Andrew Mason: Groupon Went on ‘Rocket-Ship Ride’

Groupon CEO Andrew Mason tells 60 Minutes that his company's growth took everyone by surprise, including him.

Image: CBSNews.com

This is one 60 Minutes interview that entrepreneurs and startups have been waiting for: Groupon CEO Andrew Mason is next on the show's hot seat.

The daily deal company’s chief sat down for an interview with the show’s correspondent Lesley Stahl, which is set to air in full on Sunday, January 15, at 7 p.m. ET. In a preview, Mason admits that he doesn’t fit the usual CEO mold, but says that his role as founder gives the company an edge.

“I think that 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 is expected," the 31-year-old entrepreneur says. "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."

In a CBSNews.com video preview of the piece (see below), Stahl notes that the founder of the multibillion-dollar company has a portable outhouse that serves as his “executive bathroom” behind his desk, and a YouTube video of himself doing yoga in his underwear. A photo of Mason with a gray cat atop his head flashes on the screen as Stahl says “his urge to be goofy makes him one of the most unlikely corporate CEOs you’ll ever meet.”

The growth of the company, which was valued as high as $18 billion in its first day of trading in what was the biggest initial public stock offering of any Internet company since Google, surprised even Mason, he says.

“Once we started Groupon, the success was intoxicating, and it was just this rocket-ship ride that you couldn’t let go, but you didn’t want to let go either,” he tells Stahl.

The preview doesn’t get into it in detail, but it suggests that the segment will dive into the company’s finances, including why it has yet to turn a profit even though it was dubbed "the fastest-growing company ever,” and why analysts have said the company was “unviable” and even a “Ponzi scheme.”

Mason—whose personality was surely tested during the company’s quiet period before it went public, responds to those criticisms in the preview.

"I think the big thing about Groupon is just people had never seen anything grow quite so fast, and that made people dig in and be skeptical," he says.