One of the things I realized... is how few success stories there are in websites or products or businesses that exist primarily for an altruistic purpose.
One of the challenges of innovation is figuring out how to wipe your mind clean about what you should be doing at any given moment, and not having a religious attachment to what's gotten you there thus far.
Most small business owners are not particularly sophisticated business people. That's not a criticism; they're passionate about cutting hair or cooking food, and that's why they got in the business, not because they have an MBA.
I look at being a capitalist businessperson like riding a bike - if I go too slowly, I'll fall over. Or it's kind of like a shark: if I stop swimming, I'll just die.
I feel like clout is something that builds up on your teeth.
If you have a great business, if you're great at your craft people should be coming in there. It shouldn't be this secret.
Once you have something so deeply infused in your culture and your brand, it would be very difficult to reverse that inertia if you wanted to.
Yeah, it turns out that guys don't like deals on laser hair removal or pole dancing lessons.
The popularity of Groupon has almost rendered the group-buying element of it obsolete, because we're able to deliver so many customers that the merchants are very happy with even the smallest number that we can provide.
Groupon as a company - it's built into the business model - is about surprise. A new deal that surprises you every day. We've carried that over to our brand, in the writing and the marketing that we do, and in the internal corporate culture.
There are over 2,000 direct clones of the Groupon business model. However, there's an equal amount of proof that the barriers to success are enormous. In spite of all those competitors, only a handful are remotely relevant.
Generally, what people tend to underestimate is the cyborg nature of Groupon. We are a company that has the DNA of being both a technology company and a heavily operational company.
Everybody loves a deal on a restaurant or skydiving or laser-hair removal.
In music, which was my world before, you've got thousands and thousands of years of great ideas that have already been thought of. But the internet is basically 20 years old. So you can be way stupider and still have world-changing ideas.
