Eoghan McCabe
How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI, covering AI product work, pricing decisions, and product design.
Episode
How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO)
Summary
Eoghan McCabe, founder of Intercom, tells how the company nearly hit zero net new ARR as ChatGPT launched, his decision to go "wartime," fire a third of the company, rewrite the values, and bet everything on Fin — an AI customer service agent that crossed M ARR in under three quarters. He discusses the personal transformation (therapy, ego dissolution, burnout) that enabled the turnaround.
Key Takeaways
When AI threatens your core business, go wartime: rebuild culture with new values, be willing to make the company smaller and more capable rather than larger and complacent.
Usage-based pricing tied to outcomes (Fin charges per resolved ticket) aligns incentives in a way seat-based SaaS cannot — customers feel value directly and the product wins by actually working.
Don't half-ass the AI transition: companies that "sprinkle a little AI" while keeping the same culture will lose to AI-native companies where every person defaults to AI for every task.
First-principles thinking and framework-building produce great product leaders — Intercom produced more startup founders per alumnus than almost any company because PMs got real ownership.
Great therapy is a recipe for brilliant leadership: understanding your insecurities removes the triggers that make you miscommunicate and make decisions from ego rather than clarity.
Notable Quotes
“It was the combination of the company being older, us all, me and the founders being impatient like, are we going to make something out of this? We went through a time when the company was worth a lot. We're private so we don't have a daily mark to market, but all the other public software companies dropped 80%, 85, 90%. We saw our revenue growth crater. We were used to nice double digits. We were in low single digits. And so part of it was, let's do something here. Another part of it was my own anger and dissatisfaction with how the company was being run and the mistakes that I made myself. I made a lot of compromises as a lot of founders and founding CEOs do to placate employees or do it out fear to bring investors along, following advice in the industry and best practices.”
“No joke, all of them. And that's not a fun idea for many of us, especially those who've grown up. Some people in our generation have kids or a lot of them do. There's comfort and stability in your life. You don't want to work like that, but if you want in, that's part of the price and that's how so many of these young new AI are going to win because very few of the previous generation companies are willing to make all of those changes and go all the way in. And so my actual advice, which is not that helpful, is that if founders of previous generation companies are themselves not willing to roll up their sleeves and get into it and work as hard as the kids, hire a kid. You can be a chairperson like I was, have a lot of fun. You can mentor the kid, hire a kid because you're in the wrong job, buddy.”
“So, we just love to draw diagrams so you can teach all that stuff. So, yeah, it's just all that good energy product, product energy, first principles, the people we chose. And on the founders side, I was talking to Des about this morning, why have so many Intercom people gone on to be founders? I think it's because we hired founder types and my pitch to people was always come to Intercom, figure out how great companies are built and build it with us and then go on to start your own. I would say that often at all hands. But the irony is that the people we hired back then, the founder types were probably not great employees. They were better founders. I'm not a good employee. And so it'll be interesting to see if this current cohort, we'll get many founders out of this current cohort, but will they convert as well as they did before?”