Eoghan McCabe
Co-Founder & CEO, Intercom · 1 appearance on the record.
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founderexecutiveinvestor@eoghan ↗LinkedIn ↗eoghanmccabe.com ↗
Eoghan McCabe is the co-founder, CEO, and Chairman of customer service software company Intercom. Prior to Intercom, he co-founded Exceptional and has invested in tech startups including Notion and Loom.
22statements → 9claims → 1claims resolved → 4/5average certainty → 2.95/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated →
0 supported 1 partly supported 0 contradicted 8 not checkable as stated how the 9 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
2 predictions · 7 assertions · 3 opinions · 6 insights · 4 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 9 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, and 8 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Eoghan argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
How they sound: not measured why? →
We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Eoghan McCabe on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Eoghan McCabe said on In Depth that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
McCabe: Employees who complain about non-company issues are bad culture fits
“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.”
McCabe: Intercom stack ranks all employees quarterly using an algebraic score
“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…”
McCabe: Intercom enforces quarterly bottom-tier quotas with fast-track termination PIPs
“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…”
McCabe: Cut Intercom headcount by 27% and removed most HR upon return
“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.”
Forcing sales contracts over self-serve hurt Intercom in the long term
“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…”
McCabe: Intercom eliminated peer and self-reviews for formulaic values-based evaluation
“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…”
McCabe: The MBA managerial approach is useless for building great companies
“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.”
McCabe: Intercom will be completely done if AI is all hype
“We're certainly betting the entire company on AI. If AI turns out to be all hype, we're done. Completely done.”
Intercom shipped the first AI service agent a year before Zendesk
“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.”
McCabe: Intercom AI bot resolves 48% of tickets vs Zendesk's 29%
“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.”
McCabe: Customer service work done by human seats will be replaced by AI
“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…”
McCabe: Only people who hate corporate life can build great companies
“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.”
McCabe: Servant leadership and 'leading from behind' is performative posturing
“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.”
McCabe: Prescriptive advice is incompatible with building billion-dollar companies
“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.”
McCabe: Building incrementally better products in mature categories leads nowhere
“Please don't take the egregious sacrifices to everything you value in your life by building an incrementally superior product in a big category. You will go All sorts of nowhere.”
McCabe: Founders often become unhappy slaves to their own companies
“Their manifesto or principle or values around all of business, or around the core of business, and this is me, I'm not quoting them, this is just my observation, and they're right in this, is that people start businesses to serve their interests and desires. T…”
McCabe: Every VC met in 2011 said $100M SMB revenue was impossible
“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.”
McCabe: Inventing non-standard job titles makes recruiting experienced talent harder
“If you invent a new title like this, which might make sense for the world you're building, a lot of people, you want experienced people, that's what they said, who do this job. They're not going to find this role. It's not going to describe what they do. And I…”
McCabe: Intercom pull requests rose 41% in 12 months after CEO return
“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.”
McCabe: Intercom scored in high 90s percentile on employee survey
“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…”
McCabe: Intercom reversed logo decline and accelerated revenue growth
“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.”
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| Rebooting Intercom: Eoghan McCabe on Defying Silicon Valley Orthodoxy | Co-founder & CEO | Sep 5, 2024 | 57m |