Kara Swisher

Recent Posts by Kara Swisher

Groupon Set to Price Its IPO Tomorrow, Go Public Friday

According to sources close to the situation, daily deals site Groupon is planning on pricing its IPO tomorrow and officially becoming a public company Friday, listing on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol GRPN.

The company and its investment bankers have not yet decided whether to boost the price of the offering, now aimed to raise $540 million at a valuation of $11.4 billion. Although the Chicago-based Groupon has endured an unusual amount of controversy over a variety of issues — including accounting treatments, executive turmoil and growth prospects — sources said the offering is likely to be oversubscribed as investors clamor to get into a possibly lucrative IPO.

Executives from Groupon, including its CEO Andrew Mason, have been hawking the company — which sells an assortment of discounted services from a variety of local merchants — to investors all over the country. Despite the intense criticism, the quirky Groupon had pushed on through and will now face its toughest test: Acting like a big-boy company with public shareholders.

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald