Intuit Prosperity Accelerator Demo Day 2021 - Scott Cook and David Marquis Fireside Chat

Hi there David. Great to see you again. Thanks for joining us.

Well let me pick two. We have a set of methods we call Design for Delight that we developed over time as we found what produced great products, and so we decided to double down and keep doing more of those techniques. The first is a set of methods around customer empathy, to get deep with customers and walk in their shoes. I think a great example of that is what you have in Canada last year. We've long known that cash flow, the flow of money in and out of a business, was key to success. You run out of cash, you run out of a business. So cash is king, and that became even more crucial in the downturn following the pandemic. Yet the methods to figure out your cash position are really hard because most accounting looks backwards—it's a record of what happened in the past. But for cash flow planning, you need to look forward into the future, and most accounting systems are not set up for that. So people try spreadsheets, which is a lot of work and not very accurate at times. So what you guys pioneered is this AI-based system that's now built into QuickBooks called Cash Flow Planner, based on the real problems that businesses have projecting forward: 'If I'm hiring that employee, can I afford it? Will I get the cash to cover the salary? If I get that new equipment, if I buy inventory?' What's cool about it is that since you've got to predict the future, and that's hard for a lot of people, Cash Flow Planner uses your past bank account and accounting records to do AI on those to project forward the kind of expenses you should expect going out 30, 60, 90 days—your choice. So if you see your cash measure suddenly sinking, you can take proactive action because of the AI prediction. So it doesn't sink; instead it keeps you afloat. Another practice of great innovators is experimentation and iteration—try it with customers, learn, and change. I think Dryrun is a great example of this from the accelerator. They also work on cash issues and focus on accountants. Using 'follow me homes,' a method we use to get customer empathy, they connected with a bunch of accountants and found that while accountants feel great about their compliance work, many wanted to do advisory work but weren't sure how to start the conversation. Recognizing that problem, Dryrun created an insights card—a conversation starter—that their software could produce. They produced a sample card prototype, tested it with accountants, learned a bunch of things that weren't the way accountants wanted it, iterated once, twice, three, four times, and eventually the fifth iteration was the one that worked. That's the one they're rolling out—and I think we'll see a demo later today when Blaine gets on stage. So those are some of the methods and recent applications here in Canada.

Well, I think one thing we all know is that we're never better than our people. The best talent is crucial to the success of an organization. My simple observation is that the best people want to work for more than a paycheck; they want to work for what their work adds up to, the impact on the world. The best people are mission-driven. It's our goal to have a mission so compelling that it motivates all of us, and then we'll attract the best. As you mentioned, our mission is powering prosperity around the world, because that's kind of the engine of progress. Small businesses are the major hiring engine in developed countries. As small businesses prosper, they hire more, and the whole economy prospers. It's also central to the individual: if you're a small business person, and you and that small business are almost inseparable, its success is your success, its failure is your failure. So prosperity is more than dollars; it's your essential contribution to the economy, to your family, your self-view, how your in-laws view you. That's our commitment to prosperity. And it's no accident the accelerator worked that way. There are many accelerator programs, but what's unique about the one we crafted together with Highline Beta is that it's mission-driven—all the companies there share the mission to power the prosperity of Canadians.

Yes, and I've found a pattern in the adversity—at least how we survived it. Early on, as we were building the software back in the early '80s, software was sold in boxes in stores. If you didn't get into the stores, you didn't have any sales. So during building the product, I was the sales force, went out contacted a bunch of stores and distributors, and we were shut out. We were so tiny, had no venture capital, nobody invested, and no dealer would take the product. That's a death sentence if you can't be where customers go to shop for software. So that game plan wasn't working. We had to find a different play. If your playbook isn't working, find a different play and get good at it. In desperation, I tried selling our software to banks and having them resell it. I didn't know anything about selling to banks, so I found a buddy of mine who was an ex-IBM salesman and really good at it to coach me on how to sell to large enterprises. That saved our bacon; we ultimately got 10 banks operating in 11 U.S. states to buy the software from us and resell it to their employees and customers. Without that, we wouldn't be here. But then I observed that while the first two banks were able to make a go of it, the subsequent eight banks bought the inventory but weren't very good at selling it. After seeing eight banks fumble, I could no longer ethically go to the next bank and say this is going to work. Our only sales channel disappeared. We made a little money from the banks but knew we had to get another channel. Retail stores still didn't want our product, so we decided to sell directly using direct response techniques—old magazine ads, text heavy, coupon on the bottom. I didn't know how to do that, so I found a direct response marketing expert who taught me the principles. I'd sketch an ad, send it to him, he'd send it back with comments, we iterated. We took the last money we had in the company and launched those ads—and by God, they worked. Once that started generating demand, stores actually wanted the product, and the business started tripling. I noticed the same pattern when we had to learn how to design ease of use in software; we found the best expert we could, and just employed his concepts. The learning is: when the game plan isn't working, you've got to find a new play, which means learning something new—so go find the best wheel maker and have them teach you.

Yeah, well, the tech industry is a big phrase with lots of swirls and currents of motion. I think when collaboration works best is when there's alignment on purpose—when people and different organizations are going after a shared purpose together. Then they can find the opportunities to share learnings and share opportunities. That's what's clever about the accelerator program that you and the team at Highline Beta have assembled. You get all the benefits of the accelerator together with the shared purpose and shared mission, so we can share opportunities, share learning, share techniques. Intuit Innovation Catalysts are skilled coaches in the innovation techniques we've used in financially related, small business, and consumer innovation. Until this, I don't think all that came together. I look forward to continued success for this program to continue, scale, and reach across Canada. One great thing about COVID, amongst all the wreckage, is that we've all learned to work at a distance remotely, which is helpful in countries that cover many time zones. So those will be some of the positive silver linings to the cloud of COVID.

Yeah, well, at the most foundational level, one of our folks said it well years ago: if you want a big business, solve a big problem; if you want a little business, solve a little problem. So it gets to the choice of problem you solve. If you found a really big pain point in your country and in other countries, that's the foundation. So if you're solving a problem nobody else has solved and that problem exists in multiple countries, that's your foundation for a multinational business. The second thing we found is there's a trap: the natural human mental process is to extrapolate your own experience and say that must be the experience for everyone else. But people in different countries might be different; they might have a different set of problems, or they might not have the problem you have. Your guts might allow you to understand your own country from personal experience, but I wouldn't trust your personal experience to extrapolate to other countries. Instead, that's where customer empathy comes in so importantly. We start by saying we don't assume anything that happens in the US is the right thing to do in another country. We don't assume the problem in one country is the same as in another. Start instead by saying 'tabula rasa'—what's the most important problem we can solve for businesses in the next country? We find the problems vary, so we have to build variations. There may be a core that carries over, but our goal is to be more local than the locals—we really have to understand the small businesses, their habits, practices, preferences, and fears in each country to find that big pain point we need to solve. So those would be the two principles: find the big unsolved pain point that's not solved in multiple countries, and then make sure your own assumptions don't cause you to misunderstand what's true in other countries. Start fresh, understanding from the ground up what's most important to your customer in France, Germany, the UK, or Australia.

Good, well done. Thank you. Thank you, David. Thanks for joining us.