A lot of people at Adobe weren’t all that happy when YouTube was acquired by Google for $1.65 billion in 2006. After all, YouTube was just a pretty front end to the core Flash web video technology created by Adobe. YouTube got rich. Adobe got peanuts.
Mint, which sold to Intuit earlier this week for $170 million, is Yodlee’s YouTube. That’s because, like YouTube, the core technology behind Mint wasn’t developed in house. It was licensed from Yodlee, who got paid very little for what they provided.
Yodlee, which has raised at least $116 million over its 10-year lifespan (a lot of that was written off in a recapitalization), is the leading provider to account aggregation for banks. If you log into your bank’s website and they offer you the ability to aggregate accounts from other banks and financial institutions, it’s likely Yodlee is powering it.
Very early in Mint’s life they signed a sweet deal with Yodlee to provide all that back end technology. Mint focused on the front end user experience, and did a great job with marketing. People who have knowledge of the deal say total payments from Mint to Yodlee over the last couple of years are around $2 million/year. So Yodlee made $4ish million off of Mint.
And Yodlee never thought to ask for equity in Mint in the early days of the company, so they didn’t make anything from the acquisition.
To make things worse, Mint gave a “substantial” amount of Series A stock to Hite Capital in exchange for the Mint.com domain name. That stock was worth a “couple of million dollars,” says one source, after the acquisition.
The final insult: Yodlee won’t even be able to collect those small fees any longer from Mint. Intuit has it’s own back-end account aggregation service that it will use instead of Yodlee.
To be fair to Yodlee, the situation isn’t quite identical to Adobe/YouTube. The specifications, called OFX, for transferring account information between financial institutions was created in the 1990’s and any company is free to build on them. There are a few competitors to Yodlee, but for the most part they dominate the market.
But what Yodlee didn’t forsee is that sometimes having an enterprise approach isn’t the best. Mint focused on design and user experience and sold for $170 million two years after launching. Yodlee, after a ten-year fight and more $116 million or more in venture capital, is still looking for an exit.
And don’t just call this luck. Mint founder Aaron Patzer has nerves of steel and knows how to leverage risk. The rumor is he turned down an offer from Intuit earlier this year for $130 million. I’m not sure many entrepreneurs would have been able to do that. But the bet paid off, and he and his investors made another $40 million.
Same thing goes for XBMC and Boxee
Really? The Mint app is more than “design and user experience” – they baked in value-add features. It does more than just institutional connectivity.
Enterprise software licensing is the raw materials in the application manufacturing process. Its a totally different business model. Less payout, for less risk.
Mint : Yodlee ::
Microsoft Word : “The Lost Symbol”
China : Ipod
Wordpress : TechCrunch
power company : Google
Matt, “design and user experience” encompasses identifying key features that will help users accomplish their goals, and designing how they will behave and be presented. Good design is more than icing on the cake– it’s core to the process for any successful product.
Well, that, and being real smart. With nerves of steel …
You obviously misread my post, I was saying that mint deserves the deal. Enterprise software, however, doesn’t deserve anything more than what thru get in licensing fees… That’s what they’re in the nix for
Reading this story reminds me of this for some reason:
http://www.thec...l-pictures.html
the internet as a whole can be classified as one big sloppy user interface.
@MyLocator. You mean the Web. Teh Internet is one big collection of caches.
This story says: Web technology values > Internet technology values.
your frecken funny
The Same thing happened with Boxee which is just a fork of XBMC
XBMC is an open source project based on MythTV and was not backed by large amounts of VC, so your analogy falls apart.
XBMC has nothing to do with MythTV.
Not to nit, but the analogy stands fine. The point is that a bunch of people worked on the original platform and are now probably more than a bit sad that someone else is gaining the benefit.
That said, I imagine that many (if not most) of the MythTV and XBMC contributors did it because they wanted to solve an interesting problem and are super excited that it has evolved into Boxee.
I have to disagree. $ changes everything and the MythTV community was not motivated by $, so there was no anticipation of any pay out other than the satisfaction provided by the software alone.
Anyway, one could argue TiVO was a larger beneficiary of the MythTV project than Boxee at this point.
interesting stuff.
how much did that mint domain appreciate over its life span?
the power of appreciation is underestimated.
i don’t think the analogy is correct because mint.com is worth 170 mil, boxee is worth some valuation that maybe worth as much as yodlee in the end. As far as I’m concerned as long as Boxee is not manf the hardware, they will never be mainstream, and not be worth 170 mil
That is called business and there is nothing called fairness in this sector.
tough for adobe. what are they expecting? they made a product that people are able to use how they like, and it’s only a testament to how good it is when people are able to make billions from its technology. adobe isn’t owed anything, it would be like winning races in a ford and the car company asking for a kickback because you used their product to become successful.
Hmm, why complain about that. If you think life isn’t fair you can’t stop complaining and moaning. What about a 80 mil euro (!) exit with a facebook ripoff? Come on…
been using yodlee for a while for UK accounts – not bad – needs some serious UI polish but the core functionality works. They REALLY should have taken equity but probably lacked the management skill to explore this option.
A lot of people use Internet Explorer to search using Google. … Oh and speaking of Microsoft – who wrote the first MS DOS? All computer businesses are standing on other peoples shoulders in order to rise as high as they can. Just wait and you’ll see how we will make a multi-billion dollar business based around TechCrunch
!
Lesson learned: Capturing the value is as essential as creating it.
couldn’t agree more
well said
Don’t talk like that. It’ll blow Arrington’s mind.
That can be said of any mashup services that leverage of free or cheap cloud services ( eg Youtube video, Amazon’s infrastructre, Google Map ) and get acquired by other companies for millions.
can’t seem to post comments on the post about banning music…
Nerves of steel…
How about holding out and owning Intuit rather than being its bitch.
Tough titty said the cat to the kitty…
If you sold Techcrunch, I doubt you would be worried about Wordpress getting their slice?
Tough on Yodlee, but it’s all of their own making.
i couldn’t agree with you more.
so the moral of the story is you need to be closer to the end user. underlying technology not as much value as the relationship with customer. not a real shocker there.
Good. Mint’s largest weakness is its data provider. The vast majority of issues in its support forums are connectivity issues. Quicken may be crap software but at least they can reliably sync data with multiple banks. Stick Mint’s UI on top of Quicken’s data provider and you may really have something.
You’re right in that account connectivity is generally the biggest support topic. But, you’re wrong to think it will be better on Intuit’s. Intuit’s is much worse (in my personal experience of using both, and being in the industry), and the support forums will light up even more if/when they switch. Picking Yodlee was instrumental in their success.
While it is great to compare Mint/Yodlee to the YouTube situation, Yodlee is hardly an injured party in this situation. If the facts in the story are correct (and I have no reason to doubt that they are), a license fee of two million dollars per year for the first two years in the life of a start-up is significant. I suspect the Yodlee folks were laughing all the way to the bank for the past two years.
And now that Mint has made a mint capitalizing on a different experience using the Yodlee engine, it’s a cautionary tale for Yodlee to never take your eye off the ball when it comes to partnership development.
Good news is Yodlee would still get that $2million/year for as long as Intuit continues licensing their technology for use within the product. Not a bad deal to me.
Where did you get the info?
Wrong.
Intuit uses QFX, which is a proprietary variant of OFX. OFX was standardized from the formats of Microsoft and Intuit.
Yodlee will not be continuing to get its licensing fees as a result of this deal.
That depends on the original licensing agreement.
QFX is a trivial extension of OFX, which itself is just an XML specification. Writing a library to parse OFX or QFX data is easy. The hard part is to get to the data through the user authentication layer on the 5000+ financial institution websites out there. This usually involves a lot of screen scraping and a sizable amount of human intervention (usually outsourced to India) when a site changes its layout and the scraping scripts break.
“Adobe and YouTube” is an irrelevant example.
If you want a real example to what happened here, you will have to travel back in time to the day Microsoft licensed DOS to IBM and made millions from OS they didn’t write (They bought it for less than 75K a few days after they signed the deal with IBM). Cheers!
Interesting, but what this post doesn’t state is how much Yodlee is making from its enterprise play in general.
Perhaps they are quite happy making what they make, which could be significant if they are as dominant as you suggest and made 2 million a year from Mint alone per year.
My point is that an exit the size of Mint’s may not be worth Yodlee’s while and a much larger exit might not be feasible for them. Still, I’m sure a slice of the Mint pie wouldn’t have gone down too badly.
Speaking from personal experience, Yodlee is the best aggregation offering on the market, but that doesn’t mean it’s good, reliable, or scalable in anyway.
But if Intuit thinks that they’ll switch Mint to utilize THEIR aggregation backend, I’m going to go ahead and stop using Mint now. Talk about nightmare.
The key point over whether Yodlee assured itself fair compensation for its services is that “Intuit has it’s own back-end account aggregation service that it will use instead of Yodlee.”
Presumably Mint and Intuit have performed technological due diligence on this switcheroo and believe its risks are manageable and the quality of service will not suffer. Regardless of the depth of their diligence, there’s risk from unexpected integration issues and broader cultural impediments.
But if the backends can be switched in reasonable fashion, then Yodlee’s services ultimately weren’t so unique and it implies that they received fair compensation for their two years of services. If the integration proves difficult and/or Mint’s quality suffers, then Yodlee’s value will be proven higher than the $4mm it received.
Mike:
Was the Yodlee royalties based on traffic/users then?
It seems that for Mint the economics of a $2M fixed cost would be high for a start-up financial that early on was not generating revenue.
Can’t speak about Mint’s arrangement, but Yodlee likes to do a $XXX for up to YYYY user accounts, then $X per each account thereafter.
I used Yodlee back in the 90’s when they originally started as an account aggregator for not just financial information but news, mail, etc. – like Pageflakes.
They blew through a lot of money.
OMG,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,seeing Beavis and Butthead made my day,,,,can you throw them in more often Michael?
Nice Article and nice thoughts! I have actually never thought about that before.
Yoodle provides service not only to mint but to other players who want to use its service. $2M per year times 100 clients, that’s $200M/yr.
Yoodle does not deal with Mint exclusively as a financial information aggregator’s broker.
Yoodle probably has a better future than Mint’s interface-only. Yoodle can continue to license its technology to other “Mint” upcoming to challenge Intuit.
Intuit is best off to buy Yoodle and take out any serious startup challengers.
Collect financial data costs a lot … once you have them, the cost for barrier to entry is so enormous that only the big dollars can enter the market.
Now that would be evil, but genius.
Mike
that was one of the best post from you. Nowhere would have given that kind of details about Mint.
Great stuff!!
Its like vegetable vendor or farmer saying 5-Star chef is making money by using his fruits and vegitables. Man its the creativity.
Why is it so obvious Yodlee is the loser here? The mint acqusition is tiny, and whatever Yodlee could have received would be a small share and quite diluted after Mint’s 3+ rounds of funding.
Besides, if Yodlee is the market leader as a B2B in a financial services subsector, then they could easily have cash flow that would eclipse whatever they could get from Mint.
…not to mention Yodlee would need a 1B exit at this point.
“A lot of people at Adobe weren’t all that happy ” that’s like a typewriter manufacturer feeling bad because they did not get a cut of an author’s book profits.
Interesting piece, but somewhat a ridiculous exercise in hindsight. Last that I checked Yodlee wasn’t in the business of investment banking. The real question is what did $2M per year represent when compared to Mint’s revenues? And do you think that they would have received $2M per year if they had an equity stake — even if they were able to sell this to Mint? Furthermore, if someone else had bought Mint, they might not have had a consolidation back end and it would have opened a window to increase the size of the deal through assigment.
As an OEM sales guy, I don’t think I would make my numbers by going after equity stakes in start-ups…
Back in ‘06 I worked for a company that was looking at doing online video advertising. We had to choose between using Quicktime, Windows Media and Flash. Not all users had all formats enabled on their browser. Which format to standardize on? Then along came YouTube and everyone on the planet had Flash installed. Flash became the Web standard for online video. I think Adobe has made plenty in licensing fees from everyone else thanks to YouTube.
I think this is a good deal, I as a Canadian should be able to benefit from mint’s services now as Yodlee had no support for Canadian institutions (and didn’t seem to plan for it) Whereas intuit has amazing support for Canadian institutions (and I have been using the under featured Quicken online as a result)
hmmm that didn’t sound as douchy in my head
Hi, Yodlee has pretty much full coverage of all banks, cards and investment sites in Canada… so I’m confused by your statement that Yodlee doesn’t support it.
I think what you are saying is that Mint’s service/implementation of Yodlee isn’t multi-currency or multi-country at this time. If you want to try it out, please go to https://moneycenter.yodlee.com.
Mint could enable Canadian sites (powered by Yodlee) whenever they implement the functionality in their applications.
For example, we have clients in Australia (ANZ), UK (Covestor), and Canada, and they need data from Canadian sites.
HTH
Peter Hazlehurst
SVP Products
Yodlee
Perhaps Mr. Arrington should reveal his stock interest in Mint?
nothing. of course.
i am scratching my head. so intuit bought a FEATURE for $170M?? astounding. not sure whether to commend aaron patzer for winning the TC50 with a design product, or may be using the TC50 publicity to generate that type of valuation. Intuit just bought stuff of no value., and a few MBAs got nice stuff on their resumes.
i was a user of mint. apart from beautiful design it didn’t offer anything to me beyond what an account aggregation in my online banking app did. after some time, it started to get annoying.
..or perhaps be TC and Intuit just got taken in! now i am dreading mr.patzer prancing around silicon valley with money in his pocket posing as a technology visionary.
great post, mike, by the way.
Totally disagree. The reason Mint is a huge success is because it has the best UI of any site on the web. The fact that it relates to finance is ancillary.
You take that same awesome knack for intuitive yet very complex design and apply it to other fields and you will always get a successful site. Giving credit to Yodlee for Mint is like giving Apple’s Asian suppliers credit for the iPod – you’re totally ignoring the real differentiation factor. Mint (and Apple) are triumphs of design and engineering, pure and simple.
Is anyone else nervous about this ownership change and it’s implications on the security of your personal banking information?
I’m not even talking about the possibility that this transition might increase the risk of someone stealing your bank account information (which is also offputting), but what if changes to the Privacy Policy all of a sudden mean that information, such as your income are now made available to third-party interests?
Personally, I was very hesitant to even create an account with Mint to begin with. But, I kept hearing good things so I tried it. Once I received the notification email from them a few days ago, referencing this ownership change, I immediately deleted my accounts and cancelled my registration. Upon deleting my accounts, I was presented with a “your information will be deleted from our system in @48 hours” type message but…I still felt my a$$hole pucker a little thinking about the possibilities.
I suspect that this will cause Yodlee to focus more on UI improvement. Personally, I’ve switched to Yodlee because their site has a lot more functionality than Mint’s in terms of actual financial processing. I can pay my bills through Yodlee, and get information I can’t get Mint like insurance policies. While I applaud Mint for finding an awesome exit strategy, I don’t think I’ll be using them anymore because of the Intuit acquisition.
Oh yeah, and Yodlee supports manual transactions.
What about skype who transported calls through level3 and global crossing?
App layer is where the value is today
The more I see from to-be-ex-Mint users more it is evident that Intuit will deeply regret its Mint acquisition.
Intuit should reconsider the acquisition and should pay some penalty to get out of it,if possible.
“A lot of people at Adobe weren’t all that happy when YouTube was acquired by Google for $1.65 billion in 2006.”
For what it’s worth, inside Adobe I did not see anything to substantiate this assertion.
It’s true that Adobe’s customers do get wealthy from the investment in developing the Flash Platform (which ironically deflates the “Adobe lock-in” debating point). But the success of the YouTube effort helps confirm the new opportunities available to everyone. Google’s vote-of-confidence was good news.
jd/adobe
Revisiting these kinds of conversations are rather invalid.
If Yodlee had received a significant level of equity in Mint back when they cut their operational deal, who’s to say Intuit would still have been interested in an acquisition?
Lots of stars have to be aligned for an exit. Some explicit and some implicit.
I definitely appreciate the coverage of this as I’ve been using Yodlee for about 8 years and Mint for only about 2 (and have since moved to PageOnce). The analogy that this is like Adobe and Youtube though is fallacious. Youtube doesn’t leverage the Flash video player…but that’s a very very small part of the core engineering that Youtube has done. Transcoding, hosting, delivery…that’s all stuff that’s a lot of work and Youtube did most of it in house (yes they use FFMPEG, but believe me…that still takes a lot of time configure, find all the codecs for, etc.).
Mint is much more comprised of Yodlee’s tech than Youtube is comprised of Adobe’s tech.
The insinuation that Yodlee should have asked for equity in one of its clients is absurd. I don’t think many technology platforms have had any luck with licensing their tech in exchange for equity. It’s risky and the client is unlikely to give any equity up (nor would its investors allow it to).
While Yodlee does provide a frontend for consumers (a little novel for a platform provider since they become “competition” for their clients) they definitely have their model based on a platform. Rather than trying to win the consumer game, they’ve chosen a B2B play and I think that’s smart…it’s safer and scales better. Being the middleman is always a winning proposition if you can work behind the scenes and focus on the technology. Sure it’s not as sexy, but it actually makes money; it’s stable and is a lot less susceptible to the fickle nature of consumers and the ad market.
Not everything in the world is about finding an exit. Get rich quick? I’d rather build a strong stable company that provides jobs for the long term and needed technology for the marketplace, have solid relationships with my clients and do “good work.” Quick acquisitions can be exciting and fun, but also add a lot of volatility to the companies merging and can even be very detrimental to the company being acquired (product diluted, clients ignored for the larger companies’ interests, product killed off). Just look at any of the companies that Yahoo! has had to dispose of. Great products that had bright futures that now no longer exist (I miss JumpCut, personally).
To assume that Yodlee has the taste of sour grapes in its mouth is a bit presumptuous.
SAP is nothing but a GUI on Oracle
Good one there. Over simplification is always welcome in for tech bloggers.
“the core technology behind Mint wasn’t developed in house”
Seriously, it’s a real stretch to call Yodlee the core technology behind Mint. I’ve “used” Yodlee’s technology on a number of other financial services sites, and the account aggregation services provided by those sites aren’t even in the same ballpark with Mint. Mint solves some major problems with personal financial management that have never been solved before. Mint was immediately useful to me — unlike those other services which used Yodlee technology — and I continue to use the service almost every day.
It is Yodlee’s fault that they ended up as an unknown, low-value white label provider of these services. It was their choice; remember that they started out as a destination site themselves. They easily could have been Mint if they’d innovated more on the user experience.
Funny article. As the product manager responsible for the Yodlee platform at the time Mint got started, I can tell you it’s far from a slam dunk to replace Yodlee. It’s extremely naive to imply that OFX is a substitute for Yodlee’s back-end. I’m several years removed from this now (and have zero current interest in the company), but I suspect OFX accounts for less than 10% of the data currently aggregated. Reliable financial data aggregation at Yodlee breadth and depth is a royal PITA and it’s not cheap to maintain, much less build. Replicating the same quality for $2M/year isn’t going to happen even if it’s already built. Yodlee can offer it at this rate because they’re a platform that amortizes their ops cost (many times $2m/year, trust me) across dozens of customers. Much of this cost of fixed, not variable. Intuit would be smart to continue to pay Yodlee the $2M/year (or 3x this) vs. trying to maintain the same quality of service themselves. I can pretty much guarantee the quality of Mint will decline and the migration will be very painful for users if they actually try to switch. Intuit should continue to focus on what made Mint work – great UED! That’s a tough enough challenge.
Something also overlooked is that Yodlee provides more than just data. The transaction categorization is a value-added service Yodlee puts on top of the data it collects. It’s based on a learning engine that has many years of ‘knowledge’ across hundreds of millions of transaction records. All user re-categorizations across all Yodlee customers ‘teach’ the engine to get better. Good luck replicating that for $2M.
…and don’t forget the Yodlee patents, which have been successfully defended in the past, BTW.
On the missed investment opportunity, Mint was just another scrubby startup in the beginning. There were dozens of them at the time using Yodlee API’s. If Yodlee took equity in all of them instead of taking the cash they would have been crazy. Most of those guys don’t exist anymore. There were probably 3 or 4 other companies with essentially the same business plan as Mint. Yodlee is a business, not a VC. Mint surprised everybody with their execution and focus. They should be applauded. It was not at all obvious in the beginning that they’d be able to create as much value as Intuit believes they have.
There is no doubt that Yodlee has spent a lot of VC money and missed many opportunities, but it’s a bit unfair to point to Mint as an example of this after the fact. 10+ years in without a clear exit path raises valid questions, however
“Yodlee, after a ten-year fight and more $116 million or more in venture capital, is still looking for an exit.”
How do you know this?
Great piece, Mike.
Having worked with Yodlee as a strategic partner in a previous company, it always struck me that they were not leveraging their competitive advantages to the fullest.
Their focus has been on B2B all along and while the merits of that strategy from a profitability perspective can be debated, they have focused at least a portion of their resources on their own consumer-facing service since at least 2005/2006. Unfortunately, their UI has always been clunky, even after a recent refresh that was pushed in the last week. The UIs of the co-branded service they provide through financial institutions are even worse; banks are not known for their UX savvy.
Poor UI has been a pain-point for financial services customers for a while. Yodlee couldn’t capitalize on the opportunity, while Aaron clearly recognized it and seized upon it with Mint – a fact that was instantly obvious when the service launched.
To say that Mint is nothing more than a nice UI wrapped around Yodlee’s service is to overlook the lead-gen opportunities it incorporates, to the added value of the enterprise and consumers.
+1 to pj for his comment about capturing and creating value.
You must not have been a very strategic partner.
They tried to do the public thing that Mint plus additional personal data like your Air Miles, email, and cell phone billing/statement.
Here is there website from early 2000.
http://web.arch...p://yodlee.com/
I signed up years ago (1999 to be exact) when Yodlee first app was for the palm pilot.
Their web interface for the time was good.
Yodlee went a different path for some other reason, but they did the Mint thing before Mint and paid the price.
The business world is littered with companies that tried to be first and never made to a significant exit.
ok
Mike – outstanding post. While many posts on TC could arguably be described as having a biz dev angle (funding, M&A), this is first post I can recall in which you clearly describe a classic biz dev deal structure case that also highlights the importance of the build/buy/partner decision for a start-up.
My take on this deal (w/limited facts, lots of assumptions):
A $2mm annual license wouldn’t sound like a sweet deal at a start-up that doesn’t know the Intuit gravy train is coming. That’s a lot of dough for a startup to pay for a software license, and it could be a make or break decision, especially if Yodlee’s software turned out to be really buggy. Granted, if Yodlee is substantially all of the guts behind Mint (which you suggest), then $2 mm is likely worth the money and the partner decision is much more appealing than the build (w/inherent uncertainty about timing, dev hiring, ultimate product quality.) It would be interesting to know more facts about the deal:
* What was Mint’s BATNA when they went to Yodlee to negotiate a license? Any other similar providers to counter terms against?
* Did Mint ask for perpetual one-time payment instead of annual licensing?
* What is M&S fee for Yodlee’s software (~ 15 -18%), or did Mint negotiate a fixed annual fee?
* Is Mint paying Yodlee for professional services on top of M&S?
* Is Mint “Powered by Yodlee”?
* Do Mint and Yodlee have any common investors, board members, or advisors?
* Any conditions subsequent in license that would trigger payments or other activities (e.g. in event of IPO, sale of substantially all assets?)
* Was this a non-standard deal to Yodlee that was highly negotiated, or did Yodlee biz dev just start negotiation from a standard template and pricing? If Yodlee has 100 of these deals, as another poster asks, then that is a compelling business model regardless of Mint’s exit.
It doesn’t seem as common as it used to be for a licensor in such a situation to ask for equity, warrants, or even a no-shop/rofr clause. (Not that wrt/no-shop, Yodlee even has the balance sheet to compete w/acquirors like Intuit.) My guess is that if there had been an opportunity for Yodlee to get equity, Mint probably told them to get in line with the syndicate and invest cash in a round. Yodlee’s board (investors) would probably throw up all over the idea of Yodlee, w/ a messy cap table to begin with, taking investor money (assuming Yodlee isn’t FCF+) and putting it into another start-up. So that wouldn’t likely happen. It would be interesting to know if any of Yodlee’s investors became Mint investors – that would be a very good way to set up a more collaborative partnership.
If I were biz dev at Yodlee, I would feel great about this deal. Yodlee biz dev delivered bucks, almost certainly exceeding any internal hurdle rates, and validated software value. The product and design teams at Yodlee – maybe not so much. It sounds like Mint took one step away from Yodlee’s product roadmap and just rocked the execution.
The exit amount of Mint’s deal w/ Intuit shouldn’t concern Yodlee too much. Earn-outs, indemnities, reps… In 2 years, Aaron and team can finally celebrate the resolution of this deal.
Bottom line: on paper looks like a very good deal by Yodlee’s biz dev, but it actually leaves questions about Yodlee’s product capabilities. As for Mint’s biz dev and risk-taking: agreed, extremely well played.