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Andrew Mason dishes on both the company's big financial goof & its successful email strategy. Groupon CEO Andrew Mason has admitted that the daily-deal start-up made a "bush-league mistake" in misstating its revenues before it went public late last year

Rocket Lawyer, which offers free legal documents and subscriptions for cheap legal advice, has raised $10.8 million. Just months after raising $18.5 million, online legal service Rocket Lawyer has pulled in another $10.8 million.

Rocket Lawyer, which offers free legal documents and subscriptions for cheap legal advice, has raised $10.8 million. Just months after raising $18.5 million, online legal service Rocket Lawyer has pulled in another $10.8 million. The San Francisco start-up's products, used by hundreds of small businesses, include free, interactive legal templates that users can adapt to specific legal needs, save, and share

In his book Predictably Irrational , Dan Ariely notes that from about 1978 to 1993, the average pay for a public company CEO climbed from 36 times the average worker’s pay to 131 times. In order to “shame” companies into holding back on lavish pay for CEOs, the Securities and Exchange Commission began requiring publicly held firms to disclose the pay of their top five executives in their financial reports. The result?

New legislation could expand crowdfunding options through websites such as Kickstarter and IndieGoGo.

The social networking software company--a perennial on the Inc. 5000--is seeking to raise as much as $117 million.

Co-founder Jeremy Stoppelman hopes that the review site will go viral Down Under without a marketing campaign. As online review service Yelp prepares for its initial public offering, the company quietly has gone live in Australia today.

Four bills are up for consideration, including ones that allow up to $2 million from crowd-funding sites. Lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives quickly advanced four bills that would make it easier for small businesses to line up capital.

Main Street Hub, a start-up that wants to help you manage your reputation on social media, received $2.6 million in funding.

It's been a rocky road to going public for Groupon, which has faced scrutiny from investors, analysts, and the SEC leading up to its October 24 IPO road show. Scott Sweet , the senior managing partner of IPO Boutique, a Tampa-based firm that advises companies on the road to going public, says that in his 39 years of analyzing initial public offerings, he's never seen anything like this.

What if you didn't send your money to a faceless investment bank, but instead gave it to a local business? We spoke to author Amy Cortese about local investing, where people keep their capital within 50 miles of where they live. "The crazy thing is it’s easier for most people to invest in a company halfway across the world than in their own backyard," says Amy Cortese, author of the recently published Locavesting: The Revolution in Local Investing and How to Profit From It.

You may be familiar with SAS 70: an audit standard used for businesses that provide a service relating to their clients’ finances. If you feel like you just figured out SAS 70 audits, I’m sorry to say that from now on, you will be undergoing Statement on Standards for Attestation Engagements 16 (SSAE 16) assessments instead.

It's nice when good things happen to good companies. After a more than decade of struggling to turn its streaming music service into a viable business (for a good primer check out Stephanie Clifford's 2007 story ), Pandora is profitable and poised for a blockbuster IPO. Today, it announced that it is raising the price of the offering by roughly 50 percent : Online radio station Pandora increased the share price for its initial public offering today, bringing the company’s valuation to nearly $2 billion, according to a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The discount-of-the-day site filed its papers today to become a publicly traded company. It's official.