[nchuhoai]

Quite a few commentators on this entry seem to debate whether LS was a "good" or "bad" thing.

The ones debating "good", say it allowed consumers to get great deals, merchants to get coverage, and employees to be employed.

The ones debating "bad", say it caused businesses to do dumb decisions and VC's to do dumb decisions.

All in all, I'd say Groupon/LS was good for the world, because it is exactly to show what happens with these kind of VC-businesses. They need to scale large, and not all of them can become sustainable. Clearly, someone needs to get screwed in the mean time.

We need more profilic failures like Groupon/LS, because obviously the VC model has been the holy grail for quite some time (less so now then lets say two years ago). I don't mean to hate on the VC model (like dhh for example), I like it a lot for many business models. In fact, I liked it for Groupon as well. We just should keep in mind what we are dealing with. Like so many times, information is the key, and the ones that got screwed over are usually the ones that trust blindly.