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> Quibi was more "I'm going to spend $2Bn failing where others failed before"

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.

Pretty sure some exec with 3 MBAs used TikTok as an example of "Making a YouTube with short vertical videos works, therefore let's make a Netflix of short vertical videos" to convince them to pony up :)

I think Paul Graham would respond that after having watched the startup world for a few decades, you start to have serious questions with your bad bet meter, as such a huge percentage of groundbreaking ideas seem like such bad bets beforehand. So when people undertake what seems like a bad bet and they fail, that’s okay. You don’t need to gloat that your bad bet meter was correct this time because most bets fail anyway.

I have seen plenty of bad bets become temporary unicorns, but I can’t think of any that became giant successful aka profitable companies. What in your mind makes that list?

Dropbox, famously.

And what's your definition of a "temporary unicorn".

Dropbox was and is an obvious niche that just comes down to execution.

“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.

This is my point exactly: Dropbox isn't a super obvious niche. The top-rated comment from the release on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

> 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.

And that exact poster changed his mind when presented with more information it’s directly below it. You are correct that this presents a very good, easy-to-install piece of functionality for Windows users. The Windows shortcomings that you point out are certainly problems, and I think that your software does a good job of overcoming that. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9479

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.

Theranos would be a great example of a "temporary unicorn": it peaked at over a $1 billion before its fraud was discovered.

Even now Dropbox is cash flow negative and it appears that Jobs was right. DropBox is a feature not a product. I can buy the entire Office Suite with a combined 6TB of storage for Dropbox’s 2TB plan. The same price for GSuite.

I’ll consider DropBox successful when it is consistently profitable and cash flow positive.

It's difficult to say in hindsight, because most "good ideas" seem obvious after the fact. Eg Twitch seems like such an obvious idea now (but I don't think my bad bet meter would have given Twitch a good score in 2008 - why would people watch other people play games instead of, you know, playing the game themselves?). In all honesty, I don't think I would have predicted the meteoric success of a search engine or social media. Who wants an app that just deletes pictures from your phone? Why would I trust a stranger enough to get into their car? The Wright brothers sound a bit wonky in the head, trying to get something that heavy to fly. Etc.

Odd, I thought Twitch seemed like a great idea at the time.

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.

> I don't think my bad bet meter would have given Twitch a good score in 2008 - why would people watch other people play games instead of, you know, playing the game themselves?

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.

> Let's Plays were already an established format before Twitch's predecessor started.

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

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4XknGqr3Bo

Early transistors sucked. Which makes it really difficult to separate engineering decisions based on current available technology with predictions of future advancement. At the time people where well aware of all the issues with vacuum tubes, and potentially based on Quantium mechanics transistors should be able sidestep most of them. Which is why so much money was spent on improving transistors despite the mature competition and transistor adoption was so rapid.

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 actually made a "bad bet" with a friend about Instagram. Specifically, I bet him a steak dinner that Instagram would not have more users 12 months from now than it did today, this was right around the iPhone 4 times when Instagram was like, 100K users.

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.

For investors any startup close to 50:50 is a great investment. At the seed stage anything above ~5% is actually very good odds. That increases in latter funding rounds, but that’s the benchmark I am describing as a bad bet.

His bad bets are risk mitigated, $100k per bet.

$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 totally agree: in my view, Quibi's failure was in the cards from the start. Nothing about their model made sense to me personally, and their failure to pivot or iterate seems like a huge business mistake.

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.

I basically upvoted every one of your comment on this thread.

On the one hand, I would never claim my intuitions about media consumption extend to GenZ (or whatever). On the other hand, I see very little original content, competition with "traditional" media like Netflix etc., competition with YouTube, and it's really hard to see what the pitch here is.