Cooper has been with Groupon for 10 years, according to the Wednesday news release. He has held multiple senior leadership roles, including chief marketing officer. A representative from Groupon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Twitter AllyMarotti. Skip to content. Latest Business. Former suburban tech CEO sentenced to 30 days behind bars for role in U. Capitol breach. We got this other deal at Motel Bar, which is the bar and pizza place downstairs from our office.
I think we sold 20 of those the first day that we ran it. The way that we sold them was by going to the lobby of the office building, or standing outside of Motel Bar, and handing out little postcards that we had printed. Just to get 20 people to act? Every one of those 20 was a labor of love. When did you realize that this was working? How are you feeling then?
It was incredibly intense. And I remember my team and I going to the mat — really fighting it out — on what deals we were going to run. In a way, we were behaving like children. But it was beautiful to care that much about something. Groupon was six months old when we decided to get into another city, Boston.
We sent a couple of our people out there to go door-to-door and try to sign up some businesses. What are you talking about? They had like literally copied a bunch of the writing on our website and sales materials. It was completely shocking. I was new to business. I always thought I was going to be a musician, and in that world we would call this plagiarism. What offended you most?
It was my idea, my thing. At that point in my life, I got a lot of my satisfaction from having that. It felt like cheating. Once the model had been validated, we were in a situation where we had a backlog nine months deep of people who wanted to be featured on the site.
So the whole model invited the existence of these competitors to sop up the excess demand from these businesses. Did that competition drive this push for growth? It felt like, This huge opportunity is out there, and we need to run as fast as we can to grab it before somebody else does.
It was March or April of when we launched Boston, and then it was three months before we launched our third city, which was either New York or Washington, D. We kept on cutting it in half, and we got to the point where we would launch a city a month and then two cities a month and then four cities a month. We came up with this recipe for launching a city, and it just became rinse and repeat. How does that work? Like how do you how do you manage people?
We went from 20 to 80 over the course of one year. Zero to felt different from to 2,? Something like that. Like once you get over your kibbutz or whatever, that all feels like a process of being reborn.
Your relationship with people changes. A lot of them you never even see. Were you reading those books? Yeah, I was reading everything I could to try to figure out what the fuck was happening to me. I would say it ironically a lot. I also had a really hard time accepting that. I remember Forbes wrote an article putting us on the cover, calling us the fastest-growing company of all time.
And I hung it up in the lobby of our office and I surrounded it with cover articles about like Webvan and —. And it was this kind of like morbid joke that just came from my discomfort with the insanity of everything that was happening. It started with an offer from Yahoo. Groupon was going gangbusters; it seemed like there was no end in sight. We were doing over a billion dollars topline and just growing superfast, just this rocketship ride.
And then all of a sudden we have to contend with this offer. And to me that was the least attractive idea in the world. I was thinking about wanting to build a company that was going to live on for generations. We thought that it could be a bigger business. There is something safe about just getting out, but the idea of going to work at Yahoo? It just was not an inspiring idea. But we had to take it seriously; the board wanted to take it seriously.
The head of corp dev from Yahoo came to Chicago. I went out to dinner with him, and I remember being so depressed about meeting with this guy. This is it. What did selling to Yahoo represent, exactly? It was kind of this graveyard for cool companies. I wanted this thing to be successful and as big as we wanted it to be, right? I want to be true to some vision that I have, but at the same time I want to grow the company and be really successful.
Yeah, growing a company is kind of like a process of having principles methodically beaten out of you. The year-old version of myself was listening to Fugazi and had strong opinions about the way the world was supposed to be and not be. Everything becomes a lot more gray once you actually go through an experience like this.
That nuanced understanding of the world is the most beautiful thing that, as a human being, I took away from my Groupon experience — just realizing how little can be explained by, for example, people or organizations being called evil, crazy, or stupid.
So you get the offer from Yahoo. You eat your steak. We were literally at the peak of our hypergrowth when it came time for the board to meet and discuss it.
We looked at our numbers, and we were just growing faster than ever. We looked at the offer we were getting from Google, and Google seemed like it could have been a great home. But we felt like it was fun to do an independent company, and we thought we could make more money doing it that way.
When we were making that decision, it was us and the board. Do we not do it? We keep going, and the company tanks and ends up being worth a billion dollars. So you passed. How did you feel about that decision? I mean, it was a hard decision. But it was energizing to decide to cast these things off and go it alone.
There had been all these rumors in the press, and nobody in the company knew what was going on. We had our annual end-of-the-year, all-hands meeting, where everybody in Chicago — or more people — are all in a theater, and everybody from all the other offices are dialing in. We thought we were going to be acquired by Google, and we were going to announce it at this meeting, so we bought like huge yoga balls that we were going to give to all the employees on the day, as if it was a gift from Google.
Google had this reputation as being the place where they had yoga balls — that was basically what we knew about Google. So we had all these huge yoga balls and nothing to do with them. And she comes out onstage and people are clapping in a semi-shocked way. Really excited to have you as part of the team!
I can fit four. Then I came back and was like, Just kidding! And that was it. And the argument to go public was, Well, why not go public? I hear all kinds of horror stories about it.
Just remaining a gigantic private company seemed impossible? You have to go public at some point. How much did the money play into it? I was thinking about the value of the company and creating shareholder value and all that stuff, for sure. But it was never getting back to how is this going to affect my personal wealth. How long was it before you eventually did go public?
We passed on Google in December of And we went public in the fall of So just a year later. What did it feel like to finally go public? That was like this crazy hazing. Before then, we were the darlings of the internet. There had been very little negative press, and everything was going swimmingly. And then we entered this quiet period, and we just got hammered. It had turned the overall tenor from this intense but wonderful ride to this kind of embattled, highly stressful fight. Your accounting methods were scrutinized by the SEC.
It became a huge distraction. I also want to make it clear that I totally take responsibility for everything that happened.
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