71–80 of 106 posts
I'm not sure I'd call $170m a great exit considering they were last valued at $140m. Generally VCs are looking for much more than a 20% ROI. I'd love to know if there were some special terms that make the VCs get more than their share here. Otherwise you'd think that either Mint was in trouble and needed this, or there was something else going on.
I think it's interesting to see people's reactions here -- a good dose of "oh no Intuit" paranoia. But honestly, did anyone not see this acquisition coming? I was expecting them to have to pay more, honestly, but I think it was fairly apparent that Intuit was the obvious buyer and would do what it takes. The other odd angle to this paranoia: How big do people really think the market of "people who don't trust Intuit…
wow. what really impresses me is mint isn't an engineering company - they're a marketing company that put some ajax on top of yodlee. yodlee's been around for over 10 years and they never built a brand or a community like mint. mint is now #1 on my 'notes to self' when i get so focused on engineering my way to a solution i forget sometimes its' better to partner with a competitor and move on. they outsourced the hard…
I had no idea that Mint was a layer on top of another product. Can you explain this in greater detail? What is Yodlee? (I realize I'm proving your point by asking!) And what is the nature of Mint/Yodlee's relationship?
They have a consumer front end. It's quite decent, actually, and it's free. Go to Yodlee.com and sign up. But they apparently make most of their money by (a) licensing their back end to services like Mint, and (b) serving as a kind of OEM for banks, who put up Yodlee's software rebranded as a part of the bank's website.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/13/intuit-to-acquire-forme...
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There is a good competitor, Wesabe. Disclosure: I helped get that product launched and still have some stock. They have many of the same features, are catching up in the polish area, and have a strong data privacy angle.
There's also http://www.buxfer.com , a YC company.
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There is a good competitor, Wesabe. Disclosure: I helped get that product launched and still have some stock. They have many of the same features, are catching up in the polish area, and have a strong data privacy angle.
There's also http://www.buxfer.com , a YC company.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had no idea that Mint was a layer on top of another product. Can you explain this in greater detail? What is Yodlee? (I realize I'm proving your point by asking!) And what is the nature of Mint/Yodlee's relationship?
Yodlee is the service that took on the painful and expensive problem of actually building an engine that can securely store bank and brokerage passwords and use them to scrape hundreds of different financial sites. They have a consumer front end. It's quite decent, actually, and it's free. Go to Yodlee.com and sign up. But they apparently make most of their money by (a) licensing their back end to services like Mint,…
If Mint is doing well, Yodlee is too. If Mint fails, Yodless will still have a diverse client base to support its business.
Lest we forget: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/22/google-in-final-negotia... Just because Mike Arrington says something is true doesn't mean it is. I'll believe it when there's an official announcement.
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The banks where I live use one time pads for authentication, which makes it impossible for Mint to work.
Which country?