Quickbooks is one of the most well-known and widely used accounting software for small businesses and accountants. Its rise to become a multi-billion dollar SaaS giant was fueled in part by key investments from its original founders. This article will examine how owner investments from Intuit founders like Scott Cook and John Doerr provided crucial early funding and validation for Quickbooks’ disruptive business model.
Investments from Intuit founders Scott Cook and John Doerr provided initial funding
Quickbooks was founded in the 1990s as an early pioneer of the SaaS business model for accounting software. At the time, Intuit’s Quickbooks product was still desktop-based software sold in stores. The new Quickbooks SaaS offering faced skepticism about whether the cloud could deliver robust financial applications. However, early funding from Intuit’s founders provided validation and runway for Quickbooks to prove its model. Scott Cook and John Doerr, two of Intuit’s original founders and largest shareholders, provided $15 million in initial seed funding for the new Quickbooks Online product in 2001. This early investment from Intuit’s creator and VC legend gave confidence for further development of the SaaS accounting platform.
Hands-off approach by founders allowed Quickbooks SaaS to disrupt market
Unlike many founders, Scott Cook and John Doerr took a hands-off approach after investing in Quickbooks Online. This allowed the Quickbooks product team to operate independently and make decisions optimized for the new SaaS model, rather than being constrained by the legacy desktop software business. The Intuit founders provided funding but did not dictate feature development or timelines. This patience led to long-term payoff as Quickbooks Online slowly gained adoption and mindshare, eventually disrupting the accounting software market. By 2015, Quickbooks Online reached 1 million subscribers – proving the SaaS model could successfully deliver financial applications from the cloud. By giving the Quickbooks team freedom to find product-market fit, Cook and Doerr’s founder investment maximized the disruptive impact of the new offering.
Quickbooks founder investments enabled long-term vision
The hands-off investment approach by Intuit founders allowed Quickbooks product leadership to operate with a long-term vision. Without quarterly desktop software release pressures, the team focused on ease-of-use, mobile features, and subscription pricing to drive viral growth. Cook and Doerr’s funding allowed them to focus on the fundamentals and make decisions with a 5-10 year horizon based on the SaaS business model. The founders’ patient capital and unwillingness to dictate timelines was perfectly matched to the iterative, customer-focused nature of SaaS product development. This alignment between investor expectations and optimal SaaS product processes enabled Quickbooks’ successful transition to the cloud.
Investments drove culture change and accelerated Quickbooks’ cloud success
The investments from Intuit’s founders drove culture change that accelerated the success of Quickbooks Online. Quickbooks was spun off as a separate division, allowing leadership to nurture a startup culture optimized for the SaaS business model. Iterative development with direct customer feedback became core processes. Employees were empowered to innovate and rewarded for subscriber growth, renewals, and customer satisfaction rather than annual software releases. Cook and Doerr’s investments sent a clear signal that the cloud was the future, facilitating this cultural transition. The autonomy and startup mindset fostered by their hands-off approach helped Quickbooks Online achieve exponential growth in subscribers and revenue as the cloud displaced desktop software for accounting.
In summary, the hands-off investments by Intuit founders like Scott Cook and John Doerr provided crucial early funding and validation that enabled Quickbooks’ disruptive transition to SaaS accounting software. By giving Quickbooks product leadership independence and a long-term vision, their funding allowed a culture and feature set optimized for the cloud to develop, fueling exponential growth in subscribers. The Intuit founders’ patient investments and willingness to forego control drove transformative changes that accelerated Quickbooks becoming a leading SaaS accounting platform.