Andrew Mason quotes:

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.

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.

I've been very lucky, from the beginning. I've found that as long as you're fundamentally good - as long as you're not being bad to people - people give you a lot of room to be yourself, because being yourself is being honest. And that's what people want to see.

I'm appalled that an industry has grown around teaching a practice as wholesome and spiritual as yoga, so I decided to create my own free video to help people get started.

I think if there's any difference between me and a traditional CEO, it's that I've been unwilling to change myself or shape my personality around what's expected.

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.

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.

Admit your errors before someone else exaggerates them.

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.

I'm going to continue doing my thing and work my butt off to add value for shareholders and as long as they and the board see fit to keep me in this role, I feel enormously privileged to serve.

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.

I can't predict the future.

Sainthood emerges when you can listen to someone's tale of woe and not respond with a description of your own.

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.

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.

The experience is fundamentally different for buying from local businesses than it is for buying consumer goods.

A lot of people can raise money.

Life is too short to be a boring company.

If dandelions were hard to grow, they would be most welcome on any lawn.

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.

Most of the time, the things that really change the world exist for something fundamentally selfish and then the world-changing ends up being a side-effect of that.

I just like to build things and do things.

I feel like clout is something that builds up on your teeth.

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.

If you're open with people and provide context for the decisions that your making, customers will stick with you.

You've got to go out there and kill what you're going to eat.

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.

If I could get a deal on whatever my impulse was, whenever my impulse struck, and it was nearby, I would use that all the time. It would reshape the way that I shop.

If I told people that I knew what I was doing, nobody would believe me, so why even try and fake it?

Local commerce, without question, will be one of the fundamental use cases enabled by mobile devices over the next several years.

I didn't realize how hard it was to run a small business.

I think the big thing about Groupon is just people had never seen anything grow quite so fast.

Am I as experienced, or mature, or smart as others CEOs? No probably not, but there's something, I think, very useful about having a founder as the CEO.

If you don't have those moments where you go too far, then you're probably not going far enough.

Hire great people and give them freedom to be awesome.

I'm weird. But I'm a pretty serious person.

You're building a tool, not a piece of art. Don't be blinded by the vision.

I never thought of myself as an entrepreneur before I started this. I just like to build things.

If you laugh a lot, when you get older your wrinkles will be in the right places.

In terms of fear, I still am most afraid of Freddie Kruger.

When you think of couponing, you picture a mom cutting coupons out of the back of the newspaper.

We can't be afraid to be weird.

One thing I've come to learn about myself is that I have to keep going.

It takes some experimentation to figure out what people like and don't like.

Flowers are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty out values all the utilities of the world. If dandelions were hard to grow, they would be most welcome on any lawn.

I'm just not used to talking that much about myself. It feels strange.

Globally local commerce is a $12 to $14 trillion market. If we get 10 percent of that, we'll be very happy.

In the arts they call it plagiarism, in business they call it competition.

If I ever thought I wasn't the right guy for the job, I'd be the first person to fire myself.