At the Goldman Sachs Internet and Technology Conference in San Francisco Thursday, Groupon Founder and CEO Andrew Mason took to the stage to talk about the daily deal behemoth’s newly-minted position as a public company, its roller coaster ride both leading up to and since its IPO, as well as plans for the future.
There was a lot of pressure bearing down on Groupon in the months leading up to its emergence on NASDAQ, with many grumbling about its overvaluation and undercooked business model, among other things. After listing its initial offering at $26 a share in November, the company’s stock today has dropped to $20 a share, after a series of ups and downs. → Read More
Groupon founder and CEO Andrew Mason was interviewed by Techonomy’s David Kirkpatrick on stage at the annual DLD confab in Munich, Germany.
Below are my notes – Mason’s responses are slightly paraphrased. → Read More
Andrew Mason (30), who co-founded Groupon and currently serves as its CEO, hasn’t often been spotted wearing a business suit and tie.
But when you’re pitching investors on an initial public offering, looking to raise over half a billion dollars at a $11.4 billion valuation, I guess you kinda have to.
This morning, Groupon’s IPO roadshow video presentation was published and is publicly available here (via The New York Times). → Read More
Earlier this year at All Things D, Groupon CEO Andrew Mason said one of his regrets was not opening an office in Silicon Valley earlier. The implication was that he was talking about not taking advantage of the superior coding talent, but I took it another way.
Being in Silicon Valley is like playing for the Yankees. You get knocked around more than anywhere else, the glare of the media spotlight is more brutal and the expectations are higher than they’d be in any other city. You also get the coaching and, say, run support or bullpen arms that the most outrageously rich franchise in baseball history can afford. If you’ve got the chops, all of that undoubtably makes you a better player.
Don’t get me wrong: I hate the Yankees. But I can understand on a professional level, why so many players leave teams I love to go play there. → Read More
I am in Chicago where I was supposed to be having dinner with Groupon CEO Andrew Mason last night, a dinner planned more than a month ago when I bought my plane ticket. Instead, he has suddenly decided to go to China.
It was bad news for me, but good news for anyone looking to buy shares in the company. Also good news: TechCrunch has learned that Groupon’s sprawling, costly international operations have recently been brought back under control of Groupon’s more rigorous US management team.
This all matters greatly for potential investors, because as the S1 showed, much of Groupon’s warchest of venture capital has gone to its aggressive international expansion. As we reported last week, Groupon’s U.S operations lost only $10.4 million last year, whereas the international operations lost $170.6 million. → Read More
Groupon, as everyone knows by now, is growing like crazy. How crazy? CEO Andrew Mason just revealed at the D9 technology conference that he now employs 8,000 people, which is up from 1,500 a year ago. That means it grew headcount by 433 percent.
About half of its employees are sales people. Signing up local businesses to offer group discounts requires a lot of hand-holding and sales calls across many local markets. Groupon is now in 46 countries. → Read More
These are my notes from a panel on ‘Local Markets’ at the DLD Conference in Germany, which featured Groupon CEO Andrew Mason and Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley.
Q: It’s always been quite hard for local merchants to be found. How do you look at the differences between your companies in trying to solve that problem?
Dennis: We’re more about loyalty, aiding businesses who want to reward regular customers, while Groupon I think is more about new customer acquisition. Foursquare is also users leaving tips for other users, which makes it more of a discovery thing. → Read More
Groupon CEO Andrew Mason was on Charlie Rose last night. He refused to answer any questions about why Groupon spurned Google’s $6 billion acquisition offer, but he did reveal a few stats and his thinking on what makes Groupon successful. Groupon now boasts 40 million subscribers for its daily deals, and added 3 million last week alone. In the beginning of the year, it was adding only about 100,000 new subscribers a week.
Mason attributes Groupon’s hypergrowth to the fact that it is inherently social and its growth is accelerated by Facebook and Twitter. Deals propagate much faster than they ever could before because “the social graph . . . just allows companies to grow at a rate that is unprecedented.” He explains that Groupon’s success needs to be understood in this context: → Read More
After debuted the latest in a series of wacky stunts, dating service and scholarship fund Grouspawn, I caught up with Groupon CEO Andrew Mason backstage at TechCrunch Disrupt to talk about the recent Groupon backlash, the company’s success problem and how transparency can scale to hundreds of millions of dollars in deals in 150 cities around the world. → Read More
What a difference a deal makes. This morning, Groupon launched its first nationwide deal, $25 off a $50 purchase at Gap. The promotion, which was available in every city, briefly crashed Groupon’s servers as deal-happy consumers clicked on the 50% discount and pinged their friends.
Despite the technical difficulties, according to Groupon‘s CEO Andrew Mason, as of 11AM PST (the e-mail blast went out at roughly 6AM in each time zone) Groupon has sold 200,000 Groupons and is currently selling roughly 10 per second. Ten sales per second is an unusually high volume, Mason says, “several multiples above the average.”
If this trend persists, Groupon will likely sell more than 700,000 Gap Groupons by the end of day. Or, roughly $17.5 million in revenues for the daily deal machine. (That will buy you a lot of monkeys.)
Update: The pace of sales fizzled out later in the day. In total, 400,000 Groupons were sold, or $11 million in revenues. Not quite the 700,000, but certainly not shabby. → Read More
According to GroupOn CEO Andrew Mason who is on stage right now at Social Currency CrunchUp, GroupOn was originally a side project Mason started in order to make money, “We tried a zillion things” Mason said.
Including selling slippers with flashlights, which Mason describes as “act of desperation, pretty impressive considering that the company is currently making $365 million in revenues, a million a day according to our sources. Mason gave no thought whatsoever as to whether or not it would work. → Read More
With the debut of Groupon personalization, I have little doubt that the daily deal site will double the number of deals (and double its revenue run rate) in just a few months.
According to CEO Andrew Mason, the service is churning out 75,000 transactions per day. Through personalization, Groupon will be able to offer 20, 30 or more deals per city per day. Assuming the current growth rate in subscribers — in the last four months the site has more than doubled to 12 million registered users— 2x is likely a prudish estimate.
It’s hard to fault a company that is making money hand over fist; however, as a user, I do have one piece of advice: loosen that death grip on the daily deal mantra. → Read More
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