Groupon

And if that sounds familiar, it should, because that CEO was Andrew Mason.

And he turned it into Groupon, which became the fastest-growing company ever.

So I know they're having such a thing

now, but I really love this example and what Andrew Mason says as he's talking about this change as they go from the put to Groupon.

So I just have a one-minute clip, if you guys want to listen.

The biggest mistake we made with the point was being kind of completely encumbered by this vision of what I wanted it to be and taking 10 months to build the product and making all these assumptions about what people would want that we then spent the next 10 months backtracking on instead of focusing on the one little piece of the product that people actually liked.

And then even when you're ready to build, there's still a lot that can be done without having to, like, go write out a bunch of custom code.

Like, I'm a developer, but I still will find ways.

She is on the entry list.

I think that it'll be very interesting to see what the Recording Academy voters do with her because the public perception out here is crazy surrounding her because she has this massive hit with Boston and obviously is popular, but then has this whole backlash about her being a nepo baby because her dad's a billionaire and founded Groupon or whatever.

And these two things colliding...

I'm interested to see what the voter base does with all of that information, like whether she, like if the public perception and weird backlash against her and her family, like weigh into whether she gets this nod.

My guest is Florian Odo, co-founder and CEO of Cedar.

Florian trained as a physician in Germany, worked in McKinsey's healthcare practice, built a daily deals company in Brazil that was acquired by Groupon and led commercial growth at SoftTalk before starting Cedar in 2016.

After his wife's medical bill turned a great clinical experience into a medical billing nightmare.

It was such a privilege to have Flory on the pod, and I learned so much from it.

Those two as being the biggest kind of metrics makes a lot of coherent sense overall for the business in general.

But I'd like to take a step back here and think about how Cedar came in.

Obviously, you did your work at McKinsey in the healthcare practice, and then you started a company in Brazil that got acquired by Groupon, and then you went to ZocDoc and things like that.

I'm curious to know what chapter in your journey taught you the most in Cedar and where did you see the problem being the most affected to start Cedar in the first place?

And that was in college.

It was around the time that Groupon was taking off.

And I did that in the local community that I grew up in in Detroit.

and decided part of the way into that, that I actually did want to finish my degree after dropping out.

And I would say that our best consumer year was around 2015 probably where we peaked out like the biggest day i ever had was like december 18th of 2015 the biggest single day we ever had and and It seems to me that consumerism's changed a ton since then.

And what happened in 2000, I'm gonna say right around 2006, maybe just a little bit after, is when in America, this 50 cent a liter junk was coming in from Europe, from the middle of Spain, coming into New York, being bottled under these fancy labels and being sold to people as wine through the internet and Groupon.

And I think that soured the taste of wine from a lot of people thinking this is good, but you had trouble drinking it.

I remember getting two cases of samples from a company that only sold those wines as, on the internet, a $69 case free shipping.

Yeah.

share please share share I actually I posted a video about this because I was I was asked by I didn't I wasn't asked I saw a interview or a post on Inc magazine and it said name a side hustle that became a main hustle And after I'd worked with Paul in Vegas, and he was my boss, and that company sold, I started working at a company called Groupon.com.

They were a big company.

I was hesitant to join them.

And I was like, wow, this is how it's done.

This is how a public company operates.

But while I was at Groupon, You have to remember, this is circa 2011.

And during those days at Groupon, you ran a Groupon and it went bananas.

crazy question.

What if you literally just – when we talked to Greg Conklin about his experience at – not at Dropbox, but at Groupon, right? Didn't he tell us how basically they just acquired all these little companies and instead of trying to merge everything into the same code base, they just ran the separate little code bases in parallel.

And they just had lots of small teams that were just running their own little software stacks.

I think that's right.

And I would say that our best consumer year was around 2015 probably where we peaked out like the biggest day i ever had was like december 18th of 2015 the biggest single day we ever had and and It seems to me that consumerism's changed a ton since then.

And what happened in 2000, I'm gonna say right around 2006, maybe just a little bit after, is when in America, this 50 cent a liter junk was coming in from Europe, from the middle of Spain, coming into New York, being bottled under these fancy labels and being sold to people as wine through the internet and Groupon.

And I think that soured the taste of wine from a lot of people thinking this is good, but you had trouble drinking it.

I remember getting two cases of samples from a company that only sold those wines as, on the internet, a $69 case free shipping.