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Comment by baobabKoodaa | Hacker News Reader

So let me get this straight: a video streaming service fails, and they're blaming... the pandemic? I don't think there has ever been a time in history when people have had more time to sit around watching videos.

I actually wanted to give my money to Quibi, but they made it too hard to do so. I really wanted to see the new Reno 911 skits, and I didn't find them anywhere besides Quibi. I was ready to pay and I tried to find an option to watch Quibi content on my desktop, but it seemed like there wasn't any. Only mobile. Yeah, go ahead and dictate to users the exact manner in which they must interact with your product. Don't allow any alternatives. This is what happens.

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This doesn’t seem as crazy as it appears on the surface. Quibi was streaming video targeted at people on the bus/train or sitting behind a register with nobody in line. It had no interest in serving people stuck at home.

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

> 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.

I wouldn't characterize Katzenberg as a founder in the 'startup founder' sense we're used to talking about here on HN. DreamWorks was essentially built to do exactly what he had already been doing at Disney: Make and/or distribute big blockbuster films. Film production is a pretty standardized thing, as is distribution, so if you know how to make movies then you can just plug into the distribution ecosystem and off you go!

Building and distributing apps is, however, not a consistently repeatable solved problem. Unlike movies, scale, budget, stars, and connections don't dramatically increase your chances of success... even if the content is great.

So no, I don't think Katzenberg has the type of "founder" experience that would naturally give him an advantage in learning how to understand a market that he has no experience with.

Tangentially, I was just looking at Dreamworks' filmography, and it's VERY impressive. My mind is specifically blown, though, that Steven Spielberg released Minority Report and Catch Me If You Can six months apart in the same year. That is... pretty incredible.

Its seems that Minority Report was in the can from July 2001 though you could imagine the amount of post-production required for that movie which would lead to it being released almost a year later. Catch Me If You Can was filmed between February and May 2002 to be released on December 25th. It seems like a busy year but doable,

Spielberg only stepped in to direct after Gore Verbinski dropped out because the film was delayed due to DiCaprio working on Gangs of New York. Verbinski's original casting had James Gandolfini as Hanratty and Ed Harris as Frank Sr. Verbinski ended up doing The Ring instead. Its amazing how much of Hollywood production is a string of almosts and conflicting schedules.

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.

> 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?

The point is dreamworks animation was not a tech startup the way Quibi was.

Dreamworks had large Babe Ruth level swings and to some extent got very lucky with chance.

Mike Meyers was not the original voice of Shrek. It was Chris Farley, who played an entirely different character. Farley died and much of the film had to be redone. While Farley was a star, he wasn’t well and there’s no telling the movie would have been a hit like it was under Meyers. Without the early success of Shrek a moat would have been over-engineering.

Quibi looked like they thought it would operate under similar forces, runaway successful content made cheaply.

When in fact the medium of delivery and matching algorithms are more powerful than smash content. Worrying about and being good at the former is just not like what Dreamworks did.

> tech startup the way Quibi

I think the founding theory behind Quibi was that is wasn't supposed to be a tech startup. It was a media/content start up. We largely consider Netflix a tech startup, but their technology has two main areas: distribution and recommendations. The rest of their business (and likely the larger fraction) is in content production and procurement.

Quibi wasn't supposed to be a tech startup, it was all about the content. This was their primary expertise and focus. Their main differentiating factor was that they were creating content for mobile consumption.

It may well be that the rapid changes in media consumption due to Covid had a major part of their downfall. That and TikTok. It's hard to compete against free, mobile-first, viral content.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

This is definitely not true of Jobs.

He would put aside time to identify and heavily recruit engineers he thought were talented.

Scott Forstall has a story about how Jobs was basically afraid that he (Forstall) would be put off by the rest of the HR process and pulled him out and told him he's getting hired and to just go through the motions.

Cabel Sasser from Panic has a story about how Jobs and Schiller tried to recruit Panic to work at Apple.

Bill Atkinson also has a story about Jobs spending a day pitching to him to join the Apple engineering team.

> 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.

"Mobile only" is a self imposed limitation, so that's on Katzenberg and everyone else who had influence on that decision.

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.

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/

Don't forget that it sold for 4x that a short time later. It sounds like something from a sitcom.

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.

>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.

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-predicti...

"Meritocracy" as originally defined does not mean what you think it does

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.

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.

Haha. I was about to make the comment that university prestige means didley in actually running a business. Whats worse is they raised more than a billion dollars which boggles the mind on how you can fail so hard with people literally throwing money at it. How amd where did the money burn at that rate?

Whitman's success to failure ratio is astonishing and that failure tends not to be attributed to the prestigious education...oddly.

Do you have actual evidence to back up your “guarantee” or are you just speculating? I don’t understand why so many folks come to the internet to pontificate like experts about things they know so little about.

Speaking of, what managerial caste are you talking about? Your use of that term insults people living under an actual caste system.

So from your analysis, it seems like she’s in the wrong industry? Her elitist background makes her a poor candidate for a B2C company, but maybe, IDK, a hedge fund is where she belongs? Or running anything else where her customers are other elites?

She has a billion dollars. She won. Good job, game over. My analysis is that before she does any more damage she should donate 99% of her wealth and retire. If she's looking to do something socially positive, which I'm not particularly expecting, she could go raise money among her set, or advocate for a cause.

I think most people's idea of a stellar career is not a collection of titles but a collection of accomplishments.

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...

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.

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"

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.

Leadership in management consulting is a negative mark on a resume, not a positive one.

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?

> 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.

100% agree with this based on my experiences.

Often MBB consultants are brought in with privileged permissions too - they get access to data, meetings and personnel that internal staff don’t get access to, and the end result is a fancy PowerPoint with a few well-spaced bulletpoints about simplification, efficiencies and renewed cost cutting. Hardly rocket science.

Further, their tendency to use the latest hype (big data! blockchain! data is the new oil! machine learning! etc) in their consultative sales model often shows their hand. They read the same stuff as everyone else, they just went to a fancy university and as you note ‘know how to wear a suit’.

Then once the PowerPoint has been presented, they go off into the wilderness after cashing their checks, or appear at another part of the company working on an unaffiliated project purely based on their connections and brown-nosing.

Has any research been done on the efficicacy of decisions that MBB consultants make in corporates? What empirical evidence is there that these consultants actually deliver value over the medium and long terms in relation to a placebo (ie the current management of a company)?

I don’t doubt they are generally intelligent and well-read, but so are a lot of internal staff and non-consultants.

Update: added last sentence, fixed some spelling errors.

What kinds of businesses? Do you have specific experiences that inform your opinion here?

> 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.

This has privilege written all over it. It's evident when you study her upbringing and family connections.

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.

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 !!!

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

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.

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.)

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.

Judging someone differently based on their sex is out in 2020. To not judge her would be sexist.

Remember this headline from 2017

"Meg Whitman leaves behind a fractured Hewlett-Packard with no guarantees"

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/m...

Things were not rosy at hp.

Unless there is any implication that her gender has something to do with it, it's not sexist. It's just incorrect.

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.

> 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.

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.

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?

I was not saying it might be, I was stating the premises on which it would be, while also stating that, since we can't claim it either way we should refrain from speculation.

GP then suggested we could claim something, and I pointed out the requirements for that, thus putting the onus on them for making the suggestion we could.

Dude in this thread itself people were riffing on Steve Jobs, one of the most successful CEOs in the history of America. In light of such a thing, I am inclined to think your call for proof is disingenuous. You are asking for a meta analysis of something which might be possible but nobody would do it.

Again, I wasn't asking for proof, I was saying it's pointless to pass judgement without it. I called you out for wanting to do so without anything to back it up.

No you are disingenuously setting the bar too high. I gave at least one example of a male CEO being criticised but you are not even willing to update your beliefs slightly in face of some evidence.

No, it's not evidence in either direction, it's an anecdote.

Also, even if it was, there's actually no one criticizing Jobs in the 12 search hits in the thread, but comparing him favorably. So an unfortunate anecdote at that.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

I also worked at eBay and never heard that said.

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.

Content services have thrived or not based on their content library.

So flying directly in the face of that and assuming you could carve out a niche based on a "time of day"/"behavior" thing alone seems very daring, especially when you're still spending an unimaginable amount of $$ on content that you'll need to pay back soon.

The swing and a miss on the consumption model crippled the ability of the content to stand on its own and give them any other chance...

I don't know if you were agreeing with that mentality, but that is a deeply confused business strategy.

There's a huge difference between "we [originally] wanted to target market segment X" vs "we will turn down easy money from market segment Y", and Quibi was doing the latter, which is not defensible. That's especially bad when X vanishes and Y increases. (Here, X = people watching on phones, Y = people watching at home.)

To be "not interested" in Y is to be not interested in money.

Now, to pre-empt an obvious reply: yes, sometimes you do want to turn down easy money from a segment Y. But that's primarily when you're promoting a niche luxury product, where usage by Y will hurt your branding long-term. It's not applicable to a product that deliberately attempts (and needs) to be mass-market, especially when it's targeting transit users and people who have to idly wait.

That’s how they explained it, and yet what they were actually trying to build was something that, like it or not, would compete primarily with short-form mobile content in YouTube, Facebook, tiktok, etc. And I’m pretty sure people sit around on the couch scrolling through that content for hours.

TikTok is in the same niche (short form, mobile-first video content) and hasn't been hurt by the pandemic.

TikTok isn’t $4.99 a month. Now, I would argue that even if it were, it would be more successful than Quibi, but free versus subscription (and the subscription still included ads) are very different things.

> and the subscription still included ads

sigh

Who thought that would be a good idea.

Hulu somehow manages to get people to pay and still view ads.

Because the product is not Hulu but the TV shows that you can stream exclusively on Hulu. Clearly very few people were convinced Quibi had content that they needed to watch.

True. The tone of my post was probably hidden... I honestly don't understand how hulu manages to get people to pay to watch ads.

I agree with you that in 2020 there should not be ads in any paid product. But people did pay for cable for decades, after all.

...where content is produced for free instead of bought in for billions of dollars. How does this compare?

It compares in that it's the same thing but a more sustainable sourcing model.

Then it's not the same thing! I'm sorry.

Youtube and netflix aren't the same thing either. One has to pay for hosting costs, the other has to pay for hosting AND sourcing/production costs.

(*I am simplifying here. I am aware Youtube is more than that)

That’s a really strange concept of “same”. You’re saying that if one business makes a stupid decision (overpays for an input, in this case, content), while the other one doesn’t, then they can’t be compared, merely on account of one having made the stupid decision and thus you can’t really say it was stupid?

I don't understand how you possible cannot realise there is a difference between hosting other people's content (UGC, in your example tik tok) and producing/sourcing/paying for content (in your example Quibi).

There is a difference between being a librarian who sells 1000 books and being a librarian AND author who sells AND writes 1000 books

Of course there's a difference! Any time you have two things with different identities, you can point to a difference. The important question is whether they have a difference that is applicable to the defense/failure explanation that was offered. My point was that Katzenberg does not.

Katzenberg claimed that "gosh, you just can't make money on a short-form video content service right now, there's covid and the lingering effects of 9/11 blah blah blah."

Oops, major counterexample: Tik-Tok. YouTube. Instagram/FB stories.

Dubious defense: "Oh, those aren't remotely comparable, because they paid less for their content. Obviously, the world turns upside down and the two become incomparable once you fill that service with content you paid too much for. You can't go with the much simpler explanation that we were just much worse at finding content people would be willing to view at a price sufficient to cover our costs."

>There is a difference between being a librarian who sells 1000 books and being a librarian AND author who sells AND writes 1000 books

Okay, if you want to go that route, the analogy would be:

Pointy-haired boss: "I'm going to make a fortune creating and hosting books."

PHB: <fails>

PHB: "Well, gosh, you know, people just aren't really reading that kind of content now, so of course it's going to be unprofitable."

Creators: "What? We make plenty providing content."

Bookstores and conventional libraries: "What? We make plenty of money buying and hosting content."

PHB: "No, you can't compare that, because I try to do both!"

Quibi is just the same, except that you can also add:

YouTube/TikTok: "Huh? We make money hosting free content where we share a cut of the advertising with the providers."

At what point do you say, "No, dude, the market is there, you're just bad at it"?

Social media is pretty different.

I would definitely put TikTok much closer to Quibi/Youtube than to Twitter/Facebook. Maybe Instagram, but most people go to TikTok to consume media, not to conversations.

The vast majority of twitter/Facebook users are consumers and not conversationists. Besides, I would say tiktok has the same amount of conversations as twitter.

How is it different from a consumer perspective? As a consumer I have the ability to choose when and what media I interact with. Wouldn’t Quibi be a fun distraction at home for 10-15 minutes?

tiktok has infinitely more content and pays infinitely less for it

tiktok has more viral hits per day than quibi generated in its whole lifetime

tiktok is expert at recommendation, quibi doesn't have enough content to have a recommender

quibi doesn't have anything share-driven

> quibi doesn't have anything share-driven

and that right there is why quibi failed - the only quibi clip I've seen was taken by someone using another phone to record it and post it to twitter. By not allowing viral hits to be easily shared on any platform they shot themselves in the foot.

yeah the 'no screenshots' rule was a thinker

There are so many ways they could have allowed sharing of clips/photos without giving copies of all their content to other services (which I imagine was the motivation for making it effectively impossible to share anything on other networks).

Seems like such an obvious miss.

TikTok is free.

There is a difference between watching 6 second meme videos and full length content.

To be fair, I wouldn't be surprised if a large % of TikTok users watch are on the app for durations equivalent to full length content. I see two, three, even four hours/day spent in the app surprisingly frequently. It's built to be addictive and keep you scrolling.

It is exactly as crazy as it appears on the surface. Why target people on the bus/train EXCLUSIVELY when you can get money from everyone else too? The engineering cost isn't that much higher. They actively chose to paint themselves into a corner.

I actually wanted to watch the Reno 911 stuff and the Ron Funches show.... on my TV, where I watch stuff.

They played stupid games and didn't win any prizes.

> Quibi was streaming video targeted at people on the bus/train or sitting behind a register with nobody in line.

Sorry that seems to be the most pointless niche I think someone tried to focus on

If you reframe it from "people on the bus/train or sitting behind a register with nobody in line" to "bored people looking for small bursts of entertainment who only have access to a smartphone" it looks a lot less niche.

Except those people will most often prefer to go watch a minute-long video on YouTube or an even shorter TikTok clip or just scroll mindlessly through their social media of choice even if nothing new shows up. What Quibi failed to understand is that bored people on phones aren't lacking entertainment, they're just in the exact type of boredom that makes them want to do pretty much nothing.

I think you have a misunderstanding. The product would work for some of the same people who watch tiktoks.

They could have pivoted to people that had 5 minutes between meetings and wanted some entertainment while making a new cup of coffee. I’m pretty sure there are millions of us now.

People still poop.

Let's be honest, "being at home" is not the reason it failed.

PooTube would have been a better name than Quibi

> It had no interest in serving people stuck at home.

Why not? Esp. when everybody's at home!? This sounds ridiculous.

Yeah that's Youtube.

Even consumption of video formats intended for snacking blew up during the pandemic. Their content just sucked.

Yeah I find it funny that the pandemic and the competition get blamed for Quibi's utter failure to design a product anyone wants. Their "selling points" were "each new episode is only a few minutes, you can only watch it on your phone, and we pan-&-scan it into portrait mode for you." Nobody wanted any of those things — they actively make the product worse.

It was mobile first, so I could see how you could argue that a pandemic was bad for a platform built around mobile. Having said that, the management seems to have been crap too and it seems crazy that they weren't able to acqui-quit.

"Mobile first" implies that there's something second. Like a webpage that's optimized for a mobile experience but is also viewable on desktop. This could have been Quibi: they made vertical videos ("optimized for a mobile experience") but they could have also allowed users to view those videos on desktop. That would have been mobile first.

they did eventually enter TV streaming but way after their announced stance of Mobile-Only

"Eventually" being a day or two ago

Do you understand how the culture changed, though?

Do you realise people used to consume a lot of media on their phones vertically... but now they don't... for obvious reaons.

That can't be that hard to understand? Market changed. Previously valid opportunity vanished. They didn't do anything wrong but be around at the wrong time.

Almost every TikTok video I see is vertical. They're going gangbusters. The culture hasn't changed. There never was room for something like Quibi. They had a shit business model which (as far as I can tell) was "people who ride the subway or take the bus, who will pay $8 a month for 1/3-sized episodes".

Because all other viewing scenarios still exist even with the pandemic.

I know this is content sacrilege, but I actually think that TikTok nailed it on the head with vertical video. Vertical video means that you can actually fit a single person into the whole frame and have detail. Horizontal video is all about close ups and wide shots, and that takes a production team to think about it.

Vertical video means you just put the phone the same way it always is, and everyone can see everything from floor to ceiling.

Smells a little like "all the people I know in SF would love this" limited market validation.

I literally started watching TikToks because of the pandemic. One month of "shelter at home" encourages a ton of media consumption and it can easily be on your phone.

For me it simply comes down to the fact that nobody needs "bite sized content" when there is a pause button on every single streaming site there is. Watch 10 minutes, bus stop coming, hit pause. There's no need to pay for "quibi", and for me at least there was never any question that they would fail. At least they aren't beating a dead horse spending billions to try to make it happen, "fail fast" I guess.

Even if you (for some reason) wanted bite sized content that fits into the time you wait for the bus, you couldn't do that with Quibi, because your bus doesn't arrive in exactly 6 minutes 30 seconds (or whatever). You still have to pause.

Wait what? The GP said they were not mobile-first, they were mobile-only and that’s true.

And No, what you say is not how any of the video services work. Pandemic or not, the largest selection of videos are 16:9.

Quibi bet the house on a mobile-only portrait videos In 10 minute chapters. You claim there was a market for that - but give no evidence.

There isn’t a broad market for that niche offering!

Your defense of Quibi makes them sound hapless, to borrow a pg word. That's not a strong defense.

"Don't be hapless" is good advice, and at least one thing that Quibi did wrong is not follow that.

http://www.paulgraham.com/relres.html

TikTok is mobile-first, vertical video format that I can still watch on my desktop. Makes sharing it or watching funny ones with SO very easy

Portrait on TikTok makes sense because the videos shown in algorithm driven order and are usually around 1 minute long at most. People are also swiping to skip to the next video, and you can't swipe comfortably in landscape.

A 10 minute Quibi episode is already half the length of a standard sitcom with ads (20 mins). It's not meant to be skippable. There really wasn't a need to make it portrait mode.

It was likely never going to be compelling enough to compete with free a a purely-short-form mobile-focused offering.

Look at how much grief Hulu got from users for being "paid but still with ads" for so long before at least adding the option to remove the ads, and then question how smart these other companies who think "paid but still with ads" is a great plan. Sure, you can get users with that model, but you do it if you have content that's compelling enough in spite of it, it doesn't help.

Media consumption patterns haven't dramatically changed, people still sit with their phones and scroll. Sure, people have also been Netflix binging on their TVs, but they are also doom-scrolling on Twitter and FB, and kids are instagramming and tiktoking and snapchatting.

> It was mobile first, so I could see how you could argue that a pandemic was bad for a platform built around mobile

This argument would have to ignore the massive success of TikTok during the pandemic.

It’s kind of funny they got Meg Whitman to be the CEO of Quibi. Pretty sure Bella Poarch (or someone similar) would be a more appropriate choice for knowing how to get something viral.

She was for Ops. They had Jef Katzenberg for content. That said, maybe neither of them had their finger on the pulse, and they are too old and rich to be 'hands on' founders - so without some really competent lieutenants this was going to fail.

$1B is goddam lot of money to spend on something with $0 capex.

The mobile app is a tiny cost.

So you have paying for the content then distribution. The later should have been royalty based and also drive most of the distribution.

It almost smells fishy.

TikTok has been getting popular since summer 2019.

TikTok usage tripled in 2020 versus doubled in 2019 (according to the Verge)

I don't know anyone that has used their phone less during lockdown.

I haven't used it for watching video media, that's gone way down now that I'm not commuting. When I watch videos now it's almost always on the TV instead. I'm not even sure if my streaming device supports Quibi.

Isn't the whole pitch that they're bite-sized? So you'll watch a clip on the toilet or while waiting for your turn in the covid test line. Mobile games and most apps are doing better than ever. This whole thing had a very "fellow kids" vibe, so I think the content must have been the main sticking point.

Yes, but you have no idea how long that bite size will last. While scrolling your feeds or playing most games, you can stop at any time. You can't say ahead of time "I'm going to spend 6-8 min waiting in this line / at the toilet, enough for a byte-sized episode".

There is this thing called a pause button. Which basically invalidates the whole concept of “bite-sized” entertainment to begin with. My biggest deterrent from streaming video away from home is data usage, not the length of the content.

I don't know if other people feel the same way, but I definitely feel a downside whenever I get invested in something (even a small bite of something) and then have to pause halfway through and resume at a later date/time. Tension drops, references to earlier things lose some meaning, you're completely pulled out of whatever you were watching and it starts feeling more like a disjointed effort to watch instead of a singular experience to enjoy.

Yep, that’s the irony: as much as they promote bite sized entertainment, their ten minutes is still too long for the use case they’re looking at. For people on the go (in transit, waiting in line), users want content that you can drop immediately. Like Reddit of Facebook or instagram. At the point where they’re willing to focus attention ... they want much longer stuff anyway. Quibi fails on both fronts.

Edit: well, someone else said it more succinctly:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24856020

I thought everyone felt this way.

If you're just going to pause it midway anyway, why not watch an actual episode of a real show on a streaming service you already have?

There is no pause button on human emotion. Good content evokes emotions. There’s a reason we use violent phrases like “torn away” when describing being pulled from an emotional state that some content put us in.

I don't get this "mobile". What you're talking about is "phone" first. People mostly use laptops for school/work, they spend their personal time on their phone.

Saying that the pandemic has stopped people using their phones for this purpose is excuse-making bullshit.

meanwhile snapchat stock up 30% today

Hehehe - acquihire, acquiquit. La misma cosa

You didn't miss anything. I paid them for the same reason.

They failed because their content was terrible, they just aren't admitting it.

I never even heard of them before today, and I don't consider myself particularly far out of the loop.

I heard about them one other time, on HN a few months ago. I didn’t bother checking them out because they were mobile only. Other than that, nothing. No one I know has mentioned them to me even in discussion of such services and the people I’ve asked haven’t had a clue they existed. Maybe their content sucks. Maybe their choices and interface are garbage. But surely their terrible marketing was also a nail in the coffin?

Same. Heard about them once before and thought it was at least an interesting idea. However, if you've spent that much money and generated virtually zero chitchat on various social networks and places like HN, what have you been doing on the PR front?

I heard of them because I like Reno 911 and the social media algorithms probably knew that too because I watch the show on Comedy Central sometimes, and so they advertised Quibi and their Reno 911 show to me all over the place about 5 months ago.

I signed up to watch it. It just wasn't the same as the good old show I used to watch, so I unsubscribed.

I flipped through page after page after page of their other content offerings and not a single other thing looked remotely interesting to me. I tried watching a couple just because, and I got bored fast.

I literally watch people live stream on Twitch and Youtube all the time and this is the second time I've heard of them. I'd agree.

They made some pretty big ad spending like x months ago, I can't remember, but that's the only value I have associated with "Quibi" in my brain. I think they paid some famous celebrities to endorse.

I first heard of them during the Super Bowl I think.

The pandemic is a frequent excuse for shutting down unsustainable VC-funded crap that shouldn't have existed to begin with. I am however surprised how they thought it would be believable when it comes to a media/entertainment service given that most people have more free time than ever due to the pandemic.

The pandemic is fuelling viewership, but killing advertising. It's also making video production difficult

If paid subscriptions failed to fill the ads hole, the yes, the pandemic would be bad for business.

That's on top of competing against Google, Facebook, and established broadcast/cable advertising markets, with likely unestablished or unattractive demographics.

Does Quibi have ads? My understanding is that they are a paid service (with free trials) but aren't an ad platform themselves. Thus, if anything, they should've benefited from the pandemic as the falling advertising supply meant they could advertise for their own service for less money than usual.

The streaming service attracted blue-chip advertisers including PepsiCo Inc., Walmart Inc. and Anheuser-Busch InBev SA, securing about $150 million in ad revenue in the runup to its launch.

From TFA.

Quibi cost $5 a month with ads. 8$ a month without ads.

s/the yes/then yes/

Yeah, go ahead and dictate to users the exact manner in which they must interact with your product. Don't allow any alternatives. This is what happens.

I had a similar experience recently when my phone broke and many services wouldn't work on my older phone, or older iPad, even in the browser. The worst offender was HBO Max which also flat out refuses to run on linux. I had to cancel it because I'm not going to buy a streaming service to exclusively use on my work laptop.

Does anyone remember when we made websites with the goal of as many people using them as possible? streaming video has been mainstream for over a decade, yet everyone still fucks it up.

From what I understand, they were planning to serve 5-10 minute "chapters".

In a pandemic, I think people would prefer longer form of content.

I think the whole idea was about short clips on the go, since no one is going anywhere these days ..

And yet, tiktok / instagram seem to be doing fine. Mind you, they have big companies behind them that can keep them alive for years if they choose to.

tiktok and instagram are running on free content. quibi was supposed to be netflix for people who have no time for netflix

> Yeah, go ahead and dictate to users the exact manner in which they must interact with your product. Don't allow any alternatives.

Apple?

While I see where you're going with that, in all fairness Apple has made an effort to shove Apple TV+ onto pretty much every streaming device, including non-Apple ones.

I was shocked when they made an Apple Music app for Android however subpar the app was.

It increases the number of people who get family Apple Music subscriptions, so it makes sense from a business standpoint. iMessage on Android, however, would kill the iPhone's biggest network effect.

Honestly I don't feel like the iMessage network effect exists much at all anymore. Sure, I use it frequently for communicating with other iPhone people, but I just as easily communicate with others using WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal.

In fact I generally prefer Telegram to Apple Messages.

Is this an American thing? I've owned an iPhone and currently still on a increasingly crap android phone and I've never ever heard anyone get hazed for iMessage colours or similar.

Yep, it's totally an American thing. The rest of the world uses WhatsApp, so it's much less of a big deal. But people actually do leave other people out of group chats because it would downgrade the experience from iMessage to MMS. The green bubble is just a reminder of the terrible photo/video quality and poor group features.

Are Americans still using MMS? Nobody in the UK uses it because of costs... are MMS free there? My impression is that WhatsApp is much better (and Wechat better still). Privacy questions aside.

As an American, my entire circle communicates almost exclusively using services like WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram.

iMessage shows up occasionally while forming initial connections, but I tend to move the conversation to one of these other services as soon as possible and the other party is almost always OK with that. (I do this in part because I don't regularly use my Mac and these other programs have web versions that can be used on all platforms including Windows PC.)

If you're curious about demographics I'm in my mid 30s. My particular social group is not big into Facebook or Facebook Messenger (though I know they own WhatsApp) since we are techies and privacy-conscious. I'd rather have a 1on1 or small group chat than blast thoughts out into the ether when in that mode of communication. (Hacker News is different. It's cultivated, moderated, and oriented around exploring curiosity.)

WhatsApp isn't as common as you might think, although still the largest. It's either Messenger or WhatsApp, so still Facebook. [0]

My personal pet theory is that it depends on when the country got free text messages. For example in Sweden everyone already had unlimited texts before smartphones were ubiquitous, therefore WhatsApp never really had a purpose and Messenger became the supplementary app.

[0]: https://www.similarweb.com/corp/blog/popular-messaging-apps-... (Not sure about the source but the countries I know are reflected correctly.)

Whatsapp is common in Anglo and EU. India is a big messenger user.

Asia is LINE/WeChat. Very few use either FB or Whatsapp.

> Asia is LINE/WeChat. Very few use either FB or Whatsapp.

This is...not true. Line has Japan and Thailand, WeChat has China and the mainland diaspora, and the rest is mostly dominated by Messenger, WhatsApp, or a local app (e.g. Zalo in Vietnam or KakaoTalk in South Korea).

Source: me, a person who has lived in Asia for a long time, and the bulging folder of messaging apps on my phone.

It’s not just an American thing. It’s a younger-demo-American thing.

Ok, it’s a young, relatively privileged, “conformist” American thing. I think that just about covers the demographic.

It's very likely I'm out of touch but from everyone and everything I see this is definitely an American thing. More than half the country is on some type of Apple device https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held...

It's worth nothing that Apple Music was a descendant of Beats Music, which had an Android app. Not sure if that's the reason.

I'm not able to watch it on my phone or TV. I think they only support Amazon's Android device

I can watch it on my TV; an LG running WebOS.

Nice! I actually just checked and it seems like AppleTV works in Chrome on mobile now, so I could chromecast although there's a bit of a quality hit and it prevents me from playing around on my phone while watching

I use it on my Roku.

Apple, for their part, seems to want up make you happy. So it behooves them to make things just work. I can watch my YouTube videos streamed effortlessly to my TV.

Difference being apple is competent when it comes to product design. Most companies aren't apple.

it's quite trivial to run Android apps on a desktop using Bluestacks. it's also free

> go ahead and dictate to users the exact manner in which they must interact with your product

Well, Netflix did that for a long time, too. Last time I tried to watch Netflix on Linux it was still impossible (supposedly you can do it now, but I haven't tried in a few years). Restricting modes of access isn't necessarily a death knell.

Well, Netflix at least kinda makes sense from a business point of view. The reason they don’t allow watching on Linux is because some of their content providers insist on a DRM scheme which they can’t guarantee will be secure on Linux. I disagree with this on an ideological point of view, but from a business point of view it makes sense as Linux is a minority in their potential user base.

Quibi’s decision really does not make sense. It is reasonably cheap to release a viewer app or website for the mainstream browsers & OSes, and indeed if there is a good Quibi show then offering it on desktops & TVs would significantly improve the viewing experience and bring more people in.

Netflix on Linux has worked for many years, but lots of content was (is?) limited to 720p or even 480p. This doesn't actually have anything to do with Linux - the same limitations apply to Windows as well unless you use Edge or the Microsoft Store app which implement a stronger level of DRM.

Everyone else in this thread is talking about how Netflix _now_ (or sometime recently) works, but it didn’t for about a decade.

The difference is the market share for Linux. It wasn’t that important. Restricting a paid video service, especially where the content are professionally produced, to mobile devices, and where you can’t use the excuse that it’s a social media platform, sounds like suicide.

I've been watching Netflix on linux since late 2018~early 2019 (can't remember exactly when I opened an account). Not sure when it's fixed but I had no problem.

Criterion Channel doesn't work on linux though, which I realized only after buying their product and watching a few movies on my Mac. Had I known it I would never have bought since I spend 90% of my time on linux.

Netflix on Linux has worked since at least 2015, although very early on you had to hack the browser string to make it work and you had to use Chrome. Now it works without fuss in Firefox as well, but you may have to install "non-free" extensions depending on the distro, so purists are still out of luck.

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