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 59 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 3 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
McCabe: DEI initiatives are a bad idea that discriminate by race and gender
“I always thought it was a really bad idea to discriminate against people for their race or their gender or things like that. So I never was cool with DEI”
McCabe: COVID mRNA vaccines were harmful while traditional treatments worked
“During COVID, it turned out that these gene therapies were really bad for you, and that these traditional treatments were really, really helpful. Don't slap your face like I shouldn't have said that, because it's fucking true.”
McCabe: Trump and supporters lead the defense of personal liberty
“It's crystal clear that Trump and fans are the people who are promoting the most personal liberties and freedoms.”
McCabe: Very few tech industry figures are not voting for Trump
“And that's why everyone I talk to, it's very few people I talk to in technology who are not voting Trump at the moment. Very, very few. There are some people who are either triggered by Trump or they're they don't actually study a lot of these topics, but most…”
McCabe: Most VC AI investments will underperform the S&P 500
“Most VC money is going to support a lot of excitement around AI and actually not do better than the S&P 500.”
McCabe: Claims that LLMs will crush software come from non-builders
“The people that tell these big visionary stories about how LLM companies or AGI is going to crush all of software, They're not actual business people. They're not actual builders, and they don't realize that businesses, consumers have real practical problems t…”
McCabe: Early-Stage Venture Capital Has Become an Unprofitable Commodity
“One thing I will say is the amount of capital at an early stage available today suggests to me that that's gotta be a crappy end of the market for VCs. I mean, it's just a raw commodity now, early stage VC. I don't know how you make a return there.”
McCabe: If starting over, Intercom would require five days in-office
“If I started all again, I would definitely do five days a week. I think just being a person is just far superior.”
McCabe: Global nuclear holocaust is super possible due to proxy wars
“That nuclear holocaust is super possible. Yeah, I mean, the United States and Russia have many thousands of nukes pointed at each other, ready to go, and the United States is fighting a proxy war with Russia. It's super easy for these things to tumble into nuc…”
McCabe: Performatively supporting social causes destroys leader credibility
“There's standing up for causes that everyone knows they care nothing about. They've never spoken on the topic about before. They've never acted in any way that might demonstrate that they have even thought about these issues. It's so toxic to their position as…”
McCabe: Building a $50B company is not substantially harder than $1B
“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…”
McCabe: Building custom in-house AI agent platforms is a terrible idea
“I think that building your own AI agent platforms is going to be as smart as in a previous generation building your own SaaS workflow tools. That's a terrible fucking idea.”
McCabe: Intercom has 10 to 20 years before AI threatens its existence
“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.”
McCabe: Intercom's AI bot outresolves every competitor on the market
“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.”
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…”
McCabe: AI labs won't build domain-specific features over next 5-10 years
“That's why these AI application companies are going to win. That's why they're going to become so big, because I don't think at least in the next five, 10 years that any of the AI labs are going to build all the domain specific stuff.”
McCabe: Klarna will eventually adopt purpose-built third-party AI systems
“And I think any attempt to do so may yield some short term excitement, but even Klarna long term, I'm pretty sure we'll move on to a professional purpose built system.”
McCabe: Hard work cannot be beaten by four-day weeks or work-life balance
“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 …”
McCabe: Managing by consensus and polling staff leads to corporate mediocrity
“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…”
McCabe: Intercom banned internal political discussions years ago
“I introduced that years ago also, and we do not talk about politics and intercom, and I never do that within the company either.”
McCabe promises to defend employees attacked online for political views
“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.”
McCabe: Leaders who don't flinch against vocal minorities win public support
“If you stay close to the moral high ground and you communicate the reasons you do what you do and you stay strong, don't apologize or flinch When the tiny minority of people come after you also, you'll find that the masses will be very supportive, and really I…”
McCabe: JD Vance delivered an outstanding, empathetic debate performance
“I think Vance did an outstanding job. I think he was like, he did a good job of being calm, collected, smart, empathetic, Thoughtful communicator.”
McCabe: Speech regulation and censorship are deeply evil
“I think it's deeply evil to decide what can or cannot be spoken about.”
McCabe: Restricting speech gives governments dangerous power over citizens
“Governments become insanely and dangerously powerful when their citizens cannot say what they believe is true or not.”
McCabe: AI will eventually eliminate all traditional software development work
“In the fullness of time, increasingly powerful and abstract AI will do away with You know, all of the work we need to do today to deliver software experiences.”
McCabe: Intercom's AI bot resolution rate is approaching 50%
“The average resolution rate of our bot is now approaching 50%.”
McCabe: AI's real-world impact will lag far behind tech development
“The rate at which AI is going to change the whole world is a little overhyped. You know, the raw technologies will be built long before they have real impact on the world.”
McCabe: AI agents will be cheaper and better than human workers
“These AI agents will be way cheaper than humans while they're also better.”
McCabe: Intercom froze support hiring after adopting Fin AI agent
“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.”
McCabe: Most businesses cannot automate customer service as easily as Klarna
“Certain use cases where the distribution of the types of questions is really tight, rather than this big, long, normal distribution of so many different types of questions, will be able to create these tight custom experiences. If you're a Klarina, for example…”
McCabe: Tech startups have no structural defensibility or moats
“There is no such thing. Yeah, there's no such thing. Even Apple don't have it.”
McCabe: Paul Graham's 'Founder Mode' concept is clever branding for existing practices
“I think it was really, like, acute and fun branding for it. A thing that anyone who's built the company has deployed since the start of companies that, you know, there's nothing new about it.”
McCabe: Intercom wrote an S-1 and almost went public in June 2022
“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.”
McCabe: Only one Intercom employee resigned over political policies
“There was literally one person who left.”
McCabe: Grounded, well-balanced people do not start tech companies
“I've never met a founder that's really well-balanced. You can't possibly imagine someone who is grounded and centered, part of a loving community, I'm deeply at one with the universe who then says, I think I'll start a technology company. Most people that star…”
McCabe: San Francisco is great for work productivity but lacks social excitement
“SF is just a really, really, really, really fucking great place to get work done. And it can be incredibly boring. Everywhere shuts at 10 or 11. People go to bed on time. Again, really great place to be productive. Great place to balance your nervous system in…”
McCabe: Building a billion-dollar company does not heal internal insecurities
“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…”
McCabe: Intercom built a $100M business selling to SMBs
“We built a hundred million dollar business with SMB.”
McCabe: Intercom would be 10x larger if started with bigger ambition
“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 …”
McCabe: Elon Musk replaced Steve Jobs as my primary hero
“He's no less than my hero these days. Steve Jobs used to be my hero. I would call Elon Musk my hero now. He's so authentically him and so deeply connected to his purpose and not afraid to show up in the world that makes sense to him and is aligned with his val…”
McCabe: Legacy Customer Communication Tools Were Spammy, Fake, and Bloated
“All the tools that people use to talk to customers were anything but personal, anything but human. They were the opposite. They were transactional, fake, spammy, shitty, bloated.”
McCabe: Successful CEOs must be extreme generalists with one core specialization
“All, all successful CEOs I know of are both skewed or specialized in one area, but also extreme generalists.”
McCabe: Intercom closed term sheets within days or hours of first meetings
“Basically all our rounds went from first meeting to sign term sheet in a number of days, if not like half day.”
McCabe: Intercom was first to launch an AI support agent
“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.”
McCabe: Tech success relies on timing growth cycles and self-reinvention
“In technology, it's all about timing, and it's all about, you know waving successive growth cycles and riding the trends in that moment in time, and then you must reinvent yourself and kill yourself.”
McCabe: Intercom's annual revenue is in the hundreds of millions
“It's in the hundreds of millions.”
McCabe says he originally left Intercom due to illness, slowing revenue, and press attacks
“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.”