Intercom

“Intercom realized that people hired it for four very, very different reasons. And then instead of building four different products, they literally took their product and turned off the features that were not relevant to the pathway that people wanted to take.”

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

“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…”

“These days, the pace of income today is like we're kind of 50, 50 probably in terms of resources, but it has swung 70, 30 in both directions at times.”

“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.”

“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 …”

“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…”

“The biggest mistake was we could, a lot of mistakes compounded. And this is an area where I do, I think we were risk averse. We ended up, we've ended up with too many pricing models. We've built on top of old, you know, compounded mistakes.”

“Here at Intercom, we have a kind of a one to five ratio. So like a PM has about five engineers on a team.”

“Has it transformed our business? Like financially? Not yet.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“I think it's an unnecessary addition, but maybe it's, I'm just being protective of my original idea. That, that the I in ICE is impact. And it's essentially saying, best case scenario, how much impact could we get from this? And reach is a super important part…”

“I looked at which companies produce the most founders, especially out of their PM team, and Palantir is by far number one. 30% of PMs that leave Palantir start a company, and that's like, and number two is number, is 18%, and that's Intercom.”

“When I triangulated across all the different, all these different data points, There's three companies that are kind of sat at the top. You guys, Revolut, Palantir, and Intercom.”

“Intercom for fin what they actually do is they charge based on an AI resolution. So if an AI is able to, you know, resolve the ticket completely independently without a human in the loop, then they charge for it. If a human intervention is needed, they don't c…”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

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

“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,…”