Coveted asset: his brain

Aaron Patzer started Mint.com as a competitor to Quicken because he used the product and got disgusted with it. Mint now boasts 1.5 million users. “I had been a Quicken or Microsoft Money user since age 16,” said Mr. Patzer, adding that he knew he could outdo both by building something new. With his company yapping at its heels, Intuit Inc., Quicken's creator, did the only thing it could — it bought Mint for $170 million and brought Mr. Patzer on board with the hope he'll work his magic again with Quicken. “In buying Mint, Intuit was largely buying Aaron's brain,” said Emmett Higdon, senior analyst for e-business and channel strategy at Forrester Research Inc. As a company vice president and the general manager of Intuit's personal-finance group, Mr. Patzer gets to enjoy the spoils of war: Over the next six to nine months, Quicken Online will disappear, and its users will be migrated over to Mint. Among his plans is to make Intuit's personal-finance business more useful and relevant to advisers, in part by allowing advisers to subscribe to and co-brand portions of the Mint site, a topic he already has broached with senior management at Intuit.
“There is a lot of potential synergy here for financial advisers,” Mr. Patzer said. “Between the tools already in the [Mint] application and what we are likely to integrate in the future, advisers are going to be spared a lot of tedious grunt work in terms of data collection and aggregation.” It will be interesting to see how Mr. Patzer, an engineer's engineer who helped build the cell microprocessor in Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 3, handles the shift from running an underdog startup with a small but ambitious and talented staff to swimming in more of a staid corporate fishbowl with lots of people to please. He isn't overly worried about the transition. “Every startup that is sold to a larger company has trepidation about getting stymied in a big corporate organization,” Mr. Patzer said, noting, however, that he was able to bring in his own people. “The idea is that we can continue operating relatively autonomously — and very similar to how we worked before,” he said. Mr. Higdon likened the opportunities awaiting Mr. Patzer to having a new box of Legos. “We're all waiting to see what he's going to build with them,” he said.