When was groupon founded

The Point was not intended to be a big money-making enterprise, and by one early employee's account, that was fine with most of the staff. The Point launched in June. It gained modest traction in Chicago, but basically went nowhere. Every Monday, Lefkofsky, Mason, and a handful of early employees would meet to talk about the Point's progress.

One Monday, in the middle of , Lefkofsky raised an idea he thought could revitalize the struggling start-up, based on a campaign he'd seen launched on The Point. Ordinarily, people used The Point to organize around some sort of cause that might make the world a better place. But in this case, a group of users decided their cause should be saving money. Their plan was to round up 20 or so people who all wanted to buy the same product and see if they could get a group discount.

But when Lefkofsky brought it up more than a year later, Mason and The Point's other early executives dismissed the idea. Through the rest of the summer and early fall of , Lefkofsky would not let that idea go. He'd bring up all the expensive purses his wife and all her friends were buying, and say, "It's crazy! Couldn't they buy 20 of them and get a discount? Then in September , Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and famous Silicon Valley venture capital firm Sequoia sent out a presentation called "R.

Good Times. Groupon — a side project launched out of desperation by a team of do-gooders who professed no real desire to make big bags of money — was born. Investors, some of them who also put money into Facebook , began calling Groupon the fastest growing company in history. The first major test for the project was its move into a second market: Boston. We had a lot of people who knew business owners. It's easier for business owners to trust a local company.

During Groupon's first months, customer support head Joe Harrow would spend three hours every afternoon personally emailing all the customers who bought Groupon vouchers whenever a deal closed. Nine months in, Groupon switched to software specifically designed for the new business.

Groupon successfully expanded into a third market: New York. By this time, says an employee, "we kind of had the playbook we needed to open in another city, another city, another city. By the summer of , Lefkofsky started pushing hard for growth in Groupon's Monday meetings.

Finally, according to a source familiar with those meetings, Lefkofsky just started saying, "Why don't we try and go as fast as we can?

Why don't we turn up the jets? So we wanted to get to as many cities as we can because we saw direct, outright, verbatim copies of what we were doing, popping up all over the place pretty quickly. We said we can either go chase them and beat them back and fight them legally, or race ahead and do what we do, as best we can. So the choice was to not look back, and try to be better and bigger. One source close to Groupon's board says it was director Peter Barris of Groupon investor NEA that came up with the original analysis behind this aggressive growth plan.

By this time, not only were consumers noticing Groupon, the press was catching on too. Mason went on CNBC. Learn how to drive more traffic and discover new customers for your business. Fill 1 Submit. Related Posts. View All Our Business Resources. Spa and Facial Promotion Ideas. Related Topics. Go Beyond Deals. Become a Destination. Facebook-f Twitter Youtube Linkedin-in. All Rights Reserved. It came back down to earth pretty quickly. In June, the company had a reverse stock split, where every 20 shares were converted into one share.

He was fired in February and moved to the West Coast. Williams was ousted in March. Running the company now is Aaron Cooper, who joined Groupon in and had most recently served as North American president. There have been several over the past decade, with the company cutting employees and changing its focus back and forth between daily deals and merchandise sold through Groupon Goods. In May, the company put up for sublease , square feet of space at its headquarters at W. Chicago Ave.

What happened? We got this other deal at Motel Bar, which is the bar and pizza place downstairs from our office. I think we sold 20 of those the first day that we ran it. The way that we sold them was by going to the lobby of the office building, or standing outside of Motel Bar, and handing out little postcards that we had printed. Just to get 20 people to act?

Every one of those 20 was a labor of love. When did you realize that this was working? How are you feeling then? It was incredibly intense. And I remember my team and I going to the mat — really fighting it out — on what deals we were going to run. In a way, we were behaving like children. But it was beautiful to care that much about something. Groupon was six months old when we decided to get into another city, Boston. We sent a couple of our people out there to go door-to-door and try to sign up some businesses.

What are you talking about? They had like literally copied a bunch of the writing on our website and sales materials. It was completely shocking. I was new to business. I always thought I was going to be a musician, and in that world we would call this plagiarism. What offended you most? It was my idea, my thing. At that point in my life, I got a lot of my satisfaction from having that.

It felt like cheating. Once the model had been validated, we were in a situation where we had a backlog nine months deep of people who wanted to be featured on the site. So the whole model invited the existence of these competitors to sop up the excess demand from these businesses.

Did that competition drive this push for growth? It felt like, This huge opportunity is out there, and we need to run as fast as we can to grab it before somebody else does. It was March or April of when we launched Boston, and then it was three months before we launched our third city, which was either New York or Washington, D. We kept on cutting it in half, and we got to the point where we would launch a city a month and then two cities a month and then four cities a month.

We came up with this recipe for launching a city, and it just became rinse and repeat. How does that work? Like how do you how do you manage people? We went from 20 to 80 over the course of one year. Zero to felt different from to 2,? Something like that. Like once you get over your kibbutz or whatever, that all feels like a process of being reborn.

Your relationship with people changes. A lot of them you never even see. Were you reading those books? Yeah, I was reading everything I could to try to figure out what the fuck was happening to me. I would say it ironically a lot. I also had a really hard time accepting that. I remember Forbes wrote an article putting us on the cover, calling us the fastest-growing company of all time. And I hung it up in the lobby of our office and I surrounded it with cover articles about like Webvan and —.

And it was this kind of like morbid joke that just came from my discomfort with the insanity of everything that was happening. It started with an offer from Yahoo. Groupon was going gangbusters; it seemed like there was no end in sight.

We were doing over a billion dollars topline and just growing superfast, just this rocketship ride. And then all of a sudden we have to contend with this offer. And to me that was the least attractive idea in the world. I was thinking about wanting to build a company that was going to live on for generations. We thought that it could be a bigger business. There is something safe about just getting out, but the idea of going to work at Yahoo?

It just was not an inspiring idea.