yep. And it was hard to pick Amazon among the well funded overhyped dot-com crowd. Nothing indicates so far that Groupon is Amazon, not Webvan for example.
>That's why some investors make money and some lose money.
Ones who picked AMZN would like to think that they were smart, not just lucky. Ones who picked some dot-com loser instead of AMZN would like to think that they were unlucky, not "unsmart" :)
Much of what they did is par for the course today but, at the time, it was innovative. Amazon didn't win because they were lucky. They won because they were smart. Investors who recognized this were betting intelligently, not just lucky.
The other thing to notice is that that culture still exists today. They take big chances in areas seem tangential to their business (eg. AWS, Kindle) or use business innovation to drive sales (eg. Amazon Mom).
That's one obvious difference between Iridium and Amazon. 10 years ago, when Amazon was still losing money, I had already made purchases from them. It was the first place I checked if I wanted to buy books online. I had never heard of Iridium.
I don't think groupon will be as successful as Amazon, but having real fans among consumers is a big deal.