About Brad Smith
Brad Smith, former Chairman and CEO of Intuit, has spoken at multiple QuickBooks Connect events between 2014 and 2018, where he discussed the company's strategy, product innovations, and the role of small businesses in the economy. At the 2014 event, Smith described Intuit's goal to be "the operating system behind small business success" and highlighted features such as QuickBooks financing, which he said had increased loan acceptance rates from 60% to 70% by using business data rather than FICO scores. He also stated that small businesses had created 60% of new jobs since the beginning of the recession and that if one in three small businesses hired one more employee, it would eliminate unemployment in the U.S. In 2015, Smith announced a $100 million fund for QuickBooks financing and said the company had facilitated over a quarter of a billion dollars in loans. He also noted that the company had testified before Congress as an advocate for self-employed workers.
In a 2018 interview, Smith said he heard from customers that they valued connecting with one another, new product launches such as practice management, and innovations in payments, payroll, and capital access. He stated that "people don't care what you know until they know that you care" and expressed optimism about the company's future. In other appearances, Smith discussed Intuit's operating values, including a "70-20-10" resource allocation model and a "delight pyramid" for product design. He described an experiment where engineers developed a mobile feature allowing users to photograph tax documents for automatic data entry, which he said became a significant growth driver for TurboTax. Smith also spoke about his upbringing in West Virginia and his education at Marshall University, stating that leadership involves being true to oneself and playing to one's strengths.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Brad Smith's recent appearances.
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Brad Smith0:00
Intuit's journey began 30 years ago at a small kitchen table when our founder Scott Cook observed his wife struggle to balance the family checkbook and he thought to himself, there has to be a better way. At that moment, the idea for a product called Quicken came to life and the mission for a company called Intuit was born. For three decades, employees around the globe have gotten out of bed every morning with a single simple mission: to improve our customers' financial lives so profoundly they could never imagine going back to the old way.
The way Intuit has achieved this is the way it started at that small kitchen table with an entrepreneur who set out to improve the lives of other consumers and entrepreneurs. Here we are 30 years later, and we are a 30-year-old, 8,000-employee startup. All 8,000 employees are entrepreneurs and innovators, and it's everybody's job to create, to invent, and to look for new and better ways to improve our customers' lives. The way we do that is we've turned individual ability from our founder Scott Cook into an organizational capability where we all learn the techniques and practice the methods to be innovators that change the world. We do that at Intuit through two core competencies. First is what we call customer-driven innovation. This defines where we put our energy, looking for big important unsolved problems and then figuring out if there's a way that we can solve it well, and in doing so build some source of durable advantage so that the company is built to last and the competition could never do what we do.
The second core competency is designed for delight. That's where we take an 8,000-person company and break it down into teams no bigger than two pizzas can feed. Small teams, cross-functional teams that go and get deep customer empathy, then they come back and they go broad before they go narrow. They fall in love with the problem, not with the solution. In fact, lots of solutions may be thought about before we land on which one. How we land on the solution is through rapid experimentation, getting customers involved in the development process with us, running rapid experiments with quick prototypes until we find one that actually delights the customer so much they will tell their friends and family members they have to use this product. That's the company culture: an 8,000-person startup that looks at ways to solve big important problems through customer-driven innovation, and then take 8,000 employees and turn them into entrepreneurs and innovators that apply designed for delight to rapidly identify, test, and come up with the best solution to solve that problem. Each and every day we wake up with that mission in mind: to improve our customers' financial lives so profoundly they could never go back to the old way. That's Intuit, and that's what we do each and every day.
