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.