How Quibi Burned $2 Billion in 6 Months
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Summary
Imagine you have a great business idea to compete with Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon, and you go pitch the idea to NBCU, Disney, and the rest of the big companies in the entertainment industry. You raise $1.8B and you launch a company, and six months later, you shut it down? That's exactly what happened to Quibi, a startup that was founded by Meg Whitman and Jeffrey Katzenberg.
Transcript
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So imagine you got this great business idea to compete with Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and you go pitch the idea to NBCUniversal.
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You go to Walt Disney, you go to Time Warner, Warner Brothers, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Alibaba, NBCUniversal.
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And at the end of every single meeting, these guys say, yes, we're in.
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And you don't raise $100 million, not a half a billion dollars, not a billion dollars.
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You raise $1.8 billion and you launch this company April 6th, 2020, at a time where Disney's having record-breaking subscribership, Disney Plus, where you see Netflix, Tiger King blowing up, 34 million people watching the first 10 days.
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You end up seeing all these guys getting the subscriber records.
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And six months after you raise $1.8 billion, you shut down.
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Wall Street Journal comes out two days ago saying, Quibi is shutting down barely after starting six months.
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So Quibi, a couple different things you need to know about Quibi.
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Number one, their whole idea was we're going to make 10-minute videos, right?
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So 10-minute short films and we're going to compete because nowadays, you know, the younger audience wants to watch movies on their phone.
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They don't really want to go out there and watch it on TV.
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Let's pay them $100,000 per minute is what we're going to pay them.
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And let's go compete with everybody else, right?
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So now the leadership team of Quibi, when they came out, quick bites, big stories.
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So Meg Whitman and Jeffrey Katzenberg are the ones who go out there and lead Quibi.
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Now, Meg Whitman's resume, she took eBay from $8 million to $32 billion.
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She even ran for governor in 2010 of California as a Republican.
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Do you know what her favorite show is to watch on TV?
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History Channel, which the average age of History Channel is 50 plus.
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The audience they were targeting was 18 to 24, 18 to 30.
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They wanted the younger audience to consume their content.
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Jeffrey Katzenberg on the other side, here's a man with a ridiculous, you know, resume that he has.
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We're talking about, you know, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, you know, The Lion King, Aladdin.
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They together come up and start this idea called Quibi.
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You can go to Crunchbase and see who the people are.
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Alibaba, you got Warner, Walt Disney, Warner Brothers, Sony, I miss Sony.
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Now, when they started a company, they came out saying, we're going to give $100,000 per minute.
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So when they said $100,000 per minute, whose attention did they get?
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I'm going to go through this list fairly quickly, but try to, you know, hang in there with me when I'm going through the list.
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Chance the Rapper who did Punk'd, which was the old show I think Ashlyn Kutcher used to do back in the days.
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J-Lo, Kristen Bell, Yara Shadidi, Tracy Morgan, Carly Claus, Nick Jonas, Gabriel Iglesias.
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Andy Samberg, Liam Hemsworth, Christopher Waltz, Sophie Turner, Corey Hawkins, Reese Witherspoon, Kiki Palmer, Joel Kimbooster, Queen Latifah.
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They got John Travolta, Eva Longoria, Andy Garcia.
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If I go on Trevor Noah, you know a lot of these names.
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They got all the big names and they still failed.
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Well, they also came up with a 60-minute version in Quibi for six minutes.
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So 60 minutes did a six-minute version on Quibi, yet they're targeting an audience of 18 to 34 years old.
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The average viewer of 60 minutes, you know how old it is?
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Recently, when they shut down, this is what Katzenberg and Meg Whitten said two days ago, Quibi is not succeeding, okay?
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Because of the idea itself wasn't strong enough to justify a standalone streaming service or because of our timing.
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So what they're talking about, the fact that, you know, maybe the idea wasn't good or pandemic kind of hit and, you know, people were really consuming videos on their phones because they were at home.
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They were watching stuff on their TV or their PC.
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But I can tell you for myself, I'm 42 years old.
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When the pandemic came and I was 41, I consumed more content on my phone than this.
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Matter of fact, let's look at some data on what happened during this time.
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So during the pandemic, this is an article from August 5th.
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So it's not a today article, but this is from two months ago.
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TV watching and online streaming surge during lockdown.
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Adults spend nearly six and a half hours a day watching TV and online videos.
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One hour and 11 minutes per day spent watching streaming videos.
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12 million customers signed up to new services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Disney.
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Viewing figures for video streaming services up 71%.
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In the first, when they first got started, their app was ranked number three.
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The day they launched April 6th, their app was ranked number three.
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And report says Quibi lost 92% of its original early users after free trials.
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Meaning when they first came out, they got 910,000 users because they gave it away for free for a couple weeks.
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Think about this, what is taking place with them.
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So now, Q2 was a tipping point in streaming wars.
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If you look at some data here, Disney hit 60 million plus on Disney Plus.
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Every data you pretty much look at was a great time for these guys.
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Now, let's continue a little bit more with Quibi.
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While they came out, rather than spending a chunk of their $1.8 billion advertising on TikTok or, you know, Instagram, 18 to 34.
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Maybe not Facebook, but even Facebook because Facebook allows you to do a viral or Twitter.
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Here's what they ended up spending their money.
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Do you know what happened when they advertised on Super Bowl?
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Let me read this article to you that I think is very important for you to see.
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When they advertised on, what do you call it, on Super Bowl, do you know what the average viewer thought they were watching?
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When they came out with the ads, here's the article.
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In the market research shows, it's Oscars and Super Bowl ads.
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70% of respondents said they thought Quibi was a food delivery service.
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How bad of a job can you do on advertising where I'm watching?
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You could have spent that $5.5 million of ads on TikTok, Twitter, Instagram to get the 18 to 34.
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So let's look at what kind of followership they got on TikTok.
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Facebook, they only had 50,000 likes, which by the way, it doesn't take a lot to get a lot of followers on Facebook.
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You could have spent a million dollars and you would have blown up your Facebook and got things to go viral for people to spend money.
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So they weren't really spending a lot of money there, but they did spend money on Oscars.
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And by the way, the Quibi executive denies that this happened, meaning that people thought Quibi was a food delivering service.
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Blake Robbins comes out and tweets and he says, put David Dobrik's vlogs exclusively on Quibi on actual release schedule.
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Also give Mr. Beast, which I don't know if you know who Mr. Beast is.
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But use Mr. Beast a massive budget and watch him create magic.
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Because the question was asked, how would you fix Quibi?
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So Reid, the manager of Mr. Beast, comes out and said, we tried.
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They want more older stars who are A-listers to pay more money.
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I mean, honestly, who would ever watch somebody like Mr. Beast?
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Which, by the way, if you combine NBC, ABC, CNN, Fox, you know, CBS.
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If you combine all of those YouTube channels combined, he's got more subscribers than them.
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Now, if you're watching Borat Marketing, Borat's a genius.
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She didn't get lucky taking eBay from $8 million to $32 billion.
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Team it up with Borat to promote the new movie.
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I want to bring you guys here today to introduce you guys to one of my friends.
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You get these young guys know what they're doing.
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If you would have gotten these younger people, they know what they do to promote Quibi.
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Can you imagine what Mr. Beast would have done if he would have been on Quibi?
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And they would have said, can you make a video?
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Imagine the amount of eyeballs that I want to go watch a unique series with Mr. Beast.
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Now, a couple of the names they could have gotten.
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If you go do some research on who are the big YouTubers, I made the list over here for
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Whether you like them or not, that's your audience.
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You got, we talked about it, Ninja, Emma Chamberlain, PewDiePie, Ryan, you know, Ryan the
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kid that's got 22 million subscribers, makes 7 million a year.
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You got, maybe even PewDiePie's a little bit older, but he'd still be good.
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Eliza Koshy, Dolan Brothers, Tal Fishman, Meryl Twins, Tessa Brooks, Charlie D'Amelio, 20 videos
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So then, one of the things they did, the mistakes that they made, let's unpack this.
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When you're watching a video on Quibi, you couldn't take screenshots.
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Their technology was so ridiculous, where you would watch, you turn it around, you start
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But you couldn't take screenshots because they didn't want their content to be stolen.
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To take a screenshot and send to a friend and say, watch this over here.
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They couldn't get their users to advertise and work for them.
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So imagine you get a new app that comes out with a bunch of regulations that you can't
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My good friend, Robert Kiyosaki, wrote a book once called Rich Dad, Poor Dad.
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The book ends up selling, I think, 32 million copies that's up here.
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He says, Pat, you know the book's been sold 80 million times.
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80 million copies have been sold, 32 million of which he got paid on, give or take.
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I said, how do you feel about the fact that the book's being pirated?
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Quibi missed the big mark on basic advertising.
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So what ends up happening, they got another lawsuit right now that's going on, which could
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be one of the reasons why they're shutting down, because the company's batting a lawsuit
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by an interactive company called Echo, which claims Quibi is violating its patents and
00:13:36.980
The fight centers on a key feature of Quibi app that plays different videos for users,
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depending on whether they are holding their phone horizontally or vertically.
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By the way, they had a meeting with the Quibi team, and I think Katzenberg was in a
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meeting when they presented the technology, and then they went and used the technology
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That's what's being claimed right now, and Echo is backed up by a lot of strong, big
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So when big players sue you, you better be ready, because they're not just winging and
00:14:03.520
When you get sued by big names, you better respect that paper's coming to you, so they're
00:14:07.280
So I don't know what's going to happen right there.
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Now, a couple things to be thinking about when we're going through this.
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And not only know your customer, know where your customer is.
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So if you know who your customer is, you're going to say 18 to 34, great.
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Maybe I got to go get some of these big YouTubers.
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Why are you getting bigger A-listers that you have to pay more money for just because they
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The other thing we can learn from this, just because you have money, just because you have
00:14:49.580
You know the whole idea about a startup guy that comes up and says, we're going to go out
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That hunger goes away the richer you become for most people who are not visionaries.
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For example, Elon Musk is not doing it to go out there and become rich and all this other
00:15:05.480
When he went to create a Pixar, he had a chip on his shoulder.
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We're just closing it down by two beasts, Katzenberg and Whitman.
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These are not regular lightweight people, but they shut it down.
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The other part of it is you're not connecting with your target audience.
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Because I don't know if you know or not, even though they have all this great content, they
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Because if you're just a technology company, that's a different story, versus Netflix goes
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They didn't listen to their audience fast enough.
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When you're coming up and you have an MVP product, audience is going to tell you, we
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We just launched an app three weeks ago, two weeks ago.
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I had four Zooms and people were calling on midnight till one o'clock in the morning.
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We're answering questions because you got to listen to your users.
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If you don't listen to your users quickly, you lose them, especially if you say your target
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You realize Netflix, nothing major happened to Netflix until Netflix came out with Orange
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is the New Black and Netflix came out with the House of Cards.
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Nothing happened to Netflix until they came out with that.
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The moment they came out with that, I remember I got calls, text messages, people telling me,
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watch House of Cards, watch House of Cards, watch House of Cards.
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I watched all the 12 episodes throughout the night.
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I said, I'm going to sleep on the flight to Tuscany, Italy just because my dad, a guy
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named Carl, all my friends, you got to watch this.
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So they gave up maybe a little too early where they could add a little bit more momentum.
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Six months of giving up and they're going to give $350 million back to the investors
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Amazon needed Transparent before they took off.
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You know, at this point of the game, a part of it for me was exciting because you saw
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Capitalism's great when you got a lot of different ideas competing against each other.
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But the other part of it is, if you, let's just say the lawsuit's not the big issue.
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Let's just say the lawsuit's not the big issue.
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Let's say you decide to completely change the strategy before you throw in the towel and
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you say, let's go get these big YouTubers and why don't we give them a different perspective
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Say, here's 10 million shares that we want to go find talent.
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Let's go build this thing to a $100 billion company.
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Not $100,000 per minute type of stuff and see what these young bucks could do.
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I mean, obviously, Mr. Beast has got 45 million subscribers because he knows what he's doing.
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That part I fully don't understand after six months, especially when you still have $350
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I do understand you need more money to go create more content.
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They would send you and they would not have sent another one until you send it back to
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Even my wife used to do that all the time with Netflix.
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And then Netflix adjusted and went to a completely different approach.
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Just because this didn't work at first doesn't mean you throw in the damn towel, Quibi.
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So unless if there's something darker, bigger that we don't know about, I think they shouldn't
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And I think they should have gone at least for six more months, 12 more months.
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Test this one more thing out and see what would have happened with these big YouTubers.
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And then from there, if it failed, you don't lose a lot of money.
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What do you think about what happened to these guys?
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And if you're watching this video saying, Pat, you know, I enjoyed the way you broke down
00:19:44.680
It's a whole concept about Disneyland and Disney World.
00:19:48.860
Both Disney owned company, both ran by Bob Chapin and if I'm saying the name correctly,
00:20:02.920
California one still isn't open for 200 plus days.
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If you haven't seen that video, I highly recommend you click here to watch that video as well.
00:20:12.300
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