Groupon: The Daily Deal Giant That Turned Down $6 Billion From Google

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In 2006 Andrew Mason got so frustrated trying to cancel a mobile phone contract that he built a website for collective action. The Point launched in 2007 with a million dollars in seed money from his former employer, Eric Lefkofsky, and its users promptly ignored the social causes and used it to organize group discounts. In November 2008 the pivot became Groupon, and its first deal was two-for-one pizza at Motel Bar, on the ground floor of the company's own Chicago building.

Sixteen months later Groupon was worth over a billion dollars, with comedy writers penning its daily emails and a tipping-point model that turned customers into an unpaid sales force. This episode traces what came next: a rejected Google offer of $5.3 billion plus a $700 million earn-out, a November 2011 IPO shadowed by creative accounting, a stock that lost 80 percent of its value by 2012, a notorious Super Bowl ad, and the long retreat to a smaller company focused on local experiences.

• Groupon originally kept about 50 percent of each coupon sold, and only about 20 percent of deal buyers ever came back to pay full price.
• Its custom metric, ACSOI, stripped out online marketing costs to show $60.6 million in operating income for 2010. Standard accounting revealed a $420 million operating loss.
• Of roughly $1.12 billion in venture capital raised before the IPO, more than $940 million, about 84 percent, was paid out to the three founders and early backers.
• The 2011 Super Bowl commercial starring Timothy Hutton used the plight of the Tibetan people as a punchline, forcing Mason to apologize and pull the ad.
• By 2020 Groupon was phasing down physical goods, cutting 44 percent of its workforce, and shrinking from 27 countries to 15.