Death by PDF. Ouch.
billFLO is dead. Most of you probably never heard of this startup – I admit I did not follow them, just met the Founder at a few conferences, liked him as “nice guy”. Ben covered them here, in fact he even became an Advisor for a while, his last post reporting the sale […]
I’m Lucky To Have Bet on Mint vs. Wesabe…
I’m sure as hell lucky to have bet on Mint when Microsoft Money died… but to be honest it was a flip of a coin decision, Wesabe, the other web-based personal finance management program looked just as attractive. Good product, perfect pedigre, strong VC funding. Now Wesabe is in the deadpool while Mint essentially became […]
Xero Personal – Is That It?
Six months ago Xero (see disclosure statement) announced that they’d be building a personal finance application to go with their business one. I was pleased at the time, in part because I believe the personal/business divide is an artificial one (see post here). This morning Xero flicked the switch on its long awaited personal edition […]
The Entrepreneur Thesis
I was going to save this post for a while but the Patzer Problem meme has forced my hand. I have a philosophy. A thesis. I call it the entrepreneur thesis. I’m not talk about the age old debate amongst investors whether you back entrepreneurs, markets or products (or as people like to hedge – […]
Online Finance – Rigid Segmentation Doesn’t Work
Recently ReadWriteWeb started a series taking a very high level look at online finance. One of the posts discussed the evolving online finance ecosystem. In the post, RWW editor Richard MacManus interviewed CEO of Xero (see disclosure), Rod Drury and repeated Drury’s assertion that online finance can be separated into four distinct types of markets: […]
Xero Goes Personal – This Changes the Game
An announcement from Xero today that I’ve known about for awhile but not been able to discuss publicly. From the media release; Online small business accounting software provider Xero (XRO) will launch a personal money manager in early 2010. Xero Personal will allow consumers to have a complete view all aspects of their finances. They’ll […]
21 Million Reasons For Mint To Sell
When I heard about Mint’s sale to Intuit for $170 million, I never imagined that it would be controversial. I posted my congratulations to the friends who made money in the deal, and moved on. It’s been a busy week, and I haven’t been keeping up with Twitter and RSS, so imagine my surprise to […]
What’s Wrong with Flipping a Startup for $170M?
Nothing, IMHO. But there’s a new debate on whether the Mint / Intuit deal was a good deal, or selling short-sightedly. I’m with Eric @CloudAve and Sarah @ TechCrunch in their call to “move past this incrementalism and start thinking big” – they just use Mint as a trigger to a good thought process. But […]
MinTuit: a Second Look. (You Will Be Assimilated).
TechCrunch50 could not have asked for a better start: they get to announce that personal finance startup Mint winner of the $50K grand prize @ TC50 two years ago just got acquired for $170M. Great exit for a startup – not so sure about concerned users. But the big question today is why it made […]
IntuMint – What an Intuit Owned Mint Could Mean
Image via CrunchBase Wow… exciting. Eagle eyed CloudAve stalwart Krishnan posted about the reported purchase of Mint.com by Intuit (disclosure – the Intuit Partner Platform is a consulting client but I had absolutely no previous knowledge of this deal nor any insight into Intuit’s plans). Many of us in the SaaS and personal/business finance software […]
Breaking News: Intuit To Acquire Mint
Techcrunch is reporting that Intuit (Previous Cloud Ave coverage of Intuit can be found here, here, here and here), the company that offers financial and accounting SaaS solutions to Small Businesses, is acquiring the personal finance service Mint (Previous Cloud Ave coverage of Mint can be found here and here) for $170 Million. Launched in […]
Intuit Did Not Kill MS Money. Microsoft Did. Slowly, Over Long Years. Here’s the Full Saga.
An era comes to an end on June 30th, when Microsoft discontinues their PFM (Personal Financial Management) product, Money. The story started outside Microsoft, with a startup named Intuit releasing their first DOS-based PFM software, Quicken. The concept was simple and powerful: balance your checkbook, keep track of your financial transactions electronically. It worked; in […]
The Cat is Out of the Bag (Again): The Hidden (?) Business Model in SaaS
Forget software: it’s all about (your) data. Hyper-growing Financial Management system provider and Quicken / MS Money challenger Mint recently raised eyebrows announcing their plan to sell anonymized aggregate customer data. Some reviewers were screaming, we saw bombastic titles like Personal Finance Startup Mint Wants To Sell Your Money Trail – but in reality the […]
Rudder’s Financial Data Breach is NOT a SaaS Failure
Wow, what a day. I was halfway through writing a post inspired by Mint’s intent to sell aggregate, anonymized customer data – and it was meant to be a positive post, pointing out the business model potential in SaaS. But somehow this message doesn’t feel right on the day people are up in arms finding […]
Business Finance/Personal Finance – It’s All Just Money
I came across a tweet the other day that was really interesting (at least to my small world). The official Xero twitter feed tweeted the following; This is actually bigger and more exciting than initial consideration would indicate. I was chatting with someone during a conference break the other day (as always the back channel proving […]
