Doomed to Fail - Ep 223: Too Short to Fail - Quibi

Episode Date: November 3, 2025

Imagine you've been unstoppable - created the most popular websites and movies in the history of well, websites and movies... what would be next? You see everyone on their phone all the time out in public, and think - that's it! Shows JUST for your phone! Sounds kind of dumb, but whatever - the only thing that could possibly go wrong would be if people were trapped in their houses and devoted to their TVs in a way that they hadn't been in ages. Right - That was Quibi - phone only shows that launched right before we were all stuck inside due to Covid! A spectacular failure from Meg Whitman & Jeffrey Katzenberg. Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

It's a matter of the people of the state of California versus Hortonthal James Simpson, case number B.A. 019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do. And we're back. You go. Girl, you know it's true. Welcome back, Taylor, post-Milly Vanilli.

How you doing today? Oh, good. Good, good, good. I've heard to tell you that it was Florence's birthday. She turned 11. We had a party for her yesterday. It was super fun. 11 years old. 11. Remember when I was like, far as I'm pregnant, you were like, oh, my God. Oh, my God. I mean, I can't believe it because, like, look at my beer. Look at my gray streak in my hair. I guess we can believe it. My hair line is literally racing to my neck. Yeah, so I can't believe it.

All the evidence is point to that being true. Cool. Well, do you want to introduce us? Yes. Hello, everyone. Welcome to doomed to fail. We bring you historical stories of disasters and failures. And I am Taylor joined by Fars.

And today we'll hear from Fars. Yeah, I, um, yeah, my story today, Taylor, it starts with like this objective assessment of a business that was created and failed. And it ends in me ranting about Hollywood. And so, I'm just warning the audience that this will start completely objective and end in a rant. But you'll get why I'm doing the rants when I get thought a Hollywood rants part of this. But I'm going to start out by having you picture the world in 2018. Are you there?

Are you picturing it? Yes. So at this point, when it comes to content and digital media, I just realized, like, we're doing, like, both of our episodes are, like, media related. Yeah. So at this point, 2018, streaming had basically turned out to be an obviously massively popular and necessary form of distribution of content. Netflix, which has started streaming in 2007, I did not realize it was that early. they had been around for a while doing this. He obviously took off.

Fun fact, I don't know if you've heard of this before, but do you know where we get the Roku devices from? In the end. Back in like when they were still sending DVDs to people, Netflix was, Reed Hasing and the CEO at that time was like, let's invent this little device for the home. And then if you want to like stream our stuff,

then we'll ship you this device and you can plug it into your TV and then we can stream to that box and then to your TV. And they were like on the eve of launching and re-hans, like, wait a minute, this is a terrible business strategy. That means that we have to like own

and control the hardware devices as opposed to just signing licensing deals with all the other devices where they can just have our app on their devices. And so they ended up spinning Roku, which was the device, into its own separate company.

And that's where the Roku comes from. It comes from a 2011-7 experiment with initial streaming done through Netflix. Remember Enron almost invented it earlier? Was it Enron that was trying to do it through Blockbuster? Yeah. That's what it was, yeah.

Yeah. Terrible decisions all around. So in 2018, at this point, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and Netflix were basically just like consuming the digital streaming market. And then a bunch of other players started to get involved. You got HBO Max. You got Discovery Plus. You got Disney Plus, ESPN, Paramount. And a ton of others that decided to kind of enter the...

streaming marketplace, their own content, but there are several things to point out about who existed in the market before and who came after. So Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu, they were not content creators in the beginning. They were technology companies that was created to distribute other people's content through. But they were the first, so they had established their reputation, their brand, their value, and licensing agreements to kind of like consume the market who came after were content

creators they already had brand value they already had content they already had a reputation like everybody like Disney has content like HBO has content and so that's why they also experienced tremendous success so it was under these circumstances that if

Hollywood giant rises and thinks I can do it too do you know who it is is it Jeff Bezos no Well, yeah, I mean, I guess he's now a Hollywood giant as well, but no, it's another Jeff, Jeffrey Katzenberg. Do you know that name? No, but I'm not going to look at up.

It's all good. I'm going to go into details here. Yeah, let's listen here. Don't go look at up, people. Keep listening. Stop it. So Katzenberg started out in like the early 70s in Hollywood. He started his career paramount and moved his way off the ranks until he was given the task of reviving the Star Trek,

which he did successfully. From there, he was working under CEO Michael Eisner at Paramount when Isder was tapped by the Disney family to take over as a CEO of the Walt Disney company. And then Eisner obviously brings Kastenberg over with him and made him chairman of Walt Disney Studio, which was the film division of Walt Disney. In three years, Kastenberg took what was basically considered bottom-of-the-barrel movie production studio like disney's touchstone yeah disney's touchstone brand was like kind of garbage yeah and didn't put out anything respectable from that point on they you're going to love this part under tatsonberg

and only within three years they ended up releasing pretty woman dead poet society uh good morning Vietnam. And he also expanded into sitcom television series, including home improvement and the Golden Girls. Holy shit. That's all big stuff. Big stuff. Older than I thought the story was going. Yep.

Yeah, wow. Okay. You did a lot. So about 10 years after starting a Disney, Katzenberg's relationship, they just got super afraid. There was a lot of infighting. It's one of those power dynamics where it's like who's the boss. It just gets really ugly and he ended up quitting and then later on suing

Disney. They ended up settling for an estimate of $250 million. So at this point we were reaching that point when this guy is like a mega super rich guy in Hollywood. He would then go on to found DreamWorks, which also was crazy successful. That was the studio behind Saving Pride of Ryan, Gladiator, Castaway, Shrek

on Food Panda. Like just everything. He was a hit maker. Like one after the other. So that was all true until he launched his next business and the topic of today's story, a company called Quibi. Do you remember Quibi? Oh, yeah. And did not watch it because I don't do that, but continue. It's exciting. So it's all recent.

That's what's interesting about it. You actually saw the rise and downfall super quickly. So Katzenberg got together with a woman named Meg Whitman. Meg Whitman was a pretty big deal in terms of, like, corporate CEOs. She kind of had a typical executive kind of elevation where she was VP and SVP at a bunch of companies. Her real success career-wise came in 1998 when she became CEO of eBay back when it was like 30 employees. In 10 years, she grew it to many multiples of billions and 15,000 employees. so she knew what she was doing

there. She got in trouble in 2007-ish because she assaulted one of her team members, so she ended up leaving eBay shortly thereafter, and she took a few years off, then went on to become CEO of Hewler Packard, and then it sounded like, things of Heel Packard sucked

basically, so she ended up leaving that. Her hit was eBay, like she was great with eBay, that's what it was. By virtue as being super powerful and successful people, Whitman and Katzenberg were acquaintances. I guess if you're like super rich and successful, like you just, they give you like probably like a SIM card that has every other successful rich person's contact details on it. You got to get together to like drink baby blood and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. The adrenal firms, right? Yeah. And so basically Caxonberg came up with the idea of Quibby goes to Whitman and was like, I'm the creative side.

I got hit after, hit after hit on the creative side. You're a professional CEO. I don't totally understand this, but, like, I guess being the head of a studio is much more challenging or different than being the head of, like, a regular company. I don't know. It just seems like the personality types are very different than very, like, art, creative versus, like, numbers types. Yeah.

Yeah. The way it was described was that it was kind of like a right-brain-brain-left-brain partnership between Katzenberg and Wittman. The idea with Quibi, which in hindsight, it's like, of course it was kind of stupid. But the idea behind Quibi was that high quality short form content would be the next big thing. And Quibi was short for quick bites.

That's what it would be. And the idea behind it was to create Hollywood-style content with a runtime of 10 minutes or less that was only viewable on your phone. when you said the quick bite thing it reminds me that net the name netflix is made up of two words that i would never use to describe those things like i would never say the net and i would never say a flick but net is that really what it is yeah isn't it i guess so they start fundraising because this was going to require a ton of cash and given the combo of who the two founders were they fundraised like crazy so disney 20

21st Century Fox, NBC, Sony, Viacom, JPMorgan, all these companies basically just through cashed them. And they're raising around $1.7 billion. The app launched on April 6th, 2020, and that date is important, because do you can you recall what else is going on in the world back then? COVID. Yeah. So April 20, April of 2020 was the height of COVID lockdowns. That's when about 50% of the global population whether they're mandatory stay-at-home orders. It seems like a good time to release something like this.

You think so, but what do you watch when you're at home? Movies. You watch your TV or you're on your laptop. That's true. You're not sitting there all be long. Right. Yeah.

Right. That's the thing. So would be launched as a top app download within the App Store and Google Play and within a week, it dropped off the top 50 download list. Like, it went super high and then immediately tanked. Kattenberg actually called it immediately and said COVID basically wrecked the utility of the app. And they started implementing changes to the app to address the fact that people just weren't consuming media on mobile devices as much anymore.

They introduced the option to cast to other devices in the home. They made it to the content would actually launch a landscape mode by default, rather portrait mode. Yeah. Oh, right, because it was all portrait mode? That's weird. Yeah. It's not how you watch TV at all.

Exactly. They also didn't initially roll it out with any sort of social feature, so sharing functionality didn't exist. I mean, it was just like a, kind of like a half-baked concept, I think. Within the first few months, they were off their projections

for adoption of users by 4-X, so they missed their goals tremendously. They launched a paid version, so you'd have, like, a free version, and then after that, you could pay $5 a month for a version without ads, or eight for a version with ads, or without ads, sorry. But that's how much, like, Google and Netflix cost back then. So, it was like, why would I go with this? Yeah. So, because they'd invested so heavily in the concept of, like, the highest of quality content, they were spending $100,000 per minute of cost. content produced.

So they're chewing through that catch. Wow. So just six months after launching, Katzenberg and Whitman decided that the most ethical thing to do was to call it quits rather than burn through the remaining cash reserves. Neither of them saw any pathway to reaching any sort of breakout velocity. And on some level, probably true, but also six months isn't enough to prove anything. I know. And I feel like there's so much work that had you put into it. It was like a lot of famous people made shows, didn't they? Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to talk about that here in a second. That's where my rant starts. But also it's something like is indicative of if you're good at something, that doesn't mean you're good at everything. Like Whitman was a great eBay CEO and Katzenberg was a great creative person when it came to developing new content. But like this was a tech company.

like it was tech it should have been tech and social plus media like there was a lot that they missed missed the mark on here they wound the business down returning any remaining cash investors and sold the content library that they developed to that point to rogufer like they estimate it's like south of a hundred million dollars out of the 1.7 billion they had um none of the shows went anywhere most of the content was commissioned by quibby for like a single season so the vast majority just ended up down dying when the business died. Right. I don't see anyone like talking about a show they'd miss. So the only one that I can think of, well, yes, that's true. So Reno 911 is the only one out of the list of shows that I actually recognized because they were canceled in 2009. Quibi signed them to do another season, additional season, the eighth season of the show.

And that actually did go out and get released fully through Roku. and I have no idea how good it was. I was never into Bredo 911, but like, presumably if you're, I know, I know you do. I assume if you're a fan of Redo 911 one, that's probably the one story that you would latch onto. This weekend, in last pocket on the left, Henry made

a joke about it, like, it was like very casual, but he was like, new boot-grove-in, and I was just laughing because it's such a funny scene. Just like, yes, I love it so much. That's from Reno 911, I take it. Oh, my God. You know how he wears those, like, a little shorts, and he got these white carpet boots on Layaway. He's like, my last payment today. I got them on

he's like new boot grooving he's just like walking around in his new boots there's another thing that we say all the time this got me excited is there's like a beginning you know like the like the little skit before the show starts like the little skit where one of the guys he goes whoa I just have the craziest dream and the other guy goes you know you're driving right and they hit a tree one and I said it all the time whenever he's saying I'm like you know you're driving right he's like yeah I kind of thought it was similar to super troopers but Yeah, one of my favorite movies ever. Yeah.

There was this, this is probably the dumber show. So one of the shows they produced, which like tells you the direction they were trying to go with this thing, it's called Chrissy's Court. And that also, so actually that was probably the most successful thing they produced because when that moved over to Roku, it had three full seasons. So it went two seasons past the Quibby time, but the whole point of it was that Chrissy Tegan was a judge. and her mom

whose name is Pepper Ty is a bailiff and people run through arbitration with her judging them was it real or fake I mean it was real like Judge Judy Real

yeah but when you see season like how many minutes of content is that it's not that many minutes yeah because it was all supposed to be under 10 minutes yeah so like 10 episodes

under 10 minutes yeah yeah so like every all their shows kind of seemed like terrible. One show was called The Shape of Pasta. And they also had this like really... Wasn't it like a murder house one? Like a murder renovation show on the Quibi?

I don't know. They had a lot of stuff they were in production on. Like I mean, they really burned through that cash fast. But they had this, they had this like stupid ad during the Super Bowl one year or that year they launched. And it was basically like a bunch of bank robbers who were trying to get away. And the getaway driver's busy watching some show on Quibi. with Chance the rapper, like, dancing. And I feel like the world hit, like,

key collie wood around this time. It was, like, around the time that Gall-Hadot video Imagine was released, and we all realized that people are, like, nuts. And, like, I think it's true that COVID hurt the business model, but I also think the heavy reliance on the cult of personality also hurt. Like, if you think about, like, TikTok, there's, like, an authenticity behind the content that's being generated there

because it's real people experiencing real life and with this content as I was looking at over and what they're producing on the one hand it like dilutes the celebrities involved with them because there's creating these stupid 10 minutes of like them talking and

thinking about things and the other it relies on the watchers affinity for the celebrity to keep engaging and paying for the app there was one show called The Joker with Will Smith where he like just talks about funny stories of his life. I don't like Will Smith that money.

No, I don't want to pay $5 to like, I don't want to watch Chrissy Tegan's mom. I'm not, I've no affinity towards these people. No, yeah. So, and this is the part where like it kind of blew my mind a little bit. So Katzenberg's next foray and probably the biggest impact, I would think he's had on the world to date. is he becomes co-chair of Biden's 2024 re-election campaign And again, I don't know how much weight

To put into this This quote I'm going to read out From the Hollywood Reporter They came out in like July of 2024 The article is entitled Quote, as Dump Biden Movement Fistles Hollywood turns its angry eyes On Jeffrey Kastenberg

And Katsenberg was the campaign connection to the money in Hollywood. You know that event everybody talks about where Biden doesn't recognize George Clooney and then George Clooney writes the op-ed in New York Times? Yeah, yeah. That's Katzenberg's fundraiser. Yeah.

Well, Meg Whitman also was a big Republican. Oh, I didn't know that. Because she was like a U.S. ambassador. Like there's a lot of pictures of her like with Mitt Romney and like she's in Roller-Schorsonigger and stuff. I totally didn't know that. Yeah. Are you thinking about Carly Fiorino?

I think I think about Carly Fiorino. No, I literally on Wikipedia. I lost it. My computer stopped. That's fine. I can believe it. I mean, she's worth like $4.7 billion. Yeah, like, it's not hard to believe that. Yeah.

This is the part of the Hollywood Reporter article that I don't know how much weight to give to, but here's a direct quote from it. It says, Katzenberg still stinging from his quibby epic fail in 2020, was hoping to leverage his political influence of the Biden campaign. into a comeback of sorts. Katzenberg has always been in the shadow of Steven Spielberg and David Geffen, who have quietly become elder statesman.

He's like a little brother trying to prove himself. He can't help himself. And why not? Do weird shit if you have all the money. I don't know. Instead of this. So, I mean, like, I mean, do, why not do this? Like, why not do Quibby and, like,

try weird things if you have, like, infinite money? Like, because he did so many other things I'm looking at. Yeah. I'm just, my last line here is, did Quibi's failure give us the world we currently in? Dot, dot, dot, definitely yes. Explain that more. Because if he wasn't on the committee and hadn't been pushing this. Because the story on the Hollywood reporter goes, all these money interests in Hollywood,

I mean, you should read the story because there's a lot of very, very angry, very, very rich people who are very specifically angry. at Katsenberg, because he was the connection to all the finances and resources. He was the one telling everyone, everything's fine, everything's fine, just give us your money, right? The checks, yada, yada, yada. If that hadn't happened and the money dried up, then the outcomes would look different. That's why it's literally angry eyes aimed at Tetsonk. That's what the story actually says is they see him as like the main problem here.

God, he made so many good movies. He made so many good movies. This is ridiculous. Like, executive in charge of production for Who Fray and Bradger Rabbit, Little Mermaid, Rescueers Out Under, Beauty, Aladdin, November for Christmas, Lion King, Pocahontas, Ants, American Beauty.

Yeah, every, like... The vast majority of his role, like his filmography, like, it's movies that you've seen are at the very least heard of. Like, he is... But his... television list is not very good well he did golden girls so I don't see a golden girl on this list

I believe you know it should be under dream works is he under television whatever um yeah that's wild I wonder if anyone was like sad that's five years ago I can't believe how long ago that was I know it feels like a age like you say 2018 i'm like god what even was it you know yeah i know i was doing the math when i said

2018 on how old flow was it was like holy shit i know she was born by then yeah cute so yeah my this segued into like a weird spot because of like where it ends but i don't know it's kind of like a good indicator of like yeah if someone's just good at something don't make them in charge a bunch of other stuff because I don't need to do with everything. Also, my regular rant, stop listening to Hollywood people.

These people are not better than we are. They're rich and you can see their faces. It doesn't make them better. Like, why do we care what these people think? Their opinions are worthless. Sometimes I wonder, like, what, I mean, this is stupid, but who people would be if they didn't have that, you know?

Yeah. You didn't have that media or that, like, thing. Like, who would you be, like, in your actual heart? because you were like a you were an amalgam of all of your experiences you know how many of your experiences are experiencing someone else's experiences through like film and television yeah yeah yeah that's a good point i'm a horror movie and i'm well no we talk about this all the time where it's like the academy award and it's like how the whole how this like whole world like stops to watch this like it's not actually an american thing either because like they do it everywhere like other countries

also lionize are artists and like I don't know what that is it's really gross I really I really dislike that part of culture more than pretty much any other part of culture is like the fact that we think these people are better than we are and then everybody has to stop and watch the Academy Awards where they pay each other on the back it's like why why yeah and like but then also to like tie it back to like the millie vanilla stuff like how many people ruin their lives trying to achieve that level of fame also you know yeah Yeah. Yeah, actually, this is a really stupid example.

Last side, there's this show on, I think it's on Hulu. It's like, jail is the name of it. And it's literally just shows people getting booked into jails. And like, they do crazy stuff and they film it. It's all reality TV. And I was, I literally was thinking myself, I was like, why do I always think there's such a crazy, like, super disproportionate volume of crazy people in the world compared to, like, normal people? because you watch stuff like this and you think that this is what it all is

like that's why absolutely it's such a small fraction but it goes to your point of like you watch the Academy Awards like oh everybody's here it's all just doable everybody can do this it's like it's such a

80% off oh my god that's so funny no totally I watch like I watch my favorite reality reality show is hoarders I've seen all every single episode like watching it and watching the houses get clean and it makes you clean my own house all the things, but I definitely watch it

and every time I'm like, these goddamn people vote, you know? But like, not everyone's a hoarder, you know, like not everyone's just called jail. A show called jail sounds like something out of videocracy, for sure. It's kind of fun when you just want to like zone out

because you just hear someone screaming like, okay, what are this guy? Yeah, it's a treat. And Jeffrey Gatsworth did not produce it. Okay. Jacker. but um that's fun that's fun what a weird what a weird little thing yeah yeah weird little uh blimp blipping the radar of tech and digital media but i thought it was kind of fun so that one this one definitely was doomed to fail so there you go also also probably would have failed without covid yeah i mean i can kind of see so like at first we said that i was like yes you we needed to consume media but you're totally right that no one wants to do it on their phone if they have their tv if they have their tv you're stuck at home with people were like watching i mean i'm sure like the the numbers for like

netflix were insane and then like you know figuring that out but um but i wonder if people would have watched it like on the train or something i think of but what would you but like what would you have watched like a show like the chrissey tigan show like it's it's also just bad content because all of it was because he they got these people because it's jeffrey catson so like he's he's up there and so he signs all these people to these contracts and it's like do I really do I need to like focus on what chance the rapper is doing on a Monday like I don't care like I don't want like these people don't affect me at all I mean but a lot of people watch you know an insane amount of rally TV and care about it a lot so they could have that's true you know but it's not I don't know I don't know I don't know when I would have watched it yeah but if it was great then i would have watched it but then it wasn't great you know what i mean yeah so if you had like great content people would find it but but to your point i don't it wasn't that great so like people aren't gonna it was a go out of your way thing to find something you'd have

to go out of your way yeah exactly exactly yeah so anyway that's all you got i forgot about that yeah there you go a little blast from the past um do we have any listener mail i don't have anything else But thank you, everyone for, again, dealing with, not dealing with, supporting us, thoroughly releases. Thank you for listening to them. You do. People are listening to them. I appreciate you.

If you have any ideas or questions, dom-de-fell pod at gmail.com. We are also going to, in a few weeks, record with my husband, as far as we'll schedule it out, but my husband does a newsletter and has a card deck on mental models. So he's going to talk a little bit about different mental models and some historical failures. So that'll be fun. It'll be very, very fun. We are having guests. If you want to be a guest, please let us know.

And also, I will say, like, this little break from recording really helped with, like, re-energizing me and getting back the creative choosing going again. So, you know, net positive, I think. Okay. I have read maybe 15 Romanticie books all in the same series, and I'm on the last one. So if anyone out there also has read every single one of the Sarah J. Mass books, so I've read all of the Cornerthorne Rose's books up to the one that we have. have. I read the entire Throne of Glass. Now I read Crescent City one, the end of Crescent City two. I screamed and I'm losing my fucking mind and I have nobody to talk to. And I'm on the very last book that is available. I'm on the third Crescent City book of this like unbelievably

insane huge amount of books that I've read the past couple months. If anybody is also there or has read it and wants to talk about it with me, please let me know Doobelpod at gmail.com because I've no one to talk to you and i'm losing my mind and we can spend this into a book club podcast episode oh my god literally my heart is beating i lose my mind when you come to austin taylor from austin in february which i'm really excited about for this one show sorry i'm speaking of my husband i haven't asked you if i go yet but i think you're going to say yes because i already about you got you got a week you got a week to ask you so we're good we should be good but when you come um you we have to i have to take you to vintage bookstore

oh yeah like that is the only place i'm actually really really want to take you because it is fun as shit and we're going to have a great time i can't wait yay cool all right with that we can go ahead and cut it off taylor thank you as always thank you