Jeffrey Katzenberg: Blaming Quibi's woes entirely on the pandemic wasn't "fair"

The Verge

In May, the Quibi founder told The New York Times “I attribute everything that has gone wrong to coronavirus." Following Quibi's shutdown announcement, Katzenberg said he and Quibi CEO Meg Whitman are ready to take responsibility for the shortform streaming service's collapse. "It (wasn't) fair," Katzenberg said on CNBC this morning of blaming the coronavirus. “It was a bit of a quippy answer — a flippant answer — at the time. But other companies have faced the challenges of COVID and have managed to find a path. I think Meg and I believe in owning our miss. Simply to blame it on COVID is not fair, and not something either of us want to do.” In a separate interview with Deadline, Katzenberg and Whitman explained the decision to shut Quibi down. "We tried a lot of different things over the summer, whether it was payment-less free trial, 90-day free trial, 14-day free trial," said Whitman. "We changed marketing around entirely to be more title marketing than platform marketing, which we made a lot of changes and we also you know, tried a completely different business model in Australia. And ultimately none of it really changed the fundamental answer, that we needed more capital and we needed more capital relatively soon. And so I would say it’s just been a journey for Jeffrey and I as we’ve looked very clear-eyed at the data and said what’s the right thing to do. In order to get to scale we would have to raise more capital, a lot more capital and we would need to be raising it in the first part of next year. And we don’t think that we would have the data and the metrics to support another capital raise at that point. Ultimately probably a couple weeks ago we said, you know, the right thing to do, the hard right but the right thing to do is to return cash to shareholders."

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