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.
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.
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.
But thanks for sharing, I guess?
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.
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.
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.
https://techspective.net/2020/08/07/meg-whitman-and-predicti...
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.
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.
Speaking of, what managerial caste are you talking about? Your use of that term insults people living under an actual caste system.
Whitman's success to failure ratio is astonishing and that failure tends not to be attributed to the prestigious education...oddly.
Only wierd part of this is the comment of how "children dream of"
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.
Bain Capital, the PE raider made (in)famous thanks to the 2012 Mitt Romney campaign? Sounds more like everything she touched turned to shit.
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.
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.
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 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).
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.
"Mobile only" is a self imposed limitation, so that's on Katzenberg and everyone else who had influence on that decision.
(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 HP, market cap also grew significantly on her watch.
I feel like implying that she is a failure is almost borderline sexist.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Meg Whitman was lucky enough to ride the eBay rocket at the right moment. Everything she touched after that, went wrong.
Her record breaking campaign, HPQ, and Quibi are all negatives.
If she had at least one for sure success, that’d be one thing.
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...
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.
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
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.
Seems like such an obvious miss.
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)
There is a difference between being a librarian who sells 1000 books and being a librarian AND author who sells AND writes 1000 books
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"?
sigh
Who thought that would be a good idea.
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.
Sorry that seems to be the most pointless niche I think someone tried to focus on
Let's be honest, "being at home" is not the reason it failed.
Why not? Esp. when everybody's at home!? This sounds ridiculous.