Programmer Rejects $6B, Gets Fired from His Own Company

We actually had a case study on the groupon accounting scandal as part of my MBA. In a nutshell, they claimed the retailer’s cut of the revenue in their financials improperly which arguably overstated their market power. Other interesting tidbits:

* Before going public, companies need to invest heavily in proper ERP systems. Groupon was allegedly running all its financial reporting off excel prior to IPO.

* At the time, Groupon also forced businesses into really steep discounts (think half off or more). Companies started realizing they either (1) were getting their same customers but giving them huge unnecessary discounts or (2) were acquiring a customer who would never return unless similar discounting was applied. Most businesses would only engage once before feeling burned and not engaging again. Which leads to

* They way groupon would source new deals (at least back in the day) was directly calling businesses to drum up demand. There wasn’t really a self-service portal or anything of that ilk. Groupon employed a bunch of people who literally dialed for dollars all day. It wasn’t really a scalable enterprise.