Andrew Mason

THE MAN BEHIND

GROUPON

This man is the founder of Groupon. He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1981. Unlike other internet billionaires, he attended Northwestern University in Chicago in music course. But in 2006, he won a scholorship to attend the University of Chicago Harris School of Policy. He was there just for three months and then he dropped out to set up The Point, a web service focused on online collection action and fundraising.

Andrew Mason founded Groupon one year later.

GROUPON.

Groupon grew from ThePoint.com campaign website in November 2008. Its name was a combination of "group" and "coupon". The first deal of Groupon was offering half-price for the pizza to the first floor restaurant in Chicago.

 In January 2011, Groupon has purchased the Indian deal of the day website SoSasta.com and re-branded it as 'Crazeal by Groupon Inc'. It is headed by Ankur Warikoo The Groupon acquisitions of uBuyiBuy launched services under the Groupon name in Hong Kong. Groupon also acquired GroupsMore.com in Malaysia to expand its business there.

Andrew Mason was given 1 million dollers by his previous employer, Eric Lefkofsky to develop the idea. Groupon was launched in November 2008 and Chicago was the first market for Groupon followed by Boston, New York City and Toronto. By October 2010, Groupon served more than 150 markets in North America and 100 markets in Europe, Asia, and South America and had 35 billion registered users. Since its beginning, more than 6 million deals has been sold by Groupon. Groupon taking 50 percent of every deal and a small credit card handling fee makes Groupon's revenue is expected to top 350 million by the end of 2010. It was reported that the annual revenue was jumped up to 800 million in late 2010.

I am very sure that we can expect more from him in the future.