presentation for Creative Founder class

1. Lessons of the Past
Ola Micek

2. Who were the founders?
Scott Cook
23 years old
USC Bachelors, Harvard MBA
Experience at Proctor & Gamble
Tom Proulx
Stanford Student
Programmer
Created v1 in dorm room
1983, Palo Alto, California

3. first idea:
Scott’s wife needed a better way of balancing family finances. They
were discussing the idea at the kitchen table (which is nowadays
displayed in the office as an artifact)

4. Problem:
how to manage all
household finances: paying
bills, tracking for tax
returns, maintain tracking
of spendings, track
charitable deductions to
report on taxes?
Customers:
civilians who manage
household finances
Product:
tool to simplify managing
household finances
Early stage molecule:

5. Competitors:
“most of them were designing for financial people (because funders
were from financial backgrounds) but we decided to design for
civilians.
Tom Proulx

6. They were the first to do usability testing in 1983
“the more important the decision, the more important to run an
experiment first”
Scott Cook

7. How did they fund themselves in the early days?
“Here was the problem: we had all these great data, but we needed to
raise some money to launch our product. We had money from our
former roommate. We borrowed from friends and family, Scott took
second mortgage, but it wasn’t enough, we were stuck.
There was no internet, all ways of communicating the product cost
money. We kept taking the credit so we could pay off the previous one
and pay bills and salary to our 5 employees”
Tom Proulx

8. The biggest crises
“We went to every venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, showed charts
about: time savings, what people want and what they are looking for,
competitors, what they’ve done, what we’ve done, and it turned out
that we didn’t have second meeting with anyone.”
Tom Proulx

9. Who were key early investors, and why?
“So we turned to the banks (Scott had some connections with
banking due to his previous job), and banks marketed it to the
customers (banks had the same customers), but we managed to sell it
to only two banks. It was not enough, we couldn’t pay the salary to
our 5 employees”
Tom Proulx

10. How they beat the crises
“We had to stop paying salaries and returned rented furniture and
computers.
We managed to keep going with 4 of us (none was being paid). After 6
months Tom finished apple version 2, it eventually started clicking on
the sales fund: we went from 2 banks to 10 banks. All banks paid us
so we finally had money to pay salaries and pay off all credits.”
Scott Cook

11. Today: the company’s stated mission remains:
“improving people’s financial lives so profoundly that they can never imagine
going back to the old way”
“our job is to eliminate poverty, to help the 70% of families who live from pay
cheque to pay cheque to live better lives and to help small businesses thrive”.
Brad Smith- Current CEO of Intuit

12. Problem:
how to organize and
manage accounting data in
small businesses?
Customers:
small businesses and
accounting professionals
Product:
QuickBooks: financial and
business management online
services and desktop software,
payroll solutions, and payment
processing services
Today molecule #1:

13. Problem:
how to efficiently prepare
income taxes?
Customers:
everyone who needs to prepare
income taxes
Product:
Turbotax: income preparation
products and services
Today molecule #2:

14. how are they doing now?
Today, Intuit has more than US$4 billion in annual revenue and a market capitalization of
more than US$20 billion.
Intuit was ranked in Fortune's "Top 100 Best Companies to Work For" in 2007.
Intuit was ranked in Fortune's "America's most admired software companies" in 2007.
In June 2013, Intuit announced it would sell its financial services unit to private equity firm
Thoma Bravo for $1.03 billion.
In June 2015, Intuit laid off approximately 5% of its workforce as part of a company
reorganization.

15. Sources:
How Intuit Kept the Customer in Mind as a Company | Intuit Founders Scott Cook & Tom Proulx
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQUmDOqGuOE
How to get a Startup by with Nothing in the Bank | Intuit Founders Scott Cook & Tom Proulx
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtEt0Nz_iJA
Scott Cook: The power of experimentation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0vA6Bsuew0&t=1s
Interview with Tiffany Wang: former employee (Intuit 2017 Summer UX Design Intern)
Intuit @ Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuit