Groupon founder and CEO Andrew Mason was interviewed by Techonomy’s David Kirkpatrick on stage at the annual DLD confab in Munich, Germany.
Below are my notes – Mason’s responses are slightly paraphrased. → Read More
You can say a lot of things about Groupon, but not that they lack a great sense of humor over there. This morning, the company distributed a press release touting a new invention called Clicky, the Clickable Value-Wheel (make sure you watch the behind-the-scenes video below too).
The company invites players to sign in with their Facebook account and then spin the wheel to potentially score a discount on select Groupons ($5, $10, $50 or $100). → Read More
To combat the lack of transparency around customer satisfaction with daily deals, Groupon today launched a new version of its Merchant Center. It includes the real-time percentage of deal customers who would recommend the business to a friend, plus their comments. Customer satisfaction is a big question for merchants wondering if they should start or continue running daily deals. Data on satisfaction rates is scarce, though. Worse, a 2010 study showed that just 36% of customers spend more than the value of a deal, and just 20% return to the business. The feature could be a double-edged sword, encouraging retention or desertion depending on a merchant’s feedback. → Read More
Groupon has continued its (talent) acquisition spree with the recent purchase of a hot Silicon Valley startup before they even launched – and with extremely little fanfare.
We’ve learned that Campfire Labs, which was founded by ex-Googler Sakina Arsiwala (previously Head of International at YouTube) and her husband, social search technology expert Naveen Koorakula (previously at search companies like Inktomi, Yahoo and Picch), was quietly bought by Groupon. → Read More
Sigh. Here we go again.
A patent troll called Mount Hamilton Partners has filed two separate patent infringement lawsuits against daily deals juggernaut Groupon and Google, which also operates a digital couponing business called Google Offers.
Mount Hamilton Partners, which purports to be an ‘investor in technology companies’ on its website, garnered headlines about two and a half years ago when it sued OpenTable right before the restaurant reservation service provider went public. Now they’re going after Google and Groupon. → Read More
Now this makes a lot of sense. Groupon this morning announced its latest product, dubbed Groupon Scheduler, an online appointment service that makes it easier for both end users and merchants to go from offer to actual booking.
Groupon Scheduler is based on technology from OpenCal, a Vancouver, Canada-based startup Groupon apparently – quietly – acquired in September 2011. The new product will become available to Groupon merchants and consumers in Sacramento and Miami beginning on December 7, 2011 (i.e. today) and be rolled out in other markets “soon after”. → Read More
Looking for a last-minute holiday gift? How about that Groupon you never used? Daily deal vouchers wouldn’t actually make bad presents if there was a way to gift them that didn’t involve an email printout tucked into a card. That’s where Presentify.me, which turns deal vouchers into attractive gift certificates, can help.
→ Read More
You don’t need to work on Wall Street to have seen this one coming: Today, for the first time since its NASDAQ debut on November 4th, Groupon has fallen below its IPO price, which initially placed the company’s stock at $20 per share. The company’s stock opened (at first trade) at $28 per share, with a market cap of $17.8 billion.
It’s currently hovering at about $17.30 per share, down nearly 14 percent on the day. The daily deal behemoth’s stock has been on a three-day slide, and this marks the third day in a row of double digit declines. This came after the stock hit its all-time (really, all-month since IPO) high on Friday at $26.19 per share.
Welcome to the public markets, Groupon. → Read More
Forget Festivus, today sees the return of the real fake holiday Grouponicus. The site from daily deal giant Groupon is back for the second time with a wide selection of curated deals Groupon users can buy for their friends as holiday gifts.
Last year, Grouponicus was available to 15 cities, but today’s launch sees Grouponicus in 41 cities across the U.S. and Canada, including big metro regions like New York, L.A. and Dallas. → Read More
Yelp and Groupon are both being sued by a company called Mobile Commerce Framework, an obscure patent troll that earlier filed a similar patent infringement suit against Foursquare.
On April 6, 2010, Mobile Commerce Framework (MCF) was issued US Patent No. 7,693,752 by the USPTO, for reasons unknown to mankind. In summary, this patent describes:
(After the jump) → Read More
After going from selling slippers with flashlights to being a 10,000 employee-strong business in three years, Groupon had its initial public offering today, to much fanfare and well, the opposite reaction. The offering was priced at $20 and experienced an exuberant opening pop of $28, which after a day of trading settled down a bit to close at $26.
→ Read More
After some timing drama, daily deal site Groupon finally has begun trading on the NASDAQ this morning, in the most hotly anticipated and largest Internet company IPO since Google. The company — which trades under the ticker $GRPN — priced its shares at $20 last night, but began trading at $28, an increase of 40%.
Like LinkedIn, Groupon is only floating a small amount of shares, 35 million – about 5.5% of its 637.3 million shares outstanding. The first trade would pin its market cap at 17.8 billion, with a 980 million raise. → Read More
‘Tis the season of the IPO. So far, 2011 has seen companies like LinkedIn, Pandora, Yandex, Zillow, and RenRen come to market. As you’ve heard, Groupon and Zynga are next up in the IPO pipeline, with both companies arriving on public markets within weeks of each other. Groupon, barring some catastrophic event, will begin trading publicly on NASDAQ November 4th, with shares set at $20 a pop at a valuation of $12.7 billion.
Zynga, too, is expected to trade on NASDAQ beginning the week before Thanksgiving, and according to its revised S-1 filing with the SEC, a “third party” has valued the company at approximately $14 billion. In the same ballpark as Groupon.
So, the question becomes this: Notwithstanding their potential overvaluations at the time they go public, which of the two companies stands to be the most successful and the most valuable in the long run, post-IPO? → Read More
Groupon has priced its IPO at $20 a share according to reports, which would give the company a $12.7 billion valuation and mean that it’d be seeking $690 million in tomorrow’s offering, by floating only 5.4 percent of its shares.
→ Read More
At this point, it’s no secret: Gaopeng (Groupon’s nascent effort in China) is a train wreck. By September of this year, the seven-month old endeavor had already accumulated $46.4 million in net losses with just $2.1 million in revenue. Meanwhile, a number of competitors in the region are predicting profitability within months.
In today’s “Attack Of The Clones” panel at Disrupt Beijing, a few of Groupon’s fiercest Chinese competitors took the opportunity to, well, attack. While obviously a bit subjective, their words do provide some insight on how a company so massive in the US could tank so dramatically on the other side of the world. → Read More
Despite a couple big-name companies like Groupon and Zynga lining up for IPOs, the demand for private company stock on alternative exchanges keeps rising. Private stock transactions on SecondMarket in the first three quarters of 2011 totaled $435 million, a 73 percent increase over the same period last year. In the third quarter alone, there were $167 million worth of transactions on SecondMarket, up 49 percent from the second quarter.
Who is buying all of these shares? SecondMarket breaks it out in its third quarter report. Wealthy “accredited individuals” made up the largest share of buyers (63 percent by dollar amount), followed by asset managers (22.3 percent of transactions), hedge funds (7.8 percent), and venture capital funds (5.1 percent). VC funds became much more active on SecondMarket in the quarter, accounting for 17.5 percent of the transactions by number. Last quarter, VCs made up less than 1 percent of transactions (and only 0.2 percent by dollar amount). → Read More
With the Groupon roadshow underway and the countdown to its IPO expected to culminate on November 4th, the long-anticipated arrival of the daily deals giant on the public markets is almost at hand. But the journey hasn’t been without its fair share of hiccups. While the company currently owns a 54 percent share of the daily deals market and there were some bright spots in its third quarter earnings report, the daily deals juggernaut has fallen from a once hoped-for $25 to $30 billion valuation to one that will likely be around $11.4 billion.
Comparatively speaking, going with that questionable early valuation from its underwriters, at as much as 62 percent off, Groupon itself now represents one helluva deal for the eager coupon clipping investor. Thanks to some hilarious characters on the team at Runningshoes.com, we now have an awesome mock deal in which Groupon itself is offering its common stock for the discounted price of $16 a share. → Read More
Groupon has taken a lot of heat over the last six months, some of it deserved, some of it perhaps a bit excessive. There are definitely legitimate concerns about Groupon’s value for small businesses and merchants, but lofty valuations aside, we have to remember that Groupon is still a young company, and the future remains unwritten.
Now, while Andrew Mason wearing a suit and a tie while pitching to potential investors is enough to make anyone nervous, the daily deals behemoth has taken some positive steps of late, namely its closing of the redemption loop with Groupon Rewards. Read Erick’s analysis here.
That being said, is it all sunshine and moonbeams for Groupon at present? It’s enormous valuation might lead one to see it as such, but the company shared its Q3 stats today, which were buried in its updated SEC filing. → Read More
Andrew Mason (30), who co-founded Groupon and currently serves as its CEO, hasn’t often been spotted wearing a business suit and tie.
But when you’re pitching investors on an initial public offering, looking to raise over half a billion dollars at a $11.4 billion valuation, I guess you kinda have to.
This morning, Groupon’s IPO roadshow video presentation was published and is publicly available here (via The New York Times). → Read More
And so it begins. Groupon this morning published the expected price range of its shares, to be sold in an upcoming initial public offering, in an SEC filing.
The daily deals company plans to sell 30 million shares at $16 to $18 a pop, which would see Groupon raise between $480 million and $540 million. This would give Groupon a valuation as high as $11.4 billion. → Read More
