

Groupon acquires Glassmap (YC S11) - geoffwoo
http://glassmap.posterous.com/glassmap-joins-groupon

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gus_massa
Any details about the deal? Cash or stock? Vesting? Last year the price of the
Groupon stock dropped a lot, now it appears to be stable, but ...

[http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/grpn/interactive-
chart?timefram...](http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/grpn/interactive-
chart?timeframe=1y&charttype=line)

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rdl
Yeah, it's really interesting what happens if you sell to a company which is
having tough times in the stock market in a largely-stock deal. If you had
something (either tech or a great team) who could help turn it around, you
could have a lot of the upside of a successful startup, with less risk.

Turning Groupon around is probably easier than making an arbitrary startup
successful, too.

I guess it depends on what kind of problems you like to solve. You could
probably find a bunch of scale-related or efficiency problems at a lot of
faltering larger companies during a turnaround, so if that's your thing, that
might be better than overbuilding an earlier stage startup.

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unreal37
Congrats to the team as Glassmap, and good on Groupon for going to get some
talent from outside.

But I always hate when an announcement like this ends with "... and our
service will be discontinued as of..." which means Groupon wasn't interested
in the business so much as the talent.

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brennenHN
Groupon is still a thing?

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batgaijin
awakeasleep: your account is dead. also you use too many words words words
words.

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unreal37
[http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/11/groupon-acquires-
realtime-l...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/11/groupon-acquires-realtime-
location-aware-service-glassmap-to-help-you-find-deals/)

"No word on what the purchase price was, but this sounds like one of those
fancy acquisition/hires that we talk about all of the time, mostly surrounding
Facebook and Google. Is Groupon about to get more hip? We’ll find out."

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smiddereens
Poor bastards.

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rdl
Should be really exciting to see what they end up doing at Groupon.

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clobber
Suckering more local businesses out of money, I'd assume.

Edit: Hurts cause its true.

~~~
rdl
I assume you mean Groupon suckers people out of money, not Glassmap. As far as
I can tell Glassmap never charged anyone anything, so either they're _really_
good at suckering local businesses out of money, or they weren't doing so.

I also have some issues with Groupon's business practices (mainly, in that
they have taken relatively unsophisticated small businesses for a ride at
times, and the early cash-out by their finance guys was shady), but:

1) Glassmap looks like a mostly-tech/design team, and are good people. They're
not going to be involved in anything shady, and are moral/ethical enough that
they're exactly the kind of people you want to have working at a company like
Groupon.

2) Groupon actually works great for certain kinds of businesses. For someone
with high customer acquisition costs and good lifetime value, and low marginal
cost, it's amazing. Like, "get one free laser hair removal session for $25",
works great when you then sell the resulting 5 sessions at a "special discount
of 25% if you pay after the first session". It's shitty for something like an
airport restaurant, and in some cases those businesses stupidly went with the
daily deals because they didn't think it through.

In a few years, I suspect the daily deals model will be evolved even more, and
local/mobile will have a lot to do with that.

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TommyDANGerous
Has anyone used Glassmap? It has pretty good reviews on the app store.

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swampthing
Congrats guys!

