Adku, the stealth startup company founded by ex-Google employees working on big data for e-commerce, announced on Monday that it has been acquired by Groupon, the behemoth daily deals/group buying company.  With the acquisition, the three co-founders Ajit Varma,Carlos Whitt, and  Jesse Shieh will be moving to Groupon’s Silicon Valley office in Palo Alto, California.

“Such strong product technologists and engineers add great value to the development team we’re continuing to grow in our Palo Alto office,” Groupon spokeswoman Julie Mossler told the Chicago Tribune.

The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Downside of an Acquisition

These days, startups either go big, fail or get acquired by larger companies.  If a company is acquired, it can either be because of their technology or what they are offering, or because they have outstanding employees that would be a great addition to the buying company.  And that’s what Groupon is doing.  Instead of pirating or hiring just their desired employees, they go and buy the whole company.

There’s a plausible explanation for this: a person might be performing very well because he is comfortable with the people he works with, and taking that person out of his comfort zone could be crucial to his performance.  The downside of an acquisition is the acquired company almost always gets shutdown, and only select employees stay on board.

Last year Groupon acquired OpenCal, the online appointment scheduling and booking site, as well as Campfire Labs, the startup company that gave us Slice, the web-based service that lets users “slice” friends into groups, working with existing social-media sites like Facebook to offer features such as chat, calendar, etc.  And earlier this year, Groupon acquired Mertado, the company that creates “shopping experiences that build bridges between content, commerce, and community.  Of the three acquisitions, OpenCal is the only one continuing operations.  Mertado and Camfire Labs, along with Slice, have been inaccessible to users, and Mertado will be shutting down on February 28, 2012.

First Earnings Call

Today, Groupon will have their first earnings call after they went public last November. Analysts are expecting sales of $473 million, triple the amount from a year ago, with a 2011 revenue amount of roughly $1.6 billion.  Groupon’s market value is at  $15 billion.

Groupon CEO Andrew Mason must be sweating bullets by now, because he is faced with the daunting task of delivering an awesome first earnings call, convincing investors that their company is here to stay, and not just a fad that people will soon forget.  More importantly, he’ll have to demonstrate that the company is making money.

Groupon recently announced a new marketing strategy, Clicky, the Clickable Value-Wheel that lets users spin the wheel and score potential discounts from the available choices.  It is tied up with Facebook to broaden their reach.  That is just an example of Groupon’s marketing strategy and we’d like to believe that it’s working, taking on new subscribers and maintaining their current subscribers.

Still, a lot of people will probably unsubscribe to their service in the long run, and Groupon has to face this reality.  How many people unsubscribe from their service every month?  How many new users sign up every month?  Of their total subscribers, how many of those actually use the service?  Will merchants continue to participate in group-buying deals?  These are just some of the questions that investors would probably want to ask Groupon.

“We remain concerned that merchants are wary of the longer-term impacts of offering steep discounts through Groupon and other daily-deal sites,” Jordan Rohan of Stifel Nicolaus wrote. “But it is hard to predict when that wariness will create a real drag on fundamentals.”