YouSaid · the spoken record

Eoghan McCabe

lines on the record: 85
first: 2025-08-21
most recent: 2025-08-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“A lot of people experimenting and kicking tires. You can't kick tires with Finn. We only deliver value when you expose it to your customers and it closes tickets and makes them happy. And so like AI is really, really happening. And so if you know anyone out there that has customers, they should be using Finn. It's the smartest, cheapest, easiest way to dramatically enhance their business. So if they do that, they'll be helping me sincerely.”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Outfin.ai if they want to follow me on Twitter. So it's Irish spelling of own. But if they want to be helpful to me, you know, I love them to try Finn. I'd love them to have their friends that run any kind of customer operations. Try it too. AI thing is noisy. There's so much hype. It's also really real. And the weird thing about Finn, even relative to the coding apps, the coding apps are blowing up and yet.”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They don't have a sense within themselves about the value of the stuff they're building. Will this be good? What's get customer feedback? And it is possible to build things that you deeply know make sense. And that's why my formula for building things was to always build things for myself. And that was what Quitter was. Like, you know, followers go down. At that point in time, people had 100 followers or 200 followers. You'd want to know who's not my friend anymore.”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we eventually sold it for like 14K That's cool I think there's a website called Flipper where you could sell websites, it really blew up. Was like a little experiment, kind of a social experiment. It was the first time that I had this feeling that there's no reason someone wouldn't want to use this. Like obviously people are going to want to use this. And it was really instructive for me because it taught me that that feeling is possible. You meet so many fanners, young founders particularly.”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And the problem is that even that idea. We forget it instantly. And if you start getting text every day, you'll ignore the text By default, we just don't want to acknowledge that reality on a day-to-day basis. Maybe that's important.”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My experience is that the weeks and the months and then the years go by. Like, it's not a big deal. I'm like back at Intercom two and a half years now. To any of these kids in AI in their 20s. They don't get something done or achieved by next month, they'll be so disappointed themselves and so impatient. And in some ways, at least when it comes to productivity, they're better at getting more out of the time. But I'm now trying to get more life out of the time too. So yeah, just that's if there is a motto, it's like life is short or like memento mori, you know, we're all on the way out. So make the use of what you've got.”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, it's not sophisticated, you know, and it's more of a concept than a phrase, but it's something around the idea that life is short. I'm just so aware that time ticks by and we all live on autopilot. So much of what we do is inspired by either our insecurities or things that other people we look up to or envy do very rarely making contact with what we really want and following our hearts and our heads. And yeah, we just kind of like get stuck in these lanes and just live out our days. And certainly when you get, you know, I'm 41 now, you get to 41. Thankfully, still very young. Anyone in their 40s? Congrats. Should feel good about that. But I know if you're in your 20s or 30s, 40 feels old. But when you're in your 40s,”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I very rarely like products. I'm such a perfectionist that it has to be really simple with very little moving parts, like a bowl to actually be like I've started to get more into coffee. I've been buying products by fellow. They're remarkably good for consumer products. Like different, it's on a different level. So there's some sort of level of taste and craft happening there that I don't see in basically any other consumer hardware type products. Of all things, I bought a portion 9 11 recently, and that is a beautiful product. The interiors are exquisite, and there's still a bunch of shit that is going to annoy you. So it's like far from perfect. Perfectionism is. Sometimes a gift if you're in the business of cranium products, but also quite the curse. You're never happy, including with a Porsche 9 lemon.”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love movies. I want TV to be better, but I very rarely find TV to be great. The first and last TV show I loved was True Detective One. I was just like incredible. But the last movie I watched was 28 years later. And that's by Danny Boyle. I was born in the 80s group as a kid in the 90s. And so grew up with train spotting was 28 days later. Then he made a movie called Sunshine. So 28 years later is a type of movie that's just not made anymore. It's the most... It's like very rock and roll and also deeply touching. So I was really surprised by that. I bet I would love to know the younger generations that are watching this, what they may think. They may hate it. But I love 28 years later.”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I found I lost the habit of reading as I started to get more and more stressed with my startup. And so I would listen to audiobooks here and there. But the most recent book I read is a book called Nuclear war scenario It's a very much a non fiction and scare the shit out of me. So if you like nightmares, it'll be beautiful bedtime”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you know, two years ago, we were in the low single digits growth rate. We doubled our growth rate, and last year we were in the low double digits. This year, we're in the 15th percentile of all public software companies. So you take the 120-something public software companies. We're in the 15th percentile. So we're like getting up there fast. And if we sustain this trajectory and it's obviously dangerous to put these types of things out publicly, but I'll tell you, I look at the charts and it's hard not to imagine where this goes. I think we're going to find ourselves being the fastest growing out of all relative to all public software companies. So let's see, but that's the level of shock, surprise, and transformation that has actually happened here all because of Finn. So, you know, check in with me in a year and maybe I'll be embarrassed or maybe I'll be feeling a genius.”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bucks, they just don't imagine these older companies. If I told you that IBM had made the most wildly innovative coding assistant, you'd find it hard to believe. Most people would. It's maybe so interesting such that it would stick in your mind and you'd go look at it, but by default, people aren't going to look at IBM. I want people to take a new look at Intercom because it's a brand new company. And our mission is to help every single type of business deliver impeccable, incredible, beautiful. Personal service to every single one of their users and people, many thousands of people are using Finn for that today. So go check out Finn, please, fin.ai.”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When someone like me comes on a podcast like this, they always have an ulterior motive and that's healthy and good. It's part of the transaction. Some of it is to enjoy feeling like an expert. But my ulterior motive today is to make sure that people understand that intercom is a fundamentally different type of late stage company. We are a large old startup every single way in which we work is as a startup and are competing with and crushing the actual startup competition in our agent categories. And the reason that that's important for people to know is just, like I said earlier, that They're handicap that good, but late stage companies have is that they're late stage and people don't mentally put them in the same”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Show the companies ranked by the number of founders that they have. And I'm like, what is happening? I was as surprised that we were that high as you were because there are many other great companies on that list. So surprised and proud.”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's because we hired founder types. And my pitch to people was always come to Intercom, figure out how great companies are built and build it with us and then go on to start your own. I would say that often at all hands. But the irony is that the people we hired back then, the founder types, were probably not great employees. They were better founders. I'm not a good employee. And so it'll be interesting to see if this current cohort will get money founders out of this current cohort, but will they convert as well as they did before? Because we're now hiring people who want to be part of something bigger that are more mature and grown up, more stable and consistent. They're part of, you know, they have a certain expertise and a certain lane they want to work in. And maybe they're not the crazy types that went on the star companies. But it's wild. I did see some of that research by you, particularly the one where you...”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's a bunch of frameworks for how to think about AI, etc. So it's part of what we do. And so we would hire people who are good at that, but we teach that. That's teachable. And not everyone does that. And so the conversation. We still love being on whiteboards. Our very first office, our own office in Dublin. Was a tiny office. One wall was like four or five computers. The other wall was just all whiteboards. We love that we had a whiteboard wall. In our next office, we had a room, square room, and all walls were whiteboards. So we just love to like draw diagrams. So you can teach all that stuff. So yeah, it's just all that good energy, product energy, first principles, the people we chose. And on the founder's side, I was talking to Daz about this this morning, like why have so many intercom people gone on to...”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Almost to a fault, although I don't think it's a fault, I and we would create frameworks for everything. It's like, okay, we want to do these events. Who are the events for? What is the ultimate goal of the event? What's the mechanism by which events work? What are other mechanisms that can achieve that same goal? How do we define success for an event like that? How does the user or the attendee define value? What other things do those people find valuable? Like we create these complex systems to try and approach everything, but the net effect was we'd have really joined up, considered strategy. And it's everywhere. Like Paul Adams, our chief product officer. I didn't even plan to show this. He made this book recently. The AI age and the transformation of customer service.”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lots of PMs and PM groups that we gave a lot of autonomy to. And so kind of the product of our big messy strategy was that we had PMs that got to act like many CEOs. And so I think that they got to learn. Broader skill sets beyond designing wireframes and interviewing some customers, they really own it like a mini CEO to some degree. I think there's one other thing, which is, you know, part of our approach was this deeply first principles thinking methodology.”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I don't have a really succinct answer, unfortunately. I can say in the abstract, our culture is a very producty culture. So like, And Dez, you know, those four founders and me and Dez trainer. Drove a lot like all the strategy we're product guys, you know, I was like, I was a software designer. You know, I studied computer science, so I'm technical, but never did it professionally. So the first part is that just product innovation design was just core to our culture. And people always picked up on that. So I think good people wanted to work here. We were good at finding good people. The other part was that because we had this sprawling strategy, we had all these products that we needed a complex structure for. And that included”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're human. We should let ourselves be human. I think it's beautiful. We're logic systems, but we're also heart systems and body systems and soul systems. So all of it is good.”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good, exactly May all our egos peacefully become smaller and leave this mortal coil. The reality is like none of our egos ever die. And even great, there was Ramdas is this great spiritual teacher who died a few years ago and someone asked him on his deathbed, something like, you know, how did you get over your bullshit or your ego? And he said, I never did. Just the edges got smoothed away. This is a guy who had like 70 years of the deepest, wildest spiritual work. He acknowledged no, still my same self. So the ego is still there, and we actually need to acknowledge it and love it. And when you acknowledge it, then it's not a surprise when you're like a little jealous. You're like, huh, I'm jealous. That's funny. Okay. And it's all good.”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The reason that's so good is that that's so limiting when you have this ego identity of yourself about how fucking amazing you are, then any moment that challenges that is super scary. Anyone who questions it is offensive. And so I credit wherever I am today and I have decades of learning still to go to those three components. And I feel super fortunate to have had all of them, even though the last one sucked, I can finally say, wow, it really helped.”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your ego, your sense, any sense you have of your greatness is eviscerated. And that's painful. It can be so painful that many people don't come back from it. And I credit the 10 years at that point or nine years of therapy I did at that point plus the support of this therapist and coach that I had to surviving it. But if you can survive it, what you end up with on the other side is all of those insecurity. A lot of the insecurities and all that ego bullshit that made you super ineffective jealous or triggered for all sorts of different reasons, it's gone. And your image that you are this perfect brilliant leader that all successful founders form. When they are successful Had to die.”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Help you see yourself and love yourself so much more for who you are. Completely unafraid to acknowledge the things you're not good at, but own the things you aren't. In understanding yourself, you understand others better and can communicate in a substantially more connected and authentic way. Great, great therapy and has to be great is. Recipe for brilliant leadership, in my opinion. And then the third part is Two years away where I ran away, where I was sick, revenue growth wasn't doing so hot, I unsuccessfully tried to defend myself from a bunch of fake bullshit in the newspapers. I mean, I was beat up. And in a moment like that,”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of kind of the last, I don't know, many decades, people don't even know him, but he's thought and worked with many CEOs. And he just helped me get to know me and take time for myself. And people like to hate on therapy right now. I think a lot of therapy sucks. And a lot of therapists are not good. And they fear that actually. Therapy will lobotomize them and turn them into thumb sucking, naval gazing, you know, Relevant losers that won't have that edge anymore. And the interesting thing about 12 years of weekly therapy and spiritual work is that Takes your edges off, but they are all edges that are super counterproductive, all the edges that made you an asshole, got you triggered, miscommunicated or like, you know, fought back when you were insecure. They take all the edges away.”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. Yeah, there's a couple things. First, There's three things that come to mind. Working in a startup for 14 years has a certain way of kicking you in the head. Many times a day. That either kills you or makes you far stronger. So that's one piece. There's no elegance to that point, but I think we can all intuit that that level of experience teaches you something. You grow up very fast. Did a lot of therapy. I found this amazing guy 12 years ago. He started a couple of his own tech companies and tucked them public. He only coached and was a therapist to CEOs. He's now kind of in a later stage of his career with this amazing guy. His name is Yossi Amram. Amazing guy. I just landed on my feet. I just didn't know who I was dealing with. But, you know, one of the greatest minds and teachers”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you want to compete and enjoy success in this age, which means you need to be doing AI, that is the price. So you either decide to pay the price or get out. Don't half asset. You see all these companies saying, we do AI and they've just sprinkled a little bit of crappy AI and they've got the same cultures, it won't work. One thing I will say, the one little asterisk to my first point is that all great people and great things have been achieved through hard work. And so... I'm speaking out of both sides of my mouth here to younger people to let them know that every way of living is valid, but people who have achieved things have always worked hard and they find a way to enjoy it too, and particularly in 2025 in AI.”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think so. I don't actually generally promote working that hard. I try to not fetishize it. I actually think a life well lived includes taking slow walks in nature where you're not thinking about ARO growth or hiring your chief revenue officer, you know, not going to eight meetings a day. Maybe you should go to no meetings a day. Certainly not working 12 hours a day. I don't actually promote that. In general, as a thing one should do with their life, I'm simply saying that”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a prime example. Doing many such things. When I say 365 days a year, they're the company I think of because they're doing exactly that. All these young companies are doing wild, weird, and ridiculous things that people you're in my age kind of chuckle at. But it's Business as usual for them. So there's just a big mind shift, cultural shift, and there's a culture clash of the previous generation versus the new generation. And the sooner you kind of wrap your head around, the sooner you can start to unstake yourself, I think.”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that's not just a poetic cute phrase thing to say. That comes from something very real, which is these younger companies know how to use AI in ways that the older companies don't. The younger companies are vibe coding and using AI for their creative work and for their job descriptions. I guarantee you go to companies of our generation and even we have had to push people. You go to companies of our generation. Most people in most organizations, particularly non technical organizations, they're not using any AI. Maybe they're starting to use ChatGPT to write a job description, but they're not doing it by default. And so That's more than a joke. You're competing with young companies that are in part AI.”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Growing up, some people in our generation have kids, or a lot of them do. There's like comfort and stability in your life. You don't want to work like that. But if you want in, that's part of the price. And that's how so many of these young new AI companies are going to win because very few of the previous generation companies are willing to make all of those changes and go all the way in. And so my actual advice, which is not that helpful, is that if fanners of previous generation companies are themselves not willing to roll up their sleeves and get into it and work as hard as the kids, hire a kid. Can be a chairperson like I was. Have a lot of fun. You can mentor the kid, hire a kid because you're in the ram job, buddy.”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To you, Fergal Reed, and he's just one of the very best in AI applications. And we happened to be working with him for many years. So part of it is finding the talent. And part of it is bringing in the young talent too. AI is kind of a young man's game. And I'm young, but I'm not as young as a lot of the kids building AI. And so learning to empower and enable them and learn from them too is a really big deal. And unfortunately, part of what you learn from them is the only way you're going to win right now is if you work your ass off because all these little AI companies run by kids in their 20s are literally working twelve hours a day literally three hundred sixty five days a year. No joke, all of them. And that's not a fun idea for many of us, especially those who've”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We and I would be nothing if we didn't have actual AI scientists and leaders. It's the only way we can be successful here. We have an incredible person who, by the time this is out, will have received a promotion to Chief AI officer. I keep announcing all these things.”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, I think it's ultimately that you don't have a choice My condit is writing a book at the moment, and that's core to the idea here. You don't have a choice. Story of the technology industry or digital technology is really short and it's been it's punctuated by a small number of things, microprocessors, personal computers. The internet may be mobile. Now this AI, I think AI is bigger than all these things. And all of these things disrupted essentially all categories So, not only is this lightly disrupt all the categories, it's going to disrupt it in the most aggressive, violent ways. And if you're not in it, you're about to get kicked out of all of it. And so my strongest advice is roll your sleeves up, figure out what's going to disrupt you, have fun with it. You need to bring in actual talent.”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because some things have more quality, more beauty, more craft, more art, more humanity. So I think there'll always be a place for that.”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I don't know. It will in many ways. We're going to have agents and AI to aggregate content and create content. But humans. As much as when it comes to productivity, value efficiency, efficiency is not the number one thing that we value. If efficiency was the number one thing we value, I'd always buy the cheapest clothes, furniture, computers, even paper for my printer. But I think humans value things like beauty. And human stories and human heart and connection. And Not only will they still want those and they'll still want a lenny that has his own story and his own taken opinions and is a little imperfect, but they'll pay more for it. Abundance of AI Is going to make automated things. Worth zero, just like The value of cheap content on YouTube. Why do people subscribe? Some channels and pay more? Why do people pay to rent movies?”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not Pollyanish here, like I said, and I'm suggesting that there won't be friction. But for the most part, we're doing good. To get specific, they will be CX roles and a lot of basic repetitive roles. There is a lot of repetitive stuff in sales. And so you'll do more sales with less people. There are SDR roles, qualifying basic questions. You're not going to need as many people in sales organizations. So I'm a little misaligned with Mark in that respect. But what he's getting at is that what sales people bring to the table is human connection and trust. And that is not about to go away anytime soon. And thank God for that.”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And happier. What are the work, the types of work that will go away? It's all the demeanor and crappy stuff. And that exists in Know digital businesses, you ask a human to sit at a keyboard answering the same question day in, day out, and you get to a point where you don't even ask them to answer the question manually. You ask them to click the button that brings up the macro. Like what a horrible use of a human life. I've met thousands of people that have worked at Intercom, a broad range of talents, people who they might not describe themselves as particularly high IQ. Maybe they were suited at that point in their life for this highly repetitive work. You talk to them for two or three minutes, you'll see the bright spark of a beautiful human that if they got to do the right thing, they would light up and bring so much happiness and joy to the world. And so like that's the mission we're all on.”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or just doing things that's highly demeaning to the great, beautiful creative potential of each human individual life. So I want to apologize for competing with or competing for shit work because all the while technology has done that in the past. Population has increased, GDP has increased, longevity, crime rates have diminished in the Western world, the world that is enjoy the most technology. So we have no good reason to not believe that that won't continue. Even while there is difficulty, and there has been in the past, no doubt people who were gainfully employed in dangerous work in mines at the find new work. And so I don't take that for granted, but I think that this is part of the long arc of humanity flourishing and getting health.”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, I don't find it to be particularly touchy because jobs have always gone away. And technology has done a really good job at stealing jobs that were repetitive, demeaning, dangerous. We have less people losing limbs in dangerous factories or dying and suffocating down mines because of the technology that we now have available to us. People breaking their backs on farms.”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“AI itself is insanely competitive right now. It's so intense in a way that it was never before that's going to come to all industries when so much of their inner workings becomes automated. And ultimately, I think it's going to be great for the consumer. They'll have more options, cheaper options. And I can't but see that be great for the economy. A lot of economic lubricant, as it were, and a lot of new movement and activity. And if we were to really go off the reservation, but I'll stop here, that means that we need more humans too. We need population growth to show up for this big growth economically. And yeah, I just see the future as just a beautiful collaboration between humans and agents in every direction.”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Understands your priorities and actually talks to you and does a check in each day and reaches out to different people and ask for updates and helps organize your priorities and helps you remember who you need to keep accountable. You know, clearly there's an opportunity for that. And so you can imagine agents in specific roles like customer service, in operational roles being glue, and in being kind of like co-pilot or assistant roles like that which I mentioned. But what I think that all brings is just epic levels of Efficiency Going to be super deflationary. There'll be a lot more competition.”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know people that are like managers and leaders, but they'll be in icy roles working with agents to configure them for success and monitor and manage their progress, kind of add that oversight and cover for edge cases. And so, you know, I think we're going to be surprised in which the way that these organizations go. They'll definitely be smaller. They'll be flatter because of that. I won't be surprised if there are agents at the highest level too. I mean, I've been thinking about how, and we do have a great human chief of staff here, but imagine a future human chief of staff that.”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interesting questions is how much will be generic operations bots? How much will be expert agents? You know, there are expert agents for law and contract review. There'll probably be expert agents for accounting. But you'll need the glue in between all of these agents too. future organizations will be agents everywhere. Spent quite a bit of time thinking about what it all looks like in the future You know, I imagine it as a medley of humans and agents. And I don't think it's obviously going to be humans on the top and the agents all in the AC roles. I think that'll be more of a complex mix where you're going to have”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First thing I'll say is that. Is deceptively large given it's hidden behind just two words, two letters. You know, customer experience really is service success, sales, and marketing, in my opinion. It's all engagement with all customers. It's the biggest... Part by headcount of any business. Any consumer business and any B2B business, the biggest organizations are sales, service, success. I'll talk about things other than CX in a moment, but I want to emphasize that CX is The majority of business operations. Of course, it'll go beyond CX. Any function that requires a lot of repetitive operational mechanical work will be automated, whether it's chasing or collecting or issuing invoices. It could be onboarding, offboarding employees. There are so many repetitive jobs in an organization that it'll start to replace. One of the...”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not, you know, you're giving me an opportunity to paint the story of this maverick-led adventure that you might imagine in a comic, like, you know, like for some reason picturing Tintin, you know, sail the seas, you know, this swashbuckling adventure, it's not. It's corporate life kind of sucks, particularly for people like me. I have many of those days. And so the only reason I'm still around is that I have a broader mission that makes it worthwhile for now. But that's why you see so many of our best founders get to a point where they're like, okay, I've had enough corporate fun. So that's the most authentic answer I could give you. No regrets coming back, but plenty of pain on a day to day basis.”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of all these people, who wouldn't want that? That said, The reality is that for particularly people like me who like the adventure and the high agency being unilateral day-to-day movement where you're trying to make big wild bold decisions, the reality is that If you're successful, most of your days will not be that it'll be reviewing the bonus policy for next year and reviewing the comp proposal for your execs for the next year. It will be showing up for accountability meetings. Those people aren't offended and hurt. And trying to communicate in the ways that your staff and your team that is empathetic and thoughtful and keeps in mind that they may be having as shit a day as you are.”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I never regretted coming back. But I have many moments where I don't enjoy the job. I didn't regret coming back because it was deeply cathartic for me. When a founder runs away from their business, it is the ultimate betrayal of their heart and the dream that they have. Now it's okay to wrap things up and quit, but when you kind of run away like I kind of had to because I was sick and burned out and kind of disenchanted, I don't know. It didn't feel good. So especially when I had done that having betrayed a million or a thousand small ways my intuition, there was something I needed to exercise. So it has been deeply meaningful in that respect. And then, of course, I'm fortunate that it worked out. I get to be on the second most popular podcast in tech. I get to like pat myself on the back and front.”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who wants to go to war every day with your organization and in Slack? That's just not fun. Let's not go for the nervous system or the soul.”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That there are startups that hire the crazy young, wild, messy early startup people. And that's great for them and the company too. So it's really all about having the right individuals. And when you create that, not only do you create success, but you just create a lot more happiness and balance and harmony. Ultimately, the employees who wanted a more Gentle, democratic environment, they're not going to be happy in a company like Intercom or Coinbase or any of these strong organizations. They'll be more happy somewhere else. So even if it requires a little bit of a loving push out the door, I know that you're actually doing them a favor in the medium to long run.”
2025-08-21 · Lenny's Podcast · How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source