#3 Groupon

Founder: Andrew Mason

Percent voting share: 19.5 percent

Date founded: 2008

Andrew Mason founded Groupon in 2008, a deal-of-the-day website that features discounted gift certificates usable at local or national companies. In April 2010, the company was valued at $1.35 billion. According to a December 2010 report conducted by Groupon's marketing association and reported in Forbes Magazine and the Wall Street Journal, Groupon was "projecting that the company is on pace to make $1 billion in sales faster than any other business, ever".

However, a report from Forrester Research in October 2011 suggested that the Groupon business model was a "disaster" and that the firm had become an example of "how fast an Internet darling can fall."

Group on revised its financial reports in August 2011 after regulators and analysts took issue with its accounting methods. Groupon issued another revision to its financials in early 2012 as the company overstated its 2011 profit by more than $20 million. Because of these problems, along with general concern that the daily deal fad — the company’s core business — may be slowing, the stock price has been declining. It is now roughly a quarter of its initial public offering price of $20 a share, with the company’s market capitalization at $3.3 billion. It didn’t have to be this way. In 2010, Groupon rebuffed Google’s offer to buy the company for up to $6 billion. There has been talk that Mason isn’t mature enough to run a company of this size.

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