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Rachat de mint

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The next generation bends over. Mint’s sale to Intuit really pissed me off. Why should I care? Because I think it’s indicative of a VC-induced cancer that’s infecting our industry and killing off the next generation. I don’t know the full backstory, but I’d bet this sale was encouraged by a Mint investor. Here’s a fresh new company that was gunning for an aging incumbent.

And not only gunning, but gaining. They had a great product, great design, and great potential. They were everything their main competitor, Intuit, was not. But here’s what happened: Intuit, last decade’s leader in personal finance, just became the next decade’s leader in personal finance. Mint was a key leader of the next generation of game changers. As more great new companies are absorbed into big old companies, a whole new generation of change is lost. Thomas Jefferson said “Periodic revolution, ‘at least once every 20 years,’ was ‘a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.’” But today it seems like the old is doing the plowing. Mint Is Yodlee’s YouTube. A lot of people at Adobe weren’t all that happy when YouTube was acquired by Google for $1.65 billion in 2006. After all, YouTube was just a pretty front end to the core Flash web video technology created by Adobe. YouTube got rich.

Adobe got peanuts. Mint, which sold to Intuit earlier this week for $170 million, is Yodlee’s YouTube. Yodlee, which has raised at least $116 million over its 10-year lifespan (a lot of that was written off in a recapitalization), is the leading provider to account aggregation for banks. Very early in Mint’s life they signed a sweet deal with Yodlee to provide all that back end technology. And Yodlee never thought to ask for equity in Mint in the early days of the company, so they didn’t make anything from the acquisition.

To make things worse, Mint gave a “substantial” amount of Series A stock to Hite Capital in exchange for the Mint.com domain name. The final insult: Yodlee won’t even be able to collect those small fees any longer from Mint. Did Mint Cave To Investor Pressure Selling So Soon? Rumor Mill: Intuit to Acquire Mint.com for. Mint.com ou le triomphe du Web 2.5 | slate. - Image de une: bonbon traditionnel russe vert, Flickr/Mi55r - Intuit, la société qui possède déjà Quicken et TurboTax, deux logiciels à succès de gestion de finances personnelles, vient d'acquérir Mint.com pour 170 millions de dollars. Mint.com est une start-up vieille de deux ans. Elle élabore des outils gratuits qui permettent aux économes et aux fauchés de gérer leurs finances en ligne.

Quelques observateurs (parmi lesquels l'entrepreneur du Web Jason Fried), ont fait remarquer que l'accord avantageait clairement Inuit: on voit ici une société certes reconnue, mais en perte de vitesse (et qui facture ses services à des prix exorbitants) se débarrasser d'un adversaire proposant des services gratuits, et ce pour une somme relativement modeste, renforçant par là-même son pouvoir de marché. (L'année dernière, la chronique «Shopping» de Slate.com avait élu Quicken.com et Mint.com meilleurs outils de gestion de finances personnelles en ligne).

Le Web 2.0: économies d'échelle publicité.