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There's a comment which suggested that this happened in "England" (the UK, grrr) but the roles were reversed and Groupon did this to a local competitor. Does anyone know anything about this?

Quote: "and this was after you did the same thing to some poor guy in england."

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He's probably referring at the technique they've used to get the groupon.com domain from a guy living up in UK. This guy bought groupon.com with the intention of building a group coupon business. While he was sitting on it, the real groupon guys built the real thing and registered the trademark in US (which, somehow, extends to the UK) and told the poor english guy to either take 250k for the domain or prepare to be sued. He accepted the money and everyone was happy.

If only he had taken Groupon equity; he'd be a multi-millionaire. Does anyone know if the owner of the groupon.com domain had such an offer?

I know of someone who started up in this space in London in about '07. I talked to him the other day asking what happened and he said "oh, Groupon just overtook the market".

He didn't hold anything against them for it, just said they had better vision and iterated faster.

(that's probably not the story you were thinking of, but your comment happened to remind me of our conversation)

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