Items24The creator’s order
  1. 1Scott CookScott CookIntuit. Cook co-founded Intuit in 1983 after watching his wife struggle to keep the household accounts, and built the company around a habit of studying customers in their own homes and offices. Quicken was followed in 1992 by QuickBooks, which became the standard bookkeeping package for millions…0i
  2. 2Tom ProulxTom ProulxIntuit. Proulx was a Stanford student when he co-founded Intuit with Scott Cook in 1983 and wrote the first version of Quicken in his room. He was an early champion of usability testing, watching ordinary people try the software and fixing whatever confused them, and modelled the screen on the…0
  3. 3Graham WylieGraham WylieBorn 12 Aug 1959Sage. While studying computing at Newcastle University, Wylie wrote software for David Goldman's local business, and in 1981 the two founded Sage with Paul Muller to sell affordable accounts packages to other small firms. Cheap, dependable and recommended by accountants, Sage became the default…0
  4. 4Rod DruryRod DruryXero. Drury founded Xero in Wellington in 2006 with Hamish Edwards, betting that small-business accounts belonged online rather than on one office PC. Automatic bank feeds, a shared ledger for owner and accountant, and an open API that let hundreds of other apps plug in made it a serious rival to…0i
  5. 5Ben ChestnutBen ChestnutMailchimp. Chestnut and Dan Kurzius started Mailchimp in Atlanta in 2001 as a side project of their web design agency, after small clients kept asking for an affordable way to send newsletters. They never took venture funding, and the free plan they introduced in 2009 brought email marketing within…0i
  6. 6Dan KurziusDan KurziusMailchimp. Kurzius co-founded Mailchimp with Ben Chestnut and ran the customer side of the business, from support to the playful brand voice that made a dull product feel approachable to first-time users. That attention to small customers, rather than large marketing departments, is much of why the…0
  7. 7Jason FriedJason FriedBorn 7 Apr 197437signals. Fried founded 37signals in 1999 as a web design studio and turned it into a software company with Basecamp in 2004, a project tool deliberately kept simple and sold at a flat price rather than per seat. His books, written with David Heinemeier Hansson, argue for small teams and calm…0
  8. 8David Heinemeier HanssonDavid Heinemeier HanssonBorn 15 Oct 197937signals and Ruby on Rails. Heinemeier Hansson wrote Basecamp's code and in 2004 released the framework underneath it as open-source Ruby on Rails, which let tiny teams build web applications quickly and later underpinned Shopify, GitHub and many small software firms. As co-owner and technical…0i
  9. 9Tobias LütkeTobias LütkeShopify. Lütke wanted to sell snowboards online in 2004 and, finding the available shop software poor, wrote his own in Ruby on Rails with co-founder Scott Lake. Opened to other merchants in 2006, Shopify let a one-person business run a proper online shop without a developer, and its app store and…0i
  10. 10Jim McKelveyJim McKelveyBorn 19 Oct 1965Square. McKelvey was a glassblower in St Louis when he lost a sale because he could not take a credit card. With Jack Dorsey he founded Square in 2009 and designed the small reader that plugged into a phone's headphone socket, with flat fees and no merchant account contract. It brought card…0i