How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO)

Eoghan McCabe is the founder and CEO of Intercom, a customer service platform that has successfully pivoted to become an AI-first company with its agent product, Fin. After stepping away from the CEO role in 2020 due to health issues, Eoghan returned to find the company’s growth had stalled. Just one month after his return, ChatGPT launched, and within six weeks, Intercom had a working prototype of what would become Fin. In this conversation, Eoghan shares the brutal reality of transforming a late-stage SaaS business valued at multiple billions into an AI-first company that’s now growing faster than most public software companies. *We discuss:* 1. Why Eoghan believes most late-stage companies won’t survive the AI transition 2. The “founder mode” transformation that required firing 40% of staff and resulted in 98% employee satisfaction 3. Why having “nothing to lose” is the ultimate advantage in AI transformation (and why comfortable companies will fail) 4. How Intercom transformed from a plateauing SaaS business to an AI-first company growing at 300%+ 5. How Intercom’s pricing evolved from “the most hated in SaaS” to a model that charges just $0.99 per resolved ticket 6. The cultural transformation required to compete with AI-native startups 7. How 12 years of therapy and a period of “ego death” shaped Eoghan’s leadership approach *Transcript:* https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-intercom-rose-from-the-ashes-eoghan-mccabe *My biggest takeaways (for paid newsletter subscribers):* https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/i/170710700/my-biggest-takeaways-from-this-conversation *Brought to you by:* Great Question—Empower everyone to run great research: https://www.greatquestion.com/lenny WorkOS—Modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, free up to 1 million MAUs: https://workos.com/lenny DX—The developer intelligence platform designed by leading researchers: https://getdx.com/lenny *Where to find Eoghan McCabe:* • X: https://x.com/eoghan • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eoghanmccabe/ • Website: https://eoghanmccabe.com/ *Where to find Lenny:* • Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com • X: https://twitter.com/lennysan • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/ *In this episode, we cover:* (00:00) Introduction to Eoghan (05:00) The state of Intercom (09:53) The decision to pivot to AI (12:33) Why Eoghan is "anti-bot" in customer service (16:19) Pricing strategy evolution (19:26) Implementing the AI transformation (26:11) Cultural and organizational changes (31:18) Surviving a coup attempt (40:05) The future of AI and business (45:11) AI's impact on jobs (48:44) AI and human creativity (50:26) The importance of young AI talent (55:00) The cultural shift in AI adoption (58:00) Personal growth and leadership (01:04:34) Intercom’s success in producing product leaders (01:11:05) Intercom’s unique company culture (01:14:11) Lightning round and final thoughts *Referenced:* • Intercom: https://www.intercom.com/ • Fin: https://fin.ai/ • Des Traynor on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/destraynor/ • The art and science of pricing | Madhavan Ramanujam (Monetizing Innovation, Simon-Kucher): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-art-and-science-of-pricing-madhavan • Pricing your AI product: Lessons from 400+ companies and 50 unicorns | Madhavan Ramanujam: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/pricing-and-scaling-your-ai-product-madhavan-ramanujam • Brian Chesky’s new playbook: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/brian-cheskys-contrarian-approach • Behind the founder: Marc Benioff: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/behind-the-founder-marc-benioff • Anthropic co-founder on quitting OpenAI, AGI predictions, $100M talent wars, 20% unemployment, and the nightmare scenarios keeping him up at night | Ben Mann: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/anthropic-co-founder-benjamin-mann • Fergal Reid on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fergalreid/ • How Perplexity builds product: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-perplexity-builds-product • Yosi Amram’s website: https://yamram.com/ • (Nathaniel Russell) Ego Death Now: https://heythereprojects.shop/products/copy-of-nathaniel-russell-space-is-a-place • Daniel Kahneman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kahneman • Palantir: https://www.palantir.com/ • Stripe: https://stripe.com/ • Revolut: https://www.revolut.com/en-US/ • Paul Adams on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pauladams • What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/what-ai-means-for-your-product-strategy ... References continued at: ⁠https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-intercom-rose-from-the-ashes-eoghan-mccabe⁠ _Production and marketing by https://penname.co/._ _For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected]._ Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You don't have a choice. AI is going to disrupt in the most aggressive, violent ways. If you're not in it, you're about to get kicked out of all of it.

• 0:08Lenny Rachitsky?

  You have very successfully shifted late-stage SaaS business to an AI-first agent-based business.

• 0:14Speaker 00

  Finn, our AI agent, will pass 100 million ARR with Finn in less than three quarters.

• 0:20Lenny Rachitsky?

  Let's talk about how you made this actually happen.

• 0:22Speaker 00

  We were about to hit like $0 net new ARR, which means we would have been in negative growth territory.

• 0:28Lenny Rachitsky?

  So ChatGPT launches, was it just like, this is it? We got to go all in on this thing?

• 0:32Speaker 00

  I said, we need to become a wartime company. If we don't fight for this, we are dead. I jumped hard on AI. But I also restarted the culture. I rewrote the values, designed to be a sharp knife to cut out the parts of the company that I just knew wouldn't be effective.

• 0:48Lenny Rachitsky?

  If you're trying to make the shift and it's just not moving, you may need to go hardcore founder mode.

• 0:52Speaker 00

  The way that greatness is created is that you find a CEO who's willing to make brave, hard decisions and own the results.

• 0:59Lenny Rachitsky?

  What percentage of the employees kind of turned over during this period?

• 1:02Speaker 00

  Ultimately, like 40%.

• 1:04Lenny Rachitsky?

  You said there was a soft coup. Is there more you could share about that?

• 1:09Lenny Rachitsky?

  Today, my guest is Owen McCabe. This is the first in a series of conversations that I'm having with founders who have successfully transformed their established SaaS or marketplace businesses into an AI-first company that is growing like crazy and overtaking their decade-plus-old business. So many companies and product teams and founders are trying to navigate this very tricky time where every industry is being disrupted by AI. And my goal here is to help you essentially disrupt yourself before somebody else does. The story of Intercom's transformation into Finn is incredible. Their traditional business was valued at billions of dollars, was making hundreds of millions of dollars in ARR, but growth started to plateau and was even about to go negative. Six weeks after GPT-3.5 came out, they had a working prototype of what is now Finn,

• 1:54Lenny Rachitsky?

  and Owen and the team decided to go all in on AI. Today, Finn is growing like crazy, already at eight digits in ARR, and Intercom is on track to be growing faster than every public software company by next year. In our conversation, Owen gets very real and honest about what it takes Win right now? What do you have to do to turn the ship around at Intercom? In spite of a lot of pushback and even a soft coup attempt? What do you believe people still don't understand about what is happening in software and AI? And so much more. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of a bunch of incredible products, including Lovable, Replid, Bolt, N8N, Linear, Superhuman, Descript, Whisperflow, Gamma, Perplexity Warp,

• 2:39Lenny Rachitsky?

  Granola Magic Patterns, Raycast, ChapierD, and Mobin. Check it out at lennysnewsletter.com and click Bundle. With that, I bring you Owen McKay. This episode is brought to you by GreatQuestion, the all-in-one UX research platform loved by teams at Brex, Canva, Intuit, and more. One of the most common things I hear from PMs and founders that I talk to is, "I know I should be speaking to customers more, but I just don't have the time or the tools." That's exactly the gap GreatQuestion fills. GreatQuestion makes it easy for anyone on your team, not just researchers, to recruit participants, run interviews, send surveys, test prototypes, and then share it all with powerful video clips. It's everything you need to put your customers at the center of your product decisions. With a prompt as simple as, "Why did users choose us over competitors?",

• 3:24Lenny Rachitsky?

  GreatQuestion not only reveals what your customers have already shared, but it also makes it incredibly easy to ask them in the moment for fresh insights from the right segment. Picture this: your roadmap's clear, your team's aligned, you're shipping with confidence, and you're building exactly what your customers need. Head to greatquestion.com/lenny to get started. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're building a SaaS app, at some point, your customers will start asking for enterprise features like SAML authentication and SCIM provisioning. That's where WorkOS comes in, making it fast and painless to add enterprise features to your app. Their APIs are easy to understand so that you can ship quickly and get back to building other features.

• 4:06Lenny Rachitsky?

  Today, hundreds of companies are already powered by WorkOS, including ones you probably know, like Vercel, Webflow, and Loom. WorkOS also recently acquired Warned, the fine-grained authorization

• 4:20Lenny Rachitsky?

  Service. Warrant product is based on a groundbreaking authorization system called Zanzibar, which was originally designed for Google to power Google Docs and YouTube. This enables fast authorization checks at enormous scale while maintaining a flexible model that can be adapted to even the most complex use cases. If you're currently looking to build role-based access control or other enterprise features like single sign-on, SCIM, or user management, you should consider WorkOS. It's a drop-in replacement for Auth0 and supports up to 1 million monthly active users for free. Check it out at workos.com to learn more. That's workos.com.

• 5:04Lenny Rachitsky?

  Alan, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

• 5:09Speaker 00

  Thank you. Great to be here.

• 5:10Lenny Rachitsky?

  You have done something quite extraordinary with Intercom, something that a lot of founders and product teams are trying to do, which is to navigate this very scary disruption that's happening as a result of AI to most businesses. You have very successfully shifted, as you described, a late-stage SaaS business to an AI-first, agent-based, very successful business. I want to use this time to extract as much as I can out of your journey so that people that are trying to navigate this and having a hard time can have less pain, less suffering, and hopefully get to something that works. To give people a sense of just how well things have gone, can you share some stats about the current state of the business, how it's going?

• 5:52Speaker 00

  Currently, across the business, you know, we benchmark ourselves against all the public software companies, there's like 120-something B2B software companies. We're like in the 15th percentile for ARR growth, so we're up there. Finn, which is our AI agent, which is, you know, the future of the business, the thing that will disrupt the old business. It's, you know, growing north of 300%. It took off really fast, like all these other AI companies you hear of. The first year, it grew from 1 to 12 million ARR. We're now in solid mid- Eight-digit ARR growth there will pass 100 million ARR with Finn in less than three quarters. And yeah, Finn, you know, we're in the customer experience category with Finn.

• 6:35Speaker 00

  So it's one of these agents that helps do all your customer work. And they all started with service. And in that category, we are the biggest by customer count, biggest by revenue, best by performance benchmarks. We win all our head-to-heads and our direct competitor big-offs. We're rated number one on G2. So I think we're doing, we're doing pretty well. We're doing far better than we imagined at this point.

• 7:00Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay. This sounds like the dream for a lot of founders, especially ones that are stuck with their existing business that isn't going very far. So let's get to that. Let's talk about the beginning of this journey. You had a business that was working, people used it, loved it, over, over 100 million ARR, I believe. Talk about just the state of the business at the point roughly when you decided, I really need to make a big change and go AI, AI first.

• 7:23Speaker 00

  It was already in the hundreds of millions. Enter commerce, 14 years and change now. Part of the story is that in 2020, I had been sick for a couple of years. The background is I had mold toxins and later I found out that I had got a tick bite and that messed me up. And so I left the CEO role in 2020. And, you know, a lot of the mistakes I had been making when I was sick got worse. We became what a lot of late-stage software companies are today, which is a bit bloated. We lost some energy. Our strategy was diluted and unfocused. We're trying to do all the things for all the people.

• 8:06Speaker 00

  We didn't know what problems we were really solving and for who. And the result was very slow revenue growth in like the low single-digit percent. And I was away for two years, unsatisfied with where the business was going. We had this post-COVID sugar rush, which a lot of big companies at that stage did. In 2021, everyone's valuation and revenue was through the roof. And that hit a lot of problems in a lot of these companies. And we had five quarters of successive, you know, sequential decline in our net UAR.

• 8:49Speaker 00

  And we were about to hit like zero dollars net UAR, which means we would have been in negative growth territory. We never got there. I managed to stop it before we got there, but we were falling each quarter. And I found that I, despite my wishes to go and have new adventures, still had a lot of pride for this damn thing and didn't want to see it. And in a way that was so different from the way it started. It started with so much hope and optimism, like so many companies do, and it was about to fade away. So that was when I felt like I need to go back and I need to make a change. I went back and one month later, ChatGPT was

• 9:32Speaker 00

  announced. So it would be really neat and tidy to be able to say that the AI transformation came. I knew I couldn't be on the sidelines. I had to save this thing from the coming disruption. Actually, I got whacked across the head by this AI thing, but it also ended up being a gift.

• 9:54Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay, so ChatGPT launches. Was it just like, this is it? We got to go all in on this thing? Was it like, hmm, let's watch this thing? How quickly was it clear that this is the future? This isn't working what we're doing?

• 10:06Speaker 00

  We and I were very lucky in that we had an AI group already. We were in the customer communication business, chiefly doing customer service. We were building bots, but they were rudimentary AI. We had a bunch of our own machine learning that did Q and A for customer service, but it required a phenomenal amount of setup and was kind of crappy. But we had a number of AI engineers in the company already. And so when GPT 3.5 came out, they said this is different. And it didn't take long for people to start to imagine that this is going to be pretty disruptive to service. And it started where we imagined that this was

• 10:47Speaker 00

  going to just wreck everyone selling seats, everyone in the conventional SaaS game. And we believed that was quite possible for some couple of years after that moment. But we were only six weeks into the launch of GPT 3.5 when we actually had a beta version of Finn. So I got a text from Dez, my co-founder.

• 11:11Speaker 00

  A week or so after the launch of G P T three point five and he said the A I team have something interesting and they actually think we could make a product out of this. And this was long before there's now like no doubt a hundred service agents. We had something very early working and and part of what we had to our advantage also was that we had this giant base three hundred, you know, sorry, thirty thousand paying customers or, you know, hundreds of thousands of active users, you know, millions of their users, billions of data points. So we had a lot to play with.

• 11:45Speaker 00

  And so we jumped on it. And now obviously, it's fun to tell that once again as a, you know, to to to to support the idea of this brave maverick move. And I won't discount the fact that we were brave, but we were coming from a point of having nothing to lose. So, you know, like, we certainly are unique. I I don't know a a single company of our size and age that has pivoted this hard to A I and being as successful as we have been. But we also previously were screwed. We ran a really tough spot, so had no choice. So I'll take the kudos and credit, but also have a lot of empathy for companies that weren't as in as much trouble as we were. And so

• 12:27Speaker 00

  try to thread the needle and sustain the old business while adding to it with the new A I stuff.

• 12:34Lenny Rachitsky?

  Something I heard from someone that worked at Intercom, correct me if this is not correct. You've always been very anti-bot in the customer support business because it just you didn't like how impersonal it was. It just didn't feel like the way you wanted to build a business. And then now that's what you do. Talk about just that transition.

• 12:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know. It's a it's a fun and ironic twist. Our mission from the early days was make internet business personal. And when I came back and we started to lean into A I, I started to wonder, does that mission make any sense anymore?

• 13:06Speaker 00

  Now, part of our lean into A I is that we had no choice, not only for the business, we needed something new, but also we saw that this is the future and you can't fight the future. You must be part of it. And so, okay, fuck, we're gonna be part of it. And

• 13:21Speaker 00

  Ultimately, and it's very easy to tell yourself these little stories. So I'm open to anyone telling me this is bullshit. But when I interrogate myself, my soul and my mind, I don't think it is.

• 13:38Speaker 00

  When I interrogate my heart and my mind, I don't think it is.

• 13:43Speaker 00

  But I'm now of the belief that providing a customer with a highly engaged, instantly available, expert, consistent, fast, charismatic, funny, friendly, personal agent,

• 14:03Speaker 00

  available for literally every single customer, every minute of the day, around the clock, is so much more personal than making them wait two, three, four days for a crappy canned response. And so that's the irony and the magic and the wonder of AI. Even if it does make us ask some hard questions of ourselves and think carefully about its impact on humanity, it actually is superior at the things we describe as personal and human relative to humans themselves.

• 14:48Speaker 00

  And so that's where I'm at today. Yeah, maybe it's a bunch of fancy post rationalization. But honestly, that's, that's really where I stand.

• 14:58Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah, I think, I think data has shown people often prefer not to talk to humans to just to solve problems that can just be solved. Like it's, it's, it's a lot of stress to try to figure out how to talk to some support agent that doesn't know anything about what's going on.

• 15:10Speaker 00

  Yes, and AI is just better. Look at Waymo. So Waymo doesn't crash. It has 3.5 times less crashes than humans.

• 15:24Speaker 00

  It doesn't bother you or bug you. I like to chat with an Uber driver as much as the next guy, but not always. It doesn't have hygiene problems, doesn't take wrong turns. I mean, it just doesn't do all these things that really bug people. And it's really interesting to see Uber now offer women the option to call only female drivers. And I guarantee the reason they're doing that is because women love Waymo because they feel safer. Like AI is so often superior and humans are going to be far better at all the things. I'm pro-human. I love humans. I really

• 16:06Speaker 00

  want humans in the mix for all things in the rest of my life. But when it comes to practical, productive, efficient and effective value, the glue in between the human parts of our lives, I actually want AI and robotics.

• 16:20Lenny Rachitsky?

  Before we start talking about how you actually made this transformation a success, one other piece of history is just your pricing strategy historically has been not liked by people. For example, I once had a Twitter poll or a survey on my newsletter, just like, what products do you pay the most for? All your SaaS products in here comes by far the most. I know people constantly complain about just how unclear it was and how high it was. And now you guys are at the forefront of how to price AI products. So we're going to get to that. But just talk about the lessons and what happened there with pricing back in the day.

• 16:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I want to just validate your survey data. Yes, people abhorred our pricing. It was a meme. There were like actual funny, popular viral memes on Twitter that were making fun of our pricing. Part of the problem, if not all of the problem, there's two problems. One was our strategy.

• 17:18Speaker 00

  Super unfocused, as you said, we're trying to do all the things for all the people. And when you're trying to do all the things for all the people, your

• 17:27Speaker 00

  efforts to capture all that different types of value are gonna necessitate pretty complex pricing. If you're like customer service and you're selling seats and you're doing outbound messaging and you need to charge for messages and you're doing like SDR messenger on a website, you need to charge for leads. Already, that's just metrics in every direction. And then if you're trying to sell to many different sizes of customers, you need tiers and gates. And it just became a behemoth. So part of the problem was the unfocused strategy. And then the other part of the problem was an unwillingness to

• 18:05Speaker 00

  frankly, make bold decisions, say no, pick a lane, and actually take pain in the short term for the long term. We rolled out this new pricing, and this is even before the fin pricing you're talking about. When I came back and I said, yes, we're gonna lose a lot of revenue here. Like, I can't remember how much we wrote down, but we actually have already given away something like something like $50 million in AOR. We've reduced the prices for a lot of customers just to give them way simpler pricing. Because, surprise, surprise, when people feel like they have far simpler, more predictable, fairer pricing, they'll stick around longer. And it creates so much more ease in the company

• 18:51Speaker 00

  and promotes a healthier relationship with the customer too. When our people saw that we were screwing customers effectively in every direction, it starts to erode the idea that we care about our customers. And then they make other customer-friendly decisions. And so one of the values I promoted when I came back was that we would be customer obsessed. And so we had to kill our own pricing and give away a lot of revenue. So that was the The spirit behind the changes, but we can talk about the Finn pricing if you want to also.

• 19:22Lenny Rachitsky?

  Let's save that because that's a really important topic that I think people need to hear. Let's talk about the shift and how you made this actually happen. You make it sound like, oh, like not fully, but it's, oh, we had to do, like, it wasn't working anyway. There's no risk to go all in on this AI thing. You're making $150 million a year AR. You're worth at least a billion dollars at that point, right? As a business, yeah.

• 19:45Speaker 00

  I mean, multiple billions. We were making more money than that. So we were like multiple hundreds of millions. Yeah.

• 19:50Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay. Very difficult to actually do, you know, even if things don't feel like they're growing anywhere. So first of all, just what was the moment, if there was one of just like, okay, the six week experiment of someone building Finn internally was, was that being like, this is it? Or was there another moment of like, let's go all in on this?

• 20:07Speaker 00

  It was the combination of the company being older, us all, me and the founders being impatient. Like, are we going to make something out of this? We went through a time when the company was worth a lot. We're private, so we don't have like a daily mark to market. But all the other public software companies dropped 80%, 85, 90%. We saw our revenue growth crater. We were used to nice double digits. We were in low single digits.

• 20:39Speaker 00

  And so part of it was like, let's do something here. Another part of it was my own kind of anger and dissatisfaction with how the company was being run and the mistakes that I made myself. I made a lot of compromises as a lot of founders and founding CEOs do to placate employees or do it out of fear to bring investors along.

• 21:08Speaker 00

  You know, following advice in the industry and best practices, you know, you betray your intuition in little bits and pieces over the years. When the bright spark of your original idea turns into this big unstoppable scary corporate beast. And a little bit of you dies every single time you go and betray yourself in that way. I it's very like you, you know, if you could pick in your mind, three or four tech darlings from 10 years ago. When you meet the CEO and talk to them privately, very few of them feel outstanding about the state of their culture and the decisions that they make and the way in which they have to work.

• 21:52Speaker 00

  All of them have betrayed themselves in little ways. And I was, I had left the business, I was super sick. I was burned out frankly from the revenue, even having started to slow down before I left. I had been attacked unfairly in the press, just all of me was just fed up. And I decided to take a very authoritarian, top down, aggressive founder first approach to all the things. And I found that deeply cathartic. And that was the thing that led to me in, in part, the other was just good old fashioned logic. And the other was desperation, saying, we're doing the AI thing.

• 22:37Speaker 00

  The AI thing, exciting and sexy, exciting and sexy. We need some new energy thing here. The new AI thing makes sense. And also just my intuition says, go for it. And so, you know, when people tell these stories, they rewrite history in their minds for the stories to be elegant and also so that they support their own self aggrandized narratives about their brilliance. Actually, it's a big messy cocktail of things. And anyway, that's my attempt at explaining the cocktail.

• 23:09Lenny Rachitsky?

  I saw a stat that when you first launched, when you first had this kind of prototype, you were losing money on every transaction that you're charging like a dollar or cost you a hundred twenty dollars, something like that.

• 23:22Speaker 00

  Hundred twenty, yeah, yeah.

• 23:24Lenny Rachitsky?

  Hundred twenty cents, okay. So there is a lot of vision here. This is going to get to a place where this actually will be great and affordable.

• 23:32Speaker 00

  You know, it's really funny, like we charge ninety nine cent. To resolve tickets, you know, customer problems. And we have a higher resolution rate than anyone else. And we are very proud of that and we obsess over that. It is the metric by which these agents are assessed. And we wanted our revenue to be 100% aligned with the value that they attained. Because we had all this scar tissue from pricing prior that felt unfair to customers. And so we said, what's the most fair that we can possibly fathom? And when we did all our research, we found that many SaaS businesses were spending between $20 and $30 per ticket resolved.

• 24:16Speaker 00

  We were spending 22. Now, consumer businesses, maybe they go down to $5. We were thinking, like, can we charge $10? That seems fair. It's half price. Could we charge $5? Could we even charge $2.5? But early on, we started to sense that people just wouldn't value the digital work as much as the human work, even though the digital work is better, more consistent, always available, makes the customer far happier. And so we actually started to lean into a price that we thought would be, you know, was the nexus between us earning the most and it being the most palatable.

• 25:00Speaker 00

  We basically said that if someone is not prepared to pay 99 cent for us to rapidly and elegantly, perfectly and excellently solve their customer's problem, we need to wrap this up. We don't have a business here. So that was where the 99 cent came from. And I always believed that pricing should come from value and not from costs. Cost is our problem. And we just had this sense and intuition early on that this thing will get cheaper. And it got a lot cheaper. And so, you know, the margin moves around, but we make a margin that makes this.

• 25:39Speaker 00

  More than worth our while and we know our customers get an excellent deal and are able to deliver to their customers a level of service that they never could before.

• 25:50Lenny Rachitsky?

  It's a very clear pitch. We just had a mod of on on the podcast and pricing expert and he has this phrase beautifully simple pricing is where you want to get to. Also, he's a huge fan of outcome based pricing, which is what you're describing here where you can pay for an outcome. So you guys are in the magic quadrant of his pricing advice.

• 26:07Speaker 00

  Yes, thank God. Our pricing woes are over.

• 26:10Lenny Rachitsky?

  Finally.

• 26:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:12Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay, so going back to how you actually did this thing. So you basically you just you described what many people think of now as founder mode, just top down, as you said, the third area and just here's what we're doing. We're not going to sit around waiting for you to give me ideas. How did what did you do? What did that look like internally?

• 26:30Speaker 00

  Um, you know, there was a couple of things. One was we were burning a lot of money. So I cut a lot of costs aggressively, canned a bunch of different projects. We had this like big glorious office we were about to fit out. And I'm like, we're about to hit negative growth territory. Like, stop it. And a lot of companies were really stuck in the prior world where they just were used to being super successful, rich and wealthy and spent like drunken sailors. So I stopped all of that, got really frugal in ways I never thought I would. I still haven't touched the interior design of this office I'm in here, even though I call it the Hotel Marriott. Sick of it. Anyway, that was one. Another was I picked

• 27:12Speaker 00

  a lane strategically. We were all over the place. And I said, we're doing service. Zendesk had been acquired a couple of years prior. They were strategically, energetically, culturally dead. They were upsetting customers in the market. There's an opportunity there. We're doing service. Forget all the other stuff, even though there was a lot of people in the company saying, Well shit, we still have eighty million dollars of air orb that we're getting from the other thing and we're really good at that. And there's a big opportunity. There's other companies in this space worth billions. It was, you know, the type of decision that were I to practice the professional CEO approach, which is, hey, folks, what do you all think? Let's take everyone's input. Let's put it all down on a spreadsheet. Everyone out of

• 27:56Speaker 00

  color beside all of the different options that we may take. Let's make a group decision. I said, sorry, this is what we're doing. So I was very dictatorial in that respect. We had no one making decisions if somebody needed to, even if I had some qualms about the decisions myself, I couldn't predict the future, but someone had to make a call. You know, obviously, as soon as AI came around, I jumped hard on AI and announced that we were going to spend nearly a hundred million dollars of our own cash on that. We allocated a lot of capital. But I also restarted the culture. We had just a very comfortable culture, as a lot of companies did. There was a lot of focus on social issues and a lot of complaining and dissatisfaction. And I rewrote the values designed to be a

• 28:38Speaker 00

  sharp knife to cut out the parts of the company that I just knew wouldn't be effective. So I said that people must be resilient, that we had very high standards, that we'd work incredibly hard, that shareholder value was the most important thing that we'd optimize for. A lot of things that were controversial for this prior crowd. And then I designed these quarterly performance processes where not only would you get a mark or a grade for your performance against your goals that quarter, but you'd also get a score for your behavior against the values. And I hardcoded a formula myself. And so I took it out of the manager's hands to say, if people got below a certain mark, respectfully and lovingly, we would say, thank you for your service. We're going to go forward without you. And

• 29:23Speaker 00

  so you do that just a small number of quarters, and you can start to shape an organization that's designed in the image of the values you want to create. And obviously, there was a lot of pain, a lot of satisfaction. There was attempts at a soft coup. There was letters sent to the board. People were really unhappy. But on the other side of it.

• 29:44Speaker 00

  The people left were

• 29:48Speaker 00

  the most incredible entrepreneurial, brave, inspiring, happy individuals you could possibly imagine. And then you hire in their image. We ran an anonymous employee survey like, I think, fifteen or sixteen months after I started aggressively working through the org and rebuilding the org and rebuilding the culture. And we had a ninety-eight to ninety-nine percent approval of management, leadership and new strategy. And this is coming from me having the lowest class door rating for a CEO I had ever seen when I came back. So I, I, I just want to explain that.

• 30:30Speaker 00

  Like being that deliberate about your culture and upsetting a lot of people is the path through which you can create a culture where people are super happy, super engaged, super reliant. And now we have just this highly performant organization. Yes, we're messy in many ways. So that was a big part of it too. So it was kind of strategically picking a lane. You know, remaking how we go to market, the pricing was a really, really big piece that had a big effect.

• 31:02Speaker 00

  Betting on AI and then culture. And I kind of buried the AI thing because frankly, none of this would matter if we didn't bet on AI. So the story could all be summed up by saying, when you ask, what did I do? It was that we, we built Finn and that changed everything.

• 31:19Lenny Rachitsky?

  You said that this was very unpopular. I imagine many people were not happy with all the change and how top down this was. You said there was a, a soft coup. Is there more you could share about that? I've never heard that story.

• 31:29Speaker 00

  When, when you make that degree of change and you tell people that they're in control, like we did in the previous generation of late-stage businesses, there's going to be some friction when you change the rules. And it's my strong belief that great employees in great companies want and are constructed out of.

• 31:52Speaker 00

  A very clear and strong hierarchy where it is the responsibility of the CEO to make brave and hard decisions unilaterally, yes, using their experts as inputs and be responsible for the outcome. If I make decisions that propel the company in the way that thankfully my decisions have, I get rewards and kudos and I get to go back to the board and say, I want a bigger grant. If I don't, I get fired and I should get fired. If my big brave unilateral decisions put us in the toilet, then I have to take responsibility for that also. So that's how, in my humble opinion, it should work.

• 32:33Speaker 00

  And I for one, don't know of a great company that doesn't work that way. You'll see from time to time, I did this a couple of years ago, people will construct these indexes of the performance of companies that are founder-led. And of course, this is a self-serving statement, but it's also true. And surprise, surprise, the founder-led companies perform substantially better because they have the moral authority and the willingness to take the risks that the professional CEOs don't have the remit for. Professional CEOs are typically told, don't mess things up. And the founders are bored if they're not taking the risk of messing things up from time to time. And so that's, in my opinion, what creates greatness and great innovation.

• 33:16Speaker 00

  But like I said, there will be friction, change in a company that's configured for democracy and committee decisions and soft and gentle interactions and communication to be properly founder-led and top-down.

• 33:31Lenny Rachitsky?

  So a big lesson here is if you're trying to make the shift and it's just not moving, there's a lot of resistance, you may need to go hardcore founder mode and make some significant change. What percentage of the employees kind of turned over during this period?

• 33:45Speaker 00

  Could be something ultimately like 40%. So it was a big turnover over some couple number of years. You know, often the culture is set by a very small number of people. So it only took a quarter to really start to change the tenure of the tenor of the conversations.

• 34:06Speaker 00

  That were happening, but to bring in the people that were that new level of ambition and wanted to work as hard as the rest of us and work in a mature and engaged and excited way, that took a little longer time. You know, there's such a thing as product market fit. There's a thing as founder market fit. There's a thing as founder product market fit, you know? That's how you're doing it right. But there's also such a thing as employee founder product market fit. You have to have the right employees for the type of business you're creating. And there are companies that want the need to be more stable and they're going to want the need to hire more stable individuals. There's going to be companies that want to

• 34:49Speaker 00

  do the highly collaborative, more democratic thing. I won't invest in them, but there's companies that want to do it. If you're an employee that enjoys that, there are a lot of positions out there. There are big companies like Google that do that. There are startups that hire the crazy, you know, young, wild, messy, early startup people, and that's great for them and the company too. So it's really all about having the right individuals. And when you create that, not only do you create great success, but you just create a lot more happiness and balance and harmony. You know, ultimately, the employees who wanted a more, you know, gentle, democratic environment, they're not going to be happy in a company

• 35:31Speaker 00

  like Intercom or Coinbase or any of these strong organizations. They'll be more happy somewhere else. So even if it requires a little bit of a loving push out the door, I know that you're actually doing them a favor in the medium to long run.

• 35:48Lenny Rachitsky?

  I was going to say that. A lot of these people will be happier working in a different company.

• 35:52Speaker 00

  Who wants to go to war every day with your organization and in Slack? That's just not fun. It's not go for the nervous system or the soul.

• 36:02Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah. So this whole period sounds very stressful for you. Did you ever regret coming back and just like, what the hell did I get myself into? What am I, what am I doing to myself?

• 36:12Speaker 00

  I never regretted coming back.

• 36:15Speaker 00

  But I have many moments where I don't enjoy the job. I didn't, I didn't regret coming back because it was deeply cathartic for me. When a founder runs away from their business, it is the ultimate betrayal of, you know, their heart and the dream that they have. Now, it's okay to wrap things up and quit. But when you kind of run away, like I kind of had to because I was sick and burned out and, and, and kind of disenchanted, I don't know, it didn't feel good. So especially when I had done that, having betrayed in a million or a thousand small ways, my intuition, there was something I needed to exercise.

• 36:59Speaker 00

  So it has been deeply meaningful in that respect. And then, of course, I'm fortunate that it worked out. I get to be on the second most popular podcast in tech. I get to like pat myself on the back in front of all these people. Who wouldn't want that? That said, the reality is that for particularly people like me, who like the adventure and the, you know, high agency, you know, unilateral day-to-day movement where you're trying to make big, wild, bold decisions. The reality is that if you're successful, most of your days will not be that.

• 37:43Speaker 00

  It'll be reviewing the bonus policy for next year and reviewing, you know, the comp proposal for your execs for the next year. It will be, you know, showing up for accountability meetings and stepping through the status of different work streams. It'll be rushing from meeting to meeting, having eight, nine, 10 meetings a day. I don't happen to believe that that's a great way to live your life. It'll be trying to get to all the emails you need to get to such that all those people aren't offended and hurt and, you know, trying to communicate in the ways with your staff and your team that is empathetic and thoughtful

• 38:26Speaker 00

  and keeps in mind that they may be having as shitty day as you are like. It's not, you know, you're giving me an opportunity to paint the story of this, you know, maverick-led adventure that you might imagine in a comic, like, you know, like, I'm, for some reason, picturing Tin Tin, you know, sail the seas, you know, this swashbuckling adventure. It's not. It's corporate life kind of sucks, particularly for people like me. So I have many of those days. And so the only reason I'm still around is that I have a broader mission that makes it worthwhile for now. But that's why you see so many of our best founders get to a point where they're like, okay, I've had

• 39:11Speaker 00

  enough corporate fun. So that's the most authentic answer I could give you. No regrets coming back, but plenty of pain on a day-to-day basis.

• 39:22Lenny Rachitsky?

  Today's episode is brought to you by DX, the developer intelligence platform designed by leading researchers. To thrive in the AI era, organizations need to adapt quickly. But many organization leaders struggle to answer pressing questions like, which tools are working? How are they being used? What's actually driving value? DX provides the data and insights that leaders need to navigate this shift. With DX, companies like Dropbox, Booking.com, Adyen, and Intercom get a deep understanding of how AI is providing value to their developers and what impact AI is having on engineering productivity. To learn more, visit DX's website at getdx.com/lenny. That's getdx.com/lenny.

• 40:06Lenny Rachitsky?

  One of the interesting things about this space of agents, there's all this talk agents are taking over, it's the future of software, SaaS is gonna be replaced with agents. CX is like a classic. It just feels like, like, I imagine looking forward, it was not obvious. Now, looking back, it's like, obviously, this is an amazing place for agents to take over work, but there's always this talk of agents will do everything and all the SaaS software is going to be replaced with agents. Do you have a sense of just like how far this disruption will go outside of CX? Because it's already happening in your businesses.

• 40:35Speaker 00

  The first thing I'll say is that CX is deceptively large, given it's hidden behind just two words, two letters. You know, customer experience really is service, success, sales and marketing, in my opinion. It's all engagement with all customers. It's the biggest

• 40:58Speaker 00

  Part by headcount of any business, any consumer business and any B2B business. The biggest organizations are sales, service, success. So I'll talk about things other than CX in a moment, but I want to emphasize that CX is the majority of business operations. Of course, it'll go beyond CX. Any function that requires a lot of repetitive operational mechanical work will be automated, whether it's chasing or collecting or issuing invoices.

• 41:42Speaker 00

  It could be onboarding or offboarding employees. You know, there are so many repetitive jobs in an organization that it'll start to replace. One of the interesting questions is how much will be generic operations bots? How much will be expert agents? You know, there are expert agents for law and contract review. There'll probably be expert agents for accounting, but you'll need the glue in between all of these agents too. But future organizations will be agents everywhere. I have spent quite a bit of time thinking about what does it all look like in the future?

• 42:26Speaker 00

  And, you know, I imagine it as a medley of humans and agents. And I don't think it's obviously going to be humans on the top and the agents all on the IC roles. I think that'll be more of a complex mix where you're going to have.

• 42:50Speaker 00

  You know, people that are like managers and leaders, but they'll be in IC roles, working with agents to configure them for success and monitor and manage their progress, kind of add that oversight and cover for edge cases. And so, you know, I think we're going to be surprised in which the way that these organizations go. They'll definitely be smaller, they'll be flatter because of that. I won't be surprised if there are agents at the highest level too. I mean, I've been thinking about how, and we do have a great human chief of staff here, but imagine a future human chief of staff that like understands your priorities

• 43:31Speaker 00

  and actually talks to you and does a check in each day and reaches out to different people and asks for updates and helps organize your priorities and helps you remember who you need to keep accountable, you know? Clearly, there's an opportunity for that. And so you can imagine agents in specific roles like customer service, in operational roles being glue and in being kind of like co-pilot or assistant roles like that which I mentioned. But, you know, what I think that all brings is just epic levels of efficiency. It's going to be super deflationary, there'll be a lot more competition.

• 44:13Speaker 00

  AI itself is insanely competitive right now. It's so intense in a way that was never before. That's going to come to all industries when so much of their inner workings becomes automated. And ultimately, I think it's going to be great for the consumer. They'll have more options, cheaper options. And I can't but see that be great for the economy. A lot of economic lubricant, as it were, and a lot of new movement and activity. And if we were to really go off the reservation, but I'll stop here. That means that we need more humans too. We need population growth to show up for this big growth economically.

• 44:55Speaker 00

  And yeah, I just see the human, the future as just a beautiful collaboration between humans and agents in every direction.

• 45:02Lenny Rachitsky?

  I love the optimism. Someone described this once as a society, what is it, a agentic society?

• 45:09Speaker 00

  Right.

• 45:09Lenny Rachitsky?

  Us and agents living together.

• 45:11Speaker 00

  Right.

• 45:12Lenny Rachitsky?

  This begs the question around just jobs. We had Mark Benioff on the podcast. He's, you know, all agent force, agent force, agent force. And I asked him just like, what jobs do you think are going away? He's just like CX going away, gone. Sales not going away. We need salespeople. Just with your sense, I know it's like touchy subject. No one ever wants to say jobs are going away, but just with your sense of where jobs might be disappearing more most.

• 45:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I don't find it to be particularly touchy because jobs have always gone away. And technology has done a really good job at stealing jobs that were repetitive, demeaning, dangerous. We have less people losing limbs in dangerous factories or dying and suffocating down mines because of the technology that we now have available to us. People breaking their backs on farms. Or just doing things that's highly demeaning to the great, beautiful, creative potential of each human individual life. So I want to apologize for competing with or competing for shit work.

• 46:17Speaker 00

  Because all the while, technology has done that in the past. Population has increased, GDP has increased, longevity, crime rates have diminished in the Western world. The world that has enjoyed the most technology. So we have no good reason to not believe that that won't continue. Even while there is difficulty and there has been in the past. No doubt, people who were gainfully employed in dangerous work in mines had to find new work. And so I don't take that for granted, but I think that this is part of the long arc of humanity flourishing and getting healthier and happier.

• 47:00Speaker 00

  What are the work, the types of work that will go away? It's all the demeaning crappy stuff and that exists in. You know, digital businesses, you ask a human to sit at a keyboard answering the same question day in, day out, and you get to a point where you don't even ask them to answer the question manually, you ask them to click the button that brings up the macro. Like, what a horrible use of a human life. I've met thousands of people that have worked at Intercom, a broad range of talents, people who they might not describe themselves as particularly high IQ, maybe they're were suited

• 47:44Speaker 00

  at that point in their life for this highly repetitive work. You talk to them for two or three minutes, you'll see the bright spark of a beautiful human that if I if they got to do the right thing, they would light up and bring so much happiness and joy to the world. And so like, that's the mission we're all on. I'm not Pollyannaish here, like I said, and I'm suggesting that there won't be friction, but for the most part, we're doing good. And to get specific, there will be CX roles and a lot of basic repetitive roles. There is a lot of repetitive stuff in sales. And so you'll you'll do more sales with less people. And there are SD or roles, qualifying, you know, basic questions, you're not going to need as many people in sales organizations.

• 48:29Speaker 00

  So I'm a little misaligned with Mark in that respect, but what he's getting at is that what salespeople bring to the table is human connection and trust. And that is not about to go away anytime soon. And thank God for that.

• 48:44Lenny Rachitsky?

  I had Ben Mann, the co-founder of Anthropic on the podcast recently, and he said that he's like, even my job is probably going to go at some point. He's like, Lenny, your job is going to be replaced by AI at some point. That was pretty compelling, did not expect him to say that.

• 49:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't know. I like, it will in many ways, we're going to have agents and AI to aggregate content and create content, but humans.

• 49:15Speaker 00

  As much as when it comes to productivity, value efficiency, efficiency is not the number one thing that we value. You know, if efficiency was the number one thing we value, I'd always buy the cheapest clothes, furniture, computers, even paper for my printer. But I think humans value things like beauty and human stories and human heart and connection. And not only will they still want those and they'll still want a Lenny that has his own story and his own take and opinions and is a little imperfect,

• 50:00Speaker 00

  but they'll pay more for it. The abundance of AI is gonna make automated things worth zero, just like the value of cheap content on YouTube. Why do people subscribe to some channels and pay more? Why do people pay to rent movies? Because some things have more quality, more beauty, more craft, more art, more humanity. So I think there'll always be a place for that.

• 50:33Lenny Rachitsky?

  Phew, all right. I've got a couple more years at least.

• 50:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:37Lenny Rachitsky?

  Before I move on to a different topic, just kind of reflecting back on this shift to Finn and the success that you've had. Are there any other just lessons that we haven't touched on that you think might be helpful for folks that are trying to go through this journey?

• 50:51Speaker 00

  You know, I think it's ultimately that you don't have a choice. My co-founder Des is writing a book at the moment and that's core to the idea here. You don't have a choice.

• 51:07Speaker 00

  The story of the technology industry or digital technology is really short. And it's been, it's punctuated by a small number of things. Microprocessors, personal computers, the internet, maybe mobile. Now there's AI. I think AI is bigger than all these things. And all of these things disrupted essentially all categories. So not only is this likely to disrupt all the categories, it's going to disrupt it in the most aggressive, violent ways. And if you're not in it, you're about to get kicked out of all of it. And so my strongest advice is roll your sleeves up, figure out what's going to disrupt you, have fun with it.

• 51:50Speaker 00

  You need to bring in actual talent. We and I would be nothing if we didn't have actual AI scientists and leaders. It's the only way we can be successful here. We have an incredible person who by the time this is out, will have received a promotion to Chief AI Officer. I keep announcing all these things and confidence to you. Fergal Reid, and he's just one of the very best in AI applications. And we happened to be working with him for many years. So part of it is finding the talent and part of it is bringing in the young talent too. AI is kind of a young man's game. And I'm young, but I'm not as young as a lot of the kids building AI.

• 52:34Speaker 00

  And so learning to empower and enable them and learn from them too is a really big deal. And unfortunately, part of what you learn from them is the only way you're going to win right now is if you work your ass off. Because all these little AI companies run by kids in their twenties are literally working 12 hours a day, literally 365 days a year.

• 53:01Speaker 00

  No joke, all of them. And that's not a fun idea for many of us, especially those who've grown up. Some, some people in our generation have kids or a lot of them do. There's like comfort and stability in your life. You don't want to work like that, but if you want in, that's part of the price. And that's how so many of these young, new AI companies are going to win. Cause very few of the previous generation companies are willing to make all of those changes and go all the way in. And so my actual advice, which is not that helpful, is that if founders of previous generation companies are themselves not willing to roll up their sleeves and get into it

• 53:46Speaker 00

  and work as hard as the kids, hire a kid. You can be a chairperson like I was, have a lot of fun. You can mentor the kid, hire a kid, cause you're in the wrong job, buddy.

• 53:58Lenny Rachitsky?

  I love how pragmatic this advice is. And what's interesting as you talk about 12 hours a day, every day, it's like, we're trying to get close to what agents are doing, uh, which is half. That's basically 50% of agents.

• 54:08Speaker 00

  But that, that's not just a poetic, cute phrase, thing to say. That comes from something very real, which is these younger companies know how to use AI in ways that the older companies don't. The younger companies are vibe coding and using AI for their creative work and for their job descriptions. I guarantee you go to companies of our generation, and even we have had to push people. You go to companies of our generation, most people in most organizations, particularly non-technical organizations, they're not using any AI. Maybe they're starting to use chat GPT to write a job description, but they're not doing it by default.

• 54:53Speaker 00

  Uh, and so. That's more than a joke. You're competing with young companies that are in part AI.

• 55:02Lenny Rachitsky?

  This reminds me, I did an interview with the perplexity founders. It was, I just checked, April 2024, so just over a year ago. And they were saying that the way they operated, and this sounded so crazy at the time, is anytime they were, they had a question for anyone else on the team, they first asked chat GPT about it, and then they go ask the person, I was like, that is insane. And now it's just like obvious. That's what we all do now. I'm just like, hey, I'm just gonna talk voice.

• 55:28Speaker 00

  It's a, it's a prime example. They're doing many such things. When I say 365 days a year, they're the company I think of because they're doing exactly that. All these young companies are doing wild, weird and ridiculous things that people your, in my age, kind of chuckle at. But it's business as usual for them. So there's just a big mind shift, cultural shift, and there's a culture clash of the previous generation versus the, the new generation. The sooner you kind of wrap your head around that, the sooner you can start to unstake yourself, I think.

• 56:04Lenny Rachitsky?

  And just to build on that, like, this sounds crazy to work this hard. Like, it sounds very stressful, not fun. Why would I do this? This sucks. But at the same time, this is, as you said, such an unusual, rare opportunity. There's so much opportunity. There's so much wealth being created. There's so many businesses being created. This is the time, if you were to ever work really hard, this is a good time to do it.

• 56:26Speaker 00

  I, I think so. I don't actually generally promote working that hard. I try to not fetishize it. I actually think a life well-lived includes taking slow walks in nature where you're not thinking about AOR growth or hiring your chief revenue officer, you know, not going to eight meetings a day. Maybe you should go to no meetings a day. Certainly not working 12 hours a day. I don't actually promote that.

• 56:57Speaker 00

  In general, as a thing one should do with their life, I'm simply saying that if you want to compete and and enjoy success in this age, which means you need to be doing AI, that is the price. So you either decide to pay the price or get out. Don't half ass it. You see all these companies saying, we do AI and they've just sprinkled a little bit of crappy AI and they've got the same cultures. It won't work. The one thing I will say, the one little asterisk to my first point is that all great people and great things have been achieved through hard work.

• 57:41Speaker 00

  And so I'm speaking out of both sides of my mouth here to younger people to let them know that every way of living is valid, but people who have achieved things have always worked hard and they find a way to enjoy it too. And particularly in 2025 in AI.

• 58:01Lenny Rachitsky?

  I want to follow this thread. I was gonna ask you this earlier, but I didn't. And I want to see if this takes us somewhere interesting. Just watching you speak and talk, you're very self reflective, very centered. You have these really good breaths you take when you think about something. I met you a long time ago randomly at a party when you were just starting Intercom. I don't think you were like that. Was there during this kind of two year period, was there kind of a transformation that you went through to kind of?

• 58:27Speaker 00

  Absolutely, yeah. There's a couple of things. First, I mean, there's three things that come to mind. Working in a startup for 14 years has a certain way of kicking you in the head.

• 58:42Speaker 00

  Many times a day, that either kills you or makes you far stronger. So that's one piece. There's no elegance to that point, but I think we can all intuit that that level of experience teaches you something. You grow up very fast.

• 58:59Speaker 00

  Point two is I did a lot of therapy. I found this amazing guy 12 years ago. He started a couple of his own tech companies and talked on public. He only coached and was a therapist to CEOs. He's now kind of in a later stage of his career, but this amazing guy. His name is Yosi Amram. Amazing guy. I just landed on my feet. I just didn't know who I was dealing with, but you know, one of the greatest minds and teachers and of kind of the last, I don't know, many decades. People don't even know him, but he's, he's, he's thought and worked with many CEOs.

• 59:40Speaker 00

  And he just helped me get to know me and take time for myself. And people like to hate on therapy right now. I think a lot of therapy sucks and a lot of therapists are not good. And they fear that actually therapy will lobotomize them and turn them into thumb sucking, navel gazing, you know, soft, irrelevant losers that won't have that edge anymore. And the interesting thing about 12 years of weekly therapy and spiritual work is that it takes your edges off, but they're all edges that are super counterproductive.

• 1:00:25Speaker 00

  All the edges that made you an asshole, got you triggered, miscommunicated or like, you know, fought back when, when you were insecure. They take all the edges away. Then help you see yourself and love yourself so much more for who you are. Be completely unafraid to acknowledge the things you're not good at, but own the things you are. And in understanding yourself, you understand others better and can communicate in a substantially more connected and authentic way. Great, great therapy and has to be great is a recipe for brilliant leadership, in my opinion.

• 1:01:06Speaker 00

  And then the third part is,

• 1:01:09Speaker 00

  two years away where I ran away, where I was sick, revenue growth wasn't doing so hot. I unsuccessfully tried to defend myself from a bunch of fake bullshit in the, in the newspapers. I mean, I was beat up and in a moment like that, your ego, your sense, any sense you have of your greatness is eviscerated. And that's painful. It can be so painful that many people don't come back from it. And I credit the 10 years at that point, or nine years of therapy I did at that point, plus the support of this therapist and coach that I had to surviving it. But if you can survive it, what you end up with on the other side is all of those insecure,

• 1:01:53Speaker 00

  well, a lot of the insecurities and all that ego bullshit that made you super ineffective, jealous or triggered for all sorts of different reasons, it's gone. And your image that you are this perfect, brilliant leader that all successful founders form when they are successful, had to die. And the reason that's so good is that that's so limiting. When you have this ego identity of yourself about how fucking amazing you are, then any moment that challenges that is super scary. Anyone who questions it is offensive.

• 1:02:33Speaker 00

  And so I credit wherever I am today, and I have decades of learning still to go to those three components. And I feel super fortunate to have had all of them, even though the last one sucked. I can finally say, wow, it really helped.

• 1:02:51Lenny Rachitsky?

  Thank you for sharing all that.

• 1:02:54Lenny Rachitsky?

  I'm glad I went there. I want to show you something that I randomly have in my office. My wife just got me that I think you're gonna love. It's a, it's a piece of art that I think will resonate with you.

• 1:03:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, what am I looking at here? So it's a hand.

• 1:03:04Lenny Rachitsky?

  It's a hand with a snap. And then let me see if you can see what it says.

• 1:03:08Speaker 00

  I can't see what it says.

• 1:03:09Lenny Rachitsky?

  It says ego death now.

• 1:03:12Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:03:13Lenny Rachitsky?

  Look at this.

• 1:03:13Speaker 00

  Good. Exactly.

• 1:03:15Lenny Rachitsky?

  There it is.

• 1:03:16Speaker 00

  May, may all our egos peacefully become smaller and leave this mortal coil. That, that the reality is like none of our egos ever die. And even great. There was, you know, Ram Dass is this great spiritual teacher who died a few years ago. And someone asked him on his deathbed, something like, you know, how did you get over your bullshit or your ego? And he said, hmm, I never did, just the edges got smoothed away. This is a guy who had like 70 years of the deepest, wildest spiritual work. He acknowledged, no, still my same self. So the ego is still there and we actually need to acknowledge it and love it.

• 1:04:00Speaker 00

  And when you, when you acknowledge it, then it's not a surprise when you're like a little jealous. You're like, huh, I'm jealous. That's funny. Okay. And it's all, it's all good.

• 1:04:09Lenny Rachitsky?

  Reminds me of Daniel Kahneman, who wrote all these books about biases that we have. And like, here's all the ways we're flawed. If people ask him, have you like learned to live more rationally? He's like, not, not at all. Knowing all these things about how we're flawed and the way we think, all these biases doesn't actually, I can't use it in life.

• 1:04:24Speaker 00

  We're human and we should let ourselves be human. I think it's beautiful. We're, we're logic systems, but we're also heart systems and body systems and soul systems. So all of it is good.

• 1:04:35Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay. I want to go in a completely different direction. The last thing I want to talk about, I, I needed to mention this. I don't know if you've seen this, but I've been doing research on which companies produce the best product leaders. And I've been doing this by looking at which alumni of companies go on to become CPOs at the highest rate, get promoted the most at their next job, become the first product manager at a few startups, start their own companies. Intercom is coming number one across this research, next to like Palantir and Stripe, Revolut. So the question this begs is what are you, what are you guys doing that produces such great product leaders? There's kind of like the hiring piece and then there's the, what they do at Intercom piece. So what do you think? What do you think is, is, is creating these sort of really big successes for your alumni group?

• 1:05:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't have a really succinct answer, unfortunately. I can say in the abstract, our culture is a very product-y culture. So like myself and Dez, you know, those four founders and me and Dez Trainer.

• 1:05:37Speaker 00

  Drove a lot like all the strategy. We're product guys. You know, I was, I was like, I was a software designer. You know, I studied computer science, so I'm technical, but never did it professionally. So the first part is that just product innovation design was just core to our culture. And people always picked up on that. So I think good people wanted to work here. We were good at finding good people. The other part was that because we had this sprawling strategy, we had all these products that we needed a complex structure for. And that included lots of PMs and PM groups that we gave a lot of autonomy to.

• 1:06:20Speaker 00

  And so like, kind of the product of our big messy strategy was that we had PMs that got to act like mini CEOs. And so I think that they got to learn the broader skillsets beyond designing wireframes and interviewing some customers. They really owned it like a mini CEO to some degree. I think there's one other thing, which is, you know, part to our approach was this deeply first principles thinking methodology, almost to a fault, although I don't think it's a fault. We would, I and we would create frameworks for everything. It's like, okay, we want to do these events. Who are the events for?

• 1:07:04Speaker 00

  What is the ultimate goal of the event? What's the mechanism by which events work? What are other mechanisms that can achieve that same goal? How do we define success for an event like that? How does the user or the attendee define value? What other things do those people find valuable? Like, we create these like complex systems to try and approach everything, but the net effect was we'd have really joined up considered strategy.

• 1:07:35Speaker 00

  And it's everywhere, like Paul Adams, our chief product officer, I didn't even plan to show this. He made this book recently, The AI Age and the Transformation of Customer Service. And it's a bunch of frameworks for how to think about AI, et cetera. So it's part of what we do. And so we would hire people who are good at that, but we teach that. That's teachable and not everyone does that. And so the conversations that Des and I would have, you know, we still love being on whiteboards. Our very first office, our own office in Dublin, it was a tiny office. One wall was like four, five computer, computers. The other wall was just all whiteboards. We loved that we had a whiteboard wall.

• 1:08:19Speaker 00

  In our next office, we had a room, a square room, and all walls were whiteboards. So we just love to like draw diagrams. So you can teach all that stuff. So yeah, it's just all that good energy, product, product energy, first principles, the people we chose. And on the founder's side, I was talking to Des about this this morning. Like, why have so many Intercom people gone on to be founders? I think it's because we've, we hired founder types. And my pitch to people was always come to Intercom, figure out how great companies are built and build it with us. And then go on to start your own. I would say that often at all hands. But the irony is that the people we hired back then, the founder types were probably not great employees.

• 1:09:04Speaker 00

  But they were better founders. I'm not a good employee. And so I, it'll be interesting to see if this current cohort, we'll get many founders out of this current cohort. But will they convert as well as they did before? Because we're now hiring people who want to be part of something bigger. They're more mature and grown up, more stable and consistent. They're part of, you know, they have a certain expertise and a certain lane they want to work in. And maybe they're not the crazy types that went on to start companies, but it's wild. I did see some of that research by you, particularly the one where you show the, the companies ranked by the number of founders that they have. And I'm like, what is happening? I was as surprised, I was as surprised that we were that high as you were.

• 1:09:48Speaker 00

  Because there are many other great companies on that list. So surprised and proud.

• 1:09:53Lenny Rachitsky?

  I love, I love when people say, I don't really have like a clear answer. And then you have exactly a clear answer.

• 1:10:00Lenny Rachitsky?

  And it resonates a lot with other companies on this list that I've had on of what the themes are. And I'll just reflect back a few of them. One is complexity. That comes up a lot. So like, and interestingly, most of the other companies in the list, I'll read them real quick. Intercom, Palantir, Revolut, N26, Dropbox, Chime, Stripe, and then Coinbase and Notions down there. So many are fintech, almost all are fintech.

• 1:10:22Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:10:23Lenny Rachitsky?

  And the complexity there is really high. So there's like a really interesting trend there, just like complexity. Ownership is another one that comes up a lot. Mini COs, GMs kind of roles.

• 1:10:33Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:10:34Lenny Rachitsky?

  First principles thinking and just like going to the bare metal comes up a lot in these conversations.

• 1:10:38Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:10:39Lenny Rachitsky?

  And then hiring senior people, hiring founder types.

• 1:10:42Speaker 00

  Yes, like Stripe did a lot of that. I think Stripe did a lot of first principle stuff and founder types.

• 1:10:48Lenny Rachitsky?

  The, the other thing, we're not, we wouldn't even talk about this, but you guys invented Rice. You guys popularized jobs to be done, like speaking frameworks. You guys are a wealth of frameworks that we all use.

• 1:10:58Speaker 00

  Drowning in frameworks.

• 1:11:00Lenny Rachitsky?

  Drowning slash changing the way everyone builds product in a really positive way. Okay. Is there anything else that you wanted to touch on or leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round?

• 1:11:13Speaker 00

  When someone like me comes on a podcast like this, they always have an ulterior motive. And that's healthy and good. It's part of the transaction. Some of it is to, you know, enjoy feeling like an expert. But my ulterior motive today is to make sure that people understand that Intercom is a fundamentally different type of late stage company. We are a large, old startup. Every single way in which we work is as a startup and are competing with and crushing the actual startup competition in our agent categories. And the reason that that's important for people to know is just like I said earlier that

• 1:12:00Speaker 00

  Their handicap that good but late-stage companies have is that they're late-stage and people don't mentally put them in the same box. They just don't imagine these older companies. If I told you that IBM had made the most wildly innovative coding assistant, you'd find it hard to believe. Most people would. It's maybe so interesting such that it would stick in your mind and you'd go look at it, but by default, people aren't going to look at IBM. And so I want people to take a new look at Intercom because it's a brand-new company.

• 1:12:38Speaker 00

  And our mission is to help every single type of business deliver impeccable, incredible, beautiful, personal service to every single one of their users. And people, many thousands of people are using Finn for that today. So go check out Finn, please, finn.ai.

• 1:12:59Lenny Rachitsky?

  And I don't know if you mentioned this at the beginning, but let's mention it. You predict that you will be the fastest-growing company across, if you were to look at all public software companies, next year.

• 1:13:10Speaker 00

  So, you know, two years ago, we were in the low, single-digits growth rate. We doubled our growth rate and last year, we were in the low, double-digits. This year, we're in the 15th percentile of all public software companies. So you take the 120-something public software companies, we're in the 15th percentile. So we're like getting up there fast. And if we sustain this trajectory, and it's obviously dangerous to put these types of things out publicly, but you know, I'll tell you, I look at the charts and it's hard enough to imagine where this goes. I think we're going to find ourselves being the fastest-growing out of all, relative to all public software companies. So let's, let's see. But that's the level of shock, surprise, and transformation that has actually happened

• 1:13:54Speaker 00

  here, all because of Finn. So, you know, check in with me in a year and maybe I'll be embarrassed or maybe I'll be...

• 1:14:02Lenny Rachitsky?

  Or underselling it. This is just reflects back on exactly how I started our conversation. You've done something extraordinary in your comment. I'm really happy that we're hearing that we're sharing this story.

• 1:14:11Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:14:12Lenny Rachitsky?

  With that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got five questions for you. Are you ready?

• 1:14:16Speaker 00

  Please, ready.

• 1:14:17Lenny Rachitsky?

  What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?

• 1:14:21Speaker 00

  So I found I lost the habit of reading as I started to get more and more stressed with my startup. And so I would listen to audiobooks here and there. But the, the most recent book I read is a book called Nuclear War Scenario. And it's a very much a nonfiction and scared the shit out of me. So if you like nightmares, it'll be beautiful bedtime reading.

• 1:14:46Lenny Rachitsky?

  Excellent.

• 1:14:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:14:47Lenny Rachitsky?

  What's a recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed?

• 1:14:50Speaker 00

  I love movies. I want TV to be better, but I very rarely find TV to be great. The one, the first and last TV show I loved was True Detective One. That was just like incredible. But the last movie I watched was 28 Years Later. And that's by Danny Boyle. Like I, you know, I was born in the eighties, grew up as a kid in the nineties. And so grew up with, you know, you know, Trainspotting was 28 Days Later. Then he made a movie called Sunshine. So 28 Years Later is a type of movie that's just not made anymore. It's the most nineties movie made since the nineties.

• 1:15:33Speaker 00

  It's like very rock and roll and also deeply touching. So I was really surprised by that. I bet, I would love to know the younger generations that are watching this, what they may think. They may hate it, but I love 28 Years Later.

• 1:15:49Lenny Rachitsky?

  So this is the same person that made 28 Days Later, 29 Years Later. Wow, okay, very cool. Didn't know about that.

• 1:15:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:15:56Lenny Rachitsky?

  Do you have a favorite product you've recently discovered that you really love? Could be a gadget, could be an app, could be clothes.

• 1:16:01Speaker 00

  So I, I like, I very rarely like products. I'm such a perfectionist that it has to be really simple with very little moving parts, like a bow, to actually be like. Good. I've started to get more into coffee. I've been buying products by fellow. They're remarkably good for consumer products, like different, it's on a different level. So there's some sort of level of taste and craft happening there that I don't see in basically any other consumer hardware type products.

• 1:16:36Speaker 00

  And of all things, I bought a Porsche nine eleven recently, and that is a beautiful product. The interiors are exquisite and there's still a bunch of shit that is gonna annoy you. And so it's like far from perfect. So yeah, perfectionism is

• 1:16:56Speaker 00

  sometimes a gift if you're in the business of creating products, but also quite the curse. You're never happy, including with the Porsche nine eleven.

• 1:17:02Lenny Rachitsky?

  I think that's the third time someone recommended a car, someone recommend, I think Boz at Facebook recommended this fancy Mercedes and then someone once suggested a Rivian. So now we got Porsche on the list. I always thought maybe one day I'll give someone all the prizes, all the products people have ever mentioned in this and those are getting, you know, Porsche might be a little high. Okay, two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you find yourself repeating, coming back to in work or life, sharing with friends?

• 1:17:27Speaker 00

  You know, it's, it's, it's, it's trite, it's not sophisticated. You know, and it's more a concept than a phrase, but it's something around the idea that life is short. I'm just so aware that time ticks by and we all live on autopilot. So much of what we do is inspired by either our insecurities or things that other people we look up to or envy do. Very rarely making contact with what we really want and following our hearts and our heads. And yeah, we just kind of like get stuck in these lanes and just live out our days. And certainly when you get, you know, forty one now, you get to forty one.

• 1:18:12Speaker 00

  And thankfully, still very young, anyone in their 40s, congrats, should feel good about that. But I know if you're in your 20s or 30s, 40 feels old. But when you're in your 40s, my experience is that the weeks and the months and then the years go by. Like, it's not a big deal. I'm like back at Intercom two and a half years now. To any of these kids in AI in their 20s, if they don't get something done or achieved by next month, they'll be so disappointed themselves and so impatient. And in some ways, at least when it comes to productivity, they're better at getting more out of the time. But I'm now trying to get more life out of the time, too.

• 1:18:53Speaker 00

  So, yeah, just, if there is a motto, it's like, "Life is short," or like, "Memento mori," you know? We're all on the way out, so make the use of what you've got.

• 1:19:05Lenny Rachitsky?

  Fun fact, I built an app once called Savorable that helped you savor the moment. It's called Savorable, and it sends you a text every few hours, I don't know, maybe once a day, with a little reminder of a way to savor the moment. And one of the texts was just like, "Remember, you will die."

• 1:19:21Speaker 00

  Yeah. And the problem is that, like, even that idea, we forget it instantly. And if you start getting texts every day, you'll ignore the text. Like, by default, we just don't want to acknowledge that reality on a day-to-day basis. Maybe that's important.

• 1:19:39Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah, maybe for the best.

• 1:19:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:19:42Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay, final question. Speaking of apps, I was doing research on you in preparation for this, and I didn't realize you built Quitter back in the day.

• 1:19:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:19:49Lenny Rachitsky?

  I loved Quitter. I found it so fun. It basically told you anytime someone unfollowed you on Twitter.

• 1:19:54Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:19:55Lenny Rachitsky?

  So the question is, what happened to that app?

• 1:19:58Speaker 00

  I think we eventually sold it for like 14K.

• 1:20:03Lenny Rachitsky?

  Wow.

• 1:20:04Speaker 00

  On some, on one of these, I think there's a website called Flipper where you could sell websites. It really blew up. It was like a little experiment, kind of a social experiment. It was the first time that I had this feeling that there's no reason someone wouldn't want to use this. Like, obviously, people are going to want to use this. And it was really instructive for me because it taught me that that feeling is possible. You meet so many founders, young founders particularly.

• 1:20:37Speaker 00

  And they don't have a sense within themselves about the value of the stuff they're building. Will this be good? Let's get customer feedback. And it is possible to build things that you deeply know makes sense. And that's why my formula for building things was to always build things for myself. And that was what Quitter was like, you know, followers go, followers go down. At that point in time, people had 100 followers or 200 followers. You'd want to know who's not my friend anymore.

• 1:21:04Lenny Rachitsky?

  Oh, man. I love that that was your bar of like, that led you to this success later is like, if it's as good as Quitter in terms of product market fit and so.

• 1:21:12Speaker 00

  I mean, it was, it had the best fit ever. About everyone on Twitter tried to sign up for it.

• 1:21:19Speaker 00

  And it broke.

• 1:21:21Lenny Rachitsky?

  Well, I loved it. Owen, thank you so much for doing this. I love just how real and open you are about everything and just how much insight you have to share. I also just love the vibe. I feel like I just am more centered just watching you.

• 1:21:34Speaker 00

  Oh, thank you.

• 1:21:34Lenny Rachitsky?

  Speak. Two final questions, where can folks check out Finn, follow you if they want to follow up on anything? And then how can listeners be useful to you?

• 1:21:42Speaker 00

  Check out Finn, fin.ai. If they want to follow me, I'm E O G H A N on Twitter. So it's Irish spelling of Owen. But if they want to be helpful to me, you know, I'd love them to try Finn. I'd love them to, you know, have their friends that run any kind of customer operations try it too.

• 1:22:05Speaker 00

  This AI thing is noisy, there's so much hype. But it's also really real. And the weird thing about Finn, even relative to the coding apps, the coding apps are blowing up. And yet, there's a lot of people experimenting and kicking tires. You can't kick tires with Finn. We only deliver value when you expose it to your customers and it closes tickets and makes them happy. And so like AI is really, really happening. And so if you know anyone out there that has customers, they should be using Finn. It's the smartest, cheapest, easiest way to dramatically enhance their business. So if they do that, they'll be helping me sincerely.

• 1:22:46Lenny Rachitsky?

  I'm sold. Owen, Owen, thank you so much for being here.

• 1:22:50Speaker 00

  Pretty fun.

• 1:22:50Lenny Rachitsky?

  This was amazing.

• 1:22:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, thank you.

• 1:22:53Lenny Rachitsky?

  Bye, everyone.

• 1:22:55Lenny Rachitsky?

  Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.