Even early on, and despite the predictions of it being a threat to Google and Amazon, others debated whether it could rightly be considered a “tech” company. The very concept of group buying is structured on the concept of hype, which may have been a fateful, less-than-promising starting point.
Groupon specifically has faced a host of challenges over the years. The company has also been doing some other fairly intense restructuring, with its position not helped by the wider pressures on the technology sector and the economy overall: across two tranches in August 2022 and January 2023, it laid off around 1,000 employees, or roughly 30% of its workforce. In November, Pale Fire announced that it was helping Groupon rebuild its whole technology team, starting with the appointment of a new CTO from one of its other portfolio companies. “Since he joined the Board, Dusan has been very engaged as a director, providing important oversight on Groupon’s strategy and strengths and helping the company identify areas in need of improvement,” noted Ted Leonsis, Groupon’s chairman, in an upbeat take on the news. But it is also currently Groupon’s biggest shareholder - a role it has not held passively: The two businesses were embroiled in an activist fight last year that resulted in the firm getting two board seats at the company, one of which Senkypl holds. Most of Pale Fire’s investments are in businesses out of its home country and other parts of Europe. Senkypl is a co-founder of Pale Fire Capital, a PE firm based in Prague (and named after the Nabokov novel?). He will stay on for 60 more days to help with the transition, the company said. Before Groupon, Deshpande was an exec at Zappos for more than a decade, and after he took the Groupon job, he continued to be based out of Las Vegas. He replaces Kedar Deshpande, who had been Groupon’s CEO for just 15 months. His appointment is effective immediately, the company said in a statement today. Senkypl will run the company… out of the Czech Republic. The Chicago-based company, which today has a market cap of just $103 million (a drop of 99.4% from its public market debut), has appointed Dusan Senkypl, a current board member, as interim CEO. The company today says it has 14 million active users, but almost consistently for the last decade, its financial position has been in a slow decline - with stagnation in its core business model, little success in efforts to diversify, declining revenues and ongoing losses.Īnd today comes the latest chapter in that story. A dozen years ago, Groupon shot to fame popularizing the online group buying format, confidently rejecting a $6 billion acquisition offer from Google and instead going public with a $17.8 billion market cap.
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