You implied, Zynga isn't a pump-and-dump scheme because Mark Pincus still runs it, and nobody would inflict the management of a poorly-performing public company on themselves. Well, that's just not true.
There are better arguments against the assertion that Groupon is a pump-and-dump scheme than "it must suck to be Andrew Mason these days" (it does not suck to be Andrew Mason, by the way). For instance, Groupon was open about its liabilities and the enormous risks it faced, and its whole industry sector was very carefully scrutinized.
I'm done arguing this point. My nerdly brain just couldn't handle the idea that being Andrew Mason in Q4'12 is so painful that simply holding his job imputes him credibility.
Agreed. If Pincus and Mason are having a hard time now, I'm sure they can have a good cry in their mansion or on their yacht, weekends in Aspen, luge lessons in Zurich, private Zoroastrian monk mentoring, perhaps a custom birthday song written by the Rolling Stones -- you know, the typical way of handling such hard times as these.
I worked in business consulting for a bit. Part of what I learned is that at least some emperors have no clothes. There were really two main types I encountered:
(1) Extremely competent, hard-working executives who try their best to build real value.
(2) Fast talking dominance machines. Sociopaths, really. They make big promises, send a lot of primate dominance gestures, and generally build vapid unsustainable businesses that eventually fail. Yet the failure never sticks to them, and it often never sticks to their initial investors. Usually it's handed off to someone down the line (later investors, the public, employees, etc.).
When I see a resume that consists of a series of a series of unsustainable businesses where the early investors and executives made out well by handing a bag of flaming poo to later investors, I tend to suspect that we're dealing with category (2) players.
I also suspect that when I hear of extremely magnetic reality-distortion-field personality types. There is a certain kind of charisma that I take as a contrarian indicator.
The key point here, I think, is to be very careful to distinguish between a failure to build sustainability, and willful maneuvering for maximum personal gain at the expense of sustainability. The former is a noble failure, the later is deeply unethical (if not illegal) and ne'er the twain shall meet!
Because, at least in Pincus' case, he can't be removed. It would be pretty hard to argue that he wouldn't have been canned under different circumstances.
"Pump and dump" may be a bit much. But I'm glad that it's coming to light that business shadiness doesn't start and stop with the financial industry; it occurs everywhere there are substantial amounts of money changing hands. The Valley has some pretty serious scum-baggery going on. I hope we hold the people who promoted this stuff accountable in the court of public opinion.
My point is that "good vs. evil" style commentary is useless. It automatically lowers the commenters' mean IQ by 15 points.
This, of course, is the reason discussing politics (as opposed to policy) is generally a waste of time.
No one can force them to stay. They're already obscenely rich. Think about what their motivations must be.
Either way it's not a pump and dump, and their goal is to turn the company around.
They're alpha dogs in the absolute worst sense of the word. They thrive off ego, winning, power, greed, narcissism and all those other lovely traits most people pulling similar moves seem to have.
Think Gordon Geko. Remove the pin stripe suit, fast forward 30 years and change the modus operandi from cynical asset stripping to cynical stock hyping and you get...
Edit: a more charitable view, in Pincus' case, is he isn't THAT evil and instead simply made a hugely expensive mistake buying OMGPOP. That wrecked the balance sheet and he's holding in there trying to recover.
As Excutive Chairman in a non-operational role, Lefkofsky is under only a fraction of the unpleasant pressure Mason is under as CEO. If he were guilty of behaving in this way, that would actually jibe pretty well with pg's assertion about people not wanting to run struggling public companies if they can avoid it.
Personally, I am no expert on Groupon. I make no claims that Lefkofsky has behaved in that way, because I don't have any evidence to either validate or invalidate such a hypothesis. It's simply not clear to me that such an accusation is obviously false, as pg claims.
I would openly run a company into the ground if I got hundreds of millions of dollars in the process like they Zynga or Groupon guys did.