Eric Dunn 11:13
Yeah, Intuit had a great culture at the time. And I like to think some of the things we’ve done with the culture here at Quicken, are an attempt to reproduce the wonderful culture. Intuit had as a private company. And it was, I think, what was good about it was like our own company, you know, Kleagle, back based, don’t punish mistakes, learn from them. But also press to do well, your press to Excel. So so so be ambitious. So those are some points of the the Intuit culture. So we had a very conscious effort, just before the IPO at Intuit, to try to codify what we thought was good about the Intuit culture in an exercise we called vision, mission, operating values. And so we we had an off site we had, we close the company down for the day, we had 400 people at a sports arena in San Jose, we got a team team of ideation and aggregation of ideas. And then ultimately, we wrote down what at that time, were the, you know, the 10 core values of the company, and, and also refined our mission. So you know, that writing it down doesn’t guarantee, you know, the culture and the behaviors will persist. But it certainly helps. And that, you know, returning to intuit, you know, many years later, you know, I could still see, you know, those those themes enduring in the company and providing goodness durable goodness in the way the company operated. So there was a very conscious effort to kind of capture in a strong, effective customer focused culture, and make sure it would endure. Hmm.
John Corcoran 12:55
I want to ask you about you got incredible institutional knowledge at this point, having been with the company, knowing its history and know its track record, how do you personally honor that, but at the same time, also be open to the changes that happen in the marketplace and being open to keeping the product evolving and changing and up to up to speed with the market.
Eric Dunn 13:22
One of the things we tried to do, in a very focused way, at the time of our spin off at Intuit, in 2016, was to make it clear to the employees that you know, we’re not Intuit, we’re our own company, we’re our own company that has benefit of a lot of kind of history and knowledge about what Intuit does, that works really well. But we’re by no means trying to emulate a pet, you know, copy it, we want to be our own company. And I like to think we’ve kept, you know, the 65 to 70%, you know, I’ve been to it, which is really good. And then we’ve layered in another 30 or 35% of our own perspectives and approach which are which, which are better. So, my answering the question, I feel like I’m at 100
John Corcoran 14:09
know that? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I just think it’s a it’s an interesting perspective, you know, for yourself. So having been with the product for as long as you have, and yet at the same time, you seem also very cognizant of the fact that you have to be, you know, in touch with your users in touch with your customers. And, you know, aware of like, new wants and needs that the customer base have, well, we
Eric Dunn 14:37
knew we couldn’t keep doing what Intuit had been doing because Intuit had, you know, not really invested in cloud or mobile capabilities or per Quicken, get it under invested in customer customer care in in, at least on the most important product development team lost touch with with customers, they didn’t have the customer Contact. And I think it had been a little bit capricious in technology decisions, some of which we, you know, we did. One of the things Intuit was great at in the 90s, was making everybody in the company, talk to customers. And in the 90s, that meant actually answering texts, live tech support costs, which is scary preventing people. And then the last one people didn’t love. And it was easy for me, because I wrote the software, it’s easy for me to pick a textbook, that’s hard for other people. So we don’t do exactly that. But, but we did introduce what we call customer empathy for everybody in the company. And we’ve now found ways to do it with our Angular team as well, where you basically do a, you do a call with an agent. And the call is increasingly today are using screenshare. So you can see what’s going on with the customer. But it’s an immersive experience, you know, an hour, every month for our employees, where they’re, you know, participating in a live interaction with, with the customer. So that was one of the things that we, we dug out of the, you know, the history books of Intuit and kind of breathed new life into that I think it’s been really valuable. The other thing that I joke that part of the reason Brad Smith, the CEO at the time of Intuit wanted to spin off Quicken was he was tired of all those customer emails. And you know, a handful of customers were a boy, I love Quicken, but a lot more. Wow, I sure wish I could get my Citibank that was to work. What’s wrong with you lame, as you know, we can customers felt very entitled to just, uh, you know, just to write an email to Brad Smith and, and then they transfer that to me. And so the customers feel very entitled to email me about a problem. And I think I’ve made progress. I mean, I would say initially, it was probably at 20, a complaint versus a, you know, versus praise. And we probably gotten to 5050, you’ll never get to 2080. Because people are motivated more to contact you. When they have it, they have a grievance. But you know, it’s particularly when you have a team which can respond effectively the issue of the customers raised, it’s, it’s not a bad thing. And the happiest some of the happiest kind of incidents I have, I hear a suggestion from a customer. I mentioned the judiciary, the product manager, you know, that’s a pretty good idea. Could we get into our 39? Sure. And then like three weeks later, I, we did that. And so you close the loop. And you know, that’s not to say that our feature development has to be driven completely randomly by, you know, coincidental customer interactions. But every now and then, you know, just respond that way, it’s good for the team, it’s good for the customers, and that makes the product better. So
John Corcoran 17:51
so how do you as a busy CEOs got hundreds of employees underneath you? How do you decide what’s the right balance of that? Customer Support that you do? Because you could very easily say to an assistant, okay, if we get any email from a customer, you handle it, delete it from my inbox? Is it is it 20 minutes of your week? Is it two hours of your week? How do you decide what is the right amount of time you should be devoting to that.
Eric Dunn 18:18
So, you know, when we’re, the good news is that most of the time, it’s manageable. And I probably spend, you know, only a few hours per week on customer emails, I we do get letters, sometimes handwritten letters delivered to the office. So I do have my assistant, scan those and write a synopsis, because sometimes you’ll get, you know, a three page Miss reading those, you know, would be quite time consuming. But my assistant does a great job of of summarizing them. And in some cases, I’ll say even as a carry issue, and I’ll you know, I’ll I’ll just forward it to the care team and the care of we have a very good care and care escalation team who can handle them. But in many cases, you know, I can respond myself. So, you know, it’s, I think I’m just fortunate, it’s, it’s a few hours a week, and that, you know, if it was five times as much, I’d have to have a different process. But it’s it’s manageable. And it gives me a lot of a lot of insight into what the actual customers are experiencing to get their emails and their handwritten letters and their type letters, not typed, probably printed on a computer type letter
John Corcoran 19:32
I want to ask you about now you’ve spent some time doing venture capital doing angel investing. And you’ve said that the spin off from Intuit of Quicken and 2016 in many ways, has been a example of a success for private equity. So what was it about that investment from private equity in 2016 that led it to be a success?
Eric Dunn 19:54
Yeah, I mean in venture capital, by contrast, you know, what you’re hoping to get from Funding for a great idea and a great team, which hasn’t been developed, and then have it turned into something great. What private equity seems to be good at is finding kind of quirky opportunities with existing business, where there’s some, there’s some goodness, but it’s kind of intertwined with some crushed. And I would say that was sort of the situation with, with Quicken, there was some goodness that hyg Or first investors were aware of the the brand, the installed base test, loyal customer, the reputation, but it was intertwined with a lot of Intuit crop. And so extracting that was, you know, their, their piece of alchemy. And part of that was, you know, being willing to pay money to Intuit to break it off. And then to recruit a leader who volunteered me, you know, to be the leader, and then to make judicious decisions about, you know, how much to invest, and generally very supportive decisions about investing. So, the theme I came at it with is, this is, you know, a solid product and a solid product category. But Intuit is way under invested in care and the product development team, and we need to spend another 10 or $15 million a year in care and product development, in order to have a product people start to love again. And then when we do that, we can do other important things, such as switching from a license to a subscription model, that will make it easier to be a customer and easier for us to run the business, add cloud mobile capabilities, and then kind of move on to next gen PFM. It’s cloud native. So all that, you know, was kind of envisioned at the time, but before we could get there, we just had to dig ourselves out of a hole. And, you know, part of that was spending a lot more money than we’d spent in the past. But, you know, it worked, you know, they, you know, the revenue for this fiscal year, will be in a 30% higher than the record year in the Intuit years, and maybe 40%, higher than it was at the time, the spin off, which is not lightning growth. But you know, in, you know, in a dura in a category that’s 40 years old, you know, having reversed the decline, and then growing double digit revenue, which we have the past couple of years, that’s that’s good stuff that we’re, we’re happy with those results, and he was happy. We had a closing dinner with hlG, after the transaction in September, where they said, You guys, you guys know, we had like a dozen 10 or 15 companies in your portfolio and the best performing company in our portfolio in that particular portfolio, not in the firm ever, but in that fund. And then at the same time, the new investors say, we sure got a deal with that cleaning company love it, you’re gonna make money on that one, too. So I feel like we created value for each AIG, you know, who had the faith to invest in a spin off with, you know, disentangling the craft. And then I think we’re gonna make money for aquiline, which believes in the growth story. So we’ve done some of the repair work, we built a strong team, we, you know, we’ve, we’ve been successful with our customers. And we have growth ideas that will, you know, turn us into, you know, the, the next FinTech unicorn, I mean, that’s, that’s where we’re heading.
John Corcoran 23:08
So in the midst of that long list of of items you wanted to tackle beginning in 2016, COVID, hits in 2020. How, how was that? How did that impact you as a leader? How did it impact the company? And how did it impact
Eric Dunn 23:25
the user base? Well, I’m really happy that happened in 2020, in that in 2018, because we had kind of, we’ve gotten kind of through the narrows of our passage, we had, you know, we, we improved the product quality, we we implemented the subscription model, and customers understood that it made sense and they weren’t, we had launched, we just launched simplifier, new cloud finance product. We so we don’t, we built really good web and mobile versions of cricket. So we done a lot of the repair work already. And so we had, we had a business that was working. And, you know, all the all the gauges on the instrument panel were in the green going into COVID. And then they stayed in the green, there is a little bit of a, you know, flickering of the oil pressure, I’d say, you know, in the first couple of weeks when no one knew what was happening in the world was ending. And then what happened to us was, people said, Oh, I’m going to be at home for the next six months, I’m going to get my finances in order. And so we actually saw not a huge uptick, but a little bit of an uptick in our business in 2020. So at the time that had happened, it was, you know, it was It wasn’t difficult for our business to continue operating. And we also had, like everybody else in the tech world, you know, embrace, you know, zoom and slack and all this stuff and cloud based document storage. So our whole company, you know, runs on cloud based infrastructure, and we realize don’t really have to be the office to do this. Yeah, what we’re living with today.
John Corcoran 25:03
It’s funny because I’ve talked to people at some of those types of companies like zoom and slack and stuff like that. And sometimes you hear within those companies that they weren’t as set up as other companies that use their products to operate remotely, but it sounds like it wasn’t too much of a transition for you.
Eric Dunn 25:21
Yeah, yeah, it was, it was it was easy for us to operate well. And, you know, we, we also benefited from building our tech infrastructure from scratch on AWS. So you know, data centers, none of that stuff. All our back office infrastructure was cloud hosted, including our entire customer care staff, were one of the early adopters of cloud based telephony. So everything was was was virtual, and it was quite easy to operate wasn’t as fun, but it was it was easy.
John Corcoran 25:49
As you look at the the personal finance software landscape today, without revealing any, you know, industry secrets, what keeps you up at night? What What
Eric Dunn 26:00
worries you? You know, the biggest worry we have is it’s, it’s very hard to collect all the data reliably and accurately from all the endpoints that we reach. So, you know, we have over 10,000 financial institutions, banks, references, credit card companies, we have about 10,000 billers, you know, we have credit reports, we have, you know, home values, we have stock quotes. So, there’s just, there’s just a lot of endpoints we reach out to, and that’s the value that we provide. But that part of our business, I compare it to running an airline versus running a water company, you might think it’s just pipes, like a water company, but it’s more like an airline. So, you know, if you’re a great day United airline, maybe 85% of your flights are on time, and, you know, a great day at Quicken, you know, 90% of the individual of the connectivity sections, you know, work flawlessly. But, you know, there’s, there’s not enough going to standardize, you know, well defined purpose built API’s out there to, you know, to get the get a reliable 100% consistent downloads that everybody wants. Now, the good news is, the industry is changing. And we recently migrated, you know, one of our major financial institutions, to modern FTX API’s, we’re in the process of doing three more. And so I think, you know, going forward, it’ll get better. But even so, it’s the hardest thing we do reaching out into the real world digitally, and collecting the stuff accurately and reliably for billing to customers, it’s hard. And I worry that you know, we’ll we’ll break it, or they’ll break it or something will go wrong.
John Corcoran 27:38
We’re coming up on on, I guess, a year anniversary of the alkaline majority investment, what’s on your punch list? Now, compared to what was on we talked about what was on your punch list in 2016. But what’s on your punch list? Now? What else? Are you
Eric Dunn 27:53
excited to tackle? Yeah, so first of all, I mean, they, they started from the outset talking growth and growth initiatives, and they said, you know, you got your plan, if you want to spend X dollars, in addition to your plan, we’re not going to count that, you know, for a reckoning purposes, because we want you to feel particularly in this first year of our ownership that you’re free to make to do investment spending. And so that was kind of the, that was a helpful framing, we’re going to them in our next board meeting with a, you know, a project plan for our next fiscal year, which starts October one, where we’re asking them to support two additional six person teams to take on new stuff, I can’t tell you what they’re going to be doing. But you know, it’ll, it’s relevant and will make sense. And I think they’re gonna say, Yeah, we believe in you, you’ve run a good software business, and we want you to take on some additional areas. So in general, they’ve said, you know, look outward looking, you know, looking at adjacent industries, you know, look at financial services, and, you know, find opportunity, and when, so, we probably assessed six or eight opportunities, we pick two, that I think they’re prepared to prepare to fund. And so I, you know, I, we, we are already at a double digit growth company, but, you know, we’d like to be in the high double digits. And I think that to reach the high end of our aspirations, you know, that’s, that’s how we want to operate as a business. And, you know, maybe we’ll be a public company. That’ll be fun, too. Hmm.
John Corcoran 29:20
You heard it here. First. I want to wrap up. Now, we’re almost out of time here. Last question I usually ask is about gratitude. So I’m a big fan of expressing gratitude. And if you look around at your peers and contemporaries who’ve helped you along the way, however, you want to define that. You’ve mentioned some different names here. Who would you want to just thank for being there for you along the way?
Eric Dunn 29:46
You know, I’ve been fortunate and I can, I think multiple people because early on, I’d like to thank Michael Spence, who is my professor at Harvard Business School and later came to Stanford to talk Course on entrepreneurship and technology innovation, and I was in an East Coast mindset. And that course made me think, you know, there’s something cool going on in Silicon Valley, I want to Carta, I, you know, I always think I want to thank, you know, Scott Cook for adopting me, you know, for his to his tiny team in the earliest days, and then supporting me through thick and thin. And, you know, I made plenty of mistakes myself, and he supported me and, you know, helped build a great company for him in turn. So that’s it’s been a wonderful relationship. And then later in my career, I had the good fortune to, you know, work to actually two wonderful CEOs, first Bill Campbell, and then Brad Smith. And I think the pair of them kind of set me up and said, Eric’s done a lot of stuff. He hasn’t been the CEO, but we think he could do this with a private equity partner. And so they, they kind of laid the groundwork, you know, for my taking on this role, which I think is worked out well, for our customers and our investors.
John Corcoran 30:56
Yeah. And what does that mean, meant for you, after so many years, being involved with the company stepping into the CEO role over these years?
Eric Dunn 31:06
I think I find that, you know, I had 30 years of training that equips me to do this. So, I mean, it’s hard to be a CEO, but the experience that I can draw on makes it easier than another was a day. And I think the other thing that sets me up is having a very enjoyable job. I mean, I, I liked the fact that our company does something useful. I’m looking on the wall that we help people lead healthy financial life, we really do. That’s what we do. And you know, we’re making the world better. And it’s a good business, and we have a good team and we have fun doing it. So I just, I consider myself very fortunate to have landed in this spot. So thank you, all those folks who made it possible.
John Corcoran 31:42
Eric, such a pleasure, walking down memory lane and hearing a story. Where can be obviously Quicken, and people can go check that out. Where can people go? To learn more? Where would you direct them to learn more about Quicken?
Eric Dunn 31:53
Quicken.com and Simplifimoney.com you know, both great products. Simplifi, you know, cloud only, Quicken, desktop and cloud intertwined and both terrific products.
John Corcoran 32:03
Eric, thanks so much.
Eric Dunn 32:05
Okay, thank you.
Outro 32:07
Thank you for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast with John Corcoran. Find out more at smartbusinessrevolution.com. And while you’re there, sign up for our email list and join the revolution. And be listening for the next episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast.