I have made no mystery over the years that out of the 65 companies I have invested in over the past 5 years, Mint and its CEO Aaron Patzer, was one of the most exciting. It definitely met the “3-asses” rule: a young, brilliant, kick-ass CEO (Aaron), a big-ass, phenomenal, market (personal finance) and a smart-ass product (mint.com).
I met Aaron in July 2006, thanks to the introduction of Sanford Barr (Aaron owes you a big one man ;), and I was impressed by his determination and ambitions, and promptly decided to invest in the Seed round eventually led by my good friends of First Round Capital. After building its product for over a year, Mint launched at TechCrunch40 in Sept. 2007 (and won the $50,000 prize). And from thereon, it developed a fantastic service, adding 1.4M users, and this morning, announced that Intuit had agreed to acquire the company for $170M in cash.
Aaron was just on stage at the TechCrunch50 conference, two years later, to confirm the “rumor”. Aaron will run Quicken Online and Quicken Desktop over at Intuit. He also wrote a great guest post on TechCrunch, relating to some of the fundamentals of building Mint.
Huge congratulations (and thanks!) to Aaron, the entire Mint team and all my fellow co-investors for this fantastic success. Exiting at $170M in this environment is no small feat.
Rob Hayes has a great post on the history of Mint, which he witnessed, and contributed to, as a board member since the Seed round. And yes, Mintuit was an easy one. The New York Times also wrote about the acquisition here and here. Josh Kopelman points out that Aaron (Patzer) always preaches fiscal discipline, he's now a member of the First Round Capital “blank check club” -- and should he ever start another company, he can come to us to claim it ;-), and I'll offer the same!
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