Groupon Said No to $6 Billion From Google, Then Fell 77%

Andrew Mason, a Pittsburgh native and Northwestern University graduate, started a website called The Point in 2007. It let people pledge to act together once enough others signed up. His former employer, the Chicago entrepreneur Eric Lefkofsky, provided $1 million in seed money.

The Point struggled. One use of it worked: groups of people pooling their buying power for a discount. In November 2008 the company launched Groupon, a name made from “group” and “coupon.” Its first deal was two pizzas for the price of one at Motel Bar, a restaurant on the ground floor of its building in Chicago. If enough people bought, the deal went ahead. If not, nobody paid.

The fastest growth anyone had seen

Merchants liked it because it brought in crowds. Customers liked the prices. Forbes called Groupon’s rise to a $1 billion valuation in about 17 months a growth record. By December 2010, CNN Money reported, Groupon had 35 million subscribers, 3,000 employees and operations in more than 300 cities.

Google wanted to buy it. The year before, it had tried to buy the local reviews site Yelp. In late 2010 Google made an offer for Groupon that reports put at between $5 billion and $6 billion. The Associated Press noted that a deal that size would be Google’s largest acquisition ever.

December 2010: No

Groupon said no. Mason would not comment publicly. Bloomberg reported that the offer was worth as much as $6 billion including performance incentives, and that Mason had concerns about the company’s direction under new management and what would happen to his employees. Chicagoist reported that the board had been divided, with newer investors wanting to wait in the hope that the company would be worth more later.

Mason had joked to CNN Money two months earlier that if he sold, he would rather sell to “someone totally weird” like Exxon than to Google.

2011: The IPO

At first the refusal looked smart. Groupon went public on November 4, 2011, at $20 a share, a market value of about $12.7 billion, roughly twice Google’s offer. IT Business reported that it was the largest internet IPO since Google’s in 2004. The shares briefly reached $31.

Then they fell. Groupon’s filings had drawn criticism for the unusual measures it used to present its profits, and the company later reported a weakness in its financial controls. Growth slowed: revenue rose 45% to $2.33 billion in 2012, after a fivefold increase in 2011. Customers were tiring of daily-deal emails, and competitors had copied the idea.

2013: “I was fired today”

On February 28, 2013, after another disappointing quarter, the board removed Mason. His memo to staff began with a joke about spending more time with his family and then said plainly that he had been fired. “If you’re wondering why,” he added, “you haven’t been paying attention.” That day the shares closed at $4.53, 77% below the IPO price.

What is left

Groupon is still in business in Chicago, much smaller. In 2025 its revenue was $498.4 million, up 1% and its first increase in a decade, with a net loss from continuing operations of $81.1 million. It had 16.2 million active customers at the end of the year. At the end of October 2026 the whole company was worth about $634 million on the stock market, roughly a tenth of what Google had offered.

What the record shows

• Refusing was a bet on the IPO. For a while it paid: the market valued Groupon at about twice Google’s offer.
• The bet needed the growth to last. It did not. Within 15 months of listing the shares had lost three quarters of their value.
• Simple ideas are easy to copy. Daily deals spread fast, and so did the competition.
• Founders can lose the company they built. Mason was removed by his own board.

The same decision has gone very differently for other companies. Snapchat refused $3 billion from Facebook and later went public at about $24 billion. Yahoo turned down the chance to buy Google years before Google tried to buy Groupon.