Everyone awake again? Hey, welcome to our next session. Very happy to have you, Marianna, here from Intuit. It's, let me start big picture. So, like, you had a kind of long career in the Valley, and I think people don't quite appreciate, like, how, you know, how much you've been involved in all the big technology trends. So maybe as a starting point, can you just kind of, you know, talk a little bit briefly about your kind of career stops and kind of what you learned there?
Sure. Thanks, first of all, thank you for having me here, and thanks for coming to the session. Yeah, you're right. I've been in the Valley for quite some time, and I had a chance to span multiple things that have been happening. But maybe a few stops that are worthwhile mentioning is one is being involved in consumer electronics and trying to do devices at the beginning, as part of a company called General Magic. The company actually wasn't successful. There's a documentary, though, on the company.
Okay.
Because all the smartphones today came from that source, either Android or iPhone, came from people that actually worked at General Magic. So I had an opportunity to work there.
Yeah.
I had an opportunity to be at Ariba, which is an enterprise software at the time, the biggest Java application around, first to go HTML, kind of web interface, SaaS transition, so being part of that. And then I've been part of VMware, which is an infrastructure company and, you know, the whole virtualization revolution there. And then I was part of, like, then the next phase, which is in the cloud and Docker, which is a developer tool, open source, etc. And then the last seven years I've been at Intuit. I actually started in engineering, and I was Intuit CTO for almost five years. And now I'm on the business side and run our Global Business Solutions Group at Intuit. So yeah, quite a few stops there.
And how does the technology understanding, appreciation that you kind of developed over your time just helps you in, like, a current role? Like, you know, we think QuickBooks, we think, like, yeah, it's easy accounting. So how difficult is it, you know? But, like, we have so many changes in the industry. Like, how does it help you? How does having that technology background help you kind of to think about QuickBooks and maybe think it differently?
Yeah. I would say, you know, at the end of the day, when you think about Intuit, so we do sell financial products, if you want, for small businesses, for consumers. But at the end of the day, we sell products.
Mm-hmm.
It is all about technology. It is all about selling software. So this is critical understanding of technology, how to build it, how it's being built well, how can you innovate fast. And I think even more so with AI and this next phase of changes, the ability to fully understand what does it mean and how you're developing the product, what trends are interesting and not interesting for you, which one should you jump on and how to go about it, what is the kind of talent. And even simple things, you know, will I sit down with the team and they'll give me an estimate over something, and I can call them out when I don't think it's right, or, "Oh, you can do it much faster," and, "How about we do it this way?" So even that on a day-to-day basis.
Yeah.
Can actually be quite helpful.
And then, like, if you think about that, that journey around QuickBooks, because you had to, you know, you've been through almost all the technology trends, you know, with, like, QuickBooks Desktop and, you know, on-premise and QuickBooks Online came. Now we're kind of trying to weave AI in there. Can you talk a little bit about that, that journey of, you know, how the product evolved?
Yeah. One of the biggest strengths Intuit has is the ability to disrupt itself. You're right. We started as a desktop product and then moving to the cloud, you know, being able, first of all, moving to subscription, moving to the cloud. All of those were distinct moves. Integrating with mobile, moving to AI. Each one of these changes have been significant changes. Obviously the AI thing is still in play for all the industry.
Mm-hmm.
I think what is key for Intuit, aside from just having good technologists and good base, is also the ability to really disrupt ourselves. And we just, as an example, like have this mechanism in which we look at these things. And once a year we do talk about our long term and look take a critical view at that. And big decisions could come from it.
Mm-hmm.
Like, hey, we need to do something meaningful from with AI. Here's the kind of things. Oh, we have, maybe, like, big bets. It's part of our, the way we run the company and the ability for us also to just go, go for it and disrupt ourselves, has been really playing well for us.
Mm-hmm.
and being able to make these bold moves.
Then, I'm going back to when you were, like, CTO as well, because, like, part of the, and I wanted to talk about, you know, your AI journey a little bit, but part of the reason why you're so well positioned is that you guys kind of, I want to call it, like, clean up the house or disrupted yourself to kind of go to AWS, kind of with GenOS, like, have an AI platform. Can you talk a little bit about that thinking? Because, like, you were kind of way ahead of a lot of your peers or, like, you know, Salesforce is trying to do it now only. Like, can you talk about that period and what the thinking was there?
Yeah. And, and thank you for that because that's, obviously I'm passionate about this. I can talk for a long time about this.
Yeah.
But, you know, I would say, some of the big, while I was a CTO and some of the big transitions we have made is, like, we have a strategy of being, AI-driven expert platform.
Mm-hmm.
And almost every word in there matters. I will start from the last one, which is a platform, and really taking the, what I've had a chance to do is, first of all, move us fully to the cloud because when I joined, we were not quite there.
Yeah.
The second thing is really thinking about ourselves as a platform and really articulating what it means. What are those capabilities? In fact, if you had been to our investor conference and even if you saw some of the presentations, even a couple of years ago, we started to talk about this idea of the City Map, of, like, really articulating what is the platform, what are the capabilities that we need, building everything as a platform, AI-driven expert platform, so renowned experts.
Mm-hmm.
The ability to really provide expertise in, like, TT Live, QB Live on our platform, have human and AI and data and everything come together effectively on our platform and building this as a platform. I'll give you a tangible example. We started with TT Live, but the capabilities, what we call our Virtual Expert Platform, we build as something horizontal.
Mm-hmm.
That allows us then to take this idea of human expertise and make it available to our customers in our software throughout our portfolio. So then we continued with QuickBooks Live, and now we're able to do things like Full Service. We're able to offer more expertise. We can onboard expertise easily. So the building this as a platform has been game-changing for us.
Yeah.
And if I go to the first word, which is AI, AI-driven expert platforms. Let's go to AI, investing in AI very early on in multiple ways. A lot of it has been we need to bring the right talent on board and making sure we have really strong AI expertise, AI Center of Excellence, understand this in depth, doing some research, and going after bold ideas out there. In fact, we were playing with Gen AI and had Gen AI expertise before it exploded in the industry. So when it's kind of exploded, we're like, "Oh, we totally understand it." We were already playing with deep learning.
Mm-hmm.
With generative AI. So we were kind of pretty primed to take advantage of it. And then you're right. We also built that part as a platform. And very early on, we announced something called GenOS, which is a proprietary generative AI operating system, if you want, for our software that allows us to create Gen AI, consume LLMs, generate Gen AI experiences very rapidly and allow our developers to really develop Gen AI effectively and safely and with privacy for our customers at the company. You know, twice a year we do this kind of hackathons.
Yeah.
We just had one, several months ago. The number of ideas and innovations that came from it with the ability with Gen AI were actually mind-blowing. The ability of our developers to play with what we call Gen Studio and develop, as part of Gen OS, develop Gen AI experiences rapidly is game-changing for us. In fact, some of these experiments that they have done were like, "Wow, there's there there." Some of them are deployed. Some of them are being experiments and experience experimented with.
Mm-hmm.
We believe there's a lot of there there, even from the ability to innovate rapidly in this method.
I apologize for the question, just more in a practical terms. So if I think about QuickBooks now and QuickBooks going forward, how should we think about AI feeding in there? Like, you know, I get the live platform thing, you know, like, that's fine, but, like, how's AI helping me? Like, from what's your vision there?
Yeah. So, A, we use AI and we'll continue using AI in multiple ways. But let me just give a concrete example and also talk about things where we see that, going a little bit. First of all, in the product itself, we already have a lot of AI, AI-infused experiences. We have it in our platform. We have it in our expert platform where our experts just to match, experts to customers, which sounds easy, but when you start thinking about it, there's actually thousands of attributes that you have to match.
Okay.
Between an expert and a customer to try to match them correctly, to try to slot a time that they can, you know.
Hope to.
Like AI or cash flow prediction, so like everywhere, there's a lot of AI already.
Uh-huh.
Also, as we develop software, we use a lot of AI internally. So for our software developers with, like, you know, all these, like, AI-generated codes. So AI gives us productivity internally.
Mm-hmm.
It is infused in the product. We just released today, Intuit Assist. Let me talk about the product in QuickBooks. So we have Intuit Assist as our brand name and as a way to make generative AI and AI experiences available to customers. We just released several features as part of that we've been working on for several months, and this is to really make sure we understand the benefit to the customer with it and that they're ready. But just as an example, one of these features is ability to, like, take a photo with your device of any paper receipts and turn it immediately. I'm really excited about this, to an invoice.
Uh-huh.
Then make that invoice easily pay-enabled, send reminders and make sure, like, you know, being able to do reminders for this invoice, give the user the ability to change the tone. So a little bit like, "Hey, this is a customer. I want to be a little bit more, you know,
Friendly with or unfriendly.
Unfriendly with and, you know.
Mm-hmm.
The reason I'm excited about this, we've been experimenting, like, at the beginning, like, "Oh, yeah, Gen AI, let me just do reminders and, like, 'cause, like, you know." But we were able to experiment with, in a way that we actually see that customers that use that, their invoice are paid 45% faster. This is mind-blowing in terms of the, you know, time is money.
Mm-hmm.
In terms of the benefit for a customer, this is mind-blowing. This is just one feature.
Yeah.
We'd like to do more and more and more of that. Now we released this GA just, like, several weeks ago. We're excited about that. We announced Revenue Intelligence as part of Mailchimp, which is the ability to say, "Hey, let me help you find revenue." We're gonna continue to invest in that. We're also very heavily working and participating and experimenting with agent technology.
Mm-hmm.
Some of it we're already using. It is really allowing the LLM to do orchestration. Sorry for being a little bit technical here.
Yeah, no, no.
But, we're seeing even more automation and even more done-for-you experiences that we will do for our customers. We already, again, we already have some experiments in the market, and we're super excited about that. So net-net what we, if you ask me, where do I see that going, we're gonna, we're already using AI. We're gonna continue use, to use AI to make our products even more innovative and create more done-for-you experiences in our products tied to benefit, and our benefits, what we're going for is more money in their pocket.
Yeah.
no work, so less work on their behalf and then saving them time.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay. Perfect. No, that's good. I mean, that's why I'm glad that you were here with us because, like, you have the tech background. So it's like, who else, you know, who's better to talk to? Then, shifting gear a little bit, [Vicy], you moved, you know, you were for many years on the tech side. Now you're on the business side. And so now all of a sudden it's like, here's the QuickBooks franchise, keep growing, you know? Like, so when you started looking at that, like, what, from your perspective, like, what are the big growth levers for that?
Yeah. So, you know, and I, me and my background, I do have some.
Yeah.
Business experience. It's not like a completely, you know, but I would, what I would wanna say is that at the end of the day, we do wanna lead with product and innovation.
Yeah.
At the end of the day, what we wanna do is continue to innovate, have better and better products that are out there, move ahead of competition, and continue to go after product-led growth, which means that it's with your innovation. It's with the customer being able to discover more product within the product. It's with their ability to get onboarded and get benefits very quickly from what you're releasing. Is that how we're going to grow in terms of, like, the base?
Yeah.
That we need to have. This is the fundamentals for our growing, so it's all about product, which is why I believe my background is so useful here, but of course, like, on the go-to-market side, there's a lot that we need to do. If, like, we're positioning ourselves more and more as a platform. We need to make sure that story is well-known.
Mm-hmm.
We need to make sure that when we sell, we sell a platform. We actually moved from completely having inside sales to how we, when we go -to -market, we now have sales function, and we're starting to use it for go-to-market for mid-market. We now have outside sales, right, so we used to have just inside sales. We built a sales function. We started from zero.
Mm-hmm.
We're at 200 people right now in sales, full sales organization, and understanding of what is the go-to-market motion for mid-market and then scaling it. So those are the kind of things we need, and over time, establishing more channels. So there's quite a few things that I'm planning to do on the go-to-market side to continue to make sure we have growth, especially as we talk about larger customers.
Yeah.
In addition to product innovation, the go-to-market is always an aid to, like, making sure of how you take it to market. It can never replace really solid, great product.
Yeah.
With great innovation.
And then how do we think about the opportunity available for you? Like, the easier one, and I wanna touch it a little later would be QuickBooks Advanced because there's like a massive opportunity in that space. But in the core QuickBooks space, like, let's say the 0 - 10, 0 - 20 employees, what's, I mean, you have a very high market share. Historically, we talked about like, "Oh, yeah, but 40% is still Excel." Like, what's the opportunity there that you can go in terms of new customers or gaining new customers? Is that still like a lot of Excel? Like, how do we have to think about that after?
Yeah. We count our overall TAM like the way we think of the pyramid. We think about it as about $180 billion total addressable market. So this is like the TAM. Like, if you look at that, and you start slicing it, you would see that about half of it is kind of SMB and solopreneurs.
Yeah.
I think it's roughly half and half there, a little bit more SMBs, maybe 40-50, if I remember correctly. Actually half of it, almost $90 billion, is mid-market. So first of all, in terms of how we think about customers, we definitely need to go for like the higher, the bigger customers, the mid-market customers, those that have more employees, that have higher revenue, that have more complexity. So that's kind of one. Now, if you start looking at what they're all using.
Yeah.
To your question and start breaking this apart, we do see surprisingly a lot more nonconsumption, a lot nonconsumption.
Yeah.
Spreadsheets, like as little project management tools that they're also using to manage their books, et cetera. So we still see that a lot. But interestingly, what you would find is that they have point solutions or that they have multiple solutions, and maybe they have pretty much a lot of it covered, but it's not working as well together, and they've been increasingly telling us, like, "Hey, we want one solution, and can you actually make it easy for us? I'm tired of aggregating 40 different software to try to run my business." So this idea of like one end-to-end solution, and that is increasingly important for mid-market, so often what you would find in mid-market is a hodgepodge. It's like, I have some solutions for some things, I don't have for others, and then they're also not working beautifully together.
And these companies also surprisingly write a lot of software themselves.
Wow. Okay. Yeah, yeah.
Or contract somebody to write them.
Yeah.
I was just meeting with a customer the other day, and they're like a big franchise. They have multiple, like, and they're like telling me, "We're writing a billing solution." I'm like, "You are? We have a billing. Why are you doing that?
Yeah.
They're like, "You do?" I was like, "Let me show you." Right? So we see a lot of that. So it's a hodgepodge of a little bit themselves, a little bit non-like, you know, spreadsheets, like hacks. And that's where we see an opportunity, across those three, but particularly in the mid-market.
Is part of that, because like, you know, like I've been covering you guys now for 14 years as well, and moving up market was always like a discussion point. It seems more real this time. Is it like the product maturity and product breadth, you know, breadth got better, and so now you can actually handle that space better? Or how should we think about that?
Yes. Obviously, it's been a process. We declared this like five years ago. I was like, "Hey, part of our big bet is to disrupt the mid-market." So we started working on it. We introduced QuickBooks Advanced. By the way, I was the engineering leader in QuickBooks when we did that. So I must remember that from that angle. And then, we offered more and more robust services with payroll and payments. But yes, over time, it allowed us to bring, to build even more.
And what we announced a couple of months ago is something called the Intuit Enterprise Suite, which is a more robust offering designed for the mid-market, designed for more complex businesses. It gives them more of like a view across the business, provides them with new capabilities that we didn't have before, like multi-entity and some advanced reporting, project profitability that allows them to see their profit over time. We attach that a go-to-market motion. Like I said, we hired 200 salespeople. We're scaling from there. So yes, we're like everything that we have done so far allows us to take one more leap.
Yeah.
the next leap forward with more robust offerings.
Talking about the next leap, Mailchimp.
Yeah.
So, all of us were kind of a little bit surprised when you bought it because it was like, it was a good big franchise, but, we felt like, "Yeah, but it's front office. You guys are back office." How do you think that about, like, Mailchimp going forward?
Yeah. Actually, what you said there is exactly the reason why we bought it.
Yeah.
When we go to our customers and we ask them, "What is your biggest problem?" We wanna be the financial platform. We wanna be the platform for you on which you run on every single day. So they say one of their biggest problems, factor number one, is get customers. So, when we declared that big bet to be the center of small business growth, we wanted to add a component that allows customers to get customers. So we looked at multiple ideas, and we liked Mailchimp. Because this is really at the heart of customers going in, interacting with their customers, getting customers, you know, doing marketing to their customers. So that was really the reason that we bought it is to make sure that we have a complete portfolio. And we've been integrating it since.
We also had to go back and do some work to.
Yeah.
Make sure that that business is fully healthy and everything, that we need from that. But if I, if I take you in the future.
Yeah.
Because, again, think about this end-to-end platform and think about the biggest problems that our customers have. And we wanna do that. We wanna be the end-to-end software, the end-to-end tool on which these small business and mid-size businesses rely on every single day to run and grow their business. That's our goal. And it is across their jobs. So we mapped, and I think I will mention that to different people in the meetings. We map it to the Jobs to be Done. What is your biggest problem? We asked our businesses, "What is your biggest problem? What do you need?" We map the Jobs to be Done. We know exactly what are the portions of these jobs, what are the sub-jobs of these jobs. And our idea is to be that end-to-end for these customers.
And there's a lot of benefit of being the end-to-end is because it's when it all runs together, they have full visibility and they can really run and grow their business effectively. I'll just give you an example 'cause we talk about it in the room. We're just working on something that we're now starting to release called Tap to Pay. It's the ability to use your phone to as the register, as the POS, you know, instead of like having a separate hardware. You can use your phone to be the place where you accept payments. We know we can pay with a phone, but this is to accept payments with the phone.
Imagine you have, like, a store where you sell. In the store, you can have people around basically taking payments from customers, and you can have multiple people in the room taking payments. And in real time, the second they take payment, you can immediately see.
And I think, yeah.
Exactly what does your balance look like?
Yeah, yeah.
You can immediately kind of tie your business end-to-end. You don't have to say, "Oh, I'm gonna back at the end of the day, at the end of the week, at the end of the month, I'm gonna try to reconcile it." You immediately understand how your business is doing. This is massive. So this is what we really wanna bring to our businesses is that end-to-end capability.
The I like the vision. Like, sorry, then like tell me one question on that one. Like if you, but if you look at Mailchimp, where are you on that product journey? Because like if I look at the growth rate, if I try to get it, the growth rates are not suggesting it yet.
Yeah.
How should we think about that?
You know, it's one of those things where we can say we're constructively dissatisfied.
Yeah.
With some of what we had to go and do. We did see like growth rate for our mid-market, 13%, more customers on mid-market this last year. So there's a lot of things that we are happy about.
Yeah.
But we did see higher attrition in, you know, like smaller businesses.
Yeah.
The product, we lost some focus on it. So we have to go back and fix that. Where I see that over time is as a tool to enable our customers to actually have a CRM being able to see.
Yeah.
Their customers being able to see where they are and being able to reach out to these customers and market to them and sell to them, and, like I said, integrating it into our flow. We actually have a lot of things that we are working on that we are hoping to share with you all in the coming months with like actual demos and things that we can share, but this is active work.
Yeah.
And yes, we had to go back and we had to make sure that we also like have the right people in place, that we have the right software in place, that we fully moved to the cloud. There's a lot. There's some things that we had to go back and.
Yeah.
And make sure that are in place. The reasons behind this acquisition, the motivation is still there, and we're still very excited about it, and we're still see that as part of that end-to-end platform. In this case, again, imagine I see a customer, they're not engaging. I can send something to our customers. I can find.
Yeah.
More revenue. They can go and purchase from me. I immediately see that in the books. I can hire more employees if I need to. I can take a loan to bridge if I need to. All of it in one place. That end-to-end visibility is massive, and being, understanding where your customers stand and.
Yeah.
Marketing to them is a very important part of that.
I can imagine it. Yeah. Hey, that's a great closing statement as well. I really enjoyed our conversation. Time flew by. So kind of.
Same.
That was really nice. Thank you.
Thank you.
It's good to have you here. Thank you.
Thank you all.