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

“That were happening, but to bring in the people that were that new level of ambition and wanted to work as hard as the rest of us and working in a mature and engaged and excited way, that took a little longer time. You know, there's such a thing as product market fit. There's a thing as founder market fit. There's a thing as founder product market fit, you know, that's how you're doing it right. But there's also such a thing as employee founder product market fit. You have to have the right employees for the type of business you're creating. And there are companies that want the need to be more stable and they're going to want the need to hire more stable individuals. There's going to be companies that want to do the highly collaborative, more democratic thing. I won't invest in them, but there's companies that want to do it. If you're an employee that enjoys that, there are a lot of positions out there. There are big companies like Google that.”
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'd be something ultimately like 40%. So it's a big turnover over some couple number years. Often the culture is set by a very small number of people. So it only took a quarter to really start to change the tenure of the tenor of the conversations.”
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 so that's, in my opinion, what creates greatness and great innovation. But like I said, there will be friction changing a company that's configured for democracy and committee decisions and soft and gentle interactions and communication to be properly founder-led and top-down.”
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's how, in my humble opinion, it should work. And I, for one, don't know of a great company that doesn't work that way. You'll see from time to time I did this a couple years ago. People will construct these indexes of the performance of companies that are founder-led. And of course, this is a self-serving statement, but it's also true. And surprise, surprise, the Founder-led companies perform substantially better because they have the moral authority and the willingness to take the risks that the professional CEOs don't have the remit for. The professional CEOs are typically told don't mess things up. And the founders are bored if they're not taking the risk of messing things out from time to time.”
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 you make that degree of change and you tell people that they're in control like we did in the previous generation of late stage businesses, there's going to be some friction when you change the rules. And it's my strong belief that great employees and great companies want and are constructed out of. Very clear and strong hierarchy where it is the responsibility of the CEO to make brave and hard decisions unilaterally, yes, using their experts as inputs and be responsible for the outcome. If I make decisions that propel the company in the way that thankfully my decisions have, I get rewards and kudos and I get to go back to the board and say, I want a bigger grant if I don't I get fired and I should get fired. If my big brave unilateral decisions put us in the toilet, then I have to take responsibility for that also.”
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
“Banning on AI and then culture. And I kind of bury the AI thing because frankly, none of this would matter if we didn't bet on AI. So the story could all be summed up by saying when you ask, what did I do? It was that we built Finn and that changed everything.”
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
“98 to 99% approval of management leadership and new strategy. And this is coming from me having the lowest glass door rating for a CEO I had ever seen when I came back. I just want to explain that. Being that deliberate about your culture and upsetting a lot of people Is the path through which you can create a culture where people are super happy, super engaged, super aligned. And now we have just this highly performant organization. Yes, we're messy in many ways. So that was a big part of it too. So it was kind of strategically picking a lane. Remaking how we go to market, the pricing was a really, really big piece that had a big effect”
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 people got below a certain mark respectfully and lovingly, we would say thank you for your service. We're going to go forward without you. And so you do that just a small number quarters and you can start to shape an organization that's design and the image of the values you want to create. And obviously there was a lot of pain, a lot of satisfaction. There was attempts at a soft coup. There was letters sent to the board. People were really unhappy. But on the other side of it The people left were Most incredible. Entrepreneurial, brave, inspiring, happy individuals you could possibly imagine. And then you hire in their image. We ran an anonymous employee survey like, I think, 15 or 16 months after I started aggressively working through the organ, rebuilding the org and rebuilding the culture. And we had.”
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 we were going to spend nearly $100 million of our own cash on that. We allocated a lot of capital. But I also restarted the culture. We had just a very comfortable culture as a lot of companies did. There was a lot of focus on social issues and a lot of complaining and dissatisfaction. And I rewrote the values designed to be a sharp knife to cut out the parts of the company that I just knew wouldn't be effective. So I said that people must be resilient, that we had very high standards, that we'd work incredibly hard, that shareholder value was the most important thing that we'd optimize for. A lot of things that were controversial for this prior crowd. And then I designed these quality performance processes where not only would you get a mark or a grade for your performance against your goals that quarter, but you'd also get a score for your behavior against the values. And I hard coded a formula myself. And so I took it out of the manager's hands to say.”
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
“Opportunity there. We're doing service. Forget all the other stuff. Even though there was a lot of people in the company saying, well, shit, we still have $80 million of air orb that we're getting from the other thing. And we're really good at that. And there's a big opportunity. There's other companies in this space worth billions. It was, you know, the type of decision that were I to practice the professional CEO approach, which is, hey, folks, what do you all think? Let's take everyone's input. Let's put it all down on a spreadsheet. Everyone out of color beside all of the different options that we may take. Let's make a group decision. I said, sorry, this is what we're doing. So I was very dictatorial in that respect. We had no one making decisions, so somebody needed to, even if I had some qualms about the decisions myself, I couldn't predict the future, but someone had to make a call. You know, obviously as soon as AI came around, I jumped hard on AI and announced.”
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, there were a couple things. One was we were burning a lot of money, so I cut a lot of costs aggressively, canned a bunch of different projects. We had this big, glorious office we were about to fit out. And I'm like, we're about to hit negative growth territory. Like, stop it. And a lot of companies were really stuck in the prior world where they just were used to being super successful, rich and wealthy and spent like drunken sailors. So I stopped. all of that got really frugal in ways i never thought i would i still haven't touched the interior design of this office i'm in here even though though though though though though though i call it the hotel marriott um sick of it anyway that was one another was i picked a lane strategically we were all over the place and i said we're doing service sandesk had been acquired a couple years prior they were strategically energetically culturally dead they were upsetting customers in the market there's an opportunity”
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
“Was the nexus between us earning the most and it being the most palatable? We basically said that. Someone is not prepared to pay 99 cents for us to rapidly and elegantly, perfectly and excellently solve their customers' problem, we need to wrap this up. We don't have a business here. So that was where the 99 cent came from. And I always believe that value should, that pricing should come from value and not from cost. The cost is our problem. And we just had this sense and intuition early on that this thing will get cheaper and it got a lot cheaper. And so, you know, the margin moves around, but we make a margin that makes this more than worth our while. And we know our customers get an excellent deal and are able to deliver to their customers a level of service that they never could before.”
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 had all this scar tissue from pricing prior that felt unfair to customers. And so we said, what's the most fair that we can possibly fathom? Now, when we did all our research, we found that many SaaS businesses were spending between $20 and $30 per ticket resolved. We were spending $22. Now, consumer businesses, maybe they go down to $5. We were thinking like, can we charge $10? That seems fair. It's half price. Can we charge $5? Can we even charge $2.5? But early on, we started the sense that people just wouldn't value the digital work as much as the human work, even though the digital work is better, more consistent, always available, makes the customer far happier. And so we actually started to lean into a price that we thought would be.”
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 it's really funny. We charge 99 cents to resolve tickets, customer problems. And we have a higher resolution rate than anyone else. And we are very proud of that and we obsess over that. It is the metric by which these agents are assessed. And we wanted our revenue to be 100% aligned with the value that they attain because”
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 take a very authoritarian, top-down, aggressive founder first approach to all the things. And I found that deeply cathartic. And that was the thing that led to me in. In part, the other was just good old fashioned logic, and the other was desperation saying we're doing the AI thing. The AI thing siding and sex, exciting and sexy. We need some new energy here. The new AI thing makes sense. And also just my intuition says, go for it. And so, you know, when people tell these stories, they rewrite history in their minds for the stories to be elegant and also so that they so...”
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, following advice in the industry and best practices, you know, you betray your intuition in a little. Bits and pieces over the years when the bright spark of your original idea turns into this big, unstoppable, scary corporate beast, and a little bit of you dies every single time you go and betray yourself in that way. It's very like you, you know, if you could pick in your mind three or four tech darlings from 10 years ago, when you meet the CEO and talk to them privately, very few of them feel outstanding about the state of their culture and the decisions that they make and the way in which they have to work. All of them have betrayed themselves in little ways. I had left the business. I was super sick. I was burned out frankly from the revenue even having started to slow down before I left. I had been attacked unfairly in the press. Just all of me was just fed up and I decided.”
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 was the combination of the company being older. All me and the founders being impatient. Like, are we going to make something out of this? We went through a time when the company's worth a lot. We're private, so we don't have like a daily mark to market. But all the other public software companies dropped 80%. 85, 90 percent. We saw our revenue growth crater. We were used to nice double digits. We were in low single digits. So, part of it was like, let's do something here. Another part of it was my own kind of anger and dissatisfaction with how the company was being run and the mistakes that I made myself. I made a lot of compromises as a lot of founders and fanning CEOs do to placate employees or do it out of fear to bring investors along.”
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
“Create so much more ease in the company and promotes a healthier relationship with the customer too. When our people saw that we were screwing customers effectively in every direction, it starts to erode the idea that we care about our customers. And then they make other customer-owned decisions. And so one of the values I promote when I came back was that we would be customer obsessed. And so we had to kill our own pricing and give away a lot of revenue. So that was the spirit behind the changes, but we can talk about the fin pricing if you want to also.”
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 came back, and I said, Yes, we're going to lose a lot of revenue here. Like, I can't remember how much we wrote down, but we actually have already given away something like something like 50 million dollars in AR. We've reduced the prices for a lot of customers just to give them way simpler pricing because surprise, surprise, when people feel like they have far simpler, more predictable, fairer pricing, they'll stick around longer.”
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
“Pretty complex pricing. If you're like customer service and you're selling seats and you do an outbound messaging and you need to charge for messages and you do them like SDR messenger on a website and you need to charge for leads, already that's just metrics in every direction. And then if you're trying to sell to many different sizes of customers, you need tiers and gates. And it just became a behemoth. So part of the problem was the on-focus strategy. And then the other part of the problem was an unwillingness to. Frankly, make bold decisions. Say no, pick a lane, and actually take pain in the short term for the long term. We rolled out this new pricing, and this is even before the fin pricing you're talking about.”
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, so I want to just validate your survey data. Yes, people abhorred our pricing. It was a meme. There were like actual funny, popular viral memes on Twitter that were making fun of our pricing. Part of the problem Not all the problem. There's two problems. One was our strategy. Super on focus, as you said, we're trying to do all the things for all the people. And when you're trying to do all the things for all the people, Efforts to capture all that different types of value are going to necessitate.”
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
“Things in the rest of my life, but when it comes to practical, productive, efficient, and effective value, the glue in between the human parts of our lives, I actually want AI and robotics.”
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
“ES and the AI is just better. Look at Waymo. So Waymo doesn't crash. It has 3.5 times less crashes than humans Don't bother you or bug you. I like to chat with an Uber driver as much as the next guy, but not always. Doesn't have hygiene problems, doesn't take wrong turns. I mean, it just doesn't do all these things that really bug people. And it's really interesting to see Uber now offer Women, the option to call only female drivers. I guarantee the reason they're doing that is because women love Waymo because they feel safer. Like AI is so often superior. And humans are going to be far better at all the things. I'm pro-human. I love humans. I really want humans in the mix for.”
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
“Providing a customer with a highly engaged, instantly available, expert consistent, fast, charismatic, funny, friendly personal agent. Available for literally every single customer, every minute of the day, around the clock, is so much more personal than making them wait two, three, four days for a crappy can response. And so, That's the irony and the magic and the wonder of AI, even if it does. Make us ask some hard questions of ourselves and think carefully about its impact on humanity. Actually Superior at the things we describe as personal and human relative to humans themselves. And so that's where I'm at today. Yeah, maybe it's a bunch of fancy post-rationalization, but honestly, that's really where I stand.”
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 know. It's a fun and ironic twist. Our mission from the early days was make internet business personal. And when I came back and we started to lean into AI, I started to wonder, does that mission make any sense anymore? Part of our lean into AIs that we had no choice, not only for the business, we needed something new, but also we saw that this is the future and you can't fight the future. You must be part of it. And so, okay, fuck, we're going to be part of it. Ultimately, and it's very easy to tell yourself these little stories. So I'm open to anyone telling me this is bullshit. But when I interrogate myself, my soul, and my mind, I don't think it is. I interrogate my heart and my mind. I don't think it is. I'm now of the belief 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 so we jumped on it. Now, obviously, it's fun to tell that once again, to support the idea of this brave maverick move. And I won't discount the fact that we were brave, but we're coming from a point of having nothing to lose. So, you know, We certainly are unique. I don't know a single company of our size and age that has pivoted this hard to AI and being a successful as we have been. We also previously were screwed. We were in a really tough spot, so had no choice. So I'll take the kudos and credit, but also have a lot of empathy for companies that weren't as in as much trouble as we were. And so tried to thread the needle and sustain the old business while adding to it with the new AI stuff.”
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 launch of GPT 3.5 when we actually had a beta version of Finn. So I got a text from Dez, my co-founder. A week or so after the launch of GPT 3.5, and he said the AI team have something interesting. And they actually think we could make a product out of this. And this was long before there's now like no doubt 100 service agents. We had something very early working. And part of what we had to our advantage also was that we had this giant-based 300, you know, sorry, 30,000 paying customers, hundreds of thousands of active users, millions of their users, billions of data points. So we had a lot to play with.”
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 were very lucky in that we had an AI group already. We were in the customer communication business, chiefly doing customer service. We were building bots, but they were rudimentary AI. We had a bunch of our own machine learning that did QA for customer service, but it required a phenomenal amount of setup and was kind of crappy. But we had a number of AI engineers in the company already. And so when GPT 3.5 came out, they said, this is different. And it didn't take long for people to start to imagine that this is going to be pretty disruptive to service. And it started where we imagined that this was going to just wreck everyone selling seats, everyone in the conventional SAS game. And we believe that was quite possible for some couple years after that moment. But we were only six weeks into.”
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 was so different from the way it started. It started with so much hope and optimism, like so many companies do, and it was about to fade away. So that was when I felt like I need to go back and I need to make a change. I went back and one month later, ChatGPT was announced. So it would be really neat and tidy to be able to say that the AI transformation came. I knew I couldn't be on the sidelines. I had to save this thing from the coming disruption. Actually, I got whacked across the head by this AI thing, but it also ended up being a gift.”
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 I was away for two years unsatisfied where the business was going. We had this post-COVID sugar rush, which a lot of big companies at that stage did in 2021. Everyone's valuation and revenue was through the roof. And that hit a lot of problems in a lot of these companies. And we had five quarters of successive sequential decline in our new error. And we were about to hit like zero dollars net new error ore, which means we would have been in negative growth territory. We never got there. I managed to stop it before we got there, but we were falling each quarter. And I found that despite my wishes to go and have new adventures, still had a lot of pride for this damn thing. And didn't want to see it end in a”
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
“Was already in the hundreds of millions intercommons fourteen years and changed now. Part of the story is that in 2020 I had been sick for a couple years of background is. I had mold toxins and later I found out that I had got a tick bite and that messed me up. And so I left the CEO role in 2020. Know a lot of the mistakes I had been making when I was sick got worse. We became what a lot of late stage software companies are today, which is a bit bloated. We lost some energy. Our strategy was diluted and unfocused. We're trying to do all the things for all the people. We didn't know what problems we were already solving and for who. And the result was very slow revenue growth in like the low single digit percent.”
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
“Benchmarks. We went all our head to heads, and our direct competitor bake offs. We rate a number one on G2. So I think we're doing pretty well. We're doing far better than we imagined at this point.”
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
“Currently, across the business, we benchmark ourselves against all the public software companies. There's like 120 something B2B software companies. We're like in the 15th percentile for ARRO growth. So we're up there. Fin, which is our AI agent, which is the future of the business, the thing that will disrupt the old business. It's growing north of 300%. It took off really fast like all these other AI companies you hear of the first year grew from 1 to 12 millionaire ore. We're now in solid mid eight digit air ore growth there will pass 100 million air ore with fin in less than three quarters and yeah financier experience category with fin so it's one of these agents that helps do all your customer work and they all started with service and in that category we are the biggest by customer count biggest by revenue best by performance”
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
“Said, we need to become a wartime company. If we don't fight for this, we are dead. I jumped hard on AI. But I also restarted the culture. I rewrote the values designed to be a sharp knife to cut out the parts of the company that I just knew wouldn't be effective.”
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 don't have a choice. AI is going to disrupt in the most aggressive, violent ways. If you're not in it, you're about to get kicked out of all of it.”
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