Intuit

Intuit makes some of the most widely used personal finance and small business software in the United States: TurboTax for income taxes, QuickBooks for bookkeeping, Credit Karma for credit scores and Mailchimp for email marketing. It started far smaller. In 1983 a former marketing manager living in Palo Alto teamed up with a young Stanford programmer to write a program that would balance a checkbook. That program became Quicken.

This profile follows Intuit's Palo Alto and Stanford roots, its lean early years and its move south to Mountain View. Dates come from Intuit's own pages and fact sheet, the Computer History Museum and reputable reference histories. Where accounts differ, we say so.

What Intuit does

Intuit sells software and online services that help households and small businesses handle money. Its main products today are:

• TurboTax, tax preparation software for individuals.
• QuickBooks, accounting and payroll tools for small businesses.
• Credit Karma, a personal finance service built around credit scores, bought in 2020.
• Mailchimp, email and marketing software for small companies, bought in 2021.

Intuit's 2023 fact sheet reported about 100 million customers worldwide, $14.4 billion in revenue for fiscal 2023 and 20 offices in nine countries. Sasan Goodarzi has been chief executive since January 2019. Quicken, the product that started it all, is no longer part of the company. The Computer History Museum describes it as a spinoff; Intuit sold it in 2016.

A checkbook and a Stanford bulletin board

Intuit tells its origin story the same way every time. In 1983 Scott Cook sat at his kitchen table watching his wife struggle to balance the family checkbook and decided a personal computer should do the job. Cook had worked in marketing at Procter and Gamble and then as a consultant at Bain, where he saw early banking and computing projects.

He did not code, so he went looking for someone who could. Reference histories say he went to Stanford to post an ad for a programmer and asked a passing student for directions to a bulletin board. The student was Tom Proulx. The Computer History Museum calls him "a programmer just out of Stanford," while other accounts place him in his dorm room writing the first version of Quicken. Either way, the first code came out of the Stanford orbit.

Cook also did market research the hard way. According to the Computer History Museum, he took a phone book and called his Palo Alto neighbors to ask how they handled their household bookkeeping. Their answers convinced him people hated the chore.

Where in Palo Alto it started

Intuit's older press fact sheet, cited on Wikipedia, gave Palo Alto as the founding city. Pinning down the first office is harder, because every source tells it a little differently:

• Wikipedia says the company first worked out of a small room on University Avenue in Palo Alto. No street number has been published.
• The Computer History Museum says the founders "set up camp in an unfurnished basement in 1983."
• Intuit's own origins page says it grew from "a small startup in Scott's garage."
• Older business histories place the first operation in Proulx's basement, with seven employees.

These may all be true at different moments in a company that moved often and had little money. What is clear is that Intuit belongs to the same downtown Palo Alto story as later startups on University Avenue. We could not confirm a specific building, so we do not name one.

The lean years

Quicken came out in 1984, according to reference histories. It faced about a dozen serious competitors. Cook's first plan was to sell the software through banks. It went nowhere. He could not find a retail distributor either.

By 1985 the company was close to broke. Business histories say three of the seven employees left when salaries could not be paid. The other four worked for about six months without pay. Cook approached more than 30 venture capital firms and was turned down by all of them. The Computer History Museum adds that the founders lived on savings and help from Cook's parents and returned rented furniture to save money.

The turnaround came in 1986, when Proulx persuaded Cook to spend heavily on direct advertising to consumers. The ads worked. Quicken started selling and the company grew from there. Eric Dunn, who joined as chief financial officer and wrote code alongside Proulx, later became chief executive.

QuickBooks, TurboTax and the 1990s

Intuit's growth in the early 1990s came in quick steps:

1. Around 1991. Microsoft launched Microsoft Money to compete with Quicken. About the same time, Intuit brought in John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins, the Menlo Park venture firm.
2. 1992. QuickBooks, a bookkeeping program for small businesses, came out.
3. March 12, 1993. Intuit listed on Nasdaq under the ticker INTU, according to Wikipedia. Intuit's fact sheet confirms the 1993 date.
4. 1993. Intuit bought ChipSoft of San Diego, the maker of TurboTax.
5. 1994 and 1995. Microsoft agreed to buy Intuit. The U.S. Department of Justice sued to block the deal. It was abandoned.

In the late 1990s Intuit shifted toward web services and leaned on QuickBooks and TurboTax, where Microsoft competed less. It also bought a 19 percent stake in Excite, the Stanford-born search portal, for $40 million in 1997. Our Excite profile covers that company's rise and fall.

From Palo Alto to Mountain View

Like most Palo Alto startups that grew up, Intuit left town for bigger space. Business profiles from the mid 1990s list a Menlo Park mailing address. Profiles from the late 1990s list Mountain View, first on Garcia Avenue and later on Marine Way. Intuit's current fact sheet names Mountain View as its headquarters. Its press releases carry a Mountain View dateline.

The campus sits on the bay side of Highway 101, near Google and Shoreline Park. Our Mountain View guide covers the city and its tech employers.

Later milestones

Intuit's place in the local story

Intuit fits a pattern that runs through this section of the site. A founder with a business idea finds a technical partner at Stanford, starts in a small Palo Alto space and moves to a bigger campus nearby once the product takes off. Hewlett-Packard set that pattern in 1939. Google, Facebook and PayPal repeated it decades later.

Intuit also shows that the pattern is not only about hardware or the internet. Its first product was a modest desktop program, sold in boxes, for people who disliked paying bills. It grew into one of the largest software companies in the region without leaving the Peninsula. The Silicon Valley history page puts it alongside the chip and computer firms of the same era.

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