This is 60 minutes... where we're only 1 year behind the news! This is like their exposé on high-speed trading that came six months after the Flash Crash. Brilliant. Not that I hate the show. But their tendency to cherry pick well-trodden stories always annoys me.
I immediately stopped reading when I saw they were interviewing Mason.. Groupon is a public company, and the CEO/founder of course wants to shine a positive light on things. You can't learn much here.
The scary part about Groupon's explosive growth is the difficulty of employing 150 people/day without lowering required employee competence.<p>In the long run I think that the smaller, competing companies with more competent employees are going to win the market on a city by city basis.
For those complaining about this being a puff piece about groupon... understand that a media company has little to no incentive to take companies like groupon to task. Sure they may ask one or two mildly tough questions that may address some issues that people have with the company, but if they truly hit hard they would go out of business. No one wants to do an interview where they will be sweating the entire time, and journalists who gain a tough reputation will soon be circling the classifieds. This explains why someone like Larry King can be extremely successful, yet there aren't any hard hitting interviewers out there.
This probably one of Andrew's best interviews. In my recollection- every piece of press or articles written about him/groupon have been focused on the negative fact driven parts that defines groupon.<p>I did see glimmer of hope that he is a passionate ceo focused on making his dream of his business become a profitable reality. Right now it is leaning that his dream isn't sustainable but you never know.
As a small business owner the interview left several questions unanswered for me. The most important I had was which investment would I lose least on: buying GRPN or running a Groupon?