Money Stuff: MoviePass Changed Some Passwords

MoviePass had maybe the greatest business model of the 2010s venture capital boom. The model was:

This all worked out extremely poorly, as you’d expect — MoviePass shut down in 2019 and its parent company filed for bankruptcy in 2020 — but it also became legendary. “The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now,” Kevin Roose of the New York Times said in 2018: Real-world services (car rides, food delivery, movie tickets) were being provided below cost by nominally “tech” companies, funded by venture capitalists who were flush with cash and valued user growth above all else. If you sell $20 worth of movie tickets for $10, people will sign up, you will have rapid user growth and you can probably get someone to think that that’s valuable, even though in fact every user that you add costs you $10.