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Quibi and the Perils of Ignoring the Wisdom of the Crowd
The short-lived billion-dollar backed startup got seduced by the fallacy of the visionary entrepreneur
By raising $1.75 billion and then shutting down just six months after it launched, mobile streaming service Quibi has now guaranteed itself a place on the list of business history’s great cautionary tales. Business-school professors will be teaching Quibi case studies for years to come, trying to explain in detail exactly how a high-profile startup backed by billions of dollars and experienced leaders like founder Jeffrey Katzenberg and CEO Meg Whitman went so wrong. But the most important lesson that Quibi’s demise demonstrates is already painfully clear: If pretty much everyone thinks your product or service is bound to fail, you should probably listen.
What was most striking about Quibi from the start, after all, was that it was met with near-unanimous skepticism, if not outright disdain. Quibi was a “billion-dollar boondoggle.” It had a “fatal (but fixable) flaw.” It was “doomed to fail.” Forbes was already talking about how “Quibi Can Succeed Even After It Fails” in July 2019—eight months before the service even launched.
Of course, in our hot-take world, there are always going to be critics of any new venture. But in this case, the chorus was close to universal. And the criticisms of the service were both specific and prescient. Critics pointed to the fact that Quibi was offering a service — short-form entertainment streamed to your mobile device — that YouTube and TikTok (and Facebook and Instagram, etc.) were already offering, and that there was no evidence Quibi’s bet on “high-quality” short-form content was something users wanted. They suggested, rightly, that users already had no dearth of things to do on their phones while they were commuting or waiting on line: Between the aforementioned streaming services, Twitter, email, mobile gaming, Facebook, Reddit, and so on, few of us were struggling to fill time on our phones.
