This Week in Startups - E1128: Emergency Pod! A Quibi postmortem – Diving into the numbers, what went wrong, lessons learned & more!

Episode Date: October 23, 2020

FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis Referenced in this episode: Wall Street Journal Article: https://www.wsj.com/articles/quibi-weighs-shutting-down-as-problems-mount-11603301946 Quibi's website: https://quibi.com Tweets by David Sacks, Zach Coelius & John Henry: https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1319011743708766212 https://twitter.com/zachcoelius/status/1319175661743865858 https://twitter.com/JohnHenryStyle/status/1319028755264921600 Jeffrey Katzenberg & Meg Whitman on CNBC from 10/22: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/22/quibi-co-founders-katzenberg-whitman-explain-what-went-wrong.html

everybody, you guessed it. It's an emergency pod. Quibi is dead. Quibi is dead. They burn through $1.4 billion in 30 months. That's $47 million a month. We're going to break down what went wrong. And we're going to do an autopsy, a post-mortem. And it is not pretty, folks. Stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. A business is only as strong as its people and every hire matters. Get $50 off your first job post at LinkedIn.com slash twist. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another emergency

podcast. You knew this was coming. You've all asked me on Twitter over and over again. When are you going to do the Quibi breakdown? For those of you who don't know what a quibby is, a Quibi, Q-U-I-B-I-B-I-B-I was a high-profile, new media subscription service. like Netflix or TikTok, maybe living somewhere between those two. The intention was to produce bite-sized content on your phone and to get millennials and

Gen Z and Gen C and everybody else to pay five to eight bucks a month, five bucks with ads, eight bucks without ads, $60 a year to $100 a year, basically. And based upon Jeffrey Katzenberg, one of the most successful media executives in the history of modern-day media, was able to raise $1.7 billion from folks like 21st century Fox, Alibaba, J.P. Morgan, MGM, Lionsgate, NBC Universal, Warner Brothers Disney, Sony and Goldman Sachs, and Madrone Capital. No VC's in there, obviously. This was a media play, funded by media companies. Of course, people are going to call it a technology play, and they're going to blame the technology industry for this high-profile failure.

just like they are going to blame Nicola and Theranos, those three companies did not have technology investors. I consider them separate companies from Silicon Valley, even though they all have some level of technology and get bundled with technology. So this is something very important for people to remember. These outsiders coming into the tech industry tend to get bundled with the failures or successes

of the Silicon Valley venture capital industrial complex when they are not. Putting that aside, let's go through this on the numbers, just to give you some bearings. This organization Quibi was founded back in early 2018. They launched April 6th, 2020,

in the pandemic. Not a great thing to have done. Obviously, it's not easy to launch in a pandemic. They announced just today and yesterday, October 21st, that they are shutting down. They burn through one point. point four billion, they're going to return $350 million to investors. Side note, that's a good thing to do. If you're burning through a bunch of money, you know it's not going to work, you can't find

a buyer. There's no reason to just burn the last $350 million. All dollars have value. So why not return them? That's a fine thing to do. All the employees will be laid off, which is a bummer, obviously. They had as high as 300 employees or so. So this is going to impact those people. their executives, I'm sure they're going to get great compensation, and they're going to, when they get laid off some amount of that $350 million, they'll get. This is not like workers who don't have a safety net. I'm sure they're going to get a couple of months severance at the very least, which is great. But this is obviously a bit of a disaster, and we should take a moment to think about what went wrong and to think about what could have gone right and how the lessons here of how it could have worked. If you want to create original content, that are 10 minutes or less, and you could watch them during lunch or an Uber ride. Does that exist in the world? Where does that exist?

So let's take a moment and pause in just first principles. Where does a 10-minute episode exist? Where does that exist? Podcasts? Nope. Podcasts are long-form. I mean, a short podcast is 20 or 30 minutes. Certainly not 5 or 10 minutes.

What about television? Well, the shortest television show, we watch or we binge, is the 30-minute sitcom, which has typically been 22 minutes. with commercial breaks. In the age of streaming, there's no commercial breaks typically,

so they go 30 minutes. So that doesn't count. So where does this mythical five to 10 minute show exists? Short films at the Sundance Film Festival, which nobody sees, and that is a non-starter, right? Those short films are like student projects. So I don't think they were going for student projects.

So they were trying to create a new media type. And the only place that really exists is those YouTube videos, right? people doing short vlogs. But that was not this. So they took the vlog format from YouTube, which does work, and they applied it to high production value. Now, if you're going to start up a high production value show, like The Walking Dead or, you know, pick Ted Lasso, whatever it is, orange is the new black, things that have worked before. People don't want to stop watching after 10 minutes. They want to go 30 minutes. You really can't tell that narrative in five or 10 minutes. And in fact, the Walking Dead did these, like, silly shorts.

Everybody tries these silly shorts as like little things in between shows. They've never worked. They didn't work back in the day for, you know, pop.com or other web 1.0 companies, the spot. There were all these kind of ideas around this. So that to me, when I first heard the idea, I just thought, well, that doesn't work. People don't want that. And they never actually tested, I believe, that this is something that people actually wanted. So out of the gate, the product seems that it's new and therefore you'd want to test this concept.

Just like people tested vlogs. They tried to see if vlogs would work. They tried to see if vlogs would be a thing. And they did it in a very low cost way. People looked in the camera, lonely girl, 13, whatever. They looked in the camera. They talked about their day. I Justine.

They cut it short and it costs 500 bucks total to produce. Let's pause for a second and think about the amount of money put into each of these Quibi shows. Well, according to some data we found online, and I don't know if this is exactly correct, but it certainly was correct at some point in time. They had 175 shows. And the Wikipedia page, in fact, shows dozens of shows, something like 8,500 of these 10-minute episodes were produced. 175 shows divided into $1.4 billion equals $8 million.

Eight million is not a lot of money for an entire series. In fact, famous shows have gotten up to $8 million per episode, right? like a Game of Thrones or, you know, friends or something where they're paying everybody a lot of money. It can get expensive like that per episode. But this is for the entire series. So you say, okay, maybe that makes sense, but these are 10-minute shows. So then you look at the 8,500 episodes divided into $1.4 billion. And you're getting a baked-in cost of, you know, $164,000 per episode.

If you compare that to a television show, that seems like a bargain. But in fact, if these were 10-minute episodes or 5-minute episodes, you would times that by 3 or 4 and get to a real number of an actual episode being 500,000, 750,000. What the correct way to look at this is, I think, looking at it versus a podcast episode or looking at it versus a vlog, there's no vlog in the world that costs more than a couple of thousand dollars. Even when this kid who's David Dobrick or whatever gives away a Tesla, I mean, he could give away for the amount Quibi made these episodes,

they could literally give away a car, a $60,000 car for each one, and still spend $100,000 on the production of it. Now, I know they spent money on marketing and there's overhead and paying for Meg Whitman as CEO and office space and all these different things that companies spend money on, legal infrastructure. But the truth is, in today's world, we invest in companies and the way those companies compete with the big companies, they don't have cost structure. They have low cost structure because they're posting on YouTube.

They're posting on TikTok. They're building apps with three, four developers per app. You don't need a lot of money. The modern day company doesn't need a ton of employees. And in fact, this company had a lot of employees given the revenue footprint, 300 employees, a lot of people. And so this money clearly could have been deployed in a more intelligent fashion, but they went for it. And I think this is the cardinal sin. You're creating a new format, but you didn't test it.

And it didn't exist before. So they basically threw a Hail Mary Pass and they believed that they could spend this much money on a show and that it would generate a massive. amount of consumer interest, it would become addicting when this format has only worked one other time in history for something very unique and specialized, which is not the Sundance Film Festival shorts, which are delightful, not the shorts at the beginning of a Pixar film, which are also delightful. Those are very delightful. Those are amazing. And I would say the Sundance ones are variably delightful. Most of them are bad. Some of them are delightful. In fact, the movie and the series saw, I believe, came from a short at the Sundance Film Festival. So the way Sundance worked,

was you would put up your short film there. There would be financers in the audience. And then you would take your short and say, hey, I won Best Short at Sundance. Can I get the money to take this 15 minute one, you know, saw horror film, you know, contraption short film and make it into six of them and have an arc about, you know, they have to get through six of these crazy trials and would tell the full story of whoever the horror film saw's main character is, who's on the tricycle.

I can't remember. It was a goofy thing anyway. So they basically came up with a format. Who knows who made that decision? It was Katzenberg or whoever, but they should have tested this format over and over and over again. And in fact, a friend of the pod and my co-host on the All In Pod, David Sacks, had a great tweet. Quibi was a valiant try. So he's being charitable there.

But it will go down as a reminder that you can't brute force the process of finding product market fit. a startup that hasn't launched yet is a seed stage company with seed stage risk, even if it raises $2 billion. You can't skip those steps, which is what I'm talking about here. He's using the term product market fit. I use the term media format to define these short films. That was the piece that was skipped. And they should have taken their time.

They went too fast. And what happens is you use all that jet fuel. You do 175 series in this format. and you don't even know if the format works. Then you're sitting there on the asset saying, you know what, we should recut these into series and sell these series to Netflix or CBS All Access or whatever,

and it might have worked. Zach Collius, a friend of the pod and angel investor who has his own syndicate and fund, he says, I am honestly finding all the quibby, apologists, a little silly. They burned $1.5 billion testing an idea when one, one hundredth of that would have been more than enough.

Not 150 million, but $15 million would have been more than enough. Correct. In that first phase, you could have just given, You know, 10, you had taken 10 swings at bat for a million dollars each and known if this was going to work or not. Is there no sense of skill in this work? And that is, I think, ultimately, when we look at this, what people will say. All right, when we get back, I'm going to talk about what they could have done with this money. And they were on CNBC this morning, Meg Whitman and Jeffrey Katzenberg, to explain their failure and take ownership of it, something that I take a lot of, I think takes a lot of guts and I commend them for. and I'm going to react to those videos in detail.

There's a couple of surprises when I react to those CNBC videos when we get back on an emergency podcast. The colorful days of fall are now upon us. And is your small business evolving? Do you need help? Well, despite the current uncertainty, having the right people on your team gives you that feeling of that warm blanket,

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It's crazy, I know. Let's get right to the CNBC appearance by Katzenberg on what went wrong. I'm going to play the first clip here. And I haven't watched these, actually. So you're going to get my very, very candid response to this. Here's Katzenberg on what went wrong, and I'll give you my feedback after the break. I'm wondering if you can help me identify what you think really went wrong here, because we have really seen other short form mobile content thrive during COVID,

whether it's SNAP that reported a 50% increase in time spent watching shows or TikTok growing rapidly. Jeffrey, do you think it was the subscription model that was really so problematic? Listen, I think it's a convergence of a number of things, Julia. So, yes, we had a new product. We asked people to pay for it before they actually understood what it was. I think we thought there would be easier adoption by people to it. I think that the environment that we found ourselves in, as you've heard us say many times, this was designed for on the go in between at a moment of time in which no one was on the go.

They're still not on the go. And so our product market fit was wrong. I mean, somewhere between the idea being less than perfect, which we own and the environment we found ourselves in is where the fail has come. How much is, you know, what each of those are in that equation? I'm not sure any of us are ever going to know, but it didn't work. All right. So this is super candid.

I appreciate him. And I think, yeah, he brings up product market fit there and the fact that the pandemic did remove that commute time. And I will say there is something to that. We have seen reports that podcasting, listenership and viewership went down in the pandemic because people weren't commuting as much and needed to fill that hour and a half of their day

and maybe they spent it working or maybe they spent it watching TV since they had a TV in front of them and they could do that. I'm not sure I buy that. I think the person asking the question there had an astute point when they said, hey, was this really, you know, Snapchat and TikTok,

which is a, flourishing, and that's user-generated content, and that's free to produce. And, you know, what you don't see in user-generated content, UGC, is that in UGC, for everything that goes viral, there's, you know, at least 100,000 videos, maybe a quarter million videos that didn't. So you're really playing the law of numbers there. We're going to have 250,000 videos, and then this one of a guy drinking ocean spray is going to go viral. And it's very hard to create viral videos, And that way, everybody tried to figure out that science. Some people are better at it than others, but it's hard to build a business on breaking viral

videos unless you're UGC and you can just have a big swath of them. So they picked something between even when we think about how narrow this product was. It sat between a vlog and a TikTok. And it sat between, you know, a comedy short film and a vlog and a TikTok. I mean, this seems like an area where putting massive production value is. is a mistake. And I think Katzenberg's skill has been to spend the money on building great content. He has an incredible track record of, you know, creating Disney hits and, you know, creating Shrek, Little Mermaid Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Lion King. I mean, and really helping

with that Pixar Disney relationship back in the day when he worked for Eisner, eventually leaving to do DreamWorks, SKG, and then doing Kung Fu Panda, Shark Tale, Madagascar, how to train your dragon. Those actually are all very successful. And so he's used to spending big money on big projects, not little money on little projects. And so I think that might have been the mismatch of Katzenberg's skill set. But Katzenberg does have the ability to raise big swaths of money, which obviously is what makes the story so sensationalistic. I do think it takes a lot of guts to go out and try something this ambitious and obviously a lot of lessons there. It's easy to go dunk on him. But to be honest, the people who are investing this money have trillions of dollars collectively.

Literally, when you look at those people who invest, they have trillions of dollars. So while this seems like a lot of money to people who are starting their career, it's not small people, but small projects, it seems like a lot of money. For people on Katzenberg and Meg Whitman's level and the people investing, it's actually not large amounts of money. They routinely put billions of dollars into movie studios and these kind of projects. So you don't have to cry for any of those investors. And then let's go.

Here's my man, Carl Cantania, talking about attributing the failure to COVID. Jeffrey, I actually was going to reference something you now famously told the times back in the spring, and that was, I attribute everything that's gone wrong to coronavirus, everything. Would you temper that statement now? A hundred percent. It's not fair. I mean, it was a little bit of a, you know, just a, flippy answer to, you know, flip an answer at the time in it. But, you know, other companies have faced the challenges with COVID, and they've managed to find the answer to put in. So, you know, I think Megan and I believe in, you know, owning our miss and simply blaming it on COVID, you know, I don't think it's fair and not something that either of us

want to do. We're proud of the content that we made, you know, any award-winning content in a very short period of time. We're proud of the product and the engineering team and what they built. But in the end, we did not get the acceptance of consumers and customers in the way in which we had to in order for this to be a successful business. Fantastic ownership. You got to love, Carl's professionalism and how he asked the question. CNBC is some of the best in the business. I don't work there, by the way. I don't get paid. I guess I could. It could be a formal contributor, but I just kind of go on when I want to. But they're pros, and Carl gets the best out of Katzenberg there teasing out that answer. Hey, would you temper that a little bit? It gives them like a very

easy way to, without playing gotcha journalism, to just be honest about the miss. Here we go on the cost of entry in the streaming space. Meg, I want to ask about cost of entry and the length of time that you got to play. Were you playing bad poker or is the anti just so high in content today that you had to fold early? I mean, Apple can afford to burn billions on original content and marketing. So can Amazon and Netflix. Disney has a library. How much of a factor is that? Well, listen, there's no question being a startup has challenges that big companies don't have. And there's no question that we have to launch in a big way. Everyone understood the business, case for Quibi and that it was going to take a lot of capital on front because we had to make

this very high quality content. We had to build an entirely new platform. Remember, all the content was original because it was designed to be on the go and mobile. So we actually went right along with the business plan that we laid out at the beginning. But over the summer, we saw that there were real challenges, you know, as Julia said, about acquiring and retaining those subscribers. And so that led us to look at that. very carefully at the business and say, did we really see a future here? And we didn't. But as Jeffrey said, listen, we pioneered a whole new form of storytelling. The content is well loved. We've gotten great reviews from the app. And maybe in a different time and a different place, this would have

worked better. All right. Yeah. So it's very unique to see somebody doing the actual post-mortem themselves. It's almost like they want to close this up quickly and move on with their lives. incredibly mature. I wish we saw this level of maturity in younger founders, maybe people who hold on for two or three years. The fact that they just cut this is really instructive, I think, and a very unique moment. Here's a unique moment, Katzenberg interrupting Whitman. And now if you were to be able to do things differently, would you have delayed the launch until after COVID? Would you have maybe done an ad-supported non-subscription version? Or would you have done less expensive content, you know, a per minute cost per cost per cost?

content, half or a quarter of what you were spending. You had big stars, big name producers. We do some of all of that, Julia. Yeah, maybe a little. Good ideas. We'll do some of all of that. Well, we did test an Avod version. We did test an Avod version in Australia, which had better results, but not good enough for the results, not good enough results to keep on going. I don't know that we would have done user-generated content because that marketplace is well filled by some very strong and excellent competitors.

Yeah, I don't know if Katzenberg, this might have just been a Zoom-like moment where Katzenberg didn't realize the question was directed at Meg. I don't think he was mansplaining or cutting her off. I think it was just one of those air traffic control things that does happen when you're on live TV of who the question was going to. All right, and here's Katzenberg. One more time. And Jeffrey, this was a real passion project of yours.

possibly your biggest disappointment in your very long and varied career. What's next for you? Will you continue investing at Wondercoe, which is Quibi's parent company? Can you imagine taking on investors again? Well, here's a thing, Julie, which is you've known me for a very, very long time, decades. And, you know, I have a bottomless well need to win. This marks. It hurts a lot.

very disappointed that, you know, that we have disappointed our investors and our, our employees. And, you know, so for me, I got to get back up on that horse and, you know, go find the next mountain to charge up to. And it's the only thing I know how to do and have a lot to prove. Great for them to take ownership. I know Katzenberg, socially play cards once in a while. I got a lot of mutual friends, a really nice guy in the LA scene. And yeah, he's right there. I mean, he is a dogged competitor. He likes to win. He will be back at it. Now, what could you have done differently? I always like to ask that question. He has his own thoughts. Obviously, Meg has her own thoughts. When I looked at this, I just thought to myself, what would I do with all that money had I been given it? Really, if you just think about maybe a five-year plan, you know, going a little bit slower, right? You know, five-year plan to deploy that capital would be more logical. And if you thought there was a new format to be had, maybe, going and finding YouTube and TikTok stars and saying, hey, listen, you are, you know, sometimes getting asked to make a cameo in a movie like Casey Needs that got a cameo in that recent

power movie on Netflix. And, you know, I think he's in it for like 60 seconds. But going to a cohort like that and saying, listen, how about we give you, I don't know, 10,000, 25,000, $50,000 per video to make a series of videos for us. and they'll launch on Quibi first. You can put them onto your YouTube channel or your TikTok channel or put half of them, some amount of the content there, or maybe time delay it. You can put it on your YouTube channel with the Quibi logo, with the Quibi opening,

and just slowly try to develop this format with people who already have audience and bring them along, as opposed to going to the top Hollywood people who are looking at it as a paycheck. They're looking at that $1.75 billion and saying, how much of that can I get? how much can I extract from, you know, Katzenberg and Meg Whitman, and rather build a bottom up based upon the next level of stars, right? And just slowly see which ones get traction in a more scientific way and see if this format works. And if the format doesn't work a five or ten minutes, okay, let them try 20.

And a lot of these YouTube stars have tried to make their own full-length films. They've tried to make 30-minute episodes. In fact, Issa Rae, who did Awkward Black Girl, I believe, then wound up doing Insecure the HBO series, I would almost look at that path and say, how do we create that path of success? Because that one seems very real. Using YouTube as a Farm League is tried and true. But there's nobody who's really put their chips down and said, I'm going to actually let those creators follow their own vision. And that would have been the big win here. Because when we looked at it, short films was one piece. And then the other piece was vlogs, right? If you want to go for short

entertainment, if that's your belief, your thesis, you know, from first principles is five to ten, 10-minute snackable content. Okay, if you really want to do that, find people who have built an audience, find people who are up and coming, and let them experiment with it and tell you, and have the audience tell you what works, as opposed to going to a bunch of like, you know, super affluent people who look at this as like a side project and a quick money hit. That's the problem. You know, and podcasting had the same thing, where a bunch of celebrities got into podcasting and different podcasting platforms, you know, backed up the brink truck and shipped them, you know, five or 10 million dollars to do some podcast. And, you know,

And you really, what we do in Silicon Valley is we run experiments, we iterate, and we test, and we look at the results, and then we try again. And you just iterate. And then you look at the pipeline in the funnel and you try to iterate on each step in the funnel. Here, when you're doing 175, not experiments, but you're just saying 175, you know, vaccines at once and everybody take them, it doesn't make any sense. It just was really the wrong way to do this. And you got to think, what got Katzenberg to this point.

in his career is a different model. They had the go big model. They had the go all in, do 10 movies, have, you know, five or six of them break even, one or two of them become franchises, one or two of them become duds. It's a very different model, I think, than what works in this new content era, which is this iterate, personality driven, vlog driven, etc. You have to be humble with this new generation and in any content effort, on a new medium of you may not know what format works.

And podcasting is the perfect example of this. Like, what works in podcasting is not the silky smooth NPR voice as much as the raw, passionate, authentic voice. Now, that doesn't mean that NPR is going away. Obviously, some of the biggest successes in podcasting are NPR shows just porting themselves over to be easily downloadable through a podcasting app, whether it's this American, a life or whatever. But what really has broken out is the Joe Rogan, is the Sam Harris,

is the Brett Easton Ellis, is the Red Scare, is the Ben Shapiro. These are voices that did not previously exist in the media landscape and they get passionate audiences. And even this podcast, right? Like, I don't have a voice for NPR. I mean, I can fake it. Welcome to KCRW. San Francisco's new source for new ideas and thinking when we get back from this commercial. break for our sponsors, we're going to beg you for $10 and make you feel good about how precious you are in supporting National Public Radio. I mean, I can fake those kind of voices, right? That's not what works. Authenticity is what works. And I think that's what we've seen on YouTube is these personalities. You can say what you want about them. Are they vapid? Are they

stupid? Are they immature or whatever? They work. They work. They connect with an audience. And that's really what it's about. Katzenberg will go on to do great things. He made his money already. Meg Whitman will go on to great things or retire and going to politics. She already made her money. There was a lot of dunking going on on Twitter. I get it. But it's not a tech company. So don't dunk on it when you compare it to Airbnb or other companies. And please don't, I mean, if you look at Veranos, Nicola and Quibi, these are not tech Silicon Valley companies. These are media companies or companies funded by people outside the industry. They really have very little to do with what happens here in Silicon Valley every day at its best. And somebody was dunking

and saying, like, oh, all women got $2 billion in funding and Quibi got $1.7 billion. And I was like, well, then what you're saying is women got $3.75 billion because Meg Whitten is the CEO and co-founder of this. I mean, even if she was hired as the CEO, she was there before launch. She's a co-founder. I mean, anybody who is the top position before launch is a co-founder. Let's be honest here. I thought that was unfair. It wasn't funded by Silicon Valley. So to actually even compare it to Silicon Valley funding, we fund, we don't fund at 1.75 billion of clips. So it's a ridiculous way to do it. That would be like taking the funding of the Avatar series, right? Like the new, they're doing three new avatar films or the Lord of the Rings and, you know, or Game of Thrones and

apply that to what we do here in Silicon Valley. That's not how we invest. We put $100,000, $200,000 into to accelerator companies. We then put 500,000 to 1.5 million in a seed round and a series A of 5 million, 10 million, series B. I mean, we let founders get rewarded and we allocate capital based on performance over time. Sometimes that gets a little out of hand. Sometimes it gets a little ahead of itself. Sometimes people raise two rounds at once.

There can be all kinds of dynamics that occur. But never do we invest $1.7.5 billion in a sheet of paper. No, no, no, no. Oh, contrary, Montere. That is not what happens here. So please don't bucket this into the funding. It's just a naive way to think about this. Anyway, good luck to Katzenberg.

I'll see him at the poker table. I'm sure someday soon. He is super competitive. He is a great poker player. He is a great executive and a great human. I don't know Megwin personally. But, you know, listen, you tried. Move on.

I got my Mahalo. You got your Quibi. Everybody's got their, you know, really ambitious startup that didn't make it. You hit the wall. It's all good. Don't worry about it. It's all good.

All right, we'll see you all next time. And thanks for tuning in for another Emergency Podcast on This Week in Startups. Okay, see you next time. Bye.