Russell Westbrook's Profile

Nice job Dino! I like it, though I wonder what the right incentive is for the advisors – if they view it as transactional, then it may change their attitude in a negative way and/or college students might simply not have the money to pay what these advisors are worth. If the advisors just want to do it as a way to give back, then you have to manage it in a way that’s not overly burdensome for the advisors.

Nice job Jason! Good read – totally agree that there is effective alignment if you just think about the idea of using cheap debt to fund acquisitions for your product pipeline and then raising prices when the market will allow it. However, I wonder whether this strategy, combined with their rapidly rising stock price over the last several years, pressured Valeant into pushing this strategy to a precarious extreme whereby any macroeconomic changes (not to mention accounting shenanigans) could really hurt them (interest rates rising, govt pricing regulations, stock price declining and making acquisitions tougher, etc.).

Ni! Ni! Ni! Thanks for a good post. All of these marketplace companies that seem to find the gray areas around various laws are really interesting. The laws have tried to force companies into models that don’t always match up with the ideal business model, and when companies find a better alignment between the two models by skirting laws, they hope they can just become popular enough that lawmakers feel pressure from consumers to simply change the laws.

Aniiiiiiiiiish!!!

Makes sense re: the ceiling on push. Also I would not have guessed that Groupon could steal some Yelp thunder, but that makes sense.

Was looking at Groupon for a postgame stone massage deal but think I’ll instead go for midnight rock climbing. Russ never quits. Gotta keep in shape so I can dunk on some dubs later this year.

Nice job!

Nice job Pantry Ninja! I always go there and hadn’t thought about a lot of this. I wonder how scalable the supply chain is and whether it can work well in the middle of the country, where there may be fewer local sourcing opportunities and fewer high-density locations close together.

Nice job! Seems like the “check groupon first” mentality is actually one of the worst outcomes for merchants; as you mentioned, yelp already owned discovery so what consumers were more likely to do with groupon is simply to “check groupon first” to see if Groupon is offering a deal for a place the consumer already wanted to go. I wonder if they could have scaled by sticking with the push marketing approach and actually convincing customers to do something they weren’t previously considering. I imagine even good merchants could benefit from offering off-peak deals through Groupon occasionally.