Andrew Mason is most well known for founding Groupon, the coupon program, but that was not his first business, nor his last. Andrew grew up in a suburb of Pittsburgh called Mount Lebanon, PA. At age 15 he started Bagel Express, a Saturday morning delivery service. After college and a few jobs, he started The Point, a company that helped groups connect about issues they cared about. He decided that The Point was too complex, so it was then boiled down Groupon. Eric Lefkofsky, Andrew’s former employer, gave him $1 million in seed money to help get the idea going, and it became a huge success. In 2011, Groupon projected that they were on track to make $1 billion faster than any company ever. Unfortunately for Andrew, the company was not doing as well as investors thought it should, so he was ousted from the CEO position, and from the company in 2013.
It was not long before Andrew had another business idea, called Detour. It is a company that makes smartphone audio tours. They raised $11 million in investments, and the company is still around today, even though Andrew had another business idea and moved on from that company. Through Detour, they had to edit large amounts of audio, and it took a lots of time. To make the process go easier and take less time, Andrew developed a business and program called Descript. The program transcribes audio files and matches up the word with the place it appears in the file, making it much easier to edit. His goal is to make it as easy to edit audio as it is to edit photos and videos on a smartphone app.
From these examples, we can see that Andrew did not just end up running forever with his first idea. It changed over time to fit the needs of people. The Point developed into Groupon, and Detour developed into Descript. This is a good example for us all – to keep looking for new opportunities or better ways to help people, and to form our ideas around that.