Quibi: The $1.75 Billion Disappearing Act

April 6, 2020: a streaming platform backed by $1.75 billion and Hollywood's biggest names launched into the world — and shut down six months later. This episode is a calm walk through the wreckage: what Quibi actually expected going in, what the data was already telling them, where the exec calls went sideways, and what later products — TikTok, Reels, YouTube Shorts — quietly learned from the mess.

The Quibi story is genuinely useful for anyone who's ever been in a room where a product thesis sounded airtight. Jeffrey Katzenberg had real experience. Meg Whitman had real experience. The content strategy had Spielberg attached. And the core idea — high-quality short-form video for the commute — made a certain kind of sense. That's what makes the failure instructive rather than just embarrassing: it wasn't amateur-hour. The signals that broke it were structural, and a few of them were already present before the first user ever downloaded the app.