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

Eoghan McCabe returned to the CEO seat at Intercom with a mission to shake things up. Over the past two years, he's been reinventing the company’s culture, leading with zero apologies, and transforming Intercom into an AI-driven powerhouse. In my latest conversation, we dive into Eoghan’s journey back to Intercom after a two-year break, his blueprint for turning a software company into an AI leader, and the tactics he uses to keep Intercom running like a high-intensity startup. Eoghan also shares his thoughts on personal freedom and his controversial endorsement of Donald Trump. [0:00] Intro [1:33] Eoghan McCabe's Return to Intercom [3:01] Challenges and Learnings [10:44] Cultural Reset at Intercom [29:23] AI and the Future of Customer Service [31:11] Adapting to AI and Market Changes [43:00] Competitive Landscape and Strategy [48:29] Future of AI in Customer Service [50:24] The Evolution of Work [52:18] Challenges and Rewards of Leadership [56:45] Media and Public Perception [1:00:40] Political Endorsements and Reactions [1:10:11] Freedom Club and Cultural Influence [1:12:33] HR and Company Culture [1:29:35] Fundraising and Investor Relations [1:33:01] Final Reflections and Advice Executive Producer: Rashad Assir Producer: Leah Clapper Mixing and editing: Justin Hrabovsky Check out Unsupervised Learning, Redpoint's AI Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@UCUl-s_Vp-Kkk_XVyDylNwLA 🎥 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCugS0jD5IAdoqzjaNYzns7w?sub_confirmation=1 Follow on Socials 📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theloganbartlettshow 📱 X - https://twitter.com/loganbartshow 🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@theloganbartlettshow About the Show Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode of The Logan Bartlett Show, we sit down with the people behind today’s most important startups and extract the tactics, lessons, and frameworks they’ve learned the hard way. Conversations span hiring to GTM, product, growth, fundraising and everything in between - collectively forming the ultimate playbook to make you a better CEO, investor or board member. Tap follow and enable notifications to stay ahead of the game.

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

• 0:03Logan Bartlett?

  Welcome to the Logan Bartlett Show. On this episode, what you're going to hear is a conversation I have with Owen McCabe, CEO and co-founder of Intercom. Intercom is a business with over 1,000 employees doing hundreds of millions of revenue in the customer service space, and they are building out a lot of automations related to artificial intelligence. Owen and I talk about AI and what the future of the customer service industry looks like, as well as his journey back into being CEO after he resigned in 2020, and then stepping back into that leadership position in 2022. We talk about the inputs that went into that decision, including his fatigue in running the business, some health-related concerns,

• 0:45Logan Bartlett?

  as well as media reporting on allegations that he says were deeply untrue. We talk about his learnings from stepping back into the business and what he set out to change in their culture. The biggest takeaway from Owen that I had over the course of this discussion was how leaders need to authentically be themselves and pursue their own true North Star. We also go into his decision to endorse President-elect Donald Trump, what the inputs into that decision were, as well as the ramifications for both himself as well as Intercom. Really interesting conversation with someone with a range of different views that are often contrarian that you'll hear now. Well, Owen, thanks for doing this.

• 1:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, my pleasure.

• 1:30Logan Bartlett?

  Maybe for people that don't have full context, maybe give a little bit, what does Intercom do? And I guess in particular, you've stepped back in as CEO in the last

• 1:42Speaker 01

  Couple of years ago.

• 1:42Logan Bartlett?

  When was that, two years ago? Yeah, so maybe give whatever the short version, elevator pitch and all that.

• 1:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'll give you just a tiny bit of extra context you didn't ask for. It's a 13-year-old company, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. It's like one of the late-stage companies. We're trying to stay a startup.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  We are in the customer service space, a deeply boring space.

• 2:05Logan Bartlett?

  It's pretty sexy now, actually.

• 2:06Speaker 01

  And one of the largest categories in software, which is about to be violently disrupted by AI. And so I came back to Intercom in October 2020, and ChatGPT was released when? November?

• 2:21Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 2:22Speaker 01

  Like, was a month after I came back. So, yeah, our story since my return has been betting on customer service. Fully and completely with AI.

• 2:31Logan Bartlett?

  And so you step back when? When did you?

• 2:34Speaker 01

  October 2020.

• 2:35Logan Bartlett?

  2022. You step back in?

• 2:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I came back.

• 2:37Logan Bartlett?

  When did you, when did you step back?

• 2:40Speaker 01

  March, uh, summer of 2020. So I was gone just a little over two years.

• 2:46Logan Bartlett?

  Okay. Summer of 2020. I'm sorry, just to get my dates right. So you step back in 22?

• 2:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I left during COVID.

• 2:52Logan Bartlett?

  Got it.

• 2:53Speaker 01

  In around June 2020 and I came back in November, uh, October 2022.

• 2:58Logan Bartlett?

  And, uh, for people that don't have all of that, so there were some health stuff, some business fatigue stuff, some media, you know, charges and all that. Can you just give the, I mean, I think it's an interesting thing that people have gone through at different levels on each of those components.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  Well, you tell me how much detail you want.

• 3:15Logan Bartlett?

  I think it's, I think it's interesting in general.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, you know, Intercom started 2011 by 2013 or 2014. It was one of the, it was the fastest growing software company since Salesforce.

• 3:30Speaker 01

  Uh, we had a lot of pride in that. So when a company grows that fast, and this was back before companies grew as fast as that. I mean, everyone grows insanely fast now, but we grew from.

• 3:38Logan Bartlett?

  You guys in Zenefits, I remember.

• 3:40Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, it was Slack was, was, was the next one to beat us. But yeah, Zenefits must have been somewhere in there. Uh, we went from like one to 50 million an hour or in like two point something years, which I know, I feel like there's kids in their bedroom doing that.

• 3:53Logan Bartlett?

  I know, I know. People do it.

• 3:54Speaker 01

  Oh, well, it was cool back in the day. So we were one of the fastest growing companies at that time. Slack did subsequently beat us. You know, there are so many kids now that do one to 15, I don't know, a month with some AI thing that you and I have not heard of yet, but it was a big deal back in the day.

• 4:08Logan Bartlett?

  Probably released my job at some point like that one.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  Yours and mine.

• 4:11Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  And, um, so there was a lot of confidence and swagger and excitement, you know, not to bounce around too much, but whether you know it or not, basically all founders start companies out of deep insecurity to prove something. And that was not any different from that. And so having one of the fastest growing companies of all time is pretty amazing.

• 4:31Logan Bartlett?

  Became part of your identity.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  Oh my God. And then in 2016, 2017, we had made a couple of pricing mistakes and kind of strategic mistakes. And maybe it was even by like 2018, I really took up my eye off the ball on some issues. And so by late 2018, maybe 2019, revenue had started to slow a little bit. It was, we were still growing so fast, but it wasn't the same. And I started to think I'm a failure. It is ridiculous as that sounds. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I was a younger man. My all in everything was the six rapid insane success of this company. So that, that I, that did some damage to my ego.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  2019, I was attacked with some stories in the press and false stories in the press. I had no clue how to defend myself. I watched an interview you did with Parker and the biggest takeaway, at least for me and for any young founder that they should take from that interview you did is the importance of defending yourself and correcting mistakes. He learned that the hard way, but he did a good job too. Pretty amazing. He did that at the young age that he is at because I was 30 something when, when all this went down for me. So that was a further crushing. I had this image of myself as this particularly perfect, impressive founder, not helped by this incredible success that we had. So to be embarrassed publicly was just painful.

• 5:56Speaker 01

  Then I got sick in June, 2018 for good measure. I will always remember in my little office, I don't know what I was doing, but I was typing and my finger pressed a key that I had not intended to press. I'm like, that's, that hadn't happened before, but you know, as you get slightly older, I think you're younger than me, but you start to learn that funny things happen with your body. That night I woke up twitching, involuntarily twitching. And I didn't know what it was. And for years I just had this incredible fatigue, twitching, everything else. By 2020, I some days I couldn't see. So I'd wake up and I'd see, I could see stuff, but I couldn't focus on things.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  And he wasn't a problem with my eyes. So I was just beat up. My ego and my self-image was trashed, just spiritually eviscerated. And I was ready to get the hell out of there. The business was really, really hard and I just didn't have the energy or the, how would I say, gumption to like go at it day after day. I promoted our COO to CEO and I completely ran from the business. Not only was I very sick of Intercom at that stage, I was sick of tech. And I told myself little comforting

• 7:18Speaker 01

  stories like tech is bullshit now and it's so it's fake. And I don't know, I decided I was done with tech and I had taken money off the table and I had that sense of freedom. And so I imagined I'd do some other things, but mostly I spent that time resting. That was COVID, of course, too. So it was pretty interesting to just be free during COVID, did a lot of thinking.

• 7:39Logan Bartlett?

  Quite literally, what did you do?

• 7:42Speaker 01

  Quite literally, I was in my house in Berkeley for a while. I played The Last of Us 2 on PlayStation 5, which was the last video game I've played and was awesome. I slept in until 10 to 11 each day. I imagined before I quit that I would wake up at the crack of dawn and like meditate for an hour or something. I didn't do any of that stuff. I just blew every day. I realized that life is way shorter than I realized. You know, we're all so busy. We're like, wow, what would I do if I was free? The day is really short. The days just went by.

• 8:13Logan Bartlett?

  Isn't it crazy how like when you're in that state, I took a month off in between jobs and you think that you just have abundant time and there's so many things you're going to accomplish. But when your day stops being regimented in some way, I remember like thinking in the four weeks I took off, like, okay, so tomorrow I'm going to go drop off my dry cleaning and the next day I'll pick up the dry cleaning. Like that's a full day. Like that's enough to go. Like when you get out of the regimented rat race, it's just like how it spirals. We end up just hanging out.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Yeah. Plus, busy people aren't.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  Bad at not being busy. So I still had meetings and I was on the board of Intercom when I'd check in with stuff even, you know, I didn't quite want to, but I kind of felt like I had to. And I was doing things. So I did a whole lot of nothing, which in hindsight is actually what I needed. Again, I imagine this beautiful flow and zen like monastic life was none of that, but it was still great. I drank a lot of wine. I got into wine. Outstanding, very expensive French wine. It was great. Bad for my health. It was wonderful. So I did that. All the while Intercom was not going in the right direction. I didn't agree with how it was being run, et cetera. And I found myself much to my surprise, if not despair, that I really cared about Intercom.

• 9:29Speaker 01

  And they changed the branding in particular to something really abhorrent. And that really got me because still my self-image was associated with this being a cool company. I built a cool, hot, sexy company. Now it looked like shit. And I was like, I'm not going to stand for this. So that was it. My, my faux retirement and escape from tech was a complete failure. I ended up back as the CEO of Intercom, but that time away had just given me things. I didn't know. So much had changed in those two years and I wasn't aware of that by the time I went back.

• 10:07Logan Bartlett?

  Mechanically, I'm curious and share what you can, but like when you have that feeling, do you call your series A investor and you're like, hey, you know, I don't totally agree with this and I'm recharged and ready to go. Like, how do you actually go about that?

• 10:21Speaker 01

  Mechanically, in these situations, there is so much that happens that will never be spoken.

• 10:28Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah. A lot of soft diplomacy.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  That will never be spoken.

• 10:31Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. So you have that feeling. You come back into, into the business. What did you come back into specifically the, I guess, the brand? I'd be curious how you go about switching that, but then also the culture.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, so in some senses I was gifted, although I built it, but I was gifted. That was my attempt at humility and I fucked it up. I was, I was gifted the same outstanding, incredible R and D organization that we always had. We built an R and D org in Ireland and the UK. All the leaders of which joined in our early one first couple of years. You know, in the Bay Area, it's so hard to retain people in in in Ireland and the UK. It's just kind of different. So I came back to this incredible R and D organization. Now, they were building many directions. So we were losing money, no doubt, on all our investment in R and D.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  But the ability of that team to build great software fast was was still there.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  The culture was kind of quite soft and distracted by the wrong things. The company was not aware that revenue growth had been decelerating for five quarters. The company didn't know anything about the revenue growth. So I had to come in and be the bearer of very bad and shocking news. And there was a lot of kind of pre 2023 cultural reckoning,

• 12:03Speaker 01

  cultural artifacts that that including super busy employee resource groups, meeting up a lot on company time, planning, God knows what.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  They had, they were taking four day, they were doing four day work weeks during some summer.

• 12:24Speaker 01

  The many employees were just egregiously upset at my return. They really liked the previous setup. It was a lot easier. Sounds nice.

• 12:34Logan Bartlett?

  It was nice.

• 12:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, Fridays in the summer can be, you know. Sure, awesome. And yeah, you know, I could, I could, I could really go here, but I won't. But there was an incredible amount of softness, a significant loss in the high bar for talent that we had. No focus, no transparency, and an egregiously dysfunctional organization that worked super hard to reject me. That's interesting. Fascinating.

• 13:02Logan Bartlett?

  So, so, so that happens. And how do you go about actually doing a, a cultural reset? Like the, the body, quite literally, you were once upon a time the heart of the organization.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Sure, and now I was like a new heart in a.

• 13:15Logan Bartlett?

  Do a heart transplant and the body's trying to reject the

• 13:17Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 13:18Logan Bartlett?

  The heart. So I'm curious, like, in in refounding the business and coming up with a new set of values and trying to figure out who's on your team and sort of resetting a performance oriented culture. And I'm sure a lot of the things you do, if someone's listening and they they recognize, maybe they've been, you know, probably not the circumstances that you went through, but like, they're trying to figure out how to do it. What what was, once you got through the initial organ rejection, what was kind of the tactical or the plan from there?

• 13:43Speaker 01

  I will say, by the way, I know so many companies who have not had CEO changes that have the same problems.

• 13:49Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  We all kind of slipped into it. It was a different time. Money was cheap and easy in 2021, 22, business was easy. And there's just a lot of cultural turbulence. And yeah, so there's so many companies still today that are are

• 14:05Speaker 01

  have severe problems of this sort.

• 14:07Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. And they've been able to kick the can on it because of my industry in a lot of ways where they still have the cash.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  Sure. Well, yeah, I see. Like, when you get to come in as the new CEO, even if I'm the old CEO, you've just got all this moral room to be like, everything of the last management was shit, which, you know,

• 14:28Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  Which it may or may not be true, but you're not going to do that with your own culture.

• 14:32Logan Bartlett?

  You have a moral authority to do it.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  You know what I mean?

• 14:33Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, like, we're gonna change everything. We have to change everything. I have a mandate to do so.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  So it's a lot easier with that change. It's hard for founders who've been there. And, you know, every single mistake is of their problem and they're so damn close to it.

• 14:45Logan Bartlett?

  Sure.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  So I had it easier in that respect. So practically and pragmatically, you know, I refer to things that changed. What changed with me was, and this is all relative, I'm not not speaking in absolutes here, I really just gave a shit substantially less. Something changed. Honestly, being embarrassed and and having my ego and spirit eviscerated and burned does a lot to cleanse out those insecurities. I came back just really focused on on the things I was trying to achieve in life and on business fundamentals I always knew to be important and true. So I, I, I, the, the, the first key to making a massive change is to do so with absolutely no apologies,

• 15:28Speaker 01

  to be wholly true to yourself and to never, ever ask for permission. We were thought to do this kind of inclusive

• 15:41Speaker 01

  Involved collaborative democratic style of running a business where like, hey, guys, we have these little problems. Like, I'd like to discuss them and surface them. Has anyone any ideas? Oh, Logan, that's a great idea. Cool. Let's write that down. We'll include that. And you get this big blob of a non-decision. There are CEOs who run companies that way. The opposite is, hey, folks, I fucking love this company. I want us to be insanely successful, not just one of the greats, but the great. A total leader in our category. Look at this opportunity. Look at this whole space. Look at what is possible. You are so talented. Life is short. We have a thousand employees. There are eight billion in the world, right?

• 16:26Speaker 01

  We don't need a few people. Going forward, we are going to only hire impeccable, incredibly talented people, and we're only going to keep impeccable, incredibly intelligent people. We're going to operate by these small number of values, including things like resilience and hard work and shareholder value. And I designed this performance management system whereby everyone will be graded in a very formulaic way every single quarter. You'll be ranked, stack ranked in your org. The people at the top, you're going to get a lot of salary increases, butch new equity promotions. The people at the bottom, we'll wish you well, respectfully part ways. And you push that down with zero conversation.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  Zero conversation. So even still with my exec team, I'll say, hey, I'm going to make this change. I'm really excited about it. Here's why I'm going to change it. I'd love your help with communications. I don't say, hey, guys, what do you think about this idea? Unless, of course, I actually don't know. There's often times I will not know. But if I have a strong idea, I'll say, here's what we're doing. And it is remarkable, obviously, I gave you a summary of what I did, that that very firm, top-down, unapologetic approach produces incredible greatness for the best people. The best people want that. The best people don't want a soft environment. They want an environment with brilliant, really

• 17:50Speaker 01

  special people. So a couple of stats, you know, our

• 17:55Speaker 01

  Our revenue was decreasing, our growth rate was decreasing for five quarters. We're now about to book our seventh quarter of increasing or accelerating revenue. We had massive retention problems. Now we have lower attrition than we've ever had in the company, in the history of the company. And when we recently did a anonymous employee engagement survey, we got max one to 2% people who disagreed with statements like, I agree fully with the policies, I agree fully with our new values. So we've got an insanely aligned, super happy company.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  People are happy, like I'm kind of a dick about my approach and people are super happy.

• 18:46Logan Bartlett?

  We're sort of doing a postmortem now, I don't know, 18 months later or 24 months later. So what, how long did it take for the bottom to fall out as you sort of?

• 18:55Speaker 01

  It was three months of really not fun pain. And then like six to nine months of fun pain, like cathartic firing a lot of people. And then that was kind of it. So I think it took, you know, a year to get to a much better place. And then 18 months to get to like a really high charged, excellent environment.

• 19:19Logan Bartlett?

  The, the performance management thing, is that, do you still do that today?

• 19:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I still do it.

• 19:24Logan Bartlett?

  And so, so is it kind of the old Jack Welch, like bottom?

• 19:27Speaker 01

  I haven't really studied much of those. I kind of invented it myself, but I'm sure it matches what a lot of people do. Basically, every quarter, every employee gets a score from one to five on their performance against their goals and their behavior against the six values that I wrote. And the values ascribe the type of employee and values that I want us to live by. Values on posters alone are useless. And then you plug that into a little thing and some of the values are weighted differently, et cetera. But basically it spits out a number. So there's like very little subjectivity apart from the subjectivity involved in rating their performance against their goals and their behavior against the values. But their manager, the manager's manager refused that. That spits out a number. And then in each org, they're stack ranked.

• 20:12Speaker 01

  So if we have like three or 400 engineers, there's a full list of all the engineers ordered by the score. And then we have five ratings from needs immediate improvement to exceeds expectations. And then every quarter, we look at the curve that people fit into last quarter and I gently nudge it towards the top. So every quarter, we raise the bar a little bit, a little bit, a little bit. So for any given org, maybe engineer, I can't remember what the numbers are. The bottom two and a half percent or 3% will be forced into need its immediate improvement, which means that you're departing the company. Whereas the top, I forgot what the numbers are, top 4%, which are forced to exceeds expectation,

• 20:54Speaker 01

  they get a really giant raise, really giant comp increase, they get set up for promotions, and they get a bunch of extra special allowances and rights and different things.

• 21:02Logan Bartlett?

  As you think about maybe the, I mean, it all sounds good, the negative implications of that, I don't know if it leads to competing with your fellow employee in a more explicit way, or like, have you seen the?

• 21:15Speaker 01

  Not yet. I'm sure it has negative things. That's what people say about stack ranking, right? That you're going to compete with your employees. And I think Microsoft had that problem because of this. We've not seen it. We've only been doing it a couple of years. Everything breaks eventually, you know? And the companies like also go back and forth. Eventually we'll be like, oh my God, this is a fucking terrible idea. Right now, it's built a very high performing, hard charging organization. All evenings, weekends, different levels of the company are just plugging away like a startup. It's amazing.

• 21:45Logan Bartlett?

  What did you learn about like the founder identity in some ways? Like, once you were able to disassociate it with the high growth thing? Like, what is the North Star that you would have pursued had you known or that you think about today?

• 22:03Speaker 01

  It's the most important question for anyone who would want to overcome their insecurities. When I talk to founders about this, they say, oh, I don't know if I want to lose my edge. Now, thing is, no matter how much therapy you do, and I've been doing, you know, 12 years of extensive therapy and spiritual work, which is both a lot of fun and... And not fun sometimes. You've still got your edge. You've still got your edge. And the, you know, the famous spiritual teachers of our time have done 60 years of spiritual work in therapy. They still have their fundamental insecurities, but they just don't sting as much and drive the bus anymore. So that's the first thing I'll say that working on yourself, you've still got these ego things that drive you and that's okay. We all have ego. It's totally

• 22:45Speaker 01

  fine. And the wrong way to respond to that is to fight it or deny it. You need to embrace it and love it. That said, the dream is that instead of fighting to prove that you're lovable or valid, because internally you believe that you're not, instead of that being your driver for success, you enjoy playing to win. Like you and I might enjoy playing pool. Like if you and I were playing pool, I'd want to win. I might even try really fucking hard to win. I probably wouldn't because I hate pool, but if we could find something else, I don't know, a user sport or a game that you love, I don't know.

• 23:22Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. I mean, I play pickup basketball sometimes.

• 23:26Speaker 01

  Basketball, like you're really trying to win.

• 23:27Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 23:28Speaker 01

  But it's not, it's not even going to ruin your hour if you don't. It might actually, but it's not going to ruin your day. And, and I think that that's where we need to get to where we're, we're playing to win and it fits into your life in a far healthier fashion. I think beyond that though, there is service. I think there's an opportunity to build for the world and to build for yourself and your family and your coworkers. And, you know, if you're playing to win and you're building something you think is really cool and should exist in the world and you want to make money and you want to make money for your family and for everyone that works with you. I think there are a set of really healthy motivations. And I think outstanding brilliant companies, particularly those that stand the test of time, end up being run that way. I think.

• 24:13Logan Bartlett?

  When you think about where to trust your intuition versus where to draw on precedent or, or what's been done before. So you're not reinventing every comp scale ladder necessarily or whatever it is. Like where did you think about the line of like, this is worth breaking and reinventing versus this is standard practice?

• 24:37Speaker 01

  Part of that is stylistic. Actually, I just, I like inventing. And I think if you'll find some of the greatest companies do that, you know, if you look inside a Stripe or an Airbnb, they found their own way doing things. So part of it's stylistic. Part of it's.

• 24:53Speaker 01

  Actually humility and pragmatism. A lot of young founders reinvent the fucking wheel. We did. You probably see that. That's okay.

• 25:02Logan Bartlett?

  Sales comp's the one.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  All the stuff, all the stuff. It's like, no, you actually don't have to. You should reinvent what makes you unique. I think that's the answer. Reinvent the stuff that makes you unique. And when it comes to intuition, it's like, on the decisions that don't matter that much now, I've learned to just be like, ah, this is probably the right thing. Let's just go for it. Even like a billboard design, this is awesome. Don't overthink it. And on the really hard decisions, if your intuition is telling you that the answer, that's not the obvious answer, might be worth considering, then you consider it. Think what you'll learn is if you've had some degree of success over time and you respect yourself as an artist,

• 25:42Speaker 01

  you give yourself the benefit of the doubt with still a large amount of humility that, huh, I have that feeling, I might actually be on to something. You know, young founders, they have intuition and they just blindly go for it. And it turns out that we're right, but a lot were wrong. But when you get a little on in your career, I think, and you know, I'm still, you know, perhaps I'm midway in my career, maybe I'm early in my career, we'll find out. You're not as dogmatic and arrogant about it, but you know that there's parts of this system that I zone that I don't have full

• 26:21Speaker 01

  cognitive or conscious awareness of that when I get a certain feeling or for some reason I doubt a thing, it probably means something.

• 26:30Logan Bartlett?

  When you listen to other founders or people in the industry at large that has, have good insights, board members of yours or whatever, I heard you, I guess it was specific to Mark Benioff, but not just listening to the recommendations or the answers that he has, but actually the thought process or what the inputs were into that, rather than just trying to forfeit the answers.

• 26:57Speaker 01

  It's always the why is the interesting part, right?

• 26:58Logan Bartlett?

  And so how do you think, or how do you go about doing that when you're, when you're hearing someone speak or you're asking for advice?

• 27:03Speaker 01

  I don't have any kind of formula or any kind of secret sauce there. But, you know, recently I was speaking to Benioff.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  I'm immediately uncomfortable about dropping that name, but I'm speaking to Benioff and I'm asking him about operations.

• 27:23Logan Bartlett?

  It was Sean Benioff, not Mark.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was like David Benioff is my old friend from Ireland.

• 27:28Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, people don't know.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  And asking him about, you know, certain operational questions, it's something on Bada, who should do that, et cetera. And, and he said, oh, that's your CFO, your CFO should do that. I'm skipping a lot of steps here, but that instantly made me think like, why? Why would it be CFO? And that made me want to understand how their organization is structured and who owns what. So it's just about poking holes a little bit.

• 27:54Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  And, you know, this whole industry is defined by people doing things for the new, doing things for the first time. The reason that there are such incredible returns available and that people can get rich super fast is because we're in the world, the wild, wild west of like highly innovative technology and innovative ways of going to market. And so reinvention is really, really important. But that means you need to take advice with just massive doses of salt. And, and so when I see young founders, like sometimes they'll ask for advice or I'm chit chatting and I'll, I'll say something and they'll be like, right, got it. And I'm like, no, stop it. Don't, maybe, don't do that. I'm just saying that's

• 28:36Speaker 01

  what worked for me. And so I think, yeah, the only wisdom here is just always ask the why, why, why, why? Understand the why. Really what you're trying to build is like a model of how the world of truth. You're trying to build a model of the universe. Your goal is not to figure out what a Mark Benioff wants to do. That's not actually useful.

• 28:53Logan Bartlett?

  It's 25 years ago.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  Or even if it's in a totally different company or whatever, that your, your, your, your, your goal is to build a model of the universe. And, you know, you'll ask Mark, you'll ask a bunch of other people and that knowledge will eventually overlap and you'll have then abstractions that map on to how the universe works or how certain instances of the universe works. And then you'll have a wisdom.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  So it's the why.

• 29:17Logan Bartlett?

  You you came back in 22, right before GPT was.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, three, three point five.

• 29:25Logan Bartlett?

  That was kind of the.

• 29:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:26Logan Bartlett?

  The mania.

• 29:27Speaker 01

  Big unveiling.

• 29:28Logan Bartlett?

  I would say was a big, big kickoff in a meaningful way. Was there a lightbulb moment that you said that, oh, shit, this might have a ton of implication for us?

• 29:39Speaker 01

  Um, not particularly for me.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  I I was a little slow to start shouting from the mountaintops that everything is different because I've been through many hype cycles. Right?

• 29:56Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 29:57Speaker 01

  And, um, you know, a great gift of youth is the naivety that stops you from doing that, which means that oftentimes you'll be wrong, then sometimes you'll be right. So that's why a lot of these AI companies are started by very young kids, you know, because they don't know it might be the wrong thing to do or dangerous, or it's not going to work out, or someone's going to disrupt you. And some of them will be wrong, someone, some of them will be right. I like took my time a little bit. But we, we had an AI group in the company for five, six years. We were working with L L M's and built our own machine learning systems. And they started to play, they experimented with

• 30:36Speaker 01

  GPT three point five and built a very early version of our AI agent, a very simple thing. And it just demonstrated that, oh, shit, there's actually probably a product that people built there. And so pretty early, like November or December, we realized, oh, wow.

• 30:54Speaker 01

  This probably is gonna disrupt all of customer service, not just the software category, but actually all humans who do service.

• 31:04Logan Bartlett?

  Far bigger category.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, far bigger category. Yeah. So it was, it was in 2022 still, but I wasn't the first to see it necessarily.

• 31:11Logan Bartlett?

  And, and so you ended up rethinking pricing, obviously, all different elements of product marketing.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 31:19Logan Bartlett?

  But once you, once you sort of had this realization and you decide to go all in, what are the, the knobs that you ended up tuning?

• 31:27Speaker 01

  There's so many, really.

• 31:30Speaker 01

  Oh, in a fullness of time. All software that supports humans doing work will be disrupted by AI because AI will do the work that the humans do. So the only way to survive as a software company is to become an AI company. The only way to survive as a company that sells software to be used by humans who do the work is to build technology that does the work. So we needed and need to turn all the knobs that turn us from a company that provides that thing and in the future will provide that thing. There's so much involved in that. It's everything from the amount of ML engineers we need, the way we work, certain speeds

• 32:12Speaker 01

  and in certain ways where we're less focused on polished UI and more on the performance of the ML engine that we've built. Even in the way in which we iterate, how close we work with customers. This AI agent market is so early that customers need a lot of handholding. You can't, it's not ready for like off the shelf solutions. The biggest opportunities are kind of in the mid-market and enterprise where there's high volumes of work being done. So we needed to change our segment focus. So frankly, everything. You know, the reason this is such a great opportunity for early-stage companies is

• 32:53Speaker 01

  that most incumbents will be unwilling and unable to make all of the changes needed to become an AI company. You probably need to change about everything, or certainly 80% of the company, including the revenue source upon which you're dependent. If you're a company whose growth is dependent on seats, over a long enough time, you're toast because those seats go away. If you want to get, if you want to be the company that disrupts yourself and does the work, you're going to have to get started now and you're going to have to start selling software that Is very different from the seat based software. You're going to have to damage your seat based revenue.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  You're going to have to advertise products that are quite new and different from the bread and butter products. Basically, most companies won't make it, I don't think. So I don't know, I'm not giving you very good specific examples, but I'm trying to say everything must change.

• 33:53Logan Bartlett?

  You thought about going public in 22, filed and all that. Were you, in retrospect, are you glad to have been able to do this in the private markets?

• 34:02Speaker 01

  Or? I kind of, it wouldn't have, like, I've never been a public company CEO. But the sheer thought of trying to do what we're trying to do in the public markets is enough to make me say, nope. I would never have gone back. I would never have attempted to do it. I don't know how you do it. Like, we're very, we're very much betting all of our legacy revenue on this new AI revenue. It's the only way you can do it. And I don't know how you do it under the glare of quarterly earnings. I don't know how you do it. So it was a big blessing, you know, insight. That's why, you know, you see these companies going private again, because the wild pivots and changes required are just so dramatic.

• 34:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I would bet on the companies to do that, too.

• 34:49Logan Bartlett?

  Do you think that that shift, your point on anyone that seat based pricing and being in the fullness of time, that's going to be disrupted in terms of the the business model? Maybe for people that don't appreciate, you guys are pricing how, you were what and you're pricing how today?

• 35:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, we used to charge receipts and also like messages sent, because with intercom, you can also send outbound messages. We used to charge receipts, now we charge for work done. So we charge for resolutions. Every time we resolve a ticket for you, a customer service ticket, we'll charge you 99 cent. So we don't make any money ever unless we're doing work for you. And that's analogous to, you know, humans that you might employ. At Intercom, we pay our human reps, I think, $26 per ticket resolved. Our research in the market says that it's more typically $15.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  And if you outsource to, you know, some offshore companies, you can get it down to dollars. So 99 cents is, you know, highly competitive with that human work. So that's the big change we made. But there's a lot of, there's a lot of education in that. The customers need to think differently. Part of the problem is the price is not predictable. So it's like, how much am I going to pay? If I, if I buy 100 seats, I know how much I'm going to pay you. But if you're just going to charge me for how much your bot decides to do work, how much am I paying? So there's new challenges, but I don't see it working any other way.

• 36:23Logan Bartlett?

  We're, it seems that a few people in the market have moved in this outcome-based pricing model as well.

• 36:32Speaker 01

  I want to, I want to take this opportunity to say we were first, even though Zendesk says they're first.

• 36:37Logan Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 36:37Speaker 01

  So we can prove it.

• 36:38Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, okay. Well, that was actually one of the implicit questions. But in having those conversations with customers, what's the paradigm of transition with them? I'm sure you get all different flavors. Some people are like, oh, this is amazing. And some people are like, what the hell are you talking about? We like our fixed fee pricing.

• 36:57Speaker 01

  Most people are like, this is amazing.

• 36:59Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. Most people buying right now are early adopters. So they're kind of sold on it and they're already thinking about it. The market is waking up to this in the very near future, like in a year or two. All businesses are going to have AI agents working for them, doing customer service and then sales and marketing stuff too. So the market is about to really switch on. It's, I've never seen anything in it in my career. But it's, the outcome thing is actually working. The outcome-based pricing is actually working. So there's not a big road that we need to take people on. You, you need to basically help people understand how much their current, a lot of people don't know how much it costs to resolve a ticket today, which is interesting. So you need to help people think about how much they're currently paying their humans and then show the human work versus the AI agent work.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  The remarkable thing about this, these AI agents, Finn, our product, but you're going to say this across all AI, is that Finn is better than the humans. It's faster, it's more consistent, never makes a spelling mistake.

• 37:57Logan Bartlett?

  Speaks a lot of languages.

• 37:58Speaker 01

  Speaks all the languages, beautiful formatting, great sourcing, patient. I mean, it's always better. Sometimes it doesn't have the answer and so it'll escalate to humans. Some of our competitors will just guess, that's, we don't like that. But it's always better. The analogy I use these days is the Waymo cars. The Waymos, when they were being driven by humans to train them, had 3.5 times more crashes than the actual automated Waymos. AI is just better than humans. It's wild. So when you can show these businesses that it's clearly cheaper, it's clearly faster, and it's clearly better than humans, it's a no brainer on three cans.

• 38:40Logan Bartlett?

  Implicitly, you said, there's, this has kind of changed elements of the end market or who's ready to buy AI. Can you elaborate on what you've learned actually being out there in the field?

• 38:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's fear out there still. There's a lot of people that are very conscious about the experiences that their customers have, which is understandable and fair and good. There's a lot of crappy competitors in the market that are actually missetting expectations about what these bots can do. There were previous generations of bots that required a lot of setup and were really, really bad. There were effectively phone trees and chatbots and kind of like chat interfaces. So there's a lot of kind of like education and people kind of getting up to speed with what's possible. Most people haven't seen these things in the wild yet. So fear, uncertainty, doubt, and that will just, that will melt away over the next six to 12 to 18 months as people just see these in the wild, consumers, and then as companies get demos.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  It's the most obvious epic transformative software category I've ever seen.

• 39:44Logan Bartlett?

  From an underlying model standpoint, you guys were using OpenAI now Claude?

• 39:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, we use a bunch of things. We still use a bunch of OpenAI, we use Claude from Anthropic, we experiment with different models all the time, different versions of models from these companies. We get heads up on the things they're working on. We worked with Llama. So we just, we run a lot of experiments, we're very science based. That's when I said that developing AI software is a little different. When you're developing workflow software, it requires, you know, designers and product managers to be like, hmm, that's a, that's a nice way to solve that problem. When you're developing AI agents.

• 40:23Speaker 01

  If you're doing it right, you're going to be very scientific and you're going to run these agents on all these different models, on all these different types of questions and different scenarios. And you can prove all the different ways in which it's superior. We've run well over a hundred different A B tests on many different configurations. And Finn is like seven different L L M's strung together in different complex ways. So, yeah, we're on cloud for one of the things, but we'll move around a lot. So it's going to be really interesting to see what happens with these models.

• 40:49Logan Bartlett?

  If you're a founder and your business hasn't been as, as at the forefront of the bleeding edge within artificial intelligence like yours has.

• 41:02Logan Bartlett?

  You said, obviously, all elements of your business or 80% of your businesses could change in some way. But if you're trying to instill some type of, I don't know, lessons, having lived on the front lines or things that you would say, if you're setting up this infrastructure or you're somewhat down the path with it. Were there things that you wish you had known early on?

• 41:21Speaker 01

  I don't think so. I don't think I have any great wisdom. I would just say that there's a lot of people overestimating how important it is to their business. And there's a lot of people underestimating how important it is to their business.

• 41:32Speaker 01

  A lot of people getting carried away with the timelines involved here. It takes time for products and technologies to be adopted. And there's a lot of people building shitty, useless A I things into their products because they don't know what else to do and it's hot right now. So, you know, in that respect, while so much changes, good old fashioned product strategy thinking has not gone stale. And thinking really carefully about, does the technology today enable someone in the market to solve the problem you're solving in a fundamentally new way? If you're able to answer that question well, that'll tell you whether or not you should, you should bet on this or not. The answer may be no, but again, to go just back to our situation, we're in service. All white collar work is going to be done by A I.

• 42:18Speaker 01

  It's going to start with the simplest white collar work, the simplest white collar work of service. So service starts first and it's going to get eviscerated and totally ripped apart and changed. We have to go there, but there's.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  So many other instances, like if you're making workflow tools for construction workers, mobile workflow tools, tools for construction workers, I think Procore does that, I think, right? I don't know a thing about their business, so they're probably gonna laugh, if anyone hears this, they'll laugh at me, but I don't know if they need AI for that, not yet, not yet. I'm probably wrong, I'm probably wrong. Most people, when they talk about AI these days, are probably wrong. So actually, the real wisdom is educate yourself and think deeply about it, that's all.

• 43:00Logan Bartlett?

  As you, it's been a hot category for net new startups to go after as well. Brett Taylor's business, Sierra, there's Decagon, there's Maven, there's a handful of other players that are going after this space. A new customer is thinking about working with you, who's been in the space for a while, or someone that started two years ago, or whatever, to go after this. What advantages do you feel you have for that net new customer that isn't existing in our com one?

• 43:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. So obviously, I'm thinking about this, there's meta advantages that they have, which is they're smaller, square, brier and hungrier, you know, that offers a lot of benefit compared to these like old boys now, that like they made their money and people have families and they're tired and stuff, you know, so that's, that's why, that's why startups win. That said, if we can use our size to our advantage and the fact that we've been in this space, even building LLM bots for years, I'd be quite bullish on us, and I am. What we can offer is just maturity in the platform.

• 44:10Speaker 01

  You know, you've got these early-stage companies, they're doing a really, really good job of like throwing things together quickly. A lot of them have big security vulnerabilities. We've found serious scary holes that we will now show customers in bake-offs. A lot of them are great crappy experiences for end customers. We've really sweated the details for like nearly two years now about creating seamless, beautiful customer experiences.

• 44:38Speaker 01

  A lot of them don't have the fine grain control that we have because we've built control and workflows for previous versions of bots. And I could go on, we've built a lot of different functionality that they're kind of catching up on, whether it's an ability to provide tone of voice functionality so that the bot can speak for, you know, in your brand, certain guidelines to allow that your bot to follow certain business specific instructions, et cetera. Beyond that, what we offer is a seamless consolidated platform. So you can buy Fin just all on its own and it competes head to head with these guys and we're winning deals against these guys because they see the depth of our platform and our ability to kind of go in. These companies, they've got 20 people, 30 people.

• 45:23Speaker 01

  We have like 500 people in our, in the organization, 80% of which are focused on building this AI agent. So it's really hard to compete with that. So we're selling it standalone, but a lot of these companies, they want consolidation. The biggest feedback I hear from customers is we want less software. We don't want all of this work of stringing all of these tools together. It's exhausting and it's messy and it creates a crap experience for the end user who's bounced amongst these different kind of experiences and his emails coming from one app and chat from another app. And for the users of the tools, they have to have multiple tabs open and the products don't really work well together either. So what you've seen a lot of people is doing is getting excited about our bot. And we'll sell our bot all day long.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  It works seamlessly with Zendesk and Salesforce, no problem. But then they'll look at our platform too and they'll say, actually I want it all. And that wasn't, wasn't something that was happening a year ago, but people are now leaving Zendesk for the Intercom platform. So like if we win, and if I was to bet on any one of these companies, I'd bet on, on, on us, I have to say that, but that's, that's, that's how I currently bet. It will be because we take advantage of the fact that we're big. These guys have the advantage that they're small. We can't be that, so we shouldn't try and play their game. So we'll take advantage of the fact we're big to have just a much more mature, fulsome product that's broad, that caters to humans as well as AI. Because humans are going to be around at least for 10 years, I think. Even if in a marginal capacity.

• 46:53Logan Bartlett?

  I know you mean service. Hopefully they're around.

• 46:56Speaker 01

  Hopefully.

• 46:57Logan Bartlett?

  They're around, period.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  Hopefully beyond service, we're here for more than that.

• 47:00Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I hope this frees up time for other stuff. Yeah. I'm curious then, from the mid-market or the end-market standpoint, is there more receptivity to buy or the use case is better at like kind of the mid-market-ish enterprise within AI applications?

• 47:19Speaker 01

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

• 48:04Speaker 01

  in the bigger companies. And so it's far more profitable to sell to the mid-market and the enterprise. And so that's where we're getting a lot of traction and getting a significant amount of revenue growth. But we will serve SMB to enterprise.

• 48:18Logan Bartlett?

  And you don't need to comment on product roadmap, but I assume I assume there's a belief that this stuff will all be multimodal within a single platform.

• 48:26Speaker 01

  Absolutely. We will do all of that. We have working versions of all of these things. You'll have the one agent that will, already Finn is on email, already Finn is on chat. We have a really nice technology that's not public, that has it on phone. It'll do voice messages. It'll be in all your messengers. It'll be on video calls. There'll be instances where you'll want to join a video call to talk to the agent.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  So that's all coming, and it's actually coming in a number of short years. That's not a decade thing.

• 48:59Logan Bartlett?

  As you maybe think about the higher abstraction of this, there's not society or humanity ending, but the implications for society with some of these things ultimately playing out. Do you take time to think about that? Or are you so focused on actually solving the problem?

• 49:20Speaker 01

  I do. Maybe the following is the tech bro's excuse for playing in a new field that he believes is going to make him a lot of money. But here's what I say to myself and others about that.

• 49:36Speaker 01

  Technology has always, always saved humans from demeaning and shit work. Whether it was people on factory floors who would lose limbs or children in mines who would suffocate. Technology has done away with that. Technology has taken their jobs. All the while, the world's population has increased. GDP has increased. Longevity has increased. Crime in most cities has decreased. Right? That's been the story of technology thus far.

• 50:13Speaker 01

  The rate of change in technology has been increasing, and that has remained true. And so I'm going to believe that that's going to also be true in the future with AI also. People don't like customer service work. Some do because some customer service work is deeply rewarding. Most customer service work is insanely robotic and shit. Terrible. People hate the work. You're answering the same damn questions to the same damn angry users. It's not fun. We haven't fired, obviously, we're really big proponents of this type of automation. We use our own AI agent in extreme ways.

• 50:54Speaker 01

  We've not fired a single customer support person, but we've stopped growing the customer support team. And so what's going to happen over time is that

• 51:05Speaker 01

  The AI agents will cater to new growth on met demand, kind of, you know, the cheapest and easiest work. And over time, those jobs in service will convert from the repetitive, demeaning, crappy work to the more rewarding, interesting work that requires their humanity, creativity, and the things that you would want a human to spend their life on.

• 51:31Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's interesting. I don't have any good answer to this, but you just think about the length of time the Industrial Revolution took to play out, and you think about the amount of time, you know, internet took to play out, and you compress it even further for AI. And I don't know what the social implications of it all are, but.

• 51:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know either. But there have always been social implications in technology.

• 51:54Logan Bartlett?

  Sure.

• 51:55Speaker 01

  Every technology can be used for good or bad.

• 52:00Speaker 01

  You know, a knife can be used to prepare a delicious meal or buy things too. But you're right, the acceleration makes this interesting and it makes it hard for all of us that are in AI, just the pace of change is.

• 52:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a lot.

• 52:18Logan Bartlett?

  Are you having fun now with all this?

• 52:21Speaker 01

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

• 53:03Speaker 01

  And the people who will be successful at that are the people who enjoy it. So, super challenging. It's not what I thought I was signing up for. When I went back, I'm like, clean things up, take the company public, pat on the back, off again to freedom, start a new thing. No one knew we were signing up for this, but me and all the founders, there's three founders of Intercom still at the company.

• 53:28Speaker 01

  We are, and I'm not just saying this because I'm on a cool podcast. We are now invigorated in a way that we haven't been for a really long time. And it's like two minds were like, it's 13 years. Oh my God, when do we get a break? But we're working seven days a week. We're taking big swings. We're locking in wins. We're getting on customer calls. I mean, it is invigorating in a new, in a new and a cool way. If this time isn't invigorating like that for you, get out. That's what I would say because it actually is going to kick the shit out of a lot of people that could easily do so. I'm not praising myself as some hero in that respect. It's apparently what I needed, but unless you're really up to that, because we've had to change our strategy six times in the last two years. Unless you're up for that, then I think it's going to be very hard.

• 54:12Speaker 01

  And that's why a lot of the bigger comments are going to lose.

• 54:15Logan Bartlett?

  In coming back in and resetting elements of the culture and sort of being at this wartime CEO mindset. There's been, we talked about some of the organ rejection or like, you know, that, but there's been

• 54:31Logan Bartlett?

  elements of reinstilling hard work as a first principle and pushing out. I think you, you said, did you say there was a, this is our wartime document? And you got put back from people.

• 54:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, people didn't like me saying war.

• 54:44Logan Bartlett?

  War.

• 54:45Speaker 01

  Or people were like, there's an actual war happening.

• 54:47Logan Bartlett?

  Yes, yes, which. Yeah.

• 54:49Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 54:50Logan Bartlett?

  What, what, as you, as you tried to reinvigorate the organization and reset the, the work hard culture outside of the performance management stuff, outside of these galvanizing speeches, I'm sure you give to the company. What have you found about people's desires for, for hard work and fulfillment?

• 55:09Speaker 01

  They love it. Great people love it. The, the cheap little secret for success as a leader here is that great people love the things you love. Great people love good old fashioned business fundamentals. Hard work, a focus on shareholder value, massive ambition.

• 55:33Speaker 01

  A focus on work and not politics and bullshit. Like the best people, find your best people, the people who are going to be superstars and produce 10x better than everyone else. They love that stuff. So you're not making a compromise there. You're only compromising on the worst people.

• 55:54Logan Bartlett?

  There's this interesting element of how much mediocre and excellence, like the people within Oregon, they both both hate each other for very different reasons. And if you don't solve for for one of the constituents, you're going to end up gravitating.

• 56:12Speaker 01

  Well, hopefully what you have is a cohort of brilliant people and a cohort of high potential people who can be brilliant, who aspire to be part of that cohort of brilliant people. The wrong way is where the the non brilliant people are like, actually not that ambitious, not that high potential. They've topped out. They're not aligned with the company. So you can find 1,000 people or 10,000 people who fit the definition of brilliant and high potential. That's what you need.

• 56:42Logan Bartlett?

  We touched on this a little bit earlier, but you talked about owning your own narrative and getting the truth out there. I'm curious what you what you learned about media and reporting. I guess it was specific to the tech sector for the most part, but I'm curious. I feel like you probably have some opinions.

• 57:01Speaker 01

  Sure, I have opinions. Yeah, of course. I think these these things I'll say have been said so many times before. For the longest time, the media has hated tech and hated success and ambition. They've hated people who feel high agency. And a lot of it's resentment. And a lot of it's deep insecurity about what they can achieve themselves, which is really, really tragic because there's a lot of intelligent people there, too. This is not exclusively everyone in media. You know, there's obviously some great people there. I'm saying that to try and sound chill about it.

• 57:40Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, make for a pity soundbite.

• 57:42Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, thank you. But what changed is that they overplayed the hand they were given, which is incredible influence. They.

• 57:58Speaker 01

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

• 58:43Speaker 01

  So we now have long form conversation. You know, you might read a headline about this guy called on McCabe and he sounds like a dick. Hopefully, if you look at an interview with

• 58:55Logan Bartlett?

  You listen, then you know he's a dick.

• 58:57Speaker 01

  You know for certain he's a dick, but he has some moments of charm.

• 59:01Logan Bartlett?

  I certainly did not, I never intended to be a media entity in the same or media property in some ways. I just honestly, the reflection of it all was, I think the venture job can be a little abstract at times where you're sort of making two, three decisions a year and then opining once a quarter for each of those decisions or whatever, once a week, whatever the time is, but you're not, there's no ownership or agency in actually making the decisions. And so I think it was some element of self-promotion and also

• 59:36Speaker 01

  Personal interest.

• 59:36Logan Bartlett?

  Personal, like some desire to move something forward.

• 59:39Speaker 01

  Learning, helping other people. I mean, all the good stuff.

• 59:42Logan Bartlett?

  There was all the altruistic stuff as well, but it is interesting. I never expected in a million years for it to dovetail with actual news stories and stuff. And I've, it's funny that sometimes we'll have a conversation and then there's

• 1:00:00Logan Bartlett?

  A press entity will report on the conversation, which I'm sure happened a million times with Joe Rogan or whoever, but it is an interesting sort of circular

• 1:00:08Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 1:00:09Logan Bartlett?

  thing that happens all the time. I'm curious, do you, the they in that, if we back up to the they, I assume, it sounds like you, you believe there's a higher order they in all of that, but, but specifically the they in this case that we were talking about was sort of the tech media landscape?

• 1:00:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:27Logan Bartlett?

  Is that sort of who you?

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, and media generally, I mean, you know, mainstream media generally got themselves stuck in that place. So, you know, there's a lot of new tech media, but there's a lot of new media also.

• 1:00:35Logan Bartlett?

  Oh, for sure. Yeah, that's what I assume. You had to do that there was a higher order bit as well. I guess that transitions a little bit into one thing I wanted to ask you about, which I think you've been asked about before, but you endorsed a presidential candidate.

• 1:00:50Speaker 01

  I can forget what happened there. Yeah.

• 1:00:51Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, it is not.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  It was a long, long time ago.

• 1:00:53Logan Bartlett?

  Let me remind you, it was a couple of months ago and you tweeted a picture of you with a certain presidential candidate that I think people probably wouldn't have expected you to support. What was the reaction? What was the thought process in going into it?

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  I love that he's like the candidate that shall not be named.

• 1:01:09Logan Bartlett?

  Well, that's good. It's fine. It's good. I was more just being tongue in cheek because I think people, people totally know. President-elect as of this week, Donald J. Trump.

• 1:01:19Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:01:20Logan Bartlett?

  And you tweeted a picture with him after a banquet.

• 1:01:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, like a fundraiser.

• 1:01:25Logan Bartlett?

  Fundraiser thing. Maybe take me through what the, and I mean at a very literal level of like the thought of posting that picture and, you know, were you purely thinking in terms of personal? Were you thinking in terms of intercom? Like, and maybe what the reaction was to it that was surprising versus not?

• 1:01:45Speaker 01

  It was, you know, so before I posted it, I sent it to my co-founders and a few others and like, this is gonna hurt.

• 1:01:54Logan Bartlett?

  And they knew presumably where your political.

• 1:01:56Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:57Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:57Speaker 01

  But I, like, I knew this is gonna cause some trouble.

• 1:02:00Logan Bartlett?

  True.

• 1:02:01Speaker 01

  In the moment, it was maybe majority, fuck you. I don't, I'm saying the F word.

• 1:02:07Logan Bartlett?

  No, that's fine. Yeah, we're clear. We're.

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  This'll be the last time I'll ever say.

• 1:02:10Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, no, no, no. We're in the clear.

• 1:02:14Speaker 01

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

• 1:02:58Speaker 01

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

• 1:03:42Speaker 01

  There are much more high-profile people than me, but per my knowledge, I was the only Silicon Valley CEO who did it. And I just wanted to show, there was a lot of younger founders, and I wanted to tell them like, you can build a great company as a good person and hold alternative views. I'm a big believer in the power of independent thinking. People get caught in this group think, and it dramatically incapacitates them from a business perspective and personally in their lives. And so the more that young founders in particular can think independently, the better. So I wanted to model for them that like, it's okay, and it was okay.

• 1:04:21Logan Bartlett?

  I sure, I assume the immediate blowback, it sounds like, was negative.

• 1:04:27Speaker 01

  The immediate blowback was Twitter stuff.

• 1:04:29Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, Twitter stuff.

• 1:04:30Speaker 01

  It wasn't, there was no real stuff.

• 1:04:31Logan Bartlett?

  But I assume the, that dissipated.

• 1:04:34Speaker 01

  Dissipated, people get over, get over these things. One of the big things I learned through the various wars I was in in the past is that It's really hard to kill a company. Like crises come and go. No matter what your crisis du jour is, it's gonna be okay. Whatever employee is upset or customer or someone says something about you on Twitter, it's gonna be okay.

• 1:04:57Logan Bartlett?

  And so after that happened, or after you published it, I say happened like it was terminal cancer or something, after, after, after you posted that picture, the, the employee side as well, you were doing it at a personal level, not an intercom level. I know there were many Silicon Valley CEOs that, that posted, I'm sure, pictures of the other side. I actually, I actually don't know, but I'm sure there were.

• 1:05:21Speaker 01

  Well, they, they actually did, and which was interesting. I think that was what part of what happened was actually a lot of.

• 1:05:25Logan Bartlett?

  Everyone sort of abstained?

• 1:05:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, because there wasn't a lot of excitement about the other side this time.

• 1:05:30Logan Bartlett?

  So, so what was the?

• 1:05:32Speaker 01

  The employee reaction?

• 1:05:32Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:35Speaker 01

  So when I came back, I made it clear to people that we don't do politics in work. We don't do social activism because there was a lot of that when I came back. And I told people, we're just gonna talk about our mission. And I also told people, I will never tell you what you can or cannot think or say or do in your personal lives, because I'm a big believer in proponent in personal freedom and free speech. And so I made it clear, someone asked that in all hands about my posts. I made it clear that, hey, if you post about political issues, particularly political issues that are differing from mine, I, I will be the first to defend you.

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

  If anyone tries to cancel you, it's not happening at Intercom. You have the full right and freedom to go and say whatever you want publicly. And I demonstrate that for them too. I think the other important point is, and I don't know how effectively I've done this, but when people know that the place from which you come is a desire for health and society and peace in the world, I think it's hard to disagree with that. Part of the sickness of our time is that the media still has a great degree of influence. And so they've told a lot of people who don't really follow politics or how the world works, that this certain candidate is evil, et cetera. So they get very upset about it. But the people I know who voted for Trump.

• 1:07:04Speaker 01

  They really want like safety in the streets. They want freedom for everyone to be able to speak. They want, you know, safety for kids in school around trans issues. They don't want war in the world, like really wholesome things. They never once, I'm talking about actual billionaires who supported Trump. They never once talk about taxes. So when, when, when the place from which you come is wholesome and, and is one of love and respect. I think it's, I think it's inappropriate to attack that. So as long as you're grounded in those fundamentals, I encourage people to just be themselves and be open and be free. And I think that's what made it possible for me to do this.

• 1:07:49Logan Bartlett?

  You just alluded to a lot of the inputs into it, but I'm curious, uh, like coming to that view. And I guess it was implicit in what you just said, but what were the main considerations for you? Was it the ones you just listed? Were there other ones that were?

• 1:08:06Speaker 01

  The ones I listed, but because particularly the other side are proponents of all of the opposite things. Like war in Ukraine, pushing a nuclear power, us, the United States against a nuclear power, Russia. If anyone's interested, they should read Nuclear War Scenario, new book. It's really horrific. The chance of nuclear war is extremely high. Five billion people will die. So peace-loving people are just opposed to that other side. And I would have voted for anyone who was opposed to that. I'm not like a big Trump guy.

• 1:08:40Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, which, which I think is actually important to tease out as well. Like this, this is much more policy than personality.

• 1:08:48Speaker 01

  It's all policy.

• 1:08:49Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. January sixth stuff weigh on you at all, or was that sort of?

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  That's like a character thing for me. It's not a policy thing.

• 1:08:56Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:56Speaker 01

  You know, I didn't like what he said. Ultimately, he did leave office.

• 1:09:00Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:01Speaker 01

  So I wish he didn't kind of behave some of those ways, but I also think that the degree at which he was responsible for that is mostly invented. But the other thing is you only get to choose two people.

• 1:09:12Logan Bartlett?

  Yes.

• 1:09:13Speaker 01

  So when someone says, how could you choose a guy who did X, Y, Z? I'm like, wait a sec. I'm not choosing the CEO of my company.

• 1:09:22Logan Bartlett?

  I'm not marrying this person.

• 1:09:23Speaker 01

  I'm not marrying them, making them my best friend. Theoretically, I have eight billion people to choose from in that exercise. I'm choosing one of two people. This is completely different.

• 1:09:35Speaker 01

  They're both gonna have things we don't like.

• 1:09:37Logan Bartlett?

  San Francisco Freedom Club?

• 1:09:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:09:39Logan Bartlett?

  What is that? What was the background in that coming to be?

• 1:09:43Speaker 01

  Well, look, there's a lot of really smart people that get together in this town and elsewhere. They have salons and they have these big intellectual conversations. It's great. I happen to think San Francisco's over-intellectualized. I like the highbrow chats as much as anyone else, but I think it's over-intellectualized. Culture has probably a much bigger impact on society than six guys at a dinner talking about the future of the human race. And so I wanted to find a way to influence culture in a very influential part of the world. And so the Freedom Club is big fancy quarterly parties, which I hope you'll come to the next one for.

• 1:10:26Logan Bartlett?

  You need to tell me more about the parties.

• 1:10:27Speaker 01

  Okay. And its goal is to simply celebrate freedom. Values like growth and merit and humanity. Things that were under threat and still are under threat in the West. I wanted to get the young and the not-so-young people of San Francisco excited about it and behind it. And yeah, the specific strategy was to try and make the coolest party that would happen in San Francisco. And you can get into it and you can get into it as long as you're actually down to celebrate freedom.

• 1:11:07Logan Bartlett?

  And so what is the actual party?

• 1:11:08Speaker 01

  It's just a big, it's just a big party.

• 1:11:10Logan Bartlett?

  Where, how many have you guys done?

• 1:11:12Speaker 01

  I've only done one massive demand. There was like 3,700 people on the waitlist for the first one. We invited 600, 500 came up that night. The next one's on. The 13th of December, which I've not announced yet. We do it in big historic buildings in SF.

• 1:11:29Logan Bartlett?

  Can we announce that now?

• 1:11:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:30Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. Will you do bigger, same size?

• 1:11:32Speaker 01

  We'll do the same size because it's not just, we're not just trying to do big. We're trying to do a high quality. We had some of the most interesting people and some of the most successful people at the last.

• 1:11:42Logan Bartlett?

  Presumably it's a night, a weekend night?

• 1:11:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a night thing. The last one's a Friday, the next one's a Friday. And yeah, that's it. It's just silly and fun.

• 1:11:51Logan Bartlett?

  Are you sold? Like, are there other people behind it with you?

• 1:11:54Speaker 01

  No, it's just me.

• 1:11:54Logan Bartlett?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:11:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, it's just me. One big expensive party.

• 1:11:58Logan Bartlett?

  Do you actually, you actually pay for it?

• 1:11:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:00Logan Bartlett?

  Oh, nice.

• 1:12:00Speaker 01

  Maybe I'll try and fix that someday.

• 1:12:02Logan Bartlett?

  Well, I would, I've got to think there's a.

• 1:12:05Speaker 01

  There are, except I don't want corporate sponsors.

• 1:12:07Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:07Speaker 01

  And once people pay for a thing, they have opinions about what it should be. And they have feedback and actually have a vision for what this is going to be. And it's my gift to the city, a city that doesn't have enough fun, I think. And is a little too shy about celebrating American values. So let's see, eventually I'll decide it's really bad financial move.

• 1:12:28Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:29Speaker 01

  The last one cost like 120K.

• 1:12:31Logan Bartlett?

  Wow. Transitioning some operating stuff. One interesting thing I had heard you say, I don't know if lambast is the right term, but you talked about people that are in HR functions.

• 1:12:41Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:12:41Logan Bartlett?

  And how, I don't want to see it being comments from HR people here, but maybe those aren't the, necessarily the best people to make HR decisions. I don't know if I'm characterizing it appropriately.

• 1:12:51Speaker 01

  Well, what I did say was quite often career HR executives will know a lot about the HR, the mechanics of HR game. But compared to the people and the leaders you've got in your company for years and on the ground, they'll struggle to be deeply in touch with the culture as you built it. And so, you know, for some certain roles, I'd rather someone who knew HR things, but wasn't a super senior HR leader, but definitely knew the company, be our person, rather than someone who was a tried and true proven HR executive,

• 1:13:36Speaker 01

  but knew nothing about intercom, try to come in and be useful. And I did that when I came back and I gave certain people, I even gave our like CTO pricing, you know, because I trusted the person who was there a very long time and knew all of our values and principles, rather than some pricing expert who knew abstract things about pricing but not Intercom, that's all.

• 1:13:57Logan Bartlett?

  And I guess that that ties into a more general belief of yours that that generalists are most effective, or the people that can transition between different jobs are some of the most effective leaders within your company?

• 1:14:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, all I'm trying to say is, knowledge of a company and its values and principles are at least as valuable as knowledge of the esoteric domains, specifically domains like pricing or HR, because I don't think they're, they involve rocket science, there is specific knowledge required. And so for me, if I have the opportunity to bet on someone in the company who I know and trust and love and who knows Intercom, but has a little learning to go on HR stuff, I'll do that all day long before I'll run a big exec search, find a really impressive HR person, but has to start from zero on Intercom.

• 1:14:51Logan Bartlett?

  So would rather have the depth of company knowledge than?

• 1:14:54Speaker 01

  That's, I like, I like that.

• 1:14:56Logan Bartlett?

  And is that, you mentioned pricing and HR, is that true for other functional areas?

• 1:15:02Speaker 01

  I'm sure it's true for other functions. I'm just trying to think of areas which I've, where I've done that.

• 1:15:06Logan Bartlett?

  I mean, product engineering, I assume is led by?

• 1:15:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're like pretty deep, but you know, we've been really blessed and lucky to have long tenured people. Really, the master wisdom here is bet on tenured people. Keep your tenured people, bet on tenured people, until of course, it's not working. But all day long, I will much, I would much rather find someone within the org than have to bring someone in from outside, which I'll totally do when it's needed, but. Unlike people from within the system.

• 1:15:34Logan Bartlett?

  I've heard you talk about how the abundance of raw inexperienced talent can lead to great things being produced, but perhaps in a messy way, I guess. Can you reconcile that point with the tenure and making sure you still have the talent edge or the young people coming in?

• 1:15:49Speaker 01

  That's your early stage startup, the likes of which we're competing with, you know, they're young, raw, super intelligent people that'll produce great things, but in a highly messy way.

• 1:16:00Speaker 01

  It's not that that can win, that can win, that can win often. We're still pretty damn messy. We'll bring in inexperienced people in large functions. So, sales, you'll bring in inexperienced people where there is a lot of repetitive work. And sometimes with engineering, maybe we'll bring in interns. Customer support, we'll do that too. So where we have the space to train people, we'll try to find individuals at X factor and let them rise through the org.

• 1:16:30Speaker 01

  But more and more, as we get older and I get older, I appreciate grownups. And so there's tension. You can't have all the things. You have to choose what flavor of company you want to be. And so I choose big, tenured, grownups, and I challenge them to act in scrappy, fast, intense ways. But we know we'll never be the young, naive kids we once were. So you always have to play to the strengths that you actually have. Yeah, that's what we're doing now.

• 1:17:05Logan Bartlett?

  I guess as you reflect on the early days of Intercom, you picked a handful of things that were against conventional wisdom. I think in the target market you serviced, how you distributed it, maybe there's a bunch of other things that come to mind. But if you could go back, and we've talked about a bunch of reflections and lessons learned, but is there anything that you would tell yourself then about this journey that maybe we didn't touch on?

• 1:17:35Speaker 01

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

• 1:18:12Speaker 01

  Being deeply true to yourself is just a power move and it's very, very, very, very rare. But the, the, the trust and passion and energy that comes from that is, is remarkable. And then the self satisfaction. So I don't know. If there's anything I could go back to tell myself, it's just like, find you, be you, trust your instinct. And so like, there's big and small ways in which I didn't do that. Even in company communications, try to say what you thought people wanted.

• 1:18:41Speaker 01

  Try to cheer up employees when you said something authentically that they didn't like, rather than saying, sorry, I was being me. Or following conventional wisdom. You know, I always thought, you know, we changed so much about our go to market. We like forced people to talk to sales, the sales organization, because we thought that would net and yield bigger, bigger, bigger accounts. But we, we were never those guys. We were always the self-serve guys. We went against our intuition in all the ways. The more you you can be, the better. It actually will cause more pain. It's easier to take someone's advice. It's more comforting. Then you're just kicking the failure down the road. But if you can, if you can take the pain upfront, being yourself and having your authentic self make contact with the world sooner, the sooner you will find who you are.

• 1:19:24Logan Bartlett?

  As you, as you reflect on the role that

• 1:19:31Logan Bartlett?

  investors have had, both, I guess as board members or being a part of the journey as well. Any lessons or things that you've internalized about, about that, that you would impart?

• 1:19:45Speaker 01

  To investors?

• 1:19:47Logan Bartlett?

  Well, I guess both, but I was thinking two founders and picking investors.

• 1:19:50Speaker 01

  I see. I see. Yeah. The vast majority of investors are harmless and some are helpful.

• 1:20:00Speaker 01

  I think fear the investors who want to be very helpful. It's great, in my opinion, to work with investors who know that they are your capital partners. And yours is a beautiful collaboration of talent and ambition and momentum with capital and maybe some lessons about how the capital markets work. Maybe some connections to other capital partners or some other talent. There's things that VCs can do there. But once investors want to advise you on things that they've not done themselves, you're in dangerous territory.

• 1:20:45Speaker 01

  Because like I said earlier, I will tell founders who are CEOs, who I'm 10 plus years ahead of, to not take my advice. I think it's really, really dangerous for them to take wholesale the advice of a VC. Even if a VC has seen many patterns at play and the very best ones, the most senior ones, even if they haven't been deeply operational in their time, they will have some wisdom to impart. So that's kind of the first thing I would say, just like be scared of people who want to be deeply helpful. I think that how can I help is that kind of like trite and funny thing to say. The best way an investor can help is knowing where their ability to help stops and starts.

• 1:21:27Speaker 01

  And I think a great relationship can be being in this fight together, being really excited to be super successful together, growing each other's names and reputations and making each other a shit ton of money. That's a really beautiful relationship. They don't have to be more than that.

• 1:21:47Speaker 01

  So if there's, if there's one thing I would say, I would say that. And, you know.

• 1:21:55Speaker 01

  It's still for younger investors because younger investors are the ones that are most trying to make their name, trying to win the deals and offer the most help and the promise of help, particularly to younger founders that know that they need help. But I think a superpower for great younger investors is to back off all of that and to,

• 1:22:17Speaker 01

  like I said, know their role, which they play. This is not me trying to reduce their role or demean investors at all, not at all. They clearly play a very important role, but just everyone needs to know their place and position. And I would say that there are probably 10 or 20 truly brilliant investors and getting to meet them and getting their feedback alone, even if they don't invest, is a privilege because they've seen a lot of cool, different types of things. And just like I spoke about with Benioff, if you ask them why, there's great things to be learned, even if you figure out, oh, they actually don't know the full answer. But they've told me a couple little, because what they've seen, there's guys out there,

• 1:23:03Speaker 01

  you know, Mamun Hamid led our Series A, he's on 20 something boards. Don't think that he's not seen all these crazy patterns. So Mamun was operational in his very early days, I believe he was an engineer, but he was never a CEO. But if Mamun can tell you three companies where he's seen X, Y, and Z happen before, now you're set off in your journey and you can go and find the CEOs and founders of those, those companies. So I think it's really just about seeing investors for what they are and investors seeing themselves for what they are too. It's a really hard game being an investor because your money is the exact same color as everyone else's. But the winners here have the deep confidence in that. They're like, yep, my money is exactly the same, but I choose the very best companies

• 1:23:48Speaker 01

  and the very best founders. I'm there as their capital partner if and when they need more money and there when they want to meet other capital partners and I'm never going to get in their way. Like someone who says that, that's kind of actually rare. And if someone says that in a really confident way, I don't know, that's very attractive to me.

• 1:24:06Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, there's an unintentional element on the helpful side. And I guess to tease it out a little bit, premier point is the People, everyone tries to differentiate in some way. And so it's

• 1:24:20Speaker 01

  It's an impossible challenge.

• 1:24:21Logan Bartlett?

  It's a very Being helpful is viewed, you shouldn't diminish someone's desire to be helpful.

• 1:24:29Speaker 01

  And by the way, founders are asking, oh, what are they helpful with?

• 1:24:32Logan Bartlett?

  Correct. You have two different term sheets that are their exact same price. And how do you try to differentiate between the two? And customer intros or talent intros or whatever it is.

• 1:24:43Speaker 01

  I think that's good.

• 1:24:44Logan Bartlett?

  Feels like one mechanism of doing it, but it does. I mean, to your point on this, like if someone can be fired based on their investment in you, and it's hard to know the internal dynamics of a company, but that can put a lot of pressure on them.

• 1:25:04Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 1:25:05Logan Bartlett?

  And therefore that can lead to a lot of unnatural behavior towards you.

• 1:25:08Speaker 01

  Or natural behavior. So maybe what needs to happen is like, most young founders don't know how the investing game works. They don't know the internal dynamics within partnerships. They don't know that people can be fired. They don't know how it feels to be an investor, how scary it is. They don't know how much they bet their career in every single deal. They don't know that they only going to do a couple of good deals. They don't know any of this. And so there's an opportunity for an investor to go to a founder to say, hey, I do this with all my new founders, which is basically a 101 on how the hell does investing work? It's going to really stand to you for all your other deals and it'll help in our relationship. I made this like five page deck, have it, share it.

• 1:25:52Speaker 01

  But here's how it all works. If ever I come to you and I say, hey, fuck, when are we going to hire that head of sales that you said you were going to hire? Just know that that's me being anxious and scared for our mutual success. And because I'm one of three board members and because I only represent 14% of your cap table, you can tell me to fuck off. Now, obviously that's going to be not helpful for our relationship. So a better thing to say is to say,

• 1:26:19Speaker 01

  I hear you. I'm sorry you're stressed. I'm stressed too. I'm trying. And you can say to a note that I don't even have the power to fire you. Or imagine you do have the power to fire them. You explain to them that firing you makes everything worse for me. Like, so I think good, open communication can actually resolve all these things. It's really hard. And the thing that makes it triply difficult for investors is that they play in this world of reputation. And they're so scared of damaging that with any of their founders, such that they're basically never real.

• 1:27:01Speaker 01

  So I think there are like 1% of all investors, maybe there's 1 in 1,000 investors who are able to have that conversation. And somehow they're able to have that at a young age and they just end up being killers. But if you can traverse all of that, you can be real, you can be vulnerable.

• 1:27:19Speaker 01

  You can empower your founders, you can get in the mix, you can fight with the fa- all of it. It's all okay. But you have to be able to have that conversation. I've basically never, I'm talking about a, not only a perfect investor here, but a perfect person. None of this really exists, but striving for that, I think, is the goal. And I think that there's still an opportunity in venture to be that level of mench.

• 1:27:41Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, there's a, there's a, there's a point in that that I think, I think about a lot. And I actually, I mean, similar to you in that you can't be what you're not anymore. You can't be the young upstart. And so you lean into the, you know, tenured and the experience that you have and the people you're going to bring around the table for that. Similarly, I, it's funny you say this, but I'll always pitch like, listen, I don't know. I'm career finance and then investing. I will never tell you how to do your job. My entire career is giving some probabilistic recommendations to people and then having them make decisions. And so if I feel really strongly about something, I'll tell you. I feel really strongly about this and you can still tell me you disagree.

• 1:28:24Logan Bartlett?

  But I'll tell you where in the calibration I am. And I think sometimes founders want the more declarative, like, this is how you do this. And I, I'm not great at doing it because I always get the nuance.

• 1:28:35Speaker 01

  I don't think they're good founders.

• 1:28:36Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, that's maybe fair.

• 1:28:37Speaker 01

  You know, great founders have this internal sense of right and wrong, and they have a conviction in their own ideas. That often leads to really ugly things, but at least the beautiful things, too. If you're a founder and you're asking people, what should I do, particularly investor? Good luck. No hate, but like, good luck. That's tough.

• 1:29:06Logan Bartlett?

  How have you, you have three founders currently active?

• 1:29:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:29:10Logan Bartlett?

  Have they, has everyone, has anyone been there all the way through? Do people leave when you left?

• 1:29:15Speaker 01

  Um, we had four founders at the start. One left after like five years or so. Then I left, then one of the guys left and there was one left. Then I came back, then one of the others came back. So.

• 1:29:30Logan Bartlett?

  And everyone's, everyone's active.

• 1:29:31Speaker 01

  We're super active.

• 1:29:32Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, interesting. Yeah, I guess, I guess fundraising itself was the other thing we were gonna, like, any, any lessons learned or anything you take away from that?

• 1:29:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I was, you know, it's been a while since I actually raised money. I, you know, the last we raised money was in the late 2017, so it's been a long time.

• 1:29:50Logan Bartlett?

  Geez.

• 1:29:50Speaker 01

  Super long time. We've been profitable most years since.

• 1:29:55Speaker 01

  So maybe my advice is stale at this point, but, you know, I invest in a lot of companies, too.

• 1:30:02Speaker 01

  You know, I, I think good fundraising is an interesting mix of, or a compelling pitch is an interesting mix of

• 1:30:12Speaker 01

  a highly credible, ambitious vision. So someone explains to the few, to you, here's what the future is gonna look like. Here's why I believe that.

• 1:30:26Speaker 01

  And, and paints the picture for you in a way where you're like, I could totally see that. And then is able to take it down to earth and say, here's the size of the market. Here's how many customers are in it. Here's how many people in that segment. Here's the products they currently use. Here's how they pay. Here's how we get to them. Here's the pitch that's working. Here's why we're better. And can really break it down. So you as an investor are like, okay.

• 1:30:52Speaker 01

  They have helped me understand the opportunity and helped me believe that this person really gets it. That on its own is highly compelling. And they've now given me the belief that they can mechanically get after it. And that latter piece is actually pretty rare, I think. I don't know if you find that rare, but for someone to be able to come in and show you a deck and say, here's the market, here's the customers, here's who we go after first, here's how we get them, here's the magazines they read, here's how much it costs, here's the cacti LTV. You know, if someone really breaks down, you're like, huh, they've got a full plan. Yeah. And the idea of business plans was kind of denigrated. Is that the right way to put it? Yeah, I think that's right. Like, you know, because people knock MBAs and they're like, business plans, that's

• 1:31:36Speaker 01

  so, you know, coke, you know, kind of, it's imaginary business. But I actually think, if you've got vision and a business plan, that's highly.

• 1:31:47Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, there is something about the ability to speak at different altitudes or different levels of the business. And some people can operate at the five years out point, which is super compelling. That's ultimately what we're investing is five, eight years in the future.

• 1:32:03Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:32:03Logan Bartlett?

  But if you can't go down to the what are we doing tomorrow point to get there, then it means you can't actually operate the business. And so there's, it's rare to have someone that can storytell across both of those sectors.

• 1:32:18Speaker 01

  Exactly. So I think that that's like the real X Factor founders and pitches. So if someone was to ask me, like, what's a recipe for fundraising? Well, it's figured that out, both sides.

• 1:32:29Logan Bartlett?

  Did you ever have, was valuation ever like a metric that you, in the hype of growth days and all that, did it ever become?

• 1:32:39Speaker 01

  A little, yeah.

• 1:32:40Logan Bartlett?

  And when did, obviously you haven't raised in seven years, so I assume it's no longer the metric that you think about.

• 1:32:46Speaker 01

  I mean, we all have imaginary valuations for like, here's how much we're worth now.

• 1:32:50Logan Bartlett?

  Sure, sure. Did you shift to just revenue at some point along the way? And you're, that's just been the easier?

• 1:32:56Speaker 01

  You know, interestingly.

• 1:33:00Speaker 01

  In the early days, I would just talk about success and our mission and the thing we wanted to build. Then in the later days, I would talk about revenue and revenue targets and goals. And then recently, I would talk about here's how much this opportunity is worth in the market. Here's how we can obviously be a one hundred billion dollar company if we crack X, Y, and Z. And so I now speak about that in a way, in an open way that I never did before. I used to be scared to talk to the company about money. I think a lot of CEOs are.

• 1:33:44Speaker 01

  I kind of had some shame about it and thought it was dirty. And a lot of people do actually, you know, in the Bay Area, we don't, we pretend like money's not a motivation.

• 1:33:55Speaker 01

  But I realized it was. Everyone's really excited about it and that's totally fine. You can be excited about building cool tech, creating impact in the world, making a shit ton of money, having fun doing it. You can be excited about all those things. That's, that's fine and great. And so in recent years, I've started to talk about our employees as partners in the business. My, my, my share, my co shareholders and talk about creating great wealth for ourselves and for our families.

• 1:34:25Speaker 01

  And that is remarkably motivating. People want to do, they're not, you know, they don't feel like they're in some sort of like get rich quick scheme. They're excited about what we're building and they believe in the mission and the vision and even the values and the culture. But

• 1:34:42Speaker 01

  they are putting the pieces together in a new way where we're like, if we hit this target, we'll be worth this amount. We'll do a secondary, other options will be open, we could go public, et cetera. It starts to treat the company at large as insiders. These are the things you usually only talk to with the board, never mind your exec team. But I think that that's actually a way to be super transparent and include everyone, not just as employees on a mission, but actually as business partners and shareholders too. So that has worked out a lot.

• 1:35:16Logan Bartlett?

  Thanks for doing this.

• 1:35:16Speaker 01

  Of course, it's awesome. Good questions.

• 1:35:22Logan Bartlett?

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