Intercom

“You can't just throw an operating partner at the company and say, let's put AI on it. It just doesn't work. You need to completely, and if you have, by the way, if you do have a founder mentality at the management team, like, it is possible, but the board has …”

“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.”

“The way Intercom, for instance, defines an AI resolution is not the way 98% of the market actually defines an AI resolution.”

“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…”

“If you talk to folks like at Finn or Intercom or Gorgias or Sierra and others, they're all saying that there's convergence that support sales and marketing are all converging because once you can AI-ify them, you don't want to have three different agents, righ…”

“We went after the sales vertical because my background was sales. I was an early sales hire at Intercom and we applied the tool for like AI role play for sales, got some early customers there, then ended up actually firing those customers because what we found…”

“We use lean data for routing. We use clay for enrichment. Salesforce is our system of record and source of truth. We use Jira for tickets intercoms fin product. We use for Custer's customer support, as well as for sales support. I joke with the ironclad team t…”

“This is fin or whatever intercom to the millionth degree that we built because it knows every so many details in real time for a hundred people and gets them all right. It's better than any chatbot on any website.”

“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.”

“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…”

“Zendesk, where they added AI to their existing thing, and they're like, oh yeah, our, I think Zendesk was at two hundred million or something in ARR off of their AI feature. Intercom is over a hundred million on their AI.”

“I also use intercom for my dot for my, like knowledge base, like the articles about all the features. And my, you know, I used to write them and really slave over them and make them better and use AI to help make them better. But now it's like, hey, cloud code…”

“We then had five quarters of declining revenue growth. So revenue is still growing, but the rate at which was growing was declining. And this was not a good period for the company. We had gone down the IPO journey.”

“So we bet the entire company on AI. We bet the entire company. It was a risky thing to do. We ripped up our strategy. We ripped up our roadmap. We made these decisions in a very small number of days. Like you're talking once, two weeks after ChatGPT.”

“If you fast forward to today, Finn has over a million resolutions a week. So every single week Finn is resolving over one million customer problems. We have over 6000 Finn customers. And Finn's average resolution rate is over 65%. So the resolution rate over t…”

“If you have a SaaS company and it predates AI and it's not an AI native company, in other words, you started the company designing an organization for the AI world, you have to change Everything. Your org, your product, your roadmap, how you build, the metrics…”

“If you're a truly a deep AI company, of course you have an AI layer, but you also have an app layer and a model layer.”

“You will grow to like a hundred million in AR or very quickly. Finn's on that path, very close to it.”

“Like a third of your company, you need to part ways with them. They're not fit for this new world. They don't want to build the same way you want to build. They don't like fast, crazy fast pace. They don't like chaos.”

“Culture runs really deep. So you have to be wary of the people you need to keep convincing because they're going to be a liability.”

“Most SaaS companies sold seats. These are seats that humans sit in. Those humans use some kind of GUI, some CRUD type tasks to achieve some outcome. None of these things make sense anymore, right? None of these things make sense. There's no seats in a post AI …”

“AI products don't look like this at all. It's actually the inverse. Building the UI is the easy part. That's the small part. The hard part is building great AI infrastructure, building products that actually truly work at scale.”

“We had these principles at Intercom that evolved over years and they made us really good at building SaaS product... But, these principles were designed for the SaaS era. They were designed to build a SaaS product. We had to abandon all this shit.”

“We said every designer is now shipping code to production. It is now part of your job. If you don't like that, We had a great run, but we should part ways and you should go somewhere where designers don't have to ship code.”

“Customers don't know how to evaluate AI products. They don't know how to run good evaluations.”

“A lot of AI products do look the same. A lot of them are now AI agents. They all kind of look like some kind of chat interface. They all do different things, but they all kind of look the same. It's hard to tell them apart. Look at five competitors. They all k…”

“There isn't a single buyer anymore. So for example, with Finn, we have, yes, the customer service leader, and they're still heavily, you know, heavily influential. They have a lot of clout, but they don't make the decision. And the reason is because there's tw…”

“Finn's growing 300% year over year.”

“Fin is totally different to Intercom. It's a completely different product. The two of them are like, they've almost nothing in common in some ways. It's a completely different product. I'm like, yes, Fin is, Fin usage is eating Intercom usage at times.”

“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…”

“And then we're going to use Fin for customer support. That's the second agent that we're going to roll out in the next few weeks.”

“Sierra went from nothing to a hundred million in one year, Decagon, lots of others. Intercom was just here, Finn. They, their AI products at a hundred million right after the company growth.”

“Now it's not amazing. But you know, but it's good and but it requires a lot of customization, right? And I would say that I would still recommend it. But I think the value, you know, if you go out and try Finn, I think what you're going to be very disappointed…”

“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”

“They now have this fin agent that is solving like 65% of customer service tickets that come in.”

“Intercom said Finn as a standalone product has already crossed fifty million.”

“The PMs are mostly using vZero. The designers love Figma, so they're using Figma Make. The engineers are using a combination of tools right now. So Cursor, Cloud Code, GitHub Copilot. Marketing teams use all sorts of tools for translation, subtitles, you know,…”

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

“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…”

“Currently across the business, you know, we benchmark ourselves against all the public software companies. There's like, on and 20 something B to B software companies. We're like in the 15th percentile for AR growth.”

“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…”

“We'll pass a hundred million air ore with Finn in less than three quarters.”

“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. We're rated number one on G two.”

“And we had five quarters of successive, you know, sequential decline in our net new error. And we were about to hit like zero dollars in that new error, which means we would have been in negative growth territory. We never got there. I managed to stop it befor…”

“We were only six weeks into the launch of GPT. 3.5 when we actually had a beta version of fin.”

“Providing a customer with a highly engaged, instantly available, expert, consistent, fast, charismatic, funny, friendly, personal agent. Available for literally every single customer at every minute of the day around the clock is so much more personal than mak…”

“Like, I can't remember how much we wrote down, but we actually have already given away something like fifty million dollars in air or We've reduced the prices for a lot of customers just to give them way simpler pricing”

“When our people saw that we were 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.”

“Now when we did all our research, we found that many SaaS businesses were spending between 20 and 30 dollars per ticket resolved. We were spending 22.”

“Zendesk had been acquired a couple of years prior. They were strategically, energetically, culturally dead. They were upsetting customers in the market. There's an opportunity there. We're doing service.”

“You know, obviously, as soon as AI came around, I jumped hard on AI and announced that we were going to spend nearly a hundred million dollars of our own cash on that.”

“We ran an anonymous employee survey, like, I think, It was 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 it's my strong belief that great employees and 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 an…”

“Could be something ultimately like 40%. So it was a big, big turnover over some couple number years.”

“When a founder runs away from their business, it is the ultimate betrayal of You know, their heart and the dream that they have now. It's okay to wrap things up and quit when you kind of run away. Like I kind of had to, cause I was sick and burned out and kind…”

“You see all these companies saying we do AI and they've just sprinkle a little bit of crappy AI and they've got the same cultures. It won't work.”

“Because we're now hiring people who want to 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 want to work in. And maybe they're not the c…”

“I think we're going to find ourselves being the fastest growing out of all relative to all public software companies.”

“And the weird thing about Finn, even relative to the coding apps are blowing up and yet there's a lot of people experimenting and kicking tires. You can't kick tires with Finn. We only deliver value when you expose it to your customers and it closes tickets an…”