Andrew Mason Quotes

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

Admit your errors before someone else exaggerates them.

Hire great people and give them freedom to be awesome.

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

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

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.

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

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'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.

We can't be afraid to be weird.

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

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.

Life is too short to be a boring company.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

I just like to build things and do things.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

A lot of people can raise money.