The Ledger, every show
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks, across all 44 shows. Pick shows below, then mix any filter with any other.
shows 
every show 44 of 44
Mason: Hired actress to impersonate Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz to prank staff
“What happened was we had an all hands meeting at this church down the street from the office and, you know, they're the 500 or a thousand Groupon employees were in this church. And I came up to the stage. I said, hey, I have a special announcement... I said, h…”
Mason: Groupon scaled merchant take rates from ~10% to 50%
“Well, we didn't take that much at first. We might have taken, if we're 10 dollars a unit, we might have taken a dollar, if anything, in those first deals. As we did it more, and we started to see the value that these businesses were getting out of it, and star…”
Mason: Groupon missed quarterly projections by $10M due to French spreadsheet error
“My CFO and I were meeting with investors in Barcelona or Madrid or something like that when we got a call from our French office that there was some, like, error in the spreadsheet they were using to Track stuff, and we were gonna miss our number in, in France…”
Mason: Lefkofsky offered $1M to drop out and build The Point
“So after I'd been in school for just under a quarter, he called me up one day, and he had heard about another idea for a website that I'd had that later became known as The Point. And I think his business instincts didn't know what to do with something like po…”
Mason: The Point raised around $4M to $4.8M from NEA
“So after the initial a million, I think we raised 4.8 from NEA. Or four million or something like that.”
Mason: Groupon's first deal required 20 buyers for $10 pizza
“Ultimately, the first business that ran on Groupon was a pizza shop. We offered 20 dollars of value in pizza, cost 10 dollars, so people are saving 50%. And we had to sell 20 in order to hit the so-called tipping point and actually have the deal become real.”
Mason: Thousands of Groupon clones emerged rapidly during early growth
“The emergence of what became literally thousands of Groupon clones added intensity to it because we felt like we had to stay ahead.”
Mason: Detour audio walking tours cost $30,000 each to produce
“It was cool, like really prestige stuff, if you can say such a thing, but each one cost us 30,000 dollars to make.”
Mason: Early investors showed little enthusiasm for podcasting software
“As we talked to investors there just wasn't a lot of enthusiasm about it.”