Intercom

“Telling someone else how to run their very unique business is incompatible with the idea that their goal is to build, you know, a billion dollar enterprise by virtue of the fact that it's different from everything else. Those two ideas are incompatible.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“When I started Intercom and was raising a seed around in 20 11, every single venture capitalist I met, and you remember that kind of era, told me that you can't build a hundred million dollar revenue business in SMB. Like, it cannot be done.”

“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…”

“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.”

“We raised our series A when we had 23 K M or I specifically remember that”

“We ran a An anonymous employee survey three months ago. We had 16 questions, and the questions were, you know I agree with the leadership of this company, and they will make us successful. I agree with our new policies. I agree with our new values. I agree wit…”

“In the 12 months after I went back pull requests, which are the kind of atomic component of shipped code, were up 41% over the 12 months prior.”

“We're now seeing it in our numbers, we've got like six or seven quarters of accelerating Aurora growth Our logos were decreasing for two years. Now we've like turned that around and like total number of logos are now increasing for six months.”

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

“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…”