When I first started visiting mint.com, I registered for the website and next, added my bank accounts to confirm login details.

And I thought: “What in the world am I thinking? Why should I provide my online bank account login information to some one I don’t and will never know; why would I provide this to a complete stranger?

But then I started exploring. Mint.com is actually backed up by excellent venture capitalists such as DAG Ventures, Shasta Ventures and First Round Capital.

I then dug more into the technology of how they store banking details. Surprisingly, and to my relief, I learned that whatever the information I am providing to mint is not actually stored in any of their systems. What it actually does is pull my banking transactions to evaluate how I spend my money. After reading a little more about the technology I was much more comfortable and was able to convince my self to give it a try. So I did. And the moment I completed the process, mint.com grouped all my expenses, my credit card spending, merchant-based check card transactions and each were separated into the categories I spend my money on: rent, restaurants, shopping, etc. I was thoroughly impressed by application and its service.

So later I did the same with my business transactions to compare the expense charts with Quickbooks. Surprisingly, the graph produced by mint offered more clarity. I did not foresee myself using much of Quickbooks in the near future.

It was at that moment that I knew: mint.com would surely rise to the sky.

Yesterday I received an email from mint.com telling me that they have not seen me around for months (meaning I did not login to the website for quite some time). That email reminded me about mint.com so I went ahead and visited their page.
What I saw first surprised me: there was a Quicken logo at the very top.

This was exactly my guess when I visited mint.com in 2007: this company will be an extremely good asset to either any bank or companies such as Quicken Intuit, Peachtree, or Microsoft or any other accounting software firm for that matter. I was damn sure that this company would be acquired soon by one of those three companies (not including Bank of America because they already has this kind of software in their online banking system where you can pull all bank and credit card account and create real time portfolio): Wells Fargo or Citi may not have had the chance due to the financial crisis but surely any of the aforementioned would see the immense potential and opportunity.

I am highly impressed that Aaron Patzor, the founder of mint.com, made his company worth 170 million dollars in two years time (from Q3 2007 to Q4 2009). He had successfully built a product with a great user interface and built his company from scratch into something huge. I really admire this guy.

Interestingly enough, at 30 years old and now a sought after millionaire, Aaron still drives still drives his 1996 Ford Contour with 135,000 miles.

Click the link below to read Aaron’s Interview with Inc.com

http://www.inc.com/articles/2009/09/mint-qa.html

Thank you for tuning in!