Here's what people have to say about Inside Intuit:
Inside Intuit is a tale of missionaries, not mercenaries. It’s
about a founding team that prevails through tenacity, frugality, and an
obsession with the customer experience. It’s about great people who put
the organization ahead of themselves and who embrace the mission and
values articulated clearly and consistently by Intuit’s leaders. Through
meticulous research, including scores of interviews with managers,
executives, competitors, and ex-employees, the authors take you behind the
scenes, from the trenches to the boardroom, immersing you in the struggles
inside Intuit.
One year after the news of Wall Street accounting
scandals and the shocking deceit of the scumbag CEOs and CFOs at Enron and
WorldCom, it is a pleasure to introduce you to what I believe will be an
enduring business institution. Companies like Intuit, and the story
Inside Intuit, highlight the contrast between the best entrepreneurs
have to offer and the rest.
—John Doerr, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
(Excerpt from John Doerr’s Foreword in Inside
Intuit)
It's a scary thing having authors with complete
access scrutinize your life's work. What I feared most was
inaccuracy...the bane of journalism that leads to so much disrespect of
the writing profession. I knew you two had the diligence and honor to
strive for making the accurate "book of record". You've triumphed at
that.
--Scott Cook, Intuit Co-Founder
Of all the stories and articles written about Intuit
over the years, Inside Intuit is the first to get it right. The
authors took great pains to really understand what made Intuit the
tremendous success it became, even though that story didn't "fit the mold"
of the classic entrepreneurial success story. In addition to recounting
the history of Intuit, they make sure to include the important lessons
that made Intuit successful, lessons that any budding entrepreneur can
learn from and use.
—Tom Proulx, Intuit Co-Founder
Inside Intuit offers us the secrets behind
Intuit's extraordinary success. The insights into how Intuit trounced
Microsoft alone are worth the price of the book!
—Andrea Butter, author of Piloting Palm and
former VP of Marketing at Palm Computing
This important book doesn’t take any shortcuts in
analyzing the building blocks of success. Taylor and Schroeder have
written a fascinating blow-by-blow account of the thousand and one
decisions that have made Intuit what it is. Highly readable, thorough, and
extremely well researched, Inside Intuit is a must-read for anyone
who wants to understand success in Silicon Valley.
—Emanuel Rosen, author of The Anatomy of Buzz
Inside Intuit is more than the history of a
start-up that grew to dominate a major software category. It is a
blueprint of success for entrepreneurs and investors who want to build
great businesses in difficult environments.
—Roger McNamee, cofounder, Silver Lake Partners and
Integral Capital Partners
Inside Intuit is a very entertaining book. Any
entrepreneur at heart will enjoy and learn from the story of how Scott
Cook and Tom Proulx faced so much adversity and came back from the brink
of disaster to build a very successful, highly admired Silicon Valley
company. Readers can learn many lessons from both Intuit’s successes and
mistakes. In the end, good ideas, hard work, determination, and strong
values really do pay off!
—Dan Rudolph, Senior Associate Dean/Chief Operating
Officer, Stanford Graduate School of Business
I was thrilled to read the inside story of how Intuit
was born and raised. I’ve always admired Intuit’s strict attention to
customer needs and feedback. Now I have a much better idea of how that
culture was created.
—Stewart Alsop, General Partner, New Enterprise
Associates
Kathy Schroeder and Suzanne Taylor have written a
lively, complete, and well balanced history of Intuit.
—Eric Dunn, former Intuit CFO, CTO, and Fellow
What Inside Intuit
offers is a straightforward, if not dramatic, portrait of a company in a
constant state of crisis or change brought about by shifts in the software
industry, software bugs, new products, acquisition decisions good and bad,
and changes in top management.
And, of course, for Microsoft-phobes, it offers interesting details about
one of the few times that Bill Gates came in number two.
--Knowledge@Wharton, November 5,
2003
Intuit didn't slay the dragon, speaking
metaphorically, but the dragon sure went away grumbling.
The story of Intuit, the software
company famous for its financial products like Quicken, started in a
one-room office in Palo Alto in 1983. That's not quite the same, or as
famous, as the Addison Street garage where Bill Hewlett and David Packard
started their company, but it's a pretty good story in its own right.
It's a story of perseverance against long odds, of
surviving the efforts of Microsoft to defeat Intuit and then buy the
company, and of not just having the right idea but the right way to
develop and improve it.
At the low point, Intuit was down to four unpaid
employees and the company had $51 in its checking account.
Intuit had $1.36 billion in revenue last year, and
Bill Gates still doesn't own it.
"Inside Intuit" is a corporate history with a sense
of drama, written from a sympathetic viewpoint since one of the
co-authors, Suzanne Taylor, is a former Intuit manager.
But "Inside Intuit" isn't a postcard to the company,
since the book explores mistakes that were made, strife within the
management ranks, criticism of key people, and the fact this wasn't just a
happy walk in the park for the company to achieve success.
Taylor, of Menlo Park, and co-author Kathy Schroeder
of Palo Alto have written a book that explains how an idea started at a
kitchen table turned into what would be one of the leading software
companies in the world.
--Palo Alto Weekly, November 5, 2003