 Live from San Jose, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering QuickBooks Connect 2016, sponsored by Intuit QuickBooks. Now, here are your hosts, Jeff Frick and John Walls. Welcome back here on theCUBE along with Jeff Frick. I'm John Walls as we continue our coverage here at QuickBooks Connect 2016, gathering here in San Jose at a convention center, third annual gathering with a record crowd of more than 5,000 attendees. So the show continues to show explosive growth, which is, I guess you could say a lot about what Intuit's doing in terms of how it's growing its portfolio in terms of how it serves the business or the small business in the medium-sized business communities. With us now is Sasan Gadarzi, who is the EVP of the Small Business Group at Intuit. Sasan, good to have you with us. We appreciate the time. Thank you for having me. One of the keynote stars today. You were talking about some key themes, big themes about the company, about how we're going to help save time, how we're going to have more accessibility to money, and ultimately what we can do to deliver a better proposition to small business. So talk about that if you would a little bit about that theme on the keynote stage and how that applies to what you're doing in general with QuickBooks. Sure, sure. Well, one of the things that our customers have taught us is there's three things that are most important to them. One is time so they can actually spend running their business and the product that they're passionate about, versus all the tedious, drudgery things that it takes to run your business. The second is money. It's mind-boggling, the effort that goes into earning money, but how hard it is for them to actually get access to their money. And then last but not least is ways to help them grow their business. They're experts in their industry, but where they need help is ways in which that they can drive growth. And so everything that we do is centered around those three things. And it's what inspires us when we show up to work every single day. So a lot of obviously what we talked about today on stage was just very quick, we call ESPN highlight reels, of here's the innovation that's coming your way to either save you time, put more money in your pocket, or help you grow your business or your practice. What's amazing, as you say, as much as they work to finally get that sale, a lot of times, it's all the collection side for small business, a huge issue, getting paid. Did you all that work, sell it, have a happy customer, and then don't necessarily get their receivables in line? That's right, I know we threw a lot of stats out there this morning, but first of all, 80% of small businesses have some sort of a cash flow issue. And in that context, about 65% of them have invoices that are 60 days overdue. And in fact, they live and die by getting paid on time. And so obviously the innovations that we talked about on stage today were how do you get access to those funds right away? That's one element of it. The other element is, we have all the data of small businesses, and so we know what they're good for. And so we can deliver loans to them on the spot. If they have payables and they want to borrow on the payable to make payroll for the week, or they want to go buy more inventory to grow their business, we can actually fund them very quickly, literally within minutes. And so those are examples of what we showed on stage today, all in service of helping them thrive and achieve their dreams. I'd love to dig into that a little bit because growth actually exacerbates your cash flow problem if you're not managing it well and now suddenly you're selling more and you've got to buy to fulfill those obligations. But the fact that you almost have like a secondary market now for people to be able to borrow money without pulling all their paper together and trekking down to the bank and hoping they can get it because they actually have the real data, it's updated all the time and it's a different set of data, potentially more complete set of data for a lender to actually make that decision than the stack of paper that they bring down to the local bank. That's right. Well, you know, it's interesting you just set something that triggered a thought when you think about startups that go out and get VC money there's a reason why they have board of directors because the board of directors what they're looking for is one, do you have a growth plan but then how do you manage that growth? How do you make sure you have enough money? How much money are you burning per week and are you going to be able to maintain that growth? Small businesses don't have that. They don't have a board of directors that are actually helping them with some of those decisions. They may not be surrounded by a CFO or a finance expert in the office. And so part of what we're trying to do is just digitize and automate everything so they don't have to worry about that. And secondarily, I think to the point you made helping them with access to money at the point in which they needed. But I think even before we get to that stage what we're trying to do is help them by being that board of directors without having to have one which is to helping them manage their cash flow, their inventory because as they're on that growth curve it's one of the main reasons why they go out of businesses because they're growing fast but they're not managing their funds and they don't have enough money sometimes to make payroll, right? We've heard this stat from a couple of different sources but 50% of all small businesses fail in the first five years of operation and the use of accounting and an accountant, what that can do to increase your odds of being in business for the long term. So certainly you can see where all that is coming into play. You mentioned payments. So we think about Apple Pay, that was one of the announcements you had. Google Calendar, talking about time. And then Mx with the loan. So the power of these partnerships, I'd like to hear from you on that because, big names, right? Yes, yes. That I, if Jeff or I or anybody watching ran a little mom and pop operation in Morgantown, West Virginia, I've got Apple and I've got Google and I've got Intuit on my side. Talk about leveraging that power for small business. Yes, actually listening to you inspires me around what Intuit is doing for these small businesses. And it starts with our vision of having an open platform. It's less about what we innovate on that platform but our goal is to bring all of the innovation, whether it's our engineers or engineers outside of our four walls, bring all of that innovation on our platform so that in fact we can digitize and automate everything with Google Calendar. So we can go in and we know all of where you spent your time and help you easily with one click invoice your customers or to the example you use, be able to use Apple Pay Touch where you can immediately get paid. But that's because our goal is to have an open platform where we bring all the innovation of the best companies out there to you so that you can run your business on any device and you don't have to worry about which application it is but that we do it all for you. I just love the Google Calendar example because he does so many great innovations today or basically reassembling stuff that's already out there leveraging APIs and presenting it in a different way. And so the fact that you're taking advantage of Google Calendar, which so, so many people, you probably know the numbers use and then have that drive your billing, have that drive your time management and just take advantage of the data that's there or as Scott said, take advantage of the data that's in your phone. It knows exactly how far you went on that drive to the client. It knows when you left and when you arrived and when you got home. So to leverage a cloud platform with APIs to pull that data in and drive into seamless integration which makes too much sense, right? You know, it does and when you think about someone like Google where there's a billion people that use Gmail and most of them are using, there's a billion people that have Gmail accounts and over 60% of our customers use Google Calendar to run their business and so it's just, it's only intuitive to figure out a way, well, how do we automate all of that? So that the customer doesn't have to use QuickBooks for taxes and accounting then go to Google Calendar to see where they spent their time so they can figure out an invoice and then integrate it all together so it's all in one place, yeah. How do you all keep focused when your market, your potential market's so big? You know, you've got, I don't know, I read it was at 800 million possible businesses, right? Small businesses? That's right. So how do you look at what would be the reasonable growth trajectory and expansion your plans? How do you keep your eyes on the target? You know, and how do you determine that target? Yeah, it's a great question. Let me start with where you just ended which is there are 800 million self-employed and small businesses worldwide and you know, 97 to 8% of them actually are not using the cloud to run their business or their time and the way we prioritize is think about the countries that are the biggest opportunity to create virality by those that are using the platform and so we prioritize which countries that we're going after and really doubling down in those countries and that's where we really are able to focus our efforts in time because once we create this, what we call the network effect, the more small businesses and self-employed we get to use the platform, the more we get accountants to be able to see the power of the platform, the more they tell their friends, the more accountants are recommending it, you in essence create this flywheel effect of more and more going to the crowd and once we get that flywheel effect going we'll think about what's the next country that we want to go into? We're not that serial about it but our biggest focus comes from being clear which countries we're going to play in today and which countries for now we're going to wait till we get this network effect going. And now you've got this whole new way to work. You know, people that are giving up part of their house or apartment for Airbnb rentals or people that are driving in Uber for four hours, a couple of days a week. Again, those are all based on systems that are driving that engagement. Do you see that as just a whole new opportunity? You've seen a lot of growth in, I always forget the technical term for it. The gig economy. The gig economy. That's right, the gig economy. Which is a whole new and swelling thing and for a lot of those people, they're even less sophisticated on keeping track of their tax withdrawals than the small mom and pop store. That's the least been paying to social security for a number of years. So, another huge opportunity for you. It absolutely is, one of the myths is most self-employed are actually not part of the gig economy. It's the photographer that you may call on to come take pictures of your family or the landscaper that's a one person shop. That's 90% of self-employment. About less than 10% is the Airbnb's, the Lyft and the Ubers of the world. But that number is only going to grow over time. In fact, our view is, in this day and age, people will work at a company for three to four years at a time. We believe in 10 years, people will work for three to four companies in a day because they're workers and they're outsourcing their time to different companies. Three or four companies a day. A day because in essence, they're self-employed and I may work for you and do a job. I may work for you and do a job. That's actually starting to happen today except it's a small part of the economy. We believe 10 years from now, it'll be a huge part of the economy and that creates a huge opportunity for us because they're all self-employed, right? Before we head out, again, one of the big trend topics, artificial intelligence, machine learning. How do those come into play in your vision for the company's vision and the products and services that you think you can develop that can be put to use? Yeah, you know, in fact, we think there are two core competencies that we must have. One is an open platform where we integrate all applications into the platform, whether it's ours or somebody else's. The second is being amazing at leveraging the data, whether it's data from a PayPal app, a Square app, or our own app, and leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning so we can do the work for our customers. So we believe when it comes to data and artificial intelligence, that is actually one of two or three primary core competencies that we are building as a company and it's something we're not new at. We've been doing this for years. In fact, last year in TurboTax, we reduced the amount of time it took to do your taxes by 40% by using machine learning and we're now applying that within QuickBooks. I'd like you to reduce my tax liability by 40%. We can take care of that and I'm yours. At least get you to listen to the July deadline. If you just make less income, I'm sure that's doable. If you don't make it, you don't pay it. That's right. We mentioned ESPN earlier about the stage and all that. You made top plays today. No doubt about it with the keynote's address. Oh, thank you. Thank you very much. And thank you for joining us here on theCUBE. We appreciate the time. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Back with more from QuickBooks Connect 2016 here in San Jose, you're watching theCUBE.