6 ms·

Why Laugh at Quibi's Failure?

35 points by kjcharles 6y ago

Traster 6y ago
It seems to me quite common in silicon valley (read: Paul Graham) to excuse obvious and continued miscalculations as just "bad bets". Accoridng to one group of people, we should applaud the bets because some pay off and others don't. But it's not like all bets are equal. Not all start ups are equal. Some people are doing something unique and innovative, and some people are doing a crap version of something everyone else already tried and failed. 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"
- ghaff 6y ago
  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.
- eindiran 6y ago
  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.
  - Retric 6y ago
    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?
    - monoideism 6y ago
      Dropbox, famously. And what's your definition of a "temporary unicorn".
      - Retric 6y ago
        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.
        eindiran 6y ago
        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 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.
        Retric 6y ago
        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 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.
- kjcharles 6y ago
  > 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.
  - herval 6y ago
    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 :)
batt4good 6y ago
Wow, this "article" could've been condensed down into maybe four sentences? Can we laugh at that?
mikewhy 6y ago
Wow what an awful take from PG.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  Why do you think it's awful? 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.
  - mikewhy 6y ago
    Because it ignores that this whole idea was born from toxic hustle culture, relied on skirting union laws to stay afloat, did things like pay spouses $6 million US for voice overs, and blamed it on a pandemic where most other forms of media have thrived instead of owning up to ineptitude.
seattle_spring 6y ago
> Why Laugh at Quibi's Failure? 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] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Room#Development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Room#Development [2] http://www.paulgraham.com/fh.html http://www.paulgraham.com/fh.html
- miohtama 6y ago
  Hate is good to wash down with some Juicero(TM).
  - seattle_spring 6y ago
    "How dare you say Juicero was a stupid idea!"
- fourseventy 6y ago
  The best ideas are ones that sound stupid to most people at first. Can you honestly say that you didn't think Airbnb or Uber sounded like a stupid idea?
  - seattle_spring 6y ago
    > Can you honestly say that you didn't think Airbnb or Uber sounded like a stupid idea? 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.
jdoliner 6y ago
I feel like a lot of people laughing are just expressing the feeling that they could do much more if they were given 1% of the investment Quibi had. It feels unfair when people get opportunities to pursue their startup based on who they are rather than the merits of the company. Of course, that's the way life works, you can't do anything about it and complaining is a bad look. But when you're proven right and the investors get burned for investing in a bad idea based on notable founders what else are you supposed to do but laugh? I generally agree with the sentiment that it's bad to ridicule people for failure, startups are hard and risky and ridiculing people for failing discourages people. I think when there's this much hubris involved though it's a little different.
- notatoad 6y ago
  >I feel like a lot of people laughing are just expressing the feeling that they could do much more if they were given 1% of the investment Quibi had. 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.
  - bredren 6y ago
    If a scrappy unknown set of non-Stanford, no yc network referral-having founders filmed a founder video introducing a version of this product with no money or traction, would they have gotten an interview invitation this morning? Probably not.
sebastien_b 6y ago
This list seems to be missing Quibi’s abuse of creators and actors by skirting union rules.
- trynewideas 6y ago
  Paul Graham having a blind spot on labor abuses? Ya don't say. https://twitter.com/paulg/status/663456748494127104?lang=en https://twitter.com/paulg/status/663456748494127104?lang=en
  - FridgeSeal 6y ago
    "Look at all this checks notes potential energy that could be released if we could all just treat these workers like the slaves I think they are"
- justiceforsaas 6y ago
  Happened more than once. And it happens all too often in SV.
stonogo 6y ago
"Startups are hard." 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.
zild3d 6y ago
> Rather than take the approach of a startup to validate their idea they went full steam ahead assuming they knew exactly what people wanted. 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
- kjcharles 6y ago
  This is what baffles me the most with PG's take. Quibi's approach went against every thing YC teaches and yet it's impressive. I would think we'd have even higher standards for veteran execs like these.
- shannifin 6y ago
  Yep... Their onslaught of sudden ads felt ridiculously overconfident so that my first impression of them was negative. The ads were also bizarre and obnoxious, like "are you a getaway driver at a bank heist? Watch a quibi! Are you about to die?! Quibi time!"
scott31 6y ago
The saddest part about Quibi is that with the $1.75B they raised they could have given every American $1M :( https://twitter.com/zck/status/1319046278618099712 https://twitter.com/zck/status/1319046278618099712
- masonic 6y ago
  Bad arithmetic is sad, too.
sbierwagen 6y ago
>This is probably the most inexcusable aspect of it all. You raise all that money, hire a bunch of people, and still don't at least have a great app. Not being able to share clips. No TV support. Not even screenshot support. They intentionally blocked screenshots and sharing clips, because they were worried about piracy. An error of design, not execution.
aaron695 6y ago
If you want any more reasons to think HN is stupid look at they way they think they knew better the whole time about Quibi in this and other threads. 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.
- majormajor 6y ago
  > 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. 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...)
- jcranmer 6y ago
  Well, as I pointed out in yesterday's Quibi thread, short-form content absolutely predates Quibi. Where Quibi went wrong is in its focus on producing short-form content by chopping long-form content into small pieces instead of adapting narratives to work in short-form content. 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...
  - aaron695 6y ago
jariel 6y ago
It was arrogant and wasteful to throw that much money at an unknown quantity. 'Famous' does not make 'Good'. $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.
qppo 6y ago
I think it more arrogant that the people so established thought they could build a tech company without technical innovation, but that's just my opinion. Quibi was more arrogant than bold in their ambition.
vmception 6y ago
Because 80% of people unsubscribed after a three month trial on a mobile phone! That is hilarious! The whole business plan is making that difficult and people forgetting and still! ahahaha This onion article writes itself.
moltar 6y ago
Will it be remembered as Pets.com of the dot com 2.0 era?

35 points by kjcharles 6y ago

It seems to me quite common in silicon valley (read: Paul Graham) to excuse obvious and continued miscalculations as just "bad bets". Accoridng to one group of people, we should applaud the bets because some pay off and others don't. But it's not like all bets are equal. Not all start ups are equal. Some people are doing something unique and innovative, and some people are doing a crap version of something everyone else already tried and failed. 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"

ghaff 6y ago
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.
eindiran 6y ago
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.
- Retric 6y ago
  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?
  - monoideism 6y ago
    Dropbox, famously. And what's your definition of a "temporary unicorn".
    - Retric 6y ago
      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.
      - eindiran 6y ago
        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 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.
        Retric 6y ago
        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 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.
kjcharles 6y ago
> 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.
- herval 6y ago
  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 :)

batt4good 6y ago

Wow, this "article" could've been condensed down into maybe four sentences? Can we laugh at that?

mikewhy 6y ago

Wow what an awful take from PG.

AnimalMuppet 6y ago
Why do you think it's awful? 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.
- mikewhy 6y ago
  Because it ignores that this whole idea was born from toxic hustle culture, relied on skirting union laws to stay afloat, did things like pay spouses $6 million US for voice overs, and blamed it on a pandemic where most other forms of media have thrived instead of owning up to ineptitude.

seattle_spring 6y ago

> Why Laugh at Quibi's Failure? 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] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Room#Development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Room#Development [2] http://www.paulgraham.com/fh.html http://www.paulgraham.com/fh.html

miohtama 6y ago
Hate is good to wash down with some Juicero(TM).
- seattle_spring 6y ago
  "How dare you say Juicero was a stupid idea!"
fourseventy 6y ago
The best ideas are ones that sound stupid to most people at first. Can you honestly say that you didn't think Airbnb or Uber sounded like a stupid idea?
- seattle_spring 6y ago
  > Can you honestly say that you didn't think Airbnb or Uber sounded like a stupid idea? 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.

jdoliner 6y ago

I feel like a lot of people laughing are just expressing the feeling that they could do much more if they were given 1% of the investment Quibi had. It feels unfair when people get opportunities to pursue their startup based on who they are rather than the merits of the company. Of course, that's the way life works, you can't do anything about it and complaining is a bad look. But when you're proven right and the investors get burned for investing in a bad idea based on notable founders what else are you supposed to do but laugh? I generally agree with the sentiment that it's bad to ridicule people for failure, startups are hard and risky and ridiculing people for failing discourages people. I think when there's this much hubris involved though it's a little different.

notatoad 6y ago
>I feel like a lot of people laughing are just expressing the feeling that they could do much more if they were given 1% of the investment Quibi had. 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.
- bredren 6y ago
  If a scrappy unknown set of non-Stanford, no yc network referral-having founders filmed a founder video introducing a version of this product with no money or traction, would they have gotten an interview invitation this morning? Probably not.

sebastien_b 6y ago

This list seems to be missing Quibi’s abuse of creators and actors by skirting union rules.

trynewideas 6y ago
Paul Graham having a blind spot on labor abuses? Ya don't say. https://twitter.com/paulg/status/663456748494127104?lang=en https://twitter.com/paulg/status/663456748494127104?lang=en
- FridgeSeal 6y ago
  "Look at all this checks notes potential energy that could be released if we could all just treat these workers like the slaves I think they are"
justiceforsaas 6y ago
Happened more than once. And it happens all too often in SV.

stonogo 6y ago

"Startups are hard." 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.

zild3d 6y ago

> Rather than take the approach of a startup to validate their idea they went full steam ahead assuming they knew exactly what people wanted. 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

kjcharles 6y ago
This is what baffles me the most with PG's take. Quibi's approach went against every thing YC teaches and yet it's impressive. I would think we'd have even higher standards for veteran execs like these.
shannifin 6y ago
Yep... Their onslaught of sudden ads felt ridiculously overconfident so that my first impression of them was negative. The ads were also bizarre and obnoxious, like "are you a getaway driver at a bank heist? Watch a quibi! Are you about to die?! Quibi time!"

scott31 6y ago

The saddest part about Quibi is that with the $1.75B they raised they could have given every American $1M :( https://twitter.com/zck/status/1319046278618099712 https://twitter.com/zck/status/1319046278618099712

masonic 6y ago
Bad arithmetic is sad, too.

sbierwagen 6y ago

>This is probably the most inexcusable aspect of it all. You raise all that money, hire a bunch of people, and still don't at least have a great app. Not being able to share clips. No TV support. Not even screenshot support. They intentionally blocked screenshots and sharing clips, because they were worried about piracy. An error of design, not execution.

aaron695 6y ago

If you want any more reasons to think HN is stupid look at they way they think they knew better the whole time about Quibi in this and other threads. 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.

majormajor 6y ago
> 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. 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...)
jcranmer 6y ago
Well, as I pointed out in yesterday's Quibi thread, short-form content absolutely predates Quibi. Where Quibi went wrong is in its focus on producing short-form content by chopping long-form content into small pieces instead of adapting narratives to work in short-form content. 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...
- aaron695 6y ago

jariel 6y ago

It was arrogant and wasteful to throw that much money at an unknown quantity. 'Famous' does not make 'Good'. $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.

qppo 6y ago

I think it more arrogant that the people so established thought they could build a tech company without technical innovation, but that's just my opinion. Quibi was more arrogant than bold in their ambition.

vmception 6y ago

Because 80% of people unsubscribed after a three month trial on a mobile phone! That is hilarious! The whole business plan is making that difficult and people forgetting and still! ahahaha This onion article writes itself.

moltar 6y ago

Will it be remembered as Pets.com of the dot com 2.0 era?