About Aaron Patzer: Aaron Patzer is an internet entrepreneur and the founder of Mint.com, the financial management tool which was acquired by Intuit and has over 10 million users.
The typical workday, particularly in startup mode, is from nine to six or nine to seven, then you take a two-hour break to work out and eat dinner. By that time, you're relaxed, and then you work until midnight or one A.M. If there was no break with ...
Before Mint.com, I was a long-time user of 'Microsoft Money' and Intuit's 'Quicken.' Both were powerful tools, loaded with features and functionality around taxes, investment, budgeting - too feature-laden, in fact. They took hours to set up, forever...
I pitch Mint to everyone from investors to engineers, young and old, and I do it pretty much the same way: Here's the problem in the market place, here's how we solve it, and here's how we make money.
I think sports and bodybuilding were the only things that saved me from getting beat up. People are not pleased, for whatever reason, when you can answer all the questions in class. If not for the respect I got from track, cross-country, wrestling an...
I've actually started a number of businesses in my career. So I'm 28 currently, but when I was about 16, I started building Websites, and that's how I put myself through school. I went to Duke with a degree in electrical engineering, computer science...
At Mint, we developed five pending patents on our technology, ranging from categorization to the Ways to Save system that calculates how much a new financial product would save a user given their present financial situation.
I have always thought of myself as an inventor first and foremost. An engineer. An entrepreneur. In that order. I never thought of myself as an employee. But my first jobs as an adult were as an employee: at IBM, and then at my first start-up.
If you pay your credit card off every month, get a rewards card. One that gives you airline miles or that will give you 1 percent cash back at least on every purchase.
I actually don't invest in anything that is social, mobile, deals or ad networks simply because those are areas where there are so many players and so many other smart people in the space, I feel like I don't have a competitive advantage. So I tend t...
In the first three years of Mint, from when it was founded to when it was sold, I can honestly say that in a sustainable way, I couldn't have worked any harder on it.
Tell your idea to whomever will listen, and you'll get valuable market feedback before writing a single line of code.
One third of the economy goes through 'QuickBooks' in terms of businesses invoicing other businesses. Each invoice contains a connection between vendors, suppliers, and customers, and also the price of that connection. Representing the payment graph ...
I wanted a personal-finance tool for people who didn't want to be accountants: something you could set up in ten minutes and spend less than five minutes a week on. Mint is now that tool.
Mint is designed to put your finances on auto-pilot. Whether you log in or not, it will send you a weekly summary of your balances and biggest purchases, and how your investments and budgets are doing, along with sending you alerts on unusual spendin...
You don't start a company because you want to be an entrepreneur or the fame and glory that comes along with it. You become an entrepreneur, and you create a company to solve a real problem. And by real problem, I mean a problem that is going to exis...
Because Mint has access to all of your bank accounts and credit cards, we can detect fraud or unusual spending patterns faster than your bank, then send an email or text message alert to users.
Be careful not to start a company that really belongs as a feature of another company, like the 25 Twitter URL shortener companies out there. Pick a real problem that's here to stay.
Most people don't know what they spend in every single area, but they know they have a problem in particular areas.
