<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image">OutbrainOutbrain CEO Yaron Galai.</div></div></div>Outbrain, the Israel-based content recommendation platform that powers the "Recommended by" articles seen on sites such as CNN and ESPN, has acquired Los Angeles-based software firm Revee and it is now launching a product that it claims will let publishers know exactly how much individual articles are generating in revenue, in real-time.The Outbrain Automatic Yield product integrates Revee's technology, which hooks up with publishers' ad servers to provide a dashboard view of which articles are earning the most money.Speaking to Business Insider, Outbrain's vice president of product marketing Matt Crenshaw said the new product is compatible with all the major ad servers publishers use, which includes Google's DoubleClick for Publishers.Crenshaw explained digital publishers are struggling to bring audiences to their sites. Traffic from Facebook was down 32% from January to February last year and Google search is getting more competitive, he said. Outbrain is hoping publishers will see this product as a way to bring in audiences - through placing ads for their highest-performing content on other sites - in a more predictable and scaleable way. <h2>The revenue value of individual articles can fluctate as much as 262% in a single day</h2>Outbrain says the value of individual articles or videos can fluctuate wildly - as much as 262% in a single day - which can make it difficult for publishers to determine which content to promote in order to bring in the most traffic.Most publishers know which articles are the best-performing in terms of page views, but it's less clear which are bringing in the most ad revenue - advertisers are prepared to pay more to target their ads to higher-value users (such as those that might be in the market to buy their products, or people with high incomes.) Often the article with the most page views isn't actually the article driving the most revenue, as this screenshot from the dashboard shows.<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image">OutbrainThe articles and videos with the most page views don't necessarily generate the most revenue.</div></div></div>Yaron Galai, Outbrain CEO, told Business Insider the problem is analogous to an event booker trying to get a great music act to appear at their party. The analytics show that, on average, both Beyoncé and Galai have sold more than 100 million records - but in reality, there's only one musician you really want to be booking for your event. Outbrain is adding Automatic Yield at no additional cost to customers. Galai compares it to the Google Analytics model: The more Outbrain can prove to customers that its products work, the more customers are likely to spend with Outbrain.Time Inc. is the first customer to implement the Outbrain Automatic Yield platform, across Fortune and Entertainment Weekly in the US. Outbrain says the product will roll out widely in the US and in the UK, France, Israel, and other major territories in the coming weeks.Revee was co-founded in 2013 by former Penske Media execs Nic Paul and Cham Kim. The company has around 10 employees and has raised $1 million in seed funding. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Earlier this week, Outbrain rival Taboola launched a similar product <a href="http://uk.businessinsider.com/taboola-launches-backstage-monetization-analytics-product-2016-3?r=US&amp;IR=T">called Taboola Backstage</a>, although this dashboard does not yet have ad server integration. <div class="margin-top"> <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/navy-seal-explains-why-he-wont-skydive-as-civilian-brandon-webb-2016-2">A Navy SEAL explains why he'll never go skydiving as a civilian again</a></h3> <div> <div> <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="RsNjczMTE6RHlzea-rwjd_AZCZiuvDb8" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div> </div> </div> </div>

Outbrain acquires Revee in order to tell publishers how much revenue each individual article is pulling in

<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Yon#/media/File:Michael_Yon_in_Iraq_cropped.JPG">Wikimedia Commons</a>Michael Yon</div></div></div>Michael Yon has lived an interesting life - he graduated from the US Army's Special Forces school at the top of his class, became part of Michael Jackson's security detail, and spent time hunting cannibals in India. However, none of those experiences amounted to what happened when he decided to become a war correspondent and embedded with the US military during two concurrent wars.After covering soldiers of Deuce Four battalion in Iraq for around five months, he became intimately acquainted with the soldiers - some of them even jokingly offered their rifles to him in tense situations. In a sense, he was accepted into their pack.But whether or not this was a good pack to be accepted into could depend on your preference for danger - one-third of the soldiers in Deuce Four became casualties during the war in Iraq. Even the senior ranking soldiers went on patrols, and wouldn't allow any newcomers into their unit without observing how they performed in combat.<a href="https://www.michaelyon-online.com/gates-of-fire.htm">In a scene</a> that could only be described as a Michael Bay movie, Lieutenant Colonel Erik Kurilla, the commander of the Deuce Four Battalion, was wounded from gunfire in a crowded market. After one of the other soldiers engaged the enemy in close-quarters combat, Yon, the embedded journalist, found himself holding an M-4 rifle.<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><a href="https://www.michaelyon-online.com/gates-of-fire.htm">Michael Yon</a>LTC Erik Kurilla is injured during a firefight at an Iraqi marketplace.</div></div></div>It wasn't always like this - in fact, he didn't even want to be in a combat zone at first. As he was pursuing work outside of the military, his buddies from the Army kept goading him to join them in the fray after the attacks on 9/11.But it wasn't until the death of Scott Helvenston, the youngest Navy SEAL in history, that his perspective changed. Helvenston was one of the contractors that was ambushed, killed, and hung from a bridge by insurgents right before the Battle of Fallujah in 2004. "We went to the same high school and played football together," Yon told Business Insider. "I was really upset."After purchasing $30,000 worth of equipment and calling in some favors, he soon found himself documenting numerous firefights in Iraq and Afghanistan.<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><a href="https://www.michaelyon-online.com/little-girl.htm">Michael Yon</a>A US soldier holds a girl that was hurt during an attack by a suicide bomber, in a photo taken by Yon during his time as an embedded journalist. The girl did not survive.</div></div></div>But the current firefight he was in was a bit different."I didn't want to leave Erik," Yon told Business Insider. "I've been with him for five months, mission after mission, and he's one of the best combat leaders I've ever seen."Yon yelled for a magazine to one of the other soldiers near him. After receiving one, his Army training kicked in and he successfully locked a round into the rifle's chamber."This was one of those moments where your plane's on fire and you're without a parachute," said Yon. "You just figure this s**t out as you go."As a non-combatant, his actions would <a href="https://www.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docs/v1_rul_rule34">potentially</a> violate the Geneva Conventions, and at the very least, cause a huge headache for military officials due to liability issues.Firing three rounds with his newly acquired rifle, he realized something was wrong. One of the bullets had hit a propane canister which started flying towards Yon's face. Spinning uncontrollably, Yon recalls that he knew the propane canister had barely missed him after he was hit by propane gas in the face.In the end, Lieutenant Colonel Kurilla recovered from his wounds and even deployed to another combat zone a year later.<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><a href="https://www.michaelyon-online.com/the-kopp-etchells-effect/Page-2.htm">Michael Yon</a>A photo of the 'Kopp-Etchells Effect' that Yon took during his travels.</div></div></div>After the dust settled, military officials were placed in an awkward position - how would one reprimand the man that had attempted to save a soldier's life, and yet was possibly breaking international laws in doing so?Yon merely ended up receiving a slap on the wrist and a gray-statement from the military."This was a delicate situation," Yon continued with a chuckle. "But the troops loved it."Although he doesn't embed with the military as he did back in the day, Yon continues to <a href="https://www.michaelyon-online.com/About-Michael-Yon/">blog</a> about his experiences and views about the military."Spending time with the troops was definitely the highlight of my life," Yon explained to Business Insider. "I'm happy and honored to have covered the troops." <div class="margin-top"> <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/navy-seal-skydive-military-civilian-2016-7">A Navy SEAL explains why he'll never go skydiving as a civilian again</a></h3> <div> <div> <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="RsNjczMTE6RHlzea-rwjd_AZCZiuvDb8" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div> </div> </div> </div>

Meet the journalist who found himself in combat and decided to do something about it

<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"></div></div></div>Remember when Google was cutting-edge and cool and a little bit weird?Like in 2013, when CEO Larry Page came out on stage at the company's Google I/O conference and <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/google-ceo-larry-page-wants-a-place-for-experiments-2013-5">imagined a fantasy world where Google could test out new ideas</a> free from meddlesome regulation?Or in 2012, when cofounder Sergey Brin came out wearing this new contraption on his face and suddenly there was video of a bunch of skydivers wearing cameras on their head, and they landed on the roof of the venue where the event was taking place and biked and ran downstairs into the auditorium and through the audience?Or the self-driving cars? Or Project Loon, the magic internet-delivering balloons? Or Google Fiber, which is meant to do for broadband speeds what Gmail did for online email back in 2004?There were no shocks like that on stage Thursday at the <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/google-io-keynote-liveblog-2015-5">2015 incarnation of Google I/O</a>.Under the leadership of senior product chief Sundar Pichai - Page, Brin, and executive chairman Eric Schmidt were nowhere to be seen - Google played it safe. While that's probably the right thing for the company, it's a little bit of a shame for the tech industry overall.This conference is for software developers, but it's also Google's highest-profile event of the year, where it places its tech leadership stake in the ground for the next year.But this year, it was mostly about important but little improvements to existing products.You had the next version of Android, code-named <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/android-m-release-features-screenshots-2015-5">Android M</a> - no dessert name mentioned! - which has some interesting features in it. Most important will be Google On Tap, which is Google's next step toward creating the perfect personal assistant, a task which it started a few years ago with Google Now.But it's a little premature to get too excited about Android M when the version announced last year, Android Lollipop, is still only on about 10% of all Android phones.<div class="KonaFilter image-container float_right"><div class="image on-image"></div></div>There were some other nice little things. <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/google-announces-google-photos-website-and-app-2015-5">Google Photos</a> is a new app that takes the best parts of the photo functionality from the oft-maligned Google+ social network and puts them in its own package, complete with free unlimited storage. (That <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/cloud-storage-race-to-zero-2014-11">"race to zero" in online storage</a> is reaching the finish line, and any company trying to build a business based on charging for storage is dreaming.)There were a few incremental announcements related to mobile ads which could be very important to Google's actual business - it still makes about 90% of its money through advertising - but won't mean much to most Google users. But perhaps the most telling part of the presentation was Google's answer to the virtual reality fever that every other tech company seems to have caught.Facebook and its partners <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/oculus-rift-vs-valve-htc-vive-which-virtual-reality-headset-should-you-buy-2015-5">like Valve</a> <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/oculus-is-going-to-change-everything-2014-12">blow our mind</a> with realistic 3D video games graphics on the Oculus platform, and sure the hardware will cost $1,500 to start, but what a vision!Microsoft presented its first "wow" product in years in January, with the <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/google-glass-hands-on-2015-4">HoloLens glasses</a>, which superimpose computer-generated images in the real world.<div class="KonaFilter image-container float_right"><div class="image on-image"></div></div>Google's answer? An update to Cardboard -- a set of virtual-reality goggles made out of, yes, cardboard, where you use your own smartphone to present the actual visuals. It was first presented at last year's I/O as seemingly some kind of joke.This year's version is bigger so it'll fit bigger phones. Instead of rolling out some snazzy new hardware with accompanying demos, Google is focusing on the content and software side of virtual reality - it teamed up with GoPro for a new complicated camera that will let people film 360-degree scenes, then created software to turn those scenes into videos that can be displayed on YouTube.Very hard to do. Very important - without virtual reality content, there will be no virtual reality.But not very exciting.To some degree, Google is in a trap of its own making. For years, it told everybody about the long-distance moonshots it was working on with a sort of geeky engineer's pride. But when experiments like Google Glass <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/eric-schmidt-google-isnt-giving-up-on-glass-2015-3">failed to live up to expectations</a>, the rest of the tech world snarked and criticized and laughed.So whatever Larry, Sergey, and the rest of the secret teams of Google geniuses are working on now, we probably won't hear about them until they're more polished and closer to being finished.In the meantime, Apple's big developer conference happens in a couple weeks on June 8. The ball's in your court, Tim Cook. <div class="margin-top"> <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/google-new-self-driving-car-prototype-2015-5">This new version of Google's self-driving car will hit the streets of Mountain View this summer</a></h3> <div> <div> <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="5nYmIzdTojl_yD1hvqUDPpVK7EY7R4T4" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div> </div> </div> </div>

Google played it safe today, and the tech industry is a little worse for it

<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"></div></div></div>Right now, everyone thinks of virtual reality as being for games and games alone.
But that's just not true.
Recently, I was privileged to test <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/jaunt-virtual-reality-puts-you-in-a-paul-mccartney-concert-2014-11">a special application built for the Oculus Rift</a>, which showcased the ability to jump right into a live concert.
You get the best seat in the house: Hovering right in front of the stage, and above the crowd. You feel like you're really there, minus the heat and the smells and the random people bumping into you. As you move your head around, you can see other concert-goers - real people - cheering, and as you turn back towards the stage, you can see the pyrotechnics go off right as Paul McCartney hits the chorus to "Live And Let Die."
I took the Rift off my head, and I was back inside Business Insider's conference room.
Virtual reality is going to be huge. Monumental. It's going to change the way we live. Facebook and Samsung have already made significant investments, and <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-virtual-reality-job-listing-2014-11">Apple was recently caught looking to hire</a> an app engineer "to create high performance apps that integrate with virtual reality systems." And then there's Magic Leap, the <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/magic-leap-google-investment-2014-10">mysterious $542 million startup</a> that's built an augmented reality device "so badass you can't believe it." 
The future of virtual reality is incredibly exciting. But right now, the main focus is games. And here's why.
<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"></div></div></div>In 1962, decades before Steve Jobs tried to make computers "personal," Steve Russell sat in a small room at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology working in front of the PDP-1, the first computer to utilize a visual display.
Computers back then were cold, unfriendly machines. But Russell wanted to demonstrate the capabilities of this new digital equipment, so he created a game, called "Spacewar." And once the game was created, it was nearly impossible to pry the MIT students and employees away from the computer.
"Spacewar" would inspire the arcade culture, and also had a huge impact on early game maker Atari, the creator of the first mainstream video games like "Pong," "Space Invaders," "Pac Man," and "Donkey Kong."
Video games made computers approachable. And the same thing is happening today with virtual reality.
<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"></div></div></div>Just like that era, the quality of VR games is somewhat poor currently. The controls can be wonky, and the visuals don't even approach the quality of PCs or today's living room consoles like the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. But it's a start. The ideas are there, and people are certainly experimenting with VR more and more - first through Facebook-owned Oculus, and now through other primordial (<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/google-cardboard-2014-6">see: cardboard</a>) systems built by Google, Samsung, and others.
Virtual reality is just getting started, but the goal is clear: Total immersion.
With other display-based technologies - computers, phones, tablets, and video games - you might feel immersed, but you're innately aware that you are still disconnected from these devices, and you can always turn them off. Virtual reality, on the other hand, wants "you to achieve the impossible and believe you're in another world," <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/oculus-unveils-a-new-virtual-reality-prototype-crescent-bay-2014-9">according to Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe</a>.
<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"></div></div></div>
Like that Paul McCartney concert, the ultimate goal with VR is to get you to experience something you've never done before - to truly believe you're there, and have an authentic experience. Perhaps this means you'll be able to sculpt without buying clay (like in the GIF above), or experience skydiving without needing to jump out of an airplane, or visit far-away places like the Himalayas or the gardens of Kyoto without needing to leave the country - or our own bedrooms, for that matter.
And who knows how current smartphone apps could translate to virtual reality? Maybe online dating will be transformed by VR, where "Tinder for Oculus" would allow you to see your potential dates as they really are - not just a few random pictures from Instagram - and let you "swipe right" by nodding, or "swipe left" by shaking your head. Maybe Yelp for Oculus would let you actually explore restaurants, bars, and clubs before you decide to take a date there. Again, these are all far-off dreams, but they would add considerable value to our own digital experiences.
Companies like Oculus acknowledge there's a long way to go: virtual reality needs new rendering and graphics architectures, as well as new art approaches to accommodate the "considerable demands" required to build great VR. But the promise of total immersion - being transported to a separate reality, or perhaps the same world but from a perspective you've never seen before - is the next best thing to our own lives. That might sound like hyperbole, but it's absolutely true.

Virtual Reality Isn't Just For Games. It's Going To Change Everything

A couple of weeks ago, I tried the latest prototype from Oculus, the virtual reality company Facebook bought for $2 billion earlier this year.
Here's a picture of what it looks like when you're wearing it. The man wearing the device is my boss, Henry Blodget:

It's very hard to describe what it's like to use Oculus.
You put the headset on (over your glasses, if like me, you need t0), stick a pair of ear buds in your ears, and suddenly it feels as if you are in another place.
For example, you might find yourself standing against a rail at the top of a very tall building in a rainy city at night. Look over the rail below you, and cars are moving on the streets. You can walk around the platform, and the world changes relative to you just as it does in real life.&#xa0;If you are afraid of heights, your palms will start to sweat and you will become as uncomfortable as you would be in real life.
This happened to a colleague of mine. He was standing in the middle of a conference room with the Oculus headset on. As soon as Oculus put him atop that virtual tower, however, he literally shrank with fright and began to back way from the virtual rail.
Here's a picture of Henry moving in close to a virtual object, hands up so he doesn't bump into it:

Brandon Iribe, the CEO of Oculus, says the difference between the prototype I tried and earlier versions is that this one finally gives the user a real sense of "presence" in whichever virtual world you enter.
It really does feel like that.&#xa0;
When I was wearing the Oculus headset, I kept thinking about a 1995 movie from director James Cameron called "Strange Days." It features a technology people can use to "jack in" or "wire-trip." They put a bunch of wires on their head, and suddenly it feels as if they are in someone else's body, someplace else.&#xa0;
Here's a trailer for that movie:

Oculus almost feels as if you are "jacking in." It's not totally there because you can't see your hands, the worlds are animated and not entirely photo-realistic, and you have no sense of touch.
Iribe says Oculus is working on two of those problems already. It's going to put sensors on people's hands and fingers to get them into the virtual experience. Yesterday, Oculus announced it bought a startup that will help this development.
Iribe also said people are working on cameras that will record enough of reality to reproduce it in virtual reality.

Trying the prototype, called Crescent Bay, gave me&#xa0;such a remarkable feeling that minutes after pulling the headset off I tweeted, "Just tried the newest version of Oculus. It's going to change everything."&#xa0;
What I meant was that, in the next decade or so, Oculus (or a similar product from another company) is going to change the following elements of human life.
Starting with the obvious stuff, and moving more abstract, Oculus will change:
Gaming. Plenty of immersive video games already exist in which you can move around entire cities and interact with hundreds of characters. The "Assassin's Creed" and "Grand Theft Auto" series are best known for this. Right now, you have to consume these worlds through a flat screen. The leap into virtual reality is a short one.
Commerce. There's already an Oculus program in which you can view your avatar in the mirror. Imagine dressing that avatar in clothes to see how they look before buying them. Or, instead of looking at pictures of a car's interior online, actually getting into it to see if you like the trim you've selected.
Education.&#xa0;You can already take classes at Harvard online. Sitting at a virtual desk instead of watching a video on a monitor will be nice. But education will change more radically than that. Imagine being able to travel with a Harvard professor inside the human body to see how cancer cells grow in the blood stream.&#xa0;
Sports.&#xa0;The first way Oculus will change watching sports is in the creation of cameras that can take in 360-degree views and be placed courtside at NBA games. You'll be able to put on an Oculus headset, pay some fee, and watch LeBron James from what feels like just feet away. Rumor has it, Mavericks owner Mark Cuban is already geeked about that possibility. Eventually, it's easy to imagine that Oculus cameras will become as wearable as Go Pros. Then you'll be able to watch games from the referee's perspective - or LeBron's.
Narrative.&#xa0;The way we tell stories has never stopped evolving. First there were oral traditions. Then epic poems. Then novels. Then film. Then video games. Next, you'll put on Oculus headsets. Sometimes, the narratives will be first-person stories, and it will feel as if you are seeing the world through a character's eyes. Other times, you'll float through worlds omnipresent, knowing characters' thoughts. Whole industries will form around people who figure out how best to tell stories in the medium.
Sex. Oculus porn is going to be far more immersive than the static images people used to look at in magazines or even videos on the internet. Not everyone is going to be comfortable with how immersive.
Aging.&#xa0;In the real world, knees give out and you can't play tennis or basketball anymore. Imagine playing ball at 90. Also: how long can a human body live if all it needs to do is take input from VR? Could humans live for hundreds of years?
Sense of self.&#xa0;Sometime in the not-too-distant future, you will be able to put on a headset, a pair of gloves, and a body suit and feel as if you are a different person in a different place. Do that enough - substitute your five senses for virtual input enough times - and you may begin to shed aspects of your identity you once thought fixed: race, gender, age, nationality. On the bright side, people&#xa0;may become more empathetic and less tribal. On the negative side, people may abandon their flesh selves, leaving behind loved ones.
<h3> NOW WATCH:&#xa0;<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/skydiver-spins-out-of-control-parachute-2014-12">Dramatic Video Shows A Skydiver Spinning Out Of Control At 13,000 Feet</a></h3>
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I Tried Facebook's Virtual Reality Headset - It's Going To Change Everything

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<div class="image-container float_right" style="width:339px"><div class="image"></div>Michael Seto / BI</div>It's happened.
Andrew Mason is out as CEO of <keyword id="384914" type="PERSON" weightage="60" keywordseo="Groupon">Groupon</keyword>, according to a release from the company just now. <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/groupon-ceo-andrew-masons-honest-charming-goodbye-memo-i-was-fired-today-2013-2">In a separate email to employees</a>, Mason bluntly states that he was fired.
The stock is surging nearly 8% after hours, but the stock fell nearly 25% today after reporting dismal earnings last night.
The company has not named a permanent replacement yet.
The departure of founder Mason has been speculated about for quite some time.
And just yesterday after the earnings report, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/andrew-mason-groupon-ceo-speculation-2013-2">our Owen Thomas speculated</a> that Mason was not likely to last much longer.
And last November, the subject of his tenure was the focus of an interview at our Ignition conference.
Here's the story of how Mason started Groupon, from a longer post we published in 2011 called: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/inside-groupon-the-truth-about-the-worlds-most-controversial-company-2011-10">INSIDE GROUPON: The Truth About The World's Most Controversial Company</a>
In 2006, Andrew Mason was a music major, getting a graduate degree in public policy at the University of Chicago.
Mason maintained <a href="http://www.policytree.org">a website called Policy Tree</a>, which featured articles like "Karl Rove should be fired or resign over the C.I.A. leak."
On the side, he was doing contract work building databases at a company founded and funded by an entrepreneur named Eric Lefkofsky.
Lefkofsky was already a very rich man, having built several businesses around call centers and the Internet. Mason was an intern, "kind of squatting in their offices," according to one source.
In January 2007, with Lefkofsky's backing, Mason started working on a company — a do-gooder enterprise called The Point.
The Point was a social media platform designed to get groups of people together to solve problems.
The Point was not intended to be a big money-making enterprise, and by one early employee's account, that was fine with most of the staff.
The Point launched in June. It gained modest traction in Chicago, but basically went nowhere.
Every Monday, Lefkofsky, Mason, and a handful of early employees would meet to talk about the Point's progress. One Monday, in the middle of 2008, Lefkofsky raised an idea he thought could revitalize the struggling start-up, based on a campaign he'd seen launched on The Point.
Ordinarily, people used The Point to organize around some sort of cause that might make the world a better place. 
But in this case, a group of users decided their cause should be saving money. Their plan was to round up 20 or so people who all wanted to buy the same product and see if they could get a group discount.
"Eric said maybe this is the thing that we do," says a source who was at the meeting. "Maybe we set up a separate page, make it dedicated to group buying." In his intitial business plan for The Point, Andrew Mason had actually mentionend group-buying as a possibile way the startup could eventually make money. But when Lefkofsky brought it up more than a year later, Mason and The Point's other early executives dismissed the idea. "It didn't seem core to our mission," says the person who was at the meeting. Through the rest of the summer and early fall of 2008, Lefkofsky would not let that idea go. He'd bring up all the expensive purses his wife and all her friends were buying, and say, "It's crazy! Couldn't they buy 20 of them and get a discount?" Around this time, the global economy entered free-fall as the sub-prime mortgage crisis exploded and credit markets ground to a halt. Then in September 2008, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and famous Silicon Valley venture capital firm Sequoia sent out a presentation called "R.I.P. Good Times." Mason and Lefkofsky decided to lay some people off. "There was this pressure from the market crash [and] looking at our burn rate and revenue — it was time for us to try something to scratch that itch," says a source close to early employees. Groupon — a side project launched out of desperation by a team of do-gooders who professed no real desire to make big bags of money — was born.
Sources do credit Mason for coming up with some of Groupon's defining characteristics: that it's one deal a day, that the deal doesn't go into effect until enough people buy the voucher, and that the vouchers should be for local businesses. Some of the characteristics evolved out of a crucial element of Groupon's early DNA; it was a business created by reluctant capitalists. "[The] way we rationalized it with ourselves," says an early employee, "[was that we were] helping people find interesting things to do in their city." "Some of the early things we did were an hour in a sleep deprivation tank, or skydiving. We [didn't] want to do stuff that's going to wind up in a landfill. We [didn't] want to sell overstock gadgets. We [didn't] want to deal with shipping and returns." These reluctant money-makers decided that Groupon should offer one deal a day, and that it should sell vouchers for local businesses. They decided that the daily emails should have funny copy. Mason also pitched Groupon as a way to help local businesses with cash flow at a time when banks were not lending. The concept immediately took off. Local press got wind of the company and made a lot of noise about it. Employees successfully recruited local business owners among their friends and families to sign up. "Merchants started to tell us 'if I want to do a 10,000 dedicated email blast on Daily Candy, it's going to cost me X, but you're telling me I can send it to 10,000 people for free, and only if they buy, we'll give you a cut?' That was an eye opener," says one early employee. By the end of 2008, Andrew Mason and Eric Lefkofsky knew that The Point would become Groupon. In December, Lefkofsky recruited Ted Leonsis, who made his name and fortune building AOL. Leonsis would eventually become Groupon's vice chairman. Lefkofsky's long time business partner, Brad Keywell, also signed on. Others at the The Point/Groupon didn't see the transition quite so clearly. "At first we thought it would be a little skunkworks project and we'd go on and it would help us raise money to further develop The Point. But I think that idea didn't last very long because we realized we had a tiger by the tail." In January 2009, Groupon held its company holiday party at the small apartment of its CTO, Ken Pelletier. He cooked for everyone — the whole company and all their spouses and significant others.
A year later, Groupon had around 300 employees.
A year after that it had 5,000+.
Today, Groupon has more than 10,000 employees.
Investors, some of them who also put money into Facebook, began calling Groupon the fastest growing company in history. The first major test for the project was its move into a second market: Boston. "In Chicago," explains one early employee, "we had a big network of friends and family to sign up and spread the word. We had a lot of people who knew business owners. It's easier for business owners to trust a local company." The expansion went off without a hitch — but only thanks to a number of make-it-work hacks on the technical side. During Groupon's first months, customer support head Joe Harrow would spend three hours every afternoon personally emailing all the customers who bought Groupon vouchers whenever a deal closed. Nine months in, Groupon switched to software specifically designed for the new business. Groupon successfully expanded into a third market: New York. By this time, says an employee, "we kind of had the playbook we needed to open in another city, another city, another city." Groupon knew, for example, exactly how much to invest in advertising in order to build a sizable subscriber list in a new market. By the summer of 2009, Lefkofsky started pushing hard for growth in Groupon's Monday meetings.
He started by suggesting Groupon be in five cities by the end of the year.
Then he started pushing for 10 cities by the end of the year.
Finally, according to a source familiar with those meetings, Lefkofsky just started saying, "Why don't we try and go as fast as we can? Why don't we turn up the jets?"
"We realized the main barrier to entry is going to be scale. So we wanted to get to as many cities as we can because we saw direct, outright, verbatim copies of what we were doing, popping up all over the place pretty quickly. We said we can either go chase them and beat them back and fight them legally, or race ahead and do what we do, as best we can. So the choice was to not look back, and try to be better and bigger."
One source close to Groupon's board says it was director Peter Barris of Groupon investor NEA that came up with the original analysis behind this aggressive growth plan.
Groupon began to grow into a real startup with lots of employees. It hired a COO who had worked at Yahoo and sold his own company before: Rob Solomon.
By this time, not only were consumers noticing Groupon, the press was catching on too. Mason went on CNBC. He went on "The Today Show." In August 2010, Forbes magazine put Mason on its cover. His shirt is un-tucked. He's shrugging as if to say, who me? The cover reads: "Groupon Is The Fastest-Growing Company … Ever: The New Web Phenom."
Groupon developed a "typical startup culture," with "everyone in their hoodies, and sales reps dating each other — that kind of nonsense," says one early employee." It was sort of like a fraternity that worked very hard."
"Working there was crazy," says another early employee. "[From 2009 to 2010] we hired 10,000 people. That was completely insane — something that's never happened before, and should never happen again. We ended up in 45 countries in 16 months. It was nuts, it was fun, it was a blast."
-----------------------
CHICAGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--
Groupon (<a href="http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=grpn">GRPN</a>), the global leader in local commerce, today announced a leadership change in which Executive Chairman Eric Lefkofsky and Vice Chairman Ted Leonsis have been appointed to the newly created Office of the Chief Executive, effective immediately, replacing Andrew Mason. Lefkofsky and Leonsis will serve in this role on an interim basis. The Board has commenced a search for a new Chief Executive.
“On behalf of the entire Groupon Board, I want to thank Andrew for his leadership, his creativity and his deep loyalty to Groupon. As a founder, Andrew helped invent the daily deals space, leading Groupon to become one of the fastest growing companies in history,” said Lefkofsky.
“Groupon will continue to invest in growth, and we are confident that with our deep management team and market-leading position, the company is well positioned for the future,” said Leonsis.
The company’s guidance for first quarter and full year 2013 outlined in yesterday’s earnings announcement remains unchanged.

ANDREW MASON OUT AS GROUPON CEO - STOCK SPIKES AFTER HOURS

<keyword id="384914" type="PERSON" weightage="60" keywordseo="Groupon">Groupon</keyword> <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/andrew-mason-out-as-groupon-ceo-2013-2">fired Andrew Mason today</a>. How did such a quirky person end up the CEO of a global company in the first place? We tell that story in here, in an excerpt from Business Insider's 2011 e-Book: "Inside Groupon." The full story describes the history of Groupon from its meteoric beginnings to its troubled IPO. It's available for your Kindle. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/INSIDE-GROUPON-Controversial-Company-ebook/dp/B00634MNDY/ref=sr_1_10?s=digital-text&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1320406625&amp;sr=1-10">Download your copy today</a>.
In 2006, Andrew Mason was a music major, getting a graduate degree in public policy at the University of Chicago.
Mason maintained <a href="http://www.policytree.org">a website called Policy Tree</a>, which featured articles like "Karl Rove should be fired or resign over the C.I.A. leak."
On the side, he was doing contract work building databases at a company founded and funded by an entrepreneur named Eric Lefkofsky.
Lefkofsky was already a very rich man, having built several businesses around call centers and the Internet. Mason was an intern, "kind of squatting in their offices," according to one source.
In January 2007, with Lefkofsky's backing, Mason started working on a company — a do-gooder enterprise called The Point.
The Point was a social media platform designed to get groups of people together to solve problems.
The Point was not intended to be a big money-making enterprise, and by one early employee's account, that was fine with most of the staff.
The Point launched in June. It gained modest traction in Chicago, but basically went nowhere.
Every Monday, Lefkofsky, Mason, and a handful of early employees would meet to talk about the Point's progress. One Monday, in the middle of 2008, Lefkofsky raised an idea he thought could revitalize the struggling start-up, based on a campaign he'd seen launched on The Point.
Ordinarily, people used The Point to organize around some sort of cause that might make the world a better place. 
But in this case, a group of users decided their cause should be saving money. Their plan was to round up 20 or so people who all wanted to buy the same product and see if they could get a group discount.
"Eric said maybe this is the thing that we do," says a source who was at the meeting. "Maybe we set up a separate page, make it dedicated to group buying." In his intitial business plan for The Point, Andrew Mason had actually mentionend group-buying as a possibile way the startup could eventually make money. But when Lefkofsky brought it up more than a year later, Mason and The Point's other early executives dismissed the idea. "It didn't seem core to our mission," says the person who was at the meeting. Through the rest of the summer and early fall of 2008, Lefkofsky would not let that idea go. He'd bring up all the expensive purses his wife and all her friends were buying, and say, "It's crazy! Couldn't they buy 20 of them and get a discount?" Around this time, the global economy entered free-fall as the sub-prime mortgage crisis exploded and credit markets ground to a halt. Then in September 2008, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and famous Silicon Valley venture capital firm Sequoia sent out a presentation called "R.I.P. Good Times." Mason and Lefkofsky decided to lay some people off. "There was this pressure from the market crash [and] looking at our burn rate and revenue — it was time for us to try something to scratch that itch," says a source close to early employees. Groupon — a side project launched out of desperation by a team of do-gooders who professed no real desire to make big bags of money — was born.
Sources do credit Mason for coming up with some of Groupon's defining characteristics: that it's one deal a day, that the deal doesn't go into effect until enough people buy the voucher, and that the vouchers should be for local businesses. Some of the characteristics evolved out of a crucial element of Groupon's early DNA; it was a business created by reluctant capitalists. "[The] way we rationalized it with ourselves," says an early employee, "[was that we were] helping people find interesting things to do in their city." "Some of the early things we did were an hour in a sleep deprivation tank, or skydiving. We [didn't] want to do stuff that's going to wind up in a landfill. We [didn't] want to sell overstock gadgets. We [didn't] want to deal with shipping and returns." These reluctant money-makers decided that Groupon should offer one deal a day, and that it should sell vouchers for local businesses. They decided that the daily emails should have funny copy. Mason also pitched Groupon as a way to help local businesses with cash flow at a time when banks were not lending. The concept immediately took off. Local press got wind of the company and made a lot of noise about it. Employees successfully recruited local business owners among their friends and families to sign up. "Merchants started to tell us 'if I want to do a 10,000 dedicated email blast on Daily Candy, it's going to cost me X, but you're telling me I can send it to 10,000 people for free, and only if they buy, we'll give you a cut?' That was an eye opener," says one early employee. By the end of 2008, Andrew Mason and Eric Lefkofsky knew that The Point would become Groupon. In December, Lefkofsky recruited Ted Leonsis, who made his name and fortune building AOL. Leonsis would eventually become Groupon's vice chairman. Lefkofsky's long time business partner, Brad Keywell, also signed on. Others at the The Point/Groupon didn't see the transition quite so clearly. "At first we thought it would be a little skunkworks project and we'd go on and it would help us raise money to further develop The Point. But I think that idea didn't last very long because we realized we had a tiger by the tail." In January 2009, Groupon held its company holiday party at the small apartment of its CTO, Ken Pelletier. He cooked for everyone — the whole company and all their spouses and significant others.
A year later, Groupon had around 300 employees.
A year after that it had 5,000+.
Today, Groupon has more than 10,000 employees.
Investors, some of them who also put money into Facebook, began calling Groupon the fastest growing company in history. The first major test for the project was its move into a second market: Boston. "In Chicago," explains one early employee, "we had a big network of friends and family to sign up and spread the word. We had a lot of people who knew business owners. It's easier for business owners to trust a local company." The expansion went off without a hitch — but only thanks to a number of make-it-work hacks on the technical side. During Groupon's first months, customer support head Joe Harrow would spend three hours every afternoon personally emailing all the customers who bought Groupon vouchers whenever a deal closed. Nine months in, Groupon switched to software specifically designed for the new business. Groupon successfully expanded into a third market: New York. By this time, says an employee, "we kind of had the playbook we needed to open in another city, another city, another city." Groupon knew, for example, exactly how much to invest in advertising in order to build a sizable subscriber list in a new market. By the summer of 2009, Lefkofsky started pushing hard for growth in Groupon's Monday meetings.
He started by suggesting Groupon be in five cities by the end of the year.
Then he started pushing for 10 cities by the end of the year.
Finally, according to a source familiar with those meetings, Lefkofsky just started saying, "Why don't we try and go as fast as we can? Why don't we turn up the jets?"
"We realized the main barrier to entry is going to be scale. So we wanted to get to as many cities as we can because we saw direct, outright, verbatim copies of what we were doing, popping up all over the place pretty quickly. We said we can either go chase them and beat them back and fight them legally, or race ahead and do what we do, as best we can. So the choice was to not look back, and try to be better and bigger."
One source close to Groupon's board says it was director Peter Barris of Groupon investor NEA that came up with the original analysis behind this aggressive growth plan.
Groupon began to grow into a real startup with lots of employees. It hired a COO who had worked at Yahoo and sold his own company before: Rob Solomon.
By this time, not only were consumers noticing Groupon, the press was catching on too. Mason went on CNBC. He went on "The Today Show." In August 2010, Forbes magazine put Mason on its cover. His shirt is un-tucked. He's shrugging as if to say, who me? The cover reads: "Groupon Is The Fastest-Growing Company … Ever: The New Web Phenom."
Groupon developed a "typical startup culture," with "everyone in their hoodies, and sales reps dating each other — that kind of nonsense," says one early employee." It was sort of like a fraternity that worked very hard."
"Working there was crazy," says another early employee. "[From 2009 to 2010] we hired 10,000 people. That was completely insane — something that's never happened before, and should never happen again. We ended up in 45 countries in 16 months. It was nuts, it was fun, it was a blast."
SO, WHO IS ANDREW MASON, ANYWAY? Andrew Mason — with his mild brown hair, scruffy beard, and faded polo shirts — is funny in a way that most CEOs would be afraid to be. Even as he went on Groupon's road show in 2011 in order to ask major institutional investors to trust him with hundreds of millions of dollars, his Twitter avatar — his public face to the world — remained a picture of him on his knees, in his underwear, gleefully unwrapping a Nintendo Wii. Once, we emailed Mason for a comment on a story, and he replied in minutes: "You can say that I totally was going to comment except the way you asked for my comment suggested that maybe I shouldn't and I didn't want to let you down so decided not to comment." In July 2010, Mason attended investment bank Allen &amp; Co's famous conference for moguls in Sun Valley, Idaho. 
When we asked him what it was like being around so many famous, rich people, he replied: "Have u seen Eyes Wide Shut? Nuff said." When we told Mason a quote like that could make for a good headline, Mason replied, "haha... man that would be so good. Unfortunately my commitment to our business is still marginally higher than my commitment to fucking around." On CNBC, a reporter once asked Mason if he really owned 20 cats, as he'd previously told another reporter. Mason said no. "Most CEOs will make stuff up about themselves to sound way smarter and cooler and people are disappointed to find out otherwise. I decided to set the bar very low and make up lies about myself that make me sound lame." This wacky, always-making-jokes version of Andrew Mason is the one outsiders know. Sometimes we see a more serious, self-reflective side of Mason — the one who started The Point, and now admits he's surprised to see himself in the role of capitalist. How do these versions of Andrew jibe with the one supporting the Samwer brothers' hardball business tactics? How is he also the leader of a business that is already doing more than $1 billion of revenue a year? Mason grew up in Mount Lebanon, a Pittsburgh suburb. When he was 15, he started Bagel Express, a Saturday morning food delivery service. He moved to the Chicago area after high school to go to college at Northwestern. He majored in music. Then he started working on a Masters in public policy. To make some money, he did contract web design for Lefkofsky. When hiring people for The Point, Mason struck recruits as young — but very smart. Still, one early employee told us that if it weren't for Lefkofsky's backing, he never would have joined The Point. For a while, Mason's age and inexperience showed. Always interested in Groupon's product and the customer experience, he wasn't exactly passionate about the nuts and bolts of running a business. Says one source close to the Groupon board: "Three years ago if you had said to Andrew, this is really important for you to master — where the money is made, know how many employees you have, know the best way to onboard and recruit and terminate employees — he probably would have said, yeah, I know. But deep in his heart of hearts, I don't think he would have meant it or internalized it." To help Mason with the nitty gritty — helping him to understand it, and to understand why it's important — Lefkofsky, the Groupon board, and Mason himself have sought out mentors across the industry for Mason to be in regular touch with. He's in frequent contact with famed VC John Doerr, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, investor and ex-AOL president Ted Leonsis, and LinkedIn cofounder Reed Hoffman. Mason is in particularly close contact with Marc Andreessen, the Netscape cofounder who's developed a second, very rich career as a Silicon Valley investor and entrepreneur coach to CEOs like Mason and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. The other hard transition Mason had to make was from do-gooder founder of The Point to Groupon capitalist.
Mason and other early Groupon employees have come up with some pretty good rationalizations for Groupon and how it helps the world. They like to say it gets people to try new things and that it gets small businesses cash flow.
But most sources close to Mason and Groupon agree that he made the transition into business life quite easily. One source says that after he joined Groupon, he learned that Mason "is more of a businessman than I ever would have guessed." "He just likes to be the wacky, quirky, irreverent, 'I don't care about money, I don't care about business.' It's bullshit. It's just a shtick. He started as a socialist, and now he's as capitalist as you get. He wants to build a really big special company and he wants to fly private jets," says another source who worked closely with Groupon and Mason. Mason jokes with the press, this source says, because "he wanted to be a performing artist at some point in his life, and he was granted a stage to do that and he went for it."
Another source says Mason "still wears grungy old band t-shirts and hoodies and disgusting flip-flops" and doesn't seem like he's "turning into this snazzy, d-baggy CEO kind of guy." But this source says Mason definitely "cares about making money."
"There's no way anybody would commit this much of his life and time and stress to this if he didn't care about making money."
He cares about money because it is "validation that he is smart, he can do this. " Mason can turn against people. "I remember one person, who's still there, at some point was like, heads down working like a crazy person, super serious and not able to crack a joke for a few weeks and I was like, 'what the hell is up with you,' and he was like, 'I'm in Andrew's dog house and I'm working my way back out, don't talk to me for a month.' There's a little bit of that and once I heard that, I was like, oh fair enough, see you in a month. So, yeah, it's a trait of his." "He's a total hardass," says another source. "He gives no recognition at all. He's very hard to approach. He always has a furrowed brow. He always has headphones on. Everything is through e-mail. His free-wheeling funny guy image is something he turns on very effectively when it's required, but it's not him. He's very arrogant, he's stubborn. He honestly believes he's smarter than everybody else." Not everyone takes Mason's aloofness so personally. "Does he think he's smarter than most people? Yes. Is he? Yes." Some Groupon employees appreciate his stubborn streak. One time Groupon's business development team managed to land an offer with a "national entertainment brand" that would have broken Groupon into a whole new market segment, but because the deal wasn't great for Groupon subscribers, Mason squashed it — despite protests from "most of the C-level people." "Andrew was listening to all these guys explain to him how this was going to be such a big deal, and he stopped everybody and was like, 'you mean to tell me we're going to do a deal where we offer x, y, and z, and you're excited about that? That's a stupid deal, I wouldn't buy that? Would you buy that?' And everyone looked around and he was like, 'we're not doing that deal.'" "He had a really consistent vision of what he wanted Groupon to be and he didn't compromise that even when there were big financial stakes. He's kind of no bullshit and tells it like it is." A source close to the Groupon board describes Mason as "thoughtful," and "charmingly goofy." He says that Mason is learning to become "a fully developed founder/CEO," one that "provides the vision, the soul, the power-plant for the company to continue to innovate and do great things and grow."
This is an excerpt from Business Insider's 2011 e-Book: "Inside Groupon." The full story describes the history of Groupon from its meteoric beginnings to its troubled IPO. It's available for your Kindle. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/INSIDE-GROUPON-Controversial-Company-ebook/dp/B00634MNDY/ref=sr_1_10?s=digital-text&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1320406625&amp;sr=1-10">Download your copy today</a>.

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