On November 4, 2011, the daily deals company Groupon began trading on the Nasdaq.

Its shares opened 40 percent above their $20 offering price and closed up 31 percent, valuing the three-year-old Chicago company at about $16.7 billion. It was the largest IPO by a U.S. internet company since Google in 2004. CEO Andrew Mason, who co-founded Groupon with Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell, had already turned down a roughly $6 billion offer from Google. Groupon was growing fast, but heavy spending on salespeople and marketing meant it lost $308 million in the first nine months of 2011.

The road to the IPO was rocky. Groupon's June 2011 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission introduced a self-invented measure called Adjusted Consolidated Segment Operating Income, or ACSOI, which left out marketing and subscriber acquisition costs, the company's biggest expense. After SEC pushback, Groupon dropped the metric, and a change in how it counted revenue cut its reported first-half sales roughly in half. Mason's leaked memo to employees during the pre-IPO quiet period added to the scrutiny, and the hoped-for $30 billion valuation shrank to about $13 billion at pricing.

The first-day pop didn't last. Less than three weeks later, as rival LivingSocial pushed into national holiday deals, Groupon fell below its IPO price. In March 2012, it revised its first quarterly results as a public company after underestimating customer refunds, and its auditor, Ernst and Young, flagged a material weakness in its financial controls. Mason was fired in February 2013 after the stock had lost about three quarters of its value. The story shows what happens when a company tries to choose which costs count, and the market decides for itself.

Written and hosted by Ron Trucks. Research and editing by Rodney Russ. Sound design by Angela Cahoy. Music by Cody Martin and Soundstripe.

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