Groupon acquires Glassmap (YC S11) | Hacker News Reader

Groupon acquires Glassmap (YC S11)

glassmap.posterous.com

59 pointsgeoffwoo15 comments

Any details about the deal? Cash or stock? Vesting? Last year the price of the Groupon stock dropped a lot, now it appears to be stable, but ...

http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/grpn/interactive-chart?timefram...

Yeah, it's really interesting what happens if you sell to a company which is having tough times in the stock market in a largely-stock deal. If you had something (either tech or a great team) who could help turn it around, you could have a lot of the upside of a successful startup, with less risk.

Turning Groupon around is probably easier than making an arbitrary startup successful, too.

I guess it depends on what kind of problems you like to solve. You could probably find a bunch of scale-related or efficiency problems at a lot of faltering larger companies during a turnaround, so if that's your thing, that might be better than overbuilding an earlier stage startup.

Congrats to the team as Glassmap, and good on Groupon for going to get some talent from outside.

But I always hate when an announcement like this ends with "... and our service will be discontinued as of..." which means Groupon wasn't interested in the business so much as the talent.

Groupon is still a thing?

awakeasleep: your account is dead. also you use too many words words words words.

I don't think so.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/11/groupon-acquires-realtime-l...

"No word on what the purchase price was, but this sounds like one of those fancy acquisition/hires that we talk about all of the time, mostly surrounding Facebook and Google. Is Groupon about to get more hip? We’ll find out."

Poor bastards.

Should be really exciting to see what they end up doing at Groupon.

We're looking forward to it!

Suckering more local businesses out of money, I'd assume.

Edit: Hurts cause its true.

I assume you mean Groupon suckers people out of money, not Glassmap. As far as I can tell Glassmap never charged anyone anything, so either they're really good at suckering local businesses out of money, or they weren't doing so.

I also have some issues with Groupon's business practices (mainly, in that they have taken relatively unsophisticated small businesses for a ride at times, and the early cash-out by their finance guys was shady), but:

1) Glassmap looks like a mostly-tech/design team, and are good people. They're not going to be involved in anything shady, and are moral/ethical enough that they're exactly the kind of people you want to have working at a company like Groupon.

2) Groupon actually works great for certain kinds of businesses. For someone with high customer acquisition costs and good lifetime value, and low marginal cost, it's amazing. Like, "get one free laser hair removal session for $25", works great when you then sell the resulting 5 sessions at a "special discount of 25% if you pay after the first session". It's shitty for something like an airport restaurant, and in some cases those businesses stupidly went with the daily deals because they didn't think it through.

In a few years, I suspect the daily deals model will be evolved even more, and local/mobile will have a lot to do with that.

Really Glassmap should be paying all of us now, am I right?

Has anyone used Glassmap? It has pretty good reviews on the app store.

Congrats guys!

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