2006 was a year of firsts for Mint.com aka myMint.com. It was the year Mint Software Inc. was officially incorporated, it received its seed …
2006 was a year of firsts for Mint.com aka myMint.com. It was the year Mint Software Inc. was officially incorporated, it received its seed round of funding, and formed the initial members of the Mint family. And it was the year I officially joined Mint as “#2”.
January 2006 – Aaron starts meeting with people who have VC contacts to discuss his business plan and see if they can connect him. He hopes that he can get funded with a concept, but most likely he will need to build a prototype.
March 2006 – Aaron soon finds that pursuing Mint and his day job are too much. He also realizes that if he wants to impress investors and prove that he has a vested interest in his company he should be pursuing it full time. So he quits his day job, incorporates Mint Software Inc., and begins coding daily in his apartment.
April 2006 – By this point Aaron is in full speed with development, and focused on solving difficult engineering problems such as categorizing transactions and figuring out how to automate the account sign up process.
Summer 2006 – Aaron continues to talk to people about his business plan, and also to discuss the most challenging problems they have with their finances.
August 2006 – Aaron meets Matt Snider, a front engineer and JavaScript guru. They go hiking, and Aaron tries to pitch Mint to Matt. Matt declines because he is currently working at startup. A few weeks later, looking for a place to live, Matt moves in with Aaron.
Bowling 2.0 begins, a league that brings together startups to talk shop over beers and bowling. Aaron signs up and invites Matt and Poornima to come along to mix and mingle with other startups.
Aaron starts aggressively fund raising. He meets with Sequoia Capital, who suggests that he join YouTube and head the engineering division. Aaron doesn’t bite. Other VCs are impressed by Aaron and want to hire him to come on board instead of invest in his company. Aaron kindly declines, and continues to pursue his own idea.
In a stroke of fate, Poornima gets laid off from Synopsys. Unsure of her future, she contemplates working for Mint, but Aaron hesitates to hire her, because she has no web development, web services, database, or startup experience!
Matt is growing increasingly frustrated with his current startup. He decides to take Aaron up on his offer.
September 2006 – Willing to give her a chance, Aaron hires Poornima as a contractor, and Matt joins Mint full time. Working out of Aaron and Matt’s apartment the team Mint team grows. At this point, Aaron is bootstrapping the startup, but realizes he needs funding to attract more employees. He starts talking to several VC firms.
October 2006 – After a few weeks of fundraising, Mint closes its seed round of funding with First Round Capital. The team goes out to dinner with their new VCs in Palo Alto.
Unable to spend time coding, developing the product, hiring, and formulating the business plan, Aaron starts to look for an engineering lead. He meets David Michaels, who is referred to him by another Mint interview candidate Mike Mettler. The Mint team interviews David and is pretty impressed. He is quickly hired as their VP of Engineering, and the first adult of the Mint family 🙂
Much to Poornima and Matt’s dismay Aaron finds office space in downtown Mountain View. The team moves out of Aaron and Matt’s apartment, and into the second floor of an old build one block off of Castro, only being able to afford the rent for 6 cubes.
By mid-October Poornima signs on as the third employee, but is affectionately called “#2” because engineers start counting from 0.
November 2006 – One month before the Mint Alpha is scheduled to release a competitor Wesabe launches, which is coincidentally the date that David joins Mint. Wesabe enters the market as the first Web 2.0 personal finance startup. The team nervously all log in to see what Wesabe is all about. Relieved that Wesabe’s product is more about socializing personal finance, they keep chugging along.
December 2006 – Mint releases its alpha version with about 100 users, mostly investors, friends, and family. A successful launch, focused primarily on a user being able to add accounts successfully, and see their transaction history.
