In this interview, Tom Proulx and Scott Cook recount how they met at Stanford and founded Intuit. Tom, inspired by Steve Jobs, was looking to start a PC software company and was searching for a mass‑market idea. He encountered a fellow student seeking programmers for a project to automate everyday household financial tasks—paying bills, maintaining a check register, and tracking spending. Recognizing the opportunity, Tom and Scott connected, describing their partnership as a lucky, serendipitous match. They later reflected on a management off‑site exercise that placed them on opposite corners of a 2 × 2 grid, illustrating how their strengths and weaknesses complemented each other. Both emphasized a shared vision: to create software that was intuitively obvious for unsophisticated users, moving beyond the era of thick manuals. This vision guided the naming of the company—“Intuit”—which they felt perfectly captured the goal of intuitive, user‑friendly design. The conversation highlights their complementary skills, common values of hard work and simplicity, and the foundational idea of automating routine financial tasks that became the basis for Quicken.
Chapters
So Scott is a few years older than me. He was actually out working, making a living. I was still a kid at Stanford. I was a senior at Stanford, had another year to go because I was co-term. And I had at the time figured out, actually inspired by Steve Jobs, Jobs that I wanted to start a PC software company. I didn't know yet what it was going to be, but that was the idea I had. And so I was just starting to kind of think about that and had my antenna up looking for opportunities, thinking about what would be that kind of killer app. I had a year to go, so there was no rush, but I knew that's what I wanted to do. I also knew that I was really excited about the prospect of something that would be a mass market kind of product. I wanted I wanted something that was going to— that millions of people would use. But that was as far as I got. I kind of knew that that's what I wanted to do, but I didn't yet have the idea. So that was the context that I was living in. And one day I was sitting in front of the engineering library working on a group project at Stanford, and this guy walks up to me, taps me on the shoulder. He's got a handful of paper in his hand. Excuse me, where would be a good place to post these flyers? I'm looking for programmers. And so I told him. I said, well, the computer science area is down there, and here's where you post them. And he said, but tell me a little bit about what you're looking for, and what are you doing? And he told me about this idea that his wife had had of using a— writing a program to automate the routine day-to-day financial tasks that every household has to do, paying bills, keeping a check register, tracking your spending, and just the basic stuff that we all have to do. And it was instantly obvious to me that that was the idea, that was what I was looking for. And so it was complete— to answer the question, how do you find your perfect co-founder, and Scott said, well, get lucky. That was our lucky moment, that we just happened upon each other randomly at Stanford with me in the right frame of mind looking for this idea and him looking for a guy in that right frame of mind and we just really got lucky. Years later, we— when Intuit was a big successful company, I remember we had this management offsite where we had this management guru guy that came and it was an executive team building thing. And one of the things that they had us do was they plot on a 2 by 2 grid. I don't even remember what the axes were, but there were these 2 by 2 grid of, I don't know, IQ versus drive. I don't know, it wasn't that. But anyways, and each person on the management team has to go up there and put a little X of where you are. And I remember everybody on the executive team was kind of around the middle except for Scott and me. were diagonally opposite one another. So what his strengths happened to be my weaknesses and my strengths happened to be his weaknesses and we really complemented each other well. So that was to answer your question. I'm not sure how replicatable that is when you're looking for your co-founder, but it was something that really worked well for us.
I think you've got to find someone And we were at the same time complementary in that our strengths were in opposite places, but we had the same kind of vision and values. So what excited both of us was how to take computers, which were then used just— this is 1983— were then used just by a handful of people for obscure things, and how we could solve a problem that everybody had and make something that would do something that everybody does so much better than the way they do it now. And that required a very different mindset than building software for geeks or finance people in companies. So we shared that same vision, the same values of hard work, make it beautifully simple for the customer, for the user, even if the user was totally unsophisticated. So we shared that same foundation, but then brought totally complementary skills. So that was— without that commonality, it wouldn't have worked. Without the differences, we would have been overlapping.
I think the other thing that we had a similar vision as to how the product should be. I remember when we were trying to come up with a name for the company, Scott suggested, hey, what do you think about Intuit? Again, it was one of those things that was instantly obvious to me that was the perfect name because our vision for the software was that it had to be intuitively obvious to use. In those days— today we all take it for granted, there's no such thing as a manual, you don't buy software with manuals anymore. But in those days everything came with a box and a manual.
Big thick manuals, like this thick.
And our vision was no, the software design should be so intuitively obvious that you just know how to use it without any instruction. And that's why when he said Intuit as a company, it was like yes. Obviously right.
Just one button on that. Our first guess as to the name was a play on instinctive, because we wanted it to be instinctively easy, shortening it to Instinks. But then someone mentioned that could be mispronounced as it stinks, so we didn't do that.
