The Ledger, every show

“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”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“It's crystal clear that Trump and fans are the people who are promoting the most personal liberties and freedoms.”

“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…”

“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 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…”

“Most VC money is going to support a lot of excitement around AI and actually not do better than the S&P 500.”

“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…”

“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.”

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

“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…”

“Hey, it turns out that the employees who would constantly complain about things not related to the company are actually not a good fit and not the type of people that we need to be really successful.”

“The manager simply rates the employee's performance against their goals for the quarter, because we set goals every quarter, and their behavior against each value from one to five. Plugs that into a little form. Some very basic algebra is done. Spits out a num…”

“So imagine two percent of people got the bottom rating, but I, my, by my own appraisal, look around the organization and say, this is not good enough. I want three, four, five percent of people to get the bottom rating. Then you're very prescriptive about what…”

“When I went back, I decreased the size of the company by 27%. Got rid of most of HR. Got rid of most of our policies and practices and all the grown-up stuff.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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 …”

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

“There's going to be companies that want to do the highly collaborative, more democratic thing. I won't invest in them, but there's companies that want to do it.”

“What I think that all brings is just epic levels of efficiency. It's going to be super deflationary. There'll be a lot more competition.”

“There is a lot of repetitive stuff in sales. And so you'll, you'll do more sales with less people. And there are SDR roles, qualifying, you know, basic questions. You're not going to need as many people in sales organizations.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 …”

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

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“The co-commercial strategy of the company moved away from our intuition, which was customer friendly, self-serve, cheap and cheerful, sell to small companies to you must talk to sales. You must sign a contract. We will twist your arm every time you want to use…”

“When I went back to Intercom, I found a culture I didn't like. And I ripped up the old values, wrote new values. And rather than these values be motivational posters, and I did specifically design them tongue-in-cheek as motivational posters I made them execut…”

“That is like the professional managerial class. That's the MBA way. And that's useless in building great companies. You need people with strong opinions in my humble opinion.”

“We're certainly betting the entire company on AI. If AI turns out to be all hype, we're done. Completely done.”

“We shipped the world's first AI service agent in March, 23, a whole year and change ahead of Zendesk and HubSpot and all the incumbents.”

“Zendesk Bot has a resolution rate of 29% or high twenties by our benchmark, which is the rate at which it successfully closes the ticket. Ours is currently 48% and that's what a year head start gets you.”

“AI is about to do the exact same in every category particularly categories of software for people to do work. So customer service, which is the one I focus on and obsess about for a living is about to be fundamentally changed because the work of customer servi…”

“The only people who can start and build great companies are people who hate corporate life. And the people who love corporate life can't build and start great companies.”

“And I don't mean that like lead from behind, like service CEO. I think that's a bunch of ego bullshit. People say that try and look good and look cool. My humble opinion.”

“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.”