Thomas Proulx

He earned an electrical engineering degree from Stanford University and was a Hughes Fellow.

Intuit

In 1983, he began designing Quicken in his dorm room at Stanford.

In 1983, Scott Cook went to Stanford University in California, United States. He wanted a programmer for a planned home bill payment and bank reconciliation program. Proulx was the first person Cook met and subsequently co-founded Intuit. Proulx was the first programmer of the first version of Quicken, and the first Apple and Radio Shack versions. He obtained a patent for finding a way for a computer to verify that a user had correctly inserted blank checks in a dot matrix printer. This was essential to the near-universal use of such checks in accounting programs.

After he co-founded Intuit in 1983, the company ran into financial difficulties, with staff working at one point for nine months without pay.

In 1984, in what may have been the first case of usability testing with engineers, Intuit recruited people off the street to test Quicken with a stopwatch. After each test Proulx improved Quicken. Before this, experienced computer users spent an hour or more installing programs and printing a check. Novices often gave up. Quicken allowed inexperienced computer users to do it in less than 15 minutes, printing checks faster than writing them. The market share of Quicken varied from 65% to 98%, making it a killer application, which drove many computer sales. It also made usability testing a standard industry practice.

In 1985, the company lost key employees due to a lack of funds, with Proulx as one of four remaining employees working for free for six months. They worked on Quicken, which they used to create an advertising revenue stream. In 1985, while Proulx was one of three Intuit employees, Intuit became the first company to shrink-wrap floppy disks and manuals. This further revolutionized software development. By 1992, all major Intuit programs had a market share of 75% or more. Proulx created an Intuit credit card with a download service, that automatically classified charges. Proulx was a recipient of the Inc. Magazine Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 1992. In 1993, he actively assisted with helping Intuit go public and was the driving force behind its Chip Soft TurboTax merger. He resigned soon after.

He retired from Intuit in 1994. Afterward, he became a private investor in several startup companies.

As of 2017, he has an estate in Atherton, California. He has two children.

Political involvement

Wired noted in late 1996 that Proulx "began Silicon Valley's anti-211 crusade. This spring, Proulx raised $12 million from friends in the high-tech industry to pass ballot initiatives. It would have made California courts the most inhospitable in the nation to securities fraud suits. The campaign to defeat 211 was more broad-based than his fledgling effort earlier this year." By that November, the California Technology Alliance group had "hired a lobbyist to represent it in the state capital."