It was the “are you fuckin' crazy?” heard around Chicago’s tech and business community 10 years ago: On Dec. 3, 2010, E-commerce deals platform Groupon spurned a $6 billion buyout offer from Google and chose to go it alone.
The rejection came during heady times for Groupon, which launched in the fall of 2008 with a two-for-one pizza deal at a Chicago bar and quickly became Chicago’s tech darling. By late 2010 it had grown to some 1,500 Chicago-area employees and moved into international markets. Forbes, in a cover story, proclaimed it the fastest-growing company in history.
Groupon reached out to Google while the Chicago company was being courted by Yahoo, according to co-founder Andrew Mason. Yahoo “was kind of this graveyard for cool companies,” Mason told New York Magazine in 2018.
But despite initiating the conversation, Groupon passed on Google. “We looked at our numbers, and we were just growing faster than ever,” Mason told the magazine. “We looked at the offer we were getting from Google, and Google seemed like it could have been a great home. But we felt like it was fun to do an independent company, and we thought we could make more money doing it that way.” In the words of Moses as he dropped the slab with the other five Commandements, 'OOPS'...
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