such statement is a bit far fetched. imho GRPN is no real tech company, and investors (traditional asset managers) know this.
on the other hand, if GRPN goes bust, the reputation of Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Ventures, DST and Kleiner Perkins, will be clearly damaged towards IPO investors.
If the last 5 years have taught us any lessons at all, it's that assuming traditional asset managers know anything--no matter how obvious--can get everyone in a terrible amount of trouble.
I think that at most it will make investors maybe think twice about the potential of a company. For the most part there shouldn't be any adverse affects on other companies. Especially the other ones that have gone IPO recently, they're all doing well.
Groupon is hardly even a tech company, and their business model is one that has been seriously criticized since the outset. There will be little collateral damage from their decline.
They are dotcom. They operate a website and they send their deals by email. The founder is young, does silly things (cat on head picture not something they do at Boeing or GE) and has been profiled in major media. They will be associated with tech whether deserved or not.
Defacto. If there was no connection nobody in our "business" would be talking about it.
Here's the recent IPO's. Splunk is tech. Nobody else has any connection and would never be mentioned as "dotcom" or tech.
There may be a world of folks who think Groupon = tech = uses email = young, but that definition presupposes failure for all tech companies because of their inherent silliness.
But online sales is made much more for books than pet supplies. The library of pet supplies is nothing compared to the vast variety of books. So selling books online with a good search and novel distribution model is what set Amazon apart from pets.com
Good question, and I think the answer has to be subjective.
My attempt at an answer: companies that either do things that couldn't be done before they were online because of the nature of the product/service, or where it couldn't be done before because the code has is complex.
So pets.com, really they were doing what shops had been doing for years, they just happened to do it online. Reddit on the other hand, there's not really an offline equivilent. Hipmunk, there's offline equivilents (travel agents) but the tech behind Hipmunk is what makes is a good company, not just "we've moved our travel agency online".
But yeah, no doubt there are YC companies that aren't necceasrily "tech companies", and on the other side there are companies not thought of as tech companies where technology plays a huge, huge role.
Quick question: has YC funded any fabless semiconductor shops? (this isn't snark, I legitimately don't know). That has always been my representative sample of 'a real tech company.' I may be biased though, since I was brought up as an EE :).
I'd be very surprised, as the capital outlay to start even a small ASIC team is not small. A single simulator license costs considerably more than what the fine folks at YC invest in the companies they have under their wing.
on the other hand, if GRPN goes bust, the reputation of Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Ventures, DST and Kleiner Perkins, will be clearly damaged towards IPO investors.