I think it's interesting that this story and the story from 2000 condening Amazon for losing money every quarter are both top stories on HN today[1]. Whenever

I think it's interesting that this story and the story from 2000 condening Amazon for losing money every quarter are both top stories on HN today[1]. Whenever history repeats itself you'll always hear people say "But this time is different!" The article Joel Spolsky wrote about the "Amazon model" of growth (back in 2000) really explains why some companies grow the way Groupon and Amazon do[2]. They're in a land grab and they almost have to grow with huge losses and lots of funding or else they'll lose. Personally, I'm a fan of what Joel calls the "Ben and Jerry's model" which I tend to call the Jason Fried model. Unfortunately, Groupon isn't one of those companies that can expect to win if they aren't growing extremely aggressively, and taking large losses at first is just part of the Amazon model. [1]http://www.slate.com/id/1004565/ http://www.slate.com/id/1004565/ [2]http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000056.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000056.html