Businessman

One of the challenges of innovation is figuring out how to wipe your mind clean about what you should be doing at any given moment, and not having a religious attachment to what's gotten you there thus far.

I've been very lucky, from the beginning. I've found that as long as you're fundamentally good - as long as you're not being bad to people - people give you a lot of room to be yourself, because being yourself is being honest. And that's what people want to see.

I think the big thing about Groupon is just people had never seen anything grow quite so fast.

I look at being a capitalist businessperson like riding a bike - if I go too slowly, I'll fall over. Or it's kind of like a shark: if I stop swimming, I'll just die.

I didn't realize how hard it was to run a small business.

Groupon as a company - it's built into the business model - is about surprise. A new deal that surprises you every day. We've carried that over to our brand, in the writing and the marketing that we do, and in the internal corporate culture.

Everybody loves a deal on a restaurant or skydiving or laser-hair removal.

The experience is fundamentally different for buying from local businesses than it is for buying consumer goods.

The popularity of Groupon has almost rendered the group-buying element of it obsolete, because we're able to deliver so many customers that the merchants are very happy with even the smallest number that we can provide.

Generally, what people tend to underestimate is the cyborg nature of Groupon. We are a company that has the DNA of being both a technology company and a heavily operational company.

There are over 2,000 direct clones of the Groupon business model. However, there's an equal amount of proof that the barriers to success are enormous. In spite of all those competitors, only a handful are remotely relevant.

Most small business owners are not particularly sophisticated business people. That's not a criticism; they're passionate about cutting hair or cooking food, and that's why they got in the business, not because they have an MBA.

One of the things I realized... is how few success stories there are in websites or products or businesses that exist primarily for an altruistic purpose.

In terms of fear, I still am most afraid of Freddie Kruger.

If you have a great business, if you're great at your craft people should be coming in there. It shouldn't be this secret.

I can't predict the future.

Most of the time, the things that really change the world exist for something fundamentally selfish and then the world-changing ends up being a side-effect of that.

I own over four ties.

I'm just not used to talking that much about myself. It feels strange.

I think 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's expected.