Aaron Patzer (born November 20, 1980) is an Internet entrepreneur and the founder of Mint.com, a financial management tool which was acquired by Intuit and had over 10 million users as of mid-2012.

Biography

Born in

Madison, Wisconsin Madison is the county seat of Dane County and the capital city of the U.S. state of Wisconsin. As of the 2020 census the population was 269,840, making it the second-largest city in Wisconsin by population, after Milwaukee, and the 80th-lar ...

, Patzer graduated from Central High School in Evansville,

Indiana Indiana () is a U.S. state in the Midwestern United States. It is the 38th-largest by area and the 17th-most populous of the 50 States. Its capital and largest city is Indianapolis. Indiana was admitted to the United States as the 19th s ...

. He completed his undergraduate studies in 2002 with a BSEE from

Duke University Duke University is a private research university in Durham, North Carolina. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco and electric power industrialist James ...

. In 2004, he completed an MSEE from

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...

. Patzer began his career in the Internet boom years of 1998–2000, working for Getawebsite.com and Miadora.com (an online jewelry store).

Mint.com

After a number of engineering positions and Internet startups, Patzer founded Mint.com in March 2006. According to Patzer, the inspiration for Mint.com came to him in late 2005 after being frustrated with how difficult it was to use the Intuit Quicken product. Patzer developed the full alpha version of Mint.com (in Java J2EE and

MySQL MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database o ...

) in 2006 before he met

Josh Kopelman Joshua Kopelman is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and philanthropist. Kopelman is best known as a founder of First Round Capital, a pioneering seed-stage venture fund that led the seed round in Uber. Josh has consistently been ran ...

(founder of

half.com Half.com was an e-commerce website and a subsidiary of eBay in which sellers offered items for sale at fixed prices. The items available on half.com were limited to books, textbooks, music, movies, video games, and video game consoles. Half prov ...

) and Rob Hayes at a STIRR dinner in the fall of 2006. The meeting led to funding, and Patzer launched Mint.com at the

TechCrunch40 TechCrunch is an American online newspaper focusing on high tech and startup companies. It was founded in June 2005 by Archimedes Ventures, led by partners Michael Arrington and Keith Teare. In 2010, AOL acquired the company for approximately $ ...

conference a year later, in September 2007, winning the $50K first prize. In September 2008, Patzer was listed in '' Inc.'' magazine's Top 30 Under 30. On September 14, 2009, Intuit announced that it would buy Mint.com for US$170M. Patzer was criticized for selling the company for too little. At the time of the announced sale, Mint.com had an estimated 1.5 million users. Patzer joined Intuit as VP Product Innovation, and he is also working on a new personal transportation system.

Post-Mint

In 2011, TechCrunch reported that Patzer's next project would be called "Swift" and was exploring the "feasibility of building a personal maglev vehicle transit system." According to Patzer, he was splitting his time between the new venture and his position at Intuit. He left Intuit in December 2012 in order to be able to focus on his new ventures. Patzer founded Leonardo Software Inc. in September 2013.

Fountain.com

In 2013, Patzer launched Fountain.com along with Jean Sini, CTO. The main benefit to using Fountain is that you can connect with any expert, on mostly any topic, for free from your smartphone. Fountain.com was sold to Porch.com in October 2015. Patzer stepped down as CEO and did not join Porch. Instead, he relocated overseas for personal reasons. Sini became the leader of Porch's San Francisco office.

Vital Software

In 2017, Patzer relocated to

Auckland, New Zealand Auckland (pronounced ) ( mi, Tāmaki Makaurau) is a large metropolitan city in the North Island of New Zealand. The List of New Zealand urban areas by population, most populous urban area in the country and the List of cities in Oceania by po ...

, to start Vital Software Ltd. Vital is said to "bring that consumer-focused mindset to emergency rooms and hospitals to help them organize patient flow."

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Patzer, Aaron Duke University Pratt School of Engineering alumni Living people Princeton University alumni People from Evansville, Indiana American financial company founders American technology company founders Intuit American people of German descent 1980 births