An Open letter to the VCs that invested in Quibi.
So Quibi is shutting down after raising ~$1.8B in funding.
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I’m not privy to the details of this fiasco, but the massive red flag for me was bringing on the former CEO of HP.
When will boards & investors learn that you need startup people to run startups?
Don’t get me wrong, Meg Whitman might be amazing at business.
However, a startup is not a business.
A startup is a mess of experiments and tests and learnings until you figure out what’s going to work — and then you do it all over again when you need to tackle the next milestone.
Startups don’t pay $1M for each 10-minute episode when you don’t have the subscribers to justify that.
Did you benchmark your unit economics?
Did you understand your LTV?
And if that much investment into your product was the right call, did you invest the same amount into marketing?
The best product in the world gets beat by smart marketing every single time.
If it sounds like I’m upset, it’s because I am.
Every day I work with amazing startup founders that only need a tiny fraction of that $1.8B to build something amazing.
But they don’t have the network that comes from corporate life and politics and an Ivy-league education to make that happen.
Instead, they grind away every day to solve the world’s problems and try to create a sustainable business out of their solutions.
They empty their bank accounts.
They invest their life savings.
They run up massive credit card debt.
They tell themselves it’s a rite of passage, but it’s bullshit.
The truth is that investors could easily stop dumping hundreds of millions into the Juicero’s…
