Intercom

“I mean, every other week, for example, I get an email from company, founder, or a VC saying, hey, here's a company that you could buy.”

“I never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever ran a process. I never ran a process.”

“Basically all our rounds went from first meeting to sign term sheet in a number of days, if not like half day.”

“And that once someone did it, eventually a lot of the other companies are going to get a lot of pressure to do the same thing.”

“I'm pretty sure that all other things being equal, if I was able to go back in time and start Intercom again, by this stage, it probably would be 10 exercise only because I now know that I can think bigger, and that simply doing so gives you just so many more …”

“I think it's Biz Stone, who's one of the Twitter founders invested in. And the reason he was so helpful was that for a young lad, I was 26 when I started Intercom and moved to San Francisco. For a young lad in this big industry who really thought very little o…”

“Having built a super successful business, build a dollar company, hundreds of dollars in revenue, helped me feel good. But whatever little lacking thing is there on the inside is still present. And really what it's taken for me to chip away at that, as it were…”

“Building a fifty billion dollar company, I don't think is substantially harder than building a one billion dollar company, quite frankly, within say some sort of similar timelines. I really think that for talented, smart people, ambition and the size of your v…”

“We built a hundred million dollar business with SMB.”

“Is there value in doing both of these things under the same company? Like, and this is a question of like brand architecture in a sense, right? Cause if you really, if you think, Hey, I can find a second team and they're going to go and do this other thing. Wh…”

“How are they currently solving the problem that this feature slash product solves? And if the answer is they're doing it in Excel or whatever, then yeah, you could probably argue you pull it in as a feature. If they actually have another platform where they li…”

“Intercom is like a series, what's that, like D or whatever company. We don't need to raise, so hence it's not E or F or whatever”

“Every complex new feature we build has to get marketed by a marketer and has to get sold by a salesperson and supported by a support person. So you have to think about the total cost of ownership of that feature, not just how hard was it to build.”

“I've invested in companies that have like gone on to surpass the valuation of Intercom many times over, and the founders have turned into absolute monster CEOs and monster COOs along the way.”

“If intercom launches a surveys tool, which we did in March, we can't be like limping in with an MVP that doesn't work. It would actually be brand damaging. We need to like, it needs to have all of the traits of intercom.”

“When people say, are you enterprise ready? What they actually mean is all of that stuff. And people forget to market it. People forget to like showcase that in the right places because it's not visible.”

“I think it's a really important attribute to be able to transition from one LLM to another. Because if somebody does unlock new power, you'll want to be able to use it very quickly. I just, I don't know. I think winning involves more than just simply being agn…”

“And we see staggering results for Fin. Some people are getting, like, very, very high percentage of total support volume resolved With satisfaction, like above 50% of times, right?”

“And the thick wrapper is, is like when you've actually solved the user's problem end to end fully in a way that OpenAI never will, you know.”

“It's those who really understand the user workflow are the ones who actually win this, not those who kind of like, you know, straighten their glasses and say, academically, that's been possible for seven months now.”

“Most startups with marketing with B to B or B to C, they forget to say the reason, they forget to say the thing that makes them unique, that's valuable. To the users. And if they're going up against an incumbent, the worst thing they can say is like, oh, we're…”

“Here's a shit lesson that's just true, right? If you're in the weirdest capital market in history and everyone's telling you to, like, raise billions of dollars at, like, ridiculous valuations, don't do it.”

“I think probably I prioritized growing an audience for the blog, overgrowing the right audience for the blog. And the net net is that we have a large audience for the blog. People who are like design or into product or even into engineering. People are maybe i…”

“What we're seeing a lot is, like, businesses are choosing to keep the seats and keep the people, and, like, just turn the dial on quality, so they just get really good at support.”

“Oftentimes you can find yourself ruling over a graveyard. Right. Like if we just beat Zendesk, but Zendesk is like in the current state it's in, that won't be the full realization of what Intercom can be.”

“I wrote maybe, like, some, like, 90, or 95 of the first 100 blog posts on Intercom”

“I think I saw that first round, but it was at some egregious price cause they're out of intercom. And I mean, they're obviously very talented people, but it was like a 30 or a thirty five million start.”

“Right now, a lot of value is going straight into the infra, like as in we're handing it all out the back door to open AI, and we actually torture test all of the LLMs.”

“And there are people out there who think that maybe there are smarter ways to work, that maybe four days a week is better than five, or maybe some version of work-life balance is more productive. And I think that that's false. I think that really fucking hard …”

“Like I said, with Finn, our AI agent, it's the product of over a hundred different experiments. Many patented parts. We've got 30 ML engineers and counting, you know, a hundred other engineers working on all the application components.”

“When I left chiefly because I was sick, also because revenue started to slow, always, also because I was attacked in the press, and I was, like, spiritually crushed, physically crushed psychologically crushed.”

“I wouldn't be working my ass off an intercom if I thought that it was about to die and be crushed by AI in a year or two. So I think we've got a decade, two decades.”

“You know, we built, we were the first to come out with an AI agent that would do customer support for you, like actual conversations with customers and closing tickets.”

“It's in the hundreds of millions.”

“At Intercom, for example, we've been using our, this AI agent fin for nearly two years, and we've not let anyone go, but we've stopped growing the size of our support team.”

“The average resolution rate of our bot is now approaching 50%.”

“When we first released our AI agent, the average resolution rate was in the high twenties to high 20%. So that's the rate at which it successfully closes tickets when it gets involved in the conversation. And now, like I said, it's approaching 50%. I think Zen…”

“Our total customer count started to shrink. It's now growing very rapidly again after the changes I made, but it started to shrink.”

“If I started all again, I would definitely do five days a week. I think just being a person is just far superior.”

“I introduced that years ago also, and we do not talk about politics and intercom, and I never do that within the company either.”

“There was literally one person who left.”

“The way a professional CEO runs an organization is by consensus. So, imagine they want to feel out an opportunity to bring people back to the office. They'll go and they'll poll leaders and staff on their opinions, and if it's not popular, they won't do it. An…”

“I set this project called project 52, where I gave us 52 weeks to reinvent the company.”

“We nearly went public in 2022 and I'm so grateful that we did not... Yeah, twenty-twenty-two. I think it was June, 15. We had a stock ticker that I hated, but nothing cool was available. We had written our S-one, and the markets collapsed.”

“And if any employees ever attacked for their political positions online, Especially and particularly if there are positions that I disagree with, it's important that I demonstrate that these principles in those moments I will defend them.”

“We now have the highest performing AI customer service bot. You look at everything that's on the market. They can't resolve tickets at the rate we can.”

“One is, is indeed Intercom's bet on this autonomous agent I thought was very, very wise in Finn. And I think that was a bold and correct move to jump onto that. And I think it required a lot of conviction around around this being the future and then subsequent…”

“Intercom is by far the best of those. They've done an amazing job of adding AI, their little fin charging. I mean, if there's anything that you could, if there's anything that a pre-gen AI company could do to get relevant in-gen AI for customer success, I thin…”

“Intercom is, You know, bluntly, an amazing story to not a huge enterprise value today for 17 years. I know two billions a lot.”

“I was at one of our portfolio company board meetings the other day, and they mentioned that they had switched from, you know, human-based interventions to the FIN product from Intercom, And they showed the stats of deflections went up, I forget to, you know, 9…”

“I think Intercom will be actually a case study for the most aggressive, ah, re-acceleration, rejuvenation in a world of very changing technology.”

“I look at a company like a Canva, or I look at a company like Intercom that's at a scale where in some ways they're already becoming an incumbent in those markets, and yet they're disrupting themselves at awesome rates and have AI products that are already, yo…”

“I think they've done an amazing job in a way that very few SaaS companies have of transitioning to an AI first world, and the growth rate of their AI product is frankly comparable to Sierra's”

“It's CO spite about how they were forced to run companies in 20, 21. I think there's versions and I'm a big Sheryl Sandberg fan, but I think Zuck is spiteful. He was forced to run The company in a, in, in a certain way. I know a lot, I mean, Owen from Intercom…”

“I'll tell you what I am betting on. I'm betting on that they can carve out a significant space in that market for that product, and that they've had explosive growth in it, and coming from the sass, I'm betting that I'm betting that that team coming from the S…”

“Fin great example podium, another great example, both of them with the new products have gone to a hundred plus million in a couple of years.”

“And what Owen did, and what the whole team at Intercom did, or Finn did, is they took a situation where the equity of the company was essentially worthless because no, no one's gonna buy 300 growing seven. It just, you know, it's just not, it's not a SaaS asse…”

“Salesforce just bought Intercom where we were lucky enough to invest less than a year ago, and that's a very outcome-based product for customer support where they charge based on resolutions.”