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.
