Andrew Mason

Andrew Masonis the cofounder of Groupon, a Chicago-based e-commerce company that specializes in providing customers with coupons for discounted products and services from local businesses.

Mason grew up in the Pittsburgh suburb of Mount Lebanon. His parents were entrepreneurs: his father was a diamond salesman, and his mother owned a photography business. Mason developed his own entrepreneurial spirit in high school. At age 15 he started a weekend bagel-delivery service called Bagel Express. In 2003 Mason graduated from Northwestern University with a bachelor’s degree in music. Finding no work in that field, he took a job as a software developer at InnerWorkings, Inc., and met the company’s founder, Chicago entrepreneur Eric Lefkofsky. In 2006 Mason earned a scholarship to attend the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy after creating Policy Tree, a visualization tool for policy debates.

During this period he created The Point—an Internet-based program designed to organize grassroots action for a given cause (such as boycotting a product, funding a scholarship, or supporting a charitable project)—after he had difficulty terminating his cellular telephone contract. (He believed that many other people had the same problem; if they could be organized, he thought, they could push for a better deal from their cellular provider.) The Point enabled people to collaborate with one another to support a cause while allowing them to make a monetary donation to invest in it; however, they would not be charged until a prearranged monetary or membership target had been reached. Lefkofsky provided $1 million in start-up money for the venture. Just three months after starting at the University of Chicago, Mason dropped out to work full-time on the idea.

In 2007 Mason searched for a way to make a profit from The Point by exploring the concept of collective buying—a practice in which a group of customers pledges to purchase a product from a vendor and the vendor in turn provides the product to the group at a reduced price. In 2008 he founded and opened Groupon with Lefkofsky; Mason became the company’s chief executive officer. By negotiating deep discounts on vendors’ products and services, Groupon sought to link vendors with new customers through its signature “deal of the day” for a spotlighted product or service as well as through other, less-prominent deals. Groupon profited from each sale by receiving up to 50 percent of the retail value of the product or service. By 2012 Groupon had grown from a few dozen workers to over 12,000, and it was operating in more than 150 U.S. cities and more than 40 countries.

In November 2010 Google Inc. expressed interest in buying Groupon, offering approximately $6 billion. To the shock of many in the business community, Mason and his executives decided not to sell, stating that they wanted to retain Groupon as an independent business. In June 2011 Mason announced his plan to take the company public. In November the initial public offering (IPO) allowed Groupon to raise $700 million, which raised Mason’s net worth to $1 billion and increased Groupon’s value to $12.7 billion. By August 2012, however, Groupon’s stock had plummeted 75 percent, and in February 2013 Mason was ousted as CEO.

In 2014 Mason founded Detour, an app that provided audio walking tours for various cities. Four years later its software and content were sold to Bose, a manufacturer of audio equipment.