younglingfeynman.com

We often can’t prove or disprove our hypotheses, especially when you’re innovating, so reason fails us to some extent.

Groupon started out with these really tight principles about how the site was going to work, really being pro-customer. And as we expanded people in the company would say, “Hey, why don’t we try running two deals a day?” “Why don’t we start sending two emails a day?” And I’d think, That sounds awful. Who wants to get two emails every single day fro... See more

There are certain things you have to be religious about in the company. That’s what I’ve taken away from that: There are some things where you have to say, “I’m sorry. I’m not going to look at the data on that. This is just what we’re going to do. We know that it’s right, and there’s nothing that’s going to shake us from that.” (Blumberg, 2018).

I want to end with an excerpt from the interview with Andrew Mason, the Founder and early CEO of Groupon.

The problem was when you’re in hypergrowth like this, you don’t have time to see what is going to happen to the data in the long term. The churn would catch up with you. People would unsubscribe at higher rates, and then, before you know it, the service has just turned into something — if you look at Groupon now, it’s just this vestige of what it o... See more