When I met Andrew Mason in 2007, Groupon didn’t exist. Mason was driving a startup called ThePoint that gathered people on the Web to unite behind particular causes. He had cleverly created a stir by soliciting pledges from normal people to build a dome over the entire city of Chicago that would be deployed during the cold months of winter. Mason bubbled with confidence; he would need it.
Mason has been pelted with disapproval from the tech world ever since Groupon turned down a $6 billlion acquisition offer from Google during the fall of 2010. Some of that was jealousy, some of it came from true incredulous disbelief that a company so young could spurn such an offer, and some of it came from the Silicon Valley set that saw Groupon as a company that had done nothing innovative with its Webapp and whose business didn’t scale on the back of code, but on the backs of sales people (not the preferred method of growth in the Valley). When Groupon went public in 2011, Mason drew yet more sets of critical eyes, now in the form of Wall Street analysts and the journalists they run with.