from Hacker News

Michael Arrington Invented Groupon in 2005 (Idea 4)

by ziadbc on 5/19/11, 7:22 AM with 16 comments

  • by sradnidge on 5/19/11, 8:26 AM

    Proving once again, an idea without execution is worth precisely fuck all. All the non-technical founders out there trying to rip the executors in terms of equity, take note.
  • by patio11 on 5/19/11, 9:19 AM

    Greoup buying has been done many times before, including in the bubble. GroupOn has the distinction of working. I also think it is essentially orthogonal to the original group buying aspect but that was useful pretraction.
  • by quan on 5/19/11, 10:22 AM

    If Arrington had invented Groupon, he would have invented Groupon
  • by nikcub on 5/19/11, 9:10 AM

    I wouldn't say invented so much as 'foresaw the large opportunity'.

    It popped up on Techcrunch a lot before GroupOn, ie. how is it that the $170B local ad market has been left untouched by the web?

  • by briggers on 5/19/11, 10:27 AM

    A business idea is conjecture, execution is an experiment.

    The word 'invented' here is a vocabulary failure.

  • by ewalk153 on 5/19/11, 9:19 AM

    Ideas are cheap, good execution is worth millions (or in Groupon's case billions).
  • by random42 on 5/19/11, 11:01 AM

    <snark> and I invented time machine in 2001 </snark>

    Idea means almost nothing. Execution is the hard part.

  • by paulnelligan on 5/19/11, 9:23 AM

    he's also listed spotify/grooveshark there in number 6 ...

    anyway, I would hardly call having an idea an invention ... the invention is the implementation of that idea, which is worth nothing until it's actually implemented ...

  • by wushupork on 5/19/11, 8:06 AM

    Apparently he also came up with dropbox
  • by beerglass on 5/19/11, 9:27 AM

    Is Dropbox today's answer to idea #1?
  • by finebanana on 5/19/11, 8:15 AM

    and ordered bullet list