

Michael Arrington Invented Groupon in 2005 (Idea 4) - ziadbc
http://techcrunch.com/2005/11/21/companies-id-like-to-profile-but-dont-exist/

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sradnidge
Proving once again, an idea without execution is worth precisely fuck all. All
the non-technical founders out there trying to rip the executors in terms of
equity, take note.

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quattrofan
Exactly, "inventing" is the wrong word, if you invent you build, an idea by
itself is useless without execution.

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chopsueyar
"Useless" is also the wrong word.

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patio11
Greoup buying has been done many times before, including in the bubble.
GroupOn has the distinction of working. I also think it is essentially
orthogonal to the original group buying aspect but that was useful
pretraction.

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quan
If Arrington had invented Groupon, he would have invented Groupon

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nikcub
I wouldn't say invented so much as 'foresaw the large opportunity'.

It popped up on Techcrunch a lot before GroupOn, ie. how is it that the $170B
local ad market has been left untouched by the web?

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briggers
A business idea is conjecture, execution is an experiment.

The word 'invented' here is a vocabulary failure.

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ewalk153
Ideas are cheap, good execution is worth millions (or in Groupon's case
billions).

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random42
<snark> and I invented time machine in 2001 </snark>

Idea means almost nothing. Execution is the hard part.

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paulnelligan
he's also listed spotify/grooveshark there in number 6 ...

anyway, I would hardly call having an idea an invention ... the invention is
the implementation of that idea, which is worth nothing until it's actually
implemented ...

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wushupork
Apparently he also came up with dropbox

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meatmanek
More like Carbonite, Backblaze, Mozy, Crashplan, etc.

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beerglass
Is Dropbox today's answer to idea #1?

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yeahsure
"500 GB for $20 per year" I wish!

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finebanana
and ordered bullet list

