Can anyone guess how much Mint's founder will walk away with? (from crunchbase it looks like they took about $30M in funding and sold for $170M)
I've always figured $10M was walk away (from life) money. ($2M to buy a decent house - $8M to invest so that even with a modest return of 5% you'd still be making about $400K a year)
I'd say that's a great 2 years of work, I don't need Google Money and I'd be fine with that.
5% isn't as modest as you think once you take into account inflation and taxes, and the fact that the stock market isn't going to magically go up 10% every year (as many people erroneously assume). Living off of 2% of your assets is a safer and more sustainable assumption.
Would you really be gaining 8% per year? I'm not sure how returns work when you're talking about millions of dollars. I assume you are going to leave 3% behind per year for inflation. Just to be safe, I'd rather say you take 3% out each year which would still be $240k, so it's still a lot.
I agree with this assessment of the situation. I still think that what 37signals is doing is way more interesting (not just their business, but their blog, and the community they're leading), but who am I to criticize either of their careers? They've both had success beyond my wildest dreams.
37signals is doing what they like to do . . . and Mint is completely justified in doing what they chose to do.
Once a company grows to a certain size, things change. Some entrepreneurs can grow with the change. Some can't or don't want to. Running "a big company" is different than launching a startup and requires a different set of skills and attitudes.
why is what 37 signals does cooler? what do they do? they sell software and have slowly scaled, they aren't trying to go public or take over the world. They aren't even that innovative on the web.
there are probably hundreds of companies in an almost identical situation.
They're cooler because they so thoroughly document what they're doing, they have fun doing it, and they don't take shit from people in the process?
As a kid in high school, 37signals was one of the sites that changed how I thought about the Internet. I came across it, and suddenly here were some people who had pretty good taste in design, made some cool products for some cool people, who sounded like people when they talked. That's still how they come across. There are a shitton of people who think that the point of the Internet is fakery and deception and marketing—including half the people here—and I give props to the people who're willing to be professionals without handing in a part of their personality at the door.
The guys at 37signals like what they do, they're fairly successful, fairly famous, they do good work, and despite all that they sound like people that I know in person, they're willing to take risks and have unpopular opinions and sound stupid on occasion. Meanwhile, all respect to you, pclark, but ben says he thinks 37signals is cooler though they've both achieved wild success, and you come in here all determined to remind us that 37signals isn't unique and aren't cool and aren't innovative.
I guess what I'm saying is that the 37signals attitude of "We're people doing something" is the opposite of the common Hacker News attitude of Objectivist Manifest Destiny, and so they're cool for the clichéd reason that some people had to learn from them that it's okay to be yourself and not somebody else.
I have a lot of respect for jasonfried, I'd kill to sit down and have a coffee to chat shop with him.
37 Signals are a company with great marketing and an okay product. Kudos to them, etc.
But its not right [in my eyes] for people to aspire to that. Why would you aspire for that? Are you going to sleep well knowing your product is okay? Aren't most people on Hacker News technology people rather than marketing? Isn't that the core difference - we focus on building great things.
Mint "selling out" is better than sitting on your products enjoying the small profits for the rest of your life.
Do something awesome, life is too short to be mediocre.
It is. If only their products or support were. They were snippy with me when trying to get support for Basecamp (which kinda sucks, but we're too lazy to move elsewhere) because my email replies weren't working. Turns out it's because they come from an Exchange Server account. You're basically dirt to them if you don't use gmail.
They've built a rinky-dink startup entirely on the back of their blog about how to do startups. That's ironic, but brilliant.
We tried to use Basecamp for internal project scheduling stuff, and it fell down badly for us. I went through a period of thinking Basecamp kinda sucked. I've started using it for customer evals for our product, and it is shining for me.
When you have the problem of managing lots of short-term relationships with defined processes and lifecycles, where you need freeform comms throughout the relationship that multiple people on both sides of the engagement can keep track of, Basecamp just-works. I went looking for alternatives and, apart from the pricing, I don't see a better alternative.
I think a big problem with Basecamp (and to a lesser extent Highrise) is that the marketing appeal is broad but the business value is narrow, so they bring in customers who get turned off. But why would they care? It's easy to cancel service, and they're doing well with their core customers. It seems kind of silly to go through a lot of effort to make people happy that aren't your core customers, or to sacrifice a single marketing lead to avoid irritating the Hacker News Commenters of the world.
Matt, sorry you had a bad experience with our support folks. If you had a problem I definitely want to hear about it. Please email me directly with all the details so I can look into it: jason@37signals...
To be fair, I don't think the President (Jason) responding to Matt (a high-profile user) in a forum both contribute to is an example of shining customer service.
Key relationship building, certainly, but that's a different metric.
To be fair, I wouldn't be at all surprised if Jason doesn't have the foggiest idea if Matt is a high profile user. He (or rather, 37s) is like Kibo: mention that you had a bad experience from them online, and WOOSH! there he is.
Now, I'm not privy to what happens next, but assuming what happens next is an honest attempt to make things right, why wouldn't you want a company doing that?
Obviously it helps them to appear responsive and to get the "dirty laundry" more out of the public eye, but a private exchange is probably more appropriate for individual incidents anyway.
Where it goes wrong is when you have people from a company searching the internets and having something like a team of lawyers descend, or a lackey with absolutely no authority or ability to fix the problem. Or astroturfing. But the president, offering a direct contact to help? Assuming the damage is already done, I can't see any better way to respond.
[edit]: one more thing: He says, "sorry you had a bad experience with our support folks. If you had a problem I definitely want to hear about it."
The first thing there is "sorry". Not "We pride ourselves on...", or "What was the problem?", or even simply "Give us a call", but rather: "Sorry". This means a lot. The customer is not put in a position of having to defend why they had an experience; 37S is taking for granted that he/she is upset, and is trying to make it right. There's not an assumption by the company of "I'm sure we didn't screw up", but--if not an assumption that they screwed up--at least an open mind that they could have screwed up. yeah, they are known for great customer service, and for good reason. But to stay on top of that, from the company's perspective, is to constantly entertain the possibility that you could be wrong.
To be fair, I wouldn't be at all surprised if Jason doesn't have the foggiest idea if Matt is a high profile user.
I'm actually pretty sure he does. This is simply based on observations of previous threads that I appreciate you may not have had as of yet.
Now, I'm not privy to what happens next, but assuming what happens next is an honest attempt to make things right, why wouldn't you want a company doing that?
I don't recall saying that I didn't. I think you are overreacting to my comment without fully understanding it. I'm a pretty big fan of 37S overall, mainly because I like their "we're building a successful company, not a buying opportunity" message.
That doesn't mean I'm going to give credit where credit is not really due.
I don't think I'm a high-profile user in any regard. I think we have whatever pricing plan is second or third from the bottom.
I will try to dig up the email thread, though it was quite some time ago. I just gave up on trying to use the email to comment feature, and as a result offloaded most of my personal to-do management to Outlook (which kinda sucked) and then Evernote.
I don't remember exactly why I was unhappy with the support. I do remember the support person asking me for more information and not having the foggiest idea why she (I think her name was Sarah) couldn't just look it up somewhere herself.
Regardless, I didn't mean it to air any dirty laundry. They have a reputation for poor service, which was my real point.
The article says "After busting your butt for two years on a startup salary -- and suddenly you have the chance to become a rich hotshot with a big job in a big company -- wouldn't you?"
I'm assuming that some/many entrepreneurs would rather work on their startups instead of working in "a big job in a big company".
I'm not necessarily suggesting that one is better than the other or commenting on Mint in particular, but I think that the reporter is mistaken in his assumption that people would always choose a big job in a big company.
His deal seems particularly attractive given this new information. One can imagine that he has been working 100-120 hour weeks, has no external life. Now he has buckage, gets to continue doing what he did over the last two years, and gets to run something similar. Given that he still gets to work on his startup, what is not to like?
After the acquisition closes, the Mint.com team will be leading the development of both Mint.com and Intuit’s existing personal finance products, Quicken desktop and Quicken Online. The fact that Intuit has agreed to acquire Mint.com, and is leaving our team intact, is evidence that Intuit has been impressed by and wants to build upon the user experience that Mint.com offers. We’ll not only improve upon that experience for Mint.com but also bring our know-how to the Quicken product line. Destroying the Mint.com user experience does not make sense for Intuit, Mint.com or any of our users.
Leaders of large companies often understand that they need to bring in outside influence and new ideas to remain competitive; that's a good part of why they make acquisitions after all.
The issue is - and you'll understand this if you've ever been acquired or have have tried to innovate in a large organization - that large companies are not run by their C-Suite Executives.
Large Companies are run by their internal cultures, bureaucracies and departments; often there are several separate instances of these things too. Like all cultures, they are resistant to being changed unless that change comes from within.
Given that, acquired companies tend to be mis-matched in trying to contribute what they know. Even if some of the company listens, there are many areas that aren't interested in what they have to say.
The best thing that could ever be hoped for in an acquisition is that the acquired company is run as an independent subsidiary, simply required to funnel money to to parent company. Any time the two companies are asked to merge in any real way, the result is inevitably, regardless of how it is done, the loss of the bought entities ideals, culture and business practices is inevitable.
"37signals' Fried, by the way, is a rare case in the Internet industry, in that 37signals has never had to raise a significant amount of venture capital."
That statement really shows how ignorant the business press is of the reality of business on the web. The vast majority of web companies never raise money. They are not glamorous, are not written about on the blogs every day, and many are very small, but some of them do become very large businesses as well.
I'm surprised Mint was successful at all, given that you have to give them your financial account login ids and passwords to use their system. Storing such data centrally seems like a big risk to me.
They don't store it themselves; they use Yodlee to actually store everything, and Yodlee is the one that actually has done all the work (and it's a huge undertaking) to keep everything secure.
With all the writing about this deal and what gets stored where I think yodlees' profile in the blackhat community has risen considerably in the last couple of days.
I've always figured $10M was walk away (from life) money. ($2M to buy a decent house - $8M to invest so that even with a modest return of 5% you'd still be making about $400K a year)
I'd say that's a great 2 years of work, I don't need Google Money and I'd be fine with that.