Groupon CEO Andrew Mason has been fired after another quarterly earnings whiff from the onetime darling of the daily-deals business. It's a business that doesn't really have any darlings now.
Groupon under Mason's leadership infamously spurned Google's $6 billion buyout offer. Google promptly turned around and launched its own daily deals site. Today Groupon is worth less than half of what Google offered, and less than a quarter of its value following its 2011 stock market debut — at the time the biggest internet IPO since Google's in 2004.
Google's own daily-deals endeavor didn't so much kill Groupon's business as a competitor, but rather exposed the whole business model as flawed.
As many others have pointed out, Groupon was never really a tech company but for some reason was perceived as one. In reality, Groupon is a sales business that uses technology but still relies intensively on human labor to do the selling. As it turns out, the barrier to entry into a business like that is nearly nonexistent. Competitors proliferated just as businesses and consumers started losing interest in the whole concept.
Since then, Groupon has tried to diversify into other businesses such as discount e-commerce and mobile payments. But the changes seem like too little, too late for investors and for Mason, who confirmed his departure in a note he posted online. "The events of the last year-and-a-half speak for themselves," Mason wrote. "As CEO, I am accountable."
Here's the full text of Mason's note:
