As it gears up to take on the video-streaming market with a 2020 launch, Quibi is going on an aggressive hiring spree.
The Hollywood exec Jeffrey Katzenberg's planned mobile streaming-video service has posted 48 new job listings on LinkedIn in the past few weeks, with a majority of them being posted this week. A source close to the company told Business Insider that Quibi was on "a hiring rampage."
With its top brass in place, the yet-to-be-launched company's effort seems to be geared toward expanding its roster across various teams and levels of experience, with the roles that it's hiring for spanning advertising, content, engineering, legal, marketing, product, and public relations. The company's headcount stands at 160, according to LinkedIn.
Quibi declined to comment for this story.
"It's fair to say that Quibi is aggressively going after the best talent across tech and media," the former BTIG analyst Rich Greenfield told Business Insider. "It's interesting when compared to how other companies are approaching streaming, like Disney, which is by promoting from within."
Quibi is led by Katzenberg on the content side, and former Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO Meg Whitman leads the business side. The company has already installed a number of senior execs with backgrounds in digital, streaming, and traditional media. It has recruited execs behind popular social-media and short-form-video platforms, The Hollywood Reporter previously reported.
On the content side, the company has roped in former DC Entertainment President Diane Nelson, former Viacom Music and Entertainment Group President Doug Herzog, and the news veteran Janice Min. It has named Tom Conrad, the former Snap vice president of product, as product chief, and Rob Post, Hulu's former vice president of engineering, is its chief technology officer.
Quibi has also bulked up on the advertising side, securing $100 million in ad deals ahead of its launch. The former Hulu exec Tim Connolly serves as the company's head of partnerships and advertising, and Marni Schapiro, Snap's former Snap director of sales, is its head of North America advertising sales, Business Insider first reported.
Quibi is focused on creating a diverse company of employees drawn from both tech and entertainment, Jim O'Gorman, its head of talent and organization, recently told the Los Angeles Times. Its staff is 52% female, with employees who have worked at companies such as Google, CBS, Spotify, Hulu, Facebook, and Netflix.
But the company has specifically been seeking out talent from Netflix and Snap, two other sources told Business Insider.
The company hired Juan Bongiovanni, Netflix's former director of acquisition marketing, as its head of growth marketing and Megan Imbres, Netflix's head of product creative, as its head of brand and content marketing. Thirteen of Quibi's employees have previously worked at Netflix, according to Business Insider's count on LinkedIn.
Several former Snapchatters (17, per our count on LinkedIn), meanwhile, make up Quibi's engineering and product teams, another source said. This is no surprise, given that that Snap is one of the few tech companies headquartered out of Los Angeles, the source said.
"There aren't that many technical people in LA to begin with, so it totally makes sense for Quibi to poach heavily from such companies," the source said. "There is a ton of willing supply, since a lot of these people are probably more suited for an earlier-stage company like Quibi as Snap and Netflix mature and start operating at a larger scale."
