Mason: Groupon missed quarterly projections by $10M due to French spreadsheet error
Andrew Mason · Groupon and Descript: Andrew Mason · Sep 9, 2024 · at 47:45
Andrew Mason, co-founder and former CEO of Groupon, describes the moment he realized he could not meet the board's turnaround expectations before being fired in early 2013.
0:00 / 0:20exact quote · 20.5s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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 the next quarter by ten million dollars.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Andrew Mason
Mason: Yahoo in 2010 was a place where great companies went to die
“And my perception of Yahoo at the time was it was a place where great companies go to die.”
Mason: Proliferation of daily deal copycats destroyed Groupon's core business model
“The Proliferation of clones was undermining the foundation of the business model. The business model was based on scarcity. It was based on the novelty of one of these things existing per day in a city, and when you have 50 different Groupons in Chicago, all o…”
Mason: Groupon could have rivaled tech giants without post-rejection execution mistakes
“And it could have, maybe it could have been, were it not for some execution mistakes that happened after we made that decision.”
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…”