Carlo Cisco

Groupon is kind of like the ultimate startup on steroids story.

It was the fastest growing company in history at that time.

And Japan was just the epitome of that.

They had acquired a company with about 20 people and not really significant revenue.

And then within a couple months, we had over 700 people, over 20 million a month in revenue.

So it was really Groupon's kind of extreme growth story.

And in Japan, it was Groupon on steroids.

It was absolutely crazy, but a tremendous experience and a lot of fun.

What employee number were you?

I would say probably in the low thousands.

They were already operating in probably, I would say, 15 to 20 countries.

I basically joined right before they turned down Google's offer.

And then, you know, shortly after that was when they raised 950 million.

And then that was when it was like, okay, we're just starting here, but here's our goals for this month, the following month.

And, you know, they were all crazy, but we were actually able to beat them.

So it was a really fun time.

Yeah, so that's part of where the inspiration for Select came from.

But the issue is that the merchants that were doing it initially thought that it was going to be great for their brand.

They thought that they were going to have all these repeat customers.

They thought the customers would spend more when they were there.