Mint founder on Silicon Valley

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/14/the-value-of-techcrunch50-mint-acquired-by-intuit-for-170m-two-years-after-winning-tc40/

by aditya • 17 years ago

76 67 17 years ago

techcrunch.com

nobody_nowhere2• 17 years ago

excellent timing for the relentless techcrunch self-promotion machine...

ryanwaggoner• 17 years ago

Oh come on...

  1. This was written by Mint's founder, not TC
  2. This *is* a success story for TC
  3. There's nothing wrong with self-promotion :)

nobody_nowhere2• 17 years ago

Hey, is there no room for snark about a snarky website? I've got a horse in the TC50 race, so it's great that he bills it as "The Value of TechCrunch", but isn't really about the value of Mint?

cvg• 17 years ago

I'm with you Ryan, it is a success story for Techcrunch. I'm not a TC fan, but still not gonna let emotions get in the way of the facts.

mixmax• 17 years ago

"While everyone else was doing social media, music, video or the startup de jour, we tried to ground ourselves in what any business should be doing: solve a real problem for people."

This is good advice for all aspiring entrepreneurs.

zaidf5• 17 years ago

While I can see where he is coming from(and have myself grown tired of the social media stuff), his tone is kind of condescending.

Cool he sold his "real problem" startup; but to suggest YouTube, facebook aren't solving "real problems" is interesting in the least.

modoc2• 17 years ago

If I woke up tomorrow and one of those sites was down for good, Mint is the one I'd miss the most.

TriinT9• 17 years ago

When I think of solving "real problems", I think of:

- curing cancer

- cheap water purification

- vaccines for tropical diseases (the U.S. / European pharma companies have very little incentive to work on them)

- energy-efficient desalination

- energy-efficient computing systems

- efficient solar panels and cheap fuel cells

- easy access to high-quality learning materials (MIT OCW rocks)

and you think of YouTube, Facebook. Do you want to include Twitter, too? For Christ's sake, the "social media" virus has infected a lot of minds here on HN. Let's put things this way: 5,000 people die everyday all over the world of preventable water diseases, and you're talking of social media as a real problem?

thwarted• 17 years ago

I like the easy access to videos that Youtube provides as much as the next guy, but to think that Youtube and facebook are on the utility scale anywhere near where Mint is is also "interesting". Youtube and facebook are much closer to entertainment and time wasting, at least from the user standpoint, than they are to "real problems". Obviously, businesses can get much more "real problem solving" out of Youtube and facebook (at least in terms of marketing), but that is not a significant subset of their users.

adharmad• 17 years ago

They are not problems as such. youtube/facebook are more on the entertainment side of things. Nothing wrong with that........most of the money is in entertainment.

arohner2• 17 years ago

Wow, one line out of the whole story mentions TechCrunch, and they run that as the headline.

And it's slimy how TC implies that because Mint launched at TC50, it caused Mint to be acquired.

chaosmachine• 17 years ago

Well, they won $50,000 at TC50, it's hard to get a better launch day than that.

physcab• 17 years ago

Yeah I got the same weird feeling when I read that headline, but honestly, getting that type of coverage probably helped them considerably. It seems like most successful companies have the right proportion of hard work and luck.

arohner2• 17 years ago

Sure, good coverage helps, but with a good product and good execution, they'll get it from anyone. If the formula is good idea + hard work + good execution + coverage from TC, you can easily replace "coverage from TC" with "coverage from NYTimes", and still be successful. TC didn't cause Mint to be acquired, so they shouldn't pretend they helped.

motoko• 17 years ago

It's honest for TechCrunch to broadcast their own sincere celebration in Mint's success. It would be suspect if TechCrunch did not emphasize its own participation in Mint's headline success in a TechCrunch headline. TechCrunch doesn't deserve to be called slimy for this.

javery• 17 years ago

This story does seem to gloss over the VC piece, to me it read like they started with no money and got to $170 million without investment. Didn't they raise 30+ million?

condor• 17 years ago

it sounds like they they raised a little over $30M, and the last $14M of that was @ a $140M valuation.

abossy• 17 years ago

Five rounds of funding totaling $31.8M: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/mint.

axod7• 17 years ago

What he doesn't mention is how much money Mint was making (If it was making any at all).

Plenty of bubble valley hyping up about how it couldn't have happened anywhere else etc etc. Bleugh.

brown9-2• 17 years ago

I'm ignorant on how the TechCrunch50 conference works. Does TC have any ownership stake in mint?

aditya2• 17 years ago

No, they just won the $50k prize... but it seems like Arrington got some (advisor?) stock if you see the exchange between him, Calacanis and Aaron.

antonovka• 17 years ago

Advisor stock? That's an enormous conflict of interest for a editor at news ("news"?) organization covering the space.

jasonmcalacanis• 17 years ago

We were joking about getting the $50k grand prize back from TechCrunch50 2007. :-)

aditya2• 17 years ago

Here’s to the Mint team, from New Zealand, from France, Tunisia, Armenia, Ukraine, Russia, Canada, Greece, and all over the U.S.

Hm. So, they got their start in the valley and then hired people all over the world? It reads like an ode to the valley absolutely till the last paragraph...

jhancock2• 17 years ago

Perhaps the value of the story is that it pays to have your headquarters and founders in the valley. Your programmers, content writers, etc, can be anywhere. For many startups, having your labor outside the valley may be critical. Is this a trend?

kareemm• 17 years ago

i read it as ppl from those countries are on the Mint team and live in the valley.

mace• 17 years ago

Aaron Patzer also gave a talk at Duke that has some good advice for startup founders:

http://media.fuqua.duke.edu/Content/Groups/EES/2008/Patzer_3...

giardini• 17 years ago

I'm surprised they use Mysql, since IIRC it doesn't have transaction capability.

auston• 17 years ago

?innoDB?

jhancock2• 17 years ago

I agree there are better RDB choices for a finance app. But if you know the ins and outs of MySQL, it can work for you.

daveungerer• 17 years ago

I seem to be banned from TechCrunch and have to go through google cache if I really want to read something linked from HN. Still trying to decide if that's a good thing or not. It says:

TechCrunch is currently down for some scheduled maintenance. In the meantime, please check out the other sites on our network of blogs for the latest in tech news:

The above is followed by a list of links. Been this way for at least a week now.

ramoq• 17 years ago

sounds like they might have used java on the backend :)

bkbleikamp• 17 years ago

the backend is indeed java

caa09hh• 17 years ago

Mint is such a great website.

Can someone please tell me how they are able to access websites with scripts? What languages do they use to do that?

madh• 17 years ago

They get their information from Yodlee.

ieatpaste• 17 years ago

"We’ve attracted over 1.5 million users, found over $300 million in savings, managed $50 billion in assets, and helped people track nearly $200 billion in purchases."

I'm not sure I would sell - $170m seems rather low. Furthermore, they have so much room for expansion, which only will be crippled by working under a tax software company. They might be trying to automagically do your taxes for you, but they don't have enough relevant information without having it to be the same hassle as using the software.

Mint founder on Silicon Valley

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