EP 123: Intercom CEO on Endorsing Trump, Reinventing The Company, and the Future of AI in Software

38:40Implicitly, you said this has kind of changed elements of the end market or who's ready to buy AI. Can you elaborate on what you've learned actually being out there in the field? Yeah. There's fear out there still. There's a lot of people that are very conscious about the experiences that their customers have, which is understandable and fair and good. There's a lot of crappy competitors in the market that are actually miss setting expectations about what these bots can do. there were previous generations of bots that required a lot of setup and were really really bad they were effectively phone trees and chat bots and kind of like chat interfaces so there's a lot of kind of like education and people kind of getting up to speed with what's possible most people haven't seen these things in the wild yet so fear uncertainty doubt um and that will just that will melt away over the next 6 to 12 to 18 months as people just see these in the wild consumers and then as companies get demos it's the most obvious epic transformative software category i've ever seen from an underlying model standpoint you guys were using open ai now claude or yeah we use a bunch of things we still use a bunch of open ai we use claude from anthropic we experiment with different models all the time different versions of models from these companies.

39:59We get heads up on the things they're working on. We worked with Llama. We run a lot of experiments. We're very science-based. That's when I said that developing AI software is a little different. When you're developing workflow software, it requires designers and product managers to be like, that's a nice way to solve that problem. When you're developing AI agents, if you're doing it right, you're going to be very scientific. And you're going to run these agents on all these different models on all these different types of questions and different scenarios and you can prove all the different ways in which it's superior we've run well over 100 different ap tests on many different configurations and fin is like seven different llms strung together in different complex ways so yeah we're on cloud for one of the things but we'll move around a lot so it's going to be really interesting to see what happens with these models if if you're a founder and your business hasn't been as, as, uh, at the forefront of the bleeding edge within artificial intelligence, like yours has, um, you, you said obviously all elements of your business or 80 % of your businesses could change in some way, but if you're trying to instill some type of, um, I don't know, lessons having lived on the front lines or, uh, things that you would say, if you're setting up this infrastructure, you're somewhat down the path with it, were there things that you wish you had known early on?

41:21I don't think so. I don't think I have any great wisdom. I would just say that there's a lot of people overestimating how important it is to their business and there's a lot of people underestimating how important it is to their business. A lot of people getting carried away with the timelines involved here. It takes time for products and technologies to be adopted. And there's a lot of people building shitty, useless AI things into their products because they don't know what else to do and it's hot right now. So, you know, in that respect, while so much changes, good old-fashioned product strategy thinking has not gone stale.

41:53and thinking really carefully about does the technology today enable someone in the market to solve the problem you're solving in a fundamentally new way? If you're able to answer that question well, that'll tell you whether or not you should bet on this or not. The answer may be no, but again, to go just back to our situation, we're in service. All white collar work is going to be done by AI. It's going to start with the simplest white collar work, the simplest white collar work of service. so service starts first and it's going to get eviscerated and totally ripped apart and changed we have to go there but there's so many other instances like if you're making workflow tools for construction workers mobile workflow tools tools for construction workers I think Procore does that I think right I don't know a thing about their business so they're probably going to laugh if anyone here is just going to laugh at me but I don't know if they need AI for that not yet not yet I'm probably wrong I'm probably wrong Most people, when they talk about AI these days, are probably wrong.

42:55So actually, the real wisdom is educate yourself and think deeply about it. That's all. It's been a hot category for net new startups to go after as well. Brett Taylor's business, Sierra, there's Decagon, there's Maven, there's a handful of other players that are going after this space. a new customer is thinking about working with you who's been in the space for a while or someone that started two years ago or whatever to go after this what advantages do you feel you have for that net new customer that isn't an existing intercom one yeah so obviously i'm thinking about this there's meta advantages that they have which is their smaller square per year and hungrier you know when that that offers a lot of benefit um compared to these like old boys now that like they made their money and people have families and they're tired and stuff, you know?

43:45So that's why startups win. That said, if we can use our size to our advantage and the fact that we've been in this space, even building LLM bots for years, I'd be quite bullish on us. and I am what we can offer is just maturity in the platform you know you got these early stage companies they're doing a really really good job of like throwing things together quickly a lot of them have big security vulnerabilities we've found serious scary holes that we will now show customers in bake-offs a lot of them are great crappy experiences for end customers we've really sweated the details for like nearly two years now about creating seamless, beautiful customer experiences.

44:38A lot of them don't have the fine grain control that we have because we've built control and workflows for previous versions of bots. And I could go on, we've built a lot of different functionality that they're kind of catching up on, whether it's an ability to provide tone of voice functionality so that the bot can speak for, you know, in your brand, certain guidelines to allow that your bot to follow certain business-specific instructions, etc. Beyond that, what we offer is a seamless consolidated platform. So you can buy FING just all on its own and it competes head-to-head with these guys and we're winning deals against these guys because they see the depth of our platform and our ability to kind of go in.

45:21These companies, they've got 20 people, 30 people. We have like 500 people in our R &D organization, 80 % of which are focused on building this AI agent so it's really hard to compete with that so we're selling it standalone but a lot of these companies they want consolidation the biggest feedback I hear from customers is we want less software we don't want all of this work of stringing all of these tools together it's exhausting and it's messy and it creates a crap experience for the end user who's bounced amongst these different kind of experiences and his email is coming from one app and chat from another app and for the users of the tools they have to have multiple tabs open and the products don't really work well together either.

46:01So what you've seen a lot of people is doing is getting excited about our bot. We'll sell our bot all day long and work seamlessly with Zendesk and Salesforce. No problem. But then they'll look at our platform too and they'll say, actually I want it all. And that wasn't something that was happening a year ago but people are now leaving Zendesk for the intercom platform. So like if we win and if I was to bet on any one of these companies, I'd bet on us. I have to say that, but that's how I'd currently bet. It will be because we take advantage of the fact that we're big. These guys have the advantage that they're small.

46:39We can't be that, so we shouldn't try and play their game. So we'll take advantage of the fact we're big to have just a much more mature, fulsome product that's broad, that caters to humans as well as AI. Because humans are going to be around at least for 10 years, I think. Even if in a marginal capacity. I know you mean service. Hopefully they're around period for a longer period of time. Hopefully beyond service, we're here for more than things. Yeah, I hope it's reasonable time for other stuff. I'm curious then from the mid-market or the end-market standpoint, is there more receptivity to buy or the use cases better at like kind of the mid-market-ish enterprise within AI applications?

47:19Yeah, but I think people shouldn't sleep on the SMB market too. Every single business is going to have an AI agent working for them. Every business, every business, every single business. Like, it may take a lot of time. There are still some companies that don't yet have a website, although you'd be surprised even the crappy companies that do have websites. eventually every single business will have ai agents working for them even if you're a nail salon with three employees the person that picks up your phone and makes all the appointments is going to be an ai agent so everyone will have ai agents however because we're charging per outcome for the work done there's more work happening in the bigger companies and so it's far more profitable to sell to the mid-market and the enterprise.

48:09And so that's where we're getting a lot of traction and getting a significant amount of revenue growth, but we will serve SMB to enterprise. And you don't need a comment on product roadmap, but I assume there's a belief that this stuff will all be multimodal within a single platform. Absolutely. We will do all of that. We have working versions of all of these things. you'll have the one agent that will already fin is on email already fin is on chat we have a really nice technology that's not public that has it on phone it'll do voice messages it'll be in all your messengers it'll be on video calls there'll be instances where you'll want to join a video call to talk to the agent so that's all coming and it's actually coming in a number of short years that's not a decade thing as you maybe think about the higher abstraction of this, there's not society or humanity ending, but the implications for society with some of these things ultimately playing out.

49:16Do you take time to think about that or are you so focused on actually solving the problem? I do. Maybe the following is the tech bro's excuse for playing in a new field that he believes is going to make him a lot of money. But here's what I say to myself and others about that. Technology has always, always saved humans from demeaning and shit work. Whether it was people on factory floors who would lose limbs or children in mines who would suffocate, technology has done away with that. Technology has taken their jobs all the while the world's population has increased GDP has increased longevity has increased crime in most cities has decreased right that's been the story of technology thus far the rate of change in technology has been increasing and that has remained true and so I'm going to believe that that's going to also be true in the future with AI also people don't like customer service work Some do because some customer service work is deeply rewarding.

50:30Most customer service work is insanely robotic and shit. Terrible. People hate the work. You're answering the same damn questions to the same damn angry users. It's not fun. We haven't fired. Obviously, we're really big proponents of this type of automation. We use our own AI agent in extreme ways. we've not fired a single customer support person but we've stopped growing the customer support team and so what's going to happen over time is that the ai agents will cater to new growth on met demand kind of you know the cheapest and easiest work and over time those jobs in service will convert from the repetitive demeaning crappy work to the more rewarding interesting work that requires your humanity, creativity, and the things that you would want a human to spend their life on.

51:31Yeah, it's interesting. I don't have any good answer to this, but you just think about the length of time the industrial revolution took to play out. You think about the amount of time internet took to play out and you compress it even further for AI. And I don't know what the social implications of it all are. Yeah, I don't know either. But there have always been social implications in technology. Every technology can be used for good or bad. You know, a knife can be used to prepare a delicious meal or bad things too. But you're right. The acceleration makes this interesting and it makes it hard for all of us that are in AI.

52:12Just the pace of change is, yeah, it's a lot. Are you having fun now with all this? It's the type of fun where you're fucking exhausted every week. But I used to be exhausted every week running a big company and not having fun. There's a type of big company work where you're going to the meetings, reviewing the new employee policies, working on budgets for next year, shaking hands with all the right people, investor relations, saying hi to the new employees. It's pretty exhausting. Or there's a type of work that requires you to change your whole strategy, change your whole culture, bet the company, spend a bunch of your working capital, play in new markets, take risks.

53:04And the people who will be successful at that are the people who enjoy it. So super challenging. It's not what I thought I was signing up for. When I went back, I'm like, clean things up, take the company public, pat on the back, offer Gantar Freedom, start a new thing. no one knew we were signing up for this but me and all the founders there's three founders of intercom still at the company we are and i'm not just saying this because i'm on a cool podcast we are now invigorated in a way that we haven't been for a really long time and there's like two minds we're like it's 13 years oh my god when do we get a break but we're working seven days a week we're taking big swings we're locking in wins we're getting on customer calls i mean it is invigorating in a new and a cool way.

53:50If this time is invigorating like that for you, get out. That's what I would say because it actually is going to kick the shit out of a lot of people that could easily do so. I'm not praising myself as some hero in that respect. It's apparently what I needed. But unless you're really up to that, because we've had to change our strategy six times in the last two years, unless you're up for that then I think it's going to be very hard. And that's why a lot of the bigger incumbents are going to lose. In coming back in and resetting elements of the culture and sort of being at this wartime CEO mindset.

54:23There's been, we talked about some of the organ rejection or like, you know, that, but there's been elements of re-instilling hard work as a first principle and pushing out. I think you said, did you say there was a, this is our wartime document and you got pushed back from people? Yeah, people didn't like me saying war. War. People are like, there's an actual war happening. Yes, yes. Oh my God. Yeah. Okay. As you tried to reinvigorate the organization and reset the work hard culture outside of the performance management stuff, outside of these galvanizing speeches I'm sure you give to the company, what have you found about people's desires for hard work and fulfillment?

55:09They love it. Great people love it. the the cheap little secret for success as a leader here is that great people love the things you love great people love good old-fashioned business fundamentals hard work a focus on shareholder value massive ambition a focus on work and not politics and bullshit like the best people find your best people the people who are going to be superstars and produce 10x better than everyone else they love that stuff so you're not making a compromise there you're only compromising on the worst people there's this interesting element of um how much mediocre and excellence like the people with an organization both both hate each other for very different reasons and if you don't solve for for one of the constituents you're going to end up gravitating well hopefully what you have is a cohort of brilliant people and a cohort of high potential people who can be brilliant who aspire to be part of that cohort of brilliant people the wrong way is where that the non-brilliant people are like actually not that ambitious not that high potential they've topped out they're not aligned with the company so the you can find a thousand people or ten thousand people who fit the definition of brilliant and high potential that's what you need we touched on this a little bit earlier but um you talked about owning your own narrative and getting the truth out there um i'm curious what you what you learned about media and reporting i guess it was specific to the tech sector for the most part but i'm curious i feel like you probably have some opinions sure i have opinions yeah of Of course.

57:04These things I'll say have been said so many times before. For the longest time, the media has hated tech and hated success and ambition. They've hated people who feel high agency and a lot of it's resentment and a lot of it's deep insecurity about what they can achieve themselves, which is really, really tragic because there's a lot of intelligent people there too. this is not exclusively everyone in media there's obviously some great people there I'm saying that to try and sound chill about it make for a pithy sound bite oh yeah thank you but what changed is that they overplayed the hand they were given which is incredible influence they I.

57:57published enough mean-spirited pieces and told enough lies that people tuned out and others started to serve that market. And so now we have new media. You never would have thought of yourself as media. You never would have thought I'm getting into media. You did this actually out of passion, excitement to promote yourself, your business too, all the good healthy stuff. But missing in there is, fuck these successful guys. Who do they think they are, et cetera. And so a new media was born and it's fundamentally changed the dynamic. And it's a new style of media that's adapted to the channels and mediums we have.

58:44So we now have long form conversation. You know, you might read a headline about this guy called Alan McCabe and he sounds like a dick. Hopefully, if you look at an interview with him. You listen, then you know he's a dick. You know for certain he's a dick, but he has some moments of charm. I certainly did not. I never intended to be a media entity in the same, or media property in some ways. I just, honestly, the reflection of it all was, I think the venture job can be a little abstract at times where you're sort of making two, three decisions a year and then opining once a quarter for each of those decisions or whatever, once a week, whatever the time is, but you're not, there's no ownership or agency in actually making the decisions.

59:31And so I think it was some element of self-promotion and also, um, personal interests, some desire to move something forward, helping other people. I mean, all the good stuff. There was all the altruistic stuff as well, but it is interesting. I never expected in a million years for it to dovetail with, um, um, actual news stories and stuff. And I, I've, it's funny that sometimes we'll have a conversation and then there's, uh, a press entity report on the conversation, which I'm sure happened a million times with Joe Rogan or whoever, but it is an interesting sort of circular thing that happens all the time.

1:00:10I'm curious, do you, the, they, and that, if we back up to the, they, I assume it It sounds like you believe there's a higher order they and all of that. But specifically the they in this case that we were talking about was sort of the tech media landscape. Yeah. Is that sort of who you were looking for? Yeah. And media generally. I mean, you know, mainstream media generally got themselves stuck in that place. So, you know, there's a lot of new tech media, but there's a lot of new media also. Oh, for sure. Yeah. That's what I assume. You had to view that there was a higher order bit. All of it.

1:00:39As well. I guess that transitions a little bit into one thing I wanted to ask you about, which I think you've been asked about before. but you endorsed a presidential candidate. I could forget what happened there. Yeah, it does not. It was a long time ago. Let me remind you, it was a couple months ago and you tweeted a picture of you with a certain presidential candidate that I think people probably wouldn't have expected you to support. What was the reaction? What was the thought process in going into it? I love that he's like the candidate that shall not be named. Well, that's good. It's fine.

1:01:11It's good. I was more just being tongue in cheek because I think people totally know. uh president elect as of this week donald jay trump uh okay and you tweeted a picture with him after a banquet yeah like a fundraiser fundraiser thing um maybe take me through uh what the and i i mean at a very literal level of like the thought of of posting that picture and you know were you purely thinking in terms of personal were you thinking in terms of intercom like and maybe what the reaction was to it that was surprising versus not it was you know so before i posted it i sent it to my co-founders and a few others and like this is gonna hurt and they knew presumably where your political oh yeah yeah yeah yeah but i i like i knew this is gonna cause some trouble sure in the moment it was maybe majority fuck you i don't i'm saying the f word no that's fine yeah we're clear we're this will be the last time i'll ever say Yeah, no, no, we're in the clear.

1:02:13It was majority F you to the people that say you're not allowed to hold that position, or you're not allowed to say that thing. For whatever reason, I grew up with a sense of individual sovereignty and hated people telling me what I could or could not do. That's why I love America so much, because it was born on people with high agency that went and sought freedom to live their one beautiful life. yeah there was just so many people saying this is you know tech wouldn't support this or like this is a bad guy and I'm like you have no idea you've not done your homework most of the people who would say this is a bad guy who maybe gave me the most trouble were people in Ireland or people in Europe I'm like you don't know what you're talking about you've not studied your politics you're not even interested in this as a topic

1:03:03and so part of it was just no I'm going to say what I want to say And then the other part was, hey, I think it's really important and healthy that we can have good, open conversation about our beliefs here, that we don't have to censor ourselves. I knew that there was a phenomenal amount of people supporting that candidate. There's only one of my friends who wasn't, and that guy just didn't vote. Everyone I knew is telling me, I'm supporting Trump. And I decided I was going to also. and I just thought it was like really important that people started to feel a little more comfort here. So I wanted to play my tiny part in helping open the Overton window.

1:03:42There are much more high profile people than me but for my knowledge, I was the only Silicon Valley CEO who did it and I just wanted to show, there was a lot of younger founders and I wanted to tell them like, you can build a great company as a good person and hold alternative views. i'm a big believer in um the power of independent thinking people get caught in this group think and it dramatically incapacitates them from a business perspective and personally in their lives and so the more that young founders in particular can think independently the better so i wanted a model for them that like it's okay and it was okay i sure i assume the the immediate blowback it sounds like was was negative the immediate blowback was twitter stuff yeah twitter stuff it wasn't there was no real stuff but i assume the uh that had dissipated dissipated people get over get over these things one of the big things i learned through the war various wars i was in in the past is that it's really hard to kill a company like crises come and go no matter what your crisis du jour is it's gonna be okay whatever employee is upset or customer or someone says something about you on Twitter, it's going to be okay.

1:04:58And so after that happened, or after you published it, I say happened like it was terminal cancer or something, after you posted that picture, the employee side as well, you were doing it at a personal level, not an intercom level. I know there were many Silicon Valley CEOs that posted, I'm sure, pictures of the other side. I actually don't know, but I'm sure there were. Well, they actually did, which was interesting. I think that was part of what happened, was actually a lot of... Everyone sort of went insane. Yeah, because there wasn't a lot of excitement about the other side this time. So what was the...

1:05:31The employer reaction? Yeah. So when I came back, I made it clear to people that we don't do politics and work. We don't do social activism because there was a lot of that when I came back and I told people, we're just going to talk about our mission. And I also told people, I will never tell you what you can or cannot think or say or do in your personal lives because i'm a big believer in proponent in personal freedom and free speech and so i made it clear someone asked that in all hands about my posts i made it clear that hey if you post about political issues particularly political issues that um uh are are differing from mine i i will be the first to defend you if anyone tries to cancel you it's not happening at intercom you have the full right and freedom to go and say whatever you want publicly and i demonstrate that for them too i think the other important point is and i don't know how effectively i've done this but when people know that the place from which you come is a desire for health and society and peace in the world i think it's hard to disagree with that.

1:06:44Part of the sickness of our time is that the media still has a great degree of influence. And so they've told a lot of people who don't really follow politics or how the world works that this certain candidate is evil, etc. So they get very upset about it. But the people I know who voted for Trump, they really want like safety in the streets. They want freedom for everyone to be able to speak um they want you know safety for kids in school around trans issues uh they don't want war in the world like really wholesome things they never once i'm talking about actual billionaires who supported trump they never once talk about taxes so when when when the place from which you come is wholesome and and it is one of love and respect i think it's i think it's inappropriate to attack that.

1:07:40So as long as you're grounded in those fundamentals, I encourage people to just be themselves and be open and be free. And I think that's what made it possible for me to do this. You just alluded to a lot of the inputs into it, but I'm curious, like coming to that view, and I guess it was implicit in what you just said, but what were the main considerations for you? Was it the ones you just listed? Were there other ones that were ones i listed but because particularly the other side are proponents of all of the opposite things like war in ukraine pushing a nuclear power us the united states against the nuclear power russia um if anyone's interested they should read um nuclear war scenario a new book um it's really horrific um the chance of nuclear war is extremely high five billion people will die um so peace loving people are just opposed to that other side and i would have voted for anyone who was opposed to that.

1:08:38I'm not like a big Trump guy. Yeah, which I think is actually important to tease out as well. This is much more policy than personality. It's all policy. January 6th stuff weigh on you at all or was that sort of... That's like a character thing for me. It's not a policy thing. You know, I didn't like what he said. Ultimately, he did leave office. So, I wish he didn't kind of behave some of those ways. but I also think that the degree to which he was responsible for that is mostly invented. But the other thing is you only get to choose two people. Yes. So when someone says, how could you choose a guy who did XYZ?

1:09:17I'm like, wait a sec. I'm not choosing the CEO of my company. I'm not marrying this person. I'm not marrying them, making them my best friend. Theoretically, I have 8 billion people to choose from in that exercise. I'm choosing one of two people. it's completely different they're both going to have things we don't like san francisco freedom club yes what is that what was the um background in that coming to be well look there's a lot of really smart people to get together in this town and elsewhere they have salons and they have these big intellectual conversations it's great i happen to think san francisco is over intellectualized i like the highbrow chats as much as anyone else but i think it's over intellectualized culture has probably a much bigger impact on society than six guys at a dinner talking about the future of the human race and so i wanted to find a way to influence culture in a very influential part of the world and so the freedom club is big fancy quarterly parties which i hope you'll come to the next one for you need to tell me more about the parties okay and its goal is to simply celebrate freedom values like growth and merit and humanity things that were under threat and still are under threat in the West I wanted to get the young and the not so young people of San Francisco excited about it and behind it and yeah the specific strategy was to try and make the coolest party that would happen in San Francisco and you can get into it and you can get into it as long as you're actually down to celebrate free and so what is the actual party?

1:11:09it's just a big party I've only done one massive demand there was like 3 ,700 people on the wait list for the first one we invited 600, 500 came up that night. The next one's on the 13th of December, which I've not announced yet. We do it in big historic buildings in SF. Can we announce that now? Yeah, it's announced. Will you do bigger, same size? We'll do the same size because it's not just, we're not just trying to do big. We're trying to do high quality. We had some of the most interesting people and some of the most successful people at the last one. Presumably it's a night, a weekend night?

1:11:44Yeah, it's a night thing. The last one's a Friday, the next one's a Friday. And yeah. that's it it's it's just silly and fun are you sold like are there other people behind it with you no it's just me oh yeah yeah it's just me one big expensive party do you actually you actually pay for it yeah oh nice maybe i'll try and fix that someday well i would i i've got to think there's a uh there are except i don't want corporate sponsors yeah and um once people pay for a thing they have opinions about what it should be and they have feedback and actually have a vision for what this is going to be and it's my gift to the city the city that doesn't have enough fun i think and is a little too shy about celebrating american value so let's see eventually i'll decide it's really about financial move yeah the last one costs like 120k wow transitioning some operating stuff uh one interesting thing i had heard you say i don't know if lambast is the right term but you talked about um people that are in hr functions and how, I don't want to see it meeting comments from HR people here, but maybe those aren't necessarily the best people to make HR decisions.

1:12:50I don't know if I'm characterizing it appropriately. What I did say was quite often career HR executives will know a lot about the mechanics of HR game, but compared to the people and the leaders you've got in your company for years and on the ground they'll struggle to be deeply in touch with the culture as you built it and so you know for some certain roles i'd rather someone who knew hr things but wasn't a super senior hr leader but definitely knew the company be our person rather than someone who was a tried and true prove an HR executive but knew nothing about intercom, try to come in and be useful.

1:13:40And I did that when I came back and I gave certain people, I even gave our CTO pricing, because I trusted the person who was there a very long time and knew all of our values and principles rather than some pricing expert who knew abstract things about pricing but not intercom. That's all. And I guess that ties into a more general belief of yours that generalists are most effective or the people that can transition between different jobs or some of the most effective leaders within your company? All I'm trying to say is knowledge of a company and its values and principles are at least as valuable as knowledge of the esoteric domains, specifically domains like pricing or HR, because I don't think they involve rocket science.

1:14:30There is specific knowledge required. And so for me, if I have the opportunity to bet on someone in the company who I know and trust and love and who knows Intercom, but has a little learning to go on the HR stuff, I'll do that all day long before I'll run a big exec search, find a really impressive HR person, but has to start from zero on Intercom. So we'd rather have the depth of company knowledge. I like that. And you mentioned pricing and HR. is that true for other functional areas? I'm sure it's true for other functions. I'm trying to think of areas where I've done that. I mean, product engineering, I assume, is like...

1:15:08Yeah, they're like pretty deep. But, you know, we've been really blessed and lucky to have long-tenured people. Really, the master wisdom here is bet on tenured people. Keep your tenured people, bet on tenured people. Until, of course, it's not working. But all day long, I would much rather find someone within the org than have to bring someone in from outside which i'll totally do when it's needed but i like people from within the system i've heard you talk about um how the abundance of raw and experienced talent um can lead to great things being produced but perhaps in a messy way i guess um can you reconcile that point with the the tenure and making sure you still have the talent edge or the young people coming in that that's your early stage startup the likes of which we're competing with you know they're young raw super intelligent people that'll produce great things but in a highly messy way um it's not that that can win that can win that can win often we're still pretty down messy we'll bring in inexperienced people in large functions so sales you'll bring in inexperienced people where there is a lot of repetitive work and sometimes with engineering maybe we'll bring in interns customer support will do that too so where we have the space to train people we'll try to find individuals with x factor and let them rise through the org but more and more as we get older and i get older i appreciate grown-ups and so there's tension you can't have all the things you have to choose what flavor company you want to be and so i choose big tenured grown-ups and I challenged them to act in scrappy fast intense ways but we know we'll never be the young naive kids we once were um so you always have to play to the strengths that you actually have um yeah that's what we're doing now I guess as you reflect on the early days of of intercom you picked a handful of um things that were against conventional wisdom i i think in the target market you serviced how you distributed it maybe there's a bunch of other things that come to mind but if if you could go back and we've talked about a bunch of reflections and lessons learned but is there anything that um you would tell yourself then about this journey that maybe we didn't touch on?

1:17:35It's impossible advice to take because people have to go through the type of journey I went through to authentically get there. But the more you can be yourself, the better. Just trying to be anyone else is just a failing strategy. So just authenticity is key. Authenticity is key to great leadership. And people follow authentic leaders. Everyone knows, even young employees, maybe they can't verbalize it or consciously point to it, but they know when someone's being insincere or are lying.

1:18:12Being deeply true to yourself is just a power move, and it's very, very, very, very rare. But the trust and passion and energy that comes from that is remarkable. And then the self-satisfaction. So I don't know. if there's anything i could go back to tell myself it's just like find you be you trust your instinct and so like there's big and small ways in which i didn't do that even in company communications try to say what you thought people wanted try to cheer up employees when you said something authentically that they didn't like rather than saying sorry i was being me or following conventional wisdom you know i always thought you know we changed so much better go to market we like forced people to talk to sales the sales organization because we thought that would net and yield bigger bigger bigger accounts but we we were never those guys we were always a self-serve guys we went against our intuition in all the ways the more you you can be the better it actually will cause more pain it's easier to take someone's advice it's more comforting but then you're just kicking the failure down the road but if you can if you can take the pain up front being yourself and having your authentic self make contact with the world sooner it the the sooner you will find who you are.

1:19:24As you reflect on the role that investors have had, both, I guess, as board members or being a part of the journey as well, any lessons or things that you've internalized about that that you would impart? To investors? Well, I guess both, but I was thinking two founders and picking investors. I see, I see, yeah. the vast majority of investors are harmless and some are helpful i think fear the investors who want to be very helpful it's great in my opinion to work with investors who know that they are your capital partners and yours is a beautiful collaboration of talent and ambition and momentum with capital and maybe some lessons about how the capital markets work, maybe some connections to other capital partners or some other talent.

1:20:33There's things that VCs can do there. But once investors want to advise you on things that they've not done themselves, you're in dangerous territory because like i said earlier i will tell founders who are ceos who i'm 10 plus years ahead of to not take my advice i think it's really really dangerous for them to take wholesale the advice of a vc even if a vc has seen many patterns at play and the very best ones the most senior ones even if they haven't been you know deeply operational in their time they will have some wisdom to impart so that's kind of the first thing i would say just like be scared of people who want to be deeply helpful i think that how can i help is that kind of like trite and funny thing to say the best way an investor can help is knowing where their ability to help stops and starts and i think a great relationship can be being in this fight together being really excited to be super successful together, growing each other's names and reputations and making each other a shit ton of money.

1:21:41That's a really beautiful relationship. They don't have to be more than that. So if there's one thing I would say, I would say that. And it's tough for younger investors because younger investors are the ones that are most trying to make their name, trying to win the deals and offer the most help and the promise of help, particularly to younger founders that know that they need help. But I think a superpower for great younger investors is to back off all of that and to, like I said, know their role in which they play. This is not me trying to reduce their role or demean investors at all, not at all.

1:22:24They clearly play a very important role, but just everyone needs to know their place and position. and um i would say that there are probably 10 or 20 truly brilliant investors and getting to meet them and getting their feedback alone even if they don't invest as a privilege because they've seen a lot of cool different types of things and just like i spoke about with benioff if you ask them why there's great things to be learned even if you figure out oh they actually don't know the full answer but they've told me a couple little because what they've seen there's guys out there you know mamoon hammy led our series a he's on 20 something boards don't think that he's not seeing all these crazy patterns so mamoon was operational in his very early days i believe he was an engineer but he was never a ceo but if mamoon can tell you three companies where he's seen x y and z happen before now you're set off in your journey and you can go and find the ceos and founders of those companies.

1:23:25So I think it's really just about seeing investors for what they are and investors seeing themselves for what they are too. It's a really hard game being an investor because your money is the exact same color as everyone else's. But the winners here have the deep confidence in that. They're like, yep, my money is exactly the same, but I choose the very best companies and the very best founders. I'm there as their capital partner if and when they need more money. And they're when they want to meet other capital partners and I'm never going to get in their way. Like someone who says that, that's kind of actually rare.

1:24:02And if someone says that in a really confident way, I don't know, that's very attractive to me. Yeah. There's an unintentional element on the helpful side. And I guess to tease it out a little bit from your point is the people, everyone tries to differentiate in some way. And so it's - It's an impossible challenge. It's a very, being helpful is viewed, you shouldn't diminish someone's desire to be helpful. And by the way, founders are asking, oh, what are they helpful with? Correct. You have two different term sheets that are the exact same price. And how do you try to differentiate between the two and customer intros or talent intros or whatever it is.

1:24:43I think that's good. Feels like one mechanism of doing it. But it does, I mean, to your point on this, like if someone can be fired based on their investment in you, and it's hard to know the internal dynamics of a company, but that can put a lot of pressure on them. Totally. And therefore that can lead to a lot of unnatural behavior towards you. Or natural behavior. So maybe what needs to happen is like most young founders don't know how the investing game works. they don't know the internal dynamics within partnerships they don't know that people can be fired they don't know how it feels to be an investor how scary it is they don't know how much they bet their career in every single deal they don't know that they only going to do a couple good deals they don't know any of this and so there's an opportunity for an investor to go to a founder to say hey i do this with all my new founders which is basically a 101 on how the hell is invest in work.

1:25:43It's going to really stand to you for all your other deals and it'll help in our relationship. I made this like five page deck, have it, share it. But here's how it all works. If ever I come to you and I say, hey, fuck, when are we going to hire that head of sales that you said you're going to hire? Just know that that's me being anxious and scared for our mutual success. And because I'm one of three board members and because I only represent 14 % of your cap table, you can tell me to fuck off now obviously that's going to be not helpful for our relationship so a better thing to say is to say i hear you i'm sorry you're stressed i'm stressed too i'm trying and you can say that and know that i don't even have the power to fire you or imagine you do have the power to fire them you explain to them that firing you makes everything worse for me like so i think good open communication can actually resolve all these things it's really hard and the thing that makes it triply difficult for investors is that they play in this world of reputation and they're so scared of damaging that with any of their founders such that they're basically never real so i think there are like one percent of all investors maybe there's one in a thousand investors who are able to have that conversation and somehow they're able to have that at a young age and they just end up being killers but if you can traverse all of that you can be real you can be vulnerable um you can empower your founders you can get in the mix you can fight with the fact all of it it's all okay but you have to be able to have that conversation i've basically never i'm talking about a not only a perfect investor here but a perfect person none of this really exists, but striving for that, I think is the goal.

1:27:37And I think that there's still an opportunity in venture to be that level of Mitch. Yeah. There's a, there's a, there's a point in that, that I think, I think about a lot. And I actually, I mean, similar to you in that you can't be what you're not anymore. You can't be the young upstart. And so you've leaned into the, you know, tenured and the experience that you have and the people you're going to bring around the table for that. Similarly, it's funny you say this, but I'll always pitch like, listen, I don't know. I'm career finance and then investing. I will never tell you how to do your job.

1:28:11My entire career is giving some probabilistic recommendations to people and then having them make decisions. And so if I feel really strongly about something, I'll tell you. I feel really strongly about this. And you can still tell me you disagree, but I'll tell you where in the calibration I am. And I think sometimes founders want the more declarative, like, this is how you do this. And I'm not great at doing it because I always get the nuance. I don't think they're good founders. Yeah, that's maybe fair. You know, great founders have this internal sense of right and wrong and have a conviction in their own ideas.

1:28:48That often leads to really ugly things, but at least a beautiful things too. if you're a founder and you're asking people what should i do particularly investor good luck no hate but like good luck that's tough how have you uh you have three founders currently active yeah yeah have they have everyone has anyone been there all the way through do people leave when you left um we had four founders at the start one left after like five years or so then i left then one of the guys left and there was one left then i came back then one of the others came back so and everyone's everyone's active we're super active yeah yeah well interesting yeah i guess i guess fundraising itself was the other thing we were gonna like any any lessons learned or anything you take away from yeah i mean i was you know it's been a while since i actually raised money i you know the last we raised money was in late 2017 so it's been a long time geez super long time we've been profitable most years since um so maybe my advice is stale at this point but you know i invest in a lot of companies too um you know i i think good fundraising is an interesting mix of or a compelling pitch is an interesting mix of a highly credible ambitious vision so someone explains to the few to you here's what the future is going to look like here's why i believe that um and and paints the picture for you in a way where you're like i could totally see that and then is able to take it down to earth and say here's the size of the market here's how many customers are in it here's how many people in that segment here's the products they currently use here's how they pay here's how we get to them here's the pitch that's working here's why we're better and can really break it down so you as an investor are like okay they have helped me understand the opportunity and helped me believe that this person really gets it that on its own is highly compelling and they've now given me the belief that they can mechanically get after it and that latter piece is actually pretty rare i think i don't know if you find that rare but for someone to be able to come in and show you a deck and say here's the market here's the customers here's who we go after first here's how we get them here's the magazines they read here's a bunch of costs here's the cocktail tv you know if someone really breaks down you're like huh they've got a full plan yeah and the idea of business plans was kind of denigrated uh is that the right way to put it like i think that's right you know because people knock mbas and they're like business plans that's so, you know, kind of, it's imaginary business.

1:31:42But I actually think if you've got vision and a business plan, that's highly investable. Yeah, there is something about the ability to speak at different aptitudes or different levels of the business. And some people can operate at the five years out point, which is super compelling. That's ultimately what we're investing in five, eight years in the future. But if you can't go down to the, what are we doing tomorrow point to get there, then it means you can't actually operate the business. And so there's, it's, it's rare to have someone that can storytell across both of those sectors. Exactly.

1:32:18So I think that that's like the real X factor founders and pitches. So if I, if, if, if someone has asked me like, what's a recipe for fundraising? Well, it's figured that out. Both sides. Did you ever have, was valuation ever like a metric that you, in the hype of growth days and all that, did it ever become? Yeah, a little, yeah. And when did, obviously you haven't raised in seven years, so I assume it's no longer the metric that you think about. I mean, we all have imaginary valuations for like, here's how much we're worth now. Sure, sure. Did you shift to just revenue at some point along the way and that's just been the easier heuristic?

1:32:56You know, interestingly, in the early days, I would just talk about success and our mission and the thing we wanted to build. Then in the later days, I would talk about revenue and revenue targets and goals. And then recently, I would talk about, here's how much this opportunity is worth in the market. here's how we can obviously be a 100 billion dollar company if we crack x y and z and so i now speak about that in a way in an open way that i never did before i used to be scared to talk to the company about money i think a lot of ceos are i kind of had some shame about it and thought it was dirty and a lot of people do actually you know in in the bay area we don't we pretend like money's not a motivation um but i realized it was everyone's really excited about it and that's totally fine you can be excited about building cool tech creating impact in the world making a shit ton of money having fun doing it you can be excited about all those things that's that's fine and great and so in recent years i've started to talk about our employees as partners in the business my my my share my co-shareholders um and talk about creating great wealth for ourselves and for our families and that is remarkably uh motivating people want to do they're not you know they don't feel like they're in some sort of like get rich quick scheme they're excited about what we're building and they believe in the mission and the vision and in the values and the culture but um they are putting the pieces together in a new way where we're like if we hit this target we'll be worth this amount we'll do a secondary other options will be open we could go public etc it starts to treat the company at large as insiders these are the things you usually only talk to with the board never mind your exec team but i i think that that's actually a way to be super transparent and include everyone, not just as employees on a mission, but actually as business partners and shareholders too.

1:35:13So that has worked out a lot. Thanks for doing this. Of course. It's awesome. Good questions.

1:35:22Thank you for joining this episode of The Logan Bartlett Show with CEO and co-founder of Intercom Owen McCabe. If you liked this episode, we'd really appreciate it if you subscribe to us on whatever podcast platform you're listening to us on, as well as share with anyone else that you think might find this interesting. We look forward to seeing you back here next week on another great episode of The Logan Bartlett Show. Have a good weekend, everyone.