The builder who did not call himself an entrepreneur
Groupon began as a side experiment on another product. Its founder describes himself by the work, not the title.
I never thought of myself as an entrepreneur before I started this. I just like to build things.
Andrew Mason studied music at Northwestern and worked as a programmer before he started anything. His first project with investor backing, The Point, launched in 2007 as a site for collective action: people pledged to act together once enough others agreed. It struggled to find a use. In late 2008 the team tried one narrow application, a group discount that unlocked only if enough people bought it, and the first deal was for pizza at the restaurant downstairs from their Chicago office. That experiment became Groupon, and this week there were reports that it had walked away from acquisition talks with Google worth several billion dollars.
The label Mason rejects carries a lot of baggage. “Entrepreneur” suggests someone who wants to start a company and then looks for a reason, who talks about funding before product and about exits before customers. Mason’s account puts it the other way round. He wanted to make something, the thing needed a company around it, and the company happened.
That order has real advantages. Founders who think of themselves as builders tend to judge their work by whether it is good and whether people use it, which are the right tests in the first years. They are less likely to chase the look of a startup: the office, the press release, the conference circuit.
It also hides a lot. Groupon’s growth in 2010 did not come mainly from building. It came from a huge sales operation, hundreds of people calling local merchants city by city, and from a willingness to spend heavily on marketing. That is entrepreneurship in the plainest sense: organizing people and money to capture a market before others do. Someone at Groupon clearly thought about those things, whatever they called themselves.
For a reader deciding whether to start something, the useful part of the line is permission. You do not need to feel like an entrepreneur, or look like one, to begin. The less comfortable part comes later. If the thing works, it will need all the tasks the word “entrepreneur” describes, hiring, financing, selling and managing, and a builder who refuses them will either learn them or hand the company to someone who has.