Mint’s sale to Intuit really pissed me off.
Why should I care? Because I think it’s indicative of a VC-induced cancer that’s infecting our industry and killing off the next generation. I don’t know the full backstory, but I’d bet this sale was encouraged by a Mint investor.
Here’s a fresh new company that was gunning for an aging incumbent. And not only gunning, but gaining. They had a great product, great design, and great potential. They were growing rapidly and figured out the revenue game. They were on their way to redefining an industry — one that was left for dead by the current custodians.
They were everything their main competitor, Intuit, was not. While Mint was inventing, Intuit was out of it. People used Quickbooks/Quicken out of habit and legacy. People used Mint because they loved it. Intuit was disgruntled, Mint was disruptive.
But here’s what happened: Intuit, last decade’s leader in personal finance, just became the next decade’s leader in personal finance. Mint had their number, but they sold it for $170 million. A big payday for sure, and if that was their two-year goal then they nailed it, but I can’t believe that was the point behind Mint. It had too much potential.
Mint was a key leader of the next generation of game changers. And now it’s property of Intuit — the poster-child for the last generation. What a loss. Is that the best the next generation can do? Become part of the old generation? How about kicking the shit out of the old guys? What ever happened to that?
As more great new companies are absorbed into big old companies, a whole new generation of change is lost. They can issue press releases saying how excited they are to be able to bring their product to a whole new world of customers, and how their new suitor will bring enormous resources to bear, but we know that’s usually not really what happens. Development slows, products stall, the staff that built the great stuff leaves, and mediocrity creeps in. Not always, but usually.
Thomas Jefferson said “Periodic revolution, ‘at least once every 20 years,’ was ‘a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.’” That may be even truer for business. We need new blood, new companies, new methods, new ideas, new applications, and new leaders to regenerate stale industries. The old must be plowed under by the new.
But today it seems like the old is doing the plowing. Let’s stop that. Let’s build great companies that are here to fight, here to win, and here to stay until the next generation after us comes along and kicks all our asses. And again and again and again. That’s how better happens.
Jay Owen
on 18 Sep 09Ditto. I almost could not believe the story. Intuit and Mint could not be any more different than they are.
Colin Mathews
on 18 Sep 09Especially if they were profitable, or close to it, it’s hard to imagine why they’d bail out now.
Jane Quigley
on 18 Sep 09Unfortunately – most companies have no interest in “Better”. Or kicking ass. Since Web 1.0, the lure of easy money and big paydays are what drive founders more than big ideas and customer service. And there’s a complete sense of entitlement to both.
What’s disappointing most about this is the personal investment many people made in using Mint. Time and Trust. Making a choice about NOT using the old guard, and then picking Mint over Wesabe and other choices.
jonathan
on 18 Sep 09Every company, including Intuit, should have the opportunity to reinvent itself (if, in fact, this is part of what they’re hoping to do). In fact, a sign of a great company is one that can change. I don’t mind giving Intuit the chance to do that, regardless that they were “last decade’s leader”.
As a MINT user, the only real question I had was whether I trust my data in the hands of Intuit. I have decided to take that chance until I learn something differently.
I do hope that MINT can keep on blazing new trails.
Mike Roberto
on 18 Sep 09100% Completely agree and a great Jefferson quote to top it off.
Conrad
on 18 Sep 09On. The. Money.
When I read about the acquisition it almost ruined my morning, as a Mint user I couldn’t be more unhappy. Now that Intuit is just basically going to turn it into quickbooks.com hopefully someone else will come along and pick up where Mint soldout… I mean left off.
If Freshbooks gets bought by ADP or Paychex I’m going to strangle someone.
--Josh
on 18 Sep 09A few years back Intuit bought the online bill payment service that I use (PayTrust.com). Initially I was worried that they’d screw it up, but quite the opposite – they don’t appear to have done a thing with it. It just works, and it just works the same way it always has. Maybe Mint users will have a similar experience.
Alex iskold
on 18 Sep 09theoretically you are right, but you are being too harsh. life is not just that binary, and there are some real benefits to this acquisition.
personal story: IBM bought my first start up. not big $$, we thought, we gonna change software development.
1.5 years later my vision broken into pieces ended up in a whole bunch of products. I was upset, that nothing was as i saw it. i left, thinking i was misunderstood.
today, the bits that i thought of are in all major tools for developers that IBM delivers. totally distorted, but there.
Mint is a different story, but my point is, not all shifts are phase transitions, some are graduate.
Certainly, personal finance is a candidate for gradual transition.
Anonymous Coward
on 18 Sep 09You may not realize how fragile Mint was. All the hard part was being done by Yodlee.com; Mint simply built a thin layer over Yodlee, and collected affiliate fees. Mint was not built for the long haul, it was built to flip. (Check out the free yodlee.com to see that this is true.) Mint’s users certainly did get kicked to the curb, but it was obvious from the beginning that this would happen.
Mike
on 18 Sep 09I disagree. You are right, Mint changed the game, but Intuit has every right to leverage that to rebuild itself into a better, more user friendly company. They saw the benefits first hand of what would happen if they did some of the exact opposite they were known for.
Furthermore, how do you the founders didn’t want to exit because they had plans for other great companies they wanted to start? Perhaps now they don’t have to sit through the bull shit vc meetings b/c they have some serious cash to bootstrap something even more amazing.
I think it’s unfair to judge either company at this point – especially pointing the sell-out finger. That’s too easy.
J
on 18 Sep 09Yes Mint was based on Yodlee.com, but that doesn’t matter. Plenty of other services are also based on Yodlee.com. Mint brought something different than the others. If it was as easy as hooking Yodlee.com up to the back end, Mint would have many peers. But they really stood alone. The had users! They had community! They had loyalty! They had design! They had product vision! This stuff is worth so much more than the tech back end.
JF
on 18 Sep 09but Intuit has every right to leverage that to rebuild itself into a better, more user friendly company.
Of course they do. I think it was a great pickup for Intuit. That wasn’t what the post was about.
The post was about taking out the incumbent instead of giving in to the incumbent.
Wilson Miner
on 18 Sep 09I don’t understand the automatic cynicism around things like this. For any bad decisions in the past, Intuit just made what by appearances is a good-faith effort to put their money and focus behind a product you like. They’re basically saying “We recognize that what Mint is doing is working and what we were trying to do isn’t. Instead of ignoring them or continuing to try to catch up, we’re going to put our money behind them so they can keep doing what works, and we can shift and learn.” How many companies make that kind of decision? Why should a decision like that on the part of an established company be met with scorn and cynicism just because they were successful in the “last generation?”
JF
on 18 Sep 09Wilson: I don’t have any problem with what Intuit did. It was a great move by Intuit – they took out a younger competitor who had the mojo. Intuit did what any smart incumbent who’s too old/big to move did: They bought youth.
I’d just like to see our generation stick it out and be the next generation. Instead we’re losing our own generation to the current generation.
Anson MacKeracher
on 18 Sep 09Well my biggest gripe with Mint was that it wasn’t offered in Canada – Quicken Online is.
Josh Williams
on 18 Sep 09After reading Jason’s post and Wilson’s latest comment, I could hear Topol from Fiddler on the Roof in my ear…
“He’s right and he’s right? They can’t both be right.”
Jack Chou
on 18 Sep 09“They were growing rapidly and figured out the revenue game.”
Do you actually know if that’s true or not? Maybe I missed it, but do we know that they were nailing the “revenue game”? I admit that I’m not a close Mint.com follower, but I don’t recall them announcing that they were absurdly profitable. Or that their users were tremendously engaged – I know a lot of people who tried Mint (and would count as users), but never went back.
Another way to look at it is that if your chosen business model is not making you massive money and/or your asset is not massively defensible, wouldn’t taking the big check be a good idea?
Once again, I don’t know the details (and probably neither do you?), but this scenario seems just as likely as the one you paint where they were nailing it and decided to sell out.
Wil
on 18 Sep 09Thank your congresscritters for Sarbanes-Oxley.
In the old days, investors in a company could get their money out via an IPO once the business became sustainable. Unfortunately, the IPO market is basically closed these days, meaning exits usually consist of selling to someone with the capital to buy – namely the larger, older competitors.
Intuit is Crap
on 18 Sep 09Intuit is a horrible company. They aren’t even a technology company, they are a marketing company. They put their terrible software in pretty boxes with screen shots and put it on book store shelves and at Fry’s and small business people buy it because they don’t know any better.
Quickbooks is total garbage. It’s horrible software. If you’ve ever used it and you know anything about software then you know how horrible it is.
I don’t know if Mint was horrible or not. It seemed to me like a very thin product that no one would ever pay for and I think the Mint guys bailed as fast as they could. I know everyone is smitten with Patzer, but I was never impressed with the man. He seemed very transparent and even shallow to some degree.
I know that sounds horrible to say, but that was my impression. I never had faith in their product or their company. When the founder talks like that, people love to jump on board and sure, look at the success, but really, it’s a disappointment for everyone involved.
The early team probably got screwed through many rounds of dilution. The investors wanted to get out while they could. Patzer was never really serious about wanting something to help him manage his finances. I’ve looked in that man’s eyes and I didn’t see honesty. I saw someone creating a lot of hype around a product that he knew had no real future.
But I could be wrong.
Robert Dempsey
on 18 Sep 09I agree with the main premise of Jason’s post – that the new needs to stay with the new, and replace that which has come before. This is the natural order of things: replacement.
Combine this post with a recent one from TechCrunch about the start-ups that showed at TechCrunch50 and I gotta wonder where the massive change is going to come from?
From what I’ve read (and discussed in a recent post of mine) is that technologies that require massive paradigm shifts aren’t adopted nearly as fast as those that tend to leapfrog their predecessors. I think the reasons for this are obvious. However, that should not hold any of us back from creating what we feel could be truly useful and a new way of doing things. Get out there, create something that is going to change the world, and by god stick to it until the people get it.
It took me a while to understand why 37signals wanted to stay a small company and not take money to grow even bigger. I now understand why.
Dan Grossman
on 18 Sep 09Make sure you read “J”’s post, as it is spot on.
Mint.com was nothing but a thin UI over Yodlee. Yodlee handled all the work.
Yodlee handles storing bank account credentials. Yodlee handles keeping track of the login wizards and security questions and lockout processes in order to log in to thousands of different bank websites. Yodlee handles downloading the transactions from the hundreds of different banks in their dozens and dozens of formats.
Mint just added affiliate offers and a whopping three different graphs of your spending.
EH
on 18 Sep 09Acquisitions are only beneficial to the investors. They are never good for the employees nor the end users. This has been proven time and time again, regardless of the existence of any tiny minority of exceptions.
In fact, a sign of a great company is one that can change. I don’t mind giving Intuit the chance to do that, regardless that they were “last decade’s leader”.
You can’t buy change.
Daniel Fischer
on 18 Sep 09A lot of you are talking about Mint.com in the past-tense. “Mint.com was
I don’t agree with the acquisition but it’s still the best product out there right now and it’d really suck to loose all the data that I’ve been accumulating for two years in the Mint database.
Let’s hope it stays true and continues to improve. If anything this may lead to amazing integration with other products offered by Intuit which are still partially required for taxes.
ginsu
on 18 Sep 09Gee, I think you’re being a little harsh on the Mint team – it’s not an easy thing to turn down almost a couple of hundred million dollars. On the other hand, it is quite easy to call someone a sellout if you’ve never looked your colleagues in the eyes and told them that you’re turning down an offer that would have made each of them rich beyond their dreams. Not a lot of people have done that without regretting it for the rest of their lives.
Sure, it’s easy to cite examples of revolutionaries that never sold out, and as a result went on to dominate. But many of these tried to sell out and found no buyers – Google is a famous example of this, at one time they would have sold to anyone for a billion, but everyone thought they were crazy.
Maybe by definition a company is not revolutionary unless no one will buy them: If the acquisition clearly makes financial sense for the buyer, that means that the seller has a neat incremental fit into an existing portfolio, rather than a disruptive leap forward. So anyone who sells probably never had a real shot to lead a disruptive revolution anyway.
Jimi
on 18 Sep 09I have no idea how close TaxAct Online was with the Mint.com integration, but if they were…? Something tells me Intuit saw TurboTax getting hammered by TaxAct Online this spring. I hate that it’s not going to happen now.
Just more evidence for “if you can’t beat ‘em, buy ‘em.” Lame.
Chuck Reynolds
on 18 Sep 09WELL SAID SIR
So proud of you for posting this and it’s dead on. We all are thinking that Mint will suck in a year or two as soon as we heard that news. I loved Mint, got lots of friends to sign up and use it to better themselves in a way our generation/age could understand.
It’s sad that (basically) all the cool new ideas sell out to the old…
Tyler Hurst
on 18 Sep 09Just like Zappos and Amazon.
New businesses NEED TO BE ABLE TO MAKE MONEY if they want to survive long enough to not NEED to be bought.
sb
on 18 Sep 09Yeah, anyone who’s ever been in a small biz that got stuck in the Intuit upgrade loop can attest to the fact that it’s painful. Painful is an understatement, it’s almost predatory.
Sad to see an innovator get leashed over some cash. I fully understand why & how this happens, but it does blow to see a small dev with a great product get assimilated into a historically lame company.
Will Morris
on 18 Sep 09I wouldn’t begrudge someone selling their company whenever they want to. I can think of better things to do than run a software company for the next 30 years.
allen mezquida
on 18 Sep 09Great sentiment. What happened to the rebel spirit? A great idea will survive. It doesn’t need to be swallowed up by a grey haired LOGO. That is where it will be neutered and die. I wonder if there is any social correlation between this and so many kids moving back in with their parents.
Charles Zhang
on 18 Sep 09Mint had no business model. I think they are lucky to be bought out.
Bradly Feeley
on 18 Sep 09What’s so bad abut people enjoying a big payday? I would love the opportunity to cash out and spend my time with my family and friends rather than chase down “big business” or get wrapped with pride. I would question the people that wouldn’t take 170 mil, not the people that do.
Mike O
on 18 Sep 09People may have used Quickbooks/Quicken out of habbit, but Intuit’s TurboTax.com is actually a pretty well designed and usable way to do your personal taxes. And there’s actually some pretty awesome integration potential with Mint there.
Nik
on 18 Sep 09Jason,
Can 37 Signals build a personal finance application?
I, like you, believe that Intuit will almost certainly slow down and innovate as much as Mint. Whenever I have used Mint, thier design and aesthetics reminded me a lot of 37 Signals.
Why not create your own personal finance tracker or accounting management software?
Oh btw, I think the screenshots you showed the other day is an accounting management software.
Adam Wride
on 18 Sep 09Same with Omniture. They were the big dog, now they are just a division within Adobe. There goes another Provo tech company down the drain (WordPerfect… Novell… now Omniture).
Rohit
on 18 Sep 09Your post reminds me of Joseph Schumpeter’s ‘creative destruction’ theory, wherein the old has to give way to the new. What our age is falling prey to is letting the old survive, thereby killing the prospect of future innovation. You couldn’t be more right, Jason.
Wes
on 18 Sep 09I just wanted to echo this. Look at the huge drop off in IPOs the year after its passage. Many millions in accounting compliance costs is kind of a drag on a lightweight tech startup. Something has to change or the only VC ROI option is to get bought.
Matthew Savage
on 18 Sep 09This is a really really good post – it has the passion that I think a lot of people share, they just don’t make it public…
Unfortunately the sale of Mint to Intuit is preventing the death of convoluted accounting tools like Quicken (I should mention I hate accounting tools that are overcomplicated) – it would have been better for Mint to work on capturing the Quicken audience and helping quicken die while making it easy for their customers to migrate over.
Chris
on 18 Sep 09Nice work.
Zac
on 18 Sep 09I agree. Fully.
Dan Thornton
on 18 Sep 09Is this just an effect of taking investment? Zappos was certainly making enough money, and Mint seemed to be doing pretty well from the outside – but present investors with the chance of a big pot of cash and they’re unlikely to turn it down for the chance to change the world…
Fazal Majid
on 18 Sep 09I have the opposite take. I was not willing to entrust my personal finance data to a small private company. What if it went bust and its assets were bought for a song by the Russian Mafia? Stranger things have happened.
I actually set up a Mint account once Intuit bought them. They may be slow, but they are a public company and can’t pull a fast one. Then I discovered Mint wants me to hand them my online banking credentials (i.e. the password anti-pattern, except those credentials can empty my bank account). Sorry, that’s just not going to happen.
Michael
on 18 Sep 09I hope and are almost sure that 37signals will never be sold to anybody. That’s what I like so much about you and your products, it resembles the new generation.
You never show numbers, especially financial ones. However I think your pretty profitable and that’s what counts. There’s no need to sell.
Mint.com has a great product (that I couldn’t use because of US only) and I’m sure they could have made profit out of it. Apparently not enough one for the investors…
Luis
on 18 Sep 09If you have ever used any Intuit products you understand why this move feels wrong. In particular if you have ever tried to do any type of development or integration work with them.
I don’t know about Intuit as a company and I don’t really care. Their products are terrible. I have used them and don’t want to use them ever again.
Mint is awesome. I don’t know if I’ll cancel my account for this. There’s no better option that I know of and my bank’s site is worse than any Intuit product. I will, however, keep an eye for other sites or banks that offer a better online experience and will not think twice about leaving either for something better.
Mint lost a great deal of trust from my part. At this point I wouldn’t hesitate to move on. Specially if I get any reason to believe Intuit will get their hands on it.
Paul "The Pageman" Pajo
on 18 Sep 09Time for 37Signals to come out with a competitor for Mint/Intuit :)
Anonymous Coward
on 18 Sep 09I generally don’t comment anonymously, but I’ll make an exception on this occasion. I’m the founder of a company, and anything I said here under my own name might be misconstrued by my customers, employees, or investors. So I’m posting anonymously and through a proxy.
I’ll be blunt. I think you have no business attacking the founders of Mint.com (and as they approved the sale, you are indeed attacking them) when by your own admission, you know little about the circumstances surrounding the sale. Although it may be a reasonable conjecture, you don’t know whether the company was highly profitable. You don’t know the terms of the financing that enabled the company to attain its present size. You don’t know to what extent the founders were in agreement regarding the future direction of the company, had it remained independent. Etc. Neither you nor I know enough about the situation to judge it soundly.
Beyond this particular case, you seem to presume that everyone who founds a company is either (1) dedicated to building the business in perpetuity (good) or (2) looking to sell out for as much as possible as soon as possible (bad). I’ve noticed this presumption in several posts here. I have some advice for you, in terms you may find familiar: get real. It’s perfectly possible for a founder to be both genuinely dedicated to building a business for some time and also interested in selling it thereafter, for several reasons. To begin with, as many founders have noted, the nature of the work involved in leading a company changes as the company grows, especially as it grows from a handful to dozens and eventually hundreds of employees. Some founders find these changes congenial; others don’t. I’m aware of your hostility to bureaucracy (indeed, I share it), but even the staunchest resistance to bureaucracy cannot forestall the necessity for a company’s leaders to spend less time doing whatever they did to start the company and more time supervising other people as the company gets bigger. For some founders, there comes a time to go. Moreover, some founders have significant goals for their lives that are difficult or impossible to achieve while running their companies. For example, I’m seriously interested in music. Although I would love to spend much of my time making music, I wouldn’t want to depend on it for my economic survival, which, as many professional musicians will affirm, is apt to be very stressful. Yet making music gives me joy, and I believe my music could give many other people joy too, if I devoted myself to it. Should I postpone this indefinitely, if it becomes possible to sell my company for enough that I would no longer need to work for money? I hope you aren’t so arrogant as to insist that I should. And there are still other reasons why a founder may, in good faith, build a company up and sell it off.
In the better such cases, founders sell to buyers who appreciate what they’re getting and treat it respectfully. Unlike you, I don’t “know that’s usually not really what happens.” Whether usually or not, it certainly does happen, and not so rarely as to be of no account.
I also disagree with your presumption that competition is the root of all progress (“that’s how better happens”). Cooperation has played at least as great a role as conflict in the advancement of civilization, and not merely within-group amity in the service of between-group enmity either. Treating business as if it were a schoolyard game (“kicking the shit out of the old guys”, “here to fight, here to win”, etc.) doesn’t furnish any benefit to society. It’s also awfully cliched.
Miguel Marcos
on 18 Sep 09While acknowledging the reality of Intuit’s poor reputation and lack of innovation, and Mint’s “disruptiveness”, your post makes it sound like you have a crystal ball. You’ve seen the future and called it. Mint being bought Intuit is a de facto mistake.
I would ask that you privately email me and tell me what stocks to buy today so I can become rich in the future.
Robert Gaal
on 18 Sep 09Something occurred to me in the shower today. If everybody thought like 37signals, would Facebook or YouTube ever exist? Maybe they would pick a niche instead of trying to go big, they would focus to early on making money off of their service, and they wouldn’t have been on our radar long enough to write this post about?
Then I turned the shower off, had breakfast, and wrote this comment.
mfukar
on 18 Sep 09Some people are just not interested in starting a revolution. And if their goal is financial security for the future, an acquisition is a damn desirable exit strategy.
“Bending over” could be the result of a multitude of reasons, personal and corporate, none of which you seem to be eager to consider before you turn Mint’s acquisition into a de facto competition between generations (which, in itself, is ridiculous anyway).
Bo Williams
on 18 Sep 09“Mint.com was nothing but a thin UI over Yodlee. “
That’s such bullshit. Mint had a great UI- in fact the UI was its best selling point. It allowed you to intuitively and easily see where your money was going, a trick Quicken hasn’t pulled off in years of development.* You could replace Yodlee with something else and most Mint users would never notice. Try replacing the Mint UI and see what happens.
Let me guess- I bet you also think that someone could throw together a Mint replacement, using Yodlee as the backend, in a weekend. Uh huh. Good luck with that.
I’ve been a happy Quicken user, until I switched to Mint, but “intuitive” is the last word I ever would have used to describe it.Paul M.
on 18 Sep 09@EH: your comment was great, I would say it is a candidate for a famous quote:
“Acquisitions are only beneficial to the investors. They are never good for the employees nor the end users. This has been proven time and time again, regardless of the existence of any tiny minority of exceptions.
(...)
You can’t buy change.”
fred wilson
on 18 Sep 09Jason
i agree with you that the objective should be to build a great independent company
i said so much in “number 2” in my 10 characteristics post
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/09/ten-characteristics-of-great-companies.html
but i would bet the VCs did not push this. i am a VC and i’ve been one for 26 years now. i have never forced an entrepreneur to sell their company if it was succeeding, and clearly Mint was.
this smells to me of a young founder facing the prospect of making enough money at an early age that their life will be changed forever and not being able to resist it.
that’s why Joshua Schachter sold delicious (bad move) and why Stuart and Caterina sold flickr (another bad move). i can go on and on, but you get the point.
i could be wrong, but that is how i read the news when i saw it.
Jim
on 18 Sep 09I think it’s Intuit’s way of staying hip, they actually already had a pretty decent online budget thing already that was presumably their answer to Mint. As some other commenters stated, the biggest concern is what will this other company do with your data, as Mint requires more super private data then any other company it seems.
If you’re still looking for an independent budgeting software, BudgetSimple is worth a try too.
Ben
on 18 Sep 09Funny, you want to stick it to the previous generation, but I bet you hope that doesn’t happen to you in a decade or two when you are the previous generation. By then you will be larger, less fresh, and someone more agile might come creepin’ up in the next lane.
I wonder if 37s would ever acquire a company that shows promise or threatens their dominance, inspiring a blog rant by another company.
Adam
on 18 Sep 09So what you are saying is that if someone was willing to spend, oh say, several hundred million dollars to buy you out your response would be nah…I am fighting for my generation over here. rrrrrrrright
Jeff Mackey
on 18 Sep 09And people are deleting their user accounts on Mint left and right because they hold Intuit in such low regard. I’d love to see some stats on Mint’s user base before the sale and a few months after the sale. It’s clearly going to be an unintended consequence.
William Will
on 18 Sep 09I agree with most of your post Jason, but I wish you would have framed it a bit differently. You claim the innovations of 37signals and Mint for your generation, and it is true that a lot of you younger guys have been moving things forward. But you also came into your own at a time when it became technically feasible to do things differently.
So don’t credit your generation as much – and look at it more as a moment in time, that you had the luck and the privilege of being able to leverage for yourselves. Some of us old guys have been doing the same.
I think this is much more a battle of BIG versus SMALL – of entrenched corporate and financial interests (including VC’s) versus small artisan software shops. I wish many of those companies that were bought out in recent years had stayed independent. Just imagine what they might have been able to accomplish. The biggest vacuum has obviously been Google, that has stopped quite a few developments right in the middle of their creative unfolding. Mint might just be another example.
When companies become BIG they start stepping on things. Maybe the next great insight for those that ‘want to do no harm’ is to stop growing for growth’s sake. I bet it’s not a questions you’ve had to ask yourselves yet at 37signals, but no doubt it will be a question at some point in the future.
SoWhat
on 18 Sep 09They can just do what the people behind dodgeball did. Sell out to google, don’t do anything to support your product or improve it under its new owner, whine and bitch 24/7 how your new owners don’t understand you, screw over the user base, wait six months and then just relaunch the same product again under a new name.
Rinse and repeat. The new generation are a bunch of suckers.
bah
on 18 Sep 09Reality check: That’s exactly how business is supposed to work.
steve
on 18 Sep 09What’s so bad about Intuit? I’m pretty happy if I’m a long-term investor in the company — my shares have grown at a rate equal to MSFT and AAPL. Intuit wants to infuse a competitor’s strengths into its operations for a price ($170mm) and Mint’s management team wants to cash out. From a purely financial standpoint — and that’s typically the driver in M&A — I’m sure it makes a whole lot of sense to both parties.
Mint doesn’t owe you anything, Jason. Just because you disagree with the terms of the sale doesn’t mean anyone’s “bending over”. Don’t forget that 37signals has an outside investor as well.
Ben Kittrell
on 18 Sep 09I could agree more Jason, It not only irked me because of the cop-out, but because I really enjoy Mint. I can just imagine it starting to go down the crapper as Intuit injects their BS.
I guess I can appreciate the relief of getting that one pay-off, I mean, those guys are set for life. But now they work for Intuit, how droll.
My goal is to make enough from my business to support me and my business partner, then I’ll have the time to do whatever the hell I want.
Anyway, thanks for saying what we were all thinking.
Don Bora
on 18 Sep 09JF: “I’d just like to see our generation stick it out and be the next generation. Instead we’re losing our own generation to the current generation.”
Whoa whoa there, pardner. Perhaps I’m not your generation, being 42. Brad Smith, 43, CEO of Intuit, is my generation. You are what, 10 years younger than I? Does that constitute generation? Of course, then by that logic you’re not in Aaron Patzer’s generation either. However, according to wikipedia, the average generation constituted 25 years so Aaron and Brad come /close/ to being in different generations…. but really?
“our generation” or “our culture”?
garth
on 18 Sep 09Judging by the price, they were not wining the revenue game. The VC cancer selling was just as pissed as you.
Eric
on 18 Sep 09What a terrible blog post. You can’t even begin to understand mint’s founder/investor/employee intentions. I’m sure they did they evaluated the terms and the market and did the best thing for themselves.
Lets be pragmatic. Every company has a price. There is a price and terms at which 37signals would sell.
Jim
on 18 Sep 09Good for Mint. Am I thrilled about Intuit buying Mint? No. But that’s capitalism. My advice is to get over it. Mint was not speaking for a generation of 20 somethings. It could barely update my account info daily and was always out of date Quicken updates my accounts perfectly everyday.
Joe Ranft
on 18 Sep 09Gee, you presume a lot here. Maybe this was a customer experience decision, based on research.
I have a deep background in services that aggregate customer financial data and I’ve done extensive research on customer sentiment about to whom they will give their login information, and perhaps Mint saw a barrier for their service that they could not get beyond.
Maybe Mint had signed up all the younger users they could, and through customer research they realized they were not going to get the more profitable, older, higher net worth, users into their service without partnering with a more trusted brand, like Intuit.
Intuit has been trusted with personal financial data for years, and they’ve never breached that trust. Intuit is the only brand outside of banks and brokers that is trusted by consumers with this type of data.
Ivan
on 18 Sep 09Right no the money, Jason. Swift revolution, every 20 years, with the new blood kicking our asses too.
Don’t let a huge VC buyout happen to 37s, mmmkay?
GeeIWonder
on 18 Sep 09Without exits there would be no VC, whether or not you like VC, and there would be far fewer ‘Mints’ to begin with.
Without taking exits the people who start ‘Mints’ and have the next great idea would lose the advantage of leveraging previous success. Maybe the folks at Mint know what they’d rather be working on already.
The good news is the ‘good guys’ got their money. If you dislike the ‘old’ Intuit, there’s more good news: making M&As work usually means major organizational shifts in philosophy and organization, at least as much at the parent. The revolution has either been internalized at Intuit or they’ll find themselves bleeding to death via a series of unproductive M&As.
Nice to see a real piece of business opinion though. Got to respect that.
Brett Stevens
on 18 Sep 09Great article, with a dead last paragraph (“let’s sing and hope this goes away”).
Maybe our society as a whole is moribund.
It’s dependent on a service economy. It’s divided by irresolvable internal conflicts. It is wracked by corruption and incompetence.
Ah, yes, I smell death… soon. “Let’s sing” ain’t gonna cut it. Get a rifle ;)
Natasha
on 18 Sep 09Same for Paycycle.com, online payroll service for small businesses, recently acquired by Intuit. We loved the service and have used it over 5 years. After the acquisition (only a few months!), the response time to phone calls doubled, and customer service reps provide factually incorrect information… Sigh
Dave Peele
on 18 Sep 09Great post! Totally agree! The problem is that we are still in an age where the guy with the most money in the room is in control more times than not. Intuit made a great move to buy up a competitor that would have eventually shut them down and Mint made a bad move by falling for it. Shame…
Jonathan
on 18 Sep 09I closed out my Mint account as soon as I heard the news. I wish them the best of luck.
Alan Warms
on 18 Sep 09Agree with Fred Wilson here, completely. A little harsh on the comment Jason—given we don’t know anything about what the actual financials, etc. looked like. I think we can infer that $170MM as it trickles down to Mint.com founder is a heck of alot more than either Caterina or Josh got in their sales to Yahoo.
The other point I would make is that unless you are gunning for an IPO you don’t get to choose your exit—small companies get bought not sold.
You’re making a value judgement on the entrepreneurs of Mint without knowing (or even asking?) their personal situations, backgrounds, and goals. Not really fair, imo.
Nate Klaiber
on 18 Sep 09I tried Mint a while back, didn’t get too involved. I decided to check into this again, recently, while deciding if I wanted something on the desktop or online. It was at this time I also tried Quicken Online.
Now I ask the question: why would Intuit buy Mint? The Quicken Online UI and experience is leaps and bounds above that of Mint. There was less friction for me to get into Quick and get my accounts setup, Mint required 15 steps – and to import accounts separately. It didn’t stop there. Quicken took care of all of the little things that made it easy to achieve your tasks quickly (and with a nice iPhone app to accompany it).
Anon
on 18 Sep 09I agree, this kind of sell out by a promising up and coming is disapointing. It’s not like we need to look far for more examples of this though. The heavy weight incumbent doesn’t like the inovative nimble alternative so decides to get rid of the competition rather than compete. One example that comes to mind is rails and merb.
TUCKYtil I die
on 18 Sep 09This reminds me of the time back in da tucky when Papa Johns pizza moved in… ya know. BUMP THAT… messin with Walts Pizza. F the Man! HACK THE WORRRRRLLLLLD TUCKY SON!
Denis Somar
on 18 Sep 09Jason,
Your post is spot on about this being a VC move more than anything else. Tyler commented about “just like Zappos and Amazon” which is an interesting comment…
I was privy to the Zappos Insider training seminars which indoctrinates/teaches in you all things Zappos, kind of like their own Getting Real manifesto – much of it is thought provoking but you end up realizing that they’re doing shoes, only because they like shoes. The logistics of ecommerce, warehouse, and shipping are set up for whatever is in that box from Zappos, if they choose to suddenly replace the box contents with books, video games, DVDs, toys, and other stuff – they’re certainly going to step on someone’s feet.
It makes absolute sense why Amazon would buy Zappos, it’s a protectionist measure AND IT’S SMART on Amazon’s part – aside from the fact that I think Zappos and Amazon share a vision.
On the other hand, you have Intuit which is the behemoth in personal finance. It’s easier to steer a boat than an iceberg and Mint / Yodlee aren’t nipping at the heels of Intuit, they’re a puppy becoming a pitbull unless they’re neutered. It’s a smart protectionist move on Intuit’s part but don’t be surprised when features stagnate and everything becomes an upsell to buy Quicken in a box.
Schaeffer
on 18 Sep 09Revolutions are based on changing the paradigm, and the current paradigm is creating a business with an “exit strategy” for investors. Change will come about when someone innovates a way to make the users “authentically better off” (see below). Has anyone built a community and given the users a stake in the success beyond offering an awesome, free service and UI?
Brian Armstrong
on 18 Sep 09Agreed, it was a complete sell out to the enemy.
I have no room to criticize though because $170m is a lot money. I’m not sure I would have acted any differently.
Lubo
on 18 Sep 09With all this said, 37S…I can bet if someone came along and showed you the money, pretty much guaranteeing you an early and comfortable retirement, that you would take it.
Tell me you wouldn’t?
sulfide
on 18 Sep 09this isn’t about making great products for people, this is about convincing people to join a bandwagon and making a quick buck.
Andrew Parker
on 18 Sep 09Jason, I also am unfamiliar with the situation, and don’t know the details that caused the Mint sale. But, I work in venture capital, and I, along with peers in my industry, were very surprised by this transaction for the following reason.
Mint just raised $14MM in August of this year. For them to then sell for $170MM one month later was likely frustrating to the VCs that just invested because they probably saw very little increase in value between the round they just closed and the final acquisition price.
It can be a headache to have money boomerang around back to you that quickly, when as a VC your trying to invest money on a 6-8 year horizon and acheive long term gains.
So, I find it very unlikely that VCs encouraged this sale. On the contrary, I’ll bet you an ice cream sundae that the VCs involved encouraged Aaron to stay private, and they might have even offered him a small secondary transaction at a similarly valuation to the acquisition price in order to let Aaron take some money off the table and minimize his risk. But, again, I was not in that board room so I don’t know for sure… I’m just trying to give you a brief glimpse at how I think a typical VCs though process might go in this situation.
jv
on 18 Sep 09Oh please. Intuit is a real company with real products and real customers. They have the scars from the Microsoft wars to prove it.
The current crop of startups are little bedroom SW startups who think they can make money selling ads and wiring up rented servers. What product?
When Facebook, Myspace, Twitter have revenue and report quarterly profits and have customers who buy their products come back and tell me about it.
Intuit bought an idea and some talent to add to their own products rather then develop it on their own. It’s called “real business.”
John
on 18 Sep 09I have to say that I am frustrated at your “shot in the dark” here. You admit that it’s a shot in the dark in the first paragraph… “I don’t know the full backstory…” I almost didn’t read on after you admit that you didn’t really know what was going on.
cranky is as cranky blogs.
You should send a note of congratulations to Mr. Patzer that he was acquired by a strategic partner, not an equity group (read: pirates) who would simply “cut some costs” and try to sell him to Intuit later taking the majority of the profits for themselves.
Anonymous
on 18 Sep 09I’m bothered by the use of the metaphor “bend over” in this post. Is it just me, or does this strike others as sophomoric?
Kevin Cabral
on 18 Sep 09It’s right to see the Mint sale as the sign of the end of an era. But it could also be a lesson for success in a new one.
The Mint sale is a first sign that “disrupting by being free” is no longer enough to make a billion dollar company. They built a great product quickly in a clever way through great marketing and user interfaces.
But behind it all, Mint was just a facade that was easily replicated. Increasingly, it was being replicated and competitors like BillShrink were even out-doing Mint in marketing (through the T-Mobile alliance).
What made Mint successful so quickly was also its problem from the long-term value creation standpoint. Mint did not control relationships with financial institutions, its customer data or any of the “tangible assets” that required a sales force, IT infrastructure and years of sustained investment for Yodlee to build.
The next step would require Mint to become a “brand” stronger than Intuit. This would be a very expensive effort which Microsoft and many others have already failed at. After all, Intuit has $3 billion in revenues, $400 million in profits and spends $1 billion a year on sales & marketing.
Building a big start-up takes hutzpah but it also takes a market. Reality is that this particular market for personal financial planning software is not one that can be easily “disrupted” by a free product dependent on others for its core infrastructure. I think Mint was being realistic about its chances recognizing that it had already done a lot for what it actually was.
jrome
on 18 Sep 09I largely agree with you Jason that mint coulda woulda shoulda held on and dominated, especially in light of all the shit kicking excitement that’s happening out there these days; but I’m also confident mint+intuit realizes it is going to get blindsided out of its game by the Next Mint. Sure, Mint was alone in creating that new personal finance web app, but it needn’t be the last. And one of them isn’t going to be assimilated by the Borg.
I feel a post like this believes the old guard will never change. They sometimes don’t, sometimes they can’t, but they do, good things surely can happen. Intuit may have had crap products, but now, with Mint, they certainly don’t. Plus, Intuit must have a few decent people working there; this acquisition must be a shot in the arm for them. I mean, c’mon, how great for them?! And I bet Intuit could be hiring more talent soon. Good companies exist to EMPLOY people and make great products. Let’s hope Intuit does both in a way they never could before.
Kyle Fox
on 18 Sep 09You make it sound as if Inuit purchased Mint with the intention of morphing it to fit into their existing line of kludgy software products.
Maybe Intuit realizes they’re outdated and they see Mint as an opportunity to refresh not just their their product offerings, but also their culture. Maybe instead of suffocating Mint, they’re trying to rekindle things at Intuit.
It’s too bad you’re so pessimistic about this. You—and judging from the comments, many others—have already written them off.
DAR
on 18 Sep 09The real problem here is not the VC’s, but the fact that the IPO market has been effectively shut for startups (partly because of Sarbanes-Oxley, and partly due to the crash of the internet bubble back in ‘00).
There’s nothing inherently wrong with taking VC money. In fact, it’s pretty much a necessity for any startup that actually wants to be able to grow fast enough to kick an incumbent’s ass. And there’s numerous examples of revolutionary startups that took VC money, pulverized the incumbents, went public, and became the new industry leaders: Apple (vs. IBM), Google (vs. Yahoo et al), etc.
But the implicit trade-off that a startup makes by taking VC money is that the company must move aggressively towards making an exit, and there’s only 2 kinds: IPO, or get bought. Having the IPO option effectively off the table forces startups to get bought whether they really want to or not, and that’s what leads to disappointments like Mint. If Mint had a realistic option to go public, they’d probably still be independent – and kicking Intuit’s old-school ass – today.
DAR
on 18 Sep 09Also, responding to Fred Wilson’s comment re: that he thinks the founders’ desire to cash out was behind this, not the VC’s:
If that’s indeed the case, then it really behooves VC’s to find a way to allow founders to do a cash-out before the exit occurs. (As Fred has advocated for in a blog post a few weeks back.) Without that option, start-up founders will often opt for the quick cash-out – which winds up hurting both the founders’ and the investors’ ROI long-term.
Brandon Carson
on 18 Sep 09Excellent article – my wife and I were just discussing this the other day and have since removed our Mint accounts.
The only good example I can think of where a situation like this didn’t go bad was Flickr, but then you have to take a look at the culture over at Yahoo and think that they knew if they messed it up, the backlash would be immediate and total.
Intuit, on the other hand, has been backstabbing and overbearing for years… there’s no way any good can come of this. Very, very disappointing.
Ryan Williams
on 18 Sep 09This has probably all already been said, in any case, I’ll echo the themes if they have been. I was in the personal finance startup space for 4 years, including selling my startup and working for a Mint competitor, so I have a couple points:
I doubt investors were pushing for this UNLESS the company was bleeding money, which it very well could have been. A 5X multiple is good for VCs, but for a star like Mint, if it was indeed making as much money as everybody seems to think they were, why push for an exit at that price right now? Running Mint is expensive, the aggregation fees, IT/security investment, employee investment, etc. Much more than your typical “web 2.0” company. It’s not clear that Mint was ever minting that much money.
A big possible reason to sell now is the obstacle that pf startups face with overcoming objections to storing sensitive data. Intuit is a more trusted brand, and so this perhaps limited the upside of Mint in the short to mid-term and is one of the benefits of teaming up to bring Intuit’s products into the next era. One breach, or appearance of a breach and Mint goes bust.
I agree this was huge for Intuit, they just took out their biggest up and coming competitor, and along with Microsoft’s recent announcement about leaving the industry, Intuit’s in a place to own this market for years to come.
Regarding the “mint would do just as well with any other aggregator” comment. I call bullshit on that. Yodlee was key for Mint because it provided the most coverage. Yes, Mint built the right product at the right time and the design helped differentiate them, but the fact that you could add almost any financial institution, when you could not on a competitor site cemented their “win” in the startup pf space.
I put “win” in quotes because I think with this acquisition, the race is back on. If/when Mint switches to Intuit’s aggregation, users will suffer. I tried quicken online and could hardly add any accounts. I had similar struggles with other sites. Also, the distraction of focus being spread across all Quicken products can only lead to less devotion to a single great web pfm.
Anyway, to your points in the post, my main argument with it is that we don’t really know what their potential was. Their place in the market was tenuous. One false step and it could have been toast.
Tom
on 18 Sep 09I sold my company for $75-90 million (I don’t want to be specific) a few years back and I owned a lot more of it than the Mint guys did (I only raised $5 million in funding). And you know what? I am glad I sold it because, I’m not at all sorry to say, I DID want to make money and lock in my gains—and gains for my investors.
I don’t care if I sold out to a big dumb company and lost the chance to destroy them or whatever. I had more money than anyone at that company I sold to and it DID change my life permanently.
I do whatever I want now and I’m not the least bit bored. I haven’t been bored for one second. I travel the world, have learned two new languages, exercise, learned piano, water sports, hike, snowboard at least 30 full days a year, have 3 homes, go see pro sports games of my favorite teams anytime I want, watch 3-4 movies a week, and read 1-2 books a week. I spend lots of time with my family. I’ve lived in Mexico, Italy, France, Colorado, Florida all for several months each and loved it.
I worked 12-16 hour days for FIVE years, almost always 6 days a week, and usually a few hours on the seventh day. We built a great product and sold the bloody hell out of it. We had awfully tough times for a few years and I put every cent of my money and investments into it and we had less than $100 in the bank at least 20 times. I sacrificed everything except family during those years—I got rid of my TV, cable, and stopped doing a lot of things I enjoyed because I was focused on my dream and my goal. I damn well earned every dime I frickin made. And my investors and employees made a lot of dough too.
No apologies or regrets. I made money and cashed out and my life is phenomenal. I’m so grateful and happy I made that choice. I’m not saying my life is better than anyone else’s, I’m just saying it is what I wanted. I don’t care what anyone else does—if they want to run their company for 20 or 30 years, go right ahead. I know that’s not what I wanted. But feel free to do that if it’s what you think you want.
But give me a break with this idea that selling your company and making a lot of dough is a bad thing somehow. For me it sure wasn’t.
I'm sorry - 36 signals is kicking the sh!t out out of who's ass?
on 18 Sep 09That’s right. That’s what I thought.
@JF
on 18 Sep 09Blog posts like this one are why people label 37Signals as arrogant. I mean, who the hell do you think you are, lambasting Mint.com for the legal, ethical sale of its business? Sanctimony never looks good.
Jim
on 18 Sep 09I heartily agree with Tom.
I didn’t do quite as well as Tom—I sold my company for ~10M in cash a few years ago. I owned 100% of it and selling was the best decision I’ve ever made. It was my first company, it generated a very high 6 figure cash flow, but there were substantial challenges to growing without VC involvement. The proceeds have given me freedom to take a bigger risk with my second company and swing for the fences.
If anything, my guess is the VC’s were pushing to WAIT and try for a bigger exit. Typically that’s the issue.
Fred Wilson is exactly right in saying, “This smells to me of a young founder facing the prospect of making enough money at an early age that their life will be changed forever and not being able to resist it.”
Anonymous Coward
on 18 Sep 091. you all fail to see how tremendously this will benefit Mint users. Mint doesn’t have to spend time competing for Quicken users anymore. Instead, they can focus on the UX and integration with Quicken’s other products.
2. deleting your account is dumb. the competitors aren’t as good. end of story. let me know when you’ve deleted your facebook and google accounts too. you’ll probably regret that decision when Mint has a big fat SEND MY DATA TO TURBOTAX AND DO MY TAXES FOR ME button :)
3. who on here knows mint’s revenue? nobody. Mint did an awesome job at projecting itself as a market leader—which someday it very well could have been. That’s PR. for all you know they were bleeding money as their userbase increased. COGS is not cheap in that industry.
4. yeah, intuit does historically represent suckage, but we can hope that they just let Mint do their thing and give them even more resources to do it. I mean, so does Yahoo and flickr is still pretty awesome.
William
on 18 Sep 09It pains me to say it, because I do wish somebody would go after Intuit with a stick, but this was probably a smart move on Mint’s part.
In building on somebody else’s back end, they built on sand: they were limited in what they do could, and didn’t have a strongly defensible competitive advantage. A guaranteed $170m right now looks pretty good if you have a risk of getting nothing later.
But there’s no denying that from the consumer perspective or the entrepreneurial community perspective, Mint’s sale is pretty weak sauce. I promoted Mint to friends because it was stirring up an important market that Intuit has kept stagnant. Now, it’s probably back to stagnation.
Mint’s sale may have made Mint’s owners richer, but I think it made the rest of us a little poorer.
Peter Cooper
on 18 Sep 09Perhaps the founders saw opportunities to kick ass in other areas and wanted the capital to do it. They can now do a lot more than they could have done at Mint alone.
There are parallels with the Skype founders (KaZaa then Skype), Mark Shuttleworth (Thawte, then Ubuntu), Mark Cuban, and many more.
If the 37signals guys saw an area where they could kick even bigger ass than at 37signals but they needed a ton of capital to pull it off, they’d be nuts not to sell 37signals and get a payday. “Selling out” sucks at a cultural level, sure, but ultimately it can lead to better products and projects down the line.
William
on 18 Sep 09@Tom: If you’re saying that selling out is great for the founders when the founders just want the money, I don’t think anybody’s arguing that.
Jason’s point is that it’s bad for consumers and the economy as a whole. And that’s unarguable. There’s a reason we have anti-trust laws: because decreased competition makes many things worse. And as with, say, traffic laws, the laws protect the public from the most egregious harms, but let a lot of other ones go.
planetmcd
on 18 Sep 09Isn’t this what happened with Rails/Merb; rahter than risk fighting with and loosing to the upstart, the upstart was brought on board?
planetmcd
on 18 Sep 09Don’t look at it as selling out, look at it as buy in
@planetmcd
on 18 Sep 09AWESOME way to put it.
Josh
on 18 Sep 09The data does not support the thesis.
Aggregation technology has been around for a long time, but the UI has always sucked. Mint put a great UI on licensed technology, and executed better than their many competitors that started at the same time, and better than Intuit. They grew fast and had a great story. But they didn’t fundamentally change anything.
But they didn’t change the world. Someone else’s platform + affiliate revenue does not a revolutionary business make. At least three of the financial companies I do business with offer Yodlee-based aggregation for free – the UIs all suck, but the core offering is the same as Mint’s. I don’t mean to belittle Mint’s accomplishments – they succeeded in developing a very good application where lots of other failed. But I would have sold that business for that much 10 ten times out of 10.
Mario
on 18 Sep 09You just turned me on!!!! Lets kick some butt!!!
Ryan
on 18 Sep 09You are what’s wrong with America. Those guys never have to work again in their lives. You’d have them driving themselves to early heart attack deaths for… what? Some kind of sick vengeance on the old guard?
You are SICK. Examine your life.
Dave
on 18 Sep 09Reminds of the day Microsoft bought Fox Software. MS wanted about one piece of technology and also to remove an irritating competitor.
It’s hard for me to get mad at selling founders. Most of them have earned their payday. But it is sad that the users/customers who helped them reach that payday will most likely end up with an inferior product in relatively short order.
Stockwell
on 18 Sep 09What’s amazing about this, to me, is that Microsoft tried to buy intuit years ago because Quicken was a fresh new product that was beating the bejeezus out of Microsoft Money. everyone was proud of scrappy little Intuit for resisting the buyout. Now the tables have turned and the scrappy little startup has succumbed to the lumbering old guard. Oh, well. Congratulations to the Mint founders for making such a great product.
Anonymous Coward
on 18 Sep 09You are what’s wrong with America. Those guys never have to work again in their lives. You’d have them driving themselves to early heart attack deaths for… what? Some kind of sick vengeance on the old guard? You are SICK . Examine your life.
Huh? You must be doing the wrong thing with your life if success in business means working yourself to a heart attack. You can live a great happy fulfilled life running your own business and making a great living on your own.
J
on 18 Sep 09Mint should have gone bold and BOUGHT Yodlee.
Mike D.
on 18 Sep 09Everybody has a price. You have a price for 37signals, in fact… as I’m sure you’ll agree. There are multiple components to the price, but the one that keeps you from selling is, hmmm, let’s call it the “irresponsibility margin”. I don’t mean irresponsibility in a bad way… I just mean, it’s the portion of your “number” which disregards everything other than your joy of running the company. It disregards investor returns, future prospects for the company, etc.
So… say 37signals - with a dispassionate leader - is worth $25m. That’s simply the price that shareholders would take in a vacuum. Let’s say there are bidders at that price. In that case, you sell. Everyone’s happy and life goes on.
Let’s say, however, that you love running 37signals so much that your responsibility margin is $50m. All of a sudden, someone needs to pay $75m to acquire you. That either happens and you sell, or it doesn’t and you don’t. Either way, you feel good.
I wouldn’t assume the people at Mint didn’t have a healthy irresponsibility margin. Maybe it was a lot more than $50m in fact. There are rumors they turned down $130m from Intuit earlier this year. People who run businesses generally have a good feeling as to what their future prospects are financially. Maybe they were hitting a bit of a revenue wall? Maybe, as other commenters mentioned, they realized that they were reaching a limit with their Yodlee technology integration.
I think what happened here is you had some entrepreneurs who didn’t particularly want to sell, liked running the company, but ended up getting an offer that exceeded their irrresponsibility margin… so they took it. And we should be happy for them for doing so. I think they would have taken it with or without VC involvement.
It sounds like what you are really lamenting is the lack of independent exit strategies these days. If the IPO market was such that Mint could have gone public in a year or two instead of doing this, I’m sure they would have… and they would have remained independent, as you seem to prefer.
Don Quixote
on 18 Sep 09You underestimate both Intuit and Mint. Its quite possible for Mint to become much better with Intuit’s resources and connections. There will inevitably be compromises but they will be with external financial service providers.
FWIW, Intuit did not resist the Microsoft buy out. The justice department ruled it anticompetitive.
Sam Penrose
on 18 Sep 09Fascinating to read all the hate for Sarbanes-Oxley for cutting off IPOs. No one likes S-O, but surely the demise of the 1997-1999 IPO market is a good thing. The Valley and investment bankers collaborated to milk billions from the rest of the economy. A very few people got very rich while millions more lost directly and indirectly when the bubble popped. I owe my career to the bubble, but as a citizen I have to say good riddance. And we all maintain a sense of citizenship separate from our personal drive to get filthy rich, right? We don’t all pretend that what will help us become wealthy is exactly what the country and world as a whole needs, right?
M
on 18 Sep 09I think its more akin to Disney getting Pixar and Marvel. Don’t panic.
Scott
on 18 Sep 09I’m sure 37Signals would never accept a bid to get bought up by someone right?! Of course not, the honor is so much more valuable than taking care of your families and living comfortably for the awesome work you’ve done.
Ric
on 18 Sep 09Its a shame I agree with such a contentious stance about such a successful sell out as this, but alas, I have to agree with Sam. This is purely anti-innovation in its implication and I have already written off mint and am scanning the horizon for its replacement. RIP Mint.com
Glenn Rempe
on 18 Sep 09Frankly I don’t get all the rage here. And nobody seems to have mentioned that Mint.com is going to replace Quicken online, and the Mint leadership team will be taking over the leadership of that division of Intuit.
So it seems to me that Mint.com did in fact win. Quicken online, as it exists today, will no longer be around. It will instead become a white label version of Mint.
http://bit.ly/2YLaUG
So the Mint team has just crawled inside the guts of one of its fiercest competitors and replaced their brains. While getting a big payday in the process. Not a bad deal in my book.
Don’t you think, based on this, that you are being a little pre-mature with announcing the death of Mint at the hands of the evil Intuit empire?
Steven
on 18 Sep 09Jason:
The answer to your rhetorical questions:
http://bit.ly/1pQe9S
The VC’s probably wanted to cash out to have a “successful” 2009 and recruit new money into the fund. VC’s always have two ends to play the business they invest in and the money the get to “place” it for others.
Anonymous Coward
on 18 Sep 09Congratulations, I just unsubscribed from your blog. Lambasting a company for selling out when you admit to knowing nothing about the terms of the sale is just childish. Just because you’re poster child for “your generation” and apparently think your shit doesn’t stink, it does not mean everyone else has to have your views on how to run a business. If being disrespectful is what being part of “your generation” is all about, then I’d be happy to join an older generation.
ravi
on 18 Sep 09With regard to this:
I am curious. What was the revenue game? Was the “alternative service recommendation” option really capable of turning a profit? If not, it might well be that, despite all the very legitimate criticisms you raise, the old guard (as Ryan so nicely puts it) has one advantage over the the young Turks: sustainability?
andy
on 18 Sep 09I love the anger in this post. It’s like a old-school game of Street Fighter. JF is on the side screaming “Finish Him!” but Mint takes the money rather than executing the death move.
Brad Price
on 18 Sep 09I will wait to see how this turns out – “crappy” is not a foregone conclusion, but given Intuit’s lackluster software development over the last 10 years it is a perfectly reasonable fear. The company has had a LOT of time to demonstrate that they can do better, and has failed thus far.
If Mint.com really replaces and improves Intuit’s development, good. If internal forces in Intuit continue to repress and negate good development, then this experiment has failed.
Fred
on 18 Sep 09I have had nothing but horrible experiences with Intuit and its various and sundry pieces of crapware. I had had nothing but good experiences with Mint and PayCycle. The latter is already getting worse, exponentially worse, since Intuit bought it. PayCycle used to send email reminders to run payroll, to file taxes, etc. (I only use it for my one household employee). Intuit sends me email to tell me how awesome they are and to get me to buy stuff, but not a single useful communication. I see no reason to think the Mint experience would be better. I’d rather keep my money under the mattress and record transactions on an envelope than use any Intuit product, and that includes Mint.
Joe
on 18 Sep 09Apparently Intuit isnt about to ruin mint: http://www.mint.com/blog/updates/intuit-not-out-to-change-mint-says-founder/
Cork
on 18 Sep 09All pathos and no logos. Put it this way. Why didn’t Mint just buy Quicken instead of the other way around? Because while Mint is a popular candidate, it’s not in a position to take out the incumbent. It’s like if Obama had picked Ron Paul to serve on his cabinet. We still get Ron Paul. But Obama? He’s not going anywhere, come on now.
Methinks you thought too much about viva la revolution and not enough about the reality of money, business agreements, business plans, and negotiations. It’s like your nervous you’re going to do the same thing and want to justify it? Call your shrink.
merle
on 18 Sep 09I don’t always agree with Jason but hey, he’s young and he’s an idealist. He’s just speaking his peace. If he sold out and went away rich then he his days as an innovator would be over. Sure Steve Jobs is rich but he’s crazy that way as we all know.
So Jason may do something really cool someday and I hope he does. So far I think he has synthesized some existing knowledge in an interesting manner and built a great business but nothing revolutionary. The kid may have it in him though.
Also, I don’t think that 37s is in a position to get offered a buyout like that. It seems the big money is interested in apps that deal with finances, education, or social. None of 37’s apps are in that arena.
merle
on 18 Sep 09make that “entertainment”.
Alberto
on 18 Sep 09This is why I remain hopeful that the Obama adminstration has the fortitude to move on its desires. A governing body should regulated this type of stuff particularly when it is related to the exact money that the government prints for us to digest our daily bread with while we don’t have a good example of why the opposite ways of this approach will work without an eventual government takeover
Dave McClure
on 18 Sep 09Jason -
As an angel investor in Mint, and a personal friend of Aaron, not to mention someone who knows most if not all of the other Mint investors, let me just say this:
>> Dude, you are 100% absolutely F'ing wrong on this one. <<In the future, you might want to do a little background research before you make such completely groundless & unfounded claims. You couldn’t be more off-base.
hugs & kisses,
- dave mcclure
Lanny Heidbreder
on 18 Sep 09Quicken Online is Intuit’s newest product. It’s also the only Intuit product that shows a shred of design sense or user-centrism. They started from scratch and created something not perfect, but decent. That’s far more than you can say for their desktop software.
Maybe, just maybe, that means Intuit is starting to get it. Maybe Intuit can change itself; maybe it can be good for Mint and its users.
I wouldn’t bet any money on it, but I’m hopeful.
Aviv Hadar
on 18 Sep 09I thought I’d say what was on my mind:
The morning I woke up and read about the Mint deal, I was scared. I knew that a service that I loved, relied on and used daily would eventually be changed (and most likely dramatically altered). Products don’t only “occasionally” change after acquisition, it’s absolutely “most” of the time that they get infused with horrifying bullshit. Large companies buy disruptive and innovative competitors, and large cash valuations strike a chord in most of the human beings on this planet, especially those stuck in the Silicon Valley bubble of VC insanity.
I really hope Mint continues to be run like a nimble startup, and remembers what it set out to do… Innovate and change the way personal finance is handled on a daily basis.
Good luck Mint… I will support you until you lead me wrong.
sambit
on 18 Sep 09I love the DoItYourself attitude you guys have built @ 37signals… and its a pity that the world at large hasn’t understood the greater value in doing things that way…
But the sad truth is that “very few” people look beyond the couple million bucks. And an economist’s argument would be that this is the “rational” thing to do… Unless we change from a monetary(scalar) to a value(vector) based system… this sort of shortsightedness will continue to linger.
The whole idea behind the “patent-system” that the US and Swiss economy stand on… is based on the idea of Jefferson’s periodic revolution.. Sadly, this doesn’t really work in the software domain because :
1> Its quite hard to get a software patent 2> The protection-period ~17 years is far too large for the software domain.
Looking forward to your posts about 37signals itself as it deals with growing larger :)
Nick Oliva
on 18 Sep 09Established companies buy innovative companies in the normal course of business. When you’re established, your management can’t take the risks that startups take, so you “can’t” innovate, i.e., you’re basically not allowed to. Bashing an established company for not innovating internally ignores that their stakeholders don’t want to take those risks… or they’d take ther money out and put it in startups. What’s the model for all companies being startups look like???
Bashing the startup for getting the monkey off his back for the sake of idealism disdains basic business concepts too. You’re saying that mint could have doubled-down and instead took the money and ran. At $170M for the short time they had been in business… it’s really not difficult to imagine circumstances under which this sale could easily be considered a no-brainer. I already consider it a no-brainer.
I have tremendous respect for the Twitter guys… but their apparent doing-it-for-the good-of-mankind-who-needs-revenue approach is just as bad as the don’t-stop-until-you’re-number-one-or-dead approach.
Are these, and 37 Signals, for-profit businesses or lifestyle projects?
Smart Move
on 18 Sep 09I think Mint did absolutely the right thing. To me Mint has a lot of parallels with BeOS. There was a time when BeOS was the hot thing and it had some incredible technology. A lot of people were saying that it was going to kill off Apple. Apple wanted to buy them for around $125M, but Jean-Louis Gassée said, “I’ve got them by the balls and I’m going to squeeze.” But BeOS didn’t control the underlying platform (Macs), and Apple ended up doing the squeezing when it prevented BeOS from running on a new generation of Apple hardware.
Mint has a very nice front-end and great marketing. It’s the hot thing right now and some people think they’ll kill off Intuit. But they also don’t have control of the underlying platform. They’re in somewhat better shape since Yodlee isn’t Intuit, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Yodlee was making plans to squeeze a little more licensing revenue out of Mint. It’s a pretty uncomfortable situation when a critical part of your product is owned by somebody else. It’s a bit like Italy taking on Napoleon with a rented Prussian army. We all know how that worked out for Italy.
Another point to consider is that the whole personal finance market is actually dying, which is part of the reason why MS Money (also a Yodlee licensee) got out. Mint itself only gained 1.3M or so registered users in 2 years, so actual active users is probably around 500-600K or so. That’s better than the competition, but not all that great considering the quantity and quality of exposure they’ve had. The rise of online banking and bill paying is really what’s rendering the whole segment largely redundant. The consumer finance side now only accounts for something like 10% of Intuit’s revenues, and that’s after they absolutely squeezed the last penny out of the long-suffering Quicken user base. The real cash cows now are the accounting/tax products. If Mint really wanted to take on Intuit, it would have to go into those areas, and they’d have a long and hard row to hoe.
It looks to me like Mint sold at exactly the right time for an excellent price. And if they do manage to improve Intuit somehow in the process, then that’s just icing on the cake.
Anonymous Coward
on 18 Sep 09Intuit had the courage to admit defeat – I for one respect that.
I assume 37signals will eventually be disrupted by an upcoming generation of web apps, so I wonder what you will do when the roles are reversed. Will you simply sit back and let it happen, or do your best to “buy youth”. Maybe you could simply shut your doors and go away when the next competitor arrives..
P.S. I’d be happy to get “bent over” by anyone, including JF, for $170 million dollars…
Ben Z
on 18 Sep 09Really? Like selling out wasn’t Mint’s plan all along…
What’s really so great about Mint anwyay? I’m a user and find the experience innovative and slick but if you look beyond that you really get a sliver of the functionality you can get from BOA, Quicken, or even Microsoft for that matter.
To call Mint a “leader” is also misleading. I’ve read that they have about a 1 million users (registered, not active). I would imagine that’s a tiny sliver of what BOA or Intuit can claim. Being and innovator and a leader are not the same thing—especially in financial services. Was Mint really going to challenge the big guys in the long term? What do they have beyond their interface that’s proprietary? Eventually someone larger would have stolen their ideas and caught up…Intuit can now just do it faster.
I’m not trying to flame Mint. Just the opposite. I just think it’s naive to think that this wasn’t their exit strategy all along. Mint wasn’t intended to be the “future of online finance”—their take on user experience and presentation of data solved a sticky problem in the industry, and those are the kinds of solutions that sell for a premium. Imagine it: a financial app you like using even while you hemorrhage money.
Jay Levitt
on 18 Sep 09I never quite understood why people were so gaga over Mint. I looked into them once, and came to the same conclusion another commenter had – you want me to hand over the password to my BANK account? There were a few threads about this on consumerist, IIRC, and the best their executives could say about security were “128-bit SSL! That’s military-grade!” Kinda like someone else’s old security fact sheet, come to think of it.
Nevertheless, I think we can all agree on one thing: To the extent that Mint’s sale to Intuit was a bad idea, it’s critical for us to not learn anything from it.
Greg
on 18 Sep 09I’ve got to call BS on all this. Who has the best insight into how well Mint is doing and how much money they may or may not be making? The Mint management team. And they decided to sell. If they truly saw the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, they would have stuck it out. I think either course of action is fine, personally, but it seems silly to second-guess the founders as to which was the better option.
Now, if you were to hear them griping about how the VC’s made them do it, that would be another debate.
Sundeep Sidhu
on 18 Sep 09I think the most telling responses are from existing Mint users….And they aren’t very positive. Take a look at the comments on the official mint blog:
http://www.mint.com/blog/updates/why-mint-com-plus-intuit-is-a-big-idea/
Congratulations to the Mint team on the pay day, let’s hope they were able to negotiate some degree of flexibility.
Stay positive though. Someone else will come along with a game changer if Intuit drop the ball…
Peter
on 18 Sep 09If your assumptions are correct – that Intuit will waste what they’ve bought and there still exists a demand for something better – then another company will come along and grab that opportunity.
Sean Gilligan
on 18 Sep 09SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley) was not the only thing that killed the IPO market in 2000, but it is clearly one of the things that is stopping a healthy IPO market from returning. Repealing (or rethinking) SOX is an idea whose time has come. And don’t worry, Sam Penrose, repealing SOX will not (in and of itself) cause a return to the bubble market of the late 90’s, just as it didn’t stop the real estate bubble in this decade.
Saddling companies with millions of dollars in accounting & reporting costs is not the only way to prevent stock bubbles.
steve
on 18 Sep 09I know some of the employees and investors in Mint and your premise that this was driven by the VC’s is completely false. Investors had just put $15M in the company clearly showing their interest in the long term potential. It is unfortunate that you are willing to lead your story about “VC-induced cancer” and early exits with out knowing if this was the case – it sure doesn’t look like it.
Tom
on 19 Sep 09@William,
“Jason’s point is that it’s bad for consumers and the economy as a whole. And that’s unarguable. There’s a reason we have anti-trust laws: because decreased competition makes many things worse. And as with, say, traffic laws, the laws protect the public from the most egregious harms, but let a lot of other ones go.LOT of tax revenue for the US and states. You seem to be making an argument that selling companies is bad for the economy which makes you look like someone who doesn’t understand business OR economics.
That's capitalism, folks!
on 19 Sep 09I was disappointed by the sale of Mint, but I can’t blame them for taking the cash. I wouldn’t turn down that kind of money.
Here’s my best guess on the future of Mint:
Intuit will roll out a subscription-based version of Mint, which will include all the bells and whistles we’ve grown to love. They’ll introduce some great new features too. (Pay attention to Hulu as it rolls out its “premium” service. You’ll see how it’s done.)
It will keep a (limited) free version of Mint around, but it will be plastered with ads. This version might limit the number of accounts you can monitor. You won’t have access to current financial information because it won’t be linked to your accounts. I’m sure it will allow you import the previous month’s financial statements.
Intuit will allow you to try the full version of Mint, free of charge, for 30 days. After that time you’ll need to become a subscriber.
Well, that’s what I would do if I were running Intuit. ; }
Brady J. Frey
on 19 Sep 09As an Art Director & IT Director for a business with 200+ users worldwide in over 12 companies, I’ve had first hand knowledge of Intuit’s dated software, it’s processes, and it’s customer interaction. They’re on my list sitting close to AT&T & Comcast for bloat & sincerity.
Absolutely agree… and the minute I heard that announcement, I was a little sad about what will most likely happen to an app I enjoy. I deleted my account within an hour. I hope it works out in the end, but I have little faith!
Jeff Putz
on 19 Sep 09There’s a certain irony that someone who preaches the value of being profitable and viable has an issue with a company that is not “selling out.”
Agreed with others that just because the company is purchased doesn’t mean it’s destined to fail or become something crappy. If Mint was “beating” Intuit in a real financial way, I’d love to know how. This post just sounds like fighting the man is cool, but if you don’t, you’re not cool.
Anonymous Coward
on 19 Sep 09Whether Jason has a good point or not, the tone of this post is very disrespectful and doesn’t reflect well on 37signals, Bezos and any other person associated with Jason. The 37signals brand took a big hit with this one…
Sig
on 19 Sep 09I smell a 37signals-built rival to Mint.com in the wings.
Eric
on 19 Sep 09I did some work (security consulting) at Intuit many years back. Say what you will about the UI design but I was deeply impressed by the extent to which individuals at all levels within the organization “got it.” Their data center is a piece of science, their IT department operates like clockwork, their appsec knowledge was great even in an era when that kind of thing was hard to find, and I could go on. Even their performance testing / load guys were on top of their game.
I never used Mint. It probably was awesome, and the experience probably was better. I gave up on Quicken for OS X because of the UI.
I guess I’m just saying the infrastructure of the company is awesome, if they can purchase a neat application and make it better rather than worse, then I’m excited about that.
Also, the fact that VCs can make $170M in a couple years even on rare occasions is probably the very thing that drives our VC-funded entrepreneurial culture. I’d love to see some research that says staying in the game is a better move than selling out (I’m not doubting that it exists, I would genuinely like to read such a study).
addicted
on 19 Sep 09I completely disagree…
Besides the necessity for VC money to keep the industry alive, this is the best thing that could have happened.
What you are ignoring is that not only did Intuit buy Mint.com, but they give Mint’s folks complete control over their consumer department. Which means that not only can Mint continue its great progress with more resources, but in fact, expand that to other parts of the Intuit environment (like desktop based consumer financial software). This is a GOOD thing.
Ted
on 19 Sep 09Totally disagree. It sounds like you’re just trying to defend your own life-decisions to yourself. Everyone gets to make their own choices about what they want out of life.
The Mint team made a great product, they sold it, and now they can do whatever they want for the rest of their lives. They should be applauded for pulling a feat few people ever manage to do.
There is more to life than financial software…
philip tadros
on 19 Sep 09wrd
fkinlosers
on 19 Sep 09Are you kdding me? Any one of you dbags would have sold out if it was yours to sell. Like it’s about making a superior product….It’s about making money.
Sam Foster
on 19 Sep 09Ummmm, it was $170 million….I’d sell MYSELF for that kind of money.
Fred
on 19 Sep 09Hi Jason,
I can see valid points on both sides of the fence here. Yes, we work to make money and the faster we can get on with what we truly want to pursue, the better. That’s generally my feeling when it comes to working 16-18 hours days with the hope of working on other things I can’t afford to spend time on now.
It’s always unfortunate to see a company like Mint cash in their chips, but this seems to be a glass half-empty, half-full situation. Perhaps the Mint crew want to pursue more noble pursuits, philanthropic pursuits, or start their own companies that contribute to some other exciting industry like solar or other green tech ideas?
The primary criticism I have here is not your points- it is, of course, a worthwhile pursuit to try and innovate in a given field, but rather that you seem to assume these guys are done, that they are taking the money and running off to burn hard currency in their fireplaces.
I’d say at least acknowledge you have hope that the Mint team is going on to bigger and better things.
On the other side of the coin, your passion for overthrowing the old regime is inspiring, passionate, pragmatic and admirable, but keep in mind that the large barge companies out there that are currently in the “purchase and conquer” phase could also be suffering from a lack of direction, a leadership team not sure how to adjust to a new paradigm.
You can argue the large guys will buy their way to longevity, gobbling up the innovators, but the historical data rarely ever supports that. If you haven’t read “Good to Great” by Jim Collins, please do. Warm fuzzy feelings will soon replace your outrage. Honestly, I’m encouraged when I see this acquisition pattern take place. I’m not concerned about Intuit, Intuit will either innovate or die, not buy their way to results.
As for the Mint team? Guys, congrats on your acquisition. I’m excited to see what you do next, because the thing that Intuit did not get when they bought the Mint machine was the engine, clearly.
Richard
on 19 Sep 09Depends on what their goals are. It’s quite possible they want to do something else with the next 5 years instead of milk the existing business into a bigger form of what they are already.
Maybe they’re better builders than managers, and recognise it.
Maybe they want the money – that’s okay too :)
Anonymous Coward
on 19 Sep 09As a customer, I wasn’t going anywhere near Mint while it was a goofy “Web 2.0” company. Now that it’s part of a real company that wants to make profit, I might actually take a look.
There is also a rich irony here: Mint is supposed to help you keep more money in your pocket, but the company must put “community” and “revolution” over its own economics?
Paula
on 19 Sep 09I don’t have anything against Intuit….I use QuickBooks every day…hours and hours every day….and I love it, but Quicken Online was an absolute debacle. I love Mint and it’s clean interface and reliability. And I loved the energy behind it….young upstart company kicking the ASS of the big guys. I’m with you 37signals. It just feels like a typical big business takeover entrenching us in the mire of the same old same old.
Kevin Holesh
on 19 Sep 09I agree Jason. It was a smart move on Intuit’s part, but I always thought Mint had a different end goal than making a hell of a lot of money by selling to a giant.
It’s okay to keep a profitable business medium sized. It doesn’t have to keep growing, but it can continue innovating. My personal entrepreneurial dream is to own a mid sized company (maybe 50 people) and manage it exactly how I want. I don’t want to have a big brother upstairs telling me how to run my business. Having enough money to roll around in a big pile of it would be a nice perk, but that’s not my end goal.
The people behind Mint don’t realize that millions of dollars will not make them as happy as their dreams tell them. In a year or two, they will be right back where they started, albeit with a bit more cash in the bank. The part about a startup most people enjoy is having fun running it. The best part is the work, the journey of making something innovative.
Investors have a different goal and unfortunately, that goal prevailed with Mint.
Christian Romney
on 19 Sep 09Everyone needs an exit strategy. Maybe they’re on to building something else. Maybe they’re sipping margaritas on a big-ass yacht. Not everyone wants to be a revolutionary. You guys do and that’s great. It’s part of what makes you who you are. But you can fault everyone for not having the same goals. Mint will transform Intuit or Intuit will transform Mint. Either way it’s not the end of the world. In the worst case, someone will see an opportunity and build the next Mint.
Eveyone’s piling a lot of FUD on the transaction without waiting to see what develops. How many people have cancelled their accounts since the buyout? As if Intuit paid $170 million to fuck people over from one day to the next. That kind reactionary move is not only stupid, it actually becomes self-fulfilling. What incentive will Intuit have to maintain Mint and learn from its approach if everyone jumps ship? How big of a voice will the customers have when there are only a handful left? The truth is the FUD-spreaders are probably doing more to damage Mint’s long term potential than Intuit ever could – because at least they have an incentive to make it better.
Frankly, it’s a bit surprising to see you jump on that bandwagon.
Alan Pinstein
on 19 Sep 09+1
I hate Intuit. As a Mint user I was very saddended by this news.
Happy
on 19 Sep 09Firstly, have you ever talked to anyone at Intuit? I know people that work for Intuit and they love it. It’s consistently ranked one of the best companies to work for. They’re internal processes and toolsets seem current and no where near “left for dead.” Intuit may have been around for a while, but the people there are, as far as I can tell, top notch.
Secondly, it’s mind-boggling to hear that you don’t plan on 37signals out-living your generation. Your expectation that the next generation of companies will plow you under is dis-heartening and de-motivating. You should take another read of Built to Last in which Collins’ empirically shows how just the opposite should happen and how you can “achieve and sustain success through multiple generations of leaders, across decades and even centuries.”
Happy
on 19 Sep 09Okay, I’ve thought about it a bit more and will say that my last post might be an unfair shot at JF and 37signals. Maybe you didn’t mean to imply that you plan to be “plowed under” by a new company in the future, maybe I jumped to conclusions. Still, though my last post may be presumptuous and unfair, I don’t think it is any more so than your judgement of Mint.
Gaurav Sharma
on 19 Sep 09Taking $170,000,000 and keeping your free will to make further great products (whether at Intuit or elsewhere in the future) is not equivalent to bending over.
The reality is that if any of you guys were given even that amount to go off and do your own thing again from scratch, you would take it. The only reason you wouldn’t would be if you already had the $170,000,000.
Sure they could’ve grown even larger, but they could’ve been trampled by another startup. I’d rather not take that risk and take the money, especially if I had other future projects in mind where I could use that money. Just my 2c.
Anonymous Coward
on 19 Sep 09So often ignored: THE FOUNDERS DID NOT GET $170,000,000. This is not a $170,000,000 exit for the founders. The big winners here: The VCs. Shocker! The VCs owned the majority of this company, they are the real winners here.
Brad
on 20 Sep 09Eh, I’ve always liked Wesabe better anyways :)
Daniel
on 20 Sep 09Great Post. One thing though, why do you think the investors are to blame? How about the founders wanting to exit with some real money. In most cases, the founders create the exit, not the investors.
Berserk
on 20 Sep 09What I can’t understand is how they get anybody to give up their online banking user credentials. I know that here in Europe I would most likely be fully responsible for any fraudulent transactions made if the bank learned that I had done something so stupid.
Ian Betteridge
on 20 Sep 09The direct cause of this isn’t simply VC funding: It’s VC funding of service companies who give away their product for nothing, with no clear route to turn customers directly into money. If there’s no significant revenue stream, there is no way for founders and investors to get rich, other than selling out.
Free services are a guaranteed way of ensuring that new companies won’t ever challenge big existing players in the same markets.
Gaurav Sharma
on 20 Sep 09@Anon, I think it’s understood no one got $170M. I meant collectively, the exit amount was $170M for everyone involved, and they can all take their share and do more of the same if they like. 5 even more useful start-ups could spin out of the money raised by the founders from this one. I just don’t see how that is bending over for anyone. If anything it’s Intuit that has had to bend over and pay such a huge amount for a product that could have (but probably wouldn’t have) been developed in-house.
Startup Idiot
on 20 Sep 09Zappos, Mint, Omniture. The Deal; VC = 90% – 95% of the deal All Founders
MT Heart
on 20 Sep 09So when a 401k aggressive growth fund returns 25%, how is that done again?
A Mint Investor
on 20 Sep 09As an investor in Mint.com who will do very well out of this transaction, I can ASSURE you (as have Fred who correctly analyzed it and Dave who knows) that this was absolutely, positively not driven by the company’s investors, who would have loved nothing more than to keep moving forward as an independent. Why on earth do you think we put in $14 million just a few months ago? Instead, this was completely driven by Aaron, and the investors were SUPPORTING him in his decision.
Your post was really unfortunate, not only because it is completely wrong and inspired 150+ misguided comments from people who value your opinion, but because (being a rant written with absolutely no understanding of the situation, and no attempt whatsoever to check it out with anyone) it hurts your own reputation. This is a shame, because you are usually a really positive force for good in the industry, and many of us want to see your influence enhanced, not reduced.
MattieD
on 20 Sep 09WOW delicious and heated discussion! The perfect breeding ground for new ideas… heat is a great incubator.
It seems to me everyone is right. Sure, a misguided opinion flamed the debate, drew out Minty opinions and some truth.
I only hope this filters through to Intuit; I must admit we love Mint and the Intuit mix doesn’t feel like a glove fit. Jewellers tool and sledge hammer (sorry Intuit).
I feel sorry that Minty people feel hurt.
Portman
on 21 Sep 09Uhm, isn’t that exactly what happened? Intuit is putting Aaron Patzer in charge of all Personal Finance, including Quicken. I’m sure there are several late-40s executives at Intuit who aren’t happy that some punk-ass kid just obliterated their ascension plans. This is an absolute coup for our generation, and you should be thrilled. I am.
Anonymous Coward
on 21 Sep 09Portman: You think Aaron is going to stick around beyond his contract (likely 2 years)? He’s clearly only in it for the money (which is why he sold). He’ll never see another payday like that again if he’s an employee of Intuit.
Brady J. Frey
on 21 Sep 09Look… Anonymous Coward. We get you work for a company most likely associated with Intuit or Mint… or, you really do work for a public company and are afraid to tack your name on your comments.
But this is the internet buddy; while it garners the right for an anonymous post, it does nothing for your credibility. Every response you’ve posted up here, every follow-up rant, probably laughed at.
Now, I’m not here to argue if you have a point or not, I’m simply saying your point is moot when the anonymous name goes next to it. Drop your name, show your talent. Otherwise, you’re blowing out hot air simply for my entertainment.
Thank you- I hope you do post up with your name soon, it sounds like it’d be a fun debate:)
Christian Louboutin Sale
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on 21 Sep 09Quicken sucks, but TurboTax is awesome.
Here’s to hoping Mint replaces Quicken and tight integration between Mint and TurboTax becomes a reality before next tax season.
Julius O
on 21 Sep 09Damn right JF!
Adam
on 21 Sep 09In my fairly extensive experience with Mint I’ve found that it’s great – assuming you like repeatedly re-enterning passwords for several accounts every time you log and and then watching as Mint fails to pull data from half of the accounts you’ve set up (I just logged in and 5 of my 8 accounts failed to update – either they all work, everytime, or it’s useless).
In other words, Mint has only ever momentarily been anything other than a broken experience for me. My reaction to news of the sale was noting that if I’d been working on something for a couple years and it still didn’t work properly, and someone wanted to buy it for a ton of money then I’d probably sell out too.
I’d like to note that the idea of Mint is something that I’ve been badly wanting for years – sadly it’s only been a disappointment to me.
Robert Boyle
on 22 Sep 09What amazes me is why the DOJ doesn’t take a look at this or similar deals. Intuit must have a pretty dominant share in the category and so should not be allowed to acquire a significant actual and even more significant future competitor. Most antitrust regulators respond to user complaints about deals. So complain! Don’t get mad, get even.
Not a Fan of arrogant VCs
on 22 Sep 09@dave mcclure,
Seriously dude!!! What part was JF wrong about? You guys went for the dough and sold out… thats pretty cut and dried, Its amazing how holier than tough you arrogant and VCs jackasses are.
Julie
on 23 Sep 09Julie from Intuit here. Been following the conversation and want to offer up a link to a blog post from Scott Cook, Intuit’s founder, that’s on the MintLife blog. http://www.mint.com/blog/updates/intuit-not-out-to-change-mint-says-founder Think it may address some of the questions or concerns many of you have expressed about the acquisition.
Seth
on 23 Sep 09@JF – your smugness has slowly turned me from an enthusiastic supporter of 37s into someone who barely lets your company’s name leave me lips. I’m not sure if you all have a focused effort on branding… If you don’t, you should. If you do, it isn’t going very well (for me at least).
I remember a post on this very blog about the positioning of button on a page and how it increased click-through by a tiny percentage, but how that tiny percentage still meant quite a bit to your bottom line.
Judging from many of the comments I see on here nowadays, I’d say you lose that much just because of your attitude. I’m not saying you shouldn’t have written this post, I’m saying you should have written it differently.
Gareth Hanson
on 23 Sep 09I don’t blame them for selling out (sorry, choosing an exit strategy). It’s a piece of software – let it go…
Given the choice between developing and marketing a piece of software and spending the rest of my days surfing, snowboarding and rock climbing I know which choice I would make. Good on them, and if that makes me shallow so be it. There’s more to life than work.
This discussion is closed.