Item — HN Reader

Good insight, I agree with you. The modern "Business Corporation" with emphasis on Shareholders is an anomaly. It has increased the complexity of Business allowing a whole industry to thrive without domain knowledge i.e. "Management" which messes up everything for everybody.

We need a fundamental rethink and "back to basics" to setup a simple interface between a Producer(including their Supply Chain) and a Consumer with absence of all unnecessary middlemen.

1 comments

Not a big fan of The Friedman Doctrine either. I think a company needs to fulfill two roles: be profitable, and have a positive impact on the planet.

I don't believe it's ethical to externalize that responsibility in pursuit of more profit and growth.

That's why I included what Andrew Mason said about Groupon.

Is Groupon really a better company simply because it makes more revenue? I don't think so, but if you're only using 1 dimension to measure, then that's the conclusion you'll come to.

It seems to me that the only news stories I've read about Groupon for the last 7 years or so is about how they're on the verge of bankruptcy, so I'm not sure if Friedman would think they were good either.

Did they ever go bankrupt, I tried to search groupon bankruptcy on DDG but there were so many stories about how they were going to go bankrupt I couldn't figure out if they ever did.

Yeah but Friedman wouldn't have had the info we have now. According to his thesis of shareholder value above all else, Groupon did exactly what they were supposed to.

I wonder how it would've turned out had Andrew been able to stick to his guns. But that was never an option since it was structured to IPO from the very beginning because of all that crap with thepoint . com

Don't believe they ever went bankrupt. Those stories you found might be the result of the dealsites not living up to the hype.

There was a significant period of time where many investors believed those sites were gonna create the next Google.

Their market cap is still around a billion I believe.