As someone who continues to watch Groupon I find this sort of headline a bit disingenuous. It is impossible to know the state of an alternate universe, one where things are so radically different.
Looking at the shenanigans around raising a billion dollars and then giving most of that money directly to a few of the insiders, certainly suggested to me and others that Groupon turned down the $6B bid by Google not because they didn't think the company was worth it, but rather that the rules in place regarding selling the company would not have compensated those same insiders the way they wanted to be compensated. Between the payoff and the fact that most of those preferential clauses, and common vs preferred shares, vanish once the company IPOs, a simple explanation of the sequence of events was that they were a way to structure the payout.
That said, Google would have brought a tremendous chunk of value to the Groupon party. They have lots of infrastructure at scale to handle distribution, a huge inventory of businesses who advertise with them, and a world wide sales team. Given that a lot of Groupon's early issues stemmed in part from the way they compensated their sales team, it seems that Google would have had the option of basically firing everyone to reset all those relationships, and then launching with a completely different cost structure.
But we cannot know and speculation, well its fun and all but what do we learn from it?
Looking at the shenanigans around raising a billion dollars and then giving most of that money directly to a few of the insiders, certainly suggested to me and others that Groupon turned down the $6B bid by Google not because they didn't think the company was worth it, but rather that the rules in place regarding selling the company would not have compensated those same insiders the way they wanted to be compensated. Between the payoff and the fact that most of those preferential clauses, and common vs preferred shares, vanish once the company IPOs, a simple explanation of the sequence of events was that they were a way to structure the payout.
That said, Google would have brought a tremendous chunk of value to the Groupon party. They have lots of infrastructure at scale to handle distribution, a huge inventory of businesses who advertise with them, and a world wide sales team. Given that a lot of Groupon's early issues stemmed in part from the way they compensated their sales team, it seems that Google would have had the option of basically firing everyone to reset all those relationships, and then launching with a completely different cost structure.
But we cannot know and speculation, well its fun and all but what do we learn from it?