$GRPN Groupon Tape Reports

Per Ticker.id: $GRPN Groupon Tape Reports — 1 podcast mention across 1 podcast (30 days), latest 2026-07-29 21:56 UTC.

1. Well, no, they're not even building new airplanes anymore, let alone innovative new airplanes. So could a startup do this? Not all that long ago, the idea of a startup supersonic airliner seemed laughable. Uh, one of my very many failed investor pitches was in 2015 when Jeff Bezos passed on our seed round at Boom. And then he wrote the 2015 Amazon shareholder letter about how there's certain things that only big companies can do. And he cited, uh, airliners as one of these. So, uh, an even more laughable idea was what if I could do this? Uh, I was a software engineer by training. We spent time at early Amazon. I'd founded an apps company that got acquired by Groupon. Could I do this? My knowledge about airplanes was limited to a pilot's license. I could fly a Cessna. But one of the things I learned from that time was I didn't think I could really know what I was capable of except by picking a mission that inspired me, something that I wanted to create in the world, and giving it everything I could. Only that way could I find my limits. So in 2014, we got started, and it wasn't a very auspicious start. That's right. This is a supersonic airliner mockup made of cardboard, plywood, and seats from Office Depot. That was before YC. And by the end of YC batch, this is what Boom looked like. Now we had a cardboard mockup of our first airliner prototype, and people laughed. Who would name an airplane startup after the sound of an explosion? But we didn't let this deter us, and we kept going. We started building our first prototype airliner, XB-1, which started life as Baby Boom. We didn't know what it would really take to build a supersonic passenger plane. And so we figured the only way to learn the lessons was to go build, to go build the first supersonic jet made outside of a government or military. And that was how XB-1 got started. Last year, XB-1 became the first independently developed jet to break the sound barrier. More than a decade after founding the company. I'd like to invite you to relive that moment with me from just about a year ago in the Mojave Desert. The launch system is active at 20 to 45,000 feet.

   Blake Scholl — Y Combinator Startup Podcast · Blake Scholl: Breaking the Supersonic Ban · 2026-07-29

2. Yeah. Yeah. We were exploring again, a bunch of ideas, right? Everything from, we had seen like some local companies, for example, we'd seen, there's a company called LevelUp, I think that was doing some food ordering locally. We had seen what Groupon had done. Obviously we'd seen what Square had done. So we'd seen a bunch of, we had some ideas that in like the local space, there was some interesting opportunities. But we were looking at all sorts of ideas, frankly. Like there was a bunch of things we explored.

   Aman Narang — How I Built This with Guy Raz · Toast: Aman Narang. How a Long Wait for the Dinner Check Launched a $2 Billion Business. · 2026-07-20

3. Yeah, I kind of came of age in the Chicago tech scene back in the early days of Uber and kind of during the Groupon boom and it was so cool, but then it didn't seem to have that staying power. Then everyone kept moving to Silicon Valley and it seems like such a missed opportunity to build something with a different perspective, a different LP base, a different, you know, local industry focus that what could have been, it just didn't quite, quite bear out that way. And if you're listening to Eric talk and you're thinking overlooked, man, we should build a venture capital firm called Overlooked Ventures. Too late. Someone already did that. So that brand is—

   Alex — This Week in Startups · A Startup Is Trying to Buy PayPal… Craziest Deal of 2026! | E2312 · 2026-07-15

4. It sounds like him. Yeah, I think that was him. It was like, as opposed— no, butt in chair, paintbrush, paint the canvas, stare at it. Discipline yourself. All right. So I think there is a degree to which, well, I don't know, you know, that it just seems so self-evident. Most of the people that I know, some of the most creative people I know, one of the most creative guys I know, and he just spoke at the summit, by the way, he's going to send in a video. So I know since he was public about it, I can make it public. One of the most successful entrepreneurs, he just won actually the EY World Entrepreneur of the Year for 2019. Brad Kewell and Breds. He's on 5 boards. He teaches entrepreneurialism at the University of Chicago. He built Groupon and sold it. That's why he has his own jet. His new startup, now it's like, now it's 4 years old, but even 2 years in, had a $2 billion market cap. This guy is so smart, so creative. You know, he collects modern art. He runs Chicago Ideas Week. He started it. So this is probably one of the most creative people you would ever meet. Certainly one of the most productive people you'd ever meet. And I spent a year with him. People say, well, why would he do GTD? I said, well, his presenting issue was, David, I'm just up to here. He was 27. He said, I'm just, just getting my traction, but I wake up with million-dollar ideas, but I don't know what to do with them, where to put them, or who to give them to. So he just needed more room. What GTD does is it provides space. Invariably, if you capture, clarify, organize, and reflect on all the things that have your attention, it will give you more room. What you do with that room is unique to you. Some people use it to be more creative. Some people use it to be more strategic. Some people to be more innovative. Some people to be just present, you know, with whatever they're doing. One of my biggest champions, a guy named Howard Stern, can't find a more creative guy than Howard. He'd tell you it changed his life. Gave him the time to learn to paint, which you always wanted to do, as well as keep Sirius Radio going. Or people like Will Smith or Robert Downey Jr., the big champions of my stuff. I can say their names because they were public about that. So if people think that creative people can't use GTD, hey, there are a few people you ought to meet.

   David Allen — The Tim Ferriss Show · #873: David Allen — The Art of Getting Things Done (GTD) (Repost) · 2026-07-02

5. Yeah, no, Amy, it's a very good question and it's a good point. What is the value proposition? You know, it's like, do customers want what you're making? And then the key second question is, can others do what you're doing right? And that is hard. And honestly, Amy, you know, listen, I got my notes. You know, Jensen, I first met you in 22,002. You were talking about the GeForce 256. And he was like, oh, that was the first GPU. I had no clue how important GPUs could be. And a matter of fact, for, you know, the first 15 years, it was very competitive between Nvidia and then the other company I think was the ATI or something. But, you know, originally it was graphics accelerators. And then he had the great insight. He was talking to his customers. Often the great entrepreneurs are close to their customers. He realized that people were buying GPUs to do things like in hospitals, analyze X rays. And also, you know, then he saw the AI boom. You know, he delivered that first GPU to Elon and the folks at OpenAI, which is remarkable. But I would say for me, it's what have you done in the last five years? And if you've grown profitably and gained market share, you're probably doing something better than everybody else. If you're growing really fast, you're onto something new and that can be very powerful. But often it's better to wait and you find out who's really good after the competition hits you. I mean, I was an investor, Chicago based company, Groupon. And I was like, wow, this is exciting, you know, because we like did some Google search and it was like they were the fastest company to a billion in revenue. And I was like, I have to own this thing. This is, you know, taking off. And then at least Amazon and maybe somebody else copied them and it didn't scale and it ended up being a rocket ship that blew up pretty badly, unfortunately. But so, you know, I don't know if there's any secret sauce. It's a bit of a slugging average where you have to hope that the company keeps executing. One of the strengths of Fidelity is despite reg, FD is just monitoring what's going on. And I take my notes. And in the case of Terry, I was like, terry, I haven't seen you since 2024. This is what you said two years ago. What's happened? You know, have you executed? And you know, there's always stuff that happens to management teams. And it's fine if, you know, yeah, we were wrong. You know, well, what did you learn? You know, it didn't work in India. Well, what did you learn? Didn't work in California or something. What did you learn? But so for me, it's like, what happened in the last five years? Do I like this earnings trajectory or the, you know, the sales trajectory? And then, you know, without getting into reg fd, you know, what is the opportunity? Looking out the next five to 10 years and hopefully you have confidence that management will be able to execute. But I've been shaken out of a lot of good stories, Amy. And the beauty of the business is you can, you know, I tell the team and I tell all your investors and tell you guys, if a stock has doubled, you haven't missed it. And lately I've been saying, if a stock has quadrupled, you haven't missed it. There's a lot of stocks are up now, but. And that. That it is a little hard. You know, you know, these. But, you know, Munger, of course, advised Warren Buffett, better to buy a great business at a fair price than, you know, a fair business at a great price. But, you know, some of the PEs get up there and you're like, you've got to believe further out and you've got to believe that you really understand the business. And. But yeah, I would say we're continuing to learn. And sadly, Amy, I always joke, it's like mistakes are part of the game. Just try not to make the same mistakes. And somehow I keep making the same mistakes, but we're trying.

   Will Danoff — The Long View · Will Danoff: ‘Be Very Careful of Unprofitable Companies’ · 2026-06-23

6. Foreign. Hi, I'm John and I'm a partner at yc. I often meet founders who have lots of ideas about what to work on and can't decide between them. Sometimes they're working on multiple things. Often they'll say that they're waiting to find the best idea before fully committing. But it's extremely hard to find to make meaningful progress on a startup without committing to a single idea. So in this video I'm going to give you a rubric for how to stop overthinking. Pick an idea, commit to it, and then figure out fast whether it's actually working. The most important piece of advice I'd give to founders struggling to pick a startup idea is don't overthink it. Overthinking a startup in the earliest days can take many forms, but here are a couple of the most common failure modes I see. The first is thinking that you need to find the perfect idea. In some ways this is an understandable impulse. Startups are hard, so shouldn't you figure out the best idea before committing? The problem with this approach is that it's impossible to figure out the perfect idea in the abstract. You can only figure out what you should be working on by making contact with reality and getting feedback from customers. The second overthink is am I the perfect founder for this? It's true that founder market fit matters. A non technical founder likely won't be the right person to come up with a killer devtools startup idea, for example. But often founders, especially second time founders, weaponize this line against themselves. They convince themselves that they need a decade of domain experience before they can start. The truth is, you don't. If you pick an idea you're curious about, go extremely deep, and most importantly, talk to customers, it's often possible to develop extraordinary knowledge in a short amount of time. We see incredible examples of this all the time at yc. Take Blake Sholl, the CEO of Boom Supersonic. Blake spent his early career working on ad tech at companies like Amazon and Groupon before deciding to work on commercializing Supersonic Flight. Lots of people probably thought he was crazy, but now Boom is a billion dollar company. So don't let the question of whether you're allowed to work on something stop you from starting. Once you've stopped overthinking your ideas, it's important to commit to just one. Often I meet founders who are working on multiple ideas at once because they believe that this is the best way to figure out which one will actually work. There are a couple problems with this approach. The most serious is that it tends to produce bad data. If you don't actually go deep on an idea, but instead juggle it with several others, you won't get good signal about whether what you're doing actually works. And if you don't get good signal, then you could either prematurely talk yourself out of a good idea or convince yourself that a bad one is worth continuing. The solution to this is is to go in depth first. If you're trying to decide between several ideas, all of which look equally attractive, pick one idea and go deep on it. What do I mean by going deep? The first thing is that you should burn the other boats. That is, you should explicitly foreclose your other startup idea options. Stop working on them, tell any customers that you've pivoted, and work with single minded. Focus on on the idea you've chosen. One way to think about going deep is that it should feel like wearing a new skin. You should become an almost unrecognizable version of yourself. This could mean changing your company's name, your emails, your website, and even your internal narrative about why you're building a startup in the first place. For example, I worked with a startup called Govdash that helps customers win government contracts. They pivoted at least five times before finding this idea, and each time they explored something new. They changed their company name and how they talked about their mission. At one point I forgot how to get in touch with them because they changed their email addresses with each pivot. By truly becoming domain experts in government procurement, their fifth idea worked so well that they could barely keep up with demand. They recently raised the Series B to scale the business and meet that demand. Once you've decided to fully commit to an idea and go deep, how do you know if you're actually doing it? Well, the high watermark I use to help founders answer this question is could you actually run your customer's business? Say you want to build voice customer service agents for cleaning services. The question isn't just whether you've talked to 20 owners. The question is, if I dropped you into a cleaning business tomorrow, would you know how to run it? Do you know what their daily crises are? Do you know whether answering the phone is a top five problem? Do you know how much business they lose when a call goes unanswered and what they would actually pay to never lose another one? These are the kinds of questions you need to be able to answer with very high confidence. Another way to think about this is could you teach a class on the problem you're solving. Are you one of the most informal people in the world on the subject? Getting to this level will involve lots of conversations with customers and sometimes even literally doing the job yourself. But don't obsess over needing to talk to hundreds of customers before writing code. The goal is to do both at the same time in a tight loop. Deep understanding of customer needs, then product delivery, then deeper understanding of customer needs than better product delivery. Real customers Using your product produces concrete data that will complement your abstract knowledge, giving you a sense of whether what you're building is actually working. Once you're going deep on an idea, there's several ways to validate whether it's worth continuing to work on. The most obvious one is pull from customers. But there are several other qualities of good ideas in the AI era that you should look out for as you go. The first is that the idea sits at the edge of what models can do today. This might mean that your product barely works on today's frontier models, but will clearly improve as they get better. You should understand the bottlenecks impeding your product's performance intimately. If a particular bottleneck doesn't clear the way you hoped, solving that might become the company. This is a version of Paul Graham's well known quote that you should live in the future and then build what's missing. The second quality of a good idea is that it should verticalize. By this I mean that it should ultimately sell an outcome. For example providing insurance or medical care rather than just software. In the AI era, the cost of producing software is going to zero. So the things that actually become valuable aren't just software for X, they're customer trust licenses, regulatory permission, and outcome ownership. So if you want to get into the insurance space, don't build software for insurance companies, just be the insurer. Similarly, rather than selling back office software for banks, just be the bank. One example of this is Corgi Insurance, an AI powered commercial insurance company from YC's Summer 24 batch. They were not content with being a tech enabled broker or even a managing general agent because that was just owning a part of the solution. Instead, they set an ambitious goal of owning everything from underwriting to providing customer service, the entire commercial insurance stack, and even took the unprecedented step of acquiring an insurance carrier during their YC batch to make it happen. Being the full stack insurance company allows Corgi to underwrite any insurance line in any vertical with a fraction of the headcount of traditional carriers. They can offer far better pricing, much faster turnaround and own all of the economics. That brings me to the third quality of a good idea. It should be the most ambitious version of itself. It may seem unintuitive, but the cost of pursuing a wildly ambitious startup idea and the cost of pursuing a modest one or are roughly the same. They're both extremely hard. They both place extreme demands on your time. So aim at the version that, if it works, rewrites a sector of the economy, because that's also the version that protects you from competitors, attracts the best talent, and has a moat worth building. This could mean building and selling into the most regulated industries like legal, healthcare or financial services. Or taking on very large incumbents like a $10 billion legacy SaaS company, or building hard tech like robotics for space assembly. Now, what if you do all of this and the idea fails? The good news is that you'll be in a dramatically better position than where you started. First, you have unambiguous customer data. You know whether there's actually a hair on fire problem and in this space, or whether you just talked yourself into thinking there was. You'll have real conviction to base a pivot on and a better sense of how to execute going forward. But more importantly, you will often come away from the process with a new idea that will actually work. When most founders begin they're solving surface level pain points, the real opportunities are almost always the deeper structural problem. In other words, going deep isn't primarily a process for validating the idea you started with. It's a way to find the better idea underneath. This almost always happens, especially if you're at the forefront of what models can do today. You'll notice the bottlenecks, the gaps, the dev tools nobody's built, and one of those could turn out to be the actual company. Here's what I want you to take away from this video. First, stop trying to find the perfect idea. Just pick one, then burn the other. Boats. Learn everything you can about the customer and try to execute for them. In the early idea fog, where you can only see 10ft in front of you, the temptation is to take a few cautious steps in every direction. Sample a little here, a little there. Stay close to home. The problem is that gives you almost no information. What actually works is to commit to one direction and walk fast. You're not guaranteed to end up in the right place, but you generate much more information per unit of time. And when you're walking, you might arrive at a better destination, one you couldn't have seen from the start. The worst failure mode isn't being wrong, it's not making a decision, spinning your wheels, dabbling between ideas, and never going deep enough on any one of them to learn anything. So pick one and go deep. Thanks for watching.

   John — Y Combinator Startup Podcast · How To Pick A Startup Idea · 2026-06-17

7. They're speaking about, you know, burning your nerves and all that shit. And that thing that. I remember one year I had a fung. I still got a fungi toenail, but I had the really bad fungi toenail. And I saw a thing in Groupon for a company in Studio City that blowtorched it with Heat for six sessions

   Joey Diaz — The Joe Rogan Experience · #2512 - Joey Diaz · 2026-06-10

8. I was in graduate school, and I was going through a really tough time in my life that I now recognize is emblematic of being 23. Like, I don't know who I am, what is the purpose of my life, what is going on? And one of my close friends, she had gotten into bikram yoga, and she was like, oh, my God, you should come to yoga. You're going to love it. And I was like, I am not doing that. I've done it before. I know it's not for me. And she got me caught up on a Groupon, though. She was like, what's the worst that can happen? You go one time, you pay $30 for this pass. Like, what's the worst that happened? And I went. And the interesting thing about B Kong yoga specifically is that I think of it as the McDonald's of yoga. It's literally like you could go anywhere in the world and get this practice exactly the same. So nothing had changed. It was still hot as hell, hard as hell. Everything about it was the same. But I had changed, though I didn't realize that so much of what was making me unhappy and unsatisfied in my life was that I'd created all of these boundaries for myself. And I made all these decisions about the type of person that I am and about what I'm capable of handling. And I never allowed myself to step outside of those boundaries. And yoga requires that you step outside of your boundaries. And it put me in these situations where I actually had to look at the way that I talk to myself and look at the way that I process information and be like, you know what? I know I decided that I'm not going to be able to do this, but maybe I'm just going to try. The example that I think of often, especially that first class back, I remember we were practicing a posture called Awkward pose that is literally. It's so aptly named because it is extremely awkward. I was watching everybody around me just, like, sit down into this posture. And it looked like they had all practiced it together beforehand. In bikram yoga, you look at yourself in the mirror. So I'm looking at myself in this mirror and. Which is traumatizing on its own because I literally would go out of my way at that stage in my life to avoid mirrors. I went out of my way to not look at myself, but I'm forced to look at myself. I'm looking at myself, and I'm just thinking, like, why did you even think you could come to this class? Like, you obviously don't know what you're doing, and everybody here knows it, and you can't even do this basic thing. This is, like, maybe the third or fourth posture in the class. I'm like, if you can't do this, then why even show up? And I had this moment where I was like, you know, you could just try. Maybe you just try, like, yes, maybe you're gonna fall down. Maybe everyone in the room is gonna know that you don't know what you're doing. Maybe the teacher's gonna know that you don what you're doing. And maybe that's just got to be okay because. Did you spend this money to come to this class to just stand here and talk shit about yourself? Because you could have done that at home. And that moment, that breaking point to this day, ultimately, that is why I continue to practice yoga. It's a cracking open of the spirit. It's being able to. I think of it a lot of, like. It's like you're looking in a foggy bathroom mirror, a mirror that you fogged up and, like, just swiping across it and seeing your actual reflection back at you. And it was so profound for me in a way that I certainly didn't walk into class thinking I was going to experience.

   Jessamyn Stanley — The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos · How to Feel Happier in Your Body with Jessamyn Stanley · 2026-06-01