And it's worth noting that Groupon seems to have a social purpose that I'm not sure most people who aren't economists would be able to articulate: abetting price discrimination, and presumably eeking us closer to the efficiency in those markets that use it.
Any one pharmaceutical company would be valued a couple of orders of magnitude higher than Groupon, let alone one that actually "defeated aging". Billions and billions are already invested in that. Pfizer for example, has a market cap over $200B. [2]
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/21/technology/google-makes-1-...
[2] https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...
It's not. Groupon is worth $5 billion. Any of those things would be worth trillions.
So where's the investment capital for them then? They're all chronically underfunded.
The difference, I think, is risk. Any one of those would be worth trillions if it worked, but the risk of any approach failing is very high.
Everywhere. Look at the numbers - Groupon has only taken a total of 1B in investments. SpaceX recently took 1B alone from Google in a single investment - and on top of the public billions spent on NASA, and private billions spent on SpaceX, Boeing, Lockheed - and the numerous other academic research projects.
The difference, I'm sure, is publicity. I'm sure the Groupon IPO got a ton more press than the curiosity landing. You simply don't hear about how the billions are being spent on those project because they don't have relatively massive returns in 5-8 years like a social coupon company would, and large money is spent on relatively small, uninteresting steps.
Likewise it isn't wise for a private fund to aggressively invest in these spaces. What would be an individual firm's financial return on developing the internet? A lot less than the financial return on Google.
It's possible that in the future someone will invent financial vehicles to make it possible to make those kinds of investments in the private sector, but it hasn't happened yet.
Edit: in a sense there is already something, namely government bonds, ETFs, and long-term positions in currency markets. But those are too coarse-grained. What we need is some way for private investors to make private investments in things that are all of: high risk, high payoff, and broad payoff.
[1]although some of the mutual fund investors the article sniggers at for rushing to buying secondary market shares in the private market probably made out before the post-IPO bubble burst too...
Edit: I stand corrected on the founder share sale, which appears to be part of a more orderly divestment than my source claimed.
Why is increasing population indefinitely such a priority. Isn't there enough of us already?
Oh, save 50% on a meal at a restaurant I never went to before? Hell yes, sign me up! This will distract me from the depressing reality of life for a good ninety minutes at least.
(This is a parody of the average Joe, not actually my own thoughts.)