Last month, Kara Swisher reported that Schultz and Accel Partners’ Kevin Efrusy were suddenly stepping down from the Groupon board.

Schultz’s departure was effective immediately, while Efrusy will not be standing for reelection at the company’s annual meeting in June.

In the interview on CNBC, Schultz said, “I only committed to one year. It just so happens that my exit was timed with the problem they had last quarter, and no one should read anything into that.”

When asked whether the company has enough adult supervision, he added: “I have confidence in the board and Andrew, and that’s all I have to say at this time.”

Groupon’s stock has continued a downward spiral after it revised its fourth-quarter results to account for higher than expected returns during the holiday period. Today, the stock is down 1.3 percent, or 13 cents, to trade at $9.94 a share.

At that price, it is worth half as much as at the time of its initial public offering.

On the same day that Schultz and Efrusy announced their departures, Groupon said it planned to appoint both Daniel Henry, CFO of American Express, and Deloitte Vice Chairman Robert Bass. Henry joins immediately, in Schultz’s place.

Spencer Platt | Getty Images News

According to sources close to the situation, Starbucks Chairman and CEO Howard Schultz and Accel Partners’ Kevin Efrusy will be stepping down from the board of Groupon.

Schultz’s departure will be effective today, but Efrusy — who was critical to the initial funding around the Chicago-based daily deals site — will not be standing for re-election at the company’s annual meeting in June.

The departures are voluntary, but sources said the pair will be replaced by two new directors with significantly more fiscal oversight experience, whom one source characterized as “accounting types.”

(Update: Groupon just posted a press release noting the board departures, with the names of the new board pencil pushers: Daniel Henry, CFO of American Express, and Deloitte Vice Chairman Robert Bass. Henry joins immediately in Schultz’s place. Full press release below.)

It is a move that is critical, given Groupon’s recent series of missteps around its financial reporting that have hurt both its reputation and, more importantly, its stock.

Interestingly, several sources noted that Schultz almost left the board right before Groupon’s public offering last fall, after several ongoing disputes with its management, but stayed on so as not to scuttle its IPO.

The board of the company has not involved itself as prominently in the accounting messes at the company, but it appears as if they will begin to now.

It must, given Groupon shares have been trading at a low of $11. Its stock has dipped to $10.98 today.

As Tricia Duryee wrote recently about the fall:

At that price, it is now worth just over $7 billion, down 57 percent since the company went public last November and well off the more than $10 billion it was valued at as tech’s hottest start-up of 2011.

Ironically, Groupon’s current market valuation is actually not much more than the $6 billion offered for it by search giant Google in late 2010.

The fall of Groupon has been swift, from the honorific of being the fastest-growing company ever to one that cannot keep control of that runaway growth.

That’s perhaps no surprise.

Perhaps most significantly, Groupon went public in just four years, delivering the biggest tech IPO since Google.

The quicksilver move was typical for it. In just two years’ time, the company ballooned from 37 employees to 9,625 and from serving five markets in the U.S. to 175 in North America alone. And that’s leaving out massive expansion abroad. In the past year, Groupon has acquired roughly 17 companies, including many international copycats.

The company also has entered many new segments, expanding from selling lower-priced and simpler deals on restaurants and spas to more complex and pricey arenas, including travel, physical goods and luxury items.

But Groupon is now learning that its original business does not work across just any segment, especially to more discerning customers of its higher-level and more expensive offerings.

In fact, it was those newer and potentially more lucrative markets that forced the company recently to revise the company’s fourth-quarter report after returns skyrocketed on luxury items, such as Lasik eye surgery.

The problems forced Groupon to lower revenue in the period by $14.3 million and net income by $22.6 million. It is now reporting a wider net loss of $64.9 million on revenue of $492 million, pushing it further away from its goal of profitability.

The company also disclosed at the time that independent auditors had noted “material weakness” in its financial controls. In addition, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Securities and Exchange Commission was examining Groupon’s revision. 

With many companies, investors might have shrugged off such accounting issues, but the impact on the stock has been greater since they are only the latest in a string of similar mistakes at Groupon.

In its pre-IPO period, for example, Groupon was forced to restate revenues after counting both its portion of the revenue and the revenue that goes to the merchant together. It also had to dump a controversial accounting metric that made the company look more profitable than it was, because it did not include important costs, such as critical online marketing expenses to attract new customers.

Those came after the company retracted a statement by Eric Lefkofsky, Groupon’s co-founder and executive chairman, who told Bloomberg in an interview that Groupon would be “wildly profitable.”

At least the wild part was accurate.

Much of the blame for these missteps by Wall Street is being aimed at CEO and co-founder Andrew Mason, the iconoclastic 31-year-old entrepreneur who is largely responsible for defining the company’s culture, as well as Jason Child and Joe Del Preto, the chief financial and accounting officers, respectively.

Child joined the company in December 2010, coming from Amazon, where he held several roles over a 10-year period — including VP of finance, international, and director of investors relations. Prior to joining Amazon, he worked at Arthur Andersen as a certified public accountant.

Del Preto has been Groupon’s chief accounting officer for the past year and, before that, he was the company’s global controller for three months. Before Groupon, he was controller and VP of finance at Echo Global Logistics and also served as controller at InnerWorkings, the same company where Mason was a computer programmer in his early career.

Mason, of course, is the best known and the person most responsible for establishing the company’s whimsical culture and managing — or mismanaging, depending on how you look at it — Groupon’s hard-charging growth.

It will also be up to him to turn it all around, as the company sinks in both value and investor regard. Since the restatement, Mason has said little about how he intends to do that. In February, when Mason concluded Groupon’s first-ever earnings call, he said: “Thanks, guys, this was a lot of fun, and I look forward to many more of these.”

It’s not clear fun will be on the agenda at his next outing on Groupon’s first-quarter call in mid-May.

Here is the official press release from Groupon on the board changes:

Groupon Appoints Two Directors to Board Daniel Henry, CFO of American Express, and Robert Bass, Vice Chair of Deloitte

CHICAGO — (BUSINESS WIRE) — Groupon, Inc (http://www.groupon.com) (NASDAQ:GRPN) today announced that Daniel Henry, the chief financial officer of American Express Company and Robert Bass, a vice chairman of Deloitte LLP will join its Board of Directors. Both will serve on the Audit Committee with Audit Chair, Ted Leonsis. Daniel Henry was appointed to the Board on April 26, replacing Howard Schultz, who has stepped down from the Board. Robert Bass will stand for election at the annual stockholder meeting to be held on June 19 following his retirement from Deloitte, replacing Kevin Efrusy, who will not stand for reelection at that time. “With their deep financial, accounting and operational experience, Dan and Bob will provide invaluable expertise to the Board going forward,” said Eric Lefkofsky, Groupon Chairman.

Daniel Henry, 62, has been the Chief Financial Officer of American Express Company since October 2007. Henry is responsible for leading American Express Company’s finance organization and representing American Express to investors, lenders and rating agencies. He has also served as Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of U.S. Consumer, Small Business and Merchant Services and joined American Express as Comptroller in 1990. Prior to joining American Express, Henry was a partner with Ernst & Young.

Robert Bass, 62, has been a vice chairman of Deloitte LLP since 2006, and a partner in Deloitte since 1982. He will retire from Deloitte on June 2, 2012. Bass has specialized in e-commerce, mergers and acquisitions and SEC filings. At Deloitte, Bass is responsible for all services provided to Forstmann Little and its portfolio companies and is the advisory partner for Blackstone, DIRECTV, McKesson, IMG and CSC. He has also previously been the advisory partner for priceline.com, RR Donnelley, Automatic Data Processing, Community Health Systems and Avis Budget. He is a member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and the New York and Connecticut State Societies of Certified Public Accountants.

“I’m thrilled to have been a part of Groupon’s development,” said Kevin Efrusy. “The Company is well on its way to becoming the operating system for all local commerce.”

“Howard and Kevin helped guide us on our journey to becoming a public company and I want to thank them and acknowledge their contributions,” said Groupon CEO Andrew Mason.

“During my tenure on the Board, I was impressed by the game-changing opportunities that Groupon has delivered for both merchants and customers on a global scale,” said Howard Schultz. “Groupon has a strong sense of mission and purpose, and as I move on to focus on my other time commitments, I wish them the very best.”

It seems that Internet companies are particularly concerned about earning their spots at the World Economic Forum in Davos this year. Earlier this week, Facebook and Deloitte released a more specific (and self-serving) study about the social networking company’s revenue and jobs contributions to the European Union.

There will be three billion Internet users in 2016, or 45 percent of the world’s population, the BCG study estimated. By 2013, there will be more mobile broadband connections than fixed-line connections.

By 2016, China will have 800 million Internet users — as many as France, Germany, India, Japan, the U.K. and the U.S. combined. At that time, its Internet economy will be about the same size as that of the U.S., BCG noted.

BCG highlighted the value of social media in a couple of emerging areas. More than 90 percent of Internet users in Argentina, Brazil, Indonesia and Mexico engage in social media, a higher contingent than in many more-developed markets. Plus, small- and medium-sized businesses with significant Internet presences expect to grow 5 percent faster than those that do not.

(Photo courtesy of World Economic Forum)

If you’re in the big-deal camp, then you’ll like a new survey from Deloitte, which finds that a staggering one in five U.S. residents say they have either cut the cord or are thinking about doing it. The breakdown: Nine percent of survey respondents say they’ve recently cut the cord and are getting their shows from Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, etc. And another 11 percent say they might do it. (Click image to enlarge.)

To repeat: The Deloitte survey is asking people about cutting pay TV — Comcast, Verizon, Dish, etc. Not cutting back on certain channels like HBO (that would be cord-shaving) or simply never signing up in the first place (that would be the “cord-nevers” we’ve started to hear about).

How can that possibly square with the pay-TV industry’s reported results, which show that overall subscription levels remained basically flat last year? Even if you allow for a significant margin of error, things don’t add up: If the pay-TV business had lost a single percentage point of its customers in the last year, it would be a huge deal.

But Deloitte is reporting that approximately nine million people say they’ve recently stopped paying for TV. That’s the entire population of New York, plus another million or so, vanished. Can’t be.

I’ve asked Deloitte if they’ve got any insight on the gap, but haven’t heard back. But my hunch is that — for now, at least — cord-cutters are like vegans: They’re real, and they’re out there. They’re particularly notable in certain places like New York, the Bay Area and college towns. And they over-index at certain Web gathering places, like this one. But McDonald’s sales are still chugging along.

That creates an interesting opportunity that the Boston-based startup Apperian has been working on. Companies often have their own custom-made applications that they need to distribute to hundreds or thousands of employees, but they’d rather not do so via the iTunes App Store, where Apple has control and the power to approve all applications. No, instead companies need their own internal App store.

That’s exactly what Apperian has built. It’s called EASE–for Enterprise App Service Environment–and it gives enterprises the ability to create apps that can be distributed and managed and updated throughout a company.

After two years of operation, Apperian will announce today that it has landed a $9.5 million series A led by North Bridge Partners and joined by Bessemer Venture Partners and the Kleiner Perkins iFund, the $200 million fund focused on investments in the iPhone-iPad universe. Apperian is, I’m told, its first enterprise investment. Before this round, the company was funded by about $1.9 million in seed funding from CommonAngels and LaunchCapital. Michael Skok, a partner at North Bridge, and Bob Goodman, a founder partner at Bessemer, will be joining Apperian’s board.

One of its founders and its current Chief Strategy Officer is Chuck Goldman, who spent eight years as the Director of Field Engineering and Professional Services for Apple. His job was helping companies integrate Apple gear–first Macs but then later the iPhone–into their corporate infrastructure. (A 2008 BusinessWeek cover story I worked on focused on Apple’s somewhat reluctant embracing of its newfound popularity within corporations, which has only accelerated since then.)

I talked with Apperian CEO David Patrick yesterday. Initially, the plan was to build apps for corporate customers. “About halfway through we realized there was a huge interest among our customers in building apps internally for specific internal use, especially on the iPad.” That led to EASE, which is essentially a cloud-based platform that allows companies to build, deploy and manage iPad and iPhone applications. Customers can create their own branded app store-like environments.

And there are many customers: Procter and Gamble, Cisco Systems, NetApp, and Estée Lauder among them. All of them, Patrick told me, have built their own internal app stores that authenticate employees and serve up apps that are used for company-specific work without any need to host them in Apple’s public-facing app store. “You can literally push out an application to 5,000 users in a matter of seconds,” Patrick said.

Cisco builds its own internal sales force automation apps, Patrick told me. Cosmetics giant Estée Lauder uses the iPad at its retail counters to help suggest Clinique skin care products to customers. (Apperian also built this app.)

It’s a big turn of events from when the company first started, Patrick said. “We started working on EASE about 15 months ago, and we showed it to companies who asked why they’d ever want it,” he said. “They were providing email and calendar access and that was the extent of their commitment to the iPhone and the iPad. By summer, after the iPad first launched, our phone was ringing off the hook.” CIOs at big companies quickly got iPad religion when all their senior executives and board members walked in the door with iPads. “They could read all the documents on the screen, and it wasn’t long before they wanted their corporate apps, their business intelligence and SAP reports on the iPad too.”

Last night, I was the master of ceremonies, as I have been for several years, at the laudable annual Astia Awards Dinner, which celebrated venture capital firms that support women-led companies.

And VC Tim Draper really went above and beyond in showing–quite literally–his support for his female entrepreneurs.

The San Francisco-based nonprofit does work to accelerate funding and growth of early-stage women-led businesses in life sciences, high technology and clean technology, with chapters in Silicon Valley, London and New York.

The NVCA member firms honored at the show, which is sponsored by Deloitte and Fenwick & West, by Astia for making the most investments in companies with a woman CEO were Draper Fisher Jurvetson, InterWest Partners, Prolog Ventures and Redpoint Ventures.

In addition, Allan Will, founding managing director of Split Rock Partners, received the Deloitte Leadership in Mentoring Award for encouraging female CEOs in technology-based fields.

Other award winners this year included: Anu Acharya, founder and CEO of Ocimum Biosolutions, who got the Life Science Innovator Award; Diane Greene, founder of VMware, who was awarded the Technology Innovator Award; and Pam Marrone, founder and CEO of Marrone Organic Innovations, who received the Clean Tech Innovator Award.

But it was Draper who stole the show, held at the de Young Museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.

He could not attend, but made his presence known by doing a video in which Draper sings very badly, but with incredible enthusiasm.

But before he starts crooning, Draper takes off an article of clothing for every woman-led company he funded.

Let’s just say, while he should be proud of his investments in women CEOs, it would have gotten very dicey if DFJ had done just one more.

But see for yourself–or, more correctly, see a lot of Tim Draper, in this video: