So Groupon's CEO mistake was that other people DISCOVERED his fraudulent activities? That's a great learning LMAO. It sounds very much he hasn't learned a thing.
He also railed against companies with unsustainable business models. And someone asked him why he went public, if going public was the worst thing he ever did. His reply was that because of how Groupon was financed, it was basically forced to go public.
It was very odd. I got the sense that he got frustrated with all his business ideas failing, ran with the one business idea that actually could succeed (which was basically a pyramid scheme dressed up as marketing), but never really got comfortable in his own head with running a pyramid scheme, so all sorts of psychological defense mechanisms come out when he talks about it. His other actions (like introducing Progressive Equity [1], and his subsequent startups Detour and Descript having legit if less successful business models) also suggest this.
My accounting professor used Groupon as an example of a company that was aware it's business model was unsustainable. Basically, their domestic churn is remarkably high because businesses realize after a couple campaigns on Groupon that they're actually losing money. So, Groupon decides to tap international markets. This does nothing to reduce churn, so it's just a matter of how long it takes before they run out of new businesses to bring into the fold.
It was very odd. I got the sense that he got frustrated with all his business ideas failing, ran with the one business idea that actually could succeed (which was basically a pyramid scheme dressed up as marketing), but never really got comfortable in his own head with running a pyramid scheme, so all sorts of psychological defense mechanisms come out when he talks about it. His other actions (like introducing Progressive Equity [1], and his subsequent startups Detour and Descript having legit if less successful business models) also suggest this.
[1] https://medium.com/detour-dot-com/introducing-progressive-eq...