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McCabe: Intercom suffered five straight quarters of declining net new ARR

Eoghan McCabe · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · Aug 21, 2025 · at 8:42

Eoghan McCabe, co-founder and CEO of Intercom, details the company's growth stagnation during his two-year absence as CEO prior to his return in late 2022.

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“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 before we got there, but we were falling each quarter.”

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