Making money off the stock isn't like, the only way to make money. HQ would kill to be anything close to as significant as Rovio.
In some cases, this is because you've tapped into a big market and sales are moving faster than you can scale your operations. You need to do the same thing you've been doing, but you need to do more of it quickly.
In other cases, you might have found a way to drastically increase sales, perhaps from building a new line of business that complements your old one.
HQ Trivia needs something that you can't get with more money, and that's a creative way to avoid being a fad. They needed a way to keep people on their app, and they didn't find one.
As you've seen from Instagram's wild success at this (before Facebook's acquisition) and Snapchat's decline, money isn't really a factor. It's mostly luck, honestly.
Of course it won't work out in the long run, but in the short term it might be fun and it'll employ some people for a few years. When the money runs out everybody can jump ship to other, equally nonviable, startups and do it over again.
I call them VC-bait or grant-bait. There's a handful of grants you can get for startups here, so they'll get all of those, get some free hosting from Microsoft, put up a landing page etc. If they're lucky they'll get a few tens of thousands from private investors, then fall over a few months later.
I'm not sure if it's intentional or if people are just clueless, but in any case they make a bit of money, pad out the CV a bit and move on. I wouldn't got so far as to say they're defrauding investors
The reporter basically insinuates that Rus had been aggressively trying to undermine and get employees to turn on Colin for a year and leaves an open question on whether stress resulting from their toxic relationship contributed to him increasing his drug usage.
Basically, it was maybe not a complete accident unrelated to his work.
I think HQ is on the right track but I don’t see the current team being the right team to turn it into the next big media play. The future of live TV should be heavily interactive.
The other way to read that is that there's a reason telecoms are buying media companies and not the other way around. Media companies are cheap, and they give ~cable companies competitive advantages (or another gun in a Mexican standoff) through vertical integration.
1. Nut-bar egomaniac CEO bordering on the delusional; and
2. A business that probably should never take VC money. Producing content (which is what HQ Trivia does at the end of the day) is a notoriously hard business to scale. I can remember years ago when Rovio (remember when Angry Birds was a thing?) took VC money. Huge mistake. HUGE. It is seriously detrimental to your long term viability as a business that generates an income.
So yeah, stay at your own peril.
[1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/ceo-of-hq-the-hottest-app-goin...