Sean Park Portrait
Quote of The Day Title
There's no bad time to innovate.
- Jeff Bezos

Bittersweet mint.

A couple years ago, I had just decided to try to build what would become Nauiokas Park.  I wasn’t entirely sure exactly how I was going to go about it but I had a vision of what it might look like and I knew the market opportunity – to develop technology-enabled disruptive business models in financial services and markets – was vast.  Also, Saul and Reshma’s inaugural seedcamp had given me an excuse (or a push) to stop ‘mulling it over’ and ‘get started’ even if I didn’t exactly know what ‘it’ was yet.

One of the first things I did was to start building a database of startups and private growth companies that I thought fell into my embryonic firm’s new investment universe,  and one of the first companies I added (on August 29th, 2007 to be exact) was Mint.com.  I had first heard of them early that year when they were raising a Series A round and the concept had always appealed to me (and I had always wondered why banks had been so oblivious to it.)  I had definitely hoped to be able to take a closer look once I had raised outside investment capital (they were already past the seed stage where I could have contemplated trying to play as an angel) and so it was one of the first companies on our internal ‘radar screen’.  Well as they say in the start-up game, it always takes longer than you expect and here we are – one giant financial crisis later – in the fall of 2009 and Mint will now be coming off our radar screen (into our archives) having gone and gotten itself acquired by Intuit for $170mn.

Mint.
Image via Wikipedia

On the one hand, it is exciting to see innovation in the space we are calling our own, succeed and be rewarded. And although I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting Aaron, I would like to congratulate him and wish him continued success with Mint and Intuit. Who knows, perhaps I’ll get to meet him in the future. Maybe when he’s contemplating his next venture? On the other hand, I can’t help but wonder if they sold too soon. I have to insert a disclaimer here – I have absolutely no idea what Mint’s financials looked like – so my view is entirely speculative, but I can’t shake the suspicion that if they had enough traction to get $170mn from Intuit, they had already hit and passed the inflection point and could have aimed at becoming (at least) a billion dollar company and owned the space.

Bittersweet? Well partly for not having invested as an angel but that’s just back-trading, so not really. Mainly it’s because – if the company was for sale – I would have really liked to have been in a position to run our slide-rule over it and, if it made sense, put in a bid, either alone or as part of a club deal with one or two private equity peers. If they have attained critical mass – which it looks like they may well have – it doesn’t take too much imagination (if you live in the sixth paradigm) to see them developing into a multi-billion dollar business over the next 5 years or so. Don’t get me wrong, I understand why management, the angels and the VCs, might find this exit attractive, especially given events of the past 24 months, but I can’t help thinking they’d done the hardest part and instead of letting a winner run, took their profits too soon.

PS If anyone knows where I can find Mint’s financials and projections, I’d love to have a look.
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Permalink||Comments|Filed under 'Data, FaaS, Sixth Paradigm'
Re-inventing venture capital. On seedcamp 2009 (and beyond.)
  • Ed
    @Sean -- a followup to your wondering about why Mint sold out so soon to Intuit ... check out Jason Fried's post from the 18th of Sept:

    http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1927-the-next-ge...
  • Was just stumbling through the commentary across the web on the Mint/Intuit deal this morning over breakfast and was surprised at the amount of negative energy focused on Intuit. (They bailed out of Europe years ago so I've had no first (or even second hand) experience with them for almost a decade.) But the team and investors at Mint.com must have been aware of this; and if it played out like eddie suggested (which sounds highly plausible) all the more reason to send them packing. Trading 101. But most VCs don't know how to trade. It's a learned skill. Some people are more or less talented at it but nonetheless it is a craft that you learn not something you are born with.

    As for the founders wanting to 'take a sabbatical', I have enormous sympathy with that but find it hard to believe that it was a driver here - the company wasn't that old, and it seems (but this could just be usual deal grease) that Aaron will get a big divisional management job with Intuit, which doesn't sound like much of a sabbatical...

    One 'the huddle breaks' of course everyone has to be 'on message' but I wonder if there was any dissent in the Mint boardroom? Was everyone a seller?

    In any event Eddie, you are right that there is 'no sense' belly-aching...
  • Mint was also on my radar for a long time (picked them up at the Finovate conference in NY). I have to agree with you that this was a billion dollar business sold too soon. I think experienced, and perhaps more personally wealthy founders, would have pushed the boat out on this one. Just FYI, the cost of developing this proposition versus the cost of developing EGG, or Halifax Personal Finance shows how the cost of entry has dropped. On the downside, Mint never tested their Data-API to 3rd parties as a revenue stream, so maybe this was more about the potential upside of data driven services than cross selling.
  • eddie
    @Sean -- there's no sense belly aching about not being invited to bid on a Mint acquisition. Consider the possibility that Mint was not looking to sell but Intuit came knocking on the door and dangled the $170M carrot which was too much to resist. Not all people share your view of taking things to the billion dollar level ... the Mint entrepreneurs may have been weary and decided it would be nice to take a sabbatical ...

    @Rhward3rd -- you're not the only one who is thinking of bailing, check this out from Daring Fireball (John Gruber's blog):

    http://daringfireball.net/

    Intuit — the company so inept at shipping Mac software that they were apparently caught unaware that the Java bridge had been deprecated years ago and removed from Snow Leopard, rendering QuickBooks unable to be activated — has acquired the personal finance management web site Mint.com.

    If you’re a Mint.com user, you can delete your account at the bottom of the Profile → About You page. (Thanks to Blake Seely.) Good luck, you may need it.
  • Rhward3rd
    My first emotional response to hearing that Mint had been acquired by Intuit was... To shut down my account and start over someplace else.

    Why? Because I'm pretty sure Intuit has a lot of marketing pukes that will be given a mandate to "make this deal work!". As such, I the humble Mint customer, will be subjected to EVERY half-baked cross-sell/up-sell idea they hear about.

    The Minters knew we were the geese that were going to lay their golden eggs, so they at least restrained themselves a bit when it came to this stuff. But I fear that the non-equity, salary only, employees of Intuit will see me as a cow to be milked instead.

    Last time I checked geese had no teats. But we do have wings...
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