Now Amazon Veterans Are Running Groupon
Now that Groupon has fired its CEO, Andrew Mason, the e-commerce company is largely in the hands of its current management team.
And more than half of its management team previously worked at the largest e-commerce company in the world, Amazon.com.
(They of course report up to Groupon investors and board members Eric Lefkofsky and Ted Leonsis, who are acting as co-CEOs.)
Groupon is essentially in two businesses today.
One is its original daily-deals business, which has evolved into what's more or less a marketing platform for local businesses.
The other is Groupon Goods, which the company calls "curated e-commerce"-in other words, a selection of products for sale, usually at an attractive discount.
Aside from sharing a common base of customers Groupon can advertise local and e-commerce deals, these two businesses have little to do with each other.
But aside from Mason, who's now gone, Groupon's top executives have far more experience with the second business. And Groupon's e-commerce business has been performing far better than the local-deals business.
Here are all the ex-Amazon executives running Groupon today:
- CFO Jason Child
- COO Kal Raman
- Jeff Holden, SVP of product management
- Rich Williams, SVP of global marketing
Other members of Groupon's top management team worked at Google, Microsoft, and Salesforce.com.