They raised $1.75 billion. The analogy made perfect sense. The company died in 18 months.
In 2020, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman launched Quibi with more funding than Netflix had when it started. Their pitch was brilliantly simple: “It’s like TV shows, but designed for your phone.” High-quality 10-minute episodes optimized for mobile viewing.
Hollywood veterans. Massive funding. A comparison everyone immediately understood.
Six months later, Quibi shut down.
The analogy felt intuitive. But it was catastrophically wrong. They assumed mobile viewing was like TV viewing, just shorter. But people don’t watch phones the way they watch TV—they watch phones while doing other things, in stolen moments, with constant interruptions.
YouTube and TikTok understood this. They built for distraction and fragmentation. Quibi built for focused attention that didn’t exist on mobile devices.
That single flawed analogy—treating phones like small televisions instead of understanding how people actually use them—burned through $1 billion before it was shutdown and the remaining funds returned to investors.
And here’s what should terrify you: your team is making this exact mistake right now.
“Our company is like a family.” So you avoid firing poor performers and wonder why standards collapse. “This project is like climbing Everest.” So you push through obvious warning signs and lose millions when the expedition fails. “Remote work is like letting students do homework unsupervised.” So you mandate office returns and watch your best talent leave.
Same pattern. Same expensive mistake. Different analogy.
Every day, billion-dollar decisions get made because someone said “it’s like [successful thing]” and everyone nodded without questioning whether the comparison actually holds. The person who controls the analogy controls the entire conversation—and most people never learned to fight back.
This week’s Thinking 101 episode gives you the framework to stop making this mistake: five core strategies for generating powerful analogies, recognizing when they break down, and spotting when someone’s using false comparisons to hijack your thinking.
✅👉 Watch: ‘How To Think Using Analogies’ - https://youtu.be/X5kaelEdszg
Because right now, while you’re reading this, someone just pitched a billion-dollar idea using a flawed analogy. Investors are nodding along because it “sounds like” something that worked before.
The only question is: will you be the one who sees through it?
Episode 4 of Thinking 101 Series. Cross-posted from Phil McKinney’s Innovation Studio YouTube Channel. Subscribe at youtube.com/@PhilMcKinney