10 years ago today, Groupon turned down Google’s $6B offer | Hacker News Reader

10 years ago today, Groupon turned down Google’s $6B offer

chicagotribune.com

36 pointsdredmorbius11 comments

    From: Google Groupon
    Date: September 1, 2016
    Subject: An update on Groupon

Dear Google Groupon user,

We regret to inform you...

You know the drill

Someone would still have a big chunk of that 6 billion. It doesn’t matter how sweat I put into something, I’d let it go for that much.

Maybe that is why I will not be a founder :-)

The Groupon founders took the money and ran before the IPO, so yeah they got it.

Today it has a market cap of $918 million.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GRPN

If google wants, they could buy it for a steep discount today.

> Yahoo “was kind of this graveyard for cool companies”

Yahoo! actually decent at finding and buying Flickrs and Tumblrs. I'm not sure if they went there to die because Yahoo! didn't know how to grow them further, or because, as cool as they were, there wasn't actually that great of a business in the first place. Maybe being courted by Yahoo! should have been the sign to take the Google deal because Yahoo! being interested in you isn't a good sign.

After acquiring Maktoob, Yahoo! killed dvd4arab, one of the biggest Arabic content forums with over a decade of content, everything from political and sports discussion to poetry to (unfortunately) links to pirated content.

They didn't offer a backup or anything of even the 99% of subforums which were not involved in any piracy related activities. Sad..I still miss the awesome friendly environment that existed there..

Odd that the article didn't mention that the Groupon model wasn't actually sustainable because most of its growth was from desperate merchants and desperate customers coming out of a recession, and most of the customers didn't become repeat buyers. It made for a great shopping trend, but it wasn't going to survive.

It’s an often quoted story , but having built a couple of companies, I believe a founder takes a decision based on the information available at that instant. It’s always a 50/50 deal, sometimes you get it right, sometimes you learn.

6 years ago Snapchat turned down $3B offer, today Snapchat worth $70B

Groupon reached a valuation of $30 Billion at one point...for years, the hype was how smart they were in rejecting that Google offer!

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