How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI

Great, great therapy and it has to be great, is a recipe for brilliant leadership in my opinion. It takes your edges off, but they're all edges that are super counterproductive.

I said, we need to become a wartime company. If we don't fight for this, we are dead.

Ultimately like 40% of the employees turned over during this period. Often the culture is set by a very small number of people, so it only took a quarter to really start to change the tenor of the conversations.

The way that greatness is created is that you find a CEO who's willing to make brave hard decisions and own the results.

Fin is Intercom's AI customer service agent that became their fastest-growing product after pivoting from traditional chat-based customer support.

We were only six weeks into the launch of GPT 3.5 when we actually had a beta version of Fin.

Working in a startup for 14 years has a certain way of kicking you in the head many times a day that either kills you or makes you far stronger.

I rewrote the values designed to be a sharp knife to cut out the parts of the company that I just knew wouldn't be effective.

You need to bring in actual talent. We and I will be nothing if we didn't have actual AI scientists and leaders. It's the only way we can be successful here.

Our culture is a very producty culture. Because we had this sprawling strategy, we needed a complex structure for it and that included lots of PMs that we gave a lot of autonomy to. And so the product of our big messy strategy was that we had PMs that got to act like mini CEOs.

"Vibe coding" refers to how younger AI-native companies use AI tools intuitively throughout their development workflow, rather than following traditional coding practices.

That's more than a joke. You're competing with young companies that are in part AI. The younger companies are vibe coding and using AI for their creative work and for their job descriptions.

You either decide to pay the price or get out. Don't half-ass it. You see all these companies saying, we do AI and they've just sprinkle a little bit of crappy AI and they've got the same cultures. It won't work.

The way that greatness is created is that you find a CEO who's willing to make brave hard decisions and own the results.

You don't have a choice. AI is going to disrupt in the most aggressive violent ways. If you're not in it, you're about to get kicked out of all of it.

We were about to hit $0 net new ARR, which means we would've been in negative growth territory. We never got there. I managed to stop it before we got there, but we were falling each quarter.

The only way you're going to win right now is if you work your ass off, because all these little AI companies run by kids in their twenties are literally working 12 hours a day, literally 365 days a year.

Part of what we had to our advantage also was that we had this giant base 30,000 paying customers, hundreds of thousands of active users, millions of their users, billions of data points. So, we had a lot to play with.

Working in a startup for 14 years has a certain way of kicking you in the head many times a day that either kills you or makes you far stronger.

We charge 99 cents to resolve tickets, customer problems, and we have a higher resolution rate than anyone else. I always believe that pricing should come from value and not from costs. The cost is our problem.