Next week, at the DLD conference in Munich, Germany, BoomTown will be interviewing one of my favorite start-up CEOs: Andrew Mason of Groupon.

And what’s my very first question for the adorkable toast of the digital town, who has just collected a billion dollars in funding, giving his hot social buying site a $4.75 billion valuation?

No, it’s not about what Mason is going to do with all that moolah.

Not, it’s not about why Groupon spurned the $6 billion acquisition offer from Google (and the Yahoo one before that).

No, it’s not about what hair care products Mason uses to get his hair looking so much like Justin Bieber’s coif.

Most of all, what I want to know is how he’s going to manage his ridiculously large–and, let’s be honest, very opinionated–investor group, which is made up of a big chunk of the digital arena’s most prominent VC firms, institutional investors and angels.

Consider the list, which is much more diverse than Facebook’s at a similar time in its gestation (and, in fact, it feels a lot like the social networking site’s current investor stampede):

Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Ventures, Greylock Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Mail.ru Group (formerly DST Global), Maverick Capital, Silver Lake, and Technology Crossover Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, Accel Partners, T. Rowe Price, Fidelity, Capital Group, Morgan Stanley, former AOL exec Ted Leonsis and others.

(How in the world is the ubiquitous Ron Conway not shoved in this pig pile? Or is he?)

And, of course, the inevitable Allen & Company acted as financial advisor for this massive funding, which also feels like a bit of a private pre-IPO.

It will be interesting to see exactly whom among this shareholder group that Mason and the other top Groupon execs will listen to and who will have the most influence over the next year.

None of the new moneybags got a board seat, which is probably a good thing. As most entrepreneurs know all too well, investors can be a tricky thing–at once helpful and then not so much.

Mason, a clearly gifted exec, certainly has his hands full now, managing expectations for the fast-growing company, as well as the business itself.

Let’s hope that now that this surreal investor sideshow circus is over, that Groupon’s precious time can be focused on just that.

“I recently read in the news that you lost a very special phone at a German beer bar in California. We all know how frustrating it can be to lose personal belongings, especially when it is such a unique item.

At Lufthansa we also noted with great interest your passion for German beer and culture….Therefore we would love to offer you complimentary Business Class transportation to Munich, where you can literally pick up where you last left off.”

– Lufthansa spins a bit of clever PR from this week’s iPhone prototype debacle.

“By the end of Intersolar, we sensed growing, albeit cautious optimism,” Cowen’s Robert Stone writes in a research note this morning. “ASPs are still uncertain, but volumes should definitely be up in Q2/Q3, and deals were starting to close.” He says that despite a strong rebound in the stocks since early March, the group “remains mostly undervalued.”

Likewise, Thomas Weisel Partners analyst Jeff Osborne writes that “it appears demand trends in Europe are accelerating with many companies indicating a 40-100 percent increase in units in Q2 sequentially, led mainly by Germany with some credit easing in Mediterranean countries as well.”

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Burda runs an annual digital conference in Munich called DLD (Digital, Life, Design), which a lot of U.S. tech types have gone to, including me, even though the media giant is best known for its old-line magazines about fashion, cooking and crafts.

But Burda has also been dipping into the digital sector a lot, especially via the tireless tech networking of the company’s Steffi Czerny and Marcel Reichart, who have established a high profile for the company among Silicon Valley denizens.

That was in evidence at Burda’s luncheon yesterday, which was crowded with a panoply of techies and hosted by Czerny, Maria Burda, the wife of CEO and owner Hubert Burda, and well-known Israeli investor Yossi Vardi.

Czerny has been taking Maria Burda (pictured here, she is also a famous German television star, better known as Maria Furtwängler) around the Valley on a learning tour this week to meet with companies like Ning, Mozilla, Facebook, and with venture capitalists. They are also here to attend Google’s Zeitgeist partners’ event, which starts today.

Here’s a video of yesterday’s luncheon, where I was asking everyone about the troubled economic situation and more.

It includes chats with Mullenweg and Seesmic’s Loic Le Meur, BillShrink’s Peter Pham, Facebook’s Brandee Barker and Randi Zuckerberg, Wired’s Steven Levy, Vardi and Burda and Czerny:

The three-day conference focuses on digital innovation, science and culture. It is chaired by publisher Hubert Burda and serial Israeli investor Joseph Vardi and hosted by Stephanie Czerny and Marcel Reichart.

I was here to interview Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch. In our session this afternoon, we talked about digital tools to improve reporting on human-rights abuses, the situation in China for U.S. Web companies like Yahoo and Google, along with what techies can do to help in this important arena.

I also hung around the conference and schmoozed, Eurostyle!, with a lot of folks, including Mahalo’s Jason Calacanis, BuzzMachine’s Jeff Jarvis and Vardi.

There is also some video from an interesting social-networking panel, featuring Matt Cohler of Facebook, Lars Hinrichs of Xing and Joanna Shields of Bebo.

Added bonus: I also got the no-comment-hand-over-camera move from Facebook’s Brandee Barker, but a promise of German beer!

Here’s the video:

I am now at the DLD conference in Munich, which is put on by Hubert Burda Media, a gathering that has become one of Europe’s most interesting in recent years.

The three-day DLD–which stands for Digital, Life, Design–focuses on digital innovation, science and culture and has the most cosmopolitan audience of any conference out there.

It is chaired by publisher Hubert Burda and serial Israeli investor Joseph Vardi and hosted by Stephanie Czerny and Marcel Reichart.

It is interesting to be here to garner a lot of different viewpoints from outside the U.S., and I will be visiting a lot of German Web start-ups over the next week.

There is also a lot of Olympic-level schmoozing, of course, since there are precious few such events in Europe compared to the conference-crazy U.S.

There are also, of course, a lot of the usual suspects from the States and especially Silicon Valley.

So far this morning, I have run into folks like former Microsoftie Linda Stone, Yahoo’s Bradley Horowitz, writer and entrepreneur Esther Dyson, Facebook’s Matt Cohler and, yes, Martha Stewart (who needs no introduction).

I am also here to interview onstage for DLD today Kenneth Roth (pictured here), longtime executive director of Human Rights Watch, which investigates, reports on and seeks to curb human-rights abuses in some 70 countries.

To say I am out of my league in interviewing such a serious and substantive figure is an understatement, especially given that I spend all my time contemplating the monetization of widgets (to be more specific, the non-monetization), the fate of content on the Web and the exact date the hype of social networking will end.

Still, I will give it my best effort and perhaps focus on the use of digital tools to get information and stories of heinous injustices out worldwide. After all, the Web has to be more than SuperPoking and dumb online videos on cats skateboarding.

Our session is aptly named: “Inconvenient Stories.”

My favorite kind.

Video, of course, to follow.