Andrew Mason Biography

Andrew Mason Age

Andrew Mason was born in 1981 in Pennsylvania, United States. He is 38 years old as of 2019.

Andrew Mason Net worth

Andrew Mason has an estimated net worth of $200 Million.

Andrew Mason Early life

Andrew Mason grew up in a Jewish family in Mount Lebanon, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh.

Andrew Mason Wife

Andrew Mason is married to pop/folk singer Jenny Gillespie.

Andrew Mason Education

Andrew Mason graduated from Mt. Lebanon High School in 1999 and he started a Saturday morning delivery service called “Bagel Express” when he was aged 15. He went on and joined Northwestern University in 2003 where he studied music, and after his graduation he worked in web design for Chicago entrepreneur Eric Lefkofsky.

He stopped working with Lefkofsky to attend the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy after he was awarded a scholarship. However, he dropped out of his master’s degree program several months after it started. He also interned and worked at prominent Chicago recording studio, Electrical Audio, under recording engineer Steve Albini, whom Mason cited as an inspiration on his subsequent work ethic.

Andrew Mason and wife Jenny Gillespie

Andrew Mason Businessman, Entrepreneur and CEO of Groupon

Andrew Mason was employed as a developer at InnerWorkings, which is a company founded by Lefkofsky, in 2006. Lefkofsky provided Mason with $1 million in “seed money” to bankroll The Point, Mason’s first entrepreneurial venture was on the Internet. It was found that The Point of social initiatives platform name was inspired by Malcolm Gladwell’s to The Tipping Point for it was too abstract to market, unti;l it was stripped down to the Groupon concept, to get into its website that sells deals to local businesses. Groupon’s website states that since its beginning in November 2008, it has sold more than six million deals. With Groupon taking 50 percent of every deal, plus a small credit-card handling fee, in late 2010 it was reported by Mashable that Groupon’s annual revenue was $800 million.

On December 1, 2010, The New York Times reported that Groupon was the subject of a $6 billion acquisition bid from Google, which Groupon turned down. In 2010, his salary was $180,000; “at his own recommendation” it was reduced to $756.72 effective January 1, 2011, according to the company’s SEC filings. In 2011, he sold $10 million worth of Groupon stock before the company went public in November. He still owns 46 million Class A shares. On December 18, 2012, he was named “Worst CEO of the Year” by Herb Greenberg of CNBC. Greenberg wrote, in part, “Mason’s goofball antics, which can come off more like a big kid than company leader, almost make a mockery of corporate leadership especially for a company with a market value of more than $3 billion.

It would be excusable, even endearing, if the company were doing well (think Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines) but it’s not. Sales growth is through the floor. He was dismissed as Groupon’s CEO on February 28, 2013, the day after the company missed analysts’ expectations for sales, and fell far short of the mark when it came to profit. In a letter to Groupon employees on the day of his dismissal, he wrote After four and a half intense and wonderful years as CEO of Groupon, I’ve decided that I’d like to spend more time with my family.

Just kidding I was fired today. If you’re wondering why you have not been paying attention. From controversial metrics in the S1 had a material weakness to two quarters of missing its own expectations and stock price that’s hovering around one quarter of our listing price, the events of the last year and a half speak for themselves. As CEO, I am accountable. Journalists estimated that his severance pay was just $378.36—six months’ worth of salary—based on his employment agreement and his latest public salary information.

He released a motivational rock album entitled Hardly Workin’ in July 2013 through iTunes and Spotify. A journalist described the album in the following manner: “You’re not going to bump Hardly Workin’, ever. But you might give it a spin for fun, and it’s worth that much. Maybe not $9.99 on iTunes, but you could endure a Spotify ad or two just to hear someone in tech do something truly silly.” The album was produced by Don Gehman, who has worked with R.E.M. and John Mellencamp, and the motivation behind the album was explained on the website of New York’s Daily News:

I managed over 12,000 people at Groupon, most under the age of 25. One thing that surprised me was that many would arrive at orientation with minimal understanding of basic business wisdom….It was with this in mind that I spent a week in LA earlier this month recording Hardly Workin’, a seven song album of motivational business music targeted at people newly entering the workforce.” In February 2015, he released an iPhone app, Detour, selling unconventional audio tours of major cities. The initial release offered seven different San Francisco expeditions, each costing $5. In 2018, Detour was acquired by Bose, which was planning to use the app in an upcoming Augmented Reality platform.

Andrew Mason Advocate

Tweets by andrewmason

Andrew Mason Talk on

The Super-Quick Rise and Fall of Groupon

ndrew Mason started Groupon ten years ago. He was a graduate student in his mid-20s, making money on the side by building websites. Through that work, he’d met tech billionaire Eric Lefkofsky, and Mason had mentioned to him this idea for a website he wanted him to fund. Within two years of its founding, he was earning hundreds of millions a month in revenue and was valued at several billion dollars. It grew faster than Apple. Faster than Facebook. Faster than Google.

And then, just as rapidly and just as dramatically, its fortunes changed. After Groupon’s stock had dropped to a quarter of its IPO price, Mason was fired, and his tenure is perhaps best recalled by the frank letter he sent to employees announcing his departure: “After four and a half intense and wonderful years as CEO of Groupon, I’ve decided that I’d like to spend more time with my family. Just kidding — I was fired today. If you’re wondering why … you haven’t been paying attention.”

This dream rised in a nightmare fall, to incredibly short span time, is almost like the comic-book version of a start-up story. These days, Mason is a CEO of a much smaller company, of just ten employees. It’s called Descript, and it makes software that transcribes and edits spoken-word audio.

I met Mason in 2013, around the same time my co-founder and I were starting the podcasting company Gimlet. Because Mason and I were both involved in audio, we got to know each other a bit. He eventually became an angel investor in Gimlet. We never really talked about his experience at Groupon until I sat down with him in a studio in San Francisco a couple of months ago, when I used my podcast as an excuse to finally get him to tell me his story.

Andrew Mason Youtube