Intuit To Acquire Mint For $170 Million

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/13/intuit-to-acquire-former-techcrunch50-winner-mint-for-170-million/

by adityakothadiya • 17 years ago

196 102 17 years ago

techcrunch.com

vaksel• 17 years ago

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

plinkplonk4• 17 years ago

" 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.

davidmathers3• 17 years ago

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.

dmor• 17 years ago

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

fnid• 17 years ago

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

bkudria• 17 years ago

I'm going to have to disagree with that. Wish I could tell you why.

dkokelley3• 17 years ago

Wish I could tell you why.

Is this because you have some secret knowledge about the deal, or just because you have a gut feeling about it? Your last sentence seemed a little suspicious, which is why I ask.

growt• 17 years ago

Seems a little to expensive to squash and there is some competition to take mints place. So IMHO thats not likely. It might happen by "accident", thought.

ecq• 17 years ago

congratulations!

falsestprophet• 17 years ago

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.

tonystubblebine2• 17 years ago

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.

jrbedard• 17 years ago

There's also http://www.buxfer.com, a YC company.

cdr• 17 years ago

Wesabe is not a good competitor IMO. When it first released it had a lot of promise (philosophy of data freedom, etc). Unfortunately that's pretty much completely been lost, which I guess to some extent because some of it was too hard to be realistically accomplished with limited resources and time (pulling your account data with software controlled by you rather than giving Wesabe your account password).

The core app itself has gotten continually worse. The "v2" that launched some months ago now was less usable, removed functionality (which may have been restored by now to some extent), was full of bugs, and was glacially slow and balky.

The only possible draw for Wesabe over Mint is the "community" part, which never interested me.

I guess I really see Wesabe as a money-management community with an app attached, not as a money-management app.

quellhorst• 17 years ago

This line of thinking is what spawned 100 me too YouTube clones.

immad• 17 years ago

Google is a more innovative home for tech companies than Inuit

run4yourlives3• 17 years ago

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.

davidmathers3• 17 years ago

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).

timr5• 17 years ago

The days of billion-dollar exits for zero-revenue companies are gone, and will probably continue to be gone for a long while to come.

dkokelley3• 17 years ago

Was mint a zero-revenue company? They have at least three angles to cash in on what they have (aside from selling to Intuit): A) Pitching offers from banks for credit cards and accounts. Banks are willing to pay for these, and they have the information to match the right accounts with the right people. B) Offering tax-filing services like TurboTax. C) Sellign aggregate data from their customers (Not my favorite, but it's not necessarily off of the table).

patio11• 17 years ago

Mint was making a rather significant amount of money as a credit card affiliate. (They also hawked other financial products, but that is almost certainly the most lucrative one. They have a lucrative CPA, a wider reach than home loans, and more repeat business in the demographics inclined to hand all their financial info to a Web 2.0 site.)

Many, many affiliates who look at a million dollars as "Meh, not a lot of money to me anymore" physically drooled when they heard of Mint's model, principally because almost nobody realizes they're an affiliate marketer. As an affiliate, you (potentially) make a lot of money but defensibility of your revenue is a constant driving concern since Google, the merchant, or other affiliates can always disintermediate you. But who can disintermediate the guy you've already given full read access to your financial life to?

SwellJoe• 17 years ago

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).

Tiktaalik• 17 years ago

Hopefully this means that Mint will be finally be available outside the US.

shiranaihito3• 17 years ago

The banks where I live use one time pads for authentication, which makes it impossible for Mint to work.

brown9-2• 17 years ago

Which country?

tedunangst• 17 years ago

How do they deliver your copy of the pad to you?

jlm382• 17 years ago

The question isn't so much why Intuit would buy Mint, but why would Mint allow themselves to be acquired so soon?

If Mint was doing so well, they'd continue on their path to completely outplace Quicken. Something about this just doesn't add up.

jjs• 17 years ago

The decreasing marginal utility of money meant that it was a good exit for the founders, regardless of whether it would have been optimal for the company in the long run.

wpietri• 17 years ago

It's important to remember that companies are run for the benefit of investors. These folks just took a C round, so I'd guess the majority of the shares are held by venture capitalists.

VCs don't fund startups to achieve competitive victory per se. Their job is to make money for the people who invested in their funds, and they do that by selling the shares they bought for more than they paid for them. The main routes for that are acquisition and IPO.

Right now, the IPO market is not looking healthy, and won't be for a while. Given that Mint's revenue comes from getting consumers to sign up for credit cards and other financial offers, their market will be anemic for a while. So they're an especially poor IPO candidate for the next few years.

That leaves getting bought. If that's what your after, and Intuit comes along and offers you a great price, why wouldn't you take it? Intuit needs Mint a lot right now, but maybe later Mint's bargaining position will be worse.

rgrieselhuber• 17 years ago

Goodbye, Mint.

veteran• 17 years ago

what's up with the acquisition price ..Intuit's recent acquisitions - paycycle, homestead, and now mint.com all acquired for 170 millions!

netsp3• 17 years ago

nice round number

pyre• 17 years ago

Probably an initial asking price. If anything it strongly suggests that there wasn't much haggling on the price. It would be a huge coincidence if they all haggled on the price and just happened to end up with the same number.

dkokelley3• 17 years ago

I have just one word: Damn.

FreeRadical• 17 years ago

I also think there is a good opportunity to take on the UK equivalent; Kublax. It's a seedcamp company that I tried to use a few times but it was too 'rigid' so I ended up going back to a google spreadsheet.

asb• 17 years ago

Yodlee will work with UK accounts, for whatever reason (perhaps legal?) Mint still haven't added UK support.

dca• 17 years ago

Wait - this is techcrunch. Didn't they just the other day also boldly claim that Facebook allows faxing of photos? Did they allow both Intuit and Mint a chance to respond? I'll be waiting a few days before cancelling my Mint account before I found out whether or not this is just another bad rumor.

jcl• 17 years ago

To be fair, Facebook did allow Techcrunch to fax photos. Their article was accurate, if not complete.

ojbyrne• 17 years ago

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.

agripa• 17 years ago

Official press release from Intuit: http://about.intuit.com/about_intuit/press_room/press_releas...

epall• 17 years ago

Wow! Nice exit, guys.

Elepsis• 17 years ago

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 with their financial information" is? For millions of people, it's already in Quicken... the step to doing that online, especially for a non-technical user, is not that big.

njharman• 17 years ago

I don't think it's about not trusting Intuit with financial information. It's about believing Intuit will make a mess of mint.com ruining good and useful about that site.

lurkinggrue2• 17 years ago

I just see them not getting Mint and I am reminded when they first added product activation to Turbo Tax.

The DRM would fail and support would tell you to buy the software again. That was enough to drive me from Intuit for good as it just seemed they were far too interested in profit over customer service.

That was enough to drive me from Intuit for good.

inaka• 17 years ago

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 stuff (scraping/banking relationships) and then focused on building a product. nice work, brilliant execution.

fjabre• 17 years ago

So is this yet another reason to keep your web app basically free for the masses..?

$170 million in 2 years seems like reason enough for me.. but as Inaka points out: their execution was brilliant. So if you do have a brilliant app maybe you should keep it free.

asnyder• 17 years ago

Unlike most other webapps mint has a very lucrative revenue stream. They're able to offer you alternative financial services targeted towards you based on the information they have about your current financial products. I'm sure the financial companies offering their products on mint pay more than your average ad or click through.Most webapps don't have this sort of opportunity.

gruseom2• 17 years ago

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?

mechanical_fish• 17 years ago

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, 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.

mattmaroon2• 17 years ago

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.

fallentimes• 17 years ago

But the 20% ROI was only for the last round of investors who hadn't participated before not all the investors.

mattmaroon2• 17 years ago

Right, but even then that's small right?

gruseom2• 17 years ago

I'm a little surprised by the fact that they sold now for what seems like a low price compared to what Mint would surely have grown into, given all the momentum they'd built up. It seems like they'd solved the hard problem of getting millions of people to let them into their bank accounts and were fast on their way to becoming a household word. I don't see why they couldn't have become a billion dollar company; the competitive landscape was favorable to them. This seems like a home run that turned into a double. I'd be interested to know the back story behind it.

joez• 17 years ago

It just got confirmed at Techcrunch50. They will running Quicken Desktop as well.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/13/intuit-to-acquire-forme...

fairramone• 17 years ago

Yikes! How do I close my account? Intuit == evil.

scotch_drinker• 17 years ago

This is terrible news for consumers of the software. Quicken is a horrible product if you like good user interfaces and software that just does the job. You have to constantly handhold Quicken and on top of that, many times your bank will charge you to let Quicken have access to your data. The big two (Quicken and Money) personal finance software suites had no way of competing with Mint. I would rather have had Mint start charging a fee for the service instead of selling out their users. Intuit will probably do both.

Obviously, if your reason for starting a business is to get a huge lottery ticket payout, keeping it free and hoping some megacorp buys you is a great idea. I'm disappointed that this was the plan from Mint. I had hopes they would find a business plan that made them money AND that was good for users.

Of course, if Intuit doesn't fundamentally change Mint, maybe all my handwringing will be for naught. I hope I'm wrong.

lurkinggrue2• 17 years ago

As a Mint user I must say this: Noooooooooooooooooooooooo!

ryanpetrich• 17 years ago

Perhaps now we'll finally get support for Canadian Banks?

Intuit To Acquire Mint For $170 Million

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