Calling Groupon a ponzi or pyramid scheme is missing the point. All investments are like that. You buy a stock at X in the hopes that you can sell it for more

Calling Groupon a ponzi or pyramid scheme is missing the point. All investments are like that. You buy a stock at X in the hopes that you can sell it for more than X. For Groupon, you would want to look st two things. First, how much money do they make on a deal minus what they spend to get the deal done? Second, how.many deals can they sell? If a deal makes $5000 and costs $500, you'd want to sell as many as you can. Since all of their deals require a person to complete the sale, and there is a lot of demand for deals, they hire a ton of people to sell a lot of deals. As long as they can raise enough investment until their cash flow catches up, they are good to go, assuming demand for Groupon deals stays strong of course.