As a youngster, Andrew Mason was the creative one with an offbeat sense of humor, organizing projects for his sister and friends that included forts made out of afghans, costumes and stages for plays, and building a bike path in the woods near his Pittsburgh-area home.
“He was absolutely the leader,” said Bridgit Wolf, who now playfully refers to herself not as Andrew’s mom but as Groupon mom. “He could talk (his friends) into doing things that they had no intention of building.”
The projects he built with 2-by-4s didn’t turn out quite as well — he’s no carpenter, Wolf said — as his current project, the juggernaut of daily, largely local cyberdeals known worldwide as Groupon Inc.
“I never thought of myself as an entrepreneur,” Mason said in an interview last week that he agreed to only if there was no mention of Google Inc., which wanted to buy Groupon Inc. for more than $5 billion. “I have a lot of ideas on things, and I like to try and create things. Everything that’s happened to me, it’s just meeting up with the right group of entrepreneurial people who exposed me to this community, and I’ve learned a ton.”
After earning a bachelor’s degree in music from Northwestern University in 2003 and working in Web development for serial entrepreneur Eric Lefkofsky, much of that learning came at The Point. The Web site was launched from Chicago in November 2007 to bring together people with a common cause to take action, whether it be fundraising or letter-writing. But by late summer 2008, still waiting for traffic to the site to increase and watching the bills pile up and the economy erode, the site was retooled and Groupon was born.
“I don’t think I would have dropped out of college, graduate school, if one day someone…