The Grand Finale Event Begins

As the evening opens, the Duke Start-up Challenge celebrates its 10th year of operation with an address by Aaron Patzer, a Duke alum and founder and CEO of Mint.com. Introduced by the evening’s host - second year MBA student Shalav Gupta - Aaron recently completed the sale of his company for $170 Million through an acquisition by financial software giant, Intuit.

Meet Aaron Patzer:
Duke University alum Aaron Patzer (T’02), started his professional career during the Internet boom years of 1998-2000 when he worked for Getawebsite.com and Miadora.com (an online jewelry store). After a number of engineering positions and internet startups, Patzer founded Mint.com in March 2006. Mint.com is a free, simple, and secure personal finance web application which consolidates a person’s financial life in one place. Patzer developed the full alpha version of Mint.com (in Java J2EE and mySQL) in 2006 before he met Josh Kopelman (founder of half.com) and Rob Hayes in the fall of 2006. Their meeting eventually led to funding, and in September 2007, Patzer launched Mint.com at the TechCrunch40 conference a year later – ultimately winning the $50K first prize.

In November 2009, Patzer became the Vice President and General Manager of the Personal Finance Group at Intuit when they agreed to acquire Mint.com for US$170M. At the time of the announced sale, Mint.com had an estimated 1.5 million users. Prior to Mint, Aaron was a Lead Architect at Nascentric and was the technical lead of the San Jose office.

In September 2008, Patzer was listed in Inc. magazine’s Top 30 Under 30, and was selected by Fortune Magazine to be among the Top 40 Entrepreneurs Under 40 in 2009. Money Magazine also named him as one of the top 8 Money Heroes of 2008. In addition to his BSEE from Duke University, he also holds an MSEE from Princeton University and has twelve patents issued or pending to his name.