Reading Groupon‘s S-1 recently, I kept getting flashbacks to probably one of Southern California’s biggest flameouts, MVNO Amp’d Mobile. Amp’d had raised over $375M in venture capital, managed to push annual revenues to over $500M, but ended up declaring bankruptcy rather than seeing a spectacular exit or IPO. Amp’d (which disappeared back in 2007), had spectacular success in ramping its revenues, but unfortunately wasn’t able to translate that scale and revenues into actual profits. Groupon ‘s last quarter of revenue was $644.7M (for its March 31, 2011 quarter), with a net loss of $113.8M . Yes, its revenue growth has been amazing ($94,000 in revenues in 2008; $713.3M in 2010; and almost that much alone in Q1), but one has to wonder if they are gaining profitability from their scaling. That said, maybe it doesn’t matter in these markets–high profile electric auto firm Tesla Motors just raised a chunk of additional dollars in a secondary offering, after a huge IPO, but also is bleeding cash (net loss of $154.3M on revenues of $116.7M in 2010). I do feel like I’ve seen this movie somewhere before and didn’t like it so much…

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IPO by Benjamin Kuo