YouSaid · the spoken record

Sasan Goodarzi

lines on the record: 56
first: 2024-10-21
most recent: 2024-10-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“It's really, you have to think about the cohort of customers. There will always be customers that have a simple tax situation where free may be the right thing for them. There's also a lot of customers that no matter what their tax situation is, they actually want somebody else to do their taxes for them because of confidence. They fear getting it wrong. They want to make sure they're getting the largest refund. If the IRS comes after them, they want to make sure somebody's there to protect them. And so they'll always want to have an expert do their taxes for them. So we believe that over time, we'll still have a mix of free. We'll have a mix of paying customers. And I think over time, our largest growth will come from disrupting what today is the assisted category.”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do this for you. That's right. And that's, by the way, why the essence of our investments that started six plus years. Arrangement was what matters? Not the exact number for customers. So I think accuracy has a limit based on what it is you're talking about. You got to get taxes exactly right, a range of revenue and what's possible from a marketing campaign. You can have a range and customers are totally okay with that.”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're getting a lot of economies of scale because of our own investments because we were so early and we did this for very, very practical reasons. But we actually test and experiment whether across the board with entropic AWS, Gemini, Lama, open source. And part of the experimentation is how could it potentially be a leverage to RLMs? Because our LLMs have the agency and the authority. They're the brains of delivering the experiences that I articulated. And so we're not getting economies of scale from other LLMs. In fact, I would say it's the reverse right now. I think two years from now, three years from now, we're going to get economies of scale, but today the economies of scale, and it's why we've been able to deliver platform leverage and margin leverage is from all of our own investments. Over time, I think it will help.”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not on its own. That's why I mentioned, you know, when you look at our AI platform that sits on our data layer and our data platform, it's the combination of machine learning, knowledge engineering, which is very good at math and our LLMs that work in concert to deliver experiences to ensure your taxes are done right, to make sure your accounting is done right. So on its own note, but in the combination of our other elements of our AI platform, absolutely.”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In Gen AI, and specifically in our own intuition, large language models, our models are the only thing models that are trained by the customer data. I set that context to say, to answer your question, we're in a very, very early days of what LLMs can do. I mean, I would tell you that we work a lot with the majority of the companies that are out there. The progress that's being made month to month is incredible. So in terms of, will it do most of what we need sometime in the near future, medium future? Absolutely. And I believe AI will one day be as smart as humans, if not smarter. But I think humans are always going to be a critical part of the picture for us in our industry. But it's still very early days. I don't want to at all suggest that everything can be achieved with AI today. We're at the beginning of a very long journey.”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me say two things in context of your question. The first one is we're not launching AI features. Our entire platform is fueled by data and NAI. And in fact, our goal is not to ship a bunch of plug-in features that do stuff for you, but to create a platform where marketing is done for you, Quote to Cash is done for you, books, taxes are all done for you. And please think about it from what we're trying to achieve as the whole platform is fueled by data and AI. That's the first thing. The second thing is when we declared AI core to our strategy, our investments were in machine learning and knowledge engineering. Knowledge engineering is very particular to us. We have patents around it. It takes rules and the relationship of rules and code turns it into code. And the power of it is accuracy. And a lot of what we do has to be accurate. That's really been the premise of all of our AI investments has been machine learning, knowledge engineering. About three to four years ago, we started investing in”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The goal is eventually move everybody to the cloud. We're not going to force customers that, like for instance, the workflow is not going to be the same in the cloud. But if you have a need for a particular module that we absolutely don't have in the cloud, we're not going to force you to move to the cloud. Eventually, that could be two years from now, five years from now, I think everybody's going to end up being in the cloud.”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, we have for many, many years, and many of our desktop services are actually now on the cloud. And we've built it in such a way where there will be a seamless transition to the cloud one day. At this point, we've not declared.”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Feature. So I would say a lot of our focus is how do we make the transition for our desktop customers as easy as possible to the cloud. With that said, if you look at any company that's had to go from server to cloud or desktop to cloud or on-premise to cloud, there's always a lot of growing pains because cloud platforms are not a replication of desktop platforms. And so we're really solving for as much as possible the ease of migration for our desktop customers, but we're truly building a cloud platform that's built for new customers and customers that have embraced the cloud platform from 10 years ago. And I say all that just to say, we aim to make our desktop customers as happy as possible, but really it's impossible to replicate what they want in the cloud because then our cloud offering would be very old aged and workflow-based, which is not.”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everything that we do around goal setting, performance management is about delivering for customers. I mean, that's the whole sole purpose of why I exist, why our team exists is all about the product. So the short answer is yes. I would also separate what I just said from the sort of premise of your question, which is desktop to the cloud. I mean, the reality is we were born 40 years ago. We were born in the era of DOS and we were born as a desktop company. And frankly, our desktop customers, both on the consumer side and on the business side, built who we are today. At the same time, the workflows, the features, the functionality of desktop is not intended to be translated to the cloud. If we did that, we would not be able to continue to grow with most of our customers or acquire new customers, particularly as we're trying to create done for you experiences versus”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Last several years, we have not been as great as we need to be in terms of really being great at setting goals for every individual that's meaningful goal with very clear success measures and then having conversations because it's a two-way street in terms of how you become a better version of yourself. And so we actually take the end-to-end approach to goal setting, to performance management very, very seriously.”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, for us, it's everything. And what I mean by everything is for us, it's about, first of all, goal setting. Because goal setting is about what does great look like. And performance management for us is performance management at all levels. We need the performance, our trajectory changing so that they can become a better version of themselves. And we need the performance management that does not meet expectations. So performance management for us is about, it's like coaching a basketball team, right? You're focused on making every person on the team great. There's somebody that never comes off the bench. There's somebody that's the star of the team. That's what we try to become great at. So sort of goal setting for us, discussions on a monthly basis and then the rating at the end of the year. It's about the system. And I would say the system for us is very, very important. And I would also tell you that, you know, it's a conversation I had with the whole company this year. We need to up our game in this area. When I look at”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Their ratings. And so this was done bottoms up at every layer of the organization. It was not a tops-down decision. But the decision that we made this year was that in order to move with the velocity that we need to move to reallocate the resources and the dollars, is that we would in essence lay off the 10% that fell into, it was actually more like 8% that fell into the bucket of does not meet expectations. So that's the very bottoms up, very disciplined and rigorous, although very tough in terms of how we made the decision.”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Overall investment portfolio. So this was all driven by acceleration, momentum, and growth. To answer your question in terms of how we picked those folks, it was all bottoms up. We have a performance management system where, in essence, managers will go in and they will rate their employees. Generally, 10% of the company is what we call trajectory changing. 20% is exceeds expectations. So about 30% of the company exceeds or trajectory changing. And generally about 60 to 65% are achieved expectations, which is, by the way, we have very bold goals and to achieve expectations is actually really strong performance. And generally 5 to 10% that does not meet expectations. And that's a year where managers will put into the system.”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First of all, when I look back at the last five years, there are big decisions that I've made and then there are really, really tough decisions that we've made that I've made. And this is one of them, because at the end of the day, everyone we have in the company we believe is very talented. And when you make a decision like this, you're impacting people's lives. And so one, these decisions never come easy. The second is we were very clear across five areas, particularly our five bets. We've seen so much progress that as we thought about, this is part of our six year and three-year mechanism, as we thought about the next two years, three years, and five years, we felt that it was important to accelerate investments in five key areas. Majority of them are around our big bets. And we also felt that in order to do that, there was an opportunity to reallocate dollars from within while we, by the way, continue to add to our”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was a very small cohort of customers that were using Mint. We decided that in order truly to have a platform that we can serve millions of customers that we would port, most, not all of the capabilities in the credit karma. And so we, I can't remember the exact percentage, but I think 30 to 40 percent of the Mintz customers are now on credit karma. By the way, happier than before. And I think there's 20% of customers that we can't serve today with credit karma. But we're okay with that because there's a very small core of customers that we could serve on mint. And we had, we ultimately made the decision to be one platform. So by the way, if there's anything we can do to help you, send me an email. My email address is available on our website. Anything I can do to help you, we will. But we can't replace Mint exactly the way it was.”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On culture and people. And those are decisions I'm involved with like just last week. We had an all day, which we have it four times a year, all day session focused on people in succession planning. Those are decisions, right? Whose potential successor for key roles and principles? The CEO one day, I decide if they're actual success. So those are decisions. So every mechanism is set up for an output and a set of decisions. And we're generally pretty clear are those decisions I get to make. Are there decisions the team gets to make? But we try to push as many decisions as we can into the org because most decisions are two-way doors. You can always reverse them. But that's the structure and framework that we use. It's our intuiting system.”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fall in love with what you've declared and always fall in love with the customer and sort of the trends and how the world is moving. So our mechanisms are set up for certain outcomes and decisions. Our six-year mechanism, the decision is, does anything change in our strategy and bets? And if so, what is it? So the output of it, the decision is what changed and why. Our three-in-one-year plan mechanism is all structured around not only the key priorities, but the actual deliverables, what we call input goals, which is a best practice we borrowed from Amazon, where every input goal has a leader assigned to it. It has success measures, and we ensured that it's resourced. And we also know what's below the line. Those are all decisions that our teams make, but the decisions that I make are capital allocation because not everything is created equal. And where do we put our dollars in capital? And then the last one is we spend a lot of time.”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Probably one of our largest advantages in the company is what we term our intuiting system. It's the mechanisms in which we run the company. And this is an important context to answer your question. If you look at our mechanisms, we have a set of mechanisms around how we set expectations and set strategy. We have a set of mechanisms in terms of execution. And then we have a set of mechanisms in terms of how we galvanize the leaders at all levels and all of our employees. And so therefore we have mechanisms like six-year plan. And it's not a financial plan. It's actually just looking way into the future and looking back to consider what has to change. We have three in one year plan mechanisms. I won't bore you with all the mechanisms, but that's important context to answer your question. Our six-year mechanism is really structured such that we question everything that we do. One of the things that we believe in strongly, I believe in strongly, is never to”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We live in a world of competition only because when we think about our, especially our businesses that we serve, what we really care about is our businesses are transacting on our platform. But sometimes they will use square payments. Sometimes they will use PayPal. Sometimes they will use other payroll providers. And we provide the capability to integrate those capabilities on our platform because we want the customer to be able to serve their customer the way they want. And so that's sort of when you look at our AI-driven expert platform strategy, a very important element of it is that it's open and it's open because it helps us deliver for our customers and win.”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of our decisions are based on delivering for our customers and winning in the marketplace and driving growth for the future. We don't make decisions That really are in the context of what will a regulator think about something. We have very solid governance in the company. We have data, privacy, and security principles, which we abide by all focused on our customers. And so to your question, I don't spend, and we don't spend a lot of time worrying about, well, now that we've built a company in this way to win and deliver for customers, what could a regulator do? Because at the end of the day, a regulator, generally they want to do the right thing. Generally, it's not politically driven. Sometimes it is. But our view is that they always want to do the right thing, and we always want to do the right thing. And we would always have a conversation in the construct of if there's any areas they have questions on. But our focus, our compass is very clear.”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I actually think that's very healthy to understand what works and what situation, what doesn't work. And multiple clouds in this case, multiple LLMs is actually quite healthy because you learn faster, you pivot faster. But we have these conversations all the time. We believe, and I would just tell you that probably the most heated debate that we had five years ago when I stepped into this role with my staff was whether or not we would bet on AI because AI wasn't popular then, it wasn't the buzzword that it is today. And I bring that up as an example of we debate technology bets. We debate interoperability versus you go all in with a partner all the time because it's actually critical, they're critical for the road and critical decisions for the future. So I'm definitely involved in those key discussions.”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We do have those conversations. First of all, I had the pleasure of being our CIO for a couple of years, and I was deeply involved in shifting the company from all of our own data centers to shifting the company at that time to AWS. So I worked very closely with the Amazon team and Andy to really drive their roadmap but get us prepared to go to the cloud. And one of the reasons I started there is one of the decisions that we made very, very early on is to build our capabilities, our apps, and the way we built sort of cloud-ready apps was so we would never get married to or stuck only with one platform. We wanted the interoperability. And we actually like the fact that we're on multiple clouds, and with the age of AI, we've built our own large language models, but we also experiment using about nine, ten other large language models.”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That sort of blows up the whole premise of what you thought you could do and what time frame. And now the great news is knock on wood. We've proved that out across our acquisitions. The things that is okay to get wrong and most of the time you're not going to get perfectly right is how long is it going to take to do something? And the example I just articulated earlier in the case of transforming one of the acquisitions to be entirely cloud-based, it's taking six months, about six months longer than what we thought. That's okay because that's just an element of time versus an element of doability.”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Having to be all integrated, for instance, we've actually built bridges in terms of how Google Cloud and AWS work together. So a lot of our technology innovation, because we're API-oriented services-based, is actually about connection versus integration. And that's really what has propelled what's possible because credit karma has great platform, data platform, AI platform. We didn't have to replace it or create sort of one integration of a platform, but we built, in essence, pipes where we can achieve the product innovation for our customers. So that's the approach that we've been taking. And that's what we do in the due diligence, just to make sure that we can, in fact, do that because of a platform of this scale. If you have to rewrite the entire code or integrate the stacks, it just becomes too much work and not worth it.”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And technology capabilities. And we have come a long ways and so has technology in terms of integration. So to specifically answer your question, one of the wonderful things about credit karma in Mailchimp, but I'll just use credit karma in this case as an example, is the amount of consumer data that they have and the amount of consumer data that we have within turbo tax. And the reason is very attractive acquisition is in what we can do with customers' consent to use their data to deliver benefits to them that otherwise nobody else can because we know a 360 view of their information. But rather than having to take their data lake and our data lake and the cloud that they sit on, which is Google Cloud, the rest of the company is on AWS rather than integrating, we actually innovated across the technologies where we build a data pipe where data is shared without all the data.”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We do a lot of diligence before we make an acquisition. And let me be clear, no matter how good you are at due diligence, there are things you're going to get surprised with. On the upside, once it's done, and there are things you're going to get surprised with to the downside. But the three areas where we spend a lot of time on due diligence is one, just cultural fit. Because I have a very strong belief that no matter how great of a strategic fit something is, if you got two cultures that may clash, it's just not going to work. We do a culture, deep culture assessment, and I personally get involved depending on the size of the deal to really assess the culture for myself as well. We, of course, do a very deep strategic assessment. Then we do a very deep capability assessment. So this goes to your question. You know, we'll assess what's their compensation schemes, what are the systems they have, but most importantly, we really thoroughly assess both their daily”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very deeply in our one and three year mechanism. That's a mechanism where not only do we review priorities, but we actually review very specific what are the deliverables for this year? What are the deliverables for the next three years? And what's resource, what's not, and why. And Sandip and I, our CFO and I, will get involved if we feel like there are certain areas where the team has made all of the resource allocation trade-offs, but we have an opportunity to fund even more opportunities and we'll get involved in those types of decisions. But I have a lot of gratitude for my team because of the mobility that we've had. They've seen all parts of the company. There's a lot of just natural debate and sort of trade-off decisions that's made within the team, without an escalation to me. But once in a while, maybe once every couple of months, there's something I have to get involved with, just to break a tie or make a resource decision.”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't tie break enough, and sometimes I talk to a team about is enough stuff getting to me. So I don't play a huge tiebreaker role. It's actually even better today than it was three to four years ago. And the reason is Mariana and Markana runs our business segment. Mark runs our consumer segment. Mariana used to be our CTO. She was heading up all of technology for the company before this role. And Mark was actually leading all of our customer success before stepping into running the consumer platform. We, in essence, promoted both of their proteges. And so my point is there is a very, I would say, thoughtful collaboration between the team because we're very clear about our strategy. We're very clear about the deliverables for both the year and the next three years out. And a lot of the discussions and tiebreaking happens between the team. Of course, I get involved.”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you've got the two platform leaders, I'm assuming they report to you, and then you've got CTO who's making technology decisions. I'm assuming you tiebreak a lot there, right? If you're responsible for the success of the consumer platform, for example, and you really think you need some technology built or built in a different way than the company currently has, and the answer is no, I'm guessing that comes to you.”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And of course, then really very important roles around M&A, people and places, legal and finance. But we run the company as a platform. And the leaders, in the case of the consumer and the business leader, the business segment leader, they're responsible for the outcomes of the segment. But I also hold them accountable for how the company performs.”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we're really structured as a platform. And what that means is we have a leader that runs our consumer platform. We have a leader that runs our business platform. We actually have a leader that looks at the network effect and the ecosystem effect between consumer and businesses. And then we have a CTO that is really responsible for all of our technology in the company, all of the spend in technology. segment leaders, the consumer segment leader, the business segment leader, they decide what's most important to drive growth and deliver for customers. It's our CTO that owns all the technology that then decides, how do I need to ensure that I allocate the dollars, the people to achieve what we want to achieve across the platform. And then we have a customer success platform leader that owns all of customer success across the company.”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the answer to your question part of the playbook all along was we're going to create one platform. And when I spoke to Ranya years ago to take on this role, it was very clear at the end of the day, she would take on the CEO role and that would be the title for really an interim period from a cultural transformation. But her charter is the same. And at one point, that title, it's more about the SVP of the category. And so it's important to have those conversations up front. We're very big on, we're not interested in leaders that are pursuing titles, even when we recruit from the outside, we're interested in folks that want to really fight for the same cause, that are in love with our mission. And of course, everybody has to be thoughtful about what's right for me as an individual. So we take all those things into consideration, but we have these conversations up front. And it was just sort of.”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, when we make an acquisition, whether it's credit, karma and or Mailchamp, before we make the acquisition, we create jointly with the founder of the company, but really our broad leadership team that's informed of the potential acquisition. We create a six-pager. And this six-pager really lays out what are we going to do together? Why are we buying in this case MailChimp? What's the vision of what we're trying to create? And the vision is integrate to create one platform. What are the key priorities? And particularly, we focus on acceleration, not integration. Although everything we do in the product is integration, in a company of our scale and size, clarity matters a lot. And so even basic things like what we will do in the first 90 days, what we will do in the first six months, and clearly as important what we're not going to do is all part not only the six-pager, but sort of the player.”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cause to fight for They have to know they're fighting for creating the best sort of payments capabilities, bill pay capability, accounting capability. And that's what we term mission-based teams. They have a mission and their focus is that mission, payments, MailChimp, turbo tax, whatever it may be. But the other element is the leader's job is the mission is the platform and to win as a platform. And so it's really our discipline and our rigor in how we run the company is actually our strength. And from the outside looking in, it may seem like there are sort of parts and pieces, but within, we're all solving for the same thing, which is how do you win as a platform?”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me be clear. Ronnie is no longer the CEO of MailChimp. Is the segment leader, senior vice president that runs our grow segment? Mailchimp is a part of it. And we did that very intentionally at the beginning, just from a cultural integration. But we don't have CEOs within the company. Even Joe Kaufman that runs our credit karma business, he is reporting now to Mark Noturani that owns our consumer business, and he is the head of Credit Karma, a senior vice president that runs credit karma. The first thing I wanted to sort of start with is that CEO element was just a cultural transition. We had leaders that at the end of the day, when they look at their paycheck, it's intuitive. And their expectation is to serve customers. And it goes back to the way I answered the question earlier. If you were within the company, what you'd get a sense for is really two things. One, we have mission-based teams. Because in order for teams to have it,”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, one of the things that's really interesting there is these component platforms are still divisions, right? Mailchimp has a CEO, credit karma is a big company that you acquired, usually when companies like Intuit acquire something like Credit Karma. You promise the people who work there a measure of independence. But you're talking about stitching it together into a platform. There's some technical stuff there that I definitely want to talk about, but there's just the operational side of saying, okay, now you're part of a bigger thing while still keeping the walls up and still saying, okay, we have different CEOs. That's very different than most other tech companies. How have you made that choice? And is that durable over the long term?”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, first of all, the way we run the There's a bunch of pieces and parts, and everybody is working towards their own true north. There's really one true north that we really work towards. And that's how we run the company. It's our leadership expectations. It's the mechanisms of the company and how we measure success.”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Machine learning and really AI capabilities that we coin as lightbox, which I can get into at some point down the road if you're interested. And really the intent of all of this is to create one platform. It's to really integrate the products customer back so that customers in one place can grow their business, run their business. And as a consumer be able to manage your personal life. So I think five years from now, we're going to look back and go, wow, the addition of all the things you had plus what you did with credit karma and MailChimp were just really the key to ignite the next chapter of the company. But the answer to your question is yes. We're stitching it all together to create one seamless platform.”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By the way, I love actually where you started because most people don't know what you just articulated, which is this whole company has been, in essence, it started with Scott Cook, our founder, creating Quicken and realized the way people are using it, their small businesses trying to manage their money. And that's what gave birth to what today is our QuickBooks platform. But turbo tax, even our payroll offering, MailChimp credit karma, they're all acquisitions. But to answer your question, particularly in the last five years, a lot of our platform play and where we are today has been based on a lot of organic innovation and investment. But also we bought these two sort of big brands, two number ones in their space, credit karma and MailChimp, because one, they come with a lot of data and a lot of sort of AI capabilities, particularly credit karma has a lot of machines.”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And also be able to get their taxes done. And then we help them with what should you do with your refund. So we now do all of that gamut because we wanted to play a meaningful role in the live of consumers. And for businesses, now in one place you can, in essence, manage your customers, market to your customers, be able to really manage your quote to cash, your cash flow, and make sure your, you know, books are right for tax time. So now we have all those capabilities. And really, the future for us is now how do we create everything in a way that it's done for you versus you having to do the work.”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We manage our cash flow quote to cash for you, books, accounting taxes are done for you. And really, in order to do that, we bet very early almost six years ago on data and AI. And frankly, we did it for very practical reasons because in order to do what I just articulated, which is we focus on your bottom line, your revenue and profitability as a business or your financial household savings as a consumer, we have to actually leverage data, your data, and leverage AI to deliver these insights and experiences. So today, to answer your question, we have become a platform company. And what that means from the lens of a consumer and a business is consumers can use our platform all in one place to be able to build their credit, be able to manage their money, get financial products that they need, like credit cards, loans, insurance, a mortgage for their home.”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, first of all, with our 40 years young, I've been with the company for half that time. And when I stepped into this role, the decision we made was to play a far more meaningful role in the lives of consumers and businesses. So we really started on a path to shift the company from a tax and accounting platform to a platform company that, you know, businesses in essence can rely on us to be able to grow and run their business and consumers can power their financial prosperity. So that's the path that we started down about five plus years ago. But most importantly, I would say that we said, hey, we have to create experiences that in essence are done for customers rather than creating workflows where people have to do the work to run their business and manage their cash flow or manage their personal financial life. Wouldn't it create done-for-you experiences where we deliver benefits and insights like marketing is done for you?”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I am very excited to talk to you. Just announce a bunch of AI products that are interesting. You've been changing the company around. Let's start at the very beginning. Intuit is 40 years old. A lot of people are familiar with your various products like Turbotax or MailChimp. What is into it now? What do you think of the company as?”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, so what do you think? Was that contentious? Should we have deleted it? You let me know. I'm open to the feedback. Right now, I'm mostly just amused and a little befuddled. The rest of that episode, which, as I keep saying, was a good episode of Decoder with some very interesting ideas about how to integrate big acquisitions into a single tech platform inside of it. Also, I asked why Sassan shut down Mint, which honestly is a thing I should have been the most outraged about. Okay, Sasan Gaddarzi, the CEO of Intuit. You are the CEO of Intuit. Welcome to Dakota.”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I love your question. Let me answer it in two ways. You know, one is there are over 100 million customers that we've served for completely free. It's more than the entire industry combined. So we're very, very sort of intentional about making sure that we are a big player when it comes to free tax software.”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm going to ask you this question. I can already tell you that you're going to tell me you disagree with my premise, but I ask it anyway, broadly speaking, I would say the criticism of Intuit's free products when it comes to taxes is that it says it's free, and then somewhere along the line they slide you into paying. The government has complained about this. That is a reputation damager for the company. Again, I get the emails from Dakota listeners asking me what questions to ask you. Yeah. And it's that. It's that sort of dark pattern feeling inside of, in particular, the free tax product. Is that something you want to fix? Do you worry about that damage to the reputation? Yeah.”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They provided free tax software, no impact in the tax industry. And then we sold that to another formidable company. And there's really been no formidable impact to the structure of the tax industry because free is already available. And so our view, by the way, very strongly, and we've been on the record, this is a solution looking for a problem. Free already exists. And by the way, what the government is providing is not free. You're paying. Your tax dollars are going towards building a software that already exists for Americans. So that's something that we've been on the record that from our perspective and private industry has been on the record. It doesn't make sense. Free already exists. So why build another one?”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We do not. Free is available to all consumers today. And so it really is not relevant to our business. And in fact, proof points are always important. You know, in the last five years, two pretty formidable companies got into providing free tax software. One was Credit Karma before we acquired them. 100 million members.”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you see free direct federal e-filing arrive, I think today, literally today, just before we started speaking, the government announced to be available in half the states, which is about 60% of the population. Does that have a revenue impact on you? Do you get an email saying we project turbo tax revenue will go down by X?”
2024-10-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT