The Ledger, every show

“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.”

“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 …”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“I think a lot of the motivation for those projects came from a place of fear. You know, it didn't come from a place of let's make a great product for people. Let's like really understand the things people struggle with when communicating with family and friend…”

“When I left Google kind of assumed that I was one of the spies, you know, I was quarantined when I told them I was leaving. They you know, forensically analyzed my laptop, like all sorts of stuff like that.”

“This is a like meteor coming towards you. Like this is, you know, bigger than mobile as a kind of technology shift, as big as the internet. Maybe it's bigger than the internet itself as a kind of social, you know, technology shifts, the way it'll shape, shape …”

“Any product that has any kind of workflow in it, Which is, is almost all B to B SaaS products. Any product that has multimedia in it, they're in the fire, they're in the meteor line or whatever. I don't know if this metaphor is working, but like, you know, the…”

“Radiologists will not take x-ray. Well, I guess it might take them, but they won't analyze them for sure. They'll look at what AI says, check that it's right. And then it's like kind of bedside manner time. Like, you know, tell the patient, maybe tell them wha…”

“AI will be able to ingest all the things people say and do, And when people die, it'll be able to replicate that person, you know? And so like, there's an afterlife.”

“What we're trying not to do is have like the kind of like AI inbox team who, oh, and they're the only people who work on AI features in the inbox. I think it's much better to have everyone learn about it. I, by the way, I'm a big believer in generalists, like …”

“I think, again, this is, like, hand wavy. Who knows? Maybe that's all done. Dead now. And the reporting product of the future is just a box, and the box just goes to the database, and the box is just what was our best salesman last year? January. Okay. Who was…”

“I remember when I went, I remember at Google, privacy was like really top of mind to the point that it would like block decisions, like block product progress, just privacy, circular conversations. So many circular conversations and nothing ever got built or s…”

“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…”

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

“All of these things compound. If you're really, really good at each of these steps, really good, like here we're really good, very reliable. You still have to multiply all these together. And by the time you're finished the entire workflow, especially the work…”

“When you build AI products, you really, really don't know if they're going to work. You need to have them in production, experimentation, all the time, trying to find edges, trying to find improvements in performance.”

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

“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…”

“You won't make self-harming decisions to win. You'll protect revenue. You don't want to piss off the board. You know, you don't want to piss off your sales leader. Like there's loads of reasons and loads of places where you won't say, do you know what? We're g…”

“When I left Google kind of assumed that I was one of the spies, you know, I was quarantined when I told them I was leaving. They you know, forensically analyzed my laptop, like all sorts of stuff like that.”

“A lot of the motivation for those projects came from a place of fear. You know, it didn't come from a place of let's make a great product for people. Let's like really understand the things people struggle with when communicating with family and friends. Like …”

“I don't believe in working crazy hours. You know, I don't know what hours I work. I don't know, 50 hours a week, maybe. I think beyond that, you start to make bad decisions and things like that. You get tired.”

“I think other companies like Google with Bard Have to do it, you know, and maybe they were a little bit slow, but it's so early in this tech cycle that I think they're fine.”

“People don't end up losing jobs. The jobs get moved around and also, you know, for customer support, for example, it's a high attrition job. So people saying like, Hey, everyone's going to lose their job. A bot's going to take over. It's like, maybe some of th…”

“People who are highly specialized can thrive in big companies, really thrive. They're invaluable employees, but in a fluid, Startupy culture with a lot of ambiguity that can really drown, really struggle.”

“There was kind of an idea that to know where the boundary is, you gotta cross it. And crossing, it's painful, but if you don't cross it, you'll never know. So if you go, if you think you're going up to the boundary and you stop before it, turns out it's actual…”

“I think all product people, whether you're a designer, product manager, people in research, data science, need to think about the story all the time. Work with marketing, work with product marketing, and like, learn about how to explain the product as much as …”

“There's like so many people who spend so much of their energy debating the nuances and peculiarities of one version. Who cares? Who can, like, no one cares. Oh, well, I don't care. They care, obviously. I, I'm like, your customers don't care. Like people you'r…”

“And then, and since then I've done it quite a few times in a bunch of different circumstances and realized it always works out for both sides. And the nicest thing to do is to do the harder thing. You know, it's actually the nicer thing to do.”

“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'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.”

“Getting AI and getting a rag system to accurately do these things is easier when it's discrete. You can experiment much faster. You can solve bits of the problem independently and then kind of chain them together.”

“Finn's growing 300% year over year.”

“Google had done a lot of things at the time that, that, that were the first for them. I don't know if they've done them since, but things like everyone worked in Google plus was sent to a different building that building a different key card. If you didn't wor…”

“So this question is what feedback will I be giving this person in their first performance review? And it's an amazing question because the person can't dodge it. You know, there's an answer and it's incredibly enlightening.”

“Google had done a lot of things at the time that, that, that were the first for them. I don't know if they've done them since, but things like everyone worked in Google plus was sent to a different building, that building a different key card. If you didn't wo…”

“So there's a real tension there, a real trade-off where people have these high standards, which we encourage, and we encourage them to ship fast and learn and make mistakes. It's a constant kind of tension that we're navigating.”

“So we literally ripped up our strategy almost entirely and started again, like from first principles and said, okay, why do people use Intercom? You know, Intercom is a customer support product. And then very soon after that, Sam Altman, who's the, you know, f…”

“We have some customers who are hugely successful with it. They can answer up to 50, 60, 70% of their inbound questions with Fin.”

“Ultimately, you need, like, really great machine learning engineers. Like, that's where it starts. And if you don't have that, then you know, you gotta find it hard to build truly, really, truly great things. You know, so, like, what OpenAI provide what Entrop…”

“Pricing is, like, deceptively difficult. We had a principle around, like, aligning price to value. You know, people should pay based on the amount of value they get in the product. Easy to say and incredibly hard to do. Value is subjective.”

“The number one thing I would say is keep it simple. It's simple. It's so tempting to like with us, for example, like a lot of SaaS products, you know, have add-ons... With products, tiers, add ons, tiering in the add on. You know, people can't understand their…”

“If you're a startup, you need to invest a lot more in differentiation. And then over the years, I think you start to balance the books a bit.”