To be fair, Groupon did a lot of things <i>right</i>.<p>* They grew insanely fast for several years in a row.<p>* They had crazy usage numbers.<p>* They convinced VCs they would go public at a huge valuation.<p>* They got a huge buyout offer from Google.<p>* They IPOed, giving the company a $12B valuation and bringing in billions in cash while giving investors high multiples of their investment.<p>All of those things are tremendous successes, not worth laughing at. Now from an outside perspective, they're not a traditionally successful company. They're currently worth about 1/4 of their day 2 stock price. They're trying to find a better business model (Groupon Goods?), because their daily deals wasn't cutting it. The company was, in my opinion, a pump-and-dump type of company: not built for the long haul, but for raising the next round of cash.<p>Laughing at Groupon? I'd be more jealous: they were able to complete a sprint, but so far in the marathon, they're not looking like a company built to last. They look like a company that is using the IPO cash to search for something to sustain themselves, while cutting costs to extend their runway. To say that's "successful" is a bit of a stretch, in my mind. Their success was in hitting all the right metric for a large IPO. Since then, it's been a bit of a dud.
What a fluff job. There was one interesting sentence in the whole article:<p>>Its revenue and EBITDA have consistently climbed in each year since going public, and there is plenty of cash on hand without a single cent of debt.<p>What about their business? I don't even know what they do today, still daily deals? How is that going, how are the growth prospects? Did they pivot, will they need to?<p>Asking the writer more than HN. That was crappy 'journalism'.
Disclaimer: Groupon engineer (but not speaking for company).<p>Groupon's a lot more than daily deals now—that (what we call "Local") is still a big part of the business, but there is also Goods, Getaways, our POS/inventory management system, and Snap! by Groupon (in addition to several other things I'm probably forgetting). And even in Local the emphasis has shifted from daily emails ("push") to various "pull" strategies.<p>It's always tough when you fire your founder and CEO, but the company's been recovering steadily and I have faith in upper management's ability to continue increasing revenue and diversifying the product offering.
I'm not laughing. I'm just perpetually a tad depressed that stuff like this is apparently more valuable than defeating aging, fixing our economy in fundamental ways, or making life mulitplanetary. Hell, it's usually more more valuable and profitable than even minor and mid tier innovations in the IT sector.
Andrew Mason is having the last laugh, all the way to the Bank. Last time I checked, despite being fired from the Company he created out of a Wordpress Blog, his nett worth was $200 MILLION.<p>Source: <a href="http://www.cnbc.com/id/100512677" rel="nofollow">http://www.cnbc.com/id/100512677</a>
Groupon has lots of debt, just not the long-term kind. Why is having debt due sooner somehow better? For reference check out this <a href="http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/viewer?action=view&cik=1490281&accession_number=0001490281-14-000064&xbrl_type=v#" rel="nofollow">http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/viewer?action=view&cik=1490281&ac...</a> their current assets and current liabilities are about the same, with cash and what they owe their merchants about the same too.<p>That said, I always teach Groupon as the quintessential example of the power of having a negative payables cycle. They don't deserve any laughter for the growth engine they created; whether the business itself is sustainable is still an open question, but I'd say the same thing about GM so that comment doesn't really count as derision.
Groupon has been growing some non-deals services in the past few years, I wonder if that's what's finally paying off?<p>My restaurant uses their POS+payments platform moderately successfully (for certain values of success, the POS world is awful). It's a side of Groupon that most people don't know exists, that I think makes sense.
Groupon itself was the one pushing poor metrics for valuation and hiring a bunch of salespeople they never intended to keep more than a year past IPO. They artificially pumped their price, and should be derided for that even if they made money doing so.
The Jury is still out. Groupon is still actively pushing growth strategies which can backfire in big ways.<p><a href="http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/10/06/why-groupon-stock-has-crashed-43-in-2014.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/10/06/why-groupon...</a>
One thing I don't understand that how is firing founding CEO serves to be keeping the company growing and finding new revenue sources? isn't just a terrifying signal to the market that the board has lost faith in the long-term viability of the company by making such big decisions as firing a founder CEO?
Fine. But I reserve to laugh at Fortune. This line in the article stands out: "If you want to criticize someone for overvaluing Groupon, take a good long look at public market investors."<p>Aren't they doing THAT in this article?
That page of text with ads took about 10 seconds to load and render on a 50-megabit internet connection with a 3.4 ghz i7 CPU and 16 gb memory. Let's start laughing at Fortune's web development team instead.