[00:00:00] [00:01:00] well Eoghan, thanks for doing this. Maybe for people that don't have full context and
Logan: maybe give a little bit. What does intercom do? And I guess in particular, you've stepped back in as CEO in the last.
Eoghan: A couple years ago,
Logan: When was that two years ago? Yeah. So, so maybe give whatever the short version elevator pitch and all
Eoghan: Yeah, I'll give you just a tiny bit of extra context you didn't ask for.
Eoghan: 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, uh, we're trying to stay a startup.
[00:02:00] Um, we are in the customer service space. Deeply boring space. And, 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 2020, like it was a month after I came back. So yeah, our story since my return has been banning on customer service fully and completely with AI.
Logan: And so you step back when? When did you
Eoghan: October 2020,
Logan: you step back
Eoghan: Yeah, I came back
Logan: When did you? When did you step back originally?
Eoghan: March, uh, summer of 2020. So I was gone just a little over two years.
Logan: Okay. Summer of 2020. I'm sorry. Just to get my dates right. So you step back in in 22.
Eoghan: I left during COVID in around June, 2020, and I came back in November, October, 2022.
Logan: And, uh, for people that [00:03:00] don't have all of that.
Logan: So there was some health stuff, some business fatigue stuff, some media, you know, uh, charges and all that. Can you just give the I mean, I think it's an
Eoghan: interesting thing that
Logan: have gone through at different levels
Eoghan: levels. Yeah, well you tell me how much detail you
Logan: I think it's I think it's interesting
Eoghan: Yeah, 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.
Um, 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
Logan: of you guys in Zenefits. I
Eoghan: Well, yeah, it was Slack was, was, was the next one to beat us. But yeah, Zenefits must've been somewhere in there. Uh, we went from like one to 50 million an hour or in like two point something years, which I don't know, I feel like this kid's in their bedroom doing that in
Logan: I know. I know.
Eoghan: So, 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 [00:04:00] us. Um, you know, there are so many kids now that do 1 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.
So there was a,
Logan: my job at some point like
Eoghan: your, yours and mine. 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, it's pretty amazing
Logan: Became part of your
Eoghan: ego.
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.
Logan: I
Eoghan: really took 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, [00:05:00] um, a failure. It's ridiculous as that sounds. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I was a younger man. My all in everything was the sick, rapid, insane success of this company. So that, that, uh, I, I, that did some damage to my ego. 2019, I was attacked with some stories in the press, some 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 correct 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. Uh, 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, um, painful.
Then I got sick in
Logan: june 2018
Eoghan: [00:06:00] 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, like involuntary twitching, and I didn't know what it was. And for years I just had this incredible fatigue, twitching, everything else. By 2020, some days I couldn't see.
Logan: see.
Eoghan: I'd wake up, and I'd see, I could see stuff, but I couldn't focus on things. And it wasn't a problem with
Logan: So
Eoghan: was just Beat up my ego and my self image was trashed, just spiritually eviscerated.
Um, and I was ready to get the hell out of there. The business was really, really hard and I just didn't have the [00:07:00] energy. Or the, um, uh, how would I say gumption to like go at it day after day?
Eoghan: Um, I promoted our C O O 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 a little comforting stories like tech is, was bullshit now. And, um,
Logan: decided I was
Eoghan: So it's fake. And I dunno, I decided I was done with tech and I had taken money off the table and, and I had that sense of freedom. And so I imagine I 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.
Logan: Quite literally, what did you do? Where did
Eoghan: 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. It 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.
[00:08:00] I didn't do any of that stuff. Um, I just blew every day. I, 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.
Logan: 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 do like, when you get out of the regimented rat race, it just like kind of
Eoghan: sure, absolutely.
Plus busy people are bad at not being busy. So I still had meetings and I was on the board of intercom and 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.[00:09:00]
Again, I imagine this beautiful flowing 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,
Logan: that I
Eoghan: Despair that I really cared about Intercom.
Logan: changed the branding in
Eoghan: 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
Logan: That
Eoghan: [00:10:00] 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. Yeah.
Logan: 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, it, I don't totally agree with this and I'm recharged and ready to go. Like, how do you actually go about
Eoghan: that mechanically in these situations there is so much that happens that will never be spoken.
Yeah. And
Logan: A lot of soft diplomacy
Eoghan: that will never be
Logan: yeah. Yeah. So you have that feeling you come back into, uh, into the business. Um, 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
Eoghan: 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 [00:11:00] R& D organization that we always had. We built an R& D org in Ireland and the UK,
Logan: incredible
Eoghan: 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, in Ireland and the UK, it's just kind of different.
So I came back to this incredible R& D organization. Now they were building many directions. So we were. losing money, no doubt on all our investment in R& D, but the ability of that team to build great software fast was, was still there. Um, 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
Logan: of very bad
Eoghan: And There was a lot of kind of pre
Logan: 2023
Eoghan: [00:12:00] 2023 cultural reckoning, cultural artifacts that, that including super busy, uh, employee resource groups meeting up a lot on company time planning, God knows what.
Um, they had, they were taking four day, they were doing four day work weeks during some summer. Um, the
Logan: annual work,
Eoghan: at my return. They really liked the previous setup. It was a lot easier.
Logan: sounds nice. Actually, yeah, Fridays in the summer can be, you
Eoghan: sure. It was awesome. And yeah, you know, I could, I could, I could really go here, but I won't, but it, there was a, an incredible amount of softness, a significant loss in the high bar for talent that we had no focus.
no transparency, an egregiously dysfunctional organization that worked super hard [00:13:00] to reject me.
Logan: That's interesting. So, so, so that happens. And how do you go about actually doing a, uh, a cultural reset? Like the, the body quite literally, you were once upon a time, the heart of the organization. And now you're, now you're trying to do a heart transplant and the body's trying to reject that. 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?
Eoghan: I will say, by the way, I know so many companies who have not had CEO changes that have the same problems.
We all kind of slipped into it. It was a different time.
Eoghan: Money was cheap and easy in 2021 22. Business was easy. And there was just a lot of cultural turbulence. And, uh, yeah. [00:14:00] Um, so there's so many companies still today that, uh, are, are struggling. Have severe problems of this sort.
Logan: 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 to
Eoghan: I see. Like when you get to come in as the new CEO, even if I'm the old CEO, you just got all this moral room to be like, Everything of the last management was shit, which, you know, which it may or may not be true, but you're not going to do that with your own
Logan: culture. You have a moral authority
Eoghan: you know what I mean?
Yeah. Like we're going to change everything. We have to change everything. I have a mandate to do so. 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 close to it. So, so I had it easier in that respect. So practically, pragmatically, you know, I, I refer to things that change what changed with me was.
And this is all relative, I'm not, I'm not speaking in absolute serious. I really just gave a shit substantially [00:15:00] less. Something changed. Honestly, being embarrassed 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 This is fundamentals.
I always knew to be important and true. So I, I, I, the, the, the, the, the first key to making a massive change is to do so with absolutely no apologies, to be wholly true to yourself and to never ever ask for permission. We were thought to do this kind of inclusive. Um,
Logan: a business.
Eoghan: know, involved collaborative
Logan: have
Eoghan: 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. Let's write that down. We'll include that. And you get this big blob of a non [00:16:00] 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 8 billion in the world, right? We don't need a few people
Logan: few
Eoghan: going forward. We are going to only hire impeccable, incredibly talented people.
And we're only going to keep impeccable, incredibly talented people. We're going to operate by these small number of values, including things like resilience and hard work and shareholder value.
Eoghan: And I designed this performance management system whereby everyone will be graded in a very formula, formulaic way, every single quarter.
Logan: You
Eoghan: You'll be ranked, stack ranked in your org, the people at the top, you're going to get a lot of salary increases, but new equity promotions, people at the bottom, We wish you [00:17:00] well, respectfully part ways, and you push that down with zero conversation. 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. Um, 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 special people. So, couple stats. You know, our Our revenue was decreasing.
Our growth rate was decreasing for five [00:18:00] quarters. We're now about to book our seventh quarter of increasing or accelerating revenue.
Logan: increase. We
Eoghan: massive, um, retention problems. Now we have lower, uh, 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, uh, we max one.
To 2 percent people who disagreed with statements like, um, I, I agree fully with the policies. I agree fully with our new values. So we've got an insanely aligned, super happy company. People are happy.
Logan: happy, like,
Eoghan: I'm kind of a dick about my approach and people are super happy.
Logan: We're sort of doing a post mortem now. I don't know, 18 months later or 24 months later or so. Um, what, how long did it take for the bottom to fall out as you sort of, it
Eoghan: not fun pain [00:19:00] and then like six to nine months of fun pain, like cathartic firing, a lot of pain. 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, uh, excellent environment.
Logan: The, uh, the performance management thing is that, do you still do that today? Of the, and so, so is it kind of the old Jack Welch, like
Eoghan: uh
Logan: basically gets us
Eoghan: 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 [00:20:00] rating their performance against their goals and their behavior against the values,
Logan: But
Eoghan: their manager, the manager's manager reviews that,
Logan: That spits
Eoghan: that spits out a number and then in each org, they're stack ranked.
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 and median 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 engineering, I can't remember what the numbers are.
Logan: The bottom
Eoghan: The bottom two and a half percent or 3 percent will be forced into need. It's immediate improvement, which means that you're departing the company.
Whereas the top, I forgot what the numbers are, top 4%,
Logan: [00:21:00] Yeah. As you think about maybe that 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
Eoghan: 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 oscillate and 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. Um, all evenings and weekends, different levels of the company are just plugging away like a startup. It's amazing
Logan: did you learn about, like the, the founder identity in some ways, like once you were able to disassociate it with the high growth.
Eoghan: thing.
Logan: Thing like what what is the North Star that you [00:22:00] would have pursued had you known or that you think about today?
Eoghan: 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, the thing is, no matter how much therapy you, you do, and I've been doing, you know, 12 years of extensive therapy and spiritual work, um, which is both a lot of fun and, and an art form to those, um, you've still got your edge.
You've still got your edge and the, you know, the famous spiritual teachers of our time who've done 60 years of spiritual work and 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 still got these ego things that drive you and that's okay.
We all have ego. It's totally 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 [00:23:00] 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. Uh, I might even try really fucking hard to win. I probably wouldn't cause I hate pool, but if we could find something else, I don't know, do you, is there a sport or a game that you love? I don't know. Like,
Logan: I mean, I play pick up basketball
Eoghan: I don't know, basketball.
Like you're really trying to win, but it's not good. 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 a 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 [00:24:00] 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.
Logan: about, um. 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.
Eoghan: part of that is stylistic, actually. Um, I just. I like inventing, and I think if you 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, uh, actually humility and pragmatism, a lot of young founders reinvent the fucking wheel.
We did, you [00:25:00] probably see that. Um, that's okay. All, all the stuff, all the stuff. It's like, no, you actually don't have to, you should reinvent what makes, 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,
Logan: telling you that
Eoghan: That the answer that's not the obvious answer might be worth considering, considering, then you consider it. I think what you'll learn is if you've had some degree of success over time and you respect yourself as an artist.
Um, you give yourself the benefit of the doubt with still a large amount of humility that, huh, when I have that feeling, it might actually, I might actually be onto 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 [00:26:00] 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. Um, you, you, you're not as dogmatic and arrogant about it, but you, you, you, you know, that there's parts of this system that I zone that I don't have full cognitive, uh, or conscious awareness of that when I get a certain feeling, or for some reason, I doubt a thing.
And probably, it probably means something.
Logan: certain feeling or for some reason I doubt a thing, I probably, probably lose it.
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 form fit the answers.
Eoghan: the, why is the interesting part,
Logan: And so how do you think, [00:27:00] or how do you go about doing that when you're, when you're hearing someone speak or asking for advice?
Eoghan: formula or any kind of secret sauce there, but You know, recently I was, um, speaking to Benioff, um, uh, I'm immediately uncomfortable about dropping that name, but I'm speaking to Benioff and I'm asking him about operations
Logan: Sean Benioff, not
Eoghan: yeah, it was like David Benioff. It's my old friend from
Logan: Yeah, people
Eoghan: um, and asking him.
About, uh, you know, certain operational questions. It's something on Badaad, 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. And, you know, this whole industry is defined by. People doing things for the new, [00:28:00] doing things for the first time. Um, 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
Logan: like, uh,
Eoghan: highly innovative technology and innovative ways of going to market.
And so, um, reinvention is really, really important. Um, but. That means you need to take advice with just massive doses of salt. Um, and, and so when I see young founders, like sometimes they'll ask for advice or I'm chitchatting 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, maybe don't do that. I'm just saying that's 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. Um, your goal is not to figure out what the Mark Banioff ones do.
That's not actually useful. Or even if it's in a totally different company or whatever. Your, your, your, your, your goal is to [00:29:00] build a model of the universe. And,
Logan: And, you
Eoghan: you know, you ask Mark.
Logan: you lost
Eoghan: you 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.
So it's the why.
Logan: you came back in 22 right before GPT
Eoghan: Yeah.
Eoghan: 3. 5
Logan: and that was kind of the, the mania I would say was the big, big kickoff in a meaningful way.
Um, was there a light bulb moment that you said that, Oh shit, this might have a ton of implication for us? Um,
Eoghan: 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? And, um, you know, a [00:30:00] great gift of youth is the naivety that stops you from doing that, which means that oftentimes you'll be wrong.
And sometimes it'd 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. Some of them, 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 LLMs and built our own machine learning systems. And they started to play, they experimented with
Logan: five and
Eoghan: GPT 3. 5 and built a very early version of our AI agent, a very simple thing. And it just demonstrated that
Logan: quite
Eoghan: there's actually probably a product to be built there.
And so pretty early, like November or December, we realized.
Logan: um,
Eoghan: Wow,
Logan: probably is
Eoghan: probably is going to disrupt all of customer service. Not just the software [00:31:00] category, but actually all humans who do service.
Logan: So
Eoghan: bigger category. Yeah. So it was, it was in 2022 still, but I wasn't the first to see it
Logan: and so you ended up rethinking pricing, obviously all different elements of product marketing, but once you, once you sort of had this realization and you decided to go all in, uh, what are the knobs that you ended up tuning?
Eoghan: There's so many really, um, 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.
Logan: work, right?
Eoghan: 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.
Logan: build and operate.
Eoghan: Um, so we needed and need to turn all the knobs that turn us from a [00:32:00] company. that provides that thing, in the future we'll 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, and certain speeds, 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, built.
Logan: uh, even in the way
Eoghan: Even in the way in which we iterate, how close we work with customers. Um, this AI agent market is so early that customers need a lot of handholding. Um, you can't, it's not ready for like off the shelf solutions. Um, the biggest opportunities are kind of in the mid market and enterprise where there's high volumes of work being done.
Uh, 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 that, Most incumbents will be unwilling and unable to make all of the [00:33:00] changes needed to become an AI company. You probably need to change about everything or certainly 80 percent of the company, including the revenue source upon which you're dependent.
If your company whose growth is dependent on seats
Logan: seats, over
Eoghan: over a long enough time, you're toast because those seats go away.
Logan: go away. If
Eoghan: If you want to get, if you want to be the company that disrupts yourself and does the work, you're gonna have to get started now and you're gonna have to start selling software that is very different from the seat based software.
You're gonna have to damage your seat based revenue. You're gonna have to advertise products that are, 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.
Logan: you thought about going public in 22 filed and all that. Were you in retrospect? Are you glad to [00:34:00] have been able to do this in the private markets
Eoghan: I mean,
Logan: it's, it's,
Eoghan: I, I kind of, it wouldn't, 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 you were, 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 quality earnings. Thanks. I don't know how you do it. So it was a big blessing in hindsight. That's why, you know, you see these companies going private again, because the, the, the, the wild pivots and changes required are just so dramatic.
Um, yeah, but I would bet on the companies to do that too.
Logan: Do you think that, um, 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 [00:35:00] business model? Maybe for people that don't appreciate your, you guys are pricing how you were what and you're pricing how
Eoghan: Yeah, we used to charge for receipts and also like messages sent because with intercom you can also send outbound messages. We used to charge for 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 cents.
So we don't make any money ever unless we're doing work for you. And that's analogous to, you know, you know, humans that you might employ.
Logan: ever.
Eoghan: we pay our human reps, I think, 26 per ticket resolved. Uh, our research in the market says that it's more typically
Logan: says and
Eoghan: and if you outsource to,
Logan: small companies get down to
Eoghan: offshore companies, you can get it down to dollars.
So 99 cents is, you know, highly competitive with that human work. Um, so that's [00:36:00] a big change we made, but there's a lot of, you know, There's a lot of education in that. And 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 a hundred 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.
Logan: working. We're, um, It seems that a few people in the market have moved in this outcome based pricing model as well.
Um,
Eoghan: want to, I want to take this opportunity to say we were first, even though that Zendesk says they're first and we can prove
Logan: yeah. Okay. Well, uh, that was actually
Eoghan: Yeah, yeah,
Logan: uh, but in having those conversations with, uh, Customers. What's the paradigm of transition with them? I'm sure you get all different flavors of some people are like, Oh, this is amazing. And some people are like, what the hell are you talking about?
We'd like our fixed fee pricing.
Eoghan: Most people are like, this is amazing. Yeah. [00:37:00] Most people buying right now are early adopters. So they're kind of sold on it and they're already thinking about it. Uh, 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 my career. Um, 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 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. The remarkable thing about this, these AI agents fin our product, but you're going to say this across all AI, is that. Fin is better than the humans, it's faster, it's more consistent, never makes a spelling mistake,
Logan: of languages.
Eoghan: all the languages,[00:38:00]
Logan: the
Eoghan: beautiful formatting, great sourcing, patient, I mean it's great.
Logan: mean,
Eoghan: 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 way the way mo cars, the way most, when they were being driven by humans to train them had 3.
5 times more crashes than the actual automated way most AI is just better than humans. It's wild. So when you can show, uh, 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 counts.
Logan: Implicitly, you said, um, there's, there's, there's, this is kind of changed elements of the end market or who's ready to buy a I. Can you, can you elaborate on what you've learned actually being out there in the field?
Eoghan: Yeah, um, there's fear out there still. There's a lot of people that are very conscious about the experiences that their customers [00:39:00] 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. They 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, um, and that will just, that will melt away over the next 6 to 12 to 18 months as people just see these in the wild consumers. And then as companies get demos, it's the most obvious, epic, transformative software category I've ever seen.
Logan: From an underlying model standpoint, you guys were using open AI now, Claude,
Eoghan: Yeah, we use a bunch of things. We, we still use a bunch of open AI. We use a cloud from Anthropic. We experiment with different models all the time, different versions of models from these companies. We get heads [00:40:00] up on the things they're working on. Um, we worked with, uh, uh, Lama. 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 nice way to solve that problem. When you're developing AI agents, it 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 AP tests on many different configurations and FIN is like seven different LLMs 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.
Logan: If if you're a founder and your business hasn't been as as at the forefront of the bleeding edge within artificial intelligence, like your [00:41:00] yours has, um, You said, obviously, all elements of your business or 80 percent of your businesses
could
Eoghan: change. Yeah. Will
Logan: way. But if you're trying to instill some type of, um, I don't know, lessons having lived on the front lines or, uh, things that you would say if you're setting up this infrastructure, you're somewhat down the path with it.
What are the things that you wish you had known early on? I
Eoghan: 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. Um, a lot of people getting carried away with the timelines involved here.
It takes time for products and technologies to be adopted. Uh, and there's a lot of people, um, building shit, shitty, useless AI things into their business. 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 [00:42:00] 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.
Logan: All white
Eoghan: All white collar work is going to be done by AI.
Logan: done by AI.
Eoghan: It's going to start with the simplest white collar work, the simplest white collar worker service. So service starts first, um, and it's going to get eviscerated and totally ripped apart and changed. We have to go there. But there's
Logan: there's so many other
Eoghan: 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 here is just gonna laugh at me, but I don't know if they need AI for that, not yet.
Logan: know
Eoghan: 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.[00:43:00]
Logan: As you, it's been a hot category for net new startups to go after as well. Brett Taylor's business, uh, Sierra, there's, uh, Decagon, there's Maven. There's a handful of other players that are going after the space. Um, 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 an existing intercom one?
Eoghan: Yeah. So obviously I'm thinking about this. There's meta advantages that they have, which is they're smaller, square, but you're in hungrier, you know, when that, that, that offers a lot of benefit, um, 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, uh, that's, that, that's why, that's why startups when, um, 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 [00:44:00] years, um, I'd be quite bullish on us and I am, um, what we can offer is, um, just maturity in the platform. Um, you know, you got these early stage companies, they're doing a really, really good job of like throwing things together quickly.
Um, a lot of them have big security vulnerabilities. We've found. serious scary holes that we will now show customers in fake ops. Um, 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.
Logan: customer experiences.
Eoghan: 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. Uh, 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, um, for, you know, in your brand, certain [00:45:00] guidelines to allow that, uh, your, um, bot to follow certain, uh, business specific instructions, et cetera.
Beyond that, what we offer is a seamless consolidated platform. So you can buy Fanjust 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, we have like 500 people in our R& D organization, 80 percent 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 crop experience for the end user who's bounced amongst these different kind of experiences and his email is 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 [00:46:00] well together either. So what you've seen a lot of people is doing is getting excited about our bot. We'll sell our bot all day long. 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. Um, and that was, 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 bet, um, 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,
Logan: I know you mean service. Hopefully they're around. Uh,
Eoghan: hopefully,
Logan: around period for a
Eoghan: beyond service.
We're we're [00:47:00] here for
Logan: Yeah. I hope I hope this frees up time for other stuff. Yeah. Um, I'm curious then from the mid market or the end market standpoint. Um, is there is there more receptivity, uh, to buy or the use cases better at, like, kind of the mid market ish enterprise within
Eoghan: Yeah. Yeah. But I think people shouldn't sleep on the SMB market too. Every single business is going to have an AI agent working with 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,
Logan: my website
Eoghan: 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, [00:48:00] because we're charging per outcome for the work done,
Logan: is more what
Eoghan: work happening 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.
Logan: uh, you don't need to comment on product roadmap, but I assume, um. I assume there's a belief that this stuff will all be multimodal within a single platform.
Eoghan: Absolutely. We will, we will do all of that.
Eoghan: We have, uh, working versions of all of these things. Um, you'll have the one agent that will already finish on email, already finish on chat. We have a really nice team. 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
Logan: to the agent.
Logan: That's all coming
Eoghan: So that's all coming, and it's actually coming in a number of short years, that's not a decade thing.
Logan: As [00:49:00] you, uh, maybe think about the higher abstraction of this, there's, there's, um, not, not society or humanity ending, but, but, um, 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
Eoghan: solving the problem. I, I, I do. Maybe the following is the tech bro's excuse for playing in a new field that he believes is gonna make him a lot of money. But here's what I say to myself and others about that.
Logan: it. Technology has always,
Eoghan: 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 [00:50:00] population has increased. GDP has increased, longevity has increased, crime in most cities has decreased,
Logan: Right?
Eoghan: That's been the story of technology thus far. Um, 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.
Eoghan: 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.
Logan: It's not
Eoghan: We haven't fired, obviously we're really big proponents of this type of automation, we use our, our, our, our own AI agent, uh, in extreme ways.
Logan: support person. But
Eoghan: We've not fired a single customer support person, but we've stopped growing the customer [00:51:00] support team. And so what's going to happen over time is that
Logan: AI agents will
Eoghan: will cater to new growth, on met demand, kind of,
Logan: you know,
Eoghan: 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 your humanity, creativity, um, and the things that you would want a human to spend their life on.
Logan: Hmm. Yeah, it's interesting. Um, I, I don't, 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. Then you think about the amount of time, you know, internet took to play out and then you compress it even further for AI. And I don't know what the social implications of it all are, but
Eoghan: Yeah, I don't know either. Um, but there have always been social implications in technology. Um, every technology can be used for good or bad. Um, [00:52:00] you know, a knife can be used to prepare a delicious meal or bad 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, um,
Logan: these changes. Yeah. So.
Logan: Are you having fun now with all this?
Eoghan: it's the type of fun where
Logan: fun. The
Eoghan: you are
Logan: I used to
Eoghan: exhausted every week,
Logan: tapping fucker.
Eoghan: 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,
Logan: um, shaking
Eoghan: on budgets for next year, um, 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 [00:53:00] capital, play in new markets, take risks. And. The people who will be successful at that, at that are the people who enjoy it.
So super challenging. It's not what I thought I was signing up for. When I, 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. Uh, no, 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.
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, in 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, I'm not. [00:54:00] praising myself as some hero in that respect.
It's apparently what I needed,
Logan: apparently what I needed. But, unless
Eoghan: unless you're really up to that. Cause 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. And that's why a lot of the bigger comments are going to lose.
Logan: In coming back in and resetting elements of the culture and sort of being at this wartime CEO, um, mindset, there's been, um, we talked about some of the organ rejection or like, you know, that, but there's been, um, Elements of re instilling hard work as a first principle and pushing out. I think you, you said, uh, do you say there was a, this is our wartime
Eoghan: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. People didn't like me saying war. Yeah. Well, people are like, there's an actual war
Logan: yes, yes, which, uh, yeah, uh, what, what, uh, As you, as you tried to reinvigorate the organization and reset the work hard culture outside of the performance management stuff, [00:55:00] 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 and
Eoghan: They love it. Great. People love it. The, uh, 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, a focus on work and not politics and bullshit.
Logan: Like that
Eoghan: best people. Find your best people, the people who are going to be. Superstars and produce 10 X better than everyone else. They love that stuff. So you're not making a compromise there. You're only compromising on the worst people.
Logan: There's this interesting element of, um, how much mediocre [00:56:00] and excellence like the people with an organization 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 to that
Eoghan: 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 the, you can find a thousand people or 10,000 people who fit the definition of brilliant
Logan: bit earlier, but,
Eoghan: That's what you need.
Logan: you talked about owning your own narrative and getting the truth out there. Um, I'm curious what you, what you learned about. Media in reporting, I guess it was specific to the tech sector for the most part, but I'm curious. I [00:57:00] feel like you probably have some opinions
Eoghan: I have opinions. Yeah, yeah, of course. These things I'll say have been said so many times before.
Logan: many
Eoghan: For the longest time, the media has hated tech, and hated success and ambition. They've hated people who,
Logan: pay people to, you
Eoghan: feel high agency, um, and a lot of it's resentment, um, 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 that, you know, there's obviously some great people there. Um, I'm saying that to try and sound, uh, chill about it.
Logan: a pithy soundbite.
Eoghan: Oh, yeah. Thank you. Um, but, um, What changed is that they overplayed the hand they were given, which is incredible influence. They
Logan: They. Publishing. Old enough.
Eoghan: published enough mean [00:58:00] spirited pieces and told enough lies that people tuned out, and others started to serve that market.
Logan: as
Eoghan: And so now we have new media. You never would have thought of yourself as media. You never would have thought of getting into media. You did this actually out of.
Logan: Did you
Eoghan: excitement to promote yourself, your business to all the good, healthy stuff missing in there is, fuck these successful guys, um, who do they think they are, et cetera.
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. So we now have long form conversation, you know, you might read a headline about this. Hopefully, if you look at an interview
Logan: You listen, then, you know, he's a
Eoghan: you know, for certain he's dick, but he has some moments [00:59:00] of charm, of
Logan: I never intended to be a media entity in the same or media property. Uh, in some ways, I just, uh, honestly, the, the reflection of it all was, um, I think the venture job can be a little, um, uh, abstract at times where you're sort of making, you 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 and actually making the decisions.
And so I think it was some element of self promotion and also, um.
Eoghan: Personal
Logan: Personal, like some desire to move something
Eoghan: learning, helping other people. I mean, all the good
Logan: there was all the altruistic stuff as well. But it is interesting. I never expected in a million years for it to dovetail with, um, actual new stories and stuff.
And I, I've, it's funny that sometimes we'll have a conversation and then there's, uh, [01:00:00] 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 thing that happens all the time. I'm curious. Do you The they in that if we back up to the day, I assume it sounds like you believe there's a higher order.
They and all of that. But but specifically the day in this case that we were talking about was sort of the tech media landscape. Was that sort of who you were
Eoghan: And media generally, I mean, you know, mainstream media generally got themselves
Logan: Yeah, that's what I assumed
Eoghan: Yeah. All, all,
Logan: was a higher order bit as well.
Logan: 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, uh, you endorsed a presidential candidate
Eoghan: can forget what happened there.
Logan: Yeah, it is not.
Eoghan: was a long, long time
Logan: Let me let me remind you it was a couple months ago and you tweeted a picture of you with a certain presidential candidate that I think [01:01:00] people probably wouldn't have expected you to support. What was the reaction? Uh, what was the thought process and going into
Eoghan: I love that. He's like the candidate that shall not be named. No, that's good. It's fine.
Logan: I was more just being tongue in cheek because I think people, people totally know, uh, president elect as of this week, Donald J.
Trump. Uh, uh, and you tweeted a picture with him after a banquet
Eoghan: Yeah. Yeah. Like a fundraiser. Yeah.
Logan: thing. Um, maybe take me through, uh, what the, And I mean, at a very literal level of, like, the thought of, of posting that picture and, you know, where you're purely thinking in terms of personal, where you're thinking in terms of intercom, like, and maybe what the reaction was to it that was surprising versus
Eoghan: It was, you know, so before I posted it, I sent it to my co founders and a few others and like, this is going to hurt.
Logan: And they knew, presumably, where your political
Eoghan: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I, uh, like I knew this was going to [01:02:00] cause some trouble in the moment. It was maybe majority book. You, I don't, I'm saying the F word
Logan: No, that's fine. Yeah, we're clear. We're
Eoghan: This'll be the last time I'll ever say
Logan: Yeah. No, no, we're in the clear.
Eoghan: Um, it was majority F you to the people that say you're not allowed to hold position or, you know, let's 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, you know, tech wouldn't support this or like, this is a bad guy. And I'm like, you have no idea. You have not done your homework.
Most of the people who would say that this is a bad guy who, who maybe gave me the most trouble were people in Ireland or people in Europe. I'm like,
Logan: even
Eoghan: I don't know what you're talking about. You've not studied your politics. You're not even interested in this as a [01:03:00] topic. Um,
Logan: of it
Eoghan: And so part of it was just, no, I'm going to, I'm going to say what I want to say.
And 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, that candidate. It 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, um, 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. There are much more high profile people than me, but
Logan: but from my
Eoghan: 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,
Logan: them like, Um,
Eoghan: um, you can build a great company. as a good person and [01:04:00] hold alternative views. I'm a big believer in, um, 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 a model for them that like, it's okay. And it was okay.
Logan: I sure I assume at the, the. Immediate blow back. It sounds like was, was negative or
Eoghan: The immediate blowback was Twitter stuff. It wasn't, there was no real
Logan: but I assume the, uh, that dissipated. And,
Eoghan: People get over, get over these things. One of the big things I learned through the war, 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 going to be okay. Whatever employee is upset or customer, or someone says something about you on Twitter, it's going to be okay.
Logan: And so after that happened, um, [01:05:00] Uh, or after you published it, I say happened like it was terminal cancer or something after, after, after you posted that picture, the, uh, the employee side as well. You were doing it at a personal level, not an intercom level. I know there were many, uh, 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
Eoghan: Well, they, they actually didn't, which was interesting. I think that was what part of what happened was actually a lot of not,
Logan: sort of abstained.
Eoghan: Yeah. Because there wasn't a lot of excitement about the other side this time.
Logan: So, so what was the, um, yeah.
Eoghan: Um, so when I came back, I made it clear to people that we don't do politics and work.
We don't do social activism because there was a lot of that when I came back and, um, I told people, we're just going to 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 and proponent in personal freedom and free speech.[01:06:00]
And so I made it clear, someone asked that on All Hands about my posts, I made it clear that, hey, if you post about political issues, particularly political issues that, um, uh, are, are differing from mine. I, I will be the first to defend you.
Logan: have
Eoghan: If anyone tries to cancel you, it's not happening at, at
Logan: go say whatever
Eoghan: 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 I
Logan: world
Eoghan: think it's hard to, um, 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 pretty upset about it.
Logan: They get pretty [01:07:00] upset about it.
Eoghan: The people I know who voted for Trump,
Logan: really
Eoghan: really want like safety in the streets.
Logan: streets.
Eoghan: freedom for everyone to be able to speak. Um, they want, you know, safety for kids in school around trans issues. Uh, 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 it 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 to be free. And I think that's what made it possible for me to do this.
Logan: You just alluded to a lot of the inputs into it, but I'm curious, uh, like coming to that view and, uh, I guess it was implicit in what you just [01:08:00] said, but what were the main considerations for you? Was it the ones you just listed, or were there other ones
Eoghan: 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 the nuclear power, Russia, um, if anyone's interested, they should read, um, nuclear war scenario, new book. Um, it's really horrific.
Um, the chance of nuclear war is extremely high. 5 billion people will die. Um, so peace loving people are just opposed at that other side. And I would have voted for. opposed to that. I'm not like a big Trump guy.
Logan: Yeah, which, which I think is actually important to tease out as well. Like this, this is much more policy than personality
Eoghan: It's all policy.
Logan: January 6th stuff way on you at all. Or was that sort
Eoghan: sort of That's like a character thing for me. It's not a policy thing. You know, I didn't like what he said. Ultimately, he did leave [01:09:00] office.
Logan: yeah.
Eoghan: So, I wish he didn't kind of behave some of those ways, but I also think that the degree to which he was responsible for that is, uh, mostly invented.
But the other thing is you only get to choose two people. So when someone says, how could you choose a guy who did XYZ? I'm like, wait a sec.
Logan: that
Eoghan: I'm not choosing the CEO of my
Logan: CEO of
Eoghan: I'm not marrying them, making them my best friend. Theoretically, I have 8 billion people to choose from in that exercise. I'm choosing one of two people.
So it's completely different.
Logan: happen
Eoghan: They're both going to have things we don't
Logan: sister of both individuals.
Eoghan: Um, well, look, there's a lot of really smart people that get together in this town and elsewhere. They host salons and they have these big intellectual conversations. It's great. I happen to think San Francisco is over intellectualized.
I like the highbrow chats as much as anyone else, but I think it's over intellectualized. [01:10:00] Culture has probably a much bigger impact on society than six guys at a dinner talking about the future of The human race.
Eoghan: 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
Logan: uh, it
Eoghan: fancy quarterly parties, which I hope you'll come to the
Logan: Yeah. Uh, you need to tell me
Eoghan: Okay. Um, and it's goal is to simply celebrate freedom, um, values like growth and merit and humanity, um, 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, uh, yeah, the, the, the, the specific strategy was to try and make the coolest party that would happen in San [01:11:00] Francisco. And
Logan: you can get into it, and
Eoghan: you can get into it and you can get into it as long as. You're actually down to celebrate
Logan: And so what is the actual
Eoghan: That's just a big, it's just a big
Logan: where, where, how many have you guys done?
Eoghan: Um, I've only done one massive demand.
There was like 3, 700 people on the wait list for the first one. We invited 600, 500 came up, um, that night. The next one's on. the 13th of December, which I've not announced yet. Uh, we do it in big historic buildings in NSF. Um,
Logan: Can we announce that now? Yeah. Yeah. And will you do a bigger, same size?
Eoghan: We'll do the same size. Cause it's not just, we're not just trying to do big.
We're trying to do a high quality P we had some of the most interesting people. That's one of the most successful people at the
Logan: Presumably it's a night, a weekend
Eoghan: Yeah. It's a night thing. The last ones are Friday. The next one's a Friday. And, um, Yeah, that's it. It's, it's just silly and fun.
Logan: are you sold? Like, are there other people behind it with you?
Eoghan: it's just me. Yeah, it's just me. One big expensive party.
Logan: Do you actually, you actually pay for it?[01:12:00]
Eoghan: I do. Maybe I'll try and fix that
Logan: Well, I would, I, I've got to think there's a, uh,
Eoghan: are, except I don't want corporate sponsors 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 a really bad financial move, because the last one, the last one cost like 120k.
Logan: Wow. Transitioning some operating stuff.
Logan: Uh, one interesting thing I had heard you say, I don't know if lambast is the right term, but you talked about, um, people that are in HR functions and how, uh, I don't want to skip meeting 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
Eoghan: Well, uh, what I did say was quite often career HR
Logan: [01:13:00] HR
Eoghan: 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 New 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, but knew nothing about intercom, try to come in and be useful.
Um, and I did that when I came back and I gave certain people, I even gave our like.
Logan: gave our
Eoghan: 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
Logan: And I guess that that ties into a more [01:14:00] general belief of yours that, um, that generalists are most effective.
Are there people that can transition between different jobs or some of the most effective leaders within your
Eoghan: Yeah, all I'm trying to say is
Logan: I
Eoghan: 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 the 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.
Logan: so we'd rather have the depth of
Eoghan: Yeah, that's, I like, I like that.
Logan: and is that, um, you mentioned pricing and H.
R. Um, [01:15:00] is that true for other functional
Eoghan: it's true for other functions. I'm just trying to think of areas which I've, where I've done that.
Logan: mean, product engineering, I assume,
Eoghan: 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.
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 I like people from within the system.
Logan: I've heard you talk about how the abundance of raw and experienced talent, um, can lead to great things being produced, but perhaps in a messy way, I guess, um, can you reconcile that point with the tenure and making sure you still have the talent edge or the young people coming
Eoghan: that, that's your early stage startup, the likes of which we're competing with, you know, they're young, raw, super intelligent people that will produce great things, but in a highly messy way. [01:16:00] Um, 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 that x factor and let them rise through the org, um, but more and more as we get older and I get older, I appreciate grown ups.
And so there's tension. You can't have all the things. You have to choose what flavor company you want to be. And so I choose big, tenured, grownups, and I challenged them to act in scrappy, fast, intense ways. But we know we'll never be the young, naive kids we once were. Um, [01:17:00] so you always have to play to the strengths that you actually have.
Um, yeah, that's what we're doing now.
Logan: I guess as you reflect on the early days of, of intercom, you picked a handful of, um, things that were against conventional wisdom, I, I think in the target market you serviced, uh, how you distributed it, maybe there's a bunch of other things that come to mind, but if, if you could go back and we've talked about a bunch of reflections and lessons learned, but is there anything that, um, you would.
Tell yourself then about this journey, uh, that maybe we didn't touch on.
Eoghan: It's impossible advice to take because people have to go through. the type of journey I went through to, to authentically get there. But if, if you, the more you can be yourself, the better. Um, just trying to be anyone else is just a failing strategy. Um, so just authenticity is key. Authenticity is key to great leadership and people follow authentic leaders.
[01:18:00] 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.
Logan: insincere about it far and
Eoghan: 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. Um, 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, 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 [01:19:00] accounts. But we, we were never those guys. We were always a 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, but then you're just kicking the failure down the road. But if you can, if you can take the pain up front, being yourself and having your authentic self make contact with the world sooner, it, uh, the sooner you will find who you
Logan: fun with it yourself, then having your inventive self in contact with the world sooner, the sooner you find the one. I guess as board members or being a part of the journey as well. Um, any lessons or things that you've internalized about about that, um, that you would impart,
Eoghan: Two investors, two
Logan: and picking, picking
Eoghan: Yeah, I see. I see. Yeah. The vast majority of investors are harmless and some are helpful. [01:20:00] I think fear the investors who want to be very helpful. It's. Great, in my opinion, to work with investors who know that
Logan: who know
Eoghan: are your capital partners and yours is a beautiful collaboration of talent and ambition and momentum with
Logan: capital.
Eoghan: 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. Once investors want to advise you on things that they've not done themselves, you're in dangerous territory 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 [01:21:00] seen many patterns at play and the very best ones, the most senior ones, even if they haven't been, you know, deeply operational in their time, that will have some, you know, 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. 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.
Logan: have to
Eoghan: Um,
Logan: than that. Um, so,
Eoghan: If there's, if there's one thing I would say, I would say that. And, you know, um, it's tough for younger investors because younger investors are the ones that are most trying to make their name, [01:22:00] 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.
Logan: knows what they
Eoghan: Um, but I think it's, I think a superpower for great younger investors is to back off all of that and to,
Logan: I said, know
Eoghan: like I said, know their, their potential. The role in which they play. This is not me trying to reduce their role or demean investors at all. Not at all. Clearly play a very important role, but just everyone needs to know their, their, their, their place in position.
And, um, 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 as a privilege, because
Logan: they've
Eoghan: they've seen a lot of cool, different types of things. 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, [01:23:00] because what they've seen, there's guys out there, you know, Mamoon Hamid led our series A. He's on 20 something boards. Don't think that he's not seen all these crazy patterns. So Mamoon was operational in his very early days.
I believe he was an engineer, but he was never a CEO. If Mamoon can tell you three companies where he's seen X, Y, and Z happen before, Now you're, you're set off on 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.
Logan: your money is
Eoghan: 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 and the very best founders. I'm there as their capital partner, if and when they need more money.
I'm there when they want to meet other capital partners and I'm never going to get in their way. Someone [01:24:00] 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
Logan: very attractive. Yeah, there's an unintentional element on the helpful side. Um, and I guess to tease it out a little bit from your point is, um, the People, everyone tries to differentiate in some way. And so
Eoghan: It's an impossible challenge. I don't
Logan: very being helpful is viewed.
Uh, it, it, it, we sh you shouldn't diminish someone's desire to be
Eoghan: And by the way, founders are asking, Oh, what are they helpful
Logan: 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
Eoghan: I think that's good.
Logan: 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, [01:25:00] uh, that can.
Put a lot of pressure on them. Totally. And therefore that can lead to a lot of unnatural behavior towards you.
Eoghan: 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,
Logan: Hey,
Eoghan: I do this with all my new founders, which is basically a one on one on how the hell does invest in 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. Um, 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're going to [01:26:00] 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 percent 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, 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,
Logan: And they're so
Eoghan: scared of. damaging that with any of their founders, such that they're basically never [01:27:00] real. So I think there are like 1 percent of all investors, maybe there's one in a thousand 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. Um.
Logan: you
Eoghan: empower your founders. You can get in the mix. You can fight with the fan, 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 mention.
Logan: 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 and that you can't be what you're not anymore.
You can't be the young upstart. And so you've leaned into the, you know, tenured and the experience that you have and the people you're going to bring around the table for [01:28:00] 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
Eoghan: tell me
Logan: you disagree, 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
Eoghan: I don't, they're, I don't think they're good founders. Yeah,
Logan: that's maybe fair. Yeah.
Eoghan: Um, 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 a beautiful things too.
If you're a founder being ugly, Yeah, and you're asking people, what should I do, particularly investor?
Logan: should [01:29:00] I do? That's it. Good luck.
Eoghan: No hate, but like, good luck. That's tough.
Logan: problem. How have you, uh, you have three founders currently active?
Eoghan: yeah, yeah.
Logan: Have they have everyone has anyone been there all the way through? Do people leave when you
Eoghan: And we had four founders at the start, one left after like five years or so. Then I left and one of the guys left and there was one left. Then I came back and one of the others came back.
Logan: And everyone's everyone's active
Eoghan: We're super active. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Logan: interesting.
Logan: Yeah, I guess I guess fundraising itself was the other thing we were gonna like, Any, any lessons learned or anything you would take
Eoghan: 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 late 2017. So it's been a long time, super long time. We've been profitable most years since. Um, So maybe my advice is stale at this point, but you know, I invest in a lot of [01:30:00] companies too.
Um, you know, I, I, I think good fundraising is an interesting mix of. Or a compelling pitch is an interesting mix of a highly credible, ambitious vision. So someone explains to the few, to you, here's what the future is going to look like. Here's why I believe that,
Logan: Um, and, and
Eoghan: um,
Logan: picture for you
Eoghan: and, and paints the picture for you in a way where you're like, I could totally see that.
Logan: is able
Eoghan: 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, they have helped me understand the opportunity.
Logan: help me
Eoghan: me believe that this person really gets it. That on its own is highly [01:31:00] compelling. And they've now. giving 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 cocktail TV. You know, if someone really breaks down, you're like, huh, they've got a full plan. And it was the idea of business plans was kind of. Uh, and is that the right way
Logan: to put it?
Logan: Yeah, I think that's right.
Eoghan: you know, because people knock MBAs and they're like business plans.
That's so, you know, Coke, you know, uh, kind of it's imaginary business, but actually think if you've got vision and a business plan, that's highly
Logan: 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, [01:32:00] which is super compelling.
That's ultimately what we're investing is 58 years in the future. Uh, 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, uh, operate the business. And so there's, it's, it's rare to have someone that can storytell across both of
Eoghan: Exactly, exactly. So I think that that's like the real X factor, founders and pitches. So if I, if, if, if someone was to ask me like, what's a recipe for fundraising? Well, it's figured that out. Both, both
Logan: did you ever have, um, Was valuation ever like a metric that you in the hype of growth days and all that, did it
Eoghan: you? Yeah. A a little, yeah.
Logan: and when did obviously you haven't raised in seven years. So I assume it's no longer the metric that you think
Eoghan: I mean, we all have imaginary valuations for like, here's how much we're worth now.
Logan: Did you shift to just revenue at some point along the way?
And you're that's just been the easier
Eoghan: You know, interestingly,
Logan: [01:33:00] days.
Eoghan: 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 100 billion company if we crack X, Y, and Z. Um, 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,
Logan: of CEOs
Eoghan: I kind of
Logan: kind of
Eoghan: had some shame about it and thought it was dirty and a lot of people do actually, you know, in, in, in the Bay area, we don't, we pretend like money's not a motivation.
Logan: motivation.
Um, but
Eoghan: Um, but I realized it was. Everyone's really excited about it and that's totally fine. You can [01:34:00] 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, um, and talk about creating great wealth for ourselves and for our families.
Logan: for
Eoghan: And
Logan: And that
Eoghan: is remarkably, uh, motivating. People want to do, they're, 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.
Um, 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
Logan: become public,
Eoghan: It starts to treat the company at large as insiders. These are the things you usually only talk to with the board, [01:35:00] nevermind 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, that has worked out a lot.
Logan: lot of likes. Thanks
Eoghan: Of course. It's awesome. Good questions.
Logan: fun.
SFXMUSIC EOGHAN 4D AUDIO: Thank you for joining this episode of The Logan Bartlett Show with CEO and co founder of Intercom Eoghan McCabe. If you like 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.