LivingSocial is a Washington, D.C based e-commerce discount website, offering products such as daily deals, Escapes, Families,Takeout & Delivery and Gourmet.
Living Social is known to be one of the most successful start-up ventures founded in 2007 as Hungry Machine by four previous employees of Revolution Health Group: Tim O’Shaughnessy, Aaron Batalion, Eddie Frederick, and Val Aleksenko. In initial year, Hungry Machine developed two of the most downloaded apps in Facebook history—Visual Bookshelf and Pick Your Five. The apps have been used by over 85 million users.
According to the founders, the idea of LivingSocial was initiated by Tim O’Shaughnessy while he was still working for Revolution Health as the Consumer products’ lead. Tim has a degree in marketing operations & information management from Georgetown University. He also led the team which made the Visual Bookshelf application on Facebook which offered users to index and share their preferred books with their friends. By the end of 2007, the company changed its name to LivingSocial and launched PickYourFive as well as other Polls applications, making the company the number one application developer on Facebook platform. In 2009, they took over BuyYourFriendADrink.com and launched its present highest-grossing daily deals business.
Tim O’Shaughnessy, Aaron Batalion, Eddie Frederick, and Val Aleksenko
In 2010, January Grotech Ventures and AOL Founder Steve Case funded LivingSocial with $5 million and in 2011, the founders managed $400 million funding from various investors including Amazon and Lightspeed Venture Partners, T. Rowe Price and Institutional Venture Partners. Currently, the LivingSocial is worth more than $3 billion. It took less than three years to spread its presence in 25 countries across the globe with 5000 employees. By the end of 2011, after stumbling up on the considerable down fall and loss of $558 million, they received $224 million in revenue.
