Intuit’s QuickBooks accounting product remains a steady moneymaker, but in the past two decades TurboTax, its tax preparation product, has driven the company’s steadily growing profits and made it a Wall Street phenom. The company stresses values above all, urging employees to “deliver awesome” and pursue “integrity without compromise.” Get Our Top InvestigationsĮmail address This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
In a recent Super Bowl ad, Intuit portrayed itself as a gentle robot that liberates small-business owners from paperwork. Over time, the company, like the other giants of Big Tech, cultivated an image of being not just good at what it did, but good, period.
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Intuit began in the 1980s as an accounting software company focused on helping people with their bookkeeping. The two posed for pictures, Simmons clad in black and the beaming CEO flashing the “rock on” hand sign. To Smith’s delight, his favorite rock star, Gene Simmons of Kiss, emerged. There, Smith arrived at his party in a DeLorean, and as he walked a red carpet, cheering employees waved “Brad is Rad” signs. Fittingly, the tour culminated in San Diego, the home of TurboTax, the software that transformed the company’s fortunes. In Ontario, employees wore T-shirts with Smith’s quasi-spiritual sayings: “Do whatever makes your heart beat fastest” and “Repetition doesn’t ruin the prayer.” In Bangalore, India, workers put on Smith face masks as they posed for selfies with the man himself. Smith had presided over 11 years of explosive growth, a period when Intuit had secured its place in the Silicon Valley pantheon, and the tour was like a long party. Last fall, Intuit’s longtime CEO Brad Smith embarked on a farewell tour of the company’s offices around the world. Sign up for ProPublica’s Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox as soon as they are published.
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