Just ousted Groupon CEO Andrew Mason was in India three weeks ago, had lunch with team

Just two weeks before he was sacked for the company's perpetual poor performance, Groupon founder and former CEO Andrew Mason was in India on a trip to the company's offices in Delhi. India was the third stop of Mason's 11-country tour of Groupon's international markets, sources close to the development told Techcircle.in.

Mason did this tour in 14 days straight, during which he spent just a night in India.

During his roughly 24-hour stopover in India, he met Groupon's India team and had 'routine' meetings, our sources said. Mason, in fact, did not step out of the office and had lunch with the team at the office only.

And he is believed to have given the usual CEO pep talk to the employees when he met them.

But when contacted for further details, Groupon India CEO Ankoor Warikoo declined to comment.

However, this is not the first time when the India visit of a CEO of a leading international tech company had been kept under wraps. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had visited India not once but three times and none got the wind of it when he was in the country.

The first time Zuckerberg visited India was in 2008 when he attended a wedding in Pune. He came again in 2009 and 2010, and all these trips were kept under wraps. He is also believed to have visited the Osho Ashram in Pune during his trip in 2010.

The last time Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin visited India was in 2004 but that was a well-publicised trip. At that time, Page and Brin told reporters they had come looking for "extraordinary talented entrepreneurial people who want to make a big change in the world."

There is no record of Apple's late CEO Steve Jobs visiting India when he was on the job. However, he had been to India in the mid-1970s in search of spiritual enlightenment.

(Edited by Sanghamitra Mandal)