SCOTT COOK

Thirty to 40 years ago, most financial decisions were fairly simple.

The changing nature of money is only one facet of the financial services revolution.

Technology is similarly just a catalyst at times for fundamental forces already present.

People don't place their trust in government or company pension plans; they have to be self-reliant.

A whole generation of Americans will retire in poverty instead of prosperity, because they simply are not preparing for retirement now.

Well, today people have to be self-reliant if they want a secure retirement income.

Fifty years ago wealth was stored and transmitted physically through gold bars, stock certificates, bank notes, and coins.

Even some of the greatest technology-led revolutions, or allegedly technology-led, really were only made possible because of trends already present.

Before 1980, it was basically illegal for U.S. banks to invent new products.

So I think instead of focusing on the competition, focus on the customer.

Be dramatically willing to focus on the customer at all costs, even at the cost of obsoleting your own stuff.

Subsequent to the original Quicken, the whole idea that we, as a consumer products company, could actually make business products, that was a whole revolution in our thinking.

Even the once simple home mortgage now has so many flavors and styles and variations that it is difficult for people to make a decision.

The current institutionally provided retirement plans will not cover people's needs upon retirement.

QuickBooks - the very fact that we could even dream to make something in the business arena, and that it would then succeed - was a total revolution to me.

We're still in the first minutes of the first day of the Internet revolution.

Today more people believe in UFOs than believe that Social Security will take care of their retirement.

Mutual funds were created to make investing easy, so consumers wouldn't have to be burdened with picking individual stocks.

Spend time with the customers, immersing yourselves, watching. Spend time at their homes. Hear what they say, but most importantly, watch their behaviors as the indication of where the pain is. And then go solve that pain.

Now we teach our leaders that it's your job to put in the systems that enable your people to run your experiments fast and cheap and to keep making them faster and cheaper. Yield as many of your decisions off to the experiment as possible.

Our first product was Quicken, which is personal financial management on a PC. It had a tough start, and we ran some tracking surveys to understand who was using it. Half the users claimed to use it in some sort of office environment. We ignored that. I thought it was meaningless.

In my view, product/market fit is the most important thing to get right as a startup entrepreneur. There's a variety of ways to do it, but without solving some pain point that the customer gets so excited about they tell their friends, it's really hard in the modern age to get any liftoff.

We make it easy for anyone to get free resources. Anyone can launch an idea for five minutes. Anyone can comment on, add, and enhance the idea. Need a designer? We provide an entrepreneurial matching system without the bosses getting involved. And in terms of unstructured time, we have a permission for that.

A lot of companies have teams, but they are not really independent. They still have to get stuff approved by the boss. You have to change how and where decisions are made. If the hierarchy makes the decision, it will be based on politics.

As you grow as a company, you get layers and hierarchy that, in theory, should make your decisions a lot better. They get reviewed, and thoughtful people look at decision.