After rattling off the necessary data points — more than 7,000 employees and 83 million subscribers — Mason starts Groupon’s story by bringing up the social action platform he co-founded before launching Groupon.
“After selling out on our original mission of saving the world to start hawking coupons,” he writes, “in order to live with ourselves, we vowed to make Groupon a service that people love using.”
Among the other factors Mason thinks have made Groupon successful: investing in growth even when it means posting a loss for the quarter, not shying away from the unusual, measurin g success with unconventional metrics and reinventing as needed — like when the company outgrew its one-deal-per-market model.
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The letter in its entirety is posted below.
Dear Potential Stockholders,
On the day of this writing, Groupon’s over 7,000 employees offered more than 1,000 daily deals to 83 million subscribers across 43 countries and have sold to date over 70 million Groupons. Reaching this scale in about 30 months required a great deal of operating flexibility, dating back to Groupon’s founding.
Before Groupon, there was The Point—a website launched in November 2007 after my former employer and one of my co-founders, Eric Lefkofsky, asked me to leave graduate school so we could start a business. The Point is a social action platform that lets anyone organize a campaign asking others to give money or take action as a group, but onl y once a “tipping...
