About Andrew Mason: Andrew D. Mason is an American businessman and entrepreneur. He is the founder and former CEO of Groupon, a Chicago-based website offering users discounts on local businesses.
The experience is fundamentally different for buying from local businesses than it is for buying consumer goods.
Groupon as a company - it's built into the business model - is about surprise. A new deal that surprises you every day. We've carried that over to our brand, in the writing and the marketing that we do, and in the internal corporate culture.
There are over 2,000 direct clones of the Groupon business model. However, there's an equal amount of proof that the barriers to success are enormous. In spite of all those competitors, only a handful are remotely relevant.
Most small business owners are not particularly sophisticated business people. That's not a criticism; they're passionate about cutting hair or cooking food, and that's why they got in the business, not because they have an MBA.
I didn't realize how hard it was to run a small business.
If you have a great business, if you're great at your craft people should be coming in there. It shouldn't be this secret.
Most of the time, the things that really change the world exist for something fundamentally selfish and then the world-changing ends up being a side-effect of that.
I think if there's any difference between me and a traditional CEO, it's that I've been unwilling to change myself or shape my personality around what's expected.
Local businesses have never had a great way to get customers in the door.
In music, which was my world before, you've got thousands and thousands of years of great ideas that have already been thought of. But the internet is basically 20 years old. So you can be way stupider and still have world-changing ideas.
I've been very lucky, from the beginning. I've found that as long as you're fundamentally good - as long as you're not being bad to people - people give you a lot of room to be yourself, because being yourself is being honest. And that's what people ...
In terms of fear, I still am most afraid of Freddie Kruger.
Life is too short to be a boring company.
Life is not about money.
If I could get a deal on whatever my impulse was, whenever my impulse struck, and it was nearby, I would use that all the time. It would reshape the way that I shop.
A lot of people can raise money.
Generally, what people tend to underestimate is the cyborg nature of Groupon. We are a company that has the DNA of being both a technology company and a heavily operational company.
One of the things I realized... is how few success stories there are in websites or products or businesses that exist primarily for an altruistic purpose.
When you think of couponing, you picture a mom cutting coupons out of the back of the newspaper.
One thing I've come to learn about myself is that I have to keep going.
