 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. Hey, welcome everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are in downtown San Jose, the San Jose Convention Center for actually the first CUBE trip to QuickBooks Connect 2016. About 5,000 people here talking about the QuickBooks application and platform, the ecosystem of all kinds of different vendors and applications, but really the spirit of this show is all about the entrepreneurial dream and making that real. I think really appropriate here, we're getting close to the election, a lot of talk about jobs and small business. Joined it all for the next few days with John Walls, John, great to see you. Jeff, good to see you, looking forward to it. I've been inspired by the keynotes already, heard from Brad Smith, the CEO of Intuit and some other speakers as well, both inside and outside of the company, but like you said, it is all about this entrepreneurship that we're seeing so prevalent in the United States that ain't really globally, and we'll hear from speakers I'm sure over the next two days here about what QuickBooks is doing to expand their reach on a global basis because again, small business is not only driving the United States economy, but economy is all over the world. Yeah, and he talked about a lot of global trends that are happening that small business entrepreneurs can really take advantage of. He talked about social, you know, people are using social to make buying decisions and it's influencing their behavior. He talked about machine learning and AI, and really what's interesting now with kind of a platform and cloud-based applications versus just working by yourself on the desktop, is you can leverage the power of all the QuickBooks community of that whole application, their whole engineering staff that's now delivered to you as a baseline application for you to run your business. He talked about security, big, big news. Last week, you know, there was this huge denial of service attack that took out the entire East Coast a ton of applications. You don't want to be by yourself trying to get your small business done in this type of environment. He talked about mobile and how it's really moving, especially with Gen X and Gen Y, that everyone is doing everything on mobile, really taking a mobile-first approach. And then again, the power of the platform, those are kind of his big five themes and how does Intuit be a QuickBooks deliver that to the entrepreneur? We love stats. I think we all love stats. And we heard some great stats from Brad Smith, CEO of Intuit, talking about the multiple screens on which we operate our lives today. But then if you look at the younger folk, again, the Gen Zs, as they called it, that you've got the millennials who are operating on two screens, balancing their lives between two screens. Now we're hearing about the Gen Zs who are like these 10-year-olds and 12-year-olds. I saw one getting his haircut yesterday, couldn't take his nose out of his device, but they're operating on five screens. And able to still comprehend the world around them, which I can't fathom, right? Because that's just not the way we're wired. But back to the social, that one really struck me off the top when Brad was talking about it. We think about those social platforms like Twitter and Facebook and Yelp and what have you, but how our social networks drive decisions, especially in business, do I do this? Do I do that? And how we turn to our networks in a social context to drive a lot of personal and professional decisions. And how QuickBooks is looking to tap into that. Right, right. And still take care of the business, right? At the end of the day, you got to take care of business. And there's really three or four kind of legs of the stool, if you will, the constituencies that you have to manage. You have to manage your reporting. You have to manage your inventory, your purchasing, your supplier relationships. You have to manage your customer relationships and your accounts receivable. Very, very, very important item that they talk a lot about. Speeding that up, time to payment. It's a great quote I've seen a ton from business collie. You can have the muscles of Arnold Schwarzenegger in the brain of Albert Einstein, but if there's no blood in the veins, the thing falls apart. And cash flow is the blood of business. You got to have cash flow. We're hearing over and over again that all these integrations with different payment methodologies really enable businesses to get paid quicker, both on the front side, as well as have better relationships with their suppliers. Yeah, we heard about that too from Sasan Ghazarzi, who's an EVP with QuickBooks. We'll have him on a little bit later on today, but talking about those very kind of capabilities that QuickBooks is now allowing for. Not only taking care of your accounting practices, but also how do I get access to capital? And if I've got to pay bills, I've got to borrow some relationship with AmEx that they developed. And I think that the thing that struck out with me as I listened to Mr. Ghazarzi talk about was the brands with which they're partnering. So we've got an Apple pay play here. We've got the Google Calendar's involved. We have AmEx now involved in different respects, but the fact that they're looking for these really unique partnerships, looking to big names to help small business. And leveling the playing field now and giving small business the kind of tools they didn't have before, but enabling them to go head to head with the bigger guys and the elegant ladies, as they talked about, but giving them a chance to go head to head because you have the same access to those resources that you didn't have before. But what a great enabler and what a great leveler technology is. It's kind of like Tom Friedman, right? The world's flat. He was talking about that from a communication standpoint. Now we're seeing that from a technology standpoint and creating these opportunities for businesses all over the world on a global basis to go head to head with bigger names. So it really is, I think a pretty exciting couple of days that we have in store for us. The financing thing is really interesting because we're here in Silicon Valley and you used to be able to go with a business plan and a great idea and get a lot of capital. It's not quite that much anymore. Now you've got to get a few customers and get it. But if you just had a regular business, it's hard to get capital. It's hard to get it from banks. It's hard just to get work in capital for somebody that's running a relatively small business. And really what they're trying to do is kind of break that FICO monopoly or where you always have to put your own house up. You always hear the entrepreneur always have personal guarantees against their house to say, we've got data in the system on how you get paid, when you get paid, how you pay your bills, what's your cash flow, what's your tax exposure, that we can now feed into a financing network that plays inside that network and can make a better funding decision based on a lot more data than they could before and open up a new line to financing for small business, which is so, so important, especially if they're successful in growing. That puts the biggest pressure on small business of anybody's when you're growing and those receivables aren't kind of keeping up with your demand as you're buying stuff to deliver to your products and you kind of get stuck behind the eight ball. And we heard a pretty good quote to talking about the community here is that it's an old African proverb that if you want to run fast, you go alone, if you want to run far, go together. And I think that really embodies kind of the spirit of this community that we have here is that they're people that want to go together. They're going to learn from each other's mistakes. They're going to share their experiences and their best practices. We heard from a couple of inspiring speakers today in the keynote, Ali Webb, who was really the energy behind Dry Bar, which is not necessarily a service that I could relate to. I got three daughters at home though. They all know about Dry Bar and blowing out your hair and paying $45 for that. And that started just five years ago in a recessionary time, or six years ago it was. And now there's 67 Dry Bars around the country. So we heard from Ali about the small business dream. We heard from Derek Kayango, who's a gentleman from Uganda, country the size of Oregon, in the middle of Africa. And he talked about starting the Global Soap Project. One day he was in a hotel in Philadelphia and looking at all the soap that is thrown out on a daily basis, 800 million bars of soap across the United States and hotels every year are discarded. He now has created this global project of recycling soap and has now expanded to 45 countries. So it's an amazing reach that small business can have. It starts with a germ of an idea and through the help of QuickBooks, grows and can grow into thriving, successful enterprises. So that's really kind of, I think the genesis of a lot of excitement that we're hearing today, we're going to hear today from people who are making that happen. Yeah, I really like the Ali web. And even with Ali, again, a lot of these businesses, it's not about what you think the business is. It's really kind of the subtext of what the business is. And she said, we sell happiness and confidence to women. We sell a visit that is going to change their day. They're going to leave with a big smile on their face and it's affordable. So kind of like, I think this whole QuickBooks convention is yet about accounting software and it's about getting paid and it's payment systems, but really it's about small business and we're surrounded and we're going to have a lot of guests on that are building businesses and hiring people and really setting the economy forward. So I love the positive energy. I love the mojo. We got a great lineup with two very special guests today. Scott Cook, the founder of Intuit, who are really excited to have on and Malcolm Gladwell, the award-winning author, will also be joining us. So stay with us all day and tomorrow, John Walls, Jeff Rick, you're watching theCUBE at Intuit QuickBooks Connect 2016. Thanks for watching.