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Groupon Still Losing Money, CEO Is Fired And Leaks Final Email
New submitter Inzkeeper writes with news that the CEO of Groupon met the axe today: "Groupon CEO Andrew Mason made public an email he sent to Groupon employees. He takes responsibility for the company's downturn, expresses his appreciation for his staff, and wishes them well. 'For those who are concerned about me, please don't be — I love Groupon, and I'm terribly proud of what we've created. I'm OK with having failed at this part of the journey. If Groupon was Battletoads, it would be like I made it all the way to the Terra Tubes without dying on my first ever play through.'"
Despite increased revenues, they are still losing about $81 million each quarter, and Wall Street needs blood.
Let's see, a company who cons small business into bad decisions by taking advantage of their inability to quickly do an ROI and assess risk, is themselves falling ill to their unmitigated growth and overhead.
How much could it cost to run a company that just sells coupons?
I'm not sure that's really what happened. I'll bet it's more like Google looked at their books, said "WTF???" and let Groupon "back away" from the deal to save face.
That's a very real possibility. Another possibility is that Andrew Mason really did turn down Google's offer because he knew it would kill his scam. Google isn't just going to walk in and hand them a check for $6 Billion. There's a lot of "due diligence".
Groupon was cooking the books, losing money but showing profitability. Mason was probably worried that if word got out that Google killed the deal because of what they found, Groupon would be tainted and that could put a serious damper on their IPO.
Don't cry for Andrew Mason, the fired CEO. Thanks to Groupon's IPO he leaves a pretty wealthy guy. Which is what this was really all about all along.
I used to work with someone who was close to Ted Leonsis. Ted's great infamous achievement is that he came up with the idea of blanketing the country in AOL disks. He made a lot of money at AOL and then got into buying DC-area sports teams. The media often liked to hold him up as a tech sector golden boy, but I can assure you that being close to Ted Leonsis is no guarantee of success. If anything, I find it interesting that Groupon's CEO was "mentored" by Ted, because I always thought the way Groupon advertised their coupon service was as strangely pervasive as AOL disks were. Put out enough and you're bound to get some return.
He had an idea and marketed it well. Then had an IPO where he gained hundreds of millions of real dollars in real money for the phantom value of a business that didn't work. Now that he's got the money he departs with a smile having been fired rather than quit so it's not his fault if it all goes horribly awry now since it wasn't of his own volition and his story can be it might have survived if only it had followed his secret plan.
We ought to call this one the "clean and jerk". It's becoming a standard model. Some manage to repeat the process multiple times, like AOL.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Harsh. It may be convenient to group people into nice neat categories eg. "All CEOs are terrible people with no feelings", but in reality the world is a much more varied place.
Good CEOs have to put the company above their personal feelings. If they can't do this they will strangle their company to death by making terrible decisions. On some level being a terrible person is part of the job.
I've worked in a company where the CEO could not separate his personal feelings from work duties. When the money ran out he could not cut costs anywhere, he could not even retire off staff that got to retirement age. All his so called friends got lazy and only looked out for their own interests because they knew they could get away with it. If you were there you would love a good old fashioned sociopath CEO, at least they will fire 5 people to save 50.