Hacker News Reader

Comment by vaksel | Hacker News Reader

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.

The part I don't get is why Mint would take the quick exit rather than fight the fight. It looked to me like they were well positioned for a long term victory.

$170 million is why. There was a good amount invested over a few rounds, but what's left is probably enough FU money for Aaron and team.

I hope they do manage to pull something out of this. At $31M invested, a $170M sale could end up getting sopped up by investors. Anyway, congrats to them and I hope it works out.

They just raised $14m at 140; unless they're being done over on liquidation prefs - and who knows, but on a succession of up rounds, doesn't seem that likely - they should be doing pretty well!

"It looked to me like they were well positioned for a long term victory."

True. But I would imagine 170 million is a lot of money to the founders. A bird in the hand and all that...

Also, they're now free from the work, have $170 mil, and can enjoy their lives for a bit.

170 Million is long term victory.

Crushing your enemy, seeing them driven before you and hearing the lamentations of their women is victory (e.g. Larry Ellison). $170 million is retirement.

"Crushing your enemy, seeing them driven before you and hearing the lamentations of their women is victory"

While some management "self help" books use war as a metaphor for business, business isn't really war. The Genghis Khan quote you used might be appropriate for a medieval era barbarian general, not so much a businessman in the 21st century.

"Victory" for a startup is meetings its founders'/investors' goals. No more no less.

The quote is from Conan the Barbarian: it is a funny quote, a funny post, and probably not meant to be taken as a metaphor for business.

"The quote is from Conan the Barbarian:"

You think? ;-)

And where did Robert E Howard get it from? Ole Genghiz said this a looong time ago. Look it up.

You say that, but I remember going to Oracle sales conferences in the 90s with lasers, employees lined up wearing black uniforms, Vanessa Mae playing her electric violin and a VP on stage ranting about bringing Oracle's rivals to their knees while the crowd cheered and punched the air.

Hell, I was only there for the canapes...

I'm sure it's a thrill to crush an enemy, but I think I'd rather take a few million and have some women console my "loss." Lamenting women just doesn't do it for me.

The reason is that Mint was created for an exit like this. They had no clear business model other than getting as many users as possible in order to scare Intuit. They have a great product, but I see no plan to make money with it.

Of course they have the thing of suggesting credit cards to users, but it doesn't seem that they were making any money on that...

In summary, if Mint was profitable, they wouldn't sell the company in the first opportunity.

Mint made referral fees on every offer they made "You can make 3% more a year by switching to ING Direct, etc". They made plenty of money, and all they needed was scale (which they proved they could do). The brilliance was that the offers were aligned with the user's wants/desires/needs and were super well qualified so Mint could charge more per referral.

They weren't created to flip - it was a solid business.

Hogwash. They were in a unique position to give trusted credit card reviews to their members, and collect the affiliate fees. Just because a site doesn't have ads or offer a premium subscription doesn't mean it has no business model.

If they had powerful enough investors it may not even have been their choice. Not saying it's the case, it probably isn't, but it's not impossible either.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com