Over A Year After Its Acquisition, Is Mint Still Fresh?

Mercredi, 29 Décembre 2010 05:11

Over A Year After Its Acquisition, Is Mint Still Fresh?

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Here at TechCrunch, we’ve long been fans of personal finance site Mint, which won our first TechCrunch40 conference in 2007 and was acquired two years later by Intuit for an impressive $170 million.

But things may not be going gangbusters at the

company these days. We’ve learned that in the next month, three key employees from the original, pre-acquisition team will be leaving, including Director of Marketing Stewart Langille, lead designer Justin Maxwell, and head software engineer Daryl Puryear. One Mint insider estimated that around 40% or more of the pre-acquisition team has left since Intuit bought the company in September 2009, some of whom have left substantial amounts of unvested stock on the table. Most of the executive team remains, but many employees have gone on to work at or launch their own startups.

Granted, it isn’t unusual for personnel to leave after an acquisition. Startups thrive on being nimble, and the umbrella of a large company and a new corporate infrastructure can slow things down. We’ve heard from one insider that Intuit has handled the acquisition quite well in terms of giving the company resources. The issue, it seems, has been in the execution — Mint just hasn’t pushed out many projects in the last year.

The big ones were an Android application, a launch in Canada, and a ‘Goals’ feature that helps you budget your income so that you can save up for that vacation or big-screen TV. Those aren’t bad features, mind you, but they don’t seem too groundbreaking. “Momentum has slowed down,” is how one insider put it.

It seems that some Mint users aren’t pleased with the way things are going, either. As a litmus test Mint polled its Facebook audience in November to ask what they thought of the post-acquisition Mint. Most responses have been negative, with numerous comments complaining of bugs and slow sync times between a user’s financial institutions and their Mint accounts.

Reached for comment, a company spokesperson said that there is “definetly no glut of departures”, explaining that the team has grown much more than it’s shrunk, and attributing any “key shifts” to long-time Mint employees taking advantage of the hot job market. The spokesperson added that Mint has been doing a lot of work behind the scenes to support international growth, and will be increasing its presence by adding two new countries next year. The company also plans to launch an iPad application and other mobile apps.

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