[corford]

These guys obviously aren't the sort of people that are happy to lie by the beach reading a book, quietly enjoying their millions.

They're alpha dogs in the absolute worst sense of the word. They thrive off ego, winning, power, greed, narcissism and all those other lovely traits most people pulling similar moves seem to have.

Think Gordon Geko. Remove the pin stripe suit, fast forward 30 years and change the modus operandi from cynical asset stripping to cynical stock hyping and you get...

Edit: a more charitable view, in Pincus' case, is he isn't THAT evil and instead simply made a hugely expensive mistake buying OMGPOP. That wrecked the balance sheet and he's holding in there trying to recover.

[9999]

That thing that you said there does not describe Andrew Mason in any way shape or form. He used to post on a forum that I spent a lot of time on in the early 00s. He's a clever, funny guy, and he took most of his lessons in ethics from Steve Albini. Before Groupon, he created The Point which was a group funding site for social initiatives that in many ways resembled Kickstarter.

[ahi]

Maybe not Mason, but it seems like a reasonable assessment of Lefkofsky.

[tesseractive]

This. You could believe that Mason was acting in a completely earnest fashion, but was too naive to realize he was being manipulated by Lefkofsky.

As Excutive Chairman in a non-operational role, Lefkofsky is under only a fraction of the unpleasant pressure Mason is under as CEO. If he were guilty of behaving in this way, that would actually jibe pretty well with pg's assertion about people not wanting to run struggling public companies if they can avoid it.

Personally, I am no expert on Groupon. I make no claims that Lefkofsky has behaved in that way, because I don't have any evidence to either validate or invalidate such a hypothesis. It's simply not clear to me that such an accusation is obviously false, as pg claims.

[yuhong]

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4284524 http://pandodaily.com/2012/06/04/source-lefkofsky-and-samwer...

[corford]

I'm happy to stand corrected on Andrew Mason since I don't know an awful lot about him. But as others have said, Lefkofsky definitely appears to fit the profile.