I ran Disney Studios. I co-founded DreamWorks. I know entertainment. I raised $1.75 billion for Quibi and it lasted six months. Turns out I didn't know mobile.
Quick bites. Ten minutes or less. Premium content on your phone. The thesis was perfect for the subway commute. Then COVID happened and nobody was on the subway.
We had Spielberg, Guillermo del Toro, Chrissy Teigen, and Liam Hemsworth. The content was expensive and the content was good. People just didn't want to pay for content they could only watch on their phones.
We spent $1.75 billion and got 500,000 subscribers. Netflix spends that on three movies. For $1.75 billion, we should have just bought a small country. It would have had more users.
I blame everything on COVID. The pandemic killed us. People say that's an excuse. Maybe it is. But launching a mobile video service the month everyone was locked at home with their TVs was genuinely terrible luck.