Andrew Mason

Andrew Mason is the founder of Groupon as well as The Point, the collective action platform from which Groupon was born. Andrew's mostly unremarkable existence began in Pittsburgh, PA; he moved to Chicago in 1999 to attend Northwestern University, where he lives today with his girlfriend and over 20 cats. Andrew graduated with a degree in music, the uselessness of which served as a chief inspiration to not be useless. Out of college, Andrew became a software developer by no ambition of his own, but via a series of acquaintances offering to give him money to do incrementally harder stuff on computers. Excited by the power of technology to change the world, Andrew developed Policy Tree, a policy debate visualization tool, and won a scholarship to attend the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy in 2006. In school for only three months, the flighty Andrew dropped out after receiving an unexpected offer to fund the idea that would become The Point. The Point, a ground-breaking approach to online collective action and fundraising, launched in November 2007. One year later, Andrew founded Groupon, leveraging the collective buying technology of The Point to make it easier (and cheaper) to experience all the great stuff in Chicago. Mason left Groupon in February 2013.