It is. If only their products or support were. They were snippy with me when trying to get support for Basecamp (which kinda sucks, but we're too lazy to move elsewhere) because my email replies weren't working. Turns out it's because they come from an Exchange Server account. You're basically dirt to them if you don't use gmail.
They've built a rinky-dink startup entirely on the back of their blog about how to do startups. That's ironic, but brilliant.
We tried to use Basecamp for internal project scheduling stuff, and it fell down badly for us. I went through a period of thinking Basecamp kinda sucked. I've started using it for customer evals for our product, and it is shining for me.
When you have the problem of managing lots of short-term relationships with defined processes and lifecycles, where you need freeform comms throughout the relationship that multiple people on both sides of the engagement can keep track of, Basecamp just-works. I went looking for alternatives and, apart from the pricing, I don't see a better alternative.
I think a big problem with Basecamp (and to a lesser extent Highrise) is that the marketing appeal is broad but the business value is narrow, so they bring in customers who get turned off. But why would they care? It's easy to cancel service, and they're doing well with their core customers. It seems kind of silly to go through a lot of effort to make people happy that aren't your core customers, or to sacrifice a single marketing lead to avoid irritating the Hacker News Commenters of the world.
Matt, sorry you had a bad experience with our support folks. If you had a problem I definitely want to hear about it. Please email me directly with all the details so I can look into it: jason@37signals...
To be fair, I don't think the President (Jason) responding to Matt (a high-profile user) in a forum both contribute to is an example of shining customer service.
Key relationship building, certainly, but that's a different metric.
To be fair, I wouldn't be at all surprised if Jason doesn't have the foggiest idea if Matt is a high profile user. He (or rather, 37s) is like Kibo: mention that you had a bad experience from them online, and WOOSH! there he is.
Now, I'm not privy to what happens next, but assuming what happens next is an honest attempt to make things right, why wouldn't you want a company doing that?
Obviously it helps them to appear responsive and to get the "dirty laundry" more out of the public eye, but a private exchange is probably more appropriate for individual incidents anyway.
Where it goes wrong is when you have people from a company searching the internets and having something like a team of lawyers descend, or a lackey with absolutely no authority or ability to fix the problem. Or astroturfing. But the president, offering a direct contact to help? Assuming the damage is already done, I can't see any better way to respond.
[edit]: one more thing: He says, "sorry you had a bad experience with our support folks. If you had a problem I definitely want to hear about it."
The first thing there is "sorry". Not "We pride ourselves on...", or "What was the problem?", or even simply "Give us a call", but rather: "Sorry". This means a lot. The customer is not put in a position of having to defend why they had an experience; 37S is taking for granted that he/she is upset, and is trying to make it right. There's not an assumption by the company of "I'm sure we didn't screw up", but--if not an assumption that they screwed up--at least an open mind that they could have screwed up. yeah, they are known for great customer service, and for good reason. But to stay on top of that, from the company's perspective, is to constantly entertain the possibility that you could be wrong.
To be fair, I wouldn't be at all surprised if Jason doesn't have the foggiest idea if Matt is a high profile user.
I'm actually pretty sure he does. This is simply based on observations of previous threads that I appreciate you may not have had as of yet.
Now, I'm not privy to what happens next, but assuming what happens next is an honest attempt to make things right, why wouldn't you want a company doing that?
I don't recall saying that I didn't. I think you are overreacting to my comment without fully understanding it. I'm a pretty big fan of 37S overall, mainly because I like their "we're building a successful company, not a buying opportunity" message.
That doesn't mean I'm going to give credit where credit is not really due.
I don't think I'm a high-profile user in any regard. I think we have whatever pricing plan is second or third from the bottom.
I will try to dig up the email thread, though it was quite some time ago. I just gave up on trying to use the email to comment feature, and as a result offloaded most of my personal to-do management to Outlook (which kinda sucked) and then Evernote.
I don't remember exactly why I was unhappy with the support. I do remember the support person asking me for more information and not having the foggiest idea why she (I think her name was Sarah) couldn't just look it up somewhere herself.
Regardless, I didn't mean it to air any dirty laundry. They have a reputation for poor service, which was my real point.
$170 million is "fuck you" money. Aaron and I'm guessing many of the top founders/executives made enough money to never ever have to work again. Fake revolutions are cute and all, but think of how awesome it would be to never ever have to work for the man again. They can do anything they want...for profit, not for profit, TBD (Y Combinator). This wasn't some BS talent acquisition; this was an absolute shitload of money to make in a very short period of time (3 years!).
Techcrunch and many others constantly harp on how people should be working on stuff that can help save the world. But the reality is, most of us have bills to pay and a table to put food on. With FU money you can do whatever you please without worrying about your family.
Just use yodlee.com (they power Mint's backend anyway). I've been a happy user for years.
I agree with your second statement: to the uninformed observer (me and everyone else in this thread) something does seem off. Bank and credit card leads pay from $50-$200 per pop let alone the riches that mortgage leads bring in.
I was in fits of laughter during the initial Mint acquisition HN thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=821615) when people accused Mint of being unable to make money. To some, advertising and subscription payments are the only way to monetize.
Maybe with the current economy the bank and credit card leads don't pay out as well? And the mortgage stuff is still in total downturn.
Perhaps between the crappy economy and whatever Yodlee is charging for their data, Mint may not be anywhere near profitable. They may have acquired a lot of users, but they have to pay Yodlee for all those users' data, and cover the costs by the fraction of those users who go for the bank/credit card stuff suggested.
During the time I used Mint, none of the financial offers presented were better than my current ones, so I never bit.
"We didn’t have money for writers, so most of our original blog content then was guest posts from other personal finance blogs, plus a couple of columns on people’s worst financial disasters. To build demand, we started asking for email addresses for our alpha 9 months in advance of launch. Then when we had too many people sign up, we asked people to put a little badge that said “I want Mint” on their blogs to get priority access. We got free advertising and 600 link backs which raised our SEO juice."
Instead, we relied on press. It’s where I spent 20% of my time. I’m spending it right now while writing this."
I disagree. Without adequate coverage of financial institutions, a nice frontend is useless. Users don't want to use a pfm that they can't add all their accounts to. I'd argue the backend (Yodlee) was very instrumental in making Mint easier to use and thus more popular. Competitor sites did not have as much coverage.
For me, 10 million dollars would be enough to satisfy all of my personal and family needs: house, vacation money, pay off close friends' debts, tuition, health insurance, etc. More money just means more good that can be done in the world for my larger human family.
Also, it is likely that nothing was going terribly wrong. The exit was only small for the later-round investors, who also made a killing on their investment, though not as extreme as the earliest investors.
A company should always have a sell price. Intuit met Mint's.
Your relationship with your friends will change because of something like that, it is very very nice of you to want to share the wealth, but someone that has a sense of honour themselves will either have to refuse your offer or they will accept and it will hurt their sense about themselves.
Should you ever find such wealth be very careful how you approach your friends with such plans. If someone in my circle of friends would make me an offer like that I'd see that as an intrusion, even if it was meant well. Just that you got into some money does not mean that you have the right to 'fix' others lives, they may get a lot more satisfaction out of fixing it themselves.
Giving money away is a very tricky thing to do if you do not wish to change your relationship with people.
But kudos for looking after others, I really appreciate that that would be one of the first things you'd think of.
Your relationship with the people you know will change, regardless (been there, done that). Many of my long-time crowd are ecstatic to make $15/hr, and we still hang out on a regular basis.
After a few mistakes, here's the tack I've learned to take.
Treat everything you give as a gift. Don't expect _anything_ in return, and say so very clearly. This keeps you from giving more than you would like to, and prevents the recipient from asking for more.
Any kind of loan leaves the door open to additional requests; after all, they're going to pay it all back, so what's a little more? Which leads to resentment if you decline.
Considering it as gift prevents you from going overboard - if a gift is inappropriate (paying off a friend's debts falls here), then don't do it.
In my experience, the best way to give money to your friends isn't for the necessities, but for the luxuries. When I go to a party, I bring plenty of really good booze and/or beer. If we go out to eat, we go to nice places, and I pick up the tab. On trips, I pay the difference between the Motel 6 and the Sheraton (or whatever).
Part of it is couching it all in the right terms. You aren't doing this for them, you're doing it for yourself. I don't like cheap vodka, I like the good stuff. I don't like Motel 6. Then don't bring it up again.
The tone you want to set is that you don't want to share your money, you want to share your experiences. After all, that's how we all became friends to begin with.
ADDENDUM: it is also important to leave openings for your friends to help you, in whatever way they can. Right now, I'm prepping my house for sale, and I've had a stream of friends come over to help me clean and fix things. I could just pay someone, but this way is much more fun.
> Part of it is couching it all in the right terms. You aren't doing this for them, you're doing it for yourself. I don't like cheap vodka, I like the good stuff. I don't like Motel 6. Then don't bring it up again.
That may be, but it depends on the people. There are people that could resent this and see it as you rubbing your money in their face.
It's just easier to say, "it works for me." By saying 'it works, at least for me,' you're claiming that it will always work everywhere 100% of the time... then saying "but I could be wrong." This is just anecdotal evidence. It's possible that none of your friends are the kind of people that would react that way, or that you have a personality that causes people to quickly forgive you for such things.
It's just easier to say, "it works for me." By saying 'it works, at least for me,' you're claiming that it will always work everywhere 100% of the time... then saying "but I could be wrong." This is just anecdotal evidence. It's possible that none of your friends are the kind of people that would react that way, or that you have a personality that causes people to quickly forgive you for such things.
Had he suggested that he'd pay off his mother's mortgage, I doubt there would be many objections. For some of us, close friends are closer than family. If I came into a sum of money that enabled me to help the people closest to me, I'd do it in a heartbeat - and I'm quite certain that my friends would, too.
I also can't imagine taking a heartfelt offer from a close friend as an "intrusion," but then I'm sure it depends on the relationship and the personalities involved.
I think the distinction isn't between family and friends- it's about the way different relationships work.
It would be okay to loan money to your parents or your children- there's a clear power relationship in both of these, of obligation both ways. It would be less okay to loan money to a sibling, where equal footing is a necessity for a healthy relationship.
I can see paying off my your parent's mortgage [if I could], they did after all give me free board and food for ~18 years etc. I do after all owe them. I'm not sure about friends and other family, they'd probably see it as an insult - I'd probably offer to help them get training/education either as a loan or a gift [again if I could].
Your relationship with your friends will change because of something like that, it is very very nice of you to want to share the wealth, but someone that has a sense of honour themselves will either have to refuse your offer or they will accept and it will hurt their sense about themselves.
That depends very much on the way you bring it. Indeed, if you offer to pay off their debts, of course it will hurt their ego.
But if you bring it like "here's 50 grand, i don't need it, i care about you, do with it what you want", well, most people will have a hard time rejecting it. Since they don't associate it with their debt, but rather as part of sharing in your success.
I'm not sure I'm making my point clearly enough, sharing in the success of someone else is not the same on a satisfaction level as achieving your own is.
By giving that money you are denying someone the chance of achieving that on their own and keeping parity with you. Especially if you say 'here's 50 grand, I don't need it', as though 50 grand should be peanuts to them too.
The asymmetry of the situation is what causes these problems.
The reverse also happens, plenty of people may assume that because you go back a long time they have an automatic right to whatever is yours. This is also not a healthy point of view.
There is nothing more poisonous to a friendship than to have one party suddenly come in to a lot of money. It takes a lot of tact (on both sides!) to get through that without getting peoples feelings hurt.
The best way to avoid this problem is to earn the money together with your friends.
> I'm not sure I'm making my point clearly enough, sharing in the success of someone else is not the same on a satisfaction level as achieving your own is.
> By giving that money you are denying someone the chance of achieving that on their own and keeping parity with you.
I don't refute the fact that it's a tricky situation, but I think you and the OP might be talking about different situations.
There is a big difference between a fairly well payed programmer that needs to pay $20k of student loans and might take a while to do so but still live comfortably, and someone who is unemployed, the bank just repossessed his car and his family is about to be thrown out of their house due to unpaid mortgage.
There were a few years when I was growing up when my parents' business was going under (and bleeding money like nobody's business) and things looked very bad.
They managed to get out of that by their own eventually (at a significant cost, not just financially), but a lot of people don't.
I think it would be a better idea to loan them money to pay off their debts. Of course, your loan should be interest free, shouldn't have any strings attached, should give your friends very long time to repay - otherwise there wouldn't be any difference between your loan and the 'other' loans in the first place.
2) you have some terms and conditions or attach some "strings"
3) you require collateral
4) you make your friend sign papers, and you leave "legal" options open
When I loan a friend, all I say is "dude, this is just to help you, I know you are going through tough times. No way this is to insult or patronize you. you can return the money when you can, even if it takes you 5-10 years"
That is trust and friendship, one friend helping the other, nothing more nothing less and definitely not a business.
It's bullshit. Invariably lending money to a friend leads to resentment. You are putting a dollar amount on the friendship. If they don't pay you back, will you still be friends? if yes, then why not just give them the money?
Its just like borrowing your friend's car. You use it for a weekend, and return it back, don't you? Does your friend take "deposit money" from you for it? Does he charge you "rent" for using his car? No. That is the difference between your friend and a rental car company.
You are putting a dollar amount on the friendship
Nope, I am not. All I am saying is, if I am in a better position than my friend, and he needs help, I am willing to help. He has to borrow money from someone anyway, why not from me, interest free and trouble free? He can sleep peacefully at night, knowing that I wont foreclose his house or something, if he is going to be late in repaying, or even if he is not able to repay at all.
If they don't pay you back, will you still be friends?
Yes. We are talking of FU money here, and also assuming that I am in a situation like Mint founders. I am in a position to loan money, without affecting my own lifestyle. Obviously, if I am myself living paycheck to paycheck, this won't apply.
why not just give them the money?
because, I don't want to patronize them, and don't want to insult them.
Frankly, I don't understand why you call this bullshit. Loaning money to friends happens all the time. I've done it many times, and have always been repaid.
False dichotomy. You don't have to say "we're not friends if you don't pay me back" but you can still want to be repaid. Who here hasn't loaned a friend a small sum of money? My friends and I are constantly in debts of 20 or 30 dollars to each other. I've had a friend/roommate owe me a month's rent without any problem. At no point were we every "putting a dollar amount on the friendship".
It's often a bad idea to mix friends and business/money. That doesn't mean it is always a bad idea.
Ironically, giving interest-free loan can produce complicated tax implications. It seems that loaner potentially may be taxed on the difference between 'reasonable marker interest rate' and (in this case) 0%. Receiver may potentially become liable for gift taxes.
FU money isn't only a big lump sum of cash. It can also be a residual flow of payments for SaaS or royalties or dividends. As long as that money is coming in every month, you're fine and can do most anything you want as well.
Flipping a company is just one way to say FU to the man.
I've said FU to the man lots of times, even when all I had was some cash I had saved up from working really hard and long hours at a salaried job.
There's a sense out there that you need lots of cash to break free, but lots of homeless people break free all the time and many of them are way happier than those receiving big exits for startups. That is not hyperbole.
Breaking out of the machine is about mind not money. If you believe it is about money, you'll never break free even if you have lots of money.
Even with lots of money in the bank, you get bored. You end up wanting to go back into the system, to be part of a team, to do something productive. FU money is not all it's cracked up to be and it's mostly those who have never had it who think the world of it.
"lots of homeless people break free all the time and many of them are way happier than those receiving big exits for startups. That is not hyperbole."
I'm sure you can find several homeless people who are happier than several people who made FU money in a short amount of time, but I'd be willing to bet that on average, people who started up a company and sold it for dump trucks full of cash are happier than homeless people.
I wouldn't be too sure about that. Many lottery winners are actually less happier a year after winning the lottery than before. Many also wish they had never won.
Of course, this could be psychological due to them not having done anything to earn the money.
Can you cite any studies that demonstrate this? This is often stated as fact, and I'm sure 'many' lottery winners are less happy, but I would still assume the vast majority would see massive gains in their quality of life and would report increase in their overall happiness.
I'd love to read up on any actual data gathered on the topic if you know of any.
"Here's two different futures that I invite you to contemplate, and you can try to simulate them and tell me which one you think you might prefer. One of them is winning the lottery. This is about 314 million dollars. And the other is becoming paraplegic. So, just give it a moment of thought. You probably don't feel like you need a moment of thought.
Interestingly, there are data on these two groups of people, data on how happy they are. And this is exactly what you expected, isn't it? But these aren't the data. I made these up!
These are the data. You failed the pop quiz, and you're hardly five minutes into the lecture Because the fact is that a year after losing the use of their legs, and a year after winning the lotto, lottery winners and paraplegics are equally happy with their lives."
"This American Life producer Alex Blumberg talks with Ed Ugel, who had a very unusual dream job: he bought jackpots from lottery winners. When you win the lottery, your prize is often paid out in yearly installments. And Ed would offer winners a lump sum in exchange for their yearly checks. He's talked with thousands of lottery winners, and the vast majority, he says, wish they'd never won. Ed is writing a book about his years in the "lump sum industry" called Money for Nothing: One Man's Journey through the Dark Side of Lottery Millions. It comes out in September 2007."
Most lottery winners piss away their winnings and end up where they started.
It's kind of surprising how many people are absolute idiots at managing their money. My girlfriend's parents are broke again after blowing over $100,000 in a year on leather couches. Their manufactured home is still not paid off.
I suspect it's more from their not being able to manage the money. One thing getting your money by working, saving, investing, creating your own company does teach is how to manage money.
lots of homeless people break free all the time and many of them are way happier than those receiving big exits for startups. That is not hyperbole.
Do you personally know some? Tell us about them. They must be remarkable people.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but your claim sure sounds like hyperbole. I know a few startup-exit-receivers who seem pretty happy. Of course it's hard to tell these things (http://robinson.bokardo.com/poem/richardcory and all that).
The only modern case that comes to my mind is the homeless guy who recently left $4 million to NPR. I seem to recall hearing information about him that made me think he might have been happy.
Well, let me take a harsher stance than you and call BS on his 'that is not hyperbole'. Most homeless people are rather miserable, if not about their immediate situation or their worries about the near future, then about the psychiatric diseases at least half of them are suffering from. Being homeless is hard and anyone that has taken any trouble to know something about homeless people knows that these romantic notions are utter BS. Being homeless is easy as long as you have the ability to fall back on a home, a fund, family, etc. Most homeless people do not have that option.
Tell that to Elon Musk. There'd likely be no Tesla and certainly no SpaceX if he hadn't sold PayPal to eBay. Anything customers 'lost' in PayPal's acquisition was vastly surpassed by the innovation of his subsequent companies.
I think what we don't know here is the dream/ambition of the founders. Maybe their dreams were too expensive to chase or they otherwise didn't feel equipped to chase them.
Fuck you money (for a lot of people) isn't "go buy a Caribbean island" money. It's "I can finally build the company I WANTED to build" money.
(anticipating response of "Why not just build the company you're passionate about to begin with?") Some companies cannot practically be built without vast piles of money/power/connections/etc. As a previous commenter pointed out, you can't bootstrap the SpaceX prize. :-)
Also-- people change! A guy I know's wife just got diagnosed with breast cancer. If he sold his startup tomorrow to chase a different dream, could you blame him?
It was a metaphor. In other words-- The Mint guys might take that FU money to enjoy a life of leisure. Or they might use it to work on what they REALLY want to work on.
And obviously FU money here has a very different meaning than to punt a nasty boss-- given that they people who made the decision to sell here WERE the boss.
Owning your own company doesn't make you the boss; it means you have a lot more bosses, your customers. The advantage of working for yourself or your own company is that there is no ONE boss who can fire you. The disadvantage is having to deal with many more, if individually weaker, bosses.
But I think it's stuck because, for a lot of people, it is buying a Caribbean island money; it is their chance to say "fuck you" to everyone who still has to work for a living. Their ambition is to display their wealth conspicuously, and otherwise sit on their asses while other people envy them.
I can't imagine someone working because they want to saying "fuck you" to someone who works because they have to, and especially not to the degree that the perpetual vacationer would. In fact, I can imagine the Caribbean island owner being condescending to the willing, but rich, worker because they aren't projecting the image of a rich person. Rich people don't work; but this one does, so he's a misfit.
I think for the crowd that gathers here, "fuck you" money should really be called "next level" money. They likely have that ambition you refer to, where getting rich is just a means to even greater ends. It's hard to quell intrinsic ambition, even if one of the hopes of that ambition has been fulfilled. And it's hard to develop ambition, even when one has the means to become so, but didn't rely on ambition to get there (e.g., lottery winners, etc). This is why most people call it "fuck you" money; it's where they can stop faking ambition and show how little they actually had before getting lucky.
Actually it's not about saying "fuck you to everyone who still has to work for a living". It's about saying FUCK YOU to the bosses who tell people what to do; and who doesn't want to say THAT, at least occasionally?
It's just a guess, not a certainty. Your mind seems pretty made up about Mint without knowing all the details surrounding the acquisition.
What's kind of funny is the vast majority of the 37signals philosophy I agree with. Hell, we turned down VC funding in part because we really liked what you guys were able to do without it, and the fact that investor interests and founder interests often conflict. But to lambast someone for taking the payday of a lifetime without knowing all the circumstances surrounding not only their company, but their life, doesn't seem right.
"Fuck You money" is not a myth. I know a fair few that have accepted FU money and built companies specifically to get FU money. Hell, I'd sell up for $170 million.
I'm shocked at how arrogant your comment comes across. Different strokes for different folks.
You're posting this on a site built by a guy who had the time and money to dedicate himself to helping create startups because it's a "cool hack". That certainly looks like FU money to me.
And for what it's worth, I think YC is way cooler than ViaWeb.
Hmm... there is a point where principle matters more than money. A company is not just a chunk of cash... how can you motivate people to spend their life with a company when it's just a payout? I grew up in Europe and there is something about taking a stance (if you can afford to). I like Jason Fried's general idea to focus on building good products.
Reminds me of something my uncle told me: "The rich are different from you and me: they have money...and you don't!"
Seriously though - you can never have too much money, but this doesn't change the fact that it is way better to have, say $10M in net worth vs. $100,000. Of course if you have $10M you're still going to want to be a billionaire, but now you can choose to either work hard to become a billionaire or do something entirely different. You're still going to have to find your place in the world---everyone deals with this---but now you have a huge amount of freedom you didn't have before.
Reminds me of something my uncle told me: "The rich are different from you and me: they have money...and you don't!"
This was a famous exchange between Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald said, "You know Ernest, the rich are different from you and me." Hemingway replied, "Yes, they have more money."
The phrase was lifted for the title of a book of anecdotes about rich people that I once saw a stack of on a coffee table at Restoration Hardware. I picked one up and it turned out to be freaking hilarious. I heartily recommend it: http://www.amazon.com/Rich-Are-Different-Priceless-Quotation...
For example, there was the English aristocrat who, when told he could no longer afford to keep three pastry chefs (French, Danish, and one other), said "What? Can't a man have a biscuit when he wants it?"
Then there was Christina Onassis' habit of sending her private jet out to get a twelve-pack of Diet Coke every time she ran out. The pilot was asked why he didn't just bring back a full load. His answer: "Because Madame does not want old Diet Coke."
I could quote another dozen stories from memory and this book has been sitting in storage for like 10 years. A seriously hilarious book.
FU money is the worst reason to do startups. Most startups which are driven by FU money as the goal, dont really get anywhere. They destroy lives and drain the best years of some of the brightest young people. The ones we hear about going big are really a very very small fraction - you are better of buying lottery tickets if you really want FU money.
Do a startup by all means, but do it for the right reasons. There is no better life waiting for you after you get FU money. Do a startup only if running one is the best use you can think of your life.
Are you claiming that money does not have diminishing marginal utility? (i.e., the famous "s-curve"; it's in AIMA but I can't find a convenient picture with Google.)
If you're the usual person that economics tries to model, then yes, money has diminish marginal utility that drops off quickly. The value of money drops off for everyone. If you ask me, 170 million doesn't buy a whole lot of votes in Congress. But this is irrelevant.
What's valuable is the ability to create money, not the money itself. Investing is hard. You could probably ask pg about how hard it is. These guys had a really good investment, and these guys, bright as they are, may have very well killed their golden goose.
It sounds like you're saying that society does not have a diminishing marginal utility of money, and/or that they shouldn't have axed the golden investment opportunity for everyone (had they IPOed). Is that right?
The marginal utility of money is presumably diminishing for any entity. But the curve is stretched when you look at the whole of society (or any larger group) rather than an individual, for two reasons. 1. Having $1M isn't 1000 times as good as having $1K, but giving $1K to 1K people is about 1000 times as good as giving $1K to one person if all the people matter roughly equally. You're not moving so far along their utility curves. 2. There may be big projects that deliver lots of value at very high cost. (The fact that this is possible is basically a consequence of #1.)
I'm not sure this has very much to do with whether the Mint guys would have done better to keep going independently rather than taking the $170M, though.
What would have happened if Mint had said no, and then Intuit made a bigger offer to Wesabe (and they accepted)? People who were already used to using Intuit products might be tempted to try out Wesabe instead of Mint, making it that much harder for Mint to convince such users to give them a try.
That's not to say Mint did any of us a favor by accepting Intuit's offer, but their decision may not have come as easily as you think.
I think we're discussing an attitude that is a symptom of something deeper. Currently, it is not really legal to not make money. So, the majority of people work out of necessity, and do jobs they wouldn't choose otherwise.
Being able to stop working as an obligation and start working as an authentic contribution, passion and creation is an important and very, very satisfying lifestyle change.
Alright, so Jason's post was a bit more vitriolic than it needed to be, but I don't see how this contributes meaningfully to the conversation except as a cheap-shot to attempt to discredit Jason.
You seem to assume that being a hugely profitable company is the right thing to be, and that anyone who isn't is bitter and requires a outlet to vent about how their failure isn't their own fault.
What I've seen 37Signals blog posts advocating is building a business such that it is enjoyable enough to run that it doesn't matter if it has a potential multi-million dollar exit. There is nothing wrong with them advocating such a philosophy, and nothing wrong with running a company that holds to such a policy provided no one involved was bullshitted about the terms.
The terms that Mint was running on are different, though, partly because there are investors and founders involved who entered into the deal expecting a profitable exit. Nailing them to a cross makes no sense, because their goals weren't the same, nor do I think they were ethically compelled to be.
But please, let's not make this conversation about flinging one line barbs at Jason and 37Signals so they can send one line barbs flying back. All that does is raise the heat level in the room.
I think it's fair to say that 37 Signals' aspirations are, at best, orthogonally related to profit maximisation. They're there to enjoy building things they like, their way.
No, I'm not some sort of Kool-aid drinking acolyte. But ultimately, I'm trying to do the same thing - to have fun and do what I find fulfilling, at the expense of considerably faster and more lucrative routes to making more money - so I can appreciate their general angle.
On the other hand, the Mint guys worked for 3 years, earned $170m, and now they can 'enjoy building things they like, their way', for a long ass time without needing to answer to anybody except people who use their product.
I'm not sure what's not to like about that. The real question is about what those 3 years were like. If they kind of enjoyed them, that's just gravy.
(Of course, I'm aware of Survivor's Bias here. Not everyone gets bought for $170m.)
No argument with that. I was just offering a way to look at the "shut up, you've just got sour grapes because you're not making loads of moolah!" line.
Probably mostly the reader, perhaps a little themselves.
Really, your question could be raised in response to virtually any person or entity with a clearly identifiable ideological stance of which they are frequent exponents. Just about anyone with a philosophical disposition and/or a discursive character - a tendency toward narration - is a candidate for, "Why do you keep saying what you think all the time?"
I guess it's because that's what intelligent people or groups of them who conceptualise themselves to have some sort of intellectually coherent purpose do.
It's a Cult of Personality. Benign, sure, and helpful even, but that's what you have to do to get your message across: repeat it, over and over, from a million slightly different angles.
Only nerds -- and people with no persuasive skills (or influence) -- think that saying something "the right way," once, is productive.
Of course it is. It's helpful for the people who've already bought into 37Signals' philosophy of doing business. For them, it's a reminder -- in-the-group signalling -- like a vaccination. If people nod and go, "Yeah! That's so true!" then they are confirming their group identity and commitment to the philosophy they've adopted.
If you're not thinking about these things all the time when you're reading things, you're not getting maximum usefulness out of them.
It's not just what people say, or what people read, but WHY.
They didn't have to work for the proverbial Man before they got rich, really. I would surmise that one of the reasons they started Mint was to avoid having to work for what most people consider to be the Man (e.g., typical corporate jobs). Not the only reason, but I imagine it wasn't last on the list. Talented, ambitious people have this option available, even without being "fuck you" rich, by joining companies that don't suck; the option they don't have available is "do nothing." Not all work is thankless toiling.
And you don't need FU money to have more than one option available that prevents your family from starving. Others may disagree, but I thought this was a bit hyperbolic and cliche. There are millions of shades of gray between $170 million and poverty, and I can't imagine the Mint guys, and their families, were going to go hungry if they didn't accept this deal.
But I get what you mean, and I'm inclined to agree with your larger point. The founders of Mint aren't beholden to anyone but themselves and their shareholders, and I wouldn't expect them to put their lives on hold for my comfort, convenience, and need to have faith in the goodness of mankind. In the same position, I'd have done the same.
The solution to this, if Intuit completely drops the ball in managing Mint well, is for someone else to launch another competitor to take Intuit on. That gets the best of both worlds, people getting rewarded for creating something great, and people always have another option outside of Intuit.
Eh even when you're doing a startup you're still working for your investor :).
Ha I never said their families would starve. My point was most people are beholden to many debts, people and obligations that prevent them from doing X.
Well, if you have investors outside of the founders. ;-)
But, depending on the investor, I can't imagine they're quite like working for The Man, who conjures up really unhappy images of cube farms and dress codes. I guess I can't really gauge the investors of Mint; maybe they were that bad.
And when people say they have their family to worry about, and I ask them to elaborate, starvation is brought up in many cases. Maybe it is just hyperbole in an attempt to preempt my probing.
But this opens up another probably off-topic discussion on the bounds of beholdenness, and how much of that is self-fulfilling.
I don't know...being a public company kinda sucks.
Unless you're into substantial overhead costs ($10 MM per year), red tape, excessive meetings and chief diversity officers.
I'm not sure if an IPO is the subtext; I couldn't imagine 37signals ever going public. Then again, at one point in time I could never imagine them taking venture funding. [1]
I don't get it - why would you want to "not work"? What do you do then? If I want to sit on a beach and drink, I can do that right now - if I want to play games all day, I can also do that right now. Work is the game, if I stopped working, I'd be bored out of my mind.
You can obviously still work (as I mention), but the point is you can work on whatever you please for whoever you want (including yourself). And most importantly, it doesn't have to be monetizable - that's one of the biggest limiting factors out there.
And Mark, I know your situation, you're more fortunate than others :).
Aaron is now the lead on the Quicken Online product at Intuit. He'll have to work there for 2 years (or possibly 3 or 4) in fully vest in this exit and unlock his golden handcuffs. So, yes, he has FU money on paper. But, he's got another couple years of working for "the man" first.
It seems possible that he'd get acceleration and be retained through other means (retention bonuses/etc.).
Also, for a company in Mint's position an earn-out is somewhat common (although it would be hard to argue that this would be the case when Aaron is taking over all of Quicken Online).
Agreed. I don't know that any argument about their relative merits as a company, a product or a competitor really trumps the "fuck you money" factor in this case. $170m is several metric, cubic butt-tons of money, even granted some fairly substantial fragmentation of equity among top executives and managers.
That said, one does have to keep in mind how relative the concept of "fuck you money" really is. I, for example, am broke, bootstrapping a company entirely out of cash, having to do huge amounts of consulting in order to pay two part-time employees and support my comparatively large living expenses inherited from my well-off salaried days. Yes, I do mean "to pay the bills" - as in, just to break even operationally. Finding the time to work on the projects I'm passionate about building into products, which are in the same vertical as the consulting customers but with which there exists no meaningful overlap is very hard (that is, it's not really feasible to get the customers to shoulder or subsidise the development costs - the aims are just too unrelated to short-term projects, especially since I don't have the cash cushion to float anything especially long term).
If I could sell my company for say, $5m, that would be "fuck you" money to me. It wouldn't mean that I'd never have to work forever, but it'd definitely afford me, oh, say, a good decade of being able to sit around and code whatever I please, after winding down all my customers and telling anyone who has any debts to collect: here's your principal pay-off, now blow me.
OK, if I wanted to hire some team of nontrivial size to help me along the way, fine, $10m - the extra $5m would fund, what, about 30-35 $100k employees for a year, or 7 of them for 5 years?
I'm not even interested in imagining what 9-figure exits look like. I don't care. For someone who has no real assets to speak of and no real cash nor credit, even a large six-figure exit would be a ginormous game-changer.
The point here isn't to put forth my sob story--not at all. My point is that a reasonable threshold of, "Hey, who could blame them for taking the money?" could be much, much lower than $170m, or considerably higher, depending on the position you're coming from and the relative interests bound up in that. Obviously, if I had a net worth of a few million, cashing out of a valuable, disruptive company for $5m, once its relative merits and goodwill and brand and reputation and future marketability potential and all that are considered, would seem rather absurd. But to someone with $0, $5m is very much "fuck you money." Just imagine what $170m is.
I think PG alludes to this dimension of things pointedly in "The Venture Capital Squeeze" (http://www.paulgraham.com/vcsqueeze.html), where he encourages VCs to allow founders to partially cash-out prior to any "liquidity events":
"As things currently work, their attitudes toward risk tend to be diametrically opposed: the founders, who have nothing, would prefer a 100% chance of $1 million to a 20% chance of $10 million, while the VCs can afford to be "rational" and prefer the latter.
Whatever they say, the reason founders are selling their companies early instead of doing Series A rounds is that they get paid up front. That first million is just worth so much more than the subsequent ones. If founders could sell a little stock early, they'd be happy to take VC money and bet the rest on a bigger outcome."
How's it selfish and short-sighted? And certainly that's better than making blanket statements about the next generation or having the gull to think a company is sparking a "revolution". That word is starting to become more overused than the word "celebrity".
Sure, out of context. And that doesn't mean it wouldn't be awesome :) You throw out a lot of insults and blanket statements without a lot of backing. Also, you're insinuating that it's selfish (and perhaps wrong?) to sell a company, which is just ridiculous.
It's funny you're nitpicking a quote when the original article is pretentious and what were your words "short sighted and immature" enough to call their own company a revolution.
Regardless I don't see how your quote is "out of context"; I don't see anything in your original post that would indicate the sale benefits anyone other than the owners/executives of the company.
Your reply reflects precisely the attitude that the author of the article is calling out; that many founders set out to create a company for the sole purpose of selling out. The reason this is harmful is that in most cases the sale is to a company who is uninterested in the new, innovative ideas that the original founders incorporated in the product (the same qualities which drew in early adopters and other customers).
This has a negative effect on the overall progress of the industry involved as it prevents "big changes" (I'll try to avoid loaded terms) from happening and allows stagnation to continue.
Perhaps, but calling yourself a revolution is kind of like calling yourself insane or weird or unique or a celebrity; it's just disingenuous. If you have to call yourself something...
It's out of context because I wasn't saying to be "selfish" and do nothing. I was saying they could work on whatever they wanted regardless of whether or not it's monetizable. There's no way to know that without context.
>Many founders set out to create a company for the sole purpose of selling out (which in the author's context included Aaron).
You don't know that. Aaron could have set off to build a long-term profitable company, which they appeared [1] on their way to doing. But 170 million dollars is 170 million dollars. Almost everyone has their number especially if they have shareholders and vested employees (which 37s does). Their responsibility isn't just to their customers, but to their shareholders, employees, vendors and other people in their life. Who's to say their customers will be treated worse because of the acquisition (granted, Intuit has a poor track record, but this thread has enough assuming in it already).
You run in to the same problem as the OP does: a lot of assumptions without any real knowledge of Aaron or the company's dealings. Instead you're relying on blind assertions and tunnel vision to judge others.
[1] Based on lead gen affiliate fees and the amount of users they had. Unfortunately I don't know this for sure.
You're right about that fact that neither I nor the author of the article know everything (perhaps anything?) about the genuine motivation or inner-workings of Mint's owners and operators.
In my case I was referring to startups/founders in general which I thought I made clear by the terms I chose in my response, however if this was ambiguous to you I apologize.
Well in that case apology accepted. And to your second remark I agree with you - I'm genuinely against built to flip companies. I just don't think Mint was one of them.
Hmm.. People often forget the software is almost trivial compared to some of the worlds problems. What if you took your 50million and used it to help out hungry kids? Wouldn't it be better then trying to have some revolution around accounting software?
This is a slippery slope, but suffice to say that if Mint hung in there and took over Intuit's place in the marketplace not only would they be treating their customers better (you know, the ones who got them here in the first place?) but they would also have many more millions to feed children, etc.
Yeah, nobody berates a gas station owner who doesn't provide a game-changing way of pumping gas. Likewise, most realistic entrepreneurs are just trying to make a product that some people will use and pay for.
Solve a problem. Charge a reasonable fee for it. Iterate on this.
Techcrunch create rumors and controversy to get links, mentions and pageviews? Never! Maybe there won't be a future TC50, but what about a TC60 or TC100? Haven't they run that gag before?
Yep, that's it. Hop on the T, get off at the Charles/MGH stop, and walk across the footbridge to the Esplanade. They're open until the end of October, so you've got another month of good sailing left for this year (dress warm!).
The Grand Rapids Yacht Club (on Reeds Lake in East Grand Rapids) has some classes but I don't know if it's really comparable to Boston's program.
Community Sailing sounds great - I wish I'd found out about it before I spent the summer of 2008 in the Boston area rather than once it turned cold in the fall.
This would have been a great opportunity for Posterous to gather data to test their hypothesis. It's obvious that there are passionate people on both ends of the spectrum.
Would people actually -pay- for themes? Why not show some users a link to a "Premium Themes" option and see how far down the funnel they go? If the numbers work out, launch themes as a pay option. It's always easier to go from paid -> free than the other way around.
