Things like "impact" and "reach" are orthogonal to whether or not something of value was contributed. Let's face it, it was a boiler room with immense reach. Technically I suppose you can call that an "accomplishment", but I wouldn't call it an admirable one.
I'm not saying he's a bad guy (I know nothing about him), but I think that their founders should be doing less boasting and more apologizing. I don't know that the problems they caused were intentional, but I have to think that they must have taken some notice when it was apparent that they were pushing their staff to sell unsustainable products. Sometimes it's hard to notice these things when you're pocketing hundreds of millions of dollars by cashing out early though.
Personally, I couldn't find much positive to say about them when they started laying people off back in November[1] and I don't see much positive now.
You're right, I can't claim to have created anything with "near as much reach as LS" or as the same "massive consumer impact".
However, I can't see what reach or impact LS had that fellow failing business Groupon didn't.
As I said back in November, it sure looks like they just copied a momentarily hot, yet broken business model, snagged a bunch of fancy office space and sought tax breaks [2] while posting huge loses.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4845253
2: http://www.bizjournals.com/washington/news/2012/07/10/living...
"millions of consumers around the world have experienced their local cities because of our products"
Sounds like he is reaching, just a bit...
I think its a fair assessment, but not the full story.
Millions of people did do things they wouldn't normally do. No way in hell I'm going to pay $200 for a family "dolpin tour" where you usually don't see dolphins, but when it's on LivingSocial (or similar sites) for $50? Sure, why not.
Now, whether it was a boon or bust for local businesses or not is a debated topic. I'm pretty sure that dolphin tour place actually lost money on my trip, or came close to break-even at most, and we were one time customers.
Profit is another story, though.
Last big discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5255362
Living Social -- more than any other company in the last 5 years -- showed that the DC area startup community is alive and well and can play with the big boys in the consumer internet space. LS almost single-handedly overcame the region's inferiority complex in this regard. I hope Aaron is sufficiently proud of the role he played there.
The ones debating "good", say it allowed consumers to get great deals, merchants to get coverage, and employees to be employed.
The ones debating "bad", say it caused businesses to do dumb decisions and VC's to do dumb decisions.
All in all, I'd say Groupon/LS was good for the world, because it is exactly to show what happens with these kind of VC-businesses. They need to scale large, and not all of them can become sustainable. Clearly, someone needs to get screwed in the mean time.
We need more profilic failures like Groupon/LS, because obviously the VC model has been the holy grail for quite some time (less so now then lets say two years ago). I don't mean to hate on the VC model (like dhh for example), I like it a lot for many business models. In fact, I liked it for Groupon as well. We just should keep in mind what we are dealing with. Like so many times, information is the key, and the ones that got screwed over are usually the ones that trust blindly.
Fast forward 6 years, amazon acquires goodreads while all daily deal sites are struggling.
