"Groupon's chairman, Eric Lefkofsky has a history of financial scandal.
One time he sold a startup called Starbelly to a bricks-and-mortar company that later went bankrupt.
In a lawsuit that followed, an email from Lefkofsky surfaced. In it he wrote: "Lets start having fun... lets get funky... let's announce everything... let's be WILDLY positive in our forecasts... lets take this thing to the extreme... if we get wacked [sic] on the ride down-who gives a shit... THE TIME TO GET RADICAL IS NOW... WE HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE..."
Years later, Lefkofsky hired a contract worker named Andrew Mason.
In Mason, he discovered a naive genius and gave him the money start what everyone thought would be a legitimate business.
But then Mason stumbled into a business with an explosively growing top-line (not bottom line or even middle line), and – so believe the conspiracy theorists – Lefkofsky saw another opportunity to be "wildly positive" for profit, even if it meant fudging accounting here and there.
So Groupon called itself profitable when it wasn't. It moved marketing expenses into capital costs. It confused net and gross revenues. And that's just what it got caught doing.
And when it was caught, Groupon's line was: oops, that was a dumb mistake. And while the rest of us rubes believed them, conspiracy theorists say Groupon's people are actually "dumb like a fox."
In this view, the reason Lefkofsky insists that Mason be CEO is that Mason is young, naive, and plausibly prone to innocent mistakes.
These people believe the reason Google exec Margo Georgiadis only spent a few months at the company is that she came in, looked around, freaked out, and got out.
These suspicious folks will say: Lefkofsky and company may have believed they were bending rules in order to get Groupon to a point where it could become a legitimate business with clean accounting, but that's still fraud."
"The history of Groupon’s chairman, Eric Lefkofsky, was also unearthed, showing a lawsuit-prone entrepreneur who flipped a dot-com company in 1999 only to have it lead to bankruptcy a year later for the firm he had sold it to. And Groupon’s filing shows that when the company privately raised $950 million in a pre-I.P.O. round in January, it paid out $810 million of that to its investors and employees, a red flag for any investor. (Mr. Lefkofsky and his wife took home about $319 million of the total.)"
"Groupon's chairman, Eric Lefkofsky has a history of financial scandal.
One time he sold a startup called Starbelly to a bricks-and-mortar company that later went bankrupt.
In a lawsuit that followed, an email from Lefkofsky surfaced. In it he wrote: "Lets start having fun... lets get funky... let's announce everything... let's be WILDLY positive in our forecasts... lets take this thing to the extreme... if we get wacked [sic] on the ride down-who gives a shit... THE TIME TO GET RADICAL IS NOW... WE HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE..."
Years later, Lefkofsky hired a contract worker named Andrew Mason.
In Mason, he discovered a naive genius and gave him the money start what everyone thought would be a legitimate business.
But then Mason stumbled into a business with an explosively growing top-line (not bottom line or even middle line), and – so believe the conspiracy theorists – Lefkofsky saw another opportunity to be "wildly positive" for profit, even if it meant fudging accounting here and there.
So Groupon called itself profitable when it wasn't. It moved marketing expenses into capital costs. It confused net and gross revenues. And that's just what it got caught doing.
And when it was caught, Groupon's line was: oops, that was a dumb mistake. And while the rest of us rubes believed them, conspiracy theorists say Groupon's people are actually "dumb like a fox." In this view, the reason Lefkofsky insists that Mason be CEO is that Mason is young, naive, and plausibly prone to innocent mistakes.
These people believe the reason Google exec Margo Georgiadis only spent a few months at the company is that she came in, looked around, freaked out, and got out.
These suspicious folks will say: Lefkofsky and company may have believed they were bending rules in order to get Groupon to a point where it could become a legitimate business with clean accounting, but that's still fraud."
Source: http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-04-03/tech/31279229...