Aaron Patzer (born November 20, 1980) is an
Internet entrepreneur
An Internet entrepreneur is an owner, founder or manager of an Internet-based business. This list includes Internet company founders and people brought on to companies for their general business or accounting acumen, as is the case with some CEOs ...
.
He is the founder of
Mint.com, a financial management tool which was acquired by
Intuit
Intuit Inc. is an American multinational business software company that specializes in financial software. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California, and the CEO is Sasan Goodarzi. Intuit's products include the tax preparati ...
in 2009.
He was later founder and CEO of Fountain.com, which was sold to
Porch.com in 2015.
He later founded Vital, a health app, becoming CEO.
Early life and education
Born in 1980
in
Madison, Wisconsin
Madison is the List of capitals in the United States, capital city of the U.S. state of Wisconsin. It is the List of municipalities in Wisconsin by population, second-most populous city in the state, with a population of 269,840 at the 2020 Uni ...
, Patzer graduated from
Central High School in
Evansville
Evansville is a city in Vanderburgh County, Indiana, United States, and its county seat. With a population of 118,414 at the 2020 census, it is Indiana's third-most populous city after Indianapolis and Fort Wayne, the most populous city in S ...
,
Indiana
Indiana ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Midwestern United States, Midwestern region of the United States. It borders Lake Michigan to the northwest, Michigan to the north and northeast, Ohio to the east, the Ohio River and Kentucky to the s ...
. He completed his undergraduate studies in 2002 with a BSEE from
Duke University
Duke University is a Private university, private research university in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity, North Carolina, Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1 ...
.
His bachelor's degrees were in computer science, electrical engineering and computer engineering.
In 2004, he completed an MSEE from
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private university, private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial ...
in electrical engineering.
Career
Patzer began his career in the Internet boom years of 1998–2000, working for Getawebsite.com and Miadora.com (an online jewelry store). Before founding Mint, he was a technical lead and architect for the San Jose division of Nascentric. Previous to that, he worked for IBM and founded PWeb and International, both two web development companies.
Patzer helped build the cell microprocessor in the
PlayStation 3
The PlayStation 3 (PS3) is a home video game console developed and marketed by Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE). It is the successor to the PlayStation 2, and both are part of the PlayStation brand of consoles. The PS3 was first released on ...
.
Mint.com
After a number of engineering positions and Internet startups, Patzer founded
Mint.com in March 2006,
becoming CEO.
According to Patzer, the inspiration for Mint.com came to him in late 2005 after being frustrated with how difficult it was to use
Intuit
Intuit Inc. is an American multinational business software company that specializes in financial software. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California, and the CEO is Sasan Goodarzi. Intuit's products include the tax preparati ...
's
Quicken product.
Patzer developed the full alpha version of Mint.com (in
Java J2EE and
MySQL
MySQL () is an Open-source software, 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 rel ...
) in 2006 before he met
Josh Kopelman (founder of
half.com
Half.com was a fixed-price online marketplace for books, textbooks, music, movies, video games, and video game consoles. It was acquired by eBay in 2000 and shut down in 2017, with the domain redirected to the eBay website.
Half provided a platf ...
) 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 conference a year later, in September 2007, winning the $50,000 first prize.
In September 2008, Patzer was listed in ''
Inc.'' magazine's Top 30 Under 30.
On September 14, 2009,
Intuit
Intuit Inc. is an American multinational business software company that specializes in financial software. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California, and the CEO is Sasan Goodarzi. Intuit's products include the tax preparati ...
announced that it would buy Mint.com for US$170 million.
According to
TechCrunch
TechCrunch is an American global online newspaper focusing on topics regarding high tech, high-tech and Startup company, startup companies. It was founded in June 2005 by Archimedes Ventures, led by partners Michael Arrington and Keith Teare.
I ...
, Patzer was criticized in the startup industry for selling the company for too little.
At the time of the announced sale, Mint.com had an estimated 1.5 million users.
Mint had over 10 million users as of mid-2012.
Intuit
After the sale of Mint, Patzer joined Intuit as VP Product Innovation
and was "tasked with improving Quicken."
In 2011 he was working on a new personal transportation system,
splitting his time between the new venture and his position at Intuit.
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."
He left Intuit in December 2012 in order to be able to focus on his new ventures.
Leonardo and Fountain.com
Patzer founded Leonardo Software Inc. in September 2013.
In 2013, Patzer launched Fountain.com along with Jean Sini,
CTO. The software aims to connect users to any expert on mostly any topic for free via smartphones. In early 2015, the software focused solely on home and garden issues.
Fountain.com was sold to
Porch.com in October 2015. While Sini became the leader of Porch's San Francisco office, Patzer stepped down as CEO and became a Porch product adviser, relocating oversees for personal reasons.
Vital Software
In January 2017,
Patzer relocated to
Auckland, New Zealand
Auckland ( ; ) is a large metropolitan city in the North Island of New Zealand. It has an urban population of about It is located in the greater Auckland Region, the area governed by Auckland Council, which includes outlying rural areas and ...
, 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."
In 2019, Vital raised $5.2 million in funding, launching on April 24, with Patzer as CEO.
Personal life
In 2015 Patzer had a residence in
San Francisco
San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...
.
He had a house in
New Zealand
New Zealand () is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and List of islands of New Zealand, over 600 smaller islands. It is the List of isla ...
as of 2018,
where he had also purchased a farm.
References
External links
Profile at vital.io
{{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 people
American people of German descent
1980 births