Aaron Patzer Quotes

"If you look on Amazon - if you do a search for personal finance, there are literally 20,000 books written on personal finance, and there's no real reason for it. I mean, personal finance is pretty simple."

"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."

"I've been spending quite a bit of time in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the U.K. as Mint is expanding globally, and I'm personally doing much of the research and business deals to make them happen."

"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."

"The way you dress or the car you drive or what you spend is to impress other people with how, I guess, successful and rich you are. But you're not, and you shouldn't, and who gives a damn what other people think anyway. So, that mentality, I think, is very destructive."

"If you think about photo sharing sites, the mobile photo sharing and social, there's no competitive advantage, there's no obvious business model, so I never play with anything like that. I avoid it like the plague."

"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."

"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 exist down the line."

"At 16, I started a web development business and had clients from the Netherlands, Caribbean, and across the country - none of whom knew my age because I could conduct all my business with a phone, scanner, and the Internet."

"Whenever I see a tree that is climbable, it must be climbed. Sometimes when I'm on a run, I'll just run up a tree, jump on a branch and swing off. My favorite tree, in Saratoga, gets me a good 75 feet up."

"The original idea before Mint was a life and goal planning system I called Carpe Viva. The idea was that all of life's goals, from buying a house, getting an MBA, or learning Spanish could be quantified in both time and money."

"Tell your idea to whomever will listen, and you'll get valuable market feedback before writing a single line of code."

"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 spending and low balances."

"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."

"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."

"Carefully calculate the potential size of your market to make sure you can grow. Before starting Mint, I knew that there were about 20 million people who had purchased 'Quicken' or 'Microsoft Money' over the years, and 80 million people using online banking in the U.S. alone."

"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."

"Most people don't know what they spend in every single area, but they know they have a problem in particular areas."