Read on Twitter
Enough with this "man in the arena" crap with Quibi. Yes, startups taking big swings is to be admired. More so, however, are the humility to know that customers, not stock prices, ultimately decide whether your ideas are any good, and the tenacity to weather that.
A THREAD
A THREAD
In the case of content, audiences can like it, and the business (and implicitly, distribution) model can still be right or wrong. It seems like Quibi got it wrong on all fronts -- as many predicted they might: no breakout hits, no users, no conversion.
When you're right on at least 1 dimension in a startup, you earn more chances to figure out the rest. Content connects with a big audience? Congrats; you have time to figure out how to monetize it. Got product market fit? You can raise more money to figure out how to scale.
But you cannot buy your way into being default right, no matter how rich or well-funded you are. You want to build a unicorn from scratch, you have to earn it.
Those of us who pay "the iron price," all day, every day, know this and respect this as an equalizer.
Those of us who pay "the iron price," all day, every day, know this and respect this as an equalizer.
It's not right to call clowning on Quibi's closure "schadenfreude" or "player hating". They put a stupid amount of money into an idea that had no validation. They believed old media horse-sense, w/ enough money and production values behind it, would propel them to success.
It was the Bloomberg presidential campaign of startups.
By all accounts, Quibi was a hot mess internally too. They clearly had no plan B, no appetite to pivot -- just nothing there other than the one idea. No experimental culture, no humility about the preciousness of the time and budget they had to try to figure things out.
The "blame the pandemic" spin back in May was an awful, sad illustration of this. Better founders, when it was this obvious their first hypothesis had failed, would have been owning it and pivoting their assess off.
But they had money and privilege and access, and they used those to try to stuff their one idea down our throats, from conference stages to the pages of the NY Times and the WSJ, to consumer ads everywhere.
None of it mattered. As they say, "the dogs won't eat the dog food".
None of it mattered. As they say, "the dogs won't eat the dog food".
I wish they had been more successful, or at least that the employees who pledged career equity and time there were getting a better outcome. That more creators, especially under-represented ones, were getting a new platform to develop an audience on.
But I won't feel bad being angry at the repugnant hubris of spending
***literally 5 times the annual budget of NPR***
on an entertainment-related hunch, then blaming external factors when it was wrong.
Better entrepreneurs could have done a lot more with a hell of a lot less.
***literally 5 times the annual budget of NPR***
on an entertainment-related hunch, then blaming external factors when it was wrong.
Better entrepreneurs could have done a lot more with a hell of a lot less.
We all take risks in tech, and sometimes CEO's make bad decisions, or we ignore customers or data and pay a price for it if we're wrong.
But there's risk, there's calculated risk (ie with the right returns on risk)... and there's mind-bogglingly stupid.
But there's risk, there's calculated risk (ie with the right returns on risk)... and there's mind-bogglingly stupid.
People out here trying to valorize Quibi as an honorable risk-taking -- I'm not buying it.
I think you're lending credibility to awful. Quibi should go in the same box as WeWork and Juicero and we should never speak of it again.
I think you're lending credibility to awful. Quibi should go in the same box as WeWork and Juicero and we should never speak of it again.
Which path do you choose?
