Great Builders & Success First with Intercom’s Eoghan McCabe | E1962

26:22It's amazing. I don't think you have any kids for that. I mean, if you're on your own, you can browse for the thing. I mean, we almost don't want to admit that this automation is more than just efficiency. It actually is superior than humans in so many ways. This is not an anti-human statement at all. I mean, I love humans. I want humans to thrive. I actually don't believe that we're really close to AGI. I think that the way that the AI nerds think about the future of intelligence is really limited. They don't value the body and the spirit consciousness either. So I fucking love humans, right?

26:58But sorry, some of this automation actually creates superior experiences. 100%. And that's interesting to reckon with. That's why we have this campaign. I'm not trying to make it about Intercom, but we have this campaign where our main pitch is cheaper, faster, better. Pick three. Because AI is this weird paradigm. time it's like wait a sec it's better than humans it's faster than humans it's cheaper than humans oh shit yeah so this is an old adage and you know what i was coming uh off of the uh i was coming back from tahoe and you actually have a billboard with that statement on it that statement uh coming off the uh bay bridge or no actually i was taking my daughters to an arcade in alameda right like an old classic arcade it was so much fun and i saw it and you know there is this classic thing you hire a consultant and say, well, do you want it better and cheaper?

27:46Well, you can't have it fast. Do you want it fast and cheaper? Well, it's not going to be better. And that is just such a profound insight. Did you come up with that insight or did that come from us? Where did that come from? But that wasn't an agency. That happened in a meeting. No, it's actually our brand guy. So we have a VP of brand, Will Burroughs. I'm like, I like that. He gave us like 10 different options. I'm like, sorry, you can't get over the first one. Yeah. First best. I mean, I have never remembered a billboard. I don't think. I can't tell you another billboard I remember. So, if I remember the billboard, I was like, yep, that is AI.

28:18It is going to be all of those things. And, of course, we're trying to say this is what Intercom is, but it's what AI is. Yes. Yes. And you only need to look at how frustrating it was to work with a travel agent or, you know, before that, our parents with phone operators. Anything. Yeah, it was just a waste of time for everybody. Or call PG &E today. I mean, PG &E are actually one of the good ones there, right? call Comcast. I mean, any of these companies, it's not even their fault. I mean, even try to talk to Intercom before the AI days, we get back to you in one to two days. Right. That's not good enough.

28:55That's a lifetime. Yeah. That's a lifetime. You want to solve this problem right now. Talk to me about what is actually happening today in the tool and what have you... Because you've been there for 18 months. I heard you on another pod. I think Kleiner's got a pod now called Grit. So I'll give him a promo. I don't know who the host is, but he's pretty darn good. Yeah, Joman. Yeah. Yeah. It's very good. Good job, Joe. I'm friends with Mamoun and the team over there, Ilya. I think the world of them guys, they're really hardworking. I'm on a board with Ilya. He's just a hardworking dude. What's working today in terms of tickets, customer support, people type into a box, and then what don't you trust it with yet?

29:32So today we have many thousands of intercom customers who've turned on this thing called fin it's an ai agent it looks at your public knowledge base and your website but also your internal knowledge base but it also looks at the prior conversations from your support reps and it will have a little conversation with the customer it'll only jump in when it thinks it has a chance of answering it jumps in about one out of two times so 50 of the time it jumps in it'll ask for like um clarification like oh is this what you meant whatever oh a little that's key isn't it yeah yeah yeah is that what you want this thing so there's a conversation it doesn't pretend to be human by the way i think is important on average 43 percent of the time it gets involved in the conversation it resolves to take it it's like oh shit like whoa the numbers are really real hey startups are you ready to launch your business without the headache Well, with Northwest Registered Agent, you can set up your entire business identity in one place.

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31:17Northwest's registered agent isn't just a service. It's your startup's new best friend. They've created a new category, a true one-stop shop for business formation. And Northwest loves supporting startups and is offering our listeners a$39 complete business formation package. For just$39 plus state fees, Northwest will handle your complete business identity, getting you up and running in no time. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com slash twist today. We have customers where it's 80%, 90%. And these are companies that have a thinner kind of surface area on their product. So consumer companies like Uber, Uber only wants you doing a few things in the app.

31:57Yeah. Right? They only want you to do a few things. And so theoretically, although Uber is a highly complex operation, which makes it more difficult. Let's think of something else like Amazon. Amazon, we're great at this. They've done it for forever. They only want you to do a certain number of little things. And so for these consumer businesses to use Fin, they get like 80 % resolution rate. But for a big SaaS company like Intercom, we're at like 45 % resolution rate. But that's still a giant. That's a giant. So our customer service team hasn't grown into you. Give or take. See, this is the key.

32:26And then for people who are scared by this concept, it's going to 90 % in every company. And what I've tried to do with my team is explain to them, what do you see more senior people in this company doing every day that you covet? What is it that you would like to be doing? Right. And in our firm, we're sorting through incoming applications from founders. The sorting, it's kind of inspiring to see what people are trying to build, but it would be kind of cool to do the calls with the founders and hear the pitch directly from you, wouldn't it? And you kind of get to move up the stack is what I tell people.

32:57And just constantly moving up the stack means more interesting work to be done. And this is where your point about humanity is repeating back as a customer support agent for the 17th time today, the problem that everybody has because they literally can't see when you say click any button when i was in customer support it's a great story to click any button and i had this woman call me and she said i said yeah you can just click any button she says i've been doing this for an hour jason i can't find the any button i said how about we try picking the button of your choice or the spacebar and so i just started telling people hit the spacebar it's the long bar on the bottom okay boom and and that just was my little this is why you're no longer in customer service.

33:41That's very impressive. Exactly. I was just like, oh my Lord, this is unbelievable. The second best story from my IT days was I said to the woman, take the floppy disk out of the sheath and put it in the drive. She said, I've done that already. And it's making a weird noise. I said, what floor are you on? I'm going to come down there. She had taken it out of the sleeve, the paper sleeve. And then she had taken a floppy disk, a five and an inch floppy disk, which you still remember. And she had ripped it open. the glue and everything and pulled the magnetic dial out. Which, given the instructions of take it out of the sleeve, it wasn't in a sleeve.

34:17Right? When she had the thing, it was already in the drive. So she took it out of the drive and then took it out of the sleeve and put it back in. Destroyed the software desk, whatever. It's no big deal. I have to say, your stories are way more interesting than the typical customer service job experience. And what you were getting at is that it's deeply inhumane to ask beautiful, unique humans with so much potential in their lives to do the same damn thing. Hour after hour, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. It's a terrible use of human potential. I have one more.

34:54So funny. I just thought of the third one. This is such a great clip for a YouTube short or something. I was with a woman one time and I was charged with putting lawyers onto the internet. This is the early nineties and they were using document management. Now lawyers, the idea of using a keyboard for a certain generation of boomer lawyers was like asking them to take out the trash. Like I would never touch a keyboard. We have the typing pool for that. I'm an attorney. Why would I touch a keyboard, a typewriter? I'm like, well, it's a computer. It can do a lot of things. So I say to the woman, hey, just pick up the mouse and just move the mouse.

35:26And she literally picks it up off the ground. I'm moving my phone right now. And she starts waving it in the air. And I was like, oh yeah, it can stay on the mouse pad when you move it. And I turned it over and I showed her the track ball. This was back when they had a ball and had to take the ball out and clean it. That was another great moment. And IT customer support was the waving of the mouse in front of the screen. She thought the pointer would move if she used it like a laser pointer. I love it. She was just a couple decades ahead of her time. Literally, yes. She anticipated where this was all going.

35:52Right, right. So if we're getting through 40 % now. Right. I love this idea of like confirming with the customer because that's not something that LLMs do. That's something you designed your software. Somebody had a great observation at some point of just like, hey, let's just confirm with them so they feel more safe or secure. And we get the answer right. What does this look like in one year? Yeah. So in one year, we go from not just answering knowledge questions like, hey, can I do it? Can you ship to Africa? Can you ship to Australia? Whatever. To actually doing things like, hey, my package never arrived.

36:28It's like, oh, no worries. I'll get it resent to you. so we'll we'll we'll go from answering questions to doing things really the game here if you just imagine a pie chart of the different categories of things you call customer service is checking off each of those categories and the easy one obviously was knowledge and llms were always going to be good at that in spite of the fact that it actually took a ton of work to stop it from hallucinating and only talking about the things that you could talk about yeah but the next big stuff is taking action and that's where it's a lot riskier yet again because it's one thing if you tell my customer something that's not quite right it's another thing if you refund my customer nine thousand dollars for that grill that they bought and got delivered now we've just got a big mess in our hands what if you just do that a thousand times obviously i'm making this up and hopefully intercom customers are not listening right now that this could never happen anything's possible anything's possible and so it's on us to actually build the technology to ensures that it doesn't.

37:25So that's like one of the next frontiers. It goes a lot further than that, but that's the next logical step. I mean, there's been many instances in the early days of e-commerce where people thought they were ordering a gross of something and they typed in the number for gross, which is 12 times 12, and then realized they ordered a gross of grosses, a ton of tons. And all of a sudden, too much paper towels comes to the restaurant. Of course. But this is the next piece, which is letting the AI take a behavior. It's a digital behavior, but it's a behavior in the real world. Yeah, but it doesn't have to be digital.

37:59Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't have to be. And like, we live in a digital world. So it's things like refunds, resetting passwords. It could be security implications, everything else. To build that in a really robust way is a big deal, but it's got to go there and it will. Yeah. So are you actually, you must be working on that now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Take me through how different this is than everything you've done before it. Because now this is where, and you alluded to this, which I bookmarked in my brain for this conversation to get to. And we might as well get there now, which is, oh my God, safety, security, open AI, just like nuke the safety team.

38:34And they're like, yeah, we don't need a safety team. But what we're talking about right here is safety and making sure it doesn't run amok. And so how do you think about deploying the first one? Are you going to have somebody watching the agent and then confirming each behavior and saying, good agent, here's your token. You get one point for getting it right. Oh, no, you returned it and it's out of warranty. You lose a point. Right. Tell me about this process and this war room where you're doing this. Right. It's obvious that long term, we will hire this super agent that's smarter than any SVP of customer service you would ever hire.

39:14And they don't ask you questions like, you know, how do I find about refunds? They actually say, which model of customer service are you interested in? Or like, can I propose some values for how we do customer service together? You know, so clearly we're headed to that world where all the little details we're talking about right now are not only moot, but, you know, hilariously pedestrian. However, we're talking about safety and security, comfort with customers. So there'll need to be checks and balances and there'll need to be a combination of allowing the kind of heuristic machines that are the LLMs work within a set of constraints.

39:50And so just like you have written policies for your employees, like never give a refund this large or any refunds greater than this, you check with the VP of whoever, the bots will have to do the same. And so that hints at how the bots will need to be collaborative, but also work off a set of rules. And that's where these things evolve from being wrappers on GPT-4 to actually full, deep, complex, pain in the ass to build applications and systems. And that's where people lose a little bit of the magic that a company like Intercom can bring. Of course, once again, that all goes out the window if GPT-10 just says, hey, I'm your new SVP of service.

40:37Yes. In a way, if you were to think about a teller at a bank, and when you were talking about this, like, if you come in and you deposit your check, it's like, okay, we deposited your check. There's no possible downside here. If it was a bogus check, who cares? Like, we'll find out in an hour or tomorrow. Who cares? And then, you know, we don't have to arrest you. Like, we're just trying to protect downside here. But I'm depositing this check. I'm a new customer and I'm asking you to cash it and give me cash. Right. Oh, yeah. I'll be right back. I'm going to talk to my manager. Right. And if it's a fake check, the person beelines it out if you're checking with a manager.

41:11So the manager is totally we've had checks and balances in the human world for years. So we're just going to need checks and balances in the world, too. You mentioned something about the personality of people pursuing AI versus, let's say, people who are building software with care for a specific group of people. There might be different standards. I am amazed that people are taking this technology. As impressive as the demo where we see is, anybody who uses this, I can't believe the credit we're giving for work not done to LLMs. people like google put out this searched summary at the top and i don't know if you saw it over the last like week where it was like yeah here's how you eat rocks and it's like you should eat three rocks a day and it's like this is exactly what google was trying to avoid right right is like releasing technology that tells people to eat rocks and like how to consume rocks and right but nobody actually questions a startup doing yet they're like oh yeah it's gonna hallucinate and Like this is where now we're at.

42:15Are people giving too much credit to the technology here for work not done? I'll tell you what the interesting part about this topic is that we talk a lot about the incumbents having an advantage in this AI world, the distribution and how they can just apply it to their existing customer base. Early stage startups have an advantage over the big guys in that they can make mistakes. They don't need a lot of early traction. They don't need to sell to, you know, the big 10 ,000 person company. They're selling to a two person company. And so it's really interesting to see everyone in the AI for customer service space.

42:47Most of them are tiny startups. And actually, the level of hallucination with which they're happy with is way above what we would get shot for. So it's kind of interesting. It makes us look bad in a sense where it's like, all right, your Fin AI product is the same as these literally 50 other products. and we're in this kind of lemon market where we have to try and explain to people, yeah, but their startups, their standards are way lower, etc. Yeah. And this has always been the advantage of early stage companies that sell to small companies. The bottoms up approach, you can have just a substantially less sophisticated product.

43:28And so I think that that's how AI technologies will evolve. They'll be used in lower stakes use cases. Yeah. And the companies, the small companies that get traction in these lower stakes use cases will grow with those companies and evolve over time, particularly if it's a new category. Of course, the whole intercom bet, if you're going to try and be bullish in intercom is that, okay, the incumbents have a shot too. They have all these advantages. We can play just as hard as a startup. So you touch on a really interesting set of points that we discuss internally a ton. Yeah, it is the innovator's dilemma, like, just realized in a way that is the most vibrant of our career.

44:06You can just YOLO this stuff and be like, yeah, let it book you a ticket. And it's like, really? It's not ready to do that. Yeah. The Google example is yet another example. Like, GPT, when it came out, ChatGPT, said all sorts of crazy fucking shit. Excuse my language. I don't know if we curse on this podcast or not. I mean, it was fucking boa. Effing language. Yeah. but we were like wow it's amazing it's talking then when google comes out and i you for all we know the google ai is really good but they have hundreds of millions maybe billions of users and all it has to say is two really dumb things like eat rocks or put glue in your pizza yeah and then it's a screenshot and then they're roasted for it so it's it's just different standards for the big guys and that's the really interesting challenge about how you bring this to market yeah expectation Expectations are high for brands like Apple.

45:00I mean, Siri is such an embarrassment for Apple already. And can you imagine like, I mean, just the fact that Siri can only do like such a narrow cohort of things and they're like, well, why don't they let it do what the rabbit's doing or, you know, this AI pin or this other thing. And it's like, did you see Marquez's review of the humane AI pin? Right, right. He demolished it. Now, of course, they could have avoided the whole thing. What was your take when you saw that demolition of that product? Because you're a founder and you got to feel bad for founders doing something creative. I felt really bad for them.

45:32I went to visit them that day. I didn't know them. Yeah, I pinged them on Twitter and said, can I come visit you? I almost wanted to give them a hug, but I didn't know them well enough to give them a hug. But I wanted to be there to tell them. My heart breaks a little bit for people who are... It broke for them too. I had the same exact reaction. They work so hard and they're actually onto something. Like, I believe the future of computing is a lot more ambient than us in our phones. Yes. I believe that the future of computing, thankfully, is probably a lot more conversational. Certainly in the future, you're driving your car, you'll actually have really interesting and useful conversations with your assistant and they'll go and do a bunch of helpful stuff for you.

46:08Right now, Siri's terrible for that. So they're onto the fact that the future computing is probably ambient and it's conversational and it probably therefore takes a new form factor. There's nothing wrong with the pin. No. It just wasn't ready for primetime. They should never have put it out and sent it to these reviewers. I imagine they were under a lot of pressure to do so. They were building for five or six years. We've all seen Magic Leap and many other companies with their under that pressure. I mean, it's insane. It's so hard to do. And they went out a little too early. So I don't know. You can criticize people, but I tend to not criticize people who are trying to do something brand new.

46:44If they're trying to build like a new CRM product, like a new SaaS CRM product, and it just wasn't good enough it was really slow i'm like what are you doing you ever see this movie rat tattooing uh with the rat no i haven't but there's a line at the end that people have quoted give it to me yeah you have to see the film it's my favorite pixar film but at the end there was a guy anton ego i have to think steve jobs who was the owner of pixar had a bit to do with this and i actually asked ed catnall who was on my program about it and he did indicate that this was like um something they had talked about steven and ed um it's one of my favorite episodes that i've ever done and uh at the end he says you know the life of a critic is very unique in the world because we hold the position above people who create things this very powerful position and we lord it over them and we can you know right the sharper the criticism like the more we all get out of it yada yada but there is one thing we can do in our lives that actually does have meaning because being a critic is meaningless is kind of what he comes to the realization after he's just like, pick your pundit in tech who probably is a little high on their own supply.

47:50You can think of a number of them who think they're the story and they've created nothing in their lives but thrown rocks at other people creating stuff. I'm not targeting any specific people, but people do come to mind. And he said, you know, actually now I realize the one thing we can do is we can support the new. Right. Tears. Yeah. And shot. Antonigo is taken back to his childhood and remembers his mom making him this simple French dish, Ratatouille. And he tastes the Ratatouille that's made by this rat. It's a cook. And he just says, wow, this was the best Ratatouille I've had since my mom made it.

48:26And just an incredible moment. And just a very deep moment. When I saw this review, I watched it because I'm a fan of Marquez and I co-created Engadget, which did this kind of stuff. And he says so many amazing things about the form factor, the product, the ambition. And then he just says, hey, listen, it's not worth it for a consumer to buy this right now. And the battery is too hot. And here's the limitations. But the headline was worst product I've ever reviewed. And so the link baiting headline destroyed them. But if you actually watched it without that, it would say it would have the actual accurate headline was this thing gets so many things right.

49:04But it's really just for developers right now. you don't buy it for your mom but if you're a geek geek out on it if you don't care about the cost geek out on it it's all good if you and that was the the the mistake they made but how did the conversation go with them they must have been crestfallen or were they resilient let me tell you but a quick reaction to what what you just said there i cared i was upset less about the marquis the high says name marquis marquis review and more about just the piling the dog piling you guys are idiots i'm like come on what have you made like what have you built exactly i guarantee there was not one person who's put their heart and soul into making something new that laughed at them i guarantee a hundred percent correct so so what did they say they're like uh yeah i know we kind of messed up uh yeah we went out too soon um but we believe in this thing and beautiful you know these guys are builders this is a problem they're just builders you know that's that's that's they're from apple they were protected in this large apple and i think part of apple's secret probably i'm just going to make this up because i don't know a thing about it yeah is they they protect um idealists and dreamers and they create space for craft and obsession like it's a really special environment and circumstance you need to create to allow people to obsess the degree that they do at apple and so when they're out that's a good observation yeah yeah when they're out on their own exactly i don't know if they had the comms people around them like they were getting wrecked so you know raise a ton of money they were the number one using tech they were getting wrecked and they had no no comms help so yeah you know My hat is off to them and anyone who tries to make anything new.

50:59And those guys in particular, they're good people, actually. You know, what I thought was very interesting with it as well was there would have been such a simple solution. And I think the observation about Apple is such a good one. If somebody had just told them, put on this box, developer preview. Right. That's it. That's all they had to do. This is a developer kit. And then you don't do a PR campaign. You don't oversell it. You don't try to sell it to consumers. hey when you buy it it's a developer kit yeah this is for people to imagine what's capable of if you're a civilian and you buy it okay you know you can do that but it's kind of like buying google glass or like you know some prototype and it would just solve the whole situation right but i'm very interested in this theory you have as well of where this is going in ambient computing because whenever a new technology comes out i have a little bit of a technique it's kind of the reverse of the negative review in the pylon, which is I squint.

51:56People have told me I'm very good at investing in startups. And I tried to examine my technique. And my technique has always been, assume it works. Just assume it works and people fall in love with it. How does the world change? What does it look like if it does work? So yeah, it's crazy to think Uber, you can get a car anywhere in the world. But if it did work, what would be the next domino to fall? Well, okay, I guess you could have food go anywhere, or I guess people wouldn't have to buy a car, or a guest drunk driving would go away. And so I've always just tried to say, assume it works. Assume that the pendant works.

52:28And that is a great device. And assume the battery lasts forever and assume that the LLMs are fast. So as we do this here, what do you think the world looks like when conversational AI is not the Siri experience? And it's not even what Sam showed with Omni 4.0. It's like the next three generations from now where you could interrupt it, you could have a conversation as fluid as ours, even on Zoom. That just is awesome. Yeah. What does the world look like if it knows when you say, I want to buy this ticket. Right. And I want business class, but I don't want to overspend. And I don't like to leave early.

53:07And it's like, I got you. United, it's in your thing. Yeah. It's a refundable ticket anyway. Totally. So there's a bunch of things that are given. One is that the LLMs will get super fast and you'll be able to just chit chat with them. No problem. I could speak as quickly as I am right now. They'll pick it up. No problem. So that's a given. We're probably there. We're there. That's a given. The other is that some of the big consumer tech companies will get us to a place where it's connected with our accounts and our credit cards and everything else. And it'll be out there in the world doing things with us.

53:33Google will definitely do that. Apple will definitely do that. I don't know who else will do that, but certainly those two guys will, right? That's a given. So now we're going to have assistants and we'll be happy to have those assistants do things for us. The big open questions are, what are the modes of interaction? What do they look like? It will not be the case that screens will go away. We want to look at photos of things sometimes, but you might buy a jacket. You want to look at multiple photos of different jackets. So you want to explore, you want tactile stuff, video calls, et cetera. So we want screens and panes and stuff.

54:00We want text, right? Sometimes actually seeing a number of options is superior than someone reading out a thing. Like with your toast example, sometimes it's better going through a menu like, oh, I want this beer or whatever. Yeah. Rather than the person give you a list of 16 beers, right? Yeah. So we'll still want screens, but we won't want them all the time. we will probably increasingly start to run from our screens and i have two phones i have like a little iphone mini that i use in the weekends that i've like turned off all the phone apps yeah it's the only way i can get off my down phone just to be more present you do this you leave the house with more productive whatever yeah exactly i'll leave the house with that it still does that so we're gonna have some sort of new devices maybe they'll have screens but you know how will we talk to this thing will we have ear pods in our ears all the time probably not will we have glasses maybe but that's like a big fashion step if everyone's going around with glasses but maybe maybe that's totally the future right maybe there's a pin i really think the pin is an opportunity or maybe a watch that can kind of hear you from multiple places and it's got a screen etc the watch you kind of have to do this with so it's a little awkward yeah so it's going to be really interesting like the big question is a form factor and and i just i think you know These disruptive technologies, they grow the demand for the area in which they cause disruption.

55:19So in this instance, it's going to grow to demand for personal computing. We're going to do more personal computing. But during our day, we'll be doing more little personal computing, different things. It's going to grow to demand for it. But also, they never immediately kill the older forms. I mean, I had to look this up because I try to make this point all the time. The last telegram was sent in just 2013 in India. Yeah. Facts. One's the last facts. And the facts are still going. Still going. So, and now we have, you know, email and everything else. So, screens will be around. So, TBD on the form factor, but that's why you're seeing people do Humane Pin.

55:56Rabbit. There's this new, what are they called? TinyPod. Have you seen that? Tiny little phone. TinyPod looks awesome. You've got the Daylight tablet thing. Have you seen that? I did see the Daylight one. There's new things happening. There's new things happening in personal computing. It seems like a reaction to the distraction culture and the addiction issue too. So it's almost like, you know, if you want to have a couple of beers that are a little bit lighter in alcohol than this one, or, you know, here's a milder version of the same thing that maybe there's a remarkable tablet that people love.

56:27Right. Dez has that. He likes that. He's the exact market for it. It's somebody who's like thoughtful, wants to capture their stuff. It's elegant. I bought one. I don't use it. I've just become a fan of speaking into my phone. I just love this product Grammarly. I don't know if it's... Yeah, I know. I've never used it. Yeah. Just download it and pay for it. And then check back with me a month of how much better a writer and communicator you are. I force everybody on my team to do it. And as a professional writer, which is where I started, what AI has done is taken... You know, in every organization, there were like one out of 20 people who could write well.

57:02Right. And like everybody comes to them. Hey, can you help me? I suck at writing. Now everybody's good at writing. sure now you may not be elite at writing or great at writing but the time from sucking to being good right the meantime from suckage to good is like compressed now yeah it's like a weird observation but i think everybody becomes good at everything that's a weird world everybody was good at something that previously took a year to become good right like what if everybody could play you know a dire straight song on guitar in a good fashion and be like what there'll be things that we realize though that the ai can't do and they'll be the things that people will really value in humans like the creativity and connection and spark and the x factor when you meet someone you know a founder you know there's lots of great founders but sometimes you meet a founder you're like holy shit yeah that's that's the kind of like je ne sais quoi that like ai is not about to solve anytime soon i agree with you and i also if everybody becomes a good writer how much how more important is an excellent writer how much more obvious it is that the person becomes like extraordinary or excellent like if like all films like if you watch tv shows and films they're all pretty good you know they're not terrible they're all done in a very you know the cgi is good like you can't make bad cgi today it's like almost impossible so then when somebody makes something that's truly transcendent you know you go see dune 2 or whatever i don't know what your jam is but there's been some pretty great spectacular films oppenheimer or whatever you're like yeah yep that's craftsmanship i wonder though will we get to a place where we really value artisanally made human made things like tarantino only shoots on film because that's how he likes to do it and there's certain directors that only do no effects in camera right and will we be at a place in the future where it's like i don't want to watch an AI generated thing.

58:58I want to know that a soul that really went through so much pain and birthed this from their deepest places made this piece of art. I want to experience that. That resonates a little, right? So I think the floor of all things that are created rises, but I think we'll start to just appreciate handcrafted. It sounds silly, but like, you know, a handcrafted email. It makes total sense that like, this wasn't written by AI. I took the time to do this. It's like when you get a handwritten note, like you ever have that person who you interview and they send a handwritten note and you're like, at least, I mean, you do stand out when you write that handwritten note.

59:35Of course. We talked about being a great manager and you're, you know, returning the return of the king here segment of the pod. I heard you say on another pod, you got savage on Glassdoor, which by the way, Glassdoor is where incompetent people you fired come back to get revenge on you. If you're in a high performance culture, like a startup, you have to fire people for not performing. And then that's how they get their retribution. It's not like people who love working for you are going to be like, you know what I'm going to do today? I'm going to write a great review. Sure. Sure. No, it's the last outlet of resort for people who are unhappy.

1:00:06I get it. It's very human. It's normal. Very human. It's a place event. It's like, I had to wait 30 minutes for my table and my reservation. I'm upset. I'm giving this restaurant one star, even though I think it was the best sushi I ever had. putting that aside i i i heard you say that on the other podcast like a very vulnerable moment about your return and then this 52 week countdown you did right and i was like huh i always know when you come back to a company or you you know get revitalized like you seem to have been obviously by ai you get some new ideas about management you kind of look at how you did things previously right what comes to mind when i'm saying those two things yeah 2.0 totally yeah i i this is a whole multi-series podcast in itself if anyone is ever interested but um you know part of it was just a willingness to be okay with not being liked you know and this doesn't mean i'm trying to make enemies at all but it's just like you know what if i don't have a strong opinion about what's going to make us successful no one does and every time i compromise those strong opinions just to be a little more copacetic, the business has a slightly lower chance of success.

1:01:19And so I'm just going to ruthlessly stick to what I believe will be good for us. I may be wrong, but I will entertain no dissent on that topic whatsoever. And that was one major thing I did. Then I also just was increasingly transparent with people and said, here's our values, here's our policies some people are gonna love them and we're gonna advertise them on our site like we don't do employee activism stuff social issues at intercom oh really you're not there to solve the world's diversity and you're not going to solve equality inside your software company doing customer service i'm shocked no that's what i you know that i'll tell you the ironic thing is that if you create a really great company that's just got chill nice loving accepting people it actually becomes healthily diverse you know all types of people want to work there like i had before i left the ceo are the percentage of you know just women in the company female leaders female promotions are better than like google slack all these other companies and we never had any di programs so i'm like why is that and my theory was we were just an open-minded open-hearted a good company that just accepted all the types of people um and they wanted a worker so anyway that's another piece and i would just lay it out for people that was a very interesting moment in time i think because i was put under extreme pressure as an investor right and they were like tell us about your investments and we need to see the statistics we need to see the receipts and i I was like, all right, I am not basing my investments in companies based on the gender or race of the people.

1:03:04Do you want me to be sexist? Do you want me to be racist? Right. And I'm trying to reconcile this as like a Gen Xer who was told about this meritocracy in America. And that's what made that moment hard because all of us were like, oh, wait a sec. Are we wrong? Yeah. So I'm literally second guessing myself saying like, okay, wait, I know I'm a good person, but you're telling me I'm not. And I have to do this, but wait a second. If it's a meritocracy and I'm picking the companies based on their product velocity and the skill set of the founders to build products, and that was my thesis for my funds, or is my thesis to this day, how fast is the product velocity?

1:03:44How much do the customers love it? That's the lens. But now I'm being asked to make my lens the color of a person's skin, their age, their gender, how they affiliate, who they want to have sex with. Wait a second. And I need to fill out a form? Like in California, I'm going to need to fill out a form that I have to go ask my founder. This is the level of insanity this got to. And they were asking us in venture to say, I'm going to ask my founders. If I was an investor in Intercom, I wish I was. i'd have to ask you oh and do you like to sleep are you like to sleep with boys or girls yeah or nobody like i i can't ask you that question that's illegal so we had on one side and it's not in my business you don't care who cares it's irrelevant so we were asked to do this like crazy task that right is actually illegal and i had to have this conversation with my team because it turned out in my company, four out of the five top positions were female.

1:04:43Now, why is that? I don't know. I just hired the most competent, hardworking people. It turned out to be 80 % female. I don't know why that happened. It's a small company. It could be a statistic anomaly. It could be I'm a great boss. It could be I'm a great boss to women. I don't know. I didn't consciously think of it. But I did know, hey, wait a second. It's illegal to make these investments based on this. And so I said to my team, I do not want anybody to ever bring up these topics while we're making an investment decision. And if you do, I have to fire you because it's illegal. Now, this broke people's brains for a second.

1:05:17And we had to have this like, well, don't we want to support women and people of color or underrepresented people? I said, we can do that through this podcast, This Week in Startups. We can do it through Foundry University, our free event. There are things we can do to help more people participate in this, but we can't make this investment decision. And you know what happened? There's a lawsuit now against a firm that is investing in black women. Do you know who they're being sued by? Asian women. Wow. Yeah. So now you think of the cul-de-sac, the dead end, that is intersectionality and identity politics.

1:05:48It takes you to a circular shooting squad. Right. It makes no sense. Anyway, I'm going to give up my speech here. No, you're good. I could talk about this for a long time too, but thankfully we moved on from that world. I think we're in such a healthier place. And the good thing about it is that I'm seeing, and maybe this is just wrong, but it feels to me like there's a lot more women in early stage startups now. When you go to like these, like I speak at early stage events, a lot more female founders. I think it's just happening naturally. I'm much happier for any of the women that are in tech or say like I have younger sisters, one of which was in business.

1:06:25I'm much happier when they're successful on their own virtues, not because of their sex. yeah and i just don't think it did anyone any favor to say oh is she on the board because she's a woman because california required that yeah i needed women you token like tokenizing women and people of color and all this stuff yeah it's it was just not good for them not good for anyone or you were invested in by a fund right that's for this demographic so then what does that say to the other venture firms oh so you couldn't raise money from a venture firm that does it based on merit you have to go to a one that does it based on your asian your you know whatever irish yeah irish need not apply yeah i wish we got some special attention um i mean we did back in the day it's amazing what mass hysteria can do and it's also amazing how when the world has a certain narrative that it's incredibly insanely difficult to think independently from that yes and And when you've been through a few moments like this, and this was a relatively quick one, like really the height of it was like five years in tech.

1:07:34I think that teaches you to have a little bit of skepticism about whatever the next thing is. Yes. A little bit of healthy, respectful skepticism, but super down hard. Yeah. Tell me about this 52-week charge you did, this discipline you imposed on yourself and then doing the all hands again. and then just ripping out the comms team like Elon did at Twitter and other places. I give a lot of credit to Elon for what he showed us could be done. And then I give a lot of credit to Brian Armstrong for saying, listen. Amazing, awesome. Because he flipped his position. He's like, yeah, I think we want diversity.

1:08:08I'm not a bad person. And then he's like, wait a second. You can't talk about all these issues at work. That's not why we're here. It's just, it's mission drift. Our mission is, you know, crypto and financial freedom and financial independence for the world from crypto. the end if you want to discuss other things you can do that it's called your life outside of work so maybe talk about yeah what you what you did in terms of these devices and why you deployed them because i'm always interested in successful people then coming up with devices or toolkits right like you can't you you this was pre-meditated you know when you came back 18 months all of this is built off the central idea that great people let's just say great builders of at any level in a company of any discipline great builders there's a small set of fundamentals and ideals that they love what are they right so and i say that because and i'll speak to them in a second because this is just as much about promoting an environment for those people as much as it's cutting out the stuff that's a distraction.

1:09:14So what are those things? Great people, great builders, they actually love honesty about the challenging game at heart. And so one of the values I wrote was success first. And I said, our number one mission is to create shareholder value. And great people are like, yes, I want it because they feel themselves as a partner to me in their in this business and they are i say you're my business partners we're in this together let's create shareholder value we're all shareholders let's build an incredibly valuable organization so great people love that other types of people who feel like that's not for them or they resent certain types of people maybe ideas about power and capitalism they're like oh i don't i don't that's not for me so shareholder value but business-minded people who are ambitious who want a true partnership, they like that idea.

1:10:11So that's one. Another is hard work. Let's work really hard and let's bring an intensity. And I started to use the word aggression. I got a little feedback. Someone's saying, oh, you're going to actually quite, you're going to offend some people using the word aggression. So I made sure to say aggression in every single all hands. Let's get aggressive. Let's get aggressive. I mean, come on. What's wrong with aggression? We had five quarters of declining revenue growth. I'm like, ooh, that's not good. We need an aggressive new plan to win. And so again, good people. Trigger warning. Aggressive.

1:10:45Exactly, exactly, exactly. There was a multiple of those things I was given. I also said it's wartime and people are like, hey, there's some people that are in war. And I'm like, hey, I'm sorry. Yeah, I'm sorry the metaphor is being misinterpreted by you, princess and cupcake. Totally. And again, that's another way in which you typify a great builder. They're resilient. So some people are like, you said wartime. What are you doing? This is a disgrace. This is disgusting. This is horrible. I'm upset. I'm offended. I'm offended for him. I'm offended for some person I've ever met. Resilient people are like, oh, I get it.

1:11:20This is a war. This is a fight. We're going to die as a company if we don't get into this battle. Like, let's go. So great people have that degree of resilience. And they don't like the drama. They're like, hey, I'm here. I only get to have one career. and at any one point in my career i only have one company i work with let's do something great let's not get distracted and way like waylaid by this drama so there was like another thing i promoted which is um you know that degree of maturity and then another is just new ambition it's not like okay we're going to be another nice sass company that you've never heard of it's like let's build a truly iconic technology company.

1:11:59Let's contribute to this moment in time in tech. Let's be one of the greatest brands and organizations that people want to learn from, steal from, copy, poach employees from. Like, I want you to be getting hit up by the very best startups of our time because they know intercom employees are incredible people. And I want you to say, you know what? They treat me great here. they pay me great here i love this mission and they stay but thanks yeah like you were saying before about the zendesk uh diaspora right like they were shot after so there's something going on in the water there absolutely and i love the fact that you use a metaphor right i think like we all went to school and they explained metaphors are just ways to understand the world a little different or communicate they're not perfect that's why they're metaphors and you use a metaphor and it offended somebody and they were offended for people they've never met.

1:12:58This is a tell that this person is not focused on the work. Right. It's like the ultimate tell. It's like I'm looking for something to be offended by. Look, I could rant all day long about why it's ridiculous to get offended about a metaphor. That's actually not my point. My only point is we have only a thousand seats in Intercom. We have only a thousand seats in Intercom. There are eight billion people in the world. Okay. It's my job and responsibility as CEO to all shareholders that I make sure that every one of those seats is filled by a person who really wants to be here, really believes in our future, wants to work hard, super resilient, and actually isn't too bothered by the sideshow of who's offended.

1:13:43Maybe they actually are like, yeah, you know what? It'd be nice if we didn't offend them. That's fine. But I don't care enough because I want to win. Not that I don't care enough, but I don't care enough about that like minor little conversation above this thing where we're trying to build something special together. So that's it. It's not really about, yes, I could, I could, I could write down these people. It's not about the issue. What are the best 1000 people we could find? One of the things that I think founders that have this drift and you seem to in your 1.0 of your career falling into, which is likability.

1:14:15And here's the thing. You obviously want to be loved and liked by winners, by hardcore people who want to change the world. Now, would it be nice to be liked by everybody else? Of course, nobody wants to be disliked. But if you are disliked by somebody who is unfocused in their career, well, maybe that's actually a positive signal. Yeah, that's where I was going to go. I'm not really trying to create enemies. Now, the reality is when you see your company going in the wrong direction, it's really fun to come rip up the rules and actually ruffle a few feathers. I'm not really trying to create enemies.

1:14:49However, strong values and clear opinions, that means something. Not like, we want to win, but actually strong opinionated things like the most important thing is shareholder value. They are designed to repel as much as they are designed to retract. Early on, I recorded a video and we put it on our careers page. And I said, with a smile on my face, because I was sincerely positive about it. Hey, if this is exciting to you, please apply. If it's not, there are so many great companies out there. Don't waste your time. Don't waste your time. Right? And that's what I feel about people at Intercom who were not a fit.

1:15:26I'm like, listen, again, one career, you can have one job at a time. Hopefully you've only had one job at a time. Go find somewhere where you're a great fit, where they love you. Can you imagine how much happier you would be? Find somewhere Your values. It's not inherently wrong to want to be activists. It's just not what we're doing here. I had this realization with people as well, where I told them, you realize when you're a venture capitalist, you have a fund and you invest in, we invest in a hundred companies a year. We're running an accelerator and we make a lot of small bets. I said, if the founders call us, they text us, the SLA, the service level agreement is respond immediately.

1:16:07Right. And when I email you or text you, the service level agreement is respond immediately. If you are in a movie with your kids, it is not a problem if a founder calls you to step out of a movie and answer the call. Some people will be like, whoa, LifeWorks Founders, you're with your kids in a phone call. Now, I don't think you should be doing that all the time and ignoring your kids. But if a founder is in trouble and we are a 10 % owner in their business and we're their business partner and they're in a panic and you're 14 year olds watching Futurosa, like I took my 14 year old, I could miss five minutes of that movie to just say, is everything okay?

1:16:43I'm in a movie. I can step out. It's not a problem. You know, I told people I judge you based on your response time when off working hours. And I just tell people that. And I said, if you can't work 50, 60 hours a week, you cannot be in venture capital. It is a competitive pursuit. Yeah. And integrate it with your life and enjoy it. Like you have to find a way to make it healthy. But the reality is that there just are trade-offs. You know, if you weren't a VC, if you weren't trying to be, I mean, this is one of the things that people say, like, if you're trying to be the CEO of a unicorn company, you're trying to be like an NBA player here.

1:17:20There's more NBA players than there are CEOs of unicorn companies. and these players as we acknowledge with people all people who lead fields make egregious sacrifices i'm not even trying to fetishize those sacrifices they may actually be holistically wrong we may all get to the end of our days and be like oh damn it we should like spend more time with our kids or days or painted or whatever it is like that's an okay thing but these are decisions we make because this building and creating gives us a degree of purpose and you You should live your life according to whatever gets you going. And so it just kind of is what it is.

1:17:56It's like an interesting thing. The NBA analogy is amazing because if you and I got on the court and they blew the whistle and you and I were on the team with the Lakers and LeBron James, he's going to lose immediately. The game will be a blowout immediately. We're not built for that. Right. Period. Full stop. Now, if you took two random NBA players and you said, hey, you be a VC and you go to the board meetings with this ceo immediately would pay like you have no experience in this like it's not going to work you do you have never developed software you've never invested in technology companies so understand that even with these crazy pursuits it will become immediately apparent if you are built for it or not right but we lived under some weird delusion for a period of time that like everybody gets to do this and everybody gets to have life work balance i can tell you like if you're up against sequoia and kleiner totally you know and sax and craft like and bill gurley or michael moritz like they were responding to emails on the weekend right they weren't fucking off right that's just not how google was built yeah whether it's right or wrong or smart or great for your health on the field that that is the game game on the field you know and that's it hey listen i could talk to you for hours and then we did um i'm gonna book you uh right now for six months from now please will you come on in six months to would love to right i'm just it's going to be a twice a year thing for us because you're so thoughtful and like the story is so great and we got to only so much here but i can't keep you for three hours in the first one we're just going to do it every six months going forward to check in i would love to thank you for all the questions well no i you know what it's like the greatest gig i have in the world people were like you know this i'm about to do 2 000 episodes of this podcast this week and startups over 14 years it started 14 years ago when ipods were with these ipods and they're like hey you're still doing all this and i'm like hey you know what like it's the highlight of my week to do three or four episodes of this and i learned so much and then i get out of a discussion like this with a winner like imagine you get to talk to winners all day long thank you for calling me a winner no you are like i mean i watched you build this business from 2011 till now and i know you took a lot of bad beats and five quarters of getting your ass kicked that cannot be fun sure The resiliency, you know, is, it really is like when I watch founders, I have now determined, like, there's like a competency level and then there's resiliency.

1:20:19Yeah, it's true. Can I add one more thing into the mix though? It's like, do it. Let's go. Experience. Because like, maybe, maybe Owen McCabe is a tough cookie, but actually 10 years ago when I was beaten up the way I even get beat up today, it was not as fun. Now I'm kind of like, this is what it's like. Stick to your guns. I have my principles figured out. doesn't mean every day is easy and there's like different stress and different problems on any given day but like it's to be expected but when you're i'm 40 now when you're 30 yeah no i'll tell you what it is i call it blood in the mouth have you ever gotten actually punched in a bar fight thankfully you're from i don't know if i should be offended by that or not i'll take it from another irishman but no i haven't i have not i you know like i tell you when you get punched in the face it's a very interesting experience like i'm talking when you get really sock not like a graze because what happens is the world goes away for 10 seconds and you wake up on your back looking at the ceiling and the throbbing pain of it's crazy and then you taste blood in your mouth and you put your hand like this and you look at it it's pouring out of your mouth like i've had this happen a couple times uh in brooklyn then there's something that happens like the fifth time it happens where you're like okay blood in the mouth now it's on and you become built for it and what you're experiencing in your 30s and 40s is you're not built for it it's getting punched in the face does not phase you like the first time each time it goes down by half right and now when somebody comes to you and they're like hey we got a legal letter you've been served you're like okay that goes in this stack yeah or someone's quitting or someone's upset about something you said in the all hands or whatever you're like let's figure it out take a number and then you go right to the problem and and this is what age does in the resiliency it's such a good combination because for young people listening to this week startups understand that the stuff that panics you now is going to just not even change your pulse in another 10 years you're just gonna be like oh okay and there's there's so much proof of this but i i heard an interview with barry weiss uh interviewed from the free press and she's becoming quite a good interviewer um on our podcast that's called i forgot the name of it's like candidly or frankly or something honestly right she had jerry seinfeld on and she brings up with jerry seinfeld you were in scientology you took a couple courses or whatever what was that like and like he says you know there was one thing that always stuck with me that i thought they got right which is when there's a problem uh just go right to it and address it immediately and it just like the power of it goes down like the the anxiety it's always the right thing to do when there's a problem or there's some tension to just immediately go to that that's what the great founders do later in their in their years for me it's just like companies themselves are super resilient all sorts of shit can happen and they keep going the world keeps going yeah the world keeps going it's not existential when you're younger you're like oh my god it's all over i'm a failure you're like no no keeps going that that's actually the role i've coveted most in my career now it's like sitting uh what are the jewish people called sitting shiva when you sit when you know after somebody's died or a hospice when somebody's in the process of dying right i've i've sat shiva or done hospice with people uh whose companies have died and i say hey you know i know you shut the company down let's go talk about it yeah let's go have a meal let's have a beer let's go for a walk whatever the jam is and i'll just sit with them and say tell me everything you're feeling just let it all out how do you feel about it what the regrets what are the mistakes and uh enjoy your three years at facebook or linkedin or wherever you're sold the assets to and the team landed yeah and uh you'll be out of there by the way in 18 months or 12 months even though you get this three-year thing they're gonna let you out early and then let's talk about your next company right you're gonna be okay don't forget that there are five beautiful days in the future 100 and you know tragically we've had like you know one or two people have committed suicide in our industry because of that profound failure and the impact it has with them and nobody has the presence of mind to pull these people aside and say you're bigger than your last idea it was just an idea yeah but you can tell someone that and i could have been told that many times when i was failing and it's one thing being told and it's another knowing it and we just tie up our whole identities and selves sense of self and our importance and validity and lovability in these yes projects of ours you know founder and ceo of intercom the founder and ceo of a billion dollar company right it's just like people say it to you over and over again the articles say the pocket and then you're like oh you know oh yeah no that doesn't matter it's just still takes time takes some time yeah and maybe it's good if it never really goes still got the fire a little bit but yeah you can manage it you can see it in you like i'm aware of it in me i really want intercom to do well but i'm also like you know what i'm like good independent adventure come yeah it's like as an artist if you think of yourself as an artist creation you know if an artist creates an album you know and they become so identified with that specific song or that particular album or that particular movie especially young artists who hit like something perfectly it can be so crippling because this idea that like what can never get better than this and it's like of course it can steve jobs created a bunch of computers and then he created the iphone and then he did pixar you know like there's always going to be something next so just if you ever have that despair just walk to three or four people who are slightly ahead of you on the track yeah and they'll explain it to you yeah don't ever do this final solution thing like it's it's so tragic when people get too caught up in their companies and their projects that they think uh you know this this is who i am it's not i agree i agree anyway it's a good note to it it's good that we got here because a lot of people don't want to talk about this stuff you're such a great guest uh thank you everybody check out intercom.com if you're running a startup i don't need to tell you that they always do right by startups i know that they got a startup program and you give like absurd discounts i've always appreciated that about you so we'll do that you're hiring but there's only a thousand seats so you better be elite or you better be you better love to build that's it better love to build that's it there's a lot of talkers in our industry like the building is just so it's so rewarding but it's like we had this moment in time where they're like the talkers started taking all the slots yeah you ripped out a lot of that i think yeah and i think uh america needs to rip out a lot of that too it's time to build it's time to i mean mark can be like bombastic and whatever he's so right like i i have i don't know if you spent time in the middle east at all like dubai or whatever i got to spend some time there and then texas and florida and i'm now judging like a big part about how i judge regions of the world is how quickly they can build something awesome for their citizens like a school right or a bridge right or a high-speed train right and it's like in california it's like yeah we've spent tens of billions on the high-speed train it's like yeah i haven't taken it yet and then in texas like i was talking to elon like about the gigafactory at one point and i was at the opening with him we're just sitting there you know i'm like one of those behind the stage moments and talking about like this kind of surreal right like that you built this uh i don't know if you've ever seen the gigafactory in texas yeah it's like one of the largest buildings on the planet and he built it in like a couple years i said how long would this have taken in california i'm just curious he's like i'd still be in the paperwork i mean how long did it take to build that toilet in san francisco i think it was like closer to 10 years than five and it was 1.7 million right to build a single toilet probably a pretty nice toilet i think that toilet has checked off every dei checkbox nice every like every potential ethnicity contributed to that one bathroom every screw was a different person and everybody got to check it out i'm gonna go check out that toilet we should that'd be like actually you and i should do that that'd be like a great there'd be a great bromance date you and i can just go yeah you let me know check out that toilet like that'd be amazing for 1.7 million symbolizes all that is great about america it does it does we'll talk about the american uh american exceptionalism next time and we'll see you next time on this bye-bye thank you sir