01 — History & How We Got Here
A short grounding timeline of Intuit and TurboTax — the acquisitions and pivots that shaped today's business. Referenced by the other files.
Sources: research/SOURCE_INDEX.md — [S1][S28]
Origin
- 1983 — Intuit founded by Scott Cook and Tom Proulx in Palo Alto. Cook's insight came from watching his wife struggle to balance the family checkbook. [S1]
- 1984 — Quicken launches (personal finance) — the flagship that put Intuit on the map. [S1]
- 1992 — QuickBooks launches, targeting small-business accounting. It becomes Intuit's other pillar. [S1]
- 1993 — Intuit IPOs (Nasdaq), and acquires ChipSoft (San Diego), maker of TurboTax, for ~$225M — establishing TurboTax as a flagship consumer product. [S1]
The Microsoft moment
- 1994 — Microsoft attempts a ~$1.5B acquisition of Intuit; the DOJ blocks it on antitrust grounds. Intuit stays independent and goes on to dominate consumer tax. [S1]
Desktop → online → assisted
- Late 1990s–2000s — TurboTax shifts from boxed desktop software to online/SaaS filing; e-file becomes standard. This changes the economics (recurring, seasonal, lower marginal cost).
- 2002 — The Free File Alliance forms (industry + IRS), letting some taxpayers file free through partner software — and, critically, containing a provision discouraging the IRS from building its own free filer (see
10-regulation-reputation-and-political-economy.md).
- 2010s — TurboTax leans into DIY guidance (interview-style Q&A, W-2 import, prior-year carryforward) and builds its data + tax-knowledge moat.
The platform era (acquisitions + assisted + AI)
- 2020 — Intuit acquires Credit Karma (~$8.1B) — a huge consumer base and a credit/financial-data engine.
- ~2021 — Mint is folded toward Credit Karma (Mint later shut down; users migrated).
- ~2020–2023 — TurboTax Live / Live Full Service scales the assisted model (human expert + software), powered by the Virtual Expert Platform (VEP). This becomes the growth engine.
- 2023–2026 — Intuit repositions as an "AI-driven expert platform" (GenOS, Intuit Assist), integrates TurboTax across Credit Karma and QuickBooks [S16], and — amid LLM disruption fears — restructures ~17% of staff toward AI in 2025–26 [S14].
Why the history matters
Three throughlines still define the business today:
1. Acquire-and-integrate (ChipSoft→TurboTax, Credit Karma, Mint) — growth by folding adjacent financial relationships into one ecosystem.
2. The "free" tension — from the Free File Alliance onward, "free" has been both a marketing wedge and a reputational/legal liability (see file 10).
3. Moving up the value chain — desktop → DIY SaaS → assisted (human+AI) → agentic AI. Each step raised ARPU and deepened the moat; AI is the next contested step.