Quotes from Andrew Mason

One of the challenges of innovation is figuring out how to wipe your mind clean about what you should be doing at any given moment, and not having a religious attachment to what's gotten you there thus far.

After four and a half intense and wonderful years as CEO of Groupon, I've decided that I'd like to spend more time with my family. Just kidding - I was fired today.

The experience is fundamentally different for buying from local businesses than it is for buying consumer goods.

Local businesses have never had a great way to get customers in the door.

In music, which was my world before, you've got thousands and thousands of years of great ideas that have already been thought of. But the internet is basically 20 years old. So you can be way stupider and still have world-changing ideas.

I own over four ties.

Most of the time, the things that really change the world exist for something fundamentally selfish and then the world-changing ends up being a side-effect of that.

Once you have something so deeply infused in your culture and your brand, it would be very difficult to reverse that inertia if you wanted to.

I'm appalled that an industry has grown around teaching a practice as wholesome and spiritual as yoga, so I decided to create my own free video to help people get started.

Everybody loves a deal on a restaurant or skydiving or laser-hair removal.

I didn't realize how hard it was to run a small business.

The popularity of Groupon has almost rendered the group-buying element of it obsolete, because we're able to deliver so many customers that the merchants are very happy with even the smallest number that we can provide.

All the trends show that email usage among the younger cohorts of Internet users is declining. Whether it will take five or 30 years for email to go extinct, I'm not sure.

I think I was probably that kid in the neighborhood who you could expect once or twice a year to be knocking on your door trying to sell you something stupid.

Most small business owners are not particularly sophisticated business people. That's not a criticism; they're passionate about cutting hair or cooking food, and that's why they got in the business, not because they have an MBA.

Local commerce, without question, will be one of the fundamental use cases enabled by mobile devices over the next several years.

If you don't have those moments where you go too far, then you're probably not going far enough.

There are over 2,000 direct clones of the Groupon business model. However, there's an equal amount of proof that the barriers to success are enormous. In spite of all those competitors, only a handful are remotely relevant.

Generally, what people tend to underestimate is the cyborg nature of Groupon. We are a company that has the DNA of being both a technology company and a heavily operational company.

I think if there's any difference between me and a traditional CEO, it's that I've been unwilling to change myself or shape my personality around what's expected.

If you're open with people and provide context for the decisions that your making, customers will stick with you.

I'm just not used to talking that much about myself. It feels strange.

One thing I've come to learn about myself is that I have to keep going.

Am I as experienced, or mature, or smart as others CEOs? No probably not, but there's something, I think, very useful about having a founder as the CEO.