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Please. $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 r

Please. $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.

marcofloriano 17y ago
$170 million is a lot of money ? Never mind ...
jasongullickson 17y ago
" Fake revolutions are cute and all, but think of how awesome it would be to never ever have to work for the man again. " Selfish, short-sighted and immature...more words that describe the next generation.
- doki_pen 17y ago
  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?
  - jasongullickson 17y ago
    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.
- fallentimes 17y ago
  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".
  - jasongullickson 17y ago
    Bear in mind I'm responding to the comment above my own, not the article itself. "how awesome it would be to never ever have to work for the man again" This quote outlines something that benefits the individual (self), as opposed to the many (Mint's existing customers), no?
    - fallentimes 17y ago
      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.
      - jasongullickson 17y ago
        I think you're putting undeserved of weight on the term "revolution": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.
tptacek 17y ago
Mint could have IPO'd, is the subtext here.
- fallentimes 17y ago
  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] [1] http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/bezos_expeditions_invests_in_37signals.php http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/bezos_expeditions_invests...
  - deleted 17y ago
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jasonfried 17y ago
"Fuck You money" is such a myth. More on this soon in another post.
- steamboiler 17y ago
  I was amused to see this comment on HN, a site run by Paul Graham.
- fallentimes 17y ago
  I look forward to it. Just remember I'm not saying they should do nothing, but rather they can work on something that doesn't need to be monetizable. I think the post will end up being contrarian just to be contrarian. This site and YCombinator were created as a result of "fuck you" money.
  - jasonfried 17y ago
    "I think the post will end up being contrarian just to be contrarian." If your mind is already made up then you don't need to read it.
    - fallentimes 17y ago
      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.
- swolchok 17y ago
  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.)
fnid 17y ago
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.
- omgsean 17y ago
  "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.
  - mattm 17y ago
    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.
    - philwelch 17y ago
      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.
deleted 17y ago
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dcurtis 17y ago
It is sort of fuck you money, but honestly I'm more pissed off that a shitty company now owns one of my favorite webapps. Mint is now going to die. I also think something must have been going terribly wrong. The exit was tiny considering the huge amount of money that was invested.
- JulianMorrison 17y ago
  > Mint is now going to die. Doesn't always work that way (NeXT, Apple).
  - whopa 17y ago
    Apple is an outlier. Intuit is not.
    - billswift 17y ago
      "Outlier" just means it's a statistical oddity; anything can become an outlier, sometimes very quickly, if things change the right way.
      - whopa 17y ago
        Sure, but citing an outlier as an example as something that could happen isn't really meaningful, since it is so improbable.
- fallentimes 17y ago
  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 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.
callmeed 17y ago
"never ever have to work for the man again" They already weren't working for the man. They had a startup, and one with huge potential and growth. And now, depending on how long they have to stay there, they're working for "the man" more so than before.
- fallentimes 17y ago
  They were working for their investors. Now after a temporary transition stint with Intuit, they won't have to work for anyone.
abalashov 17y ago
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 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."
azanar 17y ago
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.
- fallentimes 17y ago
  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.
  - azanar 17y ago
    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.
markessien 17y ago
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.
- fallentimes 17y ago
  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 :).
andrewparker 17y ago
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.
- tylerhwillis 17y ago
  Is this public? 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).

marcofloriano 17y ago

$170 million is a lot of money ? Never mind ...

jasongullickson 17y ago

" Fake revolutions are cute and all, but think of how awesome it would be to never ever have to work for the man again. " Selfish, short-sighted and immature...more words that describe the next generation.

doki_pen 17y ago
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?
- jasongullickson 17y ago
  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.
fallentimes 17y ago
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".
- jasongullickson 17y ago
  Bear in mind I'm responding to the comment above my own, not the article itself. "how awesome it would be to never ever have to work for the man again" This quote outlines something that benefits the individual (self), as opposed to the many (Mint's existing customers), no?
  - fallentimes 17y ago
    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.
    - jasongullickson 17y ago
      I think you're putting undeserved of weight on the term "revolution": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.

tptacek 17y ago

Mint could have IPO'd, is the subtext here.

fallentimes 17y ago
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] [1] http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/bezos_expeditions_invests_in_37signals.php http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/bezos_expeditions_invests...
- deleted 17y ago
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jasonfried 17y ago

"Fuck You money" is such a myth. More on this soon in another post.

steamboiler 17y ago
I was amused to see this comment on HN, a site run by Paul Graham.
fallentimes 17y ago
I look forward to it. Just remember I'm not saying they should do nothing, but rather they can work on something that doesn't need to be monetizable. I think the post will end up being contrarian just to be contrarian. This site and YCombinator were created as a result of "fuck you" money.
- jasonfried 17y ago
  "I think the post will end up being contrarian just to be contrarian." If your mind is already made up then you don't need to read it.
  - fallentimes 17y ago
    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.
swolchok 17y ago
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.)

fnid 17y ago

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.

omgsean 17y ago
"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.
- mattm 17y ago
  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.
  - philwelch 17y ago
    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.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

dcurtis 17y ago

It is sort of fuck you money, but honestly I'm more pissed off that a shitty company now owns one of my favorite webapps. Mint is now going to die. I also think something must have been going terribly wrong. The exit was tiny considering the huge amount of money that was invested.

JulianMorrison 17y ago
> Mint is now going to die. Doesn't always work that way (NeXT, Apple).
- whopa 17y ago
  Apple is an outlier. Intuit is not.
  - billswift 17y ago
    "Outlier" just means it's a statistical oddity; anything can become an outlier, sometimes very quickly, if things change the right way.
    - whopa 17y ago
      Sure, but citing an outlier as an example as something that could happen isn't really meaningful, since it is so improbable.
fallentimes 17y ago
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 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.

callmeed 17y ago

"never ever have to work for the man again" They already weren't working for the man. They had a startup, and one with huge potential and growth. And now, depending on how long they have to stay there, they're working for "the man" more so than before.

fallentimes 17y ago
They were working for their investors. Now after a temporary transition stint with Intuit, they won't have to work for anyone.

abalashov 17y ago

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 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."

azanar 17y ago

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.

fallentimes 17y ago
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.
- azanar 17y ago
  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.

markessien 17y ago

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.

fallentimes 17y ago
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 :).

andrewparker 17y ago

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.

tylerhwillis 17y ago
Is this public? 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).