LivingSocial's growth-at-all-costs strategy serves as a lesson for today's unicorns as the firm struggles to retain staff and pivots away from daily deals
LivingSocial, Once a Unicorn, Is Losing Its Magic — WASHINGTON — The first thing you see when walking into the headquarters … Tweets: @nytimes , @jtepper2 , @p1bc , @startupljackson , @trengriffin , @shiraovide and @rolfewinkler Tweets: The New / @nytimes : LivingSocial offers a glimpse of what some of today's biggest start-ups might look like several years down the road http://www.nytimes.com/... Jonathan Tepper / @jtepper2 : Cautionary tales for investors “There are now 142 unicorns that are together valued at around $500 billion” http://www.nytimes.com/... Paul Chiang / @p1bc : @Techmeme Size of the daily deal marketplace was never as big as they thought it was. A coupon by any other name is still a coupon. Startup L. Jackson / @startupljackson : Growing fast isn't the problem. Building stuff that doesn't provide sustained value for the customer is. http://www.nytimes.com/... Tren Griffin / @trengriffin : @Techmeme There's a big difference between how fast you can grow and how fast you should grow. Similar to: http://abovethecrowd.com/... Shira Ovide / @shiraovide : Failure is as much a part of tech as success. This is what it looks like, by @MikeIsaac, @ktbenner http://www.nytimes.com/... Rolfe Winkler / @rolfewinkler : Great story on LivingSocial via @mikeisaac and @ktbenner. A parable for our times: http://www.nytimes.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
LivingSocial arrives at this moment as the bear case made flesh: after [[a:832069|Bill Gurley warned in August that a cycle valuing growth over profitability might be ending]] and Forbes countered in October that the unicorn boom had only begun, the Times profiles a former unicorn losing staff and abandoning its core daily-deals model.
Jonathan Tepper's framing in the coverage — 142 unicorns valued around $500 billion collectively — is why one company's unraveling reads as a portfolio-wide stress test rather than an isolated failure.
First-order effects
- LivingSocial's own workforce is the immediate casualty: retention problems during a strategic pivot mean the people needed to execute the shift away from daily deals are the ones leaving.
Second-order effects
- Investors holding paper marks on similar growth-at-all-costs startups face pressure to convert valuations into cash — a dynamic the coverage shows materializing as [[a:865268|secondary buyers report unicorn shareholders becoming far more interested in selling common stock]].
Third-order effects
- If LivingSocial proves representative, the private-market structure built on bets against doomed public incumbents gives way to a discipline phase where profitability, not growth rates, gates follow-on funding for the unicorn class.
The trend: Venture capital is rotating out of the growth-at-all-costs era toward profitability as the gating metric, with early down-cycle casualties like LivingSocial setting the template for how unicorn portfolios get repriced.