What Billionaire Scott Cook's College Ski Club Taught Him About Business | Forbes

Scott Cook is chairman of the executive committee and cofounder of Intuit, a company that helps millions of people and small businesses manage their finances with products like QuickBooks, TurboTax and Mint. Cook was harnessing the power of software to make a common task simpler in 1983, when Google’s cofounders were still in grade school, most of the PayPal mafia was learning basic arithmetic and Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t even born. Today, the publicly traded behemoth boasts sales of over $6 billion and a market cap of $68 billion.

This wasn’t the future Cook imagined for himself as an undergraduate at the University of Southern California, with his eyes set more on the ivory tower than silicon valley. After he and a pal won a federal research grant to study the economics of air pollution, Cook thought he might pursue a Ph.D. in the field. A fateful day at the ski club’s general interest meeting would change all that.

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