Fyre Festival

Winterlong wrote: »

You would have to wonder how they got it so wrong? They were raking in the money. Paid in advance. Put on a decent show and rake it in again next year.

They started the whole thing with a tech startup/kickstarter mindset.

In this mindset you come up with a great idea and you sell products that don't even exist yet in order to raise capital that you can use to build those products. In general you fail to deliver that product on time, what you manage to develop is usually a shadow of what you originally envisaged (because technology and/or cost makes it unfeasible) and most people are pretty disappointed except the company founders who've managed to generate a salary for themselves to work on a pet project and then sell to a real company for a million dollars.

This model doesn't work in events. If you promise an event on a particular date, it has to be delivered on that date or not at all. You can't say, "Nah we're not ready yet, maybe in six weeks' time", or "We'll hold the event with a quarter of the bands now, then another quarter of them in six months, and then maybe the final half in two years' time".

The idiots who came up with the idea were used to the "yeah we'll have something ready to go in two months" nodding dogs who get involved in technology and then deliver a fancy screenshot as their "product".

They thought they could do the same with a music festival in a remote location.

There was a blog post by someone who was initially hired to work on it, an experienced guy in the field of event management and arrived two months before the event was to start;

The event advertised a tropical paradise resort location, but they landed on little more than a rocky outcrop which needed several seasons of landscaping work to turn into a resort.
They expected the major things to be in place; everything ordered and ready to go, just needing a crew to organise it. But nope, no accommodation, no food, no infrastructure, no security had been booked. Even the bands that had been signed on had received no booking money yet.

The crew of professionals that had been hired called a meeting and told the organisers that they were tens of millions of dollars short of the amount it would cost to get any kind of festival up and running on time.

In true clueless-startup-entrepreneur style, they decided to go ahead with it anyway and to try and cut costs they fired more than half of the crew and told the rest they were getting a paycut of 30%.

Being professionals, most of them told the organisers to stick it up their holes and left.

And so it was with six weeks to go the organisers had absolutely nothing on which to build a music fesitival. And decided to go ahead anyway.

Edit; Here's the account: http://nymag.com/thecut/2017/04/fyre-festival-exumas-bahamas-disaster.html. The timescales are worse than I said. They hired the crew and flew them out with barely six weeks to go.

Watched it on Netflix last night.

Well worth a watch.

Shows how people can be taken in.

Felt sorry for the lady running the cafe on the island. She lost her life savings 38,500 as she never got paid and was the only one who provided any service on the whole thing. If Ja Rule was any use he’d have given that lady her money back.