Intuit will acquire the free online personal finance service Mint, we’ve confirmed from a source close to the deal, for around $170 million. Silicon Alley Insider first reported a rumor on this. The deal should be announced in the next few days.
Update: CEO Aaron Patzer has just confirmed the deal on-stage at TechCrunch50, and written a guest post describing The Value of TechCrunch50 that contains more details.
This is a terrific exit for Mint, which first launched two years ago at TechCrunch50. Mint took the top prize at that event and has been growing fast ever since. Their last round of financing valued the company at $140 million.
In all, Mint has raised $32 million over three venture rounds.
Earlier this year Mint and Intuit had a humorous clash over Mint advertising claims of gaining 3,000 new users a day and jumping from 600,000 to 850,000 users in a matter of months. Intuit sent a letter to Mint demanding an explanation for this apparently inconceivable feat, which we obtained and printed here.
We have just one question for founder and CEO Aaron Patzer, though. Can we please have our $50,000 grand prize back? It seems like you don’t really need it any more. 
This is a great story. I remember when you guys covered (and raved) about Mint. Seemed like a fairy tale happy ending.
Any ideas on how big the company is right now?
http://www.traderbots.com
Interesting…
I wonder if they had any hesitation selling to Intuit, given that that they don’t really seem to “get it” and Quicken is such a terrible product. If it was my company I’d be afraid Intuit wouldn’t get the vision and would mess up Mint. But then again, you get a $170 million offer and no one can fault you for taking the money.
I’d also be curious to know what profit multiple Mint sold for.
That’s exactly what I thought once I read who bought the company. Hope Intuit is willing to stay true to what made the site so successful and attracted their attention in the first place.
Or maybe they were scared of Mint.com . . .
Sure a big company might kill Mint, but for Intuit that might be 170 million well spent . . .
http://www.traderbots.com
Whats going to happen to the Quicken vs Mint page? – http://www.mint...online-vs-mint/
Looks like about a 3x return for VC’s, I would guess that there is no profit. Not iLike bad, but not a great exit for the VC’s.
wow… few yr old co and now sold. wow
Awesome Mint!A deal like this could have come together very quickly. Perhaps that last round forced Intuit’s hand.Let us see to what more has Mint got in store for us.
Any VC’s or other companies see the obvious here?
All you need to do is take the mint.com user experience and apply it to small businesses. You won’t even need to make that many changes – perhaps just an ability to more easily modify a chart of accounts, and two more tabs for accounts payable+receivable. Make it work the same, and in 3 years you will have a $170M exit.
It won’t be enough for the medium/large business, but my guess is that there will be a minimum of 10M SOHO/small businesses who it would be good enough for.
Speaking of the Small Business version, I’ll be the first on to sign up.
Anyone know of any solutions that currently exist?
[Please note: I am not an employee of Intuit, I am merely a fan]
The best and only? small business solution out there is currently only offered to banks who pay for it and then offer it to their customers. This revitalized company made their intentions known on November 30, 2006 when they proclaimed a “New Generation of Online Banking Solutions”. On March 13, 2007, they made it clear what there intentions were, – Digital Insight®, an Intuit company, today announced the upcoming release of Personal FinanceWorks and Small Business FinanceWorks, two products expected to lead the next generation of online banking.
Small Business FinanceWorks was finally launched on February 18, 2009 — Press Release Link: http://about.in...stitutions.html
Product Demo: http://www.dipr...yroll/home.html
[All information was cobbled together by reading the Intuit Press Release Archive]
My hope is they combine the best of Small Business FinanceWorks with the best of Mint and create a non bank version for all the small businesses out there.
http://www.xero.com …i use this for my start up. love it. it is truly “mint-like” in the beauty and ease of the app, it does everything a small biz needs, and it is really cheap.
It already exists: it’s called Xero, (http://www.xero.com). we use it for our start up and it is awesome.
Wowwww !! Congrats to Mint’s team !!
And condolances to Mint’s users. Now Intuit can hose this great product up like they do with everything.
Sorry for the Intuit hate so early in the morning, but as a software company, they’re predatory and reprehensible. Not only do they intimidate users into paying $70+ a year whenever they upgrade their product, their upgrades almost never go smoothly, their support is expensive and the techs are dense, they break compatibility with their own product every time they upgrade . . . .
And for MAC users, they haven’t released a product in 3 years. Quicken Financial Life was slated for early this summer release, but now it’s been pushed to 2010.
I recently had this conversation with a friend who bought a Mac and was asking if Quicken could be had on a mac. I told him there were several alternatives to Quicken, like iBank, Jumsoft Money (my favorite) and mint.com . . . . I guess the list just got shorter.
Agreed. Good for them, bad for us Mint users.
I don’t know about you guys, but the reason I chose to use Mint in the first place was that it was NOT Intuit. Goodbye smooth web app, hello bloatware.
I’m curious why so many comments about leaving the service. That is, Quicken Online is currently free and unless people believe that Mint’s product quality is actually going to go down, if you were willing to use Mint yesterday, why not today?
The one concern I could see is business practices, but given that Mint already was making money by selling your data, I’m not sure what other concerns there might be.
I suppose one potential is that Quicken could start charging a subscription fee. That is, Quicken Online originally charged for use, then went free as a way of competing with Mint – having acquired Mint, could they be trying to force a return to a subscription, or even a freemium, model?
Yeah, I don’t understand that behavior either, honestly. Same thing happened with the Facebook Friendfeed thing.
If you’d dealt with Intuit and Quicken for any length of time you would know they abuse customers and financial institutions alike.
Of course, Mint asking you to share your bank password is a terrible idea, regardless of whether a some magic word like ‘Yodlee’ makes you feel any better about it, so they may well be a suitably evil fit.
Mint’s competitors in ‘cloud’ financial tools should be pretty happy about this deal.
Well I bet you are the same guy who writes the “if you dont like the service why are you still a customer, stop complaining” type posts too.
I stopped using quicken because it was terrible and they deliberately made my purchased version of the software stop working. Removing Intuit from my life was a great decision and eliminated headaches big and small. Ex. my bofa account was $1,670 dollars off for over three years. I just had to remember that number in the back of my head all the time because fixing whatever happened was even more cumbersome. Then there was the investment tracking that never worked right etc etc.
And now they are back against my will. You dont see the value in heading off something so consistently problematic? Intuit is a weak link.
@desqjockey: Is that first comment directed at me? If so, not at all. I’m the guy that guarantees that if you send us an email at support@justthrive.com, you get a prompt answer from an actual human. If you call our support phone number (which is on every page of the site), I’m often the one that answers.
I absolutely believe that businesses should be about service, to individuals and the larger whole, and that there is a reasonable profit to be made in doing that. Zappos as a case in point.
As I note in a comment down the page, I think every business move you make should be customer focused. When Thrive was getting acquired, we had several offers and we chose LendingTree because they understood our customer service vision and gave us the resources to continue it.
So I absolutely think that you should lobby for appropriate customer service, and if you haven’t received that from Intuit, that is reason to be concerned. We can only hope that the Mint acquisition will improve, rather than degrade, customer care.
haha, bravo Matt way to bridge that into a pitch.
As for what bugged me about Mint (while you are here): when you drop an account all your financial data goes with it. Hope you guys dont do that.
@Matt, I’m surprised that you of all people are surprised. The hatred for all things Quicken and Intuit surely has driven people to your service as well. (I know it has driven me to both justthrive.com and mint.com.) As of today, I’m deleting my mint account and hoping that you guys will carry the day as the more responsive, cleaner, and less buggy alternative. It’s not even the pay vs. free thing so much. It’s that Intuit bungles everything, stuffs their products with bloatware, forces stupid upgrades onto their users, and then provides horrible “support.” They essentially hold your data hostage–knowing that you’ve put lots of time and data into their software, they start charging you for access to it, rather than charging you to actually improve the product (which I wouldn’t mind paying for). Maybe mint won’t be ruined by this acquisition, but I’m not going to stick around to find out. If mint is still any good in a few years, I’ll re-register. But after being burned by Intuit too many times, I vowed not to be involved with that company again, and I won’t be unless there are tremendous changes. For now, I’m hoping that justthrive will provide more of mint’s functionality (like manual entry, split transactions, etc.) and continue to use a hard drive based product as all of this unfolds.
@desqjockey: Wasn’t trying to pitch, just scared me – I’d hate to be the guy that says “don’t expect good customer service.” I’m pretty loud about the fact that good customer service should be your first consideration, not your last.
Can you say a bit more about “drop an account and all your financial data goes with it”? That is, do you mean that when a user deletes an account, we also delete your financial data? Because we certainly do that as a routine part of our security: if you tell us to delete your data, we do it.
Am I not understanding your question correctly?
@ethel08: We certainly have seen a number of signups since the announcement and in the past, we’ve had plenty of users tell us that they had bad experiences with Quicken. What puzzled, and still puzzles me a bit, is why people are ready to move away from Mint preemptively: the only difference between yesterday and today is that a different company now owns your data. If Intuit is going to drive Mint into the ground, that would seem to be the time to leave, not now.
But I am also mindful of the point you make: there is a sunk cost effect. If you truly believe Intuit is going to ruin Mint, then you should delete your account or at least stop putting effort into maintaining it. That is, time you spend on Mint as it gets ruined by Intuit is time you could be building up your financial history and growth somewhere else. I just don’t have personal experience with Intuit, so it is hard to bend my mind around the idea that a company would pay $170m for something they couldn’t improve on.
In terms of Thrive improvements, we roll out new features around once a month and both of the features you mention are on the to-do list, with split transactions coming much sooner than manual entry. This is in part because manual entry is a thorny problem; easy for Mint because they aren’t actually offering any advice, but somewhat harder for us, because we base our advice on your data and if manual data gets munged, we’ll offer bad advice. So we have to take our time in implementing that correctly.
Doubly agreed. I switched from Quicken to Mint because I got so frustrated with Intuit’s software issues and corporate jackassery. Here’s to hoping someone else rises up to provide a valuable alternative.
http://en.wikip...cial_management
Just for reference, here is a list of some of the alternatives.
I used Mint just because it wasn’t Intuit and Quicken. I liked the fresh approach it provided. Time to see how it turns out.
I never trusted Mint with my passwords, because it was a startup. With Intuit backing . . . I might.
Of course, if Intuit kills the awesome stuff everyone keeps telling me about Mint, then it is all m00t
http://www.traderbots.com
Mint never actually touched the passwords, though. They’re handled through third-party banking aggregation software provider Yodlee, who supplies similar software to big banks. (Which is the only reason I ever “trusted” Mint, to be fair.)
yeah, its handled by a thirdparty and is only view access, can’t transfer or withdraw…
> Mint never actually touched the passwords, though.
Doh! They should let people know that…
Yeah . . . I guess I had a traumatic experience. A friend had a startup that needed credentials from other services, who they kept telling me
1) They don’t store user passwords
2) All transmissions are via secured protocols
While he was telling me this, I remembered how their main dev was IMing me asking if there was a way to tell that SSL was actually turned on . . .
For me, I feel like once you start having real savings, the benefit you get from Mint have a hard time competing with the feeling of security and peace of mind. That was the only thing keeping me away from Mint.com.
Now, if my banks allowed me to authorize Mint.com for view-only with some kind of auth token . . . that’d be a different story. any chance it works that way?
http://www.traderbots.com
mint is a great service but i’m afraid that with intuit’s sticky fingers all over it it’ll just turn into a web version of quicken. ugh =(
A $170m sale after a $140m round does not seem terrific to me (although it possibly was a coup for the founders).
It wasn’t a $140M round, it was a $140M valuation on a $14M C round (maybe that’s what you meant). In fact, it is terrific – as in a terrific selling valuation for investors and founders alike. Intuit obviously thinks it’s worth it (I tend to agree, although will watch with interest)
Nick, yea that is exactly what I meant. Clearly it is good for founders, but it is absolutely fuck-me-in-the-head awful for the C round investors. How could it be good in any way for them?
Invest $14M in August and get $17 in September… that is not the worst investment for the Series C guys.
yeah, the new investors were DAG and Founders Fund. Both made a good return given how long they’ve actually been investors.
So you think the other partners at DAG and FF will be congratulating whoever led this deal? Seems unlikely to me.
Regardless, congrats to Aaron and team, that’s a phenomenal two years.
If this was a typical venture deal then the Series C shares probably had ‘participating preference’. Which means that they got their money back first, then they got their equity exposure to whatever was left.
If this is true then their $14m in will have become around $28m, depending on how much existing money had preference and at what levels. (I am assuming that there was $32m invested, all with 1x preference; $14m + 10% x ($170m-$32m) = $27.8m). This is a great IRR and not a bad absolute return, even tho it is probably not what the investors had hoped for in the upside.
This showcases, again, the problem with VC investing.
This return is good as shown — however, it’s the 1 in many that actually return anything. If this is the return that VCs get these days on the extremely few that have such “successful” exits, than the model is even more broken than we thought.
After all, they get nothing back from most of the investments…so they need an occasional home run to compensate. If this is the measure of a home run, it’s time for VCs to run home.
Exactly! If you assume the deal closes on November 1, that’s at least a 463% gross IRR (on a 1.49X return) for DAG LPs. If you use today’s date (not a realistic time estimate for cash-on-cash, but as an example, it would give you a 4 digit IRR. 400%+ IRR’s are hard to beat in any market. This is a stellar deal for every founder and every investor. Here are some calculations to support the 463% gross estimate. http://vator.tv/n/a93
Congrats Mint!
Damn the Valley valutions have come down since the YouTube days.
Not at all an awesome exit. Pretty timd, actually.
I am betting on freshbooks for one of the next deal in this space: I love them and hope they will soon add a light CRM service.
Funny, I was just thinking about that.
I think having both Mint.com and Freshbooks would do wonders for Intuit’s reputation, but I really doubt Intuit would just throw away QuickBooks Online.
congrats to mint
adding my congratulations here, great product and great people. Intuit is getting a bargain
congrats,mint done a very good job,i would like to use mint..
Congratulation! This is awesome.
I noticed that Mint is down for maintenance. I wonder if it’s related.
http://post.ly/4vqj
Title: Intuit to acquire
Body: Intuit has acquired
which is it?
+1
Good question.
Congrats to Mint team for awesome exit!
Huge.
Congrats Mint. Well done. Queue “I’m On A Boat” and repeat.
congrats to Aaron and his team, and to Rob Hayes at First Round Capital, who funded them way before everyone knew how cool they were!
i second this congrats!
This is awesome for Aaron and team. They’ve been killing for the last three years straight.
Mint is powered by yodlee.
And yodlee sees Intuit as a big fish competitor.
So what does this sale mean to yodlee ?
I’d be interested in the answer here as well, given that Intuit does the aggregation piece in-house.
My two cents on Yodlee vs Intuit aggregation. Mint via Yodlee has my Bank Name Wrong name wrong after signing up. It uses a defunct bank name from February 2004 and Intuit got it right from day one.
The Lowdown. My bank bought a bank in February 2004. My account was opened in June of 2004 at the acquiring bank (not the bank that was taken over). Mint showed they were compatible with my bank and my log in work (just did an update as I right this). I just do not understand how Yodlee gets this wrong. Mint was notified. Whatever. I use Quicken Online.
I was thinking the same as I’m sure Mint will migrate to Intuit’s aggregator now. That dramatically lowers Mint’s cost structure, but it also means less coverage of financial institutions for users. All speculation, but curious how this subplot plays out. Then again, Yodlee has been competing against its own customers for a while, so I’m sure they’re not too concerned either way.
This seems like a great exit for Mint. Michael – why do you think that they raised capital just before exiting? If their last round was a $140MM post-money valuation, this does not seem like a big step up from that.
a deal like this could have come together very quickly. Perhaps that last round forced Intuit’s hand. I have no idea, just speculating.
Michael,
What was their revenue? We don’t see analysis of revenue of any of these companies? does any one have more info on this?
Mike:
Here’s a link to an article that has the Series C terms for Mint:
http://pedatace...dc/blog/view/63
Congrats to Aaron and Mint … a great team which built a great product that profoundly improved people’s lives.
I believe Mint is a former TechCrunch40 winner, not TechCrunch50. Right?
Sigh.
Another unprofitable startup that finally got a sugar-daddy in quicken.
Mint would probably *never* have been profitable based on all the investments and expenses that went into it. The business would not have acquired enough paying customers, or enough customers that they could have “saved” money for.
The fundamentals just did not add up.
All in all, Quicken bought mint so they can convert Mint’s large free customer base into their paying online services. Why? Because besides the snazzy front-end that Mint has, there is nothing behind that facade that quicken is not already doing better.
In fact, I’ve sort of changed my mind… Mint was brilliant with this one! They put together a snazzy “web 2.0″ facade to draw in a lot of people blinded by the flashing lights, in the hope that a large profitable company (such as Quicken) would buy them for their potential customer base.
In the end, this deal was never about any techology, just about the hundreds of thousands of people who signed up and gave up some of their financial profile.
If anything, I’m surprised that Quicken got it for so little.
You clearly have never read any of mint’s or techcrunch’s posts as to how mint makes money. For starters, there is no paid tier of service.
I do hope intuit doesn’t ruin Mint though.
Never said they don’t make money. I said they were unprofitable.
Ericson, you are aware that if you “change your mind” within a post, you can delete the previous irrelevant text? Then again, your whole post was irrelevant.
the fundamentals do add up. this is exactly the type of outcome that silicon valley is all about.
Big congrats to Aaron and team and advisors! First Round gets to cork another bottle of Dom Pérignon.
On the one hand I hope that this brings true Canadian support, but on the other I fear that Intuit will just plain ruin Mint. :/
+1 on both issues.
Quicken was a pretty decent market leader at least in the pre Web 2.0 days, hopefully they will keep it minty fresh…
and bring it to Canada.
Congrats to Mint. I really love their service. I have been using it ever since they debut at Techcrunch40. I just hope they keep the Free user model in tact. We will see now that Big Brother Intuit has acquired them.
Congrats to the Mint team!
Congratulations to the Mint team – would love to see the service rolled out internationally.
I joined Mint.com because I despised Intuit. Now I have to abandon a great product because an evil company has acquired it. (Yes, evil. Go Google Intuit’s involvement in creating e-file.)
As I noted elsewhere, I’m curious why this reaction. In what way is Intuit more evil than Mint?
I’m curious about this too. I hear this all the time too.
I think a lot of people had problems with older versions of Quicken or TurboTax and they started these “evil company” comments.
I know about Intuit’s involvement with e-file too. I honestly don’t care. Have you tried TurboTax online? It’s a great value. I think I spent $30 to file my taxes in about an hour last year.
I’m not trying to defend Intuit, I just wish people would say a bit more about their accusations of evil. Mint sells user data and pays bloggers for coverage; what does Intuit do that makes people that Mint is somehow going to become “worse”?
You know Matt @ Thrive it doesn’t do your service own competing service many favors to throw around comments such as these. If you’re going to make comments such as this, provide sources, otherwise its slander.
A few of the smaller things – they like to make you pay for stuff. They hate Macs and Linux clients. They don’t “get” why the consumer should be happy before they put their money in the bank.
I love Turbotax online… But Quicken, in all its variants is a nightmare to deal with… And if you look outside the webspace, at what happened with Quicken vs. Quickbooks, it’s more than mildly frightening how things might wind up to the average Mint user. Definitely bummed, myself…
Sorry Zed; these things are well-known for people in the space, so I often forget to cite. Also, these are the kind of things that companies usually “announce”, so citation can be difficult. For selling data, at least, Mint has talked about it publicly (see the link below). For paying bloggers, the only reason we know is because bloggers that accept money from Mint have told us that they do.
And just to clarify, my point wasn’t to accuse Mint of anything: there is no ill will there. I’m just trying to get clarification on why people think Intuit is “evil” as compared to Mint; Deano, thanks for answering that.
http://www.bloo...id=aWJnLqF0Y8zs talks about the data selling
You forgot the word “may” and “anonymous” there. Big, big difference. You say they *do* sell user data. Your link says they might start selling completely anonymous data about what people in general are spending money on.
Sounds pretty similar to slander to me.
@Dan: It would only be libel if it were, in fact, untrue; we’ve met some of the folks who have bought data from Mint, so I’m not too worried. So yes, they *do* sell uesr data.
But let me be 100% clear on the anonymous point: so far as I know, Mint never sells non-anonymous data. If that we implied, I’m sorry, that was not at all the intent. And again, I want to be clear, my point here was not “Mint does bad things”, it was “What does Intuit do that is evil and not something Mint already does”?
Matt, you are so full of shit it’s unbelievable.
Is Thrive’s primary PR technique having you swinging on the balls of blog posts about Mint? Is that what they pay PhD dropouts for nowadays?
“For paying bloggers, the only reason we know is because bloggers that accept money from Mint have told us that they do.”
That’s still hearsay bordering on libel. I can find you bloggers who say Thrive beams communist death rays through their televisions.
Again Matt, the Bloomberg headline was completely inaccurate. I work at Mint, and I can tell you we haven’t sold any user data. Period. The total dollars spent by our entire userbase at a merchant like Target, isn’t user data. It’s a summation with no components.
Aaron responded to Bloomberg here:
http://paidcont...w-mint.com-ceo/
Jason, I appreciate your clarification. I wasn’t trying to take a stand on what qualifies as “user data”, simply to figure out what it is that people think will suddenly change at Mint under Intuit. I’m honestly a bit puzzled by the negative reactions people have given, though the second page has some comments that I think clarify objections.
So to be clear, I can see where you can make an argument that the data Mint is selling isn’t “user” in that it isn’t given on a user-level. But it does come from users (it isn’t data that Mint self-generated or got from merchants, for example) and hence, user data. I am in no way trying to imply Mint is selling individual, non-aggregated user data – I’d be shocked if that happened from you guys.
Let me Google that for you: Why Intuit is evil:
http://www.npr....storyId=9112083
and
http://articles...local/me-taxes5
and
http://www.ctj....-taxpayers.html
for starters.
I’m not sure “Intuit Evil” would get me those results. *grins*
But thank you for pointing them out: I actually was unaware of both, particularly the Californian money spent to oppose what sounds like, to me, a very good program for people. I’m not sure that it connects to “Intuit will make Mint an instrument of evil”, but certainly it does speak to the overall actions of the company that may get inherited. This will be an interesting acquisition to watch.
On one hand this is surprising given the recent funding and that from the outside, Mint would seem a long term, possibly independent company. On the other hand, it had limited revenue and was mainly sizzle with little steak.
Without any serious competition online and a killer business model it seems like a lot of future potential and $ were left on the table for the Mint team and the investors. I don’t think any VC is in this business to make a 20% return.
According to compete their US traffic was a bit flat until July. Did they stall and find they needed a way to gain more users quickly to remain viable? Personally I don’t see the upside, it seems more like an act of necessity, because if they could continue growing on their own there is a few hundred million in value that could have been realized. Sounds like its a matter of the cash not carrying them far enough with soft growth adding to the pressure.
By the time it all gets divided up the employees of Mint are not going to walk away with much (1% is $1.5m and consider most employees have far fewer shares than that)
I was at one of the recent events, related to angel investing, and there the investors (Rob Hayes, Aydin Senkut, etc) were talking about when Aaron (Mint founder) was just starting out and was looking for funding, etc., so it’s truly fascinating to see him and his company go from an idea to a $170M exit in about 2-3 years.
Even though I personally don’t know Aaron, I’ve heard that he is simply a great guy and I’m happy for him! He definitely deserves everything he got and more!
Congrats man!!
Major Congrats to Aaron, Matt, Poornima and the whole team. I remember when Aaron first demo’d the idea asked me “do you think this is fundable?”, “I said, you’re joking right? We’re having FoundersTable with Josh Koppleman tomorrow – I’m setting an extra seat for you – you’re getting funded”. They hit it off and the rest is history. Kudos to Mint, FirstRound, Softtech, Felicis and all the others involved.
congrats aaron and team, and to first round and the other folks involved — you guys killed it
Congrats to Aaron and team. Also well done to the great PR machine that helped contribute to the company’s rapid success.
Will Aaron stay on contract with Intuit as part of the deal?
Congrats! on the exit. But must say @ $140M valuation in the last round to an exit @ $170M is kind of low for a service that is good.
Well Done!
$170mio
1.4mio free users
$121 / free user
How to recoup the $121 on a free user?
If Quicken can’t answer that quickly then they have done a stupid deal.
$170mio is money you need to earn.
$170mio is a big marketing campaign lasting several years.
$170mio is a lot of developers and development time.
Well done, my apprentice.
If they can convert even 75% of those users into new eFile customers by April 5 then the deal would pay for itself.
Intuit has lots of other properties too, like QuickBooks
Congrats, great Deal, guys!
I think it is a good exit but I’m still a little surprised. Mint is a great service and I think it would have only gone from strength to strength. Perhaps Aaron was getting itchy feet – will be looking out for his next project.
Deleted my mint account just now. Intuit is not the software company I want to do business.
Very honestly, Mint could have made SO much money off all the data they’d collected.
I feel they made too quick an exit. Two more years, and they could’ve easily turned into a $50M+ p.a. revenue company
I doubt it!!! probably some retaliation after Facebook Punk’d TechCrunch
I just hope they don’t screw up Mint now.
I’ve used Quicken since 1991. Over that time I’ve gone from loving it to completely despising it and Intuit because of their generally close architectures.
I had high hopes for Mint though. Until now. Intuit acquiring Mint absolutely sux.
thats good, I feel good with intuit having my information. As secure as it is it was always a concern of mine
I think Mint’s step into business finances was a warning sign for Intuit. To me, this is purely a, “we need to buy them before they hurt us” acquisition. The first warning sign was Intuit going after Mint about their numbers.
Who really thinks Intuit purchased Mint for the monetary potential?
Michael — is there any word about how Mint and Intuit will merge the ops & tech teams? Will Mint continue to run as its own little island without much interference from Intuit; e.g. has Intuit made any statements regarding how the two companies will merge?
-Jeff
It’s really good for Mint, but as a user I am concerned.
For now, I’ll continue to use it, but I’ve opened up an account at Yodlee, and if I don’t like the way things are going at mint, I’ll jump ship.
The interface isn’t as nice, but it does have features Mint is missing – like transfers and manual transactions. Mint seems to do better with displaying investments, though.
Good point for all the people that are concerned. There are plenty of competitors in this space: us (Thrive), MoneyStrands, Wesabe, Yodlee’s MoneyCenter. People continue to have a choice.
David is right and all other above, at an user and competition perspective it is not great. Period.
Intuit with its Quicken Online product for consumers is a direct competitor to Mint, and put in a Shareholder/Stakeholder perspective it will be inevitable to merge the two products. For employees of both companies will this news mean that some jobs _will_ be made redundant.
Sorry at @apatzer, @jeffclavier, @joshk, @billgurley, et al. who were involved in this exit. But wouldn’t have been an IPO in 2-3 years been better or just not to sell to a direct competitor? This is like any tech/tech product company selling to Yahoo/MSFT/Google/IBM/Cisco/Oracle/SAP&Co. Its seems sometimes so OK but its the easiest option sometimes too. And they just have the big pockets right?
I would love to see more VCs and entrepreneurs & communities to build and grow and nurture more. That is what we need for the future. Because that is most important for the future what we need right now.
Because the fast buck and quick exit is/was the culture that brought us into this business culture … now I am drifting off the initial theme …
It is said that you should never be afraid of making a profit. It might not have been a maximized exit, but it was definitely an exit to be proud of.
One in the hand…
But that assumes that the only point of business is profit. I’m not saying that I believe this is bad for users, but if it is, doesn’t that count for anything?