7 (somewhat meta) thoughts on the Groupon IPO

Andrew Mason doesn’t get enough credit as a CEO.
Scaling an organization from 300 to 7000 in 18 months without falling apart is pretty much unheard of, so far as I can tell.
Groupon is not an internet company. It’s the fastest-growing commodities manufacturer in history, and should be valued as such.
Internet : Group Buying :: Railroads : Industrial Agriculture.
Please stop tweeting about the lack of barriers to entry. No shit. Stop acting like this is a social media company. It isn’t. Groupon is a massive manufacturing operation that will live or die by extracting small margins from operational efficiencies (i.e., via economies of scale). It doesn’t get more old school.
When all is said and done, I’d expect the Group Buying industry’s dynamics to look a lot like any commodities industry: low barriers to local entry, large capital and operational barriers to scaling.
Along those lines, I’m a bear at any price assuming long-term operating margins of >15%.