Top 37 Quotes by Aaron Patzer

I have always thought of myself as an inventor first and foremost. An engineer. An entrepreneur. In that order. I never thought of myself as an employee. But my first jobs as an adult were as an employee: at IBM, and then at my first start-up.

Whenever I see a tree that is climbable, it must be climbed. Sometimes when I'm on a run, I'll just run up a tree, jump on a branch and swing off. My favorite tree, in Saratoga, gets me a good 75 feet up.

I actually don't invest in anything that is social, mobile, deals or ad networks simply because those are areas where there are so many players and so many other smart people in the space, I feel like I don't have a competitive advantage. So I tend to go after things that are e-commerce, like healthcare.

Before Mint.com, I was a long-time user of 'Microsoft Money' and Intuit's 'Quicken.' Both were powerful tools, loaded with features and functionality around taxes, investment, budgeting - too feature-laden, in fact. They took hours to set up, forever to learn, and an hour a week to maintain.

I've been spending quite a bit of time in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the U.K. as Mint is expanding globally, and I'm personally doing much of the research and business deals to make them happen.

If you think about photo sharing sites, the mobile photo sharing and social, there's no competitive advantage, there's no obvious business model, so I never play with anything like that. I avoid it like the plague.

I always knew I wanted to be a technologist, so I went to Duke and got a degree in computer science and electrical engineering. Really, I thought my goal in life was to be an inventor, a problem solver, so I thought I needed a Ph.D. to be good at inventions, but it turns out that you don't.