Quibi of the week
Emailed on May 15th 2020 in The Friday Forward
I don't like being right about a startup failure. It sucks. But when the co raises billions of dollars pre-launch on the premise they know more about what you want than you do, it doesn't suck quite as bad.
“I attribute everything that has gone wrong to coronavirus. Everything. But we own it.” — Jeffrey Katzenberg, co-founder of Quibi, the streaming video startup that’s struggled to find an audience despite $1.75 billion in pre-launch funding.
Quibi fell out of the list of the 50 most downloaded free iPhone apps in the United States a week after it went live on April 6. It is now ranked No. 125, behind the game app Knock’em All and the language-learning app Duolingo, according to the analytics firm Sensor Tower.
Bonus quote: “There are a whole bunch of things we have now seen in the product that we thought we got mostly right,” he said, “but now that there are hundreds of people on there using it, you go, ‘Uh-oh, we didn’t see that.’”
For 1.8 billion reasons, I hope "hundreds of people" is a figure of speech.