Skip to content
Lenny's PodcastLenny's Podcast

Eoghan McCabe: Why Intercom went wartime to bet $100M on AI

How a wartime culture rewrite drove 40% turnover and a soft coup; Fin, the AI agent, charges 99 cents per ticket and is racing past $100M ARR.

Eoghan McCabeguestLenny Rachitskyhost
Aug 21, 20251h 23mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 5:00

    Introduction to Eoghan

    1. EM

      You don't have a choice. AI's gonna disrupt in the most aggressive, violent ways. If you're not in it, you're about to get kicked out of all of it.

    2. LR

      You have very successfully shifted late-stage SaaS business to an AI-first, agent-based business.

    3. EM

      Fin is our AI agent. We'll pass 100,000,000 ARR with Fin in less than three quarters.

    4. LR

      Let's talk about how you made this actually happen.

    5. EM

      We were about to hit, like, $0 net new ARR, which means we would have been in negative growth territory.

    6. LR

      So ChatGPT launches. Was it just like, "This is it. We gotta go all in on this thing"?

    7. EM

      I said, "We need to become a wartime company. If we don't fight for this, we are dead." I jumped hard on AI, but I also restarted the culture. I rewrote the values designed to be a sharp knife to cut out the parts of the company that I just knew wouldn't be effective.

    8. LR

      If you're trying to make the shift and it's just not moving, you may need to go hardcore founder mode.

    9. EM

      The way that greatness is created is that you find a CEO who's willing to make brave, hard decisions and own the results.

    10. LR

      What percentage of the employees kinda turned over during this period?

    11. EM

      Ultimately, like, 40%.

    12. LR

      You said there was a, a soft coup. Is there more you could share about that? Today, my guest is Eoghan McCabe. This is the first in a series of conversations that I'm having with founders who have successfully transformed their established SaaS or marketplace businesses into an AI-first company that is growing like crazy and overtaking their decade-plus old business. So many companies and product teams and founders are trying to navigate this very tricky time where every industry is being disrupted by AI, and my goal here is to help you essentially disrupt yourself before somebody else does. The story of Intercom's transformation into Fin is incredible. Their traditional business was valued at billions of dollars, was making hundreds of millions of dollars in ARR, but growth started to plateau, and was even about to go negative. Six weeks after GPT-3.5 came out, they had a working prototype of what is now Fin, and Eoghan and the team decided to go all in on AI. Today, Fin is growing like crazy, already at eight digits in ARR, and Intercom is on track to be growing faster than every public software company by next year. In our conversation, Eoghan gets very real and honest about what it takes to win right now, what he had to do to turn the ship around at Intercom in spite of a lot of pushback and even a soft coup attempt, what he believes people still don't understand about what is happening in software and AI, and so much more. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of a bunch of incredible products, including Lovable, Replit, Bolt, n8n, Linear, Superhuman, Descript, Whisperflow, Gamma, Perplexity, Warp, Granola, Magic Patterns, Raycast, ChatBRD, and Mobben. Check it out at leonnysnewsletter.com and click Bundle. With that, I bring you Eoghan McCabe. This episode is brought to you by Great Question, the all-in-one UX research platform loved by teams at Brex, Canva, Intuit, and more. One of the most common things I hear from PMs and founders that I talk to is, "I know I should be speaking to customers more, but I just don't have the time or the tools." That's exactly the gap Great Question fills. Great Question makes it easy for anyone on your team, not just researchers, to recruit participants, run interviews, send surveys, test prototypes, and then share it all with powerful video clips. It's everything you need to put your customers at the center of your product decisions. With a prompt as simple as, "Why did users choose us over competitors?" Great Question not only reveals what your customers have already shared, but it also makes it incredibly easy to ask them in the moment for fresh insights from the right segment. Picture this, your roadmap's clear, your teams aligned, you're shipping with confidence, and you're building exactly what your customers need. Head to greatquestion.com/lenny to get started. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're building a SaaS app, at some point, your customers will start asking for enterprise features like SAML authentication and SCIM provisioning. That's where WorkOS comes in, making it fast and painless to add enterprise features to your app. Their APIs are easy to understand so that you can ship quickly and get back to building other features. Today, hundreds of companies are already powered by WorkOS, including ones you probably know, like Vercel, Webflow, and Loom. WorkOS also recently acquired Warrant, the fine-grained authorization service. Warrant's product is based on a groundbreaking authorization system called Zanzibar, which was originally designed for Google to power Google Docs and YouTube. This enables fast authorization checks at enormous scale while maintaining a flexible model that can be adapted to even the most complex use cases. If you're currently looking to build role-based access control or other enterprise features like single sign-on, SCIM, or user management, you should consider WorkOS. It's a drop-in replacement for Auth0 and supports up to one million monthly active users for free. Check it out at workos.com to learn more. That's workos.com.

  2. 5:00 – 9:53

    The state of Intercom

    1. LR

      Eoghan, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

    2. EM

      Thank you. Great to be here.

    3. LR

      You have done something quite extraordinary with Intercom, something that a lot of founders and product teams are trying to do, which is to navigate this very scary disruption that's happening as a result of AI to most businesses. You have very successfully shifted, uh, as you described it, late-stage SaaS business to an AI-first, agent-based, very successful business. I want to use this time to extract as much as I can out of your journey so that people that are trying to navigate this and having a hard time can, uh, have less pain, less suffering, and, and will hopefully get to something that works. To give people a sense of just how well things have gone, can you share some stats about the current state of the business, how it's going?

    4. EM

      Currently across the business, you know, we, we benchmark ourselves against all the public software companies. There's like 120-something B2B software companies. We're like in the 15th percentile for ARR growth, so we're up there.... Fin, which is our AI agent, which is, you know, the future of the business, the thing that will disrupt the old business. It's, you know, growing north of 300%. It took off really fast, like all these other AI companies you hear of. The first year, it grew from one to 12 million ARR. We're now in solid mid-eight-digit ARR growth there. We'll pass 100 million ARR with Fin in less than three quarters. And yeah, Fin, it, you know... We're, we're in the customer experience category with Fin. So, it's one of these agents that helps do all your customer work. And they all started with service, and in that category, we are the biggest by customer count, biggest by revenue, best by performance benchmarks. We win all our head-to-heads and our direct competitor bake-offs. (smacks lips) We're rated number one in G2. So, I think we're doing, we're doing pretty well. We're doing far better than we imagined at this point.

    5. LR

      Okay. Uh, this sounds like the dream for a lot of founders, especially ones that are stuck with their existing business that isn't going very far. So, let's get to that. Let's talk about the beginning of this journey. You had a business that was working. People used it, loved it, and over, over 100 million ARR, I believe. Talk about just the state of the business at the point, roughly, when you decided, "I really need to make a big change and go AI, AI first."

    6. EM

      It was already in the hundreds of millions 14 years and change now. Part of the story is that in 2020, I had been sick for a couple years. The background is I had mold toxins, and later I found out that I had got a tick bite, and that messed me up. And so I left the CEO role in 2020. And, you know, a lot of the mistakes I had been making when I was sick got worse. W- we became what a lot of late-stage software companies are today, which is a bit bloated, we'd lost some energy. Our strategy was diluted and unfocused. We were trying to do all the things for all the people. We didn't know what problems we were really solving and for who. And the result was very slow revenue growth, in like the low single-digit percent. And I was away for two years, unsatisfied with where the business was going. We had this post-COVID sugar rush, which a lot of big companies at that stage did in 2021. Everyone's valuation and revenue was through the roof. And that hid a lot of problems in a lot of these companies. And we had five quarters of successive s- you know, sequential decline in our net new ARR, and we were about to hit, like $0 net new ARR, which means we would have been in negative growth territory. We never got there. I managed to stop it before we got there. But we were falling each quarter. And I found that I, despite my wishes to go and have new adventures, still had a lot of pride for this damn thing and didn't wanna see it end in a way that was so different from the way it started. It started with so much hope and optimism, like so many companies do, and it was about to fade away. So, that was when I felt like I need to go back and I need to make a change. I went back, and one month later, ChatGPT was announced. So, it would be really neat and tidy to be able to say that the AI transformation came. I knew I couldn't be on the sidelines. I had to save this thing from the coming disruption. Actually, I got whacked across the head by this AI thing, but it also

  3. 9:53 – 12:33

    The decision to pivot to AI

    1. EM

      ended up being a gift.

    2. LR

      Okay, so, uh, ChatGPT launches. Was it just like, "This is it. We've got to go all in on this thing"? Was it like, "Hmm, let's watch this thing"? How quickly was it clear that, "This is the future. This isn't working, what we're doing"?

    3. EM

      We... And I were very lucky in that we had an AI group already. We were in the customer communication business, chiefly doing customer service. We were building bots, but they were rudimentary AI. We had a bunch of our own machine learning that did Q&A for customer service, but it required a phenomenal amount of setup and was kind of crappy. But we had a number of AI engineers in the company already. And so when GPT-3.5 came out, they said, "This is different." And it didn't take long for people to start to imagine that this is going to be pretty disruptive to service. And it started where we imagined that this was gonna just wreck everyone's selling seats, everyone in the conventional SaaS game, and we believed that was quite possible for some couple years after that moment. But we were only six weeks into the launch of GPT-3.5 when we actually had a beta version of Fin. So, I got a text from Des, my co-founder, a week or so after the launch of GPT-3.5, and he said, "The AI team have something interesting, and they actually think we could make a product out of this." And this was long before... There's now, like, no doubt 100 service agents. We had something very early working. And, and part of what we had to our advantage also was that we had this giant base, 300, you know, sorry, 30,000 paying customers with, you know, hundreds of thousands active users, you know, millions of their users, billions of data points. So, we had a lot to play with. And so we jumped on it. And now, obviously, it's fun to tell that once again as a, you know, to, to, to, to support the idea of this brave maverick move. And I won't discount the fact that we were brave, but we were coming from a point of having nothing to lose. So, you know, like, we certainly are unique. I, I don't know a, a single company of our size and age that has pivoted this hard to AI and... being as successful as we have been. But we also previously were screwed. We were in a really tough spot so had no choice. So I'll take the kudos and credit, but also have a lot of empathy for companies that weren't as, in as much trouble as we were, and so tried to thread the needle and sustain the old business while adding to it with the new AI

  4. 12:33 – 16:19

    Why Eoghan is "anti-bot" in customer service

    1. EM

      stuff.

    2. LR

      Something I heard from someone that worked at Intercom, correct me if this is not correct, you've always been very anti-bot in the customer support business because it just you didn't like how personal it was. It just didn't feel...

    3. EM

      No.

    4. LR

      ... like the way you wanted to build a business, and then now that's what you do. Talk about just that transition.

    5. EM

      Yeah. I know. It's a, it's a fun and ironic twist. Um, our mission from the early days was make internet business personal. And when I came back and we started to lean into AI, I started to wonder, does that mission make any sense anymore? Now, part of our lean into AI is that we had no choice, not only for the business. We needed something new, but also we saw that this is the future, and you can't fight the future. You must be part of it. And so, okay, fuck. We're gonna be part of it. And ultimately, and it's very easy to tell yourself these sales stories, so I'm open to anyone telling me this is bullshit, but when I interrogate myself, my soul and my mind, I don't think it is. When I interrogate my heart and my mind, I don't think it is. But I, I'm now of the belief that providing a customer with a highly engaged, instantly available, expert consistent, fast, charismatic, funny, friendly personal agent available for literally every single customer every minute of the day around the clock is so much more personal than making them wait two, three, four days for a crappy canned response. And so that's the irony and the magic and the wonder of AI. Even if it does make us ask some hard questions of ourselves and think carefully about its impact on humanity, it actually is superior at the things we describe as personal and human relative to humans themselves. And so that- that's where I'm at today. Yeah, maybe it's a bunch of fancy post-rationalization, but, hmm, honestly, that's, that's really where I stand.

    6. LR

      Yeah. I think, I think data has shown people often prefer not to talk to humans to just solve problems that can just be solved. Like, it's- it's- it's a lot of stress to try to figure out how to talk to some support agent that doesn't know anything about what's going on.

    7. EM

      Yes. And AI is just better. Look at Waymo. So Waymo doesn't crash. It has 3.5 times less crashes than humans. It doesn't bother you or bug you. I like to chat with an Uber driver as much as the next guy, but not always. It doesn't have hygiene problems. It doesn't take wrong turns. I mean, it just doesn't do all these things that really bug people. And it's really interesting to see Uber now offer women the option to call only female drivers. And I guarantee the reason they're doing that is because women love Waymo because they feel safer. Like, AI is so often superior. And humans are gonna be far better at all the things. I'm pro-human. I love humans. I really want humans in the mix for all things and the rest of my life, but when it comes to practical, productive, efficient, and effective value, the glue in between, the human parts of our lives,

  5. 16:19 – 19:26

    Pricing strategy evolution

    1. EM

      I actually want AI and robotics.

    2. LR

      Before we start talking about how you actually made this transformation a success, one other piece of history is just your pricing strategy historically has been not liked by people. For example, I once had a Twitter poll or a survey on my newsletter just like, "What products do you pay the most for of all your SaaS products?" (laughs) And Intercom was by far the most.

    3. EM

      Yeah.

    4. LR

      I know people constantly complain about just how unclear it was and how high it was, and now you guys are at the forefront of how to price AI products.

    5. EM

      Right.

    6. LR

      So we're gonna get to that, but just talk about the lessons and what happened there with pricing back in the day.

    7. EM

      Yeah. So I wanna just validate your survey data. Yes, people abhorred our pricing. Uh, it was a meme. There were, like, actual funny popular viral memes on Twitter that were making fun of our pricing. Part of the problem, if not all of the problem, well, there's two problems. One was our strategy, super unfocused. As you've said, we're trying to do all the things for all the people. And when you're trying to do all the things for all the people, your, hmm, efforts to capture all that different types of value are gonna necessitate pretty complex pricing. If you're, like, customer service and you're selling seats and you're doing outbound messaging and you need to charge for messages, and you're doing, like, SDR messenger on a website and you need to charge for leads, already that's just metrics in every direction. And then if you're trying to sell to many different sizes of customers, you need tiers and gates, and it just became a behemoth. So part of the problem was the unfocused strategy, and then the other part of the problem was an unwillingness to, frankly, make bold decisions, say no, pick a lane, and actually take pain in the short term for the long term. We rolled out this new pricing, and this is even before the fin pricing you're talking about.... when I came back and I said, "Yes, we're gonna lose a lot of revenue here." Like, I can't remember how much we wrote down, but we actually l- have already given away something like, something like 50 million dollars in ARR. We've reduced the prices for a lot of customers, just to give them way simpler pricing, because surprise, surprise, when people feel like they have far simpler, more predictable, fairer pricing, they'll stick around longer. And it creates so much more ease in the company, and promotes a healthier relationship with the customer, too. When our people saw that we were sc- screwing customers effectively in every direction, it starts to erode the idea that we care about our customers, and then they make other customer-unfriendly decisions. And so, one of the values I promoted when I came back was that we would be customer-obsessed, and so we had to kill our own pri- our old pricing and give away a lot of revenue. So, that was the- the- the spirit behind the changes, but we can talk about the Fin pricing if you want to, also.

    8. LR

      Let's save that, 'cause that's a really important topic that I think people need

  6. 19:26 – 26:11

    Implementing the AI transformation

    1. LR

      to hear. Let's talk about the sh- the shift and how you made this actually happen. You make- you make it sound like, oh, like not fully, but it's, oh, we had to do s- like, it wasn't working anyway. We ... there was no risk to go all in on this AI thing. You were making hund- 150 million dollars a year ARR. You're worth at least a billion dollars at that point, right, uh, as a business? Yeah.

    2. EM

      I mean, m- multiple billions and we were making more money than that.

    3. LR

      Multiple billions.

    4. EM

      So, we were like-

    5. LR

      Okay.

    6. EM

      ... multiple hundreds of millions, yeah.

    7. LR

      Okay. (laughs) Very difficult to actually do, you know, even if things don't feel like they're growing anymore. So, first of all, just what was the moment, if there was one, of just like, okay, the six-week ex- experiment of someone building Fin internally was, was that being like, "This is it," or was there another moment of like, "Let's go all in on this"?

    8. EM

      It was the combination of the company being older, us all, me and the founders being impatient, like, "Are we gonna make something out of this?" We went through a time when the company was worth a lot. We're private, so we don't have like a daily mark to market, but all the other public software companies dropped 80%, 85, 90%. We saw our revenue growth crater. We were used to nice double digits, we were in low single digits. And so part of it was like, "Let's do something here." Another part of it was my own kinda anger and dissatisfaction with how the company was being run, and the mistakes that I made myself. I made a lot of compromises as a lot of founders and founding CEOs do to placate employees, or do it out of fear, to bring investors along, you know, following advice in the industry and best practices. You know, you betray your intuition in little bits and pieces over the years when the bright spark of your original idea turns into this big, unstoppable, scary corporate beast, and a little bit of you dies every single time you go and betray yourself in that way. I ... it- it's very r- like you, you know, if you could pick in your mind three or four tech darlings from 10 years ago, when you meet the CEO and talk to them privately, very few of them feel outstanding about the state of their culture and the decisions that they make and the way in which they have to work. All of them have betrayed themselves in little ways. And I was ... I had left the business, I was super sick, I was burned out, frankly, from the revenue, even having started to slow down before I left, I had been attacked unfairly in the press. Just all of me was just fed up, and I decided to take a very authoritarian, top-down, aggressive, founder-first approach to all the things. And I found that deeply cathartic, and that was the thing that led to me, in- in part, the other was just good old-fashioned logic and the other was desperation, saying, "We're doing the AI thing." The AI thing, exciting and se- and- and sex- exciting and sexy. We need some new energy thing here. The new AI thing makes sense. And also, just my intuition says, "Go for it." And so, you know, when people tell these stories, they rewrite history in their minds for the stories to be elegant and also so that they support their own self-aggrandized narratives about their brilliance. Actually, it's a big, messy cocktail of things, and anyway, that's my attempt at explaining the cocktail.

    9. LR

      I saw a stat that when you first launched, when you first had this kind of prototype, you were losing money on every transaction, that you were charging like a dollar, it would cost you $120, something like that.

    10. EM

      That's right. F- f- hundred and twenty cents, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

    11. LR

      Hundred and twenty cents, okay. So, there's a lot of vision here if this is going to get to a place where this actually will be great and affordable.

    12. EM

      You know, it's really funny, like, we charge 99 cent to resolve tickets, you know, customer problems, and we have a higher resolution rate than anyone else, and we are very proud of that and we obsess over that. It is the metric by which these agents are assessed. And we wanted our revenue to be f- 100% aligned with the value that they attained, because we had all this scar tissue from pricing prior that felt unfair to customers, and we, so we said, "What's, uh, the most fair that we can possibly fathom?" Now, when we did all our research, we found that many SaaS businesses were spending between 20 and $30 per ticket resolved. We were spending 22. Now, consumer businesses, maybe they go down to $5. We- we were thinking-... like, "Can we charge $10? That seems fair. It's half price. Could we charge $5? Could we even charge two and a half dollars?" But early on, we started to sense that people just wouldn't value the digital work as much as the human work, even though the digital work is better, more consistent, always available, makes the customer far happier. And so we actually started to lean into a price that w- we thought would be, you know, it was the nexus between us earning the most and it being the most palatable. We basically said that if someone is not prepared to pay 99 cent for us to rapidly and elegantly, perfectly and excellently solve their customer's problem, we need to wrap this up. We don't have a business here. So, that was where the 99 cent came from. And, and I always believed that value should... that pricing should come from value and not from cost. The cost is our problem. And we just had this sense and intuition early on that this thing will get cheaper, and it got a lot cheaper. And so, you know, you know, the margin moves around, but we, we make a margin that makes this more than worth our while, and we know our customers get an excellent deal and are able to deliver... a- able to deliver to their customers a level of service that they never could before.

    13. LR

      It's a very clear pitch. We just had, uh, Madhavan on the podcast and a pricing expert, and he has this phrase, "Beautifully simple pricing is where you want to get to." A- also, he's a huge fan of outcome-based pricing, which is what you're describing here, where you pay for an outcome. So you guys are in the magic quadrant of his pricing advice.

    14. EM

      Yes. Thank God. Our pricing woes are over. (laughs)

    15. LR

      (laughs) Finally.

  7. 26:11 – 31:18

    Cultural and organizational changes

    1. LR

      (laughs)

    2. EM

      Yeah.

    3. LR

      Okay. So going back to how you actually did this thing. So you basically... You des- you described what many people think of now as founder mode, just top-down, as you said, authoritarian, "Just here's what we're doing. We're not gonna sit around waiting for you to give me ideas." How did... What did you do? What did that look like internally?

    4. EM

      Um, you know, there was a couple of things. One was we were burning a lot of money, so I cut a lot of costs aggressively, canned a bunch of different projects. We had this, like, big, glorious office we were about to fit out, and I'm like, "We're about to hit negative growth territory." (laughs) Like, "Stop it." And a lot of companies were really stuck in the prior world where they just were used to being super successful, rich, and wealthy, and spent like drunken sailors, so I stopped all of that, got really frugal in ways I never thought I would. I still haven't touched the interior design of this office I'm in here, even though- though I call it the Hotel Marriott. Um, I was s- sick of it. Anyway, that was one. Another was I picked a lane. Strategically, we were all over the place, and I said, "We're doing service." Zendesk had been acquired a couple years prior. They were strategically, energetically, culturally dead. They were upsetting customers in the market. "There's an opportunity there. We're doing service. Forget all the other stuff." Even though there was a lot of people in the company saying, "Well, shit, we still have $80 million of AROrb that we're getting from the other thing, and we're really good at that, and there's a big opportunity. There's other companies in this space worth billions." It was, you know, the type of decision that were I to practice the professional CEO approach, which is, "Hey, folks, what do you all think? Let's take everyone's input. Let's put it all down on a spreadsheet, everyone add a color beside all of the different options that we may take. Let's make a group decision." I said, "Sorry, this is what we're doing." So I was very dictatorial in that respect. We had no one making decisions, so somebody needed to. Even if I had some qualms about the decisions myself, I couldn't predict the future, but someone had to make a call. You know, obviously, as soon as AI came around, I jumped hard on AI and announced that we were gonna spend nearly $100 million of our own cash on that, reallocated a lot of capital. But I also restarted the culture. We had just a very comfortable culture, as a lot of companies did. There was a lot of focus on social issues and a lot of complaining and dissatisfaction. And I rewrote the values designed to be a sharp knife to cut out the parts of the company that I just knew wouldn't be effective. So I said that people must be resilient, that we had very high standards, that we'd work incredibly hard, that shareholder value was the most important thing that we'd optimize for, a lot of things that were controversial for this prior crowd. And then I designed these quarterly performance processes where not only would you get a mark or a grade for your performance against your goals that quarter, but you'd also get a score for your behavior against the values. And I hardcoded a formula myself, and so I took it out of the managers' hands to say if people got below a certain mark, respectfully and lovingly, we would say, "Thank you for your service. We're gonna go forward without you." And so you do that just a small number of quarters, and you can start to shape an organization that's designed in the image of the values you want to create. And obviously there was a lot of pain, a lot of di- s- satisfaction. There was attempts at a soft coup. There was letters sent to the board, people really unhappy. But on the other side of it, the people left were, uh, the most incredible, entrepreneurial, brave, inspiring, happy individuals you could possibly imagine. And then you hire in their image. We ran an anonymous employee survey, like, I think s- 15 or 16 months after I started aggressively working through the org and rebuilding the org and rebuilding the culture, and we had a 98 to 99% approval of management, leadership, and new strategy. And this is coming from me having the lowest Glassdoor rating for a CEO I had ever seen when I came back. So, I- I- I just wanna explain that-... like, being that deliberate about your culture. And upsetting a lot of people is the path through which you can create a culture where people are super happy, super engaged, super aligned. And now we have just this highly performant organization. Yes, we're messy in many ways. So, that was a big part of it too. So, it was kind of strategically picking a lane. You know, remaking how we go to market, the pricing was a really, really big piece. That had a big effect. Betting on AI, and then culture. And I kind of buried the AI thing because frankly, none of this would matter if we didn't bet on AI. So, the story could all be summed up by saying, when you ask what did I do, it was that we, we built Fin, and that

  8. 31:18 – 40:05

    Surviving a coup attempt

    1. EM

      changed everything.

    2. LR

      You said that this was very unpopular. I imagine many people (laughs) were not happy with all the change and how top-down this was. You said there was a, a soft coup. Is there more you could share about that? I've never heard that story.

    3. EM

      When, when you make that degree of change and you tell people that they're in control, like we did in the previous generation of late-stage businesses, there's gonna be some friction when you change the rules. And it's my strong belief that great employees in great companies want and are constructed out of a very clear and strong hierarchy where it is the responsibility of the CEO to make brave and hard decisions unilaterally. Yes, using their experts as inputs and be responsible for the outcome. If I make decisions that propel the company in the way that, thankfully, my decisions have, I get rewards and kudos, and I get to go back to the board and say, "I want a bigger grant." If I don't, I get fired, and I should get fired. If my big, brave, unilateral decisions put us in the toilet, then I have to take responsibility for that also. So, that's how, in my humble opinion, it should work, and I, for one, don't know of a great company that doesn't work that way. You'll see from time to time, I did this a couple years ago, people will construct these indexes of the performance of companies that are founder-led. And of course, this is a self-serving statement, but it's also true. And surprise, surprise, the founder-led companies perform substantially better because they have the moral authority and the willingness to take the risks that the professional CEOs don't have the remit for. The professional CEOs are typically told, "Don't mess things up." And the founders are bored if they're not taking the risk to, of messing things up from time to time. And so that's, in my opinion, what creates greatness and great innovation. But like I said, there will be friction changing a company that's configured for democracy and committee decisions and soft and gentle interactions and communication to be properly founder-led and top-down.

    4. LR

      So, a big lesson here is if you're trying to make the shift and it's just not moving, there's a lot of resistance, you may need to go hardcore founder mode and make some significant change. What percentage of the, the employees kind of turned over during this period?

    5. EM

      Could be something ultimately like 40%. Um, so it was a big, big turnover over some couple number of years. You know, often the culture is set by a very small number of people, so it only took a quarter to really start to change the tenure of the, uh, the tenor of the conversations that were happening. But to bring in the people that were that new level of ambition and wanted to work as hard as the rest of us and work in a mature and engaged and excited way, that took a little longer time. You know, there's such a thing as product-market fit. There's a thing as founder-market fit. There's a thing as founder-product-market fit, you know? That's how you're doing it right. But there's also s- such a thing as employee-founder-product-market fit. You have to have the right employees for the type of business you're creating. And there are companies that want the need to be more stable, and they're gonna want the need to hire more stable individuals. There's gonna be companies that wanna do the highly collaborative, more democratic thing. I wouldn't invest in them, but there's companies that wanna do it. If you're an employee that enjoys that, there are a lot of positions out there. There are big companies like Google that do that. There are startups that hire the crazy, (laughs) you know, young, wild, messy early startup people, and that's great for them and the company too. So, it's really all about having the right individuals. And when you create that, not only do you create great success, but you just create a lot more happiness and balance and harmony. You know, ultimately, the employees who wanted a more, you know, gentle, democratic environment, they're not gonna be happy in a company like Intercom or Coinbase or any of these strong organizations. They'll be more happy somewhere else. So, even if it requires a little bit of a loving push out the door, I know that you're actually doing them a favor in the medium to long run.

    6. LR

      I was gonna say that a lot of these people will be happier working at a different company.

    7. EM

      Absolutely.

    8. LR

      Yeah.

    9. EM

      Who wants to go to war every day with your organization and in Slack? That's just not fun. It's not good for the nervous system or the soul.

    10. LR

      Yeah. So this whole period sounds very stressful for you. Did you ever regret coming back and just like, "What the hell did I get myself into? What am I, what am I doing to myself?"

    11. EM

      I never regretted coming back, but I have many moments where I don't enjoy the job. I didn't re- I didn't regret coming back because it was deeply cathartic for me. When a founder runs away from their business, it is the ultimate betrayal of, you know, th- their heart and the dream that they have. Now,... s- it's okay to wrap things up and quit, but when you kind of run away like I kind of had to, 'cause I was sick and burned out and, and, and kind of disenchanted, (smacks lips) I don't know, it didn't feel good. So especially when I had done that, having betrayed in a million or a thousand small ways my intuition, there was something I needed to exercise. So it has been deeply meaningful in that respect. And then of course, I'm fortunate that it worked out. I get to be on the second-most popular podcast in tech.

    12. LR

      Okay.

    13. EM

      I get to, like, pat myself-

    14. LR

      Yeah.

    15. EM

      ... on the back in front of all these people. Who wouldn't want that? That said, the reality is that for particularly people like me who like the adventure and the, you know, high-agency u- and, you know, unilateral day-to-day m- movement where you're trying to make big, wild, bold decisions, the reality is that w- if you're successful, most of your days will not be that. It'll be reviewing the bonus policy for next year and reviewing, you know, the comp proposal for your execs for the next year. It will be, you know, showing up for accountability meetings and stepping through the status of different work streams. It'll be rushing from meeting to meeting, having eight, nine, 10 meetings a day. I don't happen to believe that that's a great way to live your life. It'll be trying to get to all the emails you need to get to such that all those people aren't offended and hurt and, you know, trying to communicate in the ways with your staff and your team that is empathetic and thoughtful and keeps in mind that they may be having as shitty a day as you are. Like, eh, it's not, you know, uh, uh, I... W- you're giving me an opportunity to paint the story of this, you know, m- m- m- maverick-led adventure that you might imagine in a comic. D- like, you know, like, I'm for some reason picturing Tintin-

    16. LR

      (laughs)

    17. EM

      ... you, you know, sail the seas, you know, this swashbuckling adventure. It's not. It's... Corporate life kind of sucks, particularly for people like me. So I have many of those days. And so the only reason I'm still around is that I have a broader mission that makes it worthwhile for now. And that's why you see so many of our best founders get to a point where they're like, "Okay, I've had enough corporate fun." So that's the most authentic answer I could give you.

    18. LR

      Mm-hmm.

    19. EM

      No regrets coming back, but plenty of pain on a day-to-day basis.

    20. LR

      (instrumental music) Today's episode is brought to you by DX, the developer intelligence platform designed by leading researchers. To thrive in the AI era, organizations need to adapt quickly, but many organization leaders struggle to answer pressing questions like, which tools are working? How are they being used? What's actually driving value? DX provides the data and insights that leaders need to navigate this shift. With DX, companies like Dropbox, Booking.com, Adyen, and Intercom get a deep understanding of how AI is providing value to their developers and what impact AI is having on engineering productivity. To learn more, visit DX's website at getdx.com/lenny. That's getdx.com/lenny.

  9. 40:05 – 45:11

    The future of AI and business

    1. LR

      One of the interesting things about this space of agents, there's all this talk of agents are taking over, it's the future of software, or SaaS is gonna be replaced with agents. CX is, like, a classic. It just feels like, like... I imagine looking forward it was not obvious. Now looking back, it's like, obviously this is an amazing place for agents to take over work, but there's always this talk of agents will do everything and all the SaaS software is gonna be replaced by agents. Do you have a sense of just, like, how far this disruption will go outside of CX, 'cause it's already happening in your businesses?

    2. EM

      The first thing I'll say is that CX is deceptively large given it's hidden behind just two words, two letters. You know, customer experience really is service, success, sales, and marketing, in my opinion. It's all engagement with all customers. It's the biggest part by head count of any business, any consumer business and any B2B business. The biggest organizations are sales, service, success. So I'll talk about things other than CX in a moment, but I want to emphasize that CX is a, the majority of business operations. Of course it'll go beyond CX. Any, uh, function that requires a lot of repetitive operational mechanical work will be automated, whether it's chasing or collecting or, uh, issuing invoices. It could be onboarding or offboarding employees. You know, there are so many repetitive jobs in an organization that it'll start to replace. One of the interesting questions is, how much will be generic operations bots? How much will be expert agents? You know, there are expert agents for law and contract review. There'll probably be expert agents for accounting. Um, but you'll need the glue in between all of these agents too. But future organizations will be agents everywhere. Eh, uh, I s- have spent quite a bit of time thinking about what does it all look like in the future, and, you know, I imagine it as a medley of humans and agents, and I don't think it's obviously gonna be...... humans on the top and the agents all on the, in the AC ro- IC roles. I think that'll be more of a complex mix, where you're gonna have, you know, people that are like managers and leaders, but they'll be in IC roles working with agents to configure them for success and monitor and manage their progress, kind of add that oversight and cover for edge cases. And so, you know, I think we're gonna be surprised in which the way that these organizations go. They'll definitely be smaller, they'll be flatter because of that. I, I won't be surprised if there are agents at the highest level too. I mean, I've been thinking about how, and we do have a great human chief of staff here, but imagine a future human chief of staff that, like, understands your priorities and actually talks to you and does a check-in each day and reaches out to different people and asks for updates and, uh, helps organize your priorities and helps you remember who you need to keep accountable. You know, clearly there's an opportunity for that. And so you can imagine agents in specific roles, like customer service, in operational roles, being glue, and in being kind of, like, co-pilot or assistant roles like that which I mentioned. But, uh, you know, what I think that all brings is just epic levels of efficiency. It's gonna be super deflationary. There'll be a lot more competition. AI itself is insanely competitive right now. It's so intense in a way that it was never before. That's gonna come to all industries when so much of their inner workings becomes automated. And ultimately, I think it's gonna be great for the consumer. They'll have more options, cheaper options, and I can't but see that be great for the economy. A lot of economic lubricant, as it were, and a lot of new movement and activity. And if we were to really go off the reservation, but I'll stop here, that means that we need more humans too. We need population growth to show up for this big growth economically. And yeah, I just see the hu- the future as just a beautiful collaboration between humans and agents in every direction.

    3. LR

      I love the optimism. Uh, someone, uh, described us once as a, a society, uh, what is it, agentic society-

    4. EM

      Right.

    5. LR

      ... for us, us and agents living

  10. 45:11 – 48:44

    AI's impact on jobs

    1. LR

      together.

    2. EM

      Right.

    3. LR

      This begs the question around just jobs. Uh, we had Marc Benioff on the podcast, he's, you know, all agentforce, agentforce, agentforce, and I asked him just, like, "What jobs do you think are going away?" And he's just like, "CX, going away, gone. Sales, not going away. We need salespeople." Just what's your sense? I know it's, like, touchy subject, no one ever wants to say, "Jobs are going away," but just what's your sense of where jobs might be disappearing more most?

    4. EM

      Yeah. Well, I don't find that to be particularly touchy, because jobs have always gone away.

    5. LR

      Hm.

    6. EM

      And technology has done a really good job at stealing jobs that were repetitive, demeaning, dangerous. We have less people losing limbs in dangerous factories or dying and suffocating down mines because of the technology that we now have available to us. People breaking their backs on farms, um, uh, or just doing things that's highly demeaning to the great, beautiful, creative potential of each human individual life. So, I won't apologize for competing with or competing for shit work, because all the while technology has done that in the past. Population has increased, GDP has increased, longevity, um, crime rates have diminished in the Western world, the world that has enjoyed the most technology. So, we have no good reason to not believe that that won't continue. Even while there is difficulty, and there has been in the past, no doubt people who were gainfully employed in dangerous work and mines had to find new work. And so, uh, I don't take that for granted, but I think that this is part of the long arc of humanity flourishing and getting healthier and happier. Um, what are the work, the types of work that will go away? It's all the demeaning, crappy stuff. And, and that exists in, you know, digital businesses. You ask a human to sit at a keyboard answering the same question day in, day out, and you get to a point where you don't even ask them to answer the question manually. You ask them to click the button that brings up the macro. Like, what a horrible use of a human life. I've met thousands of people that have worked at Inter- Intercom, a broad range of talents, people who they might not describe themselves as particularly high IQ. Maybe they're, were suited at that point in their life for this highly repetitive work. You talk to them for two or three minutes, you'll see the bright spark of a beautiful human, that if I, if they got to do the right thing, they would light up and bring so much happiness and joy to the world. And so, like, that's the mission we're all on. I'm not Pollyannaish here, like I said, and I'm suggesting that there won't be friction. But for the most part, we're doing good. And to get specific, there will be CX roles and a lot of basic repetitive roles. There is a lot of repetitive stuff in sales, and so you'll, you'll do more sales with less people. Uh, there are SDR roles, qualifying, you know, basic questions. You're not gonna need as many people in sales organizations. So, I'm a little misaligned with Marc in that respect, but what he's getting at is that what salespeople bring to the table is human connection and trust, and that is not about to go away any time soon. Uh, and thank God

  11. 48:44 – 50:26

    AI and human creativity

    1. EM

      for that.

    2. LR

      I had, uh, Ben Mann, the co-founder of Anthropic, on the podcast recently, and he said that, he's like, "Even my job is, uh, probably gonna go at some point." He's like, "Lenny, your job is gonna be replaced by AI at some point." That was pretty, uh, compelling. Did not expect him to say that.

    3. EM

      Yeah. I don't know. I, I... Like, it will in many ways. We're gonna have agents and AI to aggregate content and create content. But humans, as much as when it comes to productivity, value efficiency, efficiency is not the number one thing that we value, you know? If efficiency was the number one thing we value, I'd always buy the cheapest clothes, furniture, computers, even paper for my printer. But I think humans value things like beauty and human stories and human heart and connection. And not only will they still want those and they'll still want a Lenny that has his, has his own story and his own take and opinions and is a little imperfect, but they'll pay more for it. The abundance of AI is gonna make automated things worth zero. Just like, you know, the value of cheap content on YouTube, why do people subscribe to some channels and pay more? Why do people pay to rent movies? Because some

  12. 50:26 – 55:00

    The importance of young AI talent

    1. EM

      things have more quality, more beauty, more craft, more art, more humanity. So I think there'll always be a place for that.

    2. LR

      Phew. All right.

    3. EM

      (laughs)

    4. LR

      I got a couple more years at least. (laughs)

    5. EM

      Yeah.

    6. LR

      Before I move on to a, a different topic, just kind of reflecting back on this shift to Fin and the success that you've had, are there any other just lessons that we haven't touched on that you think might be helpful for folks that are trying to go through this journey?

    7. EM

      You know, I think it's ultimately that you don't have a choice. Uh, my co-founder, Des, is writing a book at the moment, and that's core to the idea here. You don't have a choice. The story of the technology industry or digital technology is really short, and it's been, it's punctuated by a small number of things, microprocessors, personal computers, the internet, maybe mobile. Now there's AI. I think AI is bigger than all these things. And all of these things disrupted essentially all categories. So not only is this likely to disrupt all the categories, it's gonna disrupt it in the most aggressive, violent ways. And if you're not in it, you're about to get kicked out of all of it. And so my strongest advice is roll your sleeves up, figure out what's gonna disrupt you, have fun with it. You need to bring in actual talent. We and I would be nothing if we didn't have actual AI scientists and leaders. It's the only way we can be successful here. We have an incredible person who, by the time this is out, will have received a promotion to Chief-

    8. LR

      Congrats.

    9. EM

      ... AI Officer. I keep announcing all these things, and-

    10. LR

      Yeah, it's great. (laughs)

    11. EM

      ... confidence to you. Fergal Reid, and he's just one of the very best in AI applications, and we happened to be working with him for many years. So part of it is finding the talent, and part of it is bringing in the young talent too. AI is kind of a young man's game, and I'm young, but I'm not as young as a lot of the kids building AI. And so learning to empower and enab- enable them and learn from them too is a really big deal. And unfortunately, part of what you learn from them is the only way you're gonna win right now is if you work your ass off, because all these little AI companies run by kids in their 20s are literally working 12 hours a day, literally 365 days a year. No joke, all of them. And that's not a fun idea for many of us, especially those who've grown up. Some, some people in our generation have kids, or a lot of them do. There's like comfort and stability in your life. You don't wanna work like that, but if you want in, that's part of the price. And that's how so many of these young new AI companies are gonna win, 'cause very few of the previous generation companies are willing to make all of those changes and go all the way in. And so my actual advice, which is not that helpful, is that if founders of previous generation companies are themselves not willing to roll up their sleeves and get into it and work as hard as the kids, hire a kid. You can be a chairperson like I was, have a lot of fun. You can mentor the kid. Hire a kid, 'cause you're in the wrong job, buddy.

    12. LR

      I love how pragmatic this advice is. And what's interesting as you talk about 12 hours a day every day, it's like we're trying to get close to what agents are doing, uh-

    13. EM

      Yes.

    14. LR

      ... which is half. That's basically 50% of agents.

    15. EM

      But that, that's not just a poetic, cute phrase, say- thing to say. That comes from something very real, which is these younger companies know how to use AI in ways that the older companies don't. The younger companies are vibe coding and using AI for their creative work and for their job descriptions. I guarantee you go to companies of our generation, and even we have had to push people. You go to companies of our generation, most people in most organizations, particularly non technical organizations, they're not using any AI. Maybe they're starting to use ChatGPT to write a job description, but they're not doing it by default. Uh, and so-That's more than a joke. You're competing with young companies

  13. 55:00 – 58:00

    The cultural shift in AI adoption

    1. EM

      that are in part AI.

    2. LR

      This reminds me, I did an interview with the Perplexity founders. Uh, it was, uh, just check, April 2024, so just over a year ago. And they were saying that the way they operated, and this sounded so crazy at the time, is any time they were, they had a question for anyone else on the team, they first asked ChatGPT about it, and then they asked the person. I was like, "That is insane." And now it's just, like, obvious. It's what we all do now. Just like, hey, I'm just gonna talk voice ?

    3. EM

      It, it's a prime example. They're doing many such things. Um, when I say 365 days a year, they're the company I think of because they're doing exactly that. All these young companies are doing wild, weird, and ridiculous things that people your and my age kind of chuckle at, but it's business as usual for them. So there's, uh, just a big mind shift, cultural shift, and there's a culture clash of the previous generation versus the, the new generation. And the sooner you kind of wrap your head around that, the sooner you can start to unstick yourself, I think.

    4. LR

      And just to build on that, like this sounds crazy to work this hard. Like, it sounds very stressful, not fun, why would I do this, this sucks. But, at the same time, this is, as you said, such an unusual, rare opportunity. There's so much opportunity. There's so much wealth being created. There's so many businesses being created. This is the time if you were to ever work really hard. This is a good time to do it.

    5. EM

      I, I think so. I don't actually generally promote working that hard. I try to not fetishize it. I actually think a life well lived includes taking slow walks in nature where you're not thinking about or growth or hiring your chief revenue officer. You know, not going to eight meetings a day. Maybe you should go to no meetings a day. Certainly not working 12 hours a day. I don't actually promote that in general as a thing one should do with their life. I'm simply saying that if you want to compete and, and enjoy success in this age, which means you need to be doing AI, that is the price. So you either decide to pay the price or get out. Don't half-ass it. You see all these companies saying, "We do AI," and they just sprinkle a little bit of crappy AI, and they've got the same cultures. It won't work. The one thing I will say, the one little asterisk to my first point is that all great people and great things have been achieved through hard work. And so, uh, I'm speaking out of both sides of my mouth here. To younger people, to let them know that every way of living is valid, but people who have achieved things have always worked hard and they find a way to enjoy it too, and particularly in 2025

  14. 58:00 – 1:04:34

    Personal growth and leadership

    1. EM

      in AI.

    2. LR

      I wanna follow this thread. I was gonna ask you this earlier, but I didn't, and I wanna see if this takes us somewhere interesting. Just watching you speak and talk, you're very self-reflective, very centered. Uh, you, you, you have these really good breaths you take when you think about something. I met you a long time ago randomly at a party in the... when you were just starting Intercom. I don't think you were like that. Was there... During this kind of two-year period, was there kind of a transformation that you went through to kind of become this?

    3. EM

      Uh, uh, absolutely, yeah. There, there's a couple things. First, I mean, there's three things that come to mind. Working in a startup for 14 years has a certain way of kicking you in the head many times a day that either kills you or makes you far stronger. So that's one piece. There's no elegance to that point, but I think we can all intuit that level of experience teaches you something. You grow very fast. Point two is, I did a lot of therapy. I found this amazing guy 12 years ago. He started a couple of his own tech companies and talked on public. He only coached and was a therapist to CEOs. He's now kind of in a later stage of his career, but this amazing guy. His name is Yossi Amram, amazing guy. I just landed on my feet. I just didn't know who I was dealing with. But, you know, one of the greatest minds and teachers and, of kind of the last, I don't know, many decades. People don't even know him, but he's tho- he's, he's thought and worked with many CEOs. And he just helped me get to know me and take time for myself. And people like to hate on therapy right now. I think a lot of therapy sucks, and a lot of therapists are not good, and they fear that actually therapy will lobotomize them and turn them into thumb-sucking, navel-gazing, (laughs) you know, soft, irrelevant losers that won't have that edge anymore. And the interesting thing about 12 years of weekly therapy and spiritual work is that it takes your edges off, but they are all edges that are super counterproductive. All the edges that made you an asshole, got you triggered, miscommunicated, or, like, you know, fought back when y- when you w- were insecure, they take all the edges away then help you see yourself and love yourself so much more for who you are. Be completely unafraid to acknowledge the things you're not good at, but own the things you are. And in understanding yourself, you understand others better and can communicate in a substantially more connected and authentic way. Great, great therapy, and it has to be great, is-... a, a recipe for brilliant leadership, in my opinion. And then the third part is, two years away, where I ran away, where I was sick, revenue growth wasn't doing so hot, I unsuccessfully tried to defend myself from a bunch of fake bullshit in the, in the newspapers, I mean, I was beat up. And in a moment like that, your ego, your se- any sense you have of your greatness is eviscerated, and that's painful. I- it can be so painful that many people don't come back from it, and I credit the 10 years at that point, or th- uh, nine years of therapy I did at that point, plus the support of this therapist and coach that I had, to surviving it. But if you can survive it, what you end up with on the other side is, all of those insecure... well, a lot of the insecurities and all that ego bullshit that made you super ineffective, jealous, or triggered for all sorts of different reasons, is gone. And your image that you are this perfect, brilliant leader that all successful founders form when they are successful, had to die. And the reason that's so good is that that's so limiting. When you have this ego identity of yourself about how fucking amazing you are, then any moment that challenges that is super scary. Anyone who questions it is offensive. And so, I credit wherever I am today, and I have decades of learning still to go, to those three components, and I feel super fortunate to have had all of them. Even though the last one sucked, I can finally say, "Wow, it really helped."

    4. LR

      Mm-hmm. Thank you for sharing all that. Um...

    5. EM

      Yeah.

    6. LR

      I'm glad I went there. I want to show you something that I randomly have in my office, my wife just got me, that I think you're gonna love. It's a pi- it's a piece of art that I think will resonate with you.

    7. EM

      Yeah. What am I looking at here? So it's a hand?

    8. LR

      It's, it's a hand with a snap, and then let me see if you can see what it says.

    9. EM

      I can't see what it says. Yeah.

    10. LR

      It says, "Ego death now."

    11. EM

      Right.

    12. LR

      Look at this.

    13. EM

      Good. Exactly.

    14. LR

      There it is.

    15. EM

      May e- may all our egos peacefully become smaller and leave this mortal coil. The, the, the reality is, like, none of our egos ever die. And even great... there was... you know, Ram Dass is this great spiritual teacher who died a few years ago, and someone asked him on his death bed, something like, you know, "How did you get over your bullshit or your ego?" And he said, "Hmm, I never did, just the edges got smoothed away." This is a guy who had, like, 70 years of the deepest, wildest spiritual work. He acknowledged, "Nope, still my same self." So, the ego's still there, and we, we, we actually need to acknowledge it and love it, and when you, when you acknowledge it, then it's not a surprise when you're, like, a little jealous. You're like, "Huh, I'm jealous. That's funny. Okay." And it's all, it's all good.

    16. LR

      Reminds me of Daniel Kahneman, who wrote all these books about biases that we have and, like, here's all the ways we're flawed. People ask him, "Have you, like, learned to live more rationally?" He's like, "Not, not at all."

    17. EM

      Right.

    18. LR

      Knowing all these things about how we're flawed in the way we think-

    19. EM

      Right.

    20. LR

      ... all these biases doesn't actually, again, use it in life.

    21. EM

      No, we're, we're human, and we should let ourselves be human. I think it's beautiful. We're, we're, we're logic systems, but we're also heart systems and body systems and soul systems, so all

  15. 1:04:34 – 1:11:05

    Intercom’s success in producing product leaders

    1. EM

      of it is good.

    2. LR

      Okay. I want to go in a completely different direction, the last thing I wanna talk about. I, I needed to mention this. I don't know if you've seen this, but I've been doing research on which companies produce the best product leaders, and I've been doing this by looking at which alumni of companies go on to become CPOs at the highest rate, get promoted the most at their next job, become the first product manager at a few star startups, start their own companies. Intercom has come in number one-

    3. EM

      Mm-hmm.

    4. LR

      ... across this research, next to, like-

    5. EM

      Yup.

    6. LR

      ... Palantir and Stripe, Revolut. So, the question this begs is, what are you, what are you guys doing that produces such great product leaders? There's kind of like the hiring piece and then there's the what they do at Intercom piece. So, what do you think, what do you think is, is, is creating these sort of really big successes from your alumni group?

    7. EM

      Yeah. I don't have a really succinct answer, unfortunately. I can say, in the abstract, our culture is a very product-y culture. So, like, myself and Des, you know, there was four founders and me and Des Traynor drove a lot, like, my... all the strategy. We're product guys. You know, I was, I was like a, a pr- I was a software designer. You know, I studied computer science, so I'm tech- technical but never did it professionally. So, the first part is that just product, innovation, design, just co- was just core to our culture, and people always picked up on that. So I think good people wanted to work here, and we were good at s- finding good people. The other part was that because we had this sprawling strategy, we had all these products that we needed a complex structure for, and that included, uh, well, lots of PMs and PM groups that we gave a lot of autonomy to. And so, like, kind of, uh, the product of our big messy strategy was that we had PMs that got to act like mini CEOs, and so I think that they got to learn the broader skillsets beyond designing wireframes and interviewing some customers. They really owned it like a mini CEO to some degree. I think there's one other thing, which is, you know, part to our approach was this deeply first principles, uh, thinking methodology, almost to a fault, although I don't think it's a fault. We would, w- I and we would create frameworks for everything. It's like, "Okay, we want to do these events-"... who are the events for? What is the ultimate goal of the event? What's the mechanism by which events work? What are other mechanisms that can achieve that same goal? How do we define success for an event like that? How does the user or the attendee define value? What other things do those people find valuable? And like, we create these, like, complex systems to try and approach everything, but the net effect was that we'd have really joined up considered strategy, and it's everywhere. Like, Paul Adams, our chief product officer, I didn't even plan to show this, he made this book recently, The AI Age (laughs) and the Transformation of Customer Service. And it's a bunch of frameworks for how to think about AI, et cetera. So it's part of what we do, and so we would hire people who are good at that, but we teach that. That's teachable, and not everyone does that. And so the conversations that Des and I would have, you know, we used to love being on whiteboards. Our very first office, our own office in Dublin was a tiny office. One wall was, like, four, five computer- computers. The other wall was just all whiteboards. We loved that we had a whiteboard wall. In our next office we had a room, square room, and all walls were whiteboards. So we just loved to, like, draw diagrams. So he can teach all that stuff. So yeah, it, it's just all that good energy, product, product energy, first principles, the people we chose, and, and on the founder side, I was talking to Des about this this morning, like, why have so many Intercom people gone on to be founders? I think it's because we, we hired founder types, and my pitch to people was always, "Come to Intercom, figure out how great companies are built and build th- with us and then go on to start your own." I would say that often at All Hands. But the irony is that the people we hired back then, the founder types, were probably not great employees. Right? They were better founders. I'm not a good employee. And so I, uh, it'll be interesting to see if this current cohort... We'll get many founders out of this current cohort. But will they convert as well as they did before? Because we're now hiring people who wanna be part of something bigger, they're more mature and grown up, more stable and consistent. They're part of, you know, they have a certain expertise and a certain lane they wanna work in, and maybe they're not the crazy types that went on to start companies. But it's wild. I did see some of that research by you, particularly the one where you s- show that the companies rank by the number of founders that they have, and I'm like, "What is happening?" I was as surpri- I was as surprised that we were that high as you were, because there are many other great companies on that list. So surprised and proud.

    8. LR

      I love, uh, I love when people say, "I don't really have, like, a clear answer," and then you have exactly a clear answer. (laughs) Uh, and it resonates, uh, a l- a lot with-

    9. EM

      Yeah.

    10. LR

      ... other companies on this list that I've had on of what the themes are. And I'll just reflect back a few of them.

    11. EM

      Right.

    12. LR

      One is complexity. That comes up a lot. So, like... And interestingly, most of the other companies on the list, I'll read them real quick, Intercom, Palantir, Revolut, N26, Dropbox, Chime, Stripe, and then Coinbase and Notion's down there. So many are fintech. Almost all are fintech.

    13. EM

      Right.

    14. LR

      And the complexity there is really high.

    15. EM

      Yeah.

    16. LR

      So there's, like, a really interesting trend there of just, like, complexity.

    17. EM

      Yeah.

    18. LR

      Ownership is another one that comes up a lot, many CEOs, GMs kind of roles.

    19. EM

      Right, right.

    20. LR

      Um, first principles thinking and just, like-

    21. EM

      Yeah.

    22. LR

      ... going to the bare metal comes up a lot in these conversations.

    23. EM

      Yes.

    24. LR

      And then hiring senior people, hiring founder types.

    25. EM

      Yes. Like, Stripe did a lot of that. I think Stripe-

    26. LR

      Mm-hmm.

    27. EM

      ... did a lot of first principles stuff and founder types.

    28. LR

      Mm-hmm. Mm.

    29. EM

      Yeah.

    30. LR

      The, uh, the other thing, we're not, we didn't even talk about this, but you guys invented RICE.

  16. 1:11:05 – 1:14:11

    Intercom’s unique company culture

    1. LR

      Okay, um, is there anything else that you wanted to touch on or leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round?

    2. EM

      When someone like me comes on a podcast like this, they always have an ulterior motive, and that's healthy and good. It's part of the transaction. Some of it is to, you know, enjoy feeling like an expert. But my ulterior motive today is to make sure that people understand that Intercom is a fundamentally different type of late-stage company. We are a large, old startup. Every single way in which we work is as a startup, and are competing with and crushing the actual startup competition in our agent categories. And the reason that that's important for people to know is just, like I said earlier, that the handicap that good but late-stage companies have is that they're late-stage and people don't mentally put them in the same box. They just don't imagine these older companies... If, if I told you that IBM had made the most wildly innovative coding assistant, mm, you'd find it hard to believe. Most people would. It's maybe so interesting such that it would stick in your mind and you'd go look at it, but by default people aren't gonna look at IBM. And so I want people to take a new look at Intercom, 'cause it's a brand-new company. And our mission is to help every single type of business deliver impeccable, incredible, beautiful personal service to every single one of their users and people, many thousands of people are using Fin for that today. So go check out Fin, please, fin.ai.

    3. LR

      And y- I don't know if you mentioned this at the beginning, but let's mention it. You, you've, you predict that you'll be the fastest-growing-... company across, if you were to look at all public software companies next year.

    4. EM

      So maybe, you know, two years ago, we were in the low single digits growth rate. We doubled our growth rate, and last year we were in the low double digits. This year, we're in the 15th percentile of all public software companies. So you take the 120-something public software companies, we're in the 15th percentile, so we're, like, getting up there fast. And if we sustain this trajectory, and it's obviously dangerous to put these types of things out publicly, but I- I'll, you know, I'll tell you, I look at the charts and it's hard not to imagine where this, uh, goes. I think we're gonna find ourselves being the fastest growing out of all, relative to all public software companies. Uh, so let's, let's see. But that's the level of shock, surprise, and transformation that has actually happened here, all because of Fin. So, um, I, you know, check in with me in a year and maybe I'll be embarrassed or maybe I'll be feeling like a genius.

    5. LR

      Or, or underselling it.

    6. EM

      Yeah.

    7. LR

      This is just, reflects back on exactly how I started our conversation. You've done something extraordinary at Intercom, and I'm really happy that we're hearing, that we're sharing

  17. 1:14:11 – 1:23:19

    Lightning round and final thoughts

    1. LR

      this story.

    2. EM

      Thank you.

    3. LR

      With that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got five questions for you. Are you ready?

    4. EM

      Please. Ready.

    5. LR

      What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?

    6. EM

      So I- I found I lost the habit of reading as I started to get more and more stressed, um, with my startup. And so I would listen to audiobooks here and there, but the- the most recent book I read is a book called Nuclear War Scenario, and it's a, uh, very much a nonfiction, and scared the shit out of me. So if you like nightmares, it'll be beautiful bedtime reading.

    7. LR

      Mm. Excellent.

    8. EM

      Yeah.

    9. LR

      What's a recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed?

    10. EM

      I love movies. I, I want TV to be better, but I very rarely find TV to be great. The, the one that... The first and last TV show I loved was True Detective 1. That was just, like, incredible. But, uh, the last movie I watched was 28 Years Later, and that's by Danny Boyle. I'm, I'm, like, I... You know, I was born in the '80s, grew up as a kid in the '90s, and sort of grew up with, you know, you know, Tr- Train Spotting. It was 28 Days Later, then he made a movie called Sunshine. So 28 Years Later is a type of movie that's just not made anymore. It's the most '90s movie made since the '90s. It's, like, very rock and roll and also deeply touching. So I was really surprised by that. I bet... I would love to know the younger generations that are watching this, what they may think. They may hate it, (laughs) but I love 28 Years Later.

    11. LR

      So this is the same person that made 20 Days Later-

    12. EM

      Yeah.

    13. LR

      ... and 29 years-

    14. EM

      Exactly, yeah. 80s Boom.

    15. LR

      Wow.

    16. EM

      Yeah.

    17. LR

      Okay. Very cool. Didn't know about that.

    18. EM

      Yeah.

    19. LR

      Do you have a favorite product you've recently discovered that you really love? Could be a gadget, could be an app, could be clothes.

    20. EM

      So I, I like... I very rarely like products. I'm s- s- such a perfectionist that it has to be really simple with very little moving parts, like a bowl, to actually be, like, good. I've started to get more into coffee. I've been buying products by Fellow. They're remarkably good for consumer products, like, different. It's, uh, on a different level. So there's some sort of level of taste and craft happening there that I don't see in basically any other consumer hardware type products. And of all things, I bought a Porsche 911 recently, and that is a beautiful product. The interiors are exquisite, and there's still a bunch of shit that is gonna annoy you. And so it's, like, far from perfect. So yeah, perfectionism is sometimes a gift if you're in the business of creating products, but also quite the curse. You're never happy, including with the Porsche 911.

    21. LR

      I think that's the third time someone recommended a car. Someone recommended... I think Boz at Facebook recommended this fancy Mercedes, and then-

    22. EM

      Yeah.

    23. LR

      ... someone once just did a Rivian, so now we got Porsche on the list. Uh, I always thought maybe one day I'll give someone all the prizes, all the products people have ever mentioned, and listen, those are getting-

    24. EM

      Wow.

    25. LR

      ... those are getting... You know, Porsche might be a little high. Okay, two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you find yourself repeating, coming back to, in work or in life, sharing with friends?

    26. EM

      You know, it's, it- it's- it's trite, it's not sophisticated, and, you know, and it's more of a concept than a phrase, but it's something around the idea that life is short. I'm just so aware that time ticks by and we all live on autopilot. So much of what we do is inspired by either our insecurities or things that other people we look up to or envy do, very rarely making contact with what we really want and following our hearts and our heads. And yeah, we just kind of, like, get stuck in these lanes and just live out our days, and certainly when you get... You know, I'm 41 now. You get to 41, and thankfully still very young. Anyone in their 40s, congrats. Should feel good about that.

    27. LR

      Mm-hmm.

    28. EM

      But I know if you're in your 20s or 30s, 40 feels old, but when you're, when you're in your 40s, my experience is that the weeks and the months and then the years go by. Like, it's not a big deal. I'm, like, back at Intercom two and a half years now. To s- To, to any of these kids in AI in their 20s, if they don't get something done or achieved by next month, they'll be so disappointed in themselves and so impatient. And in some ways, at- at least when it comes to productivity, they're better at getting more out- out of the time, but I'm now trying to get more life out of the time too. So yeah, just that's... If, if, if there is a motto, it's like, life is short or, like, memento mori, you know?

    29. LR

      Mm-hmm.

    30. EM

      We- we're, we- we're all on the way out, so make the use of what you've got.

Episode duration: 1:23:19

Install uListen for AI-powered chat & search across the full episode — Get Full Transcript

Transcript of episode 0_opWSfmN8M

Get more out of YouTube videos.

High quality summaries for YouTube videos. Accurate transcripts to search & find moments. Powered by ChatGPT & Claude AI.

Add to Chrome