The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 20 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Lemkin: SaaS giants like Zendesk and Intercom offer shitty phone support
“Even support companies do shitty support, and I go on, and I play, I go on to all the leaders, the, I, okay, does, do all the leaders in SaaS, do the Zendesk and the intercoms, and do they answer their phone and say, none of them do either, right?”
Lemkin: SaaS vendors promise AI can cut 30% to 50% of staff
“Everyone in post sales, Salesforce, Intercom, Zendesk, Gorgeous, on and on. They are promising you can eliminate. 30 to 50% of your humans in support with AI. They're promising it today.”
Mathrubootham: 2011 Hacker News response cemented Freshdesk as Zendesk alternative
“We responded to the website, we exposed what was happening, and the whole internet community, we were on Hacker News, For 30 hours at the top post, and for three days on the top page, the entire community supported us, and from that point onwards, like Freshde…”
Benioff dismissed early Zendesk threats to Salesforce to avoid fear-based leadership
“I did a year at Salesforce in the middle of all that, and I was mentioning Zendesk. I was like, hey, there's these guys called Zendesk, and they might be a problem for, like, our customer service business and I got the kind of uh-oh moment where, like, oh, and…”
Lemkin: Zendesk automates 60-80% of enterprise support versus 20% for self-serve
“With our top Customers at Zendesk, we can automate 60 to 80% of support and related interactions. Okay. Makes sense. They train them for months, sometimes for months at Zendesk for their big customers. For our Self Survey AI, it's 20%.”
Lemkin: Vertical SaaS will surge because SMBs cannot find human workers
“I think in the enterprise AI and automation are about cutting headcount. Let's cut half of the thousand agents we have doing support. My thesis is vertical SAS is blowing is going to blow up because there just aren't anyone to do the work. There's just no, fir…”
Incumbent SaaS Giants Are Adopting AI Rapidly, Avoiding Dinosaur Fate
“The learning is that the bigger SaaS companies are pretty fast to embrace AI, so it's not like they are the dinosaurs from the on-premise world that didn't manage to move to the cloud. If you look at what Intercom, HubSpot, Notion, Zendesk, and others are doin…”
Tunguz: AI technology advantages do not automatically lower customer acquisition costs
“Like, let's say you know, you create the next version of Zendesk that's got a whole bunch of ML. It's not necessarily that that technology, you know, that Intel inside technology is going to all of a sudden reduce your cost of customer acquisition relative to …”
Lemkin: Customer Support SaaS Platforms Are Converging on Per-Resolution Pricing
“Even in this sort of odd per resolution model in, in post sales support. I think everyone, Zendesk, intercom, customer, gorgeous, dial, even dial pad, even in other areas, I think they all converging on the same model.”
Yellurkar: Zendesk broke the 2014 tech IPO logjam
“In 2014 there was a log jam, right? Nobody wanted to take the companies public. Like, there was a big, and you were, actually, you were the jam cracker. You broke that log jam and were the first company to get out.”
Svane: Flexible pricing and packaging is competitively disruptive
“Being really flexible with your pricing and your packaging can be really, really competitively disruptive. That you can come with a price point, or you can come with a pricing model that works for your customer, that is almost, that feels designed for their ne…”
Lemkin: Agentforce charges $2 per AI resolution, Intercom $1, Zendesk $1.11
“It's two bucks. Okay. Finn for intercom is one buck. Zendesk is like a dollar and 11 cents.”
Postman's founders were its top support ticket solvers for two years
“And for the first two years, Postman founders were the highest ticket solvers with the highest CSAT rates at the company.”
Song: Duo Security Scaled $10M-$73M By Hiring Zendesk's GTM Nucleus
“At about ten million, I brought on board, effectively, the nucleus of Zendesk's go-to-market engine. Okay. I brought on board JimSib Jeff Wiss and Zachary Locker, and we basically went from one to three to 10, from 10 to 30 to 73”
Slack's early sales team operated out of Zendesk rather than Salesforce
“Early days we had an accounts team and the accounts team would work out of Zendesk, not Salesforce. So it was almost like an extension of customer support and they would talk to a dentist office and the CIO of a fortune 100 company in the same day.”
Svane: Zendesk operated with no sales team until $10M run rate
“Until, kind of, our first, you know, until, like, ten million dollars in, in run rate, we didn't have sales. It was all a self-service business.”
Svane: Zendesk Scaled From $0 to $10M ARR in 36 Months
“Zero to one took us 18 months, and one to 10 took us another 18 months, so of course it was a very, very busy 18 months”
Svane: Zendesk expanded from small UK division to thousands of Adobe users
“Our first Adobe customer was a small division in the UK, and now we have, you know, thousands of people within Adobe using our software. Same with Disney and a lot of other organizations”