Mint

“We, at that time we had a competitor called mint, which was a very popular mobile application, but they bought their data. So they relied on a third party data infrastructure again, before the plot days, which was less reliable, causing a lot of mistakes.”

“The challenge that we found is you actually need people to give you Mint-like access to their data, because if I, if all I know is your paycheck, I don't know your credit score. I don't know how much debt. You actually need people to give you a fair amount of …”

“VCs have been chasing the ghost of Mint for 20 years.”

“We had, I think, like, over 11 VC firms offer to invest. We actually chose to do the round with no VC firms. It was all angels, so we raised from, you know, twenty-plus CEOs and founders. It was, you know, the CEOs and founders of, you know, PayPal and Stripe …”

“Aaron moved to Silicon Valley by himself. No network, no like formal anything. He locked himself in an apartment and built the Mint prototype by himself for six months.”

“I think I wanted to prove that I'm smart or prove that I'm successful or prove that Facebook when they fired me and then when mint fired me, like I can do it. And I think this book was probably, probably some of that, like, hey, I want some level of attention …”

“If you were able to say, I got mint for twenty five million dollars or fifty million dollars and you went to Twitter, like in other places, like you probably could have raised that money to buy it.”

“Mint was not a profitable company as far as I know. I'm pretty sure they raised a bunch of venture, and then they, We're burning money, and then they sold to Mint, what, 1015, somewhere, like 10, 13 years ago, is that right around 20, 10, 2020, whatever. Had t…”

“If they've said they're going to shut down and people know this, usually you want to already be there, like today or last month. It's like, oh, my product is a perfect placement for it. But if you're talking about spending a month or two To develop, and then t…”

“Intel, 14 months, Facebook, nine months, mint, nine months, kickflip, 10 months, which was funded by Naval Ravikant, and then I did Gambit, which did really well, and then Facebook sued us, and we got banned by another company.”

“So a friend of mine, Aaron Patzer, created something called Mint and ended up taking a bunch of eyeballs from big banks and other financial companies by hacking, essentially going, doing adversarial interoperability with their websites by scraping, which is so…”

“The kinds of innovations around e-commerce where people are paying using their mobile phones as with M-Pace in Kenya or have entirely alternate payment systems as with Alipay here, that's a kind of innovation Americans don't even recognize, right? Our innovati…”