Intuit’s CEO, Brad Smith, is preparing to step down from the role by the end of 2018. On January 1, Sasan Goodarzi, currently executive vice president and general manager of Intuit’s Small Business and Self-Employed Group, will take over the office, as well as join the board.
Concurrently, chief technology officer of 10 years Tayloe Stansbury will step down on Jan. 1, 2019, as well. Marianna Tessel, senior vice president and chief product development officer for Intuit’s Small Business and Self-Employed Group, will succeed Stansbury as Intuit’s CTO.
Brad Smith has served as CEO since 2008, and has been with Intuit in different capacities since 2003. Come January, he will remain with the company as executive chairman of the board of directors.
Under Smith, Intuit reports that the company more than doubled its customer base to approximately 50 million customers, doubled its revenue to nearly $6 billion and more than tripled GAAP earnings per share. Intuit also returned nearly $13 billion through dividends and share repurchases to shareholders, and posted a total shareholder return on the stock of over 600 percent from January 2008 to date, nearly three times the return on the Nasdaq over the same period. Intuit appeared on Fortune’s Best Places to Work list during each of Smith’s 11 years as CEO.
“I’m extremely proud of what we’ve accomplished as a team,” Smith said in a statement. “We’ve transformed the company, delivered years of consistent growth and built a strong, enduring culture of innovation and self-disruption. We’ve also continued our long history of leadership development and built a deep bench of leaders who will make up the next generation of Intuit management. That includes a CEO successor in Sasan Goodarzi who is ready to take the reins of Intuit. With all this in place, the time is right for me to step down as CEO and continue serving the company in my role as executive chairman of the Intuit board of directors.”
Appointed successor Goodarzi was appointed to his current role in May 2016. Previously, he was executive vice president and general manager of Intuit’s Consumer Tax Group and, before that, served as Intuit’s chief information officer, as the general manager of Intuit’s ProTax organization and as the general manager of Intuit’s Financial Services Division.
Before joining Intuit in 2004, Goodarzi served as the global president of the products group for Invensys and held a variety of senior management roles in the automation control division at Honeywell. He also co-founded and served as the CEO of technology startup Lazer Cables Inc. Goodarzi earned his master’s degree in business administration from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Central Florida.
Other executive changes
During his nine-year run at the company, outgoing CTO Tayloe Stansbury spearheaded Intuit’s transition from the desktop to the web, then from the web to mobile. and most recently to the public cloud. Stansbury started the company on its path toward an integrated ecosystem of products and significantly expanded Intuit’s artificial intelligence capability.
“Stansbury has been a game-changer for Intuit. He has been instrumental in our company’s technology transformation,” said Smith. “He’s built a world-class technology organization and recruited and developed a deep bench of technology leaders.”
Marianna Tessel, who will succeed Stansbury, is a former engineer and a captain in the Israeli Army. She brings leadership experience from both large companies as well as startups, having held senior engineering leadership roles at General Magic, Ariba, VMware and Docker.
“Marianna Tessel is a standout technologist and an exceptional business leader. I could not be more confident in her stewardship of this important capability and function for the company,” said Smith.
Alex Chriss, currently senior vice president and chief product and platform officer for Intuit’s Small Business and Self-Employed Group, will succeed Goodarzi as general manager of the unit. Since joining Intuit in 2004, Chriss has helped expand Intuit’s small-business market opportunity around the world by launching and leading Intuit’s self-employed business, its platform-as-a-service strategy and the QuickBooks App Store. Chriss has also led Intuit’s QuickBooks Capital business.
