Scott Cook

Bookkeeping for households and small firms. Cook, a former Procter and Gamble marketer, co-founded Intuit in 1983 with programmer Tom Proulx after watching his wife struggle with the household bills. Quicken made cheque registers simple, and QuickBooks did the same for small businesses that found accounting software baffling. Intuit studied users at home and at work to fix friction. Its TurboTax lobbying against free government tax filing is the less flattering side.