Last night I caught up with Intuit founder Scott Cook and Aaron Patzer, the founder of Mint who know runs Intuit’s personal finance group. I whipped out my iPhone and did an impromptu interview. Cook and Patzer talk about where growth is coming from at Intuit, how it tries to encourage entrepreneurism, and the “payment graph.”
Cook is really excited about SnapTax, the TurboTax iPhone app that lets people do their taxes by snapping a picture of their W-2 forms. The same OCR technology will soon be baked into the company’s upcoming GoPayment apps for accepting checks via photo. Patzer came into Intuit through the $170 million acquisition of Mint. Cook knows the value of injecting entrepreneurial DNA into the larger organization, and he tries to foster that spirit throughout Intuit.
Since Intuit bought Mint, it’s kept on growing from 1.7 million to 5.6 million users, and gradually it is being connected with hooks into Intuit’s more established products like TurboTax and Quicken. Off camera I asked why doesn’t QuickBooks offer a similar service to help businesses visualize and organize their expenses like Profitably does with QuickBook’s APIs, and Patzer agreed, “That is something that should be in QuickBooks.” (That is just his opinion, he doesn’t run QuickBooks).
In the video, Patzer imagines a Mint-like service which suggests deals on business services to QuickBooks users. Patzer goes beyond that and talks about the idea of a payment graph which tracks relationships between businesses and how much they are paying each other. Before the video, he told me: “People talk a lot about the social graph and interest graph. One third of the economy goes through QuickBooks in terms of businesses invoicing other businesses. Each invoice contains a connection between vendors, suppliers, and customers, and also the price of that connection. Representing the payment graph is huge opportunity and something no other company can do.” At it’s core that is a very interesting idea—to map out business relationships based on payments, with the strength of each tie determined by the flow of money either way. I wonder if it would look anything like social influence graphs that look at who retweets and @replies whom.
It is clear that Intuit is still extremely product focussed. I asked Cook what is more important to nail down first, the product or the business model. For Cook, product always comes first: “If you’ve got delighted customers, you can figure out downstream where the money is. If you don’t have delighted customers, stop. Don’t go there.”
Intuit Inc. is a leading provider of business and financial management solutions for small and mid-sized businesses; financial institutions, including banks and credit unions; consumers and accounting professionals. Its flagship products and services, including QuickBooks™, Quicken™ and TurboTax™, simplify small business management and payroll processing, personal finance, and tax preparation and filing. ProSeries™ and Lacerte™ are Intuit’s leading tax preparation offerings for professional accountants. The company’s financial institutions division, anchored by Digital Insight, provides on-demand banking services to help...
Scott Cook started his career at Procter & Gamble, where he learned about product development, market research, and marketing. He soon began using the insights he was learning there to look for an idea for a company of his own. That idea came to him one day when his wife was complaining about paying the bills. With personal computers just coming out at the time, Scott thought there might be a market for basic software that would help...
“He is both the visionary and technical mind behind Mint, the first free, automatic and secure way to manage and save money online. He designed Mint to meet his own needs and those of people like him who value the immediacy of the Web, simplicity and their free time. With 10 patents filed or pending, Aaron brings strong innovation skills to Mint. Prior to founding Mint, Aaron was an architect and technical lead for the San Jose division of...
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