Intuit To Acquire Mint For $170 Million

#1

Post by adityakothadiya » Mon, Sep 14, 2009, 6:24 AM UTC

Intuit To Acquire Mint For $170 Million
techcrunch.com

Re: Intuit To Acquire Mint For $170 Million

#2

Post by vaksel » Mon, Sep 14, 2009, 6:25 AM UTC

personally I'm disappointed with this, I just don't see Intuit as the right company to run Mint

Re: Intuit To Acquire Mint For $170 Million

#3

Post by dmor » Mon, Sep 14, 2009, 6:32 AM UTC

couldn't have benefited better people, congrats to Aaron and the whole team

Re: Intuit To Acquire Mint For $170 Million

#4

Post by fnid » Mon, Sep 14, 2009, 6:34 AM UTC

This has "buy'em to squash'em" written all over it.

Re: Intuit To Acquire Mint For $170 Million

#5

Post by plinkplonk » Mon, Sep 14, 2009, 6:40 AM UTC

vaksel wrote: post #2

personally I'm disappointed with this, I just don't see Intuit as the right company to run Mint

" just don't see Intuit as the right company to run Mint"

It isn't. But (due disclosure: I worked at Intuit once and while I have no special knowledge about this deal, I know how Intuit works)

Intuit had no choice really. Mint was high on management's radar and they were always scared of it. Intuit doesn't "get" the web, the whole company is structured around its success on the desktop and there are too many layers of management to make any kind of innovation successful (One on team I saw, there were 22 managers and 3 developers! I kid you not!).

Intuit talks a lot about "innovation", but the fact is that Mint (and FreshBooks) have been chipping away marketshare every quarter and they couldn't build a mint clone/mint killer (they tried a few times).

Intuit has no choice but to acquire mint if they wanted to have a solid web offering. Will they run it into the ground? certainly, over time, as soon as the mint devs vest and leave and the regular Intuit folks take over. Of course this leaves the space open for another competitor!

Congratulations to the mint team! The one thing Intuit has in plenty (for now ;-)) is money! Enjoy!

EDIT: If I were Intuit and I wanted to make this work, I'd keep the Mint.com team around and let them work in their own fashion, outside the regular Intuit corporate structure. Knowing Intuit this will never happen.

Re: Intuit To Acquire Mint For $170 Million

#6

Post by ecq » Mon, Sep 14, 2009, 6:42 AM UTC

congratulations!

Re: Intuit To Acquire Mint For $170 Million

#7

Post by falsestprophet » Mon, Sep 14, 2009, 6:45 AM UTC

This could be an excellent opportunity to start a competing outfit. I bet Inuit will have choked on Mint by the time a new competitor is launched.

Re: Intuit To Acquire Mint For $170 Million

#8

Post by run4yourlives » Mon, Sep 14, 2009, 6:47 AM UTC

So, it seems that the market for a mint clone will be open pretty soon.

I'd imagine there will be a lot of disaffected users here eventually.

Re: Intuit To Acquire Mint For $170 Million

#9

Post by davidmathers » Mon, Sep 14, 2009, 6:48 AM UTC

This is a terrific exit for Mint

Seriously? Maybe I don't get it but if Yahoo had bought Google or Facebook had bought Twitter would those have been terrific exits? Why are they selling out so quickly?

I don't trust Intuit and will probably stop using Mint (I was just getting started in the past few months).

Re: Intuit To Acquire Mint For $170 Million

#10

Post by SwellJoe » Mon, Sep 14, 2009, 6:51 AM UTC

They also acquired PayCycle (among the leading online payroll companies, and one I used for a couple of years) a little while back. I switched all of our books and payroll over to Intuit products recently, mainly so the part-time bookkeeper will be happy, but haven't been able to figure out how PayCycle fits into the lineup, or whether they will be merging Intuit online payroll (which costs a measly $9.95/month) with PayCycle (which is about fifty bucks per month).