Why Laugh at Quibi's Failure?
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As well as this, there's a whole load of strategy that is specifically designed by startups to minimize wasting resources - fail fast. Building an enormous platform (for which you're being sued) and investing billions before you show it to your customer....well that's going to fail fast. But not really want we meant. And not only do you want to fail fast, but a $10m launch doesn't need to be that successful, if you're launching with billions in investment then you need an absolute home run, and to a large extent that's what happened here. The investment was so big that you needed to immediately capture a top 3 spot in the market.
I have a lot of respect for someone who can say "Ok, we see other people exist, and here's why we're different/here's why we'll succeed where they failed". But that wasn't Quibi. Quibi was more "I'm going to spend $2Bn failing where others failed before"
And what's your definition of a "temporary unicorn".
“Temporary Unicorn” is a valuation in the billions without profit to back that up. Tesla for example could still fail, but it’s made 100+M in profit for multiple quarters which seems like a safe objective benchmark.
> I have a few qualms with this app:
> For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
Now that Dropbox is a unicorn (and there are dozens of other competing products, some of them unicorns in their own right), it's easy to pass this off as an obvious idea. But plenty of people at the time thought it was a bad bet.
As Windows was by far the largest OS at the time the user was acknowledging a very clear market. Personally I described the niche as a source code repository for regular people several years before, but I thought the UI was going to be the issue. Their first demo more or less nailed it.
I’ll consider DropBox successful when it is consistently profitable and cash flow positive.
Starcraft already had multiple successful TV shows in South Korea. Which made it clear there was a market for people watching others play video games. As a teen I had multiple times had a room full of other kids watching me play video games so it wasn’t just a question of competitive sports. Finally, the focus was different many people had been making money for years entertaining over webcams, it’s ripe for stalker behavior.
I will agree with you on Uber though for economic and regulatory reasons. Taxi medallions where created because of the external costs of operating a Taxi so just ignoring that system seems unlikely to work. Similarly without subsides drivers and passengers are going to be willing to jump ship. That said, carpool lanes and Taxi where a thing which covers the stranger angle.
Economically CitySprinter (much earlier startup) and Uber had the same basic issue in my mind, the overhead of operating internationally needs some significant economies of scale to work out.
Let's Plays were already an established format before Twitch's predecessor started. Indeed, Twitch was spun off its predecessor site precisely because the gaming section was overwhelmingly popular.
> Why would I trust a stranger enough to get into their car?
It wasn't until I went to college that I discovered that slugging wasn't a common thing. What's slugging? It's the commuting practice of a driver rolling up to a line of people, saying "I'm going to the Pentagon, I've got three seats; who wants to come with?" and three people peel off the line into the car.
> The Wright brothers sound a bit wonky in the head, trying to get something that heavy to fly.
The Wright brothers were the first to succeed of a large group of people attempting to build working airplanes. It was a technological race going on, and the main difficulty was actually in getting a compact engine working that could provide sufficient forward speed to produce lift. Glider technology was already decently accomplished by the time of the first powered flight, which is the milestone the Wright brothers achieved.
Sure, there are people who are early adopters of anything, including plenty of things that never pan out.
My mom certainly hadn't heard of Let's Plays in 2008, but she can name a few streamers now. To have predicted the success of Twitch is to say with a straight face that in the mid 2000s you thought that people who absolutely did not play games then (or even consider it) would regularly watch other people play games; Twitch probably has more concurrent users right now than there are people who had heard of a Let's Play before 2008[0]. To be clear, I'm not saying that you didn't predict it: I'm saying that realizing that Twitch would be as successful as it is today is uncommon.
> The Wright brothers were the first to succeed of a large group of people attempting to build working airplanes.
Agreed. However, at the time the Washington Post famously opined on the Wright brothers that "It is a fact that man can't fly". A lot of the mockery they faced is probably apocryphal at this point, but certainly many people thought that powered flight was unlikely/impossible. Similarly, many of the early adopters of transistors were laughed at because vacuum tubes were the clearly superior choice [1].
My point here isn't that no one believed; some people have done a great job of reliably picking the right horse. My point is that for many innovative ideas, more people doubt than believe. And that (with the benefit of hindsight) it's easy to imagine you knew the right horse from the beginning.
[0] https://kotaku.com/who-invented-lets-play-videos-1702390484
Similarly, many different flying machines pre dated the Wright brothers including balloons, heavier than air gliders, and freaking kites. The problem was the crap engines of the time, which is why so many heavier than air aircraft so many inventors appeared at the same time. And why we don’t use anything like the Wright brothers aircraft.
PS: The actual first heavier than air aircraft is probably a Bamboo-copter from ~400BC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboo-copter. Though man lifting kites where likely the first useful heavier than air aircraft. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-lifting_kite
I believed at the time that filters was a flash in the pan gimmick that was making Instagram the fad of the day but they didn't have any deep engagement loops that would drive long term return usage after people got sick of seeing someone else's sunset with moire on it for the 200th time.
I wasn't exactly alone at the time about this either.
$1B is a gigantic sum to spend on a totally new things.
It breaks all the rules of startups which is start small, MVP, pivot to find the fit - and then scale.
The barriers to entry for them are not like Tesla where you have to set up a plant.
I'm just making the point that PG and many other SV founder/VC types don't feel the need to take another swing at Quibi on Twitter because most companies (good ideas or bad) fail anyway. And if they had succeeded, by 2027 everyone would have collectively re-written history to think that Quibi was a super-obvious idea from the beginning.
This is what makes it especially ridiculous. Verizon had just failed with a huge splashy launch for go90. It takes a ton of arrogance to then decide to do the same without any real innovation. Rotating between landscape and portrait is a feature not an entire product. And especially not the basis for a media company.
The average startup founder would never be in the position to pitch an idea like this AND still receive $2B in funding. This wasn't just a bad bet it was a stupid one.
I'm laughing because it was an obviously stupid idea. I first heard about it pre-launch on an NPR spot, where the CEO was interviewed about their proprietary technology that'd allow videos to be watched in both landscape and, get this, portrait mode. That means all shows had to be filmed with multiple cameras for a feature that no one in the world wanted or asked for. It reminded me of Tommy Wiseau from "The Room" insisting it be filmed in both digital and 35mm [1]. It was an obvious waste-of-money gimmick from the get-go.
but I guess according to PG, I'm "just a hater." [2]
Oh my God, Yes I definitely can say that I didn't think Airbnb or Uber were stupid. I had been hosting on Couchsurfing.org since 2004, 5 years before Airbnb first launched. I thought Airbnb was an amazing idea from day 1, and felt stupid for not thinking of it myself.
As for Uber, I had regularly been fucked by taxi drivers up until Uber came out. I used it the first day I could, and remember fondly how amazing the experience was when it first came out. That was when tipping was explicitly not required and the only option were the Black towncars.
And they were also much more of an actual "new idea" than just "somewhere between youtube and netflix, with both subscription revenue AND ad revenue despite another new subscription (that still has ads at the entry tier!) being a hard sell to users." Which is an idea that has failed before, Quibi thought they could just buy their way to popularity by raising more money.
The more money you need to raise, the higher the burden of evidence for "non-stupid" needs to be.
By mocking people for trying, yes that does make one a hater. Quibi tried, and yes it turned out they were wrong about the product or execution or timing. But that’s the point of startups. They start with an “obviously stupid” idea and sometimes it works spectacularly. Usually not, but sometimes you get surprises.
But AWS is where the real margins are.
I personally loved that. I could hold the phone comfortably without being worried that I'd miss a key part of the scene, since it was edited to handle both modes. Sure, more work, but it was a really cool feature.
From what I understand, most shows handled it by simply cropping the landscape frame to make the portrait frame.
PG is dishonest: these guys took no risk; their product did not have a hair of innovation on it; they had a $2Bn safety net.
This summer they had 72k paying users [1]; mix in the $2Bn investment; they could have distributed $27k to each of these paying users and would have still had some money in the bank. But no, they managed to burn their resources and the product with it. No pivot, no sign of adaptability whatsoever.
Let's be honest - it was just an expensive project that failed despite having the best resources at hand.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/8/21318060/quibi-subscriber-...
It's absolutely not a stupid idea, frankly, it's a great idea.
The execution was completely screwed up - were they to have done it smartly, organically, they could have won massively.
TikTok is not just an 'app' - it's a new form of content.
There is a lot of room there.
Quibi was a smart, timely concept - and would have made a perfect YCombinator type bet.
But then still using an old-model business model (cable-style subscription+ads) that makes growth difficult without extraordinarily compelling content.
This is the big one for me. YC more than anyone pushes the idea to launch early, and validate. Raising a huge amount of money is fine, all the power to you, but hiring a ton of people off the bat, building your app in isolation of real users, and pouring gas on the marketing before ever launching is just asking to go out in flames
this is 100% it. if this were some scrappy startup who had fought to launch a product and failed, i could respect that. but it's a couple old rich people who raised $2B off their names and reputations, and then squandered it in record time by overpaying for bad content.
Probably not.
They're even harder when your founders are an arrogant out-of-touch industry insider and a bureaucrat with no passion or insight for the market you depend on. That's why people are laughing. A bad idea is survivable. A bad leadership cadre is fatal, and both of them should know that by now.
Many successful startup ideas initially seemed like bad ideas. Many failed startups also initially seemed like bad ideas. Many failed startups actually were bad ideas. (Some were bad execution or just bad luck.) But it's hard to tell, at the beginning, whether the idea is bad or just looks bad. Often you have to try it to find out.
They intentionally blocked screenshots and sharing clips, because they were worried about piracy. An error of design, not execution.
$1B could have gone into COVID research or any other good things.
'Risk' is fine, 'irrational risk' is wasteful.
Whitman and Katzenberg should have known better.
That is hilarious! The whole business plan is making that difficult and people forgetting and still! ahahaha
This onion article writes itself.
Can we laugh at that?
I'd like to see who actually wrote it down and explained why it wouldn't work before it failed.
Quibi is brilliant. Short form TV will take a huge market share.
Quibi failed due to a content issue. This is hard. It takes a lot of money and a long time to pull this off. Pre-existing content is rarer.
It's possible short form TV will come into play first going through places like Netflix. But if you wanted to own the market this was an ok attempt.
And yes forcing people to use phones and having different views was wrong. People want to be on a couch and passively watching TV but next week everyone on HN believes in VR. HN has no idea of the world and IT.
One of the reasons many people doubted Quibi is because short-form content is something Netflix and Hulu have already experimented with.
The idea is like crack to product folks - habit forming! make the user get used to opening up the app every day! - but nobody has ever really made it stick for Hollywood-style or even just "a bit more premium than Youtube" content that requires a subscription.
Quibi to me looked like "Vessel/Go90, but with spending way more money" and that was a dubious proposition.
(And this was said by many people in threads before Quibi even launched, so...)
And you also point out yourself that every idea Quibi had that differentiated itself from other streaming services (save the short-form content) didn't work. It's hard to call it brilliant if every original idea it had wasn't a good one...
I've watched most of the fiction. This is not true. It was all designed for short form.
They knew this -
"“What you can’t do is take an hour-long TV show and chop it up… it has to be written and shot for this use case,” said (Quibi CEO Meg Whitman. “If we are successful, there will be plenty of competition. We will have accumulated a library [of content] that they can’t go buy.”
Their mistake is hard to exactly call. It is definitely minutes of entertainment available though.
I think you need to get short form TV to the same pricing model as TV movies then dump a lot of money into a library.
A idea I think would be to try and get more length, like 3 hours rather than 90 mins. So you make "TV movies" (Obviously learn to script and shoot for short form) that are 3 hours long that cost less than double the cost. Viewers can binge on a special night. Their can go to bed no problem, so no pressure a long movie gives you (The Irishman). It's relaxing. It feels like value.