Have you seen the movie? There is ZERO evidence in the movie that either Kaleil or his co-founder Tom are talented or successful. They're certainly, as mikek says in his comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10547832 , "driven"! But that's why they were seeking success by dishonest means in the first place. As IMDB says: > The process of building the business focuses on obtaining venture capital based solel…
The problem is that some of the stories of great success are actually quite close to the ones that are outright scams. It's harder to tell the difference than it probably should be. Around the 2000's there were a number of acquisitions of companies that were mostly hot air. It's a game of hot potato (don't pick it up!), if the investors make bank on your BS company then nobody will complain (except for the acquiring…
I don't know about Groupon. Group buys have been very successful in China but I have the sense that Groupon has institutionally evaded the accountability to its product buyers that is required to make a group buy into a net-positive interaction, let alone a win-win.
(Amusing sidenote: in Groupon's heyday I met a US spy (who of course didn't admit she was a spy) here in Argentina whose cover story was that she was coming here to open up a local presence for a more exclusive Groupon-like company called Theliste, which turned out not to exist. We had a good time at dinner talking about Arabic grammar and morphology, which she had been studying at a language school in Monterey, California; her boyfriend and my wife were unfortunately a bit left behind by the conversation.)
Pumping money around can contribute and create value — consider Bitcoin, where the question is not whether Bitcoin creates value, which it clearly does, but rather whether its potential to destroy civilization (through prediction markets and tax evasion) is more or less significant than the value that it creates.
Also, there are plenty of great successes that are outright scams. The British East India Company, for example, or the Congo Free State, or the police department of Ferguson, MO, or Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, or the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, or the divine right of kings, or the sale of indulgences. Heck, we could even include those guys who robbed me on the train a couple years back.