Will Smith will have a guaranteed $100 million in box office and DVD sales spread out over time. Sequels to popular movies will bring in a certain minimum income guaranteed. Movies that minimize dialog and maximize action do well in the global market. Include China or a Chinese celebrity actor in the plotline and you are guaranteed millions of additional revenue. This provides the bean counters information on how much to spend on movie production to minimize risk and ensure a steady revenue stream throughout the year.

- So the finance dept will green light a February rom-com with a production budget of $10 million, a summer blockbuster where there can splurge $75-100 million on production etc. They monitor other studio release dates to avoid going head-to-head with their releases. They keep a stable of celebrity actors on studio contract and force directors to include plot lines that maximize a global audience.

- It is only after the finance dept gives the green light and budget that they go and look at possible movies to make and pick a director. Story ? - that's just about the last thing to work out (Pixar is the exception).

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.

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.

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..

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.

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..

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.

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.

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.

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.

Quibi should have been premium content that was displayed on other channels that already have viewers payment information.

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.

I remember seeing some Quibi ads and had no idea what it was or why I should care.

A cryptic name doesn't help: Kwai-bee? Kwee-bye? 100% fail on branding 101.

It's apparently short for "Quick Bites" so I guess it would sound the way no one would expect it to -- "Koo eh bye"

Kind of sounds when pronounced in Portuguese like Kibbeh (https://www.oliviascuisine.com/kibbeh-lebanese-beef-croquett...), Lebanese "beef croquettes" (I never was a big fan). Usually spelled "kibe" in Portuguese. It seems to fall into the "Quick Bites" category.

The first Quibi ad I saw had a British person saying "So Americans call a jiffy a Quibi? Huh." For an American who had literally never heard of the service before, that come across as incredibly pretentious.

I'm not sure if that ad was targeted at Americans, at British, or at Americans who watch British stuff, but I can't imagine how it would come across well at any of those target audiences.

Hulu had a content library of stuff people had already shown they wanted (through both live viewing and internet piracy) and also launched before almost anybody else (Netflix instant streaming was pretty tiny back in 2007). The business model also evolved a few times.

This is more like Vessel, the more tech-backed version of "let's split the middle of Youtube and Netflix for more short-form stuff" that nobody has shown they wanted, now or then. Just with shit-tons more money to throw at celebrities vs more youtube-creator stuff.

> In their defense, this is how Hulu started. I initially dismissed based on that, but it proved to be a solid rival for Netflix.

Kinda. It's USA/Japan only, so from the other side, it basically looks like "The American version of Crave", rather than Netflix, which a global behemoth.

>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.

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.

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-rees...

Hollywood being Hollywood.

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.

Why else be the head of anything? To get yours, mang

The real question is: did the husband score Reece a sweet deal, or was the husband recruited so that Quibi could snag Reece at all?

Whitman grew eBay from $4m/yr revenue to $8B/yr and a $billion exit in 10 years.

That's not an accident.

Good managers can manage anything, if the thing has potential. What they can't do is succeed by managing nothing.

> 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

Well, in this case at least she partnered with the right person. I am not sure if anyone in Hollywood raises money better than Jeffrey Katzenberg (both for business and politics).

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.

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...

Least bad was probably Mark Hurd. When I worked at HP Labs everyone hated Fiorina.

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.

Maybe it's just me but when I look at eBay I see a combination of luck and turning a blind eye to counterfeiting. You're right they make a lot of money but it doesn't mean she is a genius leader.

'Genius' would be the wrong word.

She was lucky to be hired at EBay, but growing a small company into $8B in revenues is a highly credible act that validates a certain set of qualifications that are essentially rare.

Nobody really knows what the next big thing is going to be, but some people are strong in some areas. They theoretically make a good team on paper. But it's hard to know what the reality is.

He is content oriented, she is operations oriented, I'm not sure if anyone was behind the end-to-end experience.

Yes, but the eBay flywheel was already in place when she arrived. In a marketplace business it's hard to get started but hard to be disrupted, so while growing the company to $8B revenue demonstrates great managerial skill, it doesn't have anything to do with the skill of being the CEO of a startup without product-market fit. She hasn't ever demonstrated the skill of breathing life into a company.

It looks like she was running it while Yahoo Auctions was competing; in that time frame, Yahoo was a force to be reckoned with, and they had some scaling issues to manage (which is mostly a tech thing, but management can screw up tech things). So, while ebay did have market fit, it wasn't a sure thing.

Luck factors more into most successful enterprises than said enterprises will ever admit..

That said, hard work and good decisions are also important. =)

Whitman also integrated Paypal after the acquisition.

Eric Jackson's book, Musk's biography, and other sources paint Paypal as an organizational mess. Successful mergers are no small order. Whitman succeeded.

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.

Yes, this seemed poorly thought-out:

...a Quibi subscription is $4.99 a month with ads and $7.99 a month without...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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/ [2] https://www.floatplane.com/

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.

“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.

Reminds me of the "great man" theory of history and Randian leadership myths.

"Job creators" is also a good term.

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.

You may enjoy horse and sparrow economics - to feed the sparrows, simply give the horse oats. Eventually the birds will get some

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-trickl...

> no economist has ever used the phrase "trickle down economics"

No, but plenty of economists have used the phrases "supply-side economics" and "Laffer Curve" to discuss (and advocate) the policies that "trickle down" was coined to disparage.

Right, and the fact that actual economists (including obviously Laffer who has a Stanford PhD in economics) have tried to pretend the curve is relevant to real world tax policy ought to be cause for laughter. Instead of course American politicians took him seriously and it's cause for misery for many of its poorest citizens. "Brilliant".

It should be taken as seriously as if a physics PhD tried to persuade your state that it should use solar power to convert lead into gold.

> 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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

They list all their content in alphabetical order.

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.

They also didn’t try to build the product with in-house engineers, they bought the (very good) company BAMTech.

> 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!

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.

Does optical media really wear out?

When kids are involved, yes :)

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...

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