Will Groupon founder Brad Keywell's newer venture, Uptake, face a similar outcome? A recent Forbes article suggests he's better at starting a company than running it.
Chicago dev here. Lots of friends in the groupon circle I know have been unhappy and left. Know two people at uptake, both miserable there. They seem to have a big problem with claiming/trying to be a great place to work, but executing poorly.
Groupon was, at one point, the largest rails install in the world. They had some REALLY good Rails guys. Then they ditched the entire codebase for node.js and a lot of the best Rails developers quit soon after.
That's a crowded space to get into these days. You're competing directly with the big boys at Microsoft, Google, IBM, etc. as well as countless other startups. This seems especially difficult to do when you don't even have a product to sell.
