This keeps getting trotted out to explain why quibi was an unpredictable failure, and other companies are unpredictable successes. What is interesting is- you can (mostly) predict whether an idea has legs, but by applying Marxist economic theory. In capitalism it seems random. https://twitter.com/andrewchen/status/1132459983876939776

He uses 'an app that lets you get into strangers cars/houses' and 'an app that lets you watch people play video games' as ideas that seem random or dumb on their face, but this isn't at all how those apps actually function in reality.

AirBnB isn't what it claims to be, it's not just renting spare rooms. It's a platform to facilitate massive scale short term landlording with zero regulation. Of course that's a potentially profitable idea! Uber is deregulated, low paid, high frequency taxis.

Twitch, more interestingly, isn't watching people play video games. It's a platform of performers working 80+ hours per week for FREE just on the hope that they MIGHT get paid someday. It's a sleazy 80s talent agent's wet dream.

These platforms can only get away with what they're doing because they just simply lie about what their business model is about, and popular economic theory willfully ignores the labor value that keeps them propped up as worthy investment vehicles.

Applying some basic classical Marxist economic theory however gives you a clear picture as to where the labor value is being derived from and if it was used in an unethical way gives you a great shortcut as to what ideas will most profitably exploit people.

However, as soon as people take Marxist economics seriously they have a tendency to see the world differently and generally don't become egomaniac startup founders or angle investors. So we have a bunch of willfully ignorant hacks stumbling around in the dark.

Sidenote, quibi doesn't make sense under any of these models it's just Katzenberg doing "old man yells at cloud" and mumbling about "kids these days and their phones"

this is a good insight @new_kebede https://twitter.com/new_kebede/status/1319364171906121733

a lot of people smarter than me have explained exactly how and why quibi failed, but it largely does seem to come down to inefficiently exploiting labor at scale, and fundamentally misunderstanding how the target users engage with media, baking in a lot of old-man assumptions.