>> Announcer: Live, from San Jose, California,
in the heart of Silicon Valley, its theCUBE.
Covering QuickBooks Connect 2016.
Now, here are your hosts, Jeff Frick, and John Walls.
(upbeat electronic music)
(convention crowd chatting in distance)
>> Well welcome back, here inside
the San Jose Convention Center.
You're watching theCUBE, the Silicon-angled
TV flagship broadcast where we
extract the signal from the noise.
We're live here at QuickBooks Connect 2016,
along with Jeff Frick, I'm John Walls, as we wrap up.
And it's happy hour time, Jeff.
>> That's right.
>> Everybody is happy now, right?
>> I think everybody's got something,
catching up on watching the World Series.
>> Watching the World Series over here, and obviously
this is a great time of day for us to sit back and
kind of reflect on what we've seen.
Malcolm Gladwell on earlier today,
just an exceptional guest, and I love the fact that
here's a guy who just can make people in this day and age
of 140 characters, he can make us stop and think.
And he did that today with the food for thought,
we had heard about the advantages and disadvantages
of small business, and of playing to your weaknesses,
compensating for your weaknesses,
and turning them into strengths.
I thought that was just really exciting to talk with him.
>> Yeah, the Compensation Learning, and he followed up
on that in his keynote address,
and really talking about people that don't have
all the advantages often do the harder work
to make up for those disadvantages,
and in fact it's those behaviors over time
that deliver results.
I think he said a huge number of founders that he has
interviewed, successful founders, had dyslexia,
and he said as he interviewed them, they succeeded because,
not in spite of that condition, because they learned
to be team players, they learned to communicate,
and they learned to kind of overcompensate
for those deficiencies, so really interesting.
He always gets to kind of the personal angle,
and the really human factor behind the curtain
that you don't necessarily know.
And of course, as he said many times,
10,000 hours, that's a lot of hard work.
They only seem like overnight successes
because you weren't paying attention
for the first 14 Fleetwood Mac albums
before Rumours came out.
>> Yeah that was the message during his keynote address
this afternoon, he got off the stage just about an hour ago,
that really resonated with the attendees here,
is that Fleetwood Mac, for one example,
is a band that we know from the Fleetwood Mac album,
the Rumours album, one of the greatest sellers
of all time, we think they were a sensation,
but they had 14 previous albums that were abysmal failures.
And so, they could relate to the small business owner,
understanding that there are very few overnight successes.
That it is a methodical process,
sometimes tedious and laborious,
but that if you do understand what your strengths are,
and you weaknesses, and you compensate for them accordingly,
and stick to your plan,
that you have a great chance for success.
>> Yeah.
>> And I think that really hit home.
Brad Smith, same way today.
You know, a CEO talking earlier today about
the keys to success, and I think again they understand
their target audience here.
It's a small business crowd that is looking for tools,
and looking for resources,
and why QuickBooks is here to help them.
>> And another thing that we cover over and over, John,
at all of the events that we go to,
is founder-led, founder-led-companies.
And we are really blessed to have Scott Cook come on.
He started this company 30 years ago at the kitchen table,
watching his wife struggle to pay the bills,
and really built a checkbook register,
and now look what it has become,
through really because of his passion to help small business
and he said it multiple times here on this set,
and you could see it in his face
that he really wants to transform the world
through the power of enabling small business.
To create great companies, hire people,
deliver great technology,
and it just comes through and through.
And even though his role has changed,
he is no longer actively the CEO,
you can tell from all the people that we had on,
and some people that are no longer with Intuit,
they came by to shake his hand.
>> Right
>> That culture is very, very strong,
and we see that time and time again
for so many successful companies.
Where that founder culture remains,
and the passion towards their mission is so true.
>> You raise a great point, because as can be the case,
it gets diluted over the years,
as the influence of the founder might wane a bit.
But in this case, Scott is still very active
and the extension on the executive ladder
has very much carried on
and embodied that culture of service, right?
Of we first not me first.
And you get the idea when you talk to clients here,
when you talk to customers, when you see how they respond
to the keynote addresses, when they listen to
the various presentations, it is very much
a community of kindred spirit.
These folks are very much involved and engaged,
and they're really invested in one another.
You see that through the partnerships.
We just talked to Terry Hicks from Infusionsoft,
just a moment ago.
Same thing, that they understand that there is a
greater value to creating good for a community
and doing other people good, than it is just
for the solo purpose of that company,
for the sole purpose of one company.
And I've been impressed by that today.
That's really struck me as that when you see that kind of,
that thread carried out over the years and then executed
on a daily basis. >> Right, right.
>> You know, you're going to have
a pretty good thing going for you.
>> Yeah, I love Brad's keynote this morning, where,
we said it a number of times,
I'm more interested in your problems than my solution.
And you really see it coming through and through.
But then as we're here, there's such a consistency
in the theme that we see in so many shows,
John, that we go to.
One is really cloud, mobile, these big megatrends,
and how they've impacted things.
And now people are comfortable with cloud.
You put the software in the cloud
and deliver it via mobile, now you can deliver
tremendous power to the user wherever they are
however they want to engage with the application.
The second thing is, the community.
It's a passionate community around
enabling small business, which you've heard
from Terry Hicks and some of the other guests,
but really, as somebody said, I think in the keynote too,
most of the smartest people are not in your company.
They just can't be. >> Right, that's right.
>> They just can't be.
So to build a platform that enables other people
to fill in the gaps, the specialization, the localization,
the little micro-segments, whatever that may be.
The CRM, as Terry talked about, to fill in
on that platform, really creates a one plus one equals three
type of equation, and puts the power in the small
businessman or woman's hands,
of all these engineers, all this talent,
all this development, delivered via the cloud
to my phone, that I can leverage to hopefully
free me up to hopefully spend more time doing
what I got in this business for in the first place,
which was my passion about cars or bikes or wine
or, we've seen so many examples, or making purses.
To really enable the small business dream,
and I think that's the other really
feel-good thing about this show, is that it is
still about the small business entrepreneurial dream.
>> Right, and we heard from a gentleman from Africa today,
Derreck Kayongo, talking about the Global Soap Project
that he started, because inspired by the waste
of hotel soap in Philadelphia.
But he talked about the American spirit,
and I think realy touched a lot of hearts and minds,
when you heard this gentleman who immigrated from Uganda
talking about this pioneering, can-do American spirit
and why it so much impacted him,
and how he hoped it still impacted the attendees
here on a regular basis.
And while we might look at ourselves as a society,
and talking about this from a corporate standpoint,
we see all of the warts.
You know, we see all the problems.
Here's a gentleman coming from the outside,
looking at starting from the very bottom of the barrel
and building up a global business now,
and saying, "Only in America".
And it really is true, and everybody here captures
that spirit and it certainly is inspiring to see.
>> Yeah, and the other piece I wanted to touch on
was Vinay Pai talking about being an engineer,
and loving engineers, liked geeking out with engineers,
going in, I think what they call the Follow You Home.
Which they used to do with QuickBooks all of the time,
you get these surveys.
Can you come in and just work on QuickBooks,
and we just want to watch you.
But even in the commercial products,
he talked about we follow engineers home,
we hang out with them, we watch the way that
they interact with their product,
and really spend not a lot of time
worrying about the design, but more time
in delivering and then executing on that delivery,
changing that delivery based on customer behavior,
and just moving the ball forward.
It's just a great story and one that really
seems to be picking up momentum now,
enabled by cloud and mobile in this community,
to kind of take it to the next level.
You know, it's not a desktop application anymore.
>> Well, we are not going to follow you home.
We are going to let you go get a good night's sleep,
but we do expect you to be back with us tomorrow
here on theCUBE.
We'll be kicking off at 10:30 Pacific time,
1:30 on the East coast.
We'll be here throughout the day with another
great array of guests to join us here on theCUBE
as we continue our coverage of QuickBook Connects 2016.
For my colleauge Jeff Frick, I'm John Walls,
and for all of us here at theCUBE,
thanks for joining us today
and we'll see you back here in San Jose tomorrow
for more coverage on theCUBE.
(upbeat electronic music)