Jeffrey Katzenberg Talks About His Billion-Dollar Flop

<p>The public failure of his start-up Quibi hasn’t stopped Jeffrey Katzenberg from doubling down on tech. A Hollywood power broker, he headed up Disney in the 1980s and ’90s and co-founded a rival studio, DreamWorks, before finding a puzzle he could not yet solve: getting people to pay for short-format content. Investors gave him and the former Hewlett-Packard C.E.O. and California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman $1.75 billion to build a video platform, but not enough customers opened up their wallets, at $4.99 a month, and Quibi folded within a year of its launch. Katzenberg says the problems were product-market fit and the Covid pandemic, not competition from TikTok or YouTube.</p><p>In this conversation, Kara Swisher and Katzenberg delve into Quibi’s demise, the shifting power dynamics in Hollywood and his pivot to Silicon Valley. They also discuss his influence in another sphere: politics. And the former Hollywood executive, who co-chaired a fund-raiser to help fend off California’s recent recall effort, offers some advice to Gov. Gavin Newsom.</p><p>You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more information for all episodes at <a href="http://nytimes.com/sway" target="_blank"><strong>nytimes.com/sway</strong></a>, and you can find Kara on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/karaswisher" target="_blank"><strong>@karaswisher</strong></a>.</p>