

The real deal with Groupon - pitdesi
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7395218n&tag=contentBody;storyMediaBox

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Gaussian
This is 60 minutes... where we're only 1 year behind the news! This is like
their exposé on high-speed trading that came six months after the Flash Crash.
Brilliant. Not that I hate the show. But their tendency to cherry pick well-
trodden stories always annoys me.

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MengYuanLong
Indeed. And in addition to that, they don't even dig deeper with the extra
time. This expose has all the depth of a pleasant Sunday picnic with Mason.

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AznHisoka
I immediately stopped reading when I saw they were interviewing Mason..
Groupon is a public company, and the CEO/founder of course wants to shine a
positive light on things. You can't learn much here.

~~~
pbreit
I didn't downvote but will say the comment is dumb. In fact, we can learn a
lot from successful public company CEOs like Steve Jobs, Larry Page, Marc
Beniof and Andrew Mason.

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AznHisoka
I didn't say you can't learn much about runnign a company, but the title was
'the real deal with Groupon'. You can't learn the 'real deal' here.

~~~
pbreit
You were clearly generalizing about founder/CEOs.

Lame downvotes, guys.

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teddyknox
The scary part about Groupon's explosive growth is the difficulty of employing
150 people/day without lowering required employee competence.

In the long run I think that the smaller, competing companies with more
competent employees are going to win the market on a city by city basis.

~~~
Smirnoff
ala Living Social ;)

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Johnyma22
This is not journalism, this is a company profile.

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pg_bot
For those complaining about this being a puff piece about groupon...
understand that a media company has little to no incentive to take companies
like groupon to task. Sure they may ask one or two mildly tough questions that
may address some issues that people have with the company, but if they truly
hit hard they would go out of business. No one wants to do an interview where
they will be sweating the entire time, and journalists who gain a tough
reputation will soon be circling the classifieds. This explains why someone
like Larry King can be extremely successful, yet there aren't any hard hitting
interviewers out there.

~~~
lusr
Tim Sebastian hosting HARDtalk was the only true hard hitting interviewer I've
ever seen, although I suppose the BBC doesn't count as a traditional media
company. I was disappointed with the quality of his successors; they turned
HARDtalk into a talk show. Does anybody know of any current shows with a
similar interview style?

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mmonihan
I mean, he's a likeable guy, but something is rotten in Denmark.

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robertp
This probably one of Andrew's best interviews. In my recollection- every piece
of press or articles written about him/groupon have been focused on the
negative fact driven parts that defines groupon.

I did see glimmer of hope that he is a passionate ceo focused on making his
dream of his business become a profitable reality. Right now it is leaning
that his dream isn't sustainable but you never know.

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leak
I guess my headline wasn't good. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3468848>

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fleitz
As a small business owner the interview left several questions unanswered for
me. The most important I had was which investment would I lose least on:
buying GRPN or running a Groupon?

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samstave
Seriously, SOMEONE needs to perform this analysis.

Invest 10K into their stock and 10K into their program, compare results after
N months (12?)

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wtn
Won't play on iOS…

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gab008
Did not see the video-report, the commercial required to watch this takes too
long (more than 15 seconds). I've closed the tab after first 7 seconds.

~~~
ryanjmo
It is a twelve minute video; a minute comercial is less than 10% of the
overall time. It really isn't that unreasonable, in my opinion.

Watching a minute commercial on the internet is a good way to support video on
the web.

~~~
ComputerGuru
_a minute comercial is less than 10% of the overall time. It really isn't that
unreasonable, in my opinion._

I don't care enough about Groupon to hit the link, but I absolutely,
completely, and categorically disagree here.

Aside from the fact that expecting "payment" upfront in the form of watching
an ad before getting any info isn't necessarily the smoothest way of doing it,
I think 10% is _a lot_ of time.

It seems there are really are only two kinds of people, those that understand
that time is money, and those that don't. If I had to "give away" 10% of the
time that I spent absorbing information online, I would probably stop using
the internet altogether. The signal:noise ratio online is already in some
places ridiculously low, especially in video content (which is why I read and
not watch the news, weather, or whatever) and taking an additional 10% premium
on that is ridiculous.

I surf "free" sites for work to gain knowledge and find ideas up to twenty
hours a day. 10% of that time is _two hours_!!!! That's _a lot_ of time.
That's enough time for me to drive to the next state and come back. It's
enough time for me write a simple open source utility and stick it up on
github. It's enough time for me to bill a client five or six hundred dollars
easy (depending on the client and assuming a job is available, etc.).

My problem is this: time does not scale. If you demand something as universal
as "10% of your time" from person A and person B, that's possibly asking
dramatically different stuff. 2 hours of my time can never be directly
compared to two hours of someone else's. Two hours of Bill Gates' time or
Obama's time is worth more than I make in a year, if used correctly. At the
same time, 10% of my time is more than a month of a junior high students life
is worth.

/rant

