His recommendation is brilliant. No one is saying that the platform the 4 engineers build has to be identical to Groupon's. Do you know why Groupon needed a $9

His recommendation is brilliant. No one is saying that the platform the 4 engineers build has to be identical to Groupon's. Do you know why Groupon needed a $950 million round? Because scaling the business model requires the scaling of the sales and service organization. And that requires a lot of cash and working capital. Finances are the limiting mechanism on how fast they can grow. Also, their centralized sales and service organization, cloistered in their Chicago office, is not going to be as knowledgeable of local markets as natives. Local folk will always have an advantage in forging relationships with merchants. The point? If the platform the 4 engineers build externalizes the merchant facing function (sales/service) to local affiliates who are far better positioned to do it - and incidentally adheres to Google's own model of just being a platform - Google won't have to invest in building a sales and service organization. Local affiliates would deal with the merchants, do the marketing, sign the contracts, and do all the promotional design - essentially all the stuff done by the merchant facing side of Groupon - all for less than the 50% of revs, and would then use the Google platform to push out deals. The platform could follow an auction model like their current Adwords and Adsense platform. Local affiliates would bid to run the Google daily deal for their area. Groupon's business model is only version 1.0. If they don't innovate, they will be in trouble.