LivingSocial co-founder Aaron Battalion quits | Hacker News Reader

LivingSocial co-founder Aaron Battalion quits

aaronbatalion.com

67 pointsfunkbot37 comments

Something about rats and sinking ships. Hope all the talent there is planning their exit before the company exits for them. LivingSocial is not long for this world.

Is anything LivingSocial did something to be proud of? It seems like the majority of those who invested in or did business with LivingSocial suffered greatly. That's fine, sometimes things don't work out, but I don't know why you'd brag about it.

"millions of consumers around the world have experienced their local cities because of our products"

Sounds like he is reaching, just a bit...

> "millions of consumers around the world have experienced their local cities because of our products"

I think its a fair assessment, but not the full story.

Millions of people did do things they wouldn't normally do. No way in hell I'm going to pay $200 for a family "dolpin tour" where you usually don't see dolphins, but when it's on LivingSocial (or similar sites) for $50? Sure, why not.

Now, whether it was a boon or bust for local businesses or not is a debated topic. I'm pretty sure that dolphin tour place actually lost money on my trip, or came close to break-even at most, and we were one time customers.

Not to mention that a normal, no-dolphins-promised boat ride may be less than $50 undiscounted anyway.

Really weird for a dolphin tour business to do a coupon deal... How on earth would somebody become a regular customer of a dolphin tour ?

I would imagine they're hoping the people using the coupons have a good time and then tell their friends about it, and the tour gains more money through word-of-mouth.

Exactly.

They had revenue, which can't be said about most big startups nowadays.

Profit is another story, though.

If I had co-founded LivingSocial, I would not have considered the last n years of my life wasted, nor do I believe the majority of contributors here would either.

I would be so lucky to have cofounded a company like LS. My score so far is zero.

I met Aaron when I was on a panel with him at Bootstrap Maryland, before Living Social was big. He was a class act then, and he obviously still is.

Living Social -- more than any other company in the last 5 years -- showed that the DC area startup community is alive and well and can play with the big boys in the consumer internet space. LS almost single-handedly overcame the region's inferiority complex in this regard. I hope Aaron is sufficiently proud of the role he played there.

Quite a few commentators on this entry seem to debate whether LS was a "good" or "bad" thing.

The ones debating "good", say it allowed consumers to get great deals, merchants to get coverage, and employees to be employed.

The ones debating "bad", say it caused businesses to do dumb decisions and VC's to do dumb decisions.

All in all, I'd say Groupon/LS was good for the world, because it is exactly to show what happens with these kind of VC-businesses. They need to scale large, and not all of them can become sustainable. Clearly, someone needs to get screwed in the mean time.

We need more profilic failures like Groupon/LS, because obviously the VC model has been the holy grail for quite some time (less so now then lets say two years ago). I don't mean to hate on the VC model (like dhh for example), I like it a lot for many business models. In fact, I liked it for Groupon as well. We just should keep in mind what we are dealing with. Like so many times, information is the key, and the ones that got screwed over are usually the ones that trust blindly.

There is a bit of irony in the timing. Living Socials first product was visual bookshelf. They pivoted to daily deals business.

Fast forward 6 years, amazon acquires goodreads while all daily deal sites are struggling.

There are a lot of negative comments about LivingSocial's business model. The irony is that a lot of what I see on HN and in tech is about mobile, social media, and games.

Why are all the comments so negative on this thread? Aaron has personally contributed a ton to the communities he's a part of and I have no doubt the same goes for LivingSocial. It's a company of thousands of employees and one that most definitely has a massive consumer impact. Whether or not the business thrives or fails, few people on this site can say they founded something with anywhere near as much a reach as LS. That's an accomplishment.

I think the comments on this and other LivingSocial threads are negative because many have the perception that LivingSocial was a net negative force on the world. This is a pretty reasonable reaction.

Things like "impact" and "reach" are orthogonal to whether or not something of value was contributed. Let's face it, it was a boiler room with immense reach. Technically I suppose you can call that an "accomplishment", but I wouldn't call it an admirable one.

I'm not saying he's a bad guy (I know nothing about him), but I think that their founders should be doing less boasting and more apologizing. I don't know that the problems they caused were intentional, but I have to think that they must have taken some notice when it was apparent that they were pushing their staff to sell unsustainable products. Sometimes it's hard to notice these things when you're pocketing hundreds of millions of dollars by cashing out early though.

A net negative force on the world? Seriously? How is that? I got good deals, businesses got to try a new marketing method, many did well, some poorly. No businesses were coerced or forced into offering a coupon on LS. I fail to see how they are a negative force or anything worse than a publisher like Yellow Pages selling ads.

Many did poorly. Few did well. Groupon/LivingSocial was a classic pump and dump kind of business, only difference is Groupon reached IPO to dump it on your mutual funds.

If you really don't see how LivingSocial caused more problems than the Yellow Pages, I don't think we will be able to start a discussion.

Nobody was forced to buy those mortgages either, right?

To be fair to parent, they may not know about the terrible experience of a local business who works with Groupon, LS, or another daily deals site.

Oh, I don't know. Yellow Pages seems like a far more pervasive problem, even if they do lack the severity in harm. Yellow Pages litters their unwanted obsolete crap everywhere. Those coupon startups are worse than littering, but lack the reach.

If only this had been discussed thousands of times in hundreds of different forums...

Whether you want to talk about damage to local businesses or another company that VCs poured millions into with no return, its pretty hard to argue that this company did much good. You getting good deals and ignoring what was necessary to get them isn't really the metric by which we decide if a business is doing good or not. If you're comparing it to the Yellow Pages than that says it all really.

You say this as though the founders got together and made a plan to screw people over. The people running a boiler room operate with the intent of screwing people. The founders of livingsocial, as I know them, never operated with the intent of screwing everybody involved.

No, to be clear, I don't want to suggest that they did that at all. I'm sure they went into it with legitimate intentions.

I don't see anyone making negative comments about this guy as an individual, just Living Social as a business.

Personally, I couldn't find much positive to say about them when they started laying people off back in November[1] and I don't see much positive now.

You're right, I can't claim to have created anything with "near as much reach as LS" or as the same "massive consumer impact".

However, I can't see what reach or impact LS had that fellow failing business Groupon didn't.

As I said back in November, it sure looks like they just copied a momentarily hot, yet broken business model, snagged a bunch of fancy office space and sought tax breaks [2] while posting huge loses.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4845253

2: http://www.bizjournals.com/washington/news/2012/07/10/living...

When you're a co-founder of a business, and someone rags on it, they take it very personally. They might not make it apparent to the public, but they care, a lot.

If he cared that much, then why would he leave? A captain should go down with his ship. Here's a guy who made a boatload of money, and now he's leaving 4,000 employees behind who are probably going to be looking for new jobs inside of a year. He should take it personally.

Because it's Hacker News. Nothing gets reported here without half of this community being obnoxiously negative about it, as if we've all could have built something like LivingSocial if we wanted to.

Or, because, you know, the many, stated legitimate reasons people have? But yeah, why consider those when you can just pretend like an entire community is dumber you?

I'm not sure who you're responding to, because:

Not entire: half. And not dumber: negative.

But I rest my case.

> "obnoxiously negative"..."as if we could have built anything like LivingSocial"

That's certainly implying that the negative posts are both un-constructive and omitting important & obvious context. That sounds a lot like "dumber" to me.

[insert obligatory copy-and-paste of Man in the Arena]

The end must be near.

That was obvious for a long time.

Last big discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5255362

I remember that, but wow, that was only 36 days ago.

Not much to report... but an incredible love of ellipses. Maybe I burned a few periods, but, man, you have no idea what kinds of grammatical innovation are yet to come. Always remember... punctuate to live don't live to punctuate.

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