The GOP seems more and more against things going the way of the "public Interest" in favor of the few connected, this makes it even harder to build a future with the more and more progressive majority.
It’s always very sad to see these Big companies give hard times to startups mostly for the simple reason that they can. They don't generally give a good reason, with a generic overnight internal policy rule they will just shut down a service. It’s even more so when you think that they too were startup. Just hang in there Unglue.it team, implement a new payment process, it’s the hard way to success I guess.
random gripe: if you use a different email on gravatar than on github, your gravatar wont show up on github.
it's becoming pretty standard, especially among techies, to have a unique email per site, so you can easily tell if a site is selling your address (or is a victim of a hack, like dropbox was).
These guys should have taken the 4 billion from Google. Their unfair advantage is pretty much inexistent that leave them extremely vulnerable to any competition.
I think it actually says more that Google was willing to pay that much... for what, exactly?
As for the merits of not taking the deal, I think we should be clear – the early investors and many early employees have done alright and most likely won't be losing their shirt like any of the recent investors:
A great line from the Short logic analysis: "At the moment, it’s costing them $1.43 to make $1, and it doesn’t look like it’s getting any cheaper."
This was the kind of thing that thoughtful business analysts were noticing in the weeks before the Groupon IPO: the company didn't have a sensible earnings model, even if it had "revenue" that dug it deeper and deeper into a hole.
Indeed. Where's the IP? It's not like there's anything of value in Groupon – customers? no lock in/low switching costs. Vendors? Every small business person I've heard talk about their experience with Groupon has said they'd never use it again.
