Re:LivingSocial co-founder Aaron Battalion quits
by joonix on Friday March 29, 2013 @06:03PM
(#5463271)
A net negative force on the world? Seriously? How is that? I got good deals, businesses got to try a new marketing method, many did well, some poorly. No businesses were coerced or forced into offering a coupon on LS. I fail to see how they are a negative force or anything worse than a publisher like Yellow Pages selling ads.
Re:LivingSocial co-founder Aaron Battalion quits
by ryguytilidie on Friday March 29, 2013 @06:45PM
(#5463424)
If only this had been discussed thousands of times in hundreds of different forums...
Whether you want to talk about damage to local businesses or another company that VCs poured millions into with no return, its pretty hard to argue that this company did much good. You getting good deals and ignoring what was necessary to get them isn't really the metric by which we decide if a business is doing good or not. If you're comparing it to the Yellow Pages than that says it all really.
Re:LivingSocial co-founder Aaron Battalion quits
by lawnchair_larry on Friday March 29, 2013 @06:25PM
(#5463362)
If you really don't see how LivingSocial caused more problems than the Yellow Pages, I don't think we will be able to start a discussion.
Nobody was forced to buy those mortgages either, right?
Re:LivingSocial co-founder Aaron Battalion quits
by achompas on Friday March 29, 2013 @06:59PM
(#5463481)
To be fair to parent, they may not know about the terrible experience of a local business who works with Groupon, LS, or another daily deals site.
Re:LivingSocial co-founder Aaron Battalion quits
by jlgreco on Friday March 29, 2013 @07:48PM
(#5463671)
Oh, I don't know. Yellow Pages seems like a far more pervasive problem, even if they do lack the severity in harm. Yellow Pages litters their unwanted obsolete crap everywhere. Those coupon startups are worse than littering, but lack the reach.
Re:LivingSocial co-founder Aaron Battalion quits
by ttrreeww on Friday March 29, 2013 @06:13PM
(#5463313)
Many did poorly. Few did well. Groupon/LivingSocial was a classic pump and dump kind of business, only difference is Groupon reached IPO to dump it on your mutual funds.
Re:LivingSocial co-founder Aaron Battalion quits
by biznickman on Friday March 29, 2013 @06:27PM
(#5463365)
You say this as though the founders got together and made a plan to screw people over. The people running a boiler room operate with the intent of screwing people. The founders of livingsocial, as I know them, never operated with the intent of screwing everybody involved.
Re:LivingSocial co-founder Aaron Battalion quits
by lawnchair_larry on Friday March 29, 2013 @06:40PM
(#5463407)
No, to be clear, I don't want to suggest that they did that at all. I'm sure they went into it with legitimate intentions.
Things like "impact" and "reach" are orthogonal to whether or not something of value was contributed. Let's face it, it was a boiler room with immense reach. Technically I suppose you can call that an "accomplishment", but I wouldn't call it an admirable one.
I'm not saying he's a bad guy (I know nothing about him), but I think that their founders should be doing less boasting and more apologizing. I don't know that the problems they caused were intentional, but I have to think that they must have taken some notice when it was apparent that they were pushing their staff to sell unsustainable products. Sometimes it's hard to notice these things when you're pocketing hundreds of millions of dollars by cashing out early though.