The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 17 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Lemkin: Coupa, Zendesk, and Anaplan may fail to repay their debt
“Coupa, New Relic, Anaplan, even Zendesk, Avalara, Smartsheet they all look like they may not be able to fully repay their debt”
Rampell: AI could drive Zendesk's seat-based revenue down to zero
“On the other side, you have things like Zendesk, right? Where it's like, how many licenses per seat do you need of Zendesk? If now every customer support ticket can be answered automatically, you need zero license. Like their revenue could go down a hundred pe…”
O'Driscoll: PE firms will acquire AI startups to dress up legacy SaaS
“I'm willing to bet that all those PE shops have a, let's acquire some new AI Pixie Dust to put on top of Zendesk, to put on top of Anaplan so we can, you know, tart up the story with acquisitions.”
McCabe: Intercom AI resolution reaches 50%, beating Zendesk's high twenties
“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…”
Lemkin: Private Equity Firms Will Lose Money on Bubble-Era Software Buyouts
“Yeah. I think they'll lose money on, on, on these deals.”
Stebbings: Zendesk Is a $10B Company Overbid by Private Equity
“Come on, Zendesk is like a ten billion dollar company at best, overbid by PE providers.”
Traynor: Focusing on beating a declining competitor risks ruling over a graveyard
“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.”
Des Traynor: Private equity software playbook increases prices and shrinks product roadmaps
“The PE cash cow playbook would look like raise prices, shrink roadmap, bring the register, package it up into a very efficient, like sort of cash producing machine and hand it over.”
European enterprise software investors universally passed on Zendesk's early rounds
“Everybody in Europe, Who knew anything about enterprise software looked at Zendesk and passed because there were plenty of reasons why this would never work.”
Nelson: AI-native startups possess superior ML environments over legacy software firms
“I do think that there is an advantage to many of the younger companies that have started from their foundation with AI at the center of everything that it is that they're doing, because they have created much better environments to support machine learning the…”
Jason Lemkin: Base Zendesk AI achieves 20% ticket automation without custom training
“The base version of Zendesk, which you get with AI, it's about 20% automated. That's about as well as you can do without training.”
Halligan: Zendesk never secured long-only investors due to shaky IPO timing
“Zendesk at the time went out. And it was just, it was timing, and it was just a shaky week that they went out, and they just didn't get, they didn't get the big long onlys, and they had a good story, and they didn't get them, and they never really got them. Th…”
Brian Halligan: Activist investor horror stories are rare and public markets are rational
“Public investors, like there's so much written about what happened with Zendesk or Autodesk, or these really bad things that happen. It's pretty rare. And I have found that public investors be pretty rational.”
Tunguz: Top data teams at Facebook and Zendesk focus on internal education
“The first is they have a data team, and there's this data, and that, this exists at Facebook, it exists at Zendesk, and these data teams, they, they're structured a little bit differently, but they all basically do the same thing. They're the experts. They kno…”
Zendesk disproved the $1,000/month minimum pricing rule for enterprise software
“Five years ago, it used to be the case that You enterprise products had to be something you could sell for at least a thousand dollars a month. Otherwise you couldn't sell them economically. And then Zendesk comes along and completely rips that apart.”
Mignot: Index Ventures passed on Zendesk early rounds before growth investment
“That was just before I started, but we did that with Zendesk, for example, where, you know, we passed on, on, on the seed and on DA especially You know, if you look at the memo and the valuation at the time, it's quite funny in retrospect, I don't remember exa…”