Groupon

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• bullish assessment Mark Suster

  if they have 50 million in earnings which we could probably get to with the million uh dollars a day in Revenue uh this would be 24 times their earnings 24 times their earnings which is not outrageous for a s growing company

• neutral assessment Mark Suster

  people are starting to look at Groupon and say they got hundreds of millions of dollars in Revenue but in fact if you take their cost of goods out and you just look at what their net earnings are it's actually maybe not that impressive

• bearish criticism Jason Calacanis

  Groupon $1.2 billion ridiculous valuation

• neutral fact_claim Mark Suster

  now we're going 4X in less than six months

• neutral fact_claim Mark Suster

  the rumor is it's DST again DST is it's digital Sky Technologies it's the Russian money

• neutral fact_claim Mark Suster

  didn't we just get through about two months ago discussing a 4 or500 million valuation I think for memory was around 300 million

• neutral fact_claim Mark Suster

  the buzz is that somewhere between a 1.2 to 1.3 billion doll pre-money valuation

• mixed criticism Jason Calacanis

  that's what groupon does right they create demand we had and Iran or guilt through there creating demand in a world where there isn't much demand this too much supply there's only going to be available for 12 hours you have to buy their you know this pair of jeans you know there's a million jeans stores out there that are sucking wind these jeans do not be created this whole phenomenon why they lowered the price that convince some knuckleheads that at the jean company give it to them for a third

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  I heard Groupon Now requires like a six-month exclusive if you're going to do a deal with them you can't do it with living social or whatever

• bearish criticism Jason Calacanis

  you don't want to be in the group on business of selling the deli meat

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  I can't believe the number of group on and living social ads I see on Mahalo like they buy everything in La is it the are people just buying the whole city every city name those guys they're they're spending a lot of money because it's local so they have to be laser focused

• bullish endorsement Tyler

  Andrew uh the CEO of Groupon did a great job

• bullish endorsement Jason Calacanis

  Groupon started as some other service where you were like sort of doing a petition or trying to change the world ... and the company was failing ... then they watched their user base doing ... lobbying people for deals ... and that's how Groupon was born

• neutral fact_claim Justin Kwong

  I don't want to have to go to what's the closest city to Erie uh Cleveland or Pittsburgh they're an hour and a half two hours away yeah I don't want to go two hours to get a Groupon

• neutral fact_claim Justin Kwong

  we actually believe that Groupon focus is on Orange County here right so does Living Social and everybody else and the difference with us when we finally tackle Orange County is that we're actually hyper local

• neutral fact_claim Justin Kwong

  we read an article on CNN about Groupon and we're like what the hell is that and uh you know erie's never heard of Groupon

• neutral fact_claim Justin Kwong

  we found that markets with 50,000 to a million people in the US make up about a third of the US market and that leaves a 100 million people that are currently unserved by the local daily deal space like Groupon and companies like that

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  Groupon you know quickest to a billion dollars in Revenue Zynga Twitter Facebook I mean things are accelerating for everybody but me

• neutral assessment Andrew Mason

  I think you know what I think about is uh how do we not become how do we not start to suck and I want to make sure that all those things that like Yahoo did or even did that made them start to suck don't happen to us

• bullish fact_claim Andrew Mason

  there are James Beard award-winning restaurants uh that have worked with us all over the country um there's like World reowned art museums like the Art Institute of Chicago we sold 5,000 memberships in a day and this is like a year ago which increased the membership base that they had been building over the last 100 years by 6% in a single day

• neutral assessment Andrew Mason

  if a business doesn't need customers then they don't need us there's not there's nothing we can do to help a business that doesn't need customers because that's what we do

• neutral assessment Andrew Mason

  what what gets people to the top of the list is really the demand for that business how well reviewed is it what's the location uh what what kind of business what category is it that sort of thing

• neutral assessment Andrew Mason

  we look at this as our job is to balance the equation of that win-win between businesses and consumers and we it's not all it's about getting the best deal that the business has ever offered but we our goal isn't to get this to 99% off because then it starts to lose value for for business owners um we found that like the the our average discount I think is 60% um that works well for a lot of businesses

• neutral prediction Andrew Mason

  the question will be whether there's really a market for a second tier of of group on clones to see to serve a second tier of businesses and whether that will have sustaining interest for for consumers

• bullish assessment Andrew Mason

  the good thing about it is though we have the luxury of picking and choosing the best businesses that we want to work with and we and we make sure that we have enough inventory to serve the best businesses

• neutral assessment Andrew Mason

  the biggest problem we have as a business which is What's led to the proliferation of clones is the fact that we have far more demand from business owners than we have Supply we have the self-imposed Restriction that we think is quite important of only offering one deal per day um and in cities like Chicago or San Francisco or New York you know the larger markets we have waiting lists of hundreds of businesses that want to be featured and that's after we've turned away 00s more that didn't meet

• bullish assessment Andrew Mason

  staying focused on the long term you know there's a lot of things we could have done to um to cut Corners along the way like with the writing for example pissed off a huge amount of businesses early on because they didn't understand why we did those things that way but the reason we did is because we knew that we wanted to speak to our audience in a way that they that that showed respect to them and our we thought of our audience to people like us we wanted to speak to them like we would want to

• bullish assessment Andrew Mason

  focusing on building a product that solves a problem for me as a social recluse that always goes to the same bar the same movie theater um and and trying to create a tool that would nudge me out of the house um and then and then building it in a way that entertains me instead of figuring out if it's going to trying to figure out what uh what nerves the pluck in order to entertain other people I think that's useful um in terms of building a genuine cool product that people want to use

• bullish assessment Andrew Mason

  I really think what we've done so far is just the tip of the the iceberg um we could screw it all up but we have a lot of awesome ideas that if we do them right I think could could could make what we're doing now look very similar

• bullish prediction Andrew Mason

  we'll continue to expand we'll be in Europe in months

• neutral fact_claim Andrew Mason

  so when that started um I was a graduate student in public policy and i' had the idea um and a fellow in Chicago who's a seral entrepreneur and investor named Eric lovsky i' worked for him in the past and he heard about the idea and called me up in school one day and asked if I wanted to to drop out and turn it into a company and at at that point um I didn't know anything I didn't know what VC was I didn't know what Angel Investors were I didn't consider myself an entrepreneur um but he just sai

• neutral assessment Andrew Mason

  I'm over it at this point I mean I I was a musician before I was an entrepreneur and and as a musician you know when I first started seeing these things the kind of I could only think plagiarism um there there's some something offensive about it but apparently it's just the uh the way things work in in this world so you roll with the punches you get used to it and um uh we're we really just try to stay focused on making our product cool and I I don't pay much attention to them anymore

• neutral fact_claim Andrew Mason

  so for us it was an opportunity to get some uh to get some liquidity for the early Founders a little bit more growth capital and uh hopefully bring some some really patient and smart Partners uh into the fold

• neutral fact_claim Andrew Mason

  we were introduced through Jim Brier at Facebook um and and we've I mean since last summer we've just had a line of investors uh at the door and occasionally we decid to talk to some um so so that's how we met them we we liked them they they they were really uh came off as entrepreneurs investors you know people they like to pick two or three category defining Brands a year and get behind them in a big way and kind of leave the entrepreneurs alone to do what they do well

• bullish assessment Andrew Mason

  we seem to have found a way to make e-commerce work for local businesses which is always been um something that that people have tried to do and we seem to be doing it so we're going to continue to explore that I I think it can get quite big

• neutral fact_claim Andrew Mason

  we focused on local products where we actually could go out and cut deals that were significantly better than anything else out there

• neutral fact_claim Andrew Mason

  intentionally tried to keep it on the down low until maybe the summer of 2009 when we really started to expand

• neutral fact_claim Andrew Mason

  we launched in Chicago in November 2008 with about 400 subscribers on our mailing list and started to realize that we were on to something I guess in early 2009

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  they must be making money if they're spending that kind of Bank

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  Groupon is synonymous with success right now

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  company of the moment

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  the company that everyone else is chasing right now

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  these companies actually have the goods to back it up it's not a bubble

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  the difference between these companies zynga and groupon have billions of dollars in revenue

• bearish assessment Unattributed

  google willing to pay six billion for groupon we'll get to that story in a second because that deal looks like it's not gonna happen but in any case uh that also has to do with with valuations that are rising so quickly that all of a sudden the deal doesn't look good anymore right

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  every day we all get Groupons we all get guil group we all get one King's Lane right

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  this sounds like something Groupon could do already right so I'm I'm actually quite optimistic about it

• bullish assessment Michael Yavonditte

  look I think the thing that's interesting about Groupon is it is a it is attacking a massive 100 plus billion dollar market that has been in existence for decades and decades and decades and is fundamental to the way goods and services are

• neutral fact_claim Michael Yavonditte

  there's AIG difference between 100 million revenue for and a billion for Groupon yeah two and a half 2 billion two billion plus for Facebook right those are real numbers those are big numbers big it's a big difference huge huge

• bullish assessment Michael Yavonditte

  Groupon I think is another example of they're just doing they're attacking this massive Market they've invented it sort of a new way to discount products and services and Americans love to buy discounted products and a merch in America love to create discounted products they like to they like to benefit from those discounted products

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  when they came in and they did those valuations of zingga Groupon and Facebook pretty much everybody in the industry said these guys are paying double the valuation anybody's willing to pay

• bearish assessment Unattributed

  when they came in and they did those valuations of zingga Groupon and Facebook pretty much everybody in the industry said these guys are paying double the valuation anybody's willing to pay this is a bubble these are the last guys in these are the guys going to be left holding the bag

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  they can't launch there because these idiots in Australia launched a trademark for Groupon in Australia

• bullish assessment Gary Vaynerchuk

  if you look at Groupon Google wasn't buying their Tech I don't think anybody here can't you know any developer in this building right now could have probably replicated the tech in 48 hours right they weren't buying the mailing list if Google wanted the mailing list one little design changed for two weeks on Google and they could have had that mailing list right they wanted the what the brand no they wanted the salespeople who had the relationships with every little sushi restaurant and Chinese

• bullish assessment Om Malik

  I don't think the Groupon or living social have anything to worry about

• neutral assessment Jay Levy

  I think that both groupon and livingsocial are building out real-time location based offerings that they want you to be standing on a quarter in Times Square and get the ad for the gap right there which is you know very similar obviously to what Foursquare wants to do with the check-in

• bullish assessment Tyler

  And then it's the second part is I don't think it's going to be you searching on Google and getting the deal on your laptop. What really matters is who's going to have the better mobile experience for pushing delivering the realtime deal. And Groupon has a proposed one where you take it out and you say it gives you a list of behaviors.

• bullish assessment Tyler

  which is why Groupon has 8,000 employees because they have to the handholding is amazing for local business. It's not in Google's DNA to do that handholding conventionally, right?

• bearish assessment Vivek Wadhwa

  I think the sign is right that Facebook is a real threat over here because when your friends start recommending deals when it knows who you are and what you're you know what how you like uh shopping and so on, Facebook can easily give you much better deals with the necessary recommendations. Now, Google is also has a lot of data, a lot of information, and Google has size. So, these are real competitors to uh to group on.

• bearish assessment Cyan Banister

  I think that Facebook has got it right because they have the social graph and um I get exposed to deals all the time just because I look in my newsfeed and I see really interesting deals that my friends have bought or people that I know have bought, which makes it a lot more interesting to me because I can go do that thing with them. But I don't understand how that's going to work on Google or Amazon um necessarily.

• bearish criticism Jason Calacanis

  I tell you, it seems like the biggest scam there is to me the way they're going public, it's you know, pump and dump, right?

• bearish criticism Henry Blodget

  Groupon is going out at a $25 billion valuation Amazon went out at a $500 million valuation let's say they both have huge opportunities you can say you know Groupon hits the ball out of the park you understand how far out of the park they've got to hit it for you to have an amazing return starting from 25 billion versus Amazon hitting it out of the park starting from 500 I mean it's it's like hitting a 500 yard touchdown I mean that's right the goal posts have been moved very very far so the ups

• bearish criticism Henry Blodget

  I think that particular argument is preposterous this company is is less than three years old how could they have any idea what the lifetime value of a customer is in their mature markets it in fact looks like people are purchasing less who started early it's just way way way too early to say look at us before marketing expenses especially given how gigantic those marketing expenses are and also given how they're going up as they try to penetrate deeper and deeper and as they now have more and m

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  they have this thing called um adjusted uh csoi which is their um operating income minus things like um their marketing expenses not just the non non-cash stuff not just like the the stock based comp that you see a lot of people back out but actually their marketing costs because of their their whole business model on having to invest on customer acquisition costs so this sounds to me I'm having a flashback Henry of AOL when they said hey let's get in a fight with the SEC we pay1 $35 per custome

• neutral assessment Henry Blodget

  I I think it's both in the case of Groupon they're going to raise some money but they're also a lot of selling shareholders you've got the companies that have gone public now LinkedIn and Groupon going public at a much more mature stage than companies did in the 1990s so although people are instinctively appalled by the idea that Founders are selling on the IPO these are very mature companies even though in the case of Groupon they're very young so it's not strange that Founders would take some

• bearish criticism Martin Tobias

  I can't say the same about Groupon I don't think you can say the same about you know a lot of the big names on the tech startup scene

• bearish assessment Martin Tobias

  those results are not meaningful in the overall business if you look in their p&l you can't find a group on now line that's because they're not selling any of those yeah

• bearish prediction Martin Tobias

  I would be astounded

• bearish criticism Martin Tobias

  I think Groupon may be uh somewhat uh susceptible to that right now is that their corporate strategy is being driven by the needs of their investors for liquidity versus the needs of the business

• bearish assessment Martin Tobias

  I don't think if you're the CEO in that case you have the ability to convince your investors to not sell at the IPO

• bearish criticism Martin Tobias

  I don't think they're a technology company their primary asset is a talking cat okay it's they're not a technology company they're a brand company

• bearish fact_claim Martin Tobias

  they don't even have 18 months on their balance sheet right right it's kind of challenging I would agree it's challenging

• bearish criticism Martin Tobias

  the founders of the company have taken $340 million already off the table and of the $750 million potential IPO proceeds that they have something like 400 million of it is

• bearish assessment Martin Tobias

  the numbers that they have to acquire to continue to fill the churn is is incredibly High

• bearish criticism Martin Tobias

  you look at their 80 million subscribers only 15 million of them have purchased so they've spent a lot of money on customer acquisition for customers that are never ever going to buy from them

• bearish criticism Martin Tobias

  if very small tweaks to Groupon's business turns Groupon insolvent for example if they had to pay their merchants in four days instead of 90 days they would be insolvent

• bearish prediction Martin Tobias

  do you think that they will be able to uh remove that massive customer acquisition cost as they become you know a very well-known Global brand no okay

• bearish assessment Martin Tobias

  I think the biggest threat to you know Groupon and living social being proprietary brands that have to spend all their own money to build their own brand are Publishers like those guys

• neutral fact_claim Martin Tobias

  the reason you're seeing a 50% off retail thing is not not any expectation of daily deals or anything particular to what we're doing it really has to do with consumer Behavior what you're trying to do is spur an impulse purchase and if you see 20% off you're not going to take that impulse purchase really a deal needs to be 50% off to get a person to click or to buy

• bearish assessment Martin Tobias

  Groupon's doing some things that I think are unsustainable

• bearish criticism Martin Tobias

  Groupon doesn't have that because in fact Groupon doesn't want the consumer going back to the merchant they want the consumer going back to Groupon

• bearish criticism Martin Tobias

  if you took the float of out of Groupon's cash flow they would be out of business

• bearish criticism Martin Tobias

  what will not be sustainable is Groupon's tax on the business of 50% of that I think that margin will go down

• neutral fact_claim Martin Tobias

  Groupon's got 80 million subscribers

• bearish prediction Martin Tobias

  it's going to be very hard for Groupon to do something which these local Publishers can do very easily

• bearish criticism Martin Tobias

  Groupon has certainly tried to educate their entire uh populace that all you should care about is price

• bearish criticism Martin Tobias

  if you looked at Groupons numbers in their IPO they're losing money because they have to spend a lot of money on new customer acquisition and reducing uh churn and they have a giant fixed cost Salesforce

• bullish assessment Martin Tobias

  I don't believe that someone will catch up in terms of building another consumer brand

• neutral fact_claim Martin Tobias

  group buying and Groupon in particular is the biggest threat to local media companies because it dis intermediates not only the audience but also the advertiser from that Media company

• bullish assessment Martin Tobias

  when I saw what Groupon was doing I said that really solves the problem which it provides consumers offers which that they want you know advertisements which they you know volunteer to get plus it gets people in the door on a variable cost basis with really no effort on the business side

• bearish fact_claim Jason Nazar

  Groupon didn't sell now you have well shark media getting an investment uh for couponing

• bearish assessment Unattributed

  I think my concern is businesses got burned once before now this was the initial rush when it's you have to have a website right it's a 20 grand for the website oh you need to have oh by the way it's you know do you want to be part of the search engines well that's another ten grand every year or something those thousand dollars a month yeah so some of them they're loving they're embracing social media but at the same time some of we're getting burnt because they're gonna use social many consult

• bearish assessment Unattributed

  where's Groupon you don't get to socialness right built-in I mean it's yeah now let's connect this out look at the city's options here look what look all the coming soon Wow well this is I mean this is the thing if you don't sell your company to Google that aggressive Google will beat your company I mean that's basically what it's come up the pointers they're going to have Yelp that will loop on and Facebook all in the crosshairs within a matter of months

• bearish assessment Tyler

  for the merchants it's now become a bit more of a you have a lot of places to choose from now in terms of who you're doing these deals with they used to kind of just be Groupon was the one the enemy Groupon LivingSocial nowadays everybody ... now that the monopoly is out of the bag now that the margin pressures that calm and then that makes this accounting look even more challenged

• bearish assessment Tyler

  yeah because now Google's got it in the game and everyone's got another game there's too many deals else aren't as compelling right

• bearish prediction Tyler

  I feel like customers because of the volume of it are starting to become a little less the novelty is wearing off that's a kind of a key issue

• neutral fact_claim Sean Percival

  I did a test with a Groupon we did a mailing we just stream advertising just like Twitter was Twitter was doing and it actually did very well yeah well they were paying four or five dollars per email address if you got them signed up

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  I think they've moved to a new metric called EBE it's gonna be earnings before expenses and that will dramatically improve their performance earnings before expenses

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  CEO Andrew Mason is defended removing these costs for the metrics because they are a one-time upfront cost based on the massively rapid expansion of Groupon in a short amount of time

• bearish fact_claim Unattributed

  we now know Groupon incurred 420 million operating loss for 2010 and a 117 point 1 million dollar loss for the first quarter of 2011 that's as opposed to the original filing which showed sixty point six million for all of 2010 operating income an eighty one point six million for the first quarter

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  when they originally filed paperwork for their forthcoming IPO back in June there was some controversy over the accounting practices specifically they were using a metric called adjusted consolidated segment operating income which is a fancy way of saying let's leave marketing and customer acquisition costs completely off the books and just pretend like that's not happening

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  the the the founders of groupon have cashed at eight hundred million dollars right so for them it would be nice for the business is about to collapse it would be nice from their perspective we go public but they're already fabulously wealthy so the pressure to sell isn't so big

• bearish assessment Unattributed

  it's a hopeless business that's that's predicated on this continual inflow of people that drive this myth the drive the support of this sort of negative is working capital deficit that many people are pointed to this is its deficit that's broadening over time has massive cash consumption shows no sign of that decelerating

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  as a Google shareholder i hate it i mean you know you're growing my head count by thirty percent you're adding a bunch of expensive engineers doing a hardware that's arguably antithetical to the whole android business model and look what's happened to google share price this week I mean not surprisingly it's actually falling faster than its peers have in the face of the declining market and given this acquisition because it looks confused it looks like a jumble it looks like it's actually in som

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  I think that's overblown cuz they you got to remember they're operating in like aund and some odd cities right some so if you do 10,000 of these Groupons a month 1% of people are upset that's 100 you know so maybe 1% don't like it but the other ones are lined up and they got a six-month queue of companies

• bearish assessment Unattributed

  none of this really touches on what I feel like is the biggest liability of Groupon which is all of these complaints that you constantly hear from small business owners who tried it and feel like they got burned or they money out

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  I think it's a great company actually and this just might be a case of when you put so much fuel into the rocket and you have so much thrust that just being off like 1% in a rocket if you're going mock whatever you can get pretty far off course and that's what's happened to Groupon it's a great company I think at its core I think it's a trend that will be here 10 years from now

• bearish criticism Jason Calacanis

  this is not a lot of news if you've been paying attention to group on they sort of notorious for driving their employees really hard

• bearish assessment Jason Calacanis

  what a disaster this is turning out to be

• bearish fact_claim Lon Harris

  hundreds of Groupon sales department employees have filed a class action lawsuit against the company charging that it has failed to pay them overtime

• bearish prediction Unattributed

  if you don't sell your company to Google that aggressive Google will beat your company I mean that's basically what it's coming out the point here is they're going have yel group on and Facebook all in the crosshairs within matter of months

• bearish assessment Unattributed

  if you're thinking of doing a Groupon deal or doing a Google deal where you can get plus one to death potentially right so you get your Groupon experience at a low lower um cost to you and you get your Social and SEO built in whereas Groupon you don't get the social and SEO built in

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  I think they've taken a great company and a great management team in group on and they basically scarred themselves they shot themselves in the foot saying we we don't believe in this business so we're going to do some creative funky accounting

• mixed criticism Unattributed

  I think it's a great brand I think they got a lot of innovation left in them I think they shouldn't have done never do Creative Accounting I it's just like rule number one anytime you do anything creative like that it winds up biting you in the ass

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  it's a hopeless business that's predicated on this continual inflow of people that drive the support of this sort of negative working capital deficit that many people have pointed to this deficit that's broadening over time has massive cash consumption shows no sign of that decelerating and at the same time you know is being picked up by all kinds of directions by people who already have audiences Andor verticals where they can have Halo higher prices and make better margins and not have negativ

• bullish endorsement Jason Calacanis

  something that competes with Groupon that's already well established in the marketplace that has a billion dollars invested into it and it doesn't look as good as Groupon

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  group on billion dollars in Revenue

• bullish assessment Eric Ries

  group on in one city yel in one city Facebook on one campus uh it seems like that is the expert best practice it is and there's a reason for it it's not random it's that you have to find early adopters before you can go to mainstream customers

• neutral fact_claim Dan Martell

  so this is the premise of gift marketing was that we figured once companies because of group on another daily deal site understood their costs acquire customer

• neutral fact_claim Eric Ries

  I think a lot of people if they just started with Groupon as their first idea wouldn't have been successful

• neutral fact_claim Eric Ries

  the very first Groupon that they did was two for one pizza in the pizza restaurant in the lobby of their building... they sold 20 Groupons... so many entrepreneurs would look at that and be like total failure... but precisely because they had spent a year trying to get anybody to take any action at all

• bullish assessment Eric Ries

  if you look at Facebook and Groupon and saying all these companies there's this like pretty embarrassing failure right before the huge success

• bearish assessment Unattributed

  I think the 50/50 deal is part of the problem I and I think the discount is too steep I think if they they if they shot for 35 or 40% off and then instead of trying to take half of it from the vendor they said we're going to take a third of it then it would start to feel a little bit better for the vendors

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  I don't see how it goes away because a third of businesses local businesses will always be struggling and despite the fact that yes some of them say hey I got overwhelmed or it wasn't worth it they're still lining up for 6 months 9 mon months 12 months for Living Social and group onto the waiting lists it's not going to go away

• bearish assessment Bill Lee

  I just think this Commerce thing is too gimmicky and it's going away and group on is level you think was crowded was that the thing I just thought like I just yeah there's just too much going on in these flash shs it's too crowded people are going to burn out on them

• bearish criticism Jacqui Boland

  we've had advertisers who've done a group on and said you know ret tricycle one ret tricycle customer is equal to 10 groupon customers

• bearish fact_claim Aaron Schildkrout

  economically we can also provide a way better deal for the vendor than any Groupon could ever do

• bearish criticism Aaron Schildkrout

  you feel basically like you're degrading your brand and economically degrading Yourself by being a Groupon or a living social or whatever

• bearish criticism Aaron Schildkrout

  the complaint from top-notch restaurants like olives would be I don't want the group on customer they're cheap bastards who come in here they don't know how to behave in a restaurant they annoy the staff and they never come back and they never spend any more money they're jerks we don't want group on customers

• bearish criticism David H. Hansson

  it felt like to me like they just put the rock the thrusters on full blast to get public and they just spent all their jet fuel where they could have just gone at 55 mil hour 65 miles an hour instead of trying to floor it to get to the finish line and they would have actually been able to just manage that profitability issue or they would have figured out earlier at less expense that this was not a sustainable model

• bearish assessment David H. Hansson

  I think that that's unfortunately the conclusion because it's not just Groupon if you look at Living Social I mean it's a [ __ ] show too

• bearish criticism David H. Hansson

  what feels icky is when somebody then says well let's just saddle all that risk on the public markets and I'm going to take my $350 million and just kick back right because then like that just doesn't feel right especially when the business actually needs that money like the business continues to hammer money and certainly was at the time they needed that 800 million or whatever it was that got cashed out and maybe that would have saved them

• bearish criticism David H. Hansson

  what the thinking was Let's Take the Money and Run if you look at how that deal went down what happened just before the IPO billion dollar private exactly that that people just cashed out and took the money and ran

• bearish criticism David H. Hansson

  they could have avoided it too couldn't they have if they just said let's grow a little bit slower we don't need to be the fastest growing business ever

• bearish criticism David H. Hansson

  what I don't like about all this sort of media tension on it is that nobody pulls up these stories they don't run through the numbers they don't look at the consequences of the business until the business already looks like it's failing

• bearish criticism David H. Hansson

  the local business was giving up 75% 775 cents on every dollar no way for them to make money and they're going to get the worst customers right and they're going to be stigmatized as a failing business

• neutral assessment David H. Hansson

  they're trying all these other things now to sort of pivot the business is into selling goods and so forth but that's just a different kind of business the only reason they're doing that is because the core thing that people invested in [ __ ]

• bearish assessment David H. Hansson

  the core thing that people invested in [ __ ] like the daily deals business of offering 50% off just doesn't scale even though it sounds intuitively like it should have right

• bearish criticism David H. Hansson

  costing them $143 to make a dollar right and it's not getting any cheaper the mechanics did not make any sense they were already at Great scale it didn't make any sense at that scale

• bearish fact_claim David H. Hansson

  I think they were valued at $ 228 billion right yeah I now they're at three in market cap and what Google off 25 billion dollar disappeared right in in market cap

• bearish criticism David H. Hansson

  companies like Salesforce like Groupon get away with basically discarding those numbers and saying oh yeah here the Gap numbers pay no attention to them here are the numbers I want you to see which are the [ __ ] numbers that where we deduct all sorts of things that make no sense in that came back to bite Groupon in a major way

• bearish criticism David H. Hansson

  kuon tried to do that with marketing expenses right it was the biggest joke ever oh if you don't count all the money we have to spend to acquire customers we're actually profitable well they were sort of saying let's spend let's take that $100 a cost require and push it out over 5ye lifespan it was ridiculous

• bearish criticism David H. Hansson

  Groupon had amazing real Revenue the issue is not getting Revenue it's getting money you can keep the earnings exactly it's all about earnings um as Groupon showed if you're willing to spend a140 to buy a dollar you can buy a lot of dollars right there's there's a lot of that on the table a little bit like a pump and dump

• bearish assessment David H. Hansson

  the ones that the market found out about like group on and zing so on where they were like we were so excited about this for about 5 minutes and then we actually looked at the numbers and they were like holy [ __ ] this looks horrible right

• bearish assessment Jason Calacanis

  like rupon just kicked out CEO and like they still have no clue on how to how to make money out of it

• bullish fact_claim Mitch Kapor

  you know Groupon has done a successful apprenticeship program where they they pay people they pay people enough there's a pro it's a balance there's a prospect of a of a job

• neutral fact_claim Jimmy Chamberlin

  CU they had tens of millions

• mixed assessment Jimmy Chamberlin

  you look at something like rupon and you have the spiritual leader who's creative and everything that's been built is because of his enthusiasm and his open-mindedness as a true open thinker and an artist to lose him as a as a as a thought leader andar in Chicago was just tragic for me

• bearish prediction Jimmy Chamberlin

  to put a good face on the company before they kind of before the upcoming blood bath that ued

• bearish criticism Jimmy Chamberlin

  post IPO he was like we can't do that yeah we can't do anything coupon compan fun is gone

• bullish endorsement Jimmy Chamberlin

  he basically said look whatever you want to do you can do it that's what's so great about Groupon

• neutral fact_claim Sam Shank

  if somebody did that because at the end of the day they're still getting you users

• neutral fact_claim Sam Shank

  it's very similar to to Ubers or lifts it's give 25 get 25

• bullish assessment Sam Shank

  we saw that lo and behold since uh milwa uh Minneapolis and the Twin Cities there was a lot of people opening hotel tonight there for some reason who knows why um so we built that City like it was like our eighth or ninth City but much earlier than we would have

• bullish assessment Sam Shank

  we wanted to uh not provide any reason why you wouldn't want to sell a hotel wouldn't want to sell a hotel uh their last room on hotel tonight

• neutral fact_claim Sam Shank

  first day we actually took 20% early on and then we reduced it uh to standardize it

• neutral fact_claim Sam Shank

  we take 15% um that's our business model

• bullish assessment Sam Shank

  being better and constraining yeah better and different better and different

• bullish assessment Sam Shank

  the better was you know the order magnitude less Taps to book the hotel room the better was the best prices on the planet um 30% lower than walking into the hotel 20% lower than any OTA even to this day

• bullish assessment Sam Shank

  we were aligned not only with the interest of the hotel and in the interest of the business but also with the individual who's making the decision and then we had a lot of Sizzle we had a mobile app before a lot of people had mobile apps

• bearish criticism Sam Shank

  we would get uh go into a hotel and they would have just hung up the phone with one more group on clone and they said we don't want to talk to you because you're just another group on clone ... it was refresh ing for them to hear something new that wasn't we're just like Groupon only cheaper they didn't want to hear that

• bearish criticism Stu Wall

  if you're going to run a group on why would you give group on half the economics

• bearish criticism Stu Wall

  the other problem is a lot of the people that buy Groupons if you think about it Groupon markets to people that buy Groupon you know two or three times a week and the marketing is you're City at 90% off so those are customers that are great for Groupon because they buy often and Groupon gets 50% they're bad for the Customer because they're unlikely to come back

• bearish criticism Stu Wall

  the deal originally if I remember correctly was they would buy you know essentially they would be buying a thousand you know whatever dinners yeah or a thousand yoga lessons at uh half price they would sell them to the customers at that half price and then they would keep half of the half and give you half of the half so you basically you got 25% you get 25% yeah which for most businesses meant they were in the red yeah very few businesses can make money at 25% of their price

• bearish criticism Stu Wall

  we wouldn't recommend Groupon for for Brick and Mortar businesses but I think there are some that use it in particular folks that you know are new or kind of really need to get new customers it's pretty expensive but you do get some Capital up front there's a little bit of financing that that goes along with it so for some businesses it works for most businesses we think it does

• mixed assessment Stu Wall

  at the end of the day Groupon's still a multi-billion dollar company I think it's just the boom and the bus that you know people refer to uh so I think for a time people were very optimistic about the Outlook and and you know less so now

• bearish assessment Stu Wall

  you look at Groupon it's like that's volatility defined I mean that was like a huge phenomenon that once the economy kind of recovered it just went away

• neutral fact_claim Andrew Mason

  we were really selective about the businesses that we worked with and um built a lot of customer loyalty as a result and that's kind of what drove the the growth was just getting rid of the awful things around it.

• neutral assessment Andrew Mason

  I think we have the same kind of challenge as we had with Groupon early on which um pe there's a stigma around the audio tour. Like in the same way there was a stigma around, you know, half off deals.

• bullish fact_claim Andrew Mason

  we saw this at Groupon like when we when we created really sold really great um walking tour guided tour type of experiences like there was one of uh architecture tour uh of of Chicago that every time we put it on the site we'd sell 20,000 tickets in a matter of hours and completely sell out.

• bullish fact_claim Andrew Mason

  There have been a lot of kind of more focused versions of that idea like Kickstarter or Indiegogo or Groupon that have been successful.

• neutral fact_claim Andrew Mason

  I can't comment on the state of it other than that people are still using it. It's continuing to grow like you said. I think there's a lot of people that that really love the service, a lot of businesses and customers.

• mixed assessment Andrew Mason

  it's a crazy whipsaw up and down it was like kind of the poster child of web is that web tour

• neutral fact_claim Andrew Mason

  Groupon was in there any crew obviously very fast yeah IPO too still public right still public yeah and has Brett wheel revenue makes over a billion dollars I think

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  Groupon which everybody fell in love with during the web 2.0 era and is still doing strong by the way

• neutral fact_claim Jeff Housenbold

  I was on Groupon sport and we all know how that played out right when Andrew Mason and Google on the flip side Rosen swag made a deal with mark and they were bonding for a billion and Sue didn't want to do the deal and then it was off and now we're his Facebook

• neutral fact_claim Delane Parnell

  it was actually the story of Groupon that really inspired me to get into tech

• bearish fact_claim Unattributed

  we all know that groupon raised at 20 billion dollars went public and a year later is worth 2 billion i mean it's not as though this hasn't happened before

VentureSignalScore 0/100 for groupon, composed from 1 of 4 components (emerging formula), discounted ×0.79 for 30% signal coverage