Founder and CEO of Groupon Andrew Mason was reluctant to directly answer some questions from moderator Kara Swisher at the DLD conference today. But he still shared many of his views on what makes Groupon a great company and how he plans to expand it in the future.
Here are our notes from the panel:
On the importance of Groupon: “We’re not a discounting service; I think of us as local e-commerce…. It’s one of the original things that people wanted to do on the Internet…. With Groupon it’s the first time in history that local businesses have been able to pay for what really matters, and that’s customers at the door…. Groupon as a business model is a surprise every day.”
On the early days of Groupon: “I don’t think we fully realized how vital something like this could be to small businesses in the city.”
On expanding Groupon: “We took our time before we fully expanded… After looking at a lot of the companies that have had this kind of rise and then a sudden fall… often they’re losing to themselves. We just need to continue to focus on making our customers super happy, and we need to continue finding the ways to innovate and disrupt ourselves.”
On turning down Google’s offer: “I can’t comment on the speculation on any on that stuff, but I can say that local e-commerce is an exciting space, and we feel we’re onto something, and we’re excited to be building something in this space.”
On not being able to answer questions about turning down Google’s offer: “I think it’s important to explain why I’m not answering these questions… The first time we’ve ever acquired a company… it’s very personal, and everybody wants you to do this out in the open, and we’re only figuring things out, it’s not respectful to the other people involved to talk about it.”
On Groupon’s goals: “We’d like to become what Amazon has become for products, we want to become this for local… 2011 is the year when Groupon become much more of a technology company, and a lot of that is personalization.”
On Groupon clones: “From what I’ve seen, Groupon clones have had trouble reaching high quality advertisers… Many of the newspapers and businesses who have tried to do what we do have later come to us… there’s a lot to be gained from partnering with us.”
We’ve also heard a couple of interesting (though not all of them are new) figures about Groupon:
– 2 million subscribers in 2009, 51 million in 2010
– 1 country in 2009, 35 countries in 2010 and 5 more since the beginning of 2011
– 30 cities in 2009, thousands now
– 140 employees in 2009, more than 4,000 today
– More than 32 million Groupons purchased worldwide
– $1.5 billion in savings for consumers
Photo by Lisa Bettany
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