Learn how to fund a web app startup from nothing to $170M acquisition

If you're in the web app startup space, no doubt you've heard the big news during TechCrunch50 that Mint was acquired for $170M. That's a very high return on a company that did a great job visualizing data from Yodlee. What is Mint? It's a great service that allows you to track all your accounts, expenses, budget and more. Many people, even ones that use the service, didn't know that Mint actually gets their data from Yodlee, which preforms all the heavy lifting and connecting with financial institutions.

What's even more interesting than the fact that Yodlee feeds all of the info into Mint.com, is the presentation that Aaron Patzer, founder of Mint.com, gave, which was subsequently released online for the Founder Institute. If you're interested in getting funded or curious about the process at all, I would strongly suggest watching the video and viewing the slides as Aaron walks through the process of funding the startup, his views around value contribution, as well as some original slides from investor presentations.

Aaron talks about and provides great insight into the typical angel-to-VC model for web apps, but why not talk about the other model where companies are bootstrapped and actually charge for their service from day one? I know, I know--it's "sexy" to say you've raised money and there certainly are many incubators, angels and others that support this perception, but we need to focus on value generation. There are way too many startups focused on social media, news aggregation, and crowd sourcing that have no real business model other than to raise money and hope to figure something out. Is that really a plan?

Getting funded can work for a few companies, and there will always be huge success stories like Twitter which didn't have a business model when they started, but there are far more failures sitting in the deadpool. I am all for innovation in any industry, and if you have a passion for social media, launch something there, but at least have some model for making money. The model may change, you may give the service away later, but put some value on it today.

Now that my mini-rant is over, watch the video and slides. It's well worth the 30 minutes of your time to gain some insight into an interesting process that might be right for your startup. What other great resources like this are there to get an education about startups online?