Tom Proulx

Intuit. 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 cheque book people already used. That task-first approach later carried QuickBooks into small offices. He left Intuit in 1994.