Offered a $5 billion payday, what would you do? No need to conduct a poll. We’re sure 99.999 percent of Americans would grab it.
The other .001 percent are lying.
Well, that’s what we would have calculated before last weekend.
Chicago-based Groupon Inc. turned down a reported $5 billion or so buyout offer from Google. Honestly.
Groupon’s largest shareholder, entrepreneur Eric Lefkofsky, would have become a billionaire and one of Chicago’s richest people. Groupon CEO Andrew Mason would have suddenly become extremely rich, at age 30.
Google offered a massive deal to buy the young company that provides online consumers with steep discounts for local businesses such as restaurants and health clubs. The deal — the Group part of this — is good only if a minimum number of subscribers sign up for the offer.
Groupon said no to Google. The Grouponers aren’t saying why.
Maybe they buy into the recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that suggested more money doesn’t always yield more happiness. The study concluded that beyond household income of $75,000 a year, money “does nothing for happiness, enjoyment, sadness or stress.”
Maybe Groupon wants a bigger payday via a public offering next year. (Note to stock market players who, like some of us, thought Google’s initial public offering in 2004 was too steep at $85: Argh!)
Possibly this is all an elaborate joke. Mason is a 2003 Northwestern University music school grad with a quirky sense of humor who has been compared to the uber-weird comedian Andy Kaufman of “Taxi” fame. Mason’s Groupon is the kind of company that hires a male performance artist to stroll around the office in a tutu, mute. For a week. Enough said.
Whatever the reasons, the Grouponers are gambling on their company and … themselves. That’s exhilarating.
Sure, the company was just another struggling Web site that no one had heard of two years ago. Yes, it turned a profit within eight months. But the way the Web goes, nothing is guaranteed eight months — or eight days — from now.
We hope the Grouponers are as prescient as Bill Gates, who turned down billionaire Ross Perot’s buyout offer of a few piddly millions for Microsoft in its pre-behemoth days of 1979.
They’ve already smartly avoided the fate of Ron Wayne, one of the founders of Apple. Wayne cashed out his Apple stock after 12 days. For $800. Had he held it, there’d be a lot more zeros on that figure.
But Wayne said he had no regrets. “I don’t waste my time getting frustrated about things that didn’t work out. I left Apple for reasons that seemed sound to me at the time. Why should I go back and ‘what if’ myself? If I did, I’d be in a rubber room by now.”
He almost sounds convincing.
We’ll probably know soon whether Groupon’s gamble pays off.
And if it doesn’t? Well, from what we’ve seen, there probably won’t be any regrets. Even if the Groupon guys walk away with $800.
