Rebooting Intercom: Eoghan McCabe on Defying Silicon Valley Orthodoxy | Co-founder & CEO

Brett: Great. All right. Well, thanks for joining us.

Eoghan: It's my pleasure.

Brett: You sort of had this interesting experience where you started and built intercom for many years, you left and then came back. and we're gonna spend a bunch of time talking about how you sort of reset the company in the next chapter of the company. One kind of thing that came to mind for me was what did coming back to the company teach you that you maybe had gotten wrong in the first chapter? 

We're going to talk a little bit about the environmental factors where you had abundant capital to more scarce capital, but are there specific things that when you came back, you would have redone differently or you did incorrectly that 

with 

fresh eyes, new perspective made you change your mind on?

Eoghan: For me personally, the big lessons are all about trusting my instinct and my principles.

Um, Silicon Valley as a culture and a place and a community is a, is made up of a phenomenal amount of young people doing what they do for the very first time. And. More specifically, it's a bunch of raw talent with no experience. And that has very predictable results in that great things are produced in a very messy way. And for me and us, a bunch of the mess actually came from not having the requisite experience to know that our instincts about the way we wanted to run our business and what greatness looked like and people and companies was right. A lot of this raw talent I refer to, I think is constituted by the young people who for whatever reason, their intuition about the world and what greatness looks like, great software or great companies is actually right.

And Then all they have is their ego to, to uh, deliver that to the world. And so coming back, I realized things like, Hey, it turns out that the employees who would constantly complain about things not related to the company are actually not a good fit and not the type of people that we need to be really successful.

It turns out that raw, intense ambition and big swings and big bets rather than careful, measured, responsible moves are what excites people. Um, It turns out that putting the customer first actually, um, goes a very long way because there are a lot of business practices, go to market practices that are customer toxic, I think. And so thematically the big, big lesson for me is Is, is simply trust my intuition. We, and I all too often followed, um, Silicon Valley best practices and it took us the wrong way. That does not absolve us from responsibility for the mistakes we made with our business. Um, but, um, Getting to step away and see from a distance, What went wrong was very instructive.

Let me give you a more practical example, because I'm speaking in the abstract a little bit. So When I started Intercom and was raising a seed round in 2011, every single venture capitalist I met, and you remember that kind of era, told me that you cannot build a hundred million dollar revenue business in SMB.

Like it cannot be done. And actually people were saying this at series A stage. This was 2013. It cannot be done. This wasn't just an isolated thing. This was like conventional wisdom amongst the greatest venture capitalists. It cannot be done. And We didn't know otherwise, all we knew was, there seems to be a bunch of traction here,

we're growing nicely. And we've resisted for the longest time all of the institutional knowledge. In Silicon Valley amongst the professionals, the executives and the venture capitalists that was connected to that idea that great and giant software companies cannot be built selling to SMB companies. And we resisted it because we were young and foolhardy.

I was 26 when I started working on Intercom and we were young enough to think that we knew better. And As you get a little older, you realize you were an idiot when you were younger, and you've only been getting marginally less dumb. Um, And as we grew from, you know, we raised our series A when we had 23 K M or, or I specifically remember that, um, uh, when we got to 10 million and 50 million and then a hundred million ARR you know, life got less idealistic and more complex.

We grew older, we got kicked around a little bit, you know, as, as, as happens in the real world. And I think we lost belief in our own intuitions. You make a sufficient amount amount of mistakes as everyone does in, in, in, in the real world in business. You realize that your, uh, dogged, um, idealistic, strong minded, pure, 100 percent belief in yourself is probably not a perfect picture of reality and, and doubt creeps in. And around that time, we started to hire sales leaders who were a little more enterprise oriented. And I allowed myself, it's all my fault. Don't, don't think I'm blaming anyone else. I had myself to be convinced that we needed to start to lock in business with contracts.

And We need to send more traffic to sales, force people to sign up through sales rather than self serve. Certainly when you looked at the data, customers were owned by sales, um, retained longer and they paid more. Um, I think there was egregious selection bias in that, but we were too young and dumb to know what selection bias was.

And, um, so the CoCommercial strategy of the company moved away from our intuition, which was customer friendly, self-serve cheap and cheerful, sell to small companies, um, to, you must talk to sales. You must sign a contract. We will twist your arm every time you want to use an additional feature. And that actually boosted revenue in the short term and egregiously hurt us in the longterm.

So this is one of a number of examples. I really didn't mean to get into go to market so quickly. It's the least exciting

Brett: I think it's an interesting topic because it's screwed up so

often 

Eoghan: sure. Exactly. But focus on the abstract here, which is 

Brett: sure 

Eoghan: forgetting

Brett: of.

Eoghan: Your own intuition here. If, if a founder, a founder, all they have is their intuition because they don't have experience.

And so some, somehow, some way you must focus on staying true to what you believe. 

Brett: One of the few things that makes Silicon Valley so special, one is that it is welcoming to these weird, ambitious young people in a way that almost nowhere else in the world is. But the other thing is that this informal way that people come together and have coffee and share ideas, and you're starting your company and I,, you have no revenue, I'm running a company.

We have 30 million in ARR. We're a few steps ahead. And we're exchanging ideas and I'm telling you different things. I, I think there is magic and benefit to that, but you're getting it at like one of the more important points, I think, which is the art of great company building is knowing which of these things is relevant for you and which is not.

Eoghan: And certainly because most people do X does not mean that you should do X, but like, What do you make of the, that knowledge base? I think it's incredible think it's um, so awesome and it, and it's one of the richest and most beautiful aspects of this thing we call Silicon Valley, which expands beyond the geography, um, people are extraordinarily generous. The reason I said earlier that one's mileage may vary is that I typically hate giving advice, kind of what we're doing right now is bullshit, um, with due respect, um, because, uh, telling someone else how to run their very unique business Um, is incompatible with the idea that, um,, their goal is to build, you know, a billion dollar enterprise by virtue of the fact that it's different from everything else. Those two ideas are incompatible. The wrong way to tap into the great resources and assets that are the things in Silicon Valley are to carte blanche, take stories and pieces of advice and direction and apply them to your own business. The right way is to um, absorb them and to build a system of understanding about the world that you certainly will need to operate within. So I may go and meet a great CEO of a hundred billion dollar business. I've had the privilege say of meeting Benny off a number of times. I don't imagine that his way of running his business is directly applicable to Intercom, but if I listen carefully to what he tells me about how he runs things, and then make an effort to understand why, then I can enrich my model of how the world works and then start to apply it in the abstract to my business. So like, it's really about education rather than tips and tricks, Um, and that's what makes this so fun. That's what makes it truly an artwork. It's about, um, building these abstract models rather than paint by numbers. There is no paint by numbers. I hate the paint by numbers advice.

Brett: You have a theory of where your intuition actually is often incorrect?

Eoghan: if I'm like, this is what we have to do, like, let's follow that line of thinking, then I'll really lean into it. Other than that, I'll typically not have an answer and I'll be stuck.

So for me, intuition is typically just strong signal of truth. And I, I, perhaps that's what intuition is. perhaps intuition is, you know, specific deep neural grooves that have over many times been proven out through experience in the world and whatever instance fires and triggers. There's no firing or triggering if you've not had those experiences before.

Brett: And do you think when your intuition tells you to do something, it's most often correct?

Eoghan: That's my, That's what I'm trying to say. That's what, that's my experience. If I have a strong intuitive feeling, let's go there. Let's figure that out. If I don't, I need help. Let's talk to other people. Yeah.

Brett: Because it's also interesting because there's another version of it where, a a classic sort of example I think that you see is that very good founders have lots of intuitive ideas. We should do X, we should do Y. And I think that they,, sometimes good founders take two shapes.

One is the one that you're talking about, which is that if you actually do have a strong intuition is generally correct. The other is that it's not generally correct, but that the magnitude of correctness is so large that it makes up for the incorrect sort of intuitions, if that makes any sense.I think that's slightly sort of underexplored.

Where I think there's incredibly generative, creative founders and they're like right 20 percent of the time wrong 80%, but the 20 percent is so extraordinarily right that on a portfolio basis, it's a, you should just do all of them.

Eoghan: Depends what role they play in the company. Are they play in a creative role or not?

Brett: But it's also interesting that I think what you tend to see in great founders is they begin by thinking about first principles in every aspect of their company. We don't Believe in managers. I'm going to have 80 people reporting to me. And by and large companies do tend to converge. 

Do you sort of reason through that in any way, that there are some small set of things that sort of the gravitational pull to just make sense in some way?

Eoghan: Yes. I changed a lot in this respect. I used to like to do everything from scratch Um, and now I deeply choose my battles and there's areas of the company I have little interest or passion in or for exploring and reinventing. They don't matter to me. I want brilliant, talented people. I want it done well.

I never want to think about it ever. Um, I think there was a decent amount of ego involved in my younger years when I wanted to do the intercom version of everything, but it was really fun for the younger people who worked at that company at that time. It depends what your contribution to the world, uh, uh, is to be. If you're really trying to contribute fundamentally, a new way of doing business, there's companies like Zappos that did versions of that.

 I think that's awesome. If that's your ambition, and if that's what gives you energy, I really think that that's a beautiful, cool thing. Um, In my slightly older years, I'm just really pragmatic. I want to build one of the greatest AI companies of our generation. Not going to reinvent HR stuff unless it very directly, specifically contributes to, um, uh, our mission.

I will say that as you get a little older, you start to find certain standard practices in Silicon Valley, the corporate world, um, holding you back. And And that's where you may start to knowingly and, and, and with experience and deliberately and in an efficient way, reinvent what's right for you.

Brett: What are some examples or an example of late?

Eoghan: Can I give you a counter example I just came across today from a young founder who I think is brilliant. I won't name, and then I'll give you the counter example of where recently we re did reinvent something. brilliant founder, very successful startup posted that they wanted to hire a chief of staff, a growth chief of staff.

And they DM'd me to say, Hey, do you know anyone? And I said, um, you know, what is it that they should or intended to do? Like, what is this person? And I said, Hey, I don't know. My two cent, if you invent a new title like this, which might make sense for the world you're building. A lot of people, you want to experience people, that's what they said, who do this job, they're not going to find this role. It's not going to describe what they do. And I told them in my humble opinion, you reinventing this title for what I think is growth marketing is going to make your life really hard. And they, they're like, yeah, you're absolutely right.

Totally. And they changed it. That's I did that shit, right? That's cute when you're young, it's like exciting. Oh, we have a cool new idea. You waste years of your life reinventing that bullshit. In my humble opinion, I didn't. Okay, so Here's an example, though, of where standard practices aren't, in my humble opinion, also sufficient to keep up with what I describe as simple, good old fashioned business and organizational fundamentals.

So, um, You know, The standard way in which certainly tech companies do performance management is that the manager will, you know, write a review of the person. They'll get the person to do a self review. They'll get all of their peers to write reviews. Um, peer reviews, um, and then they'll give them some sort of rating, typically on a five point scale, the middle of which is like meets expectations.

The bottom two are bad. The top two are better. It's pretty standard. Problem with that is that everyone hates that process because it's a phenomenal amount of work , and introspective and impactful work. The peers hate it. The individuals hate it. It assumes the managers have some sort of global knowledge of how other people in the company are rated.

If it matters to you that you want to score this person relative to the rest of the company, calibrate in any kind of way. It assumes that the managers don't have any types of biases, that they understand your culture. etc. In my humble opinion, it gives far too much leeway to the manager and just creates a bunch of work for everyone.

 When I went back to intercom, I found a culture I didn't like and I ripped up the old values, wrote new values. And rather than these values be motivational posters, and I did specifically design them tongue in cheek as motivational posters, um, I made them executable code for the company.

I wrote seven values, a description for each, and invented a very, very basic formulaic approach to performance management. There were no peer reviews and no self reviews. Of course, the employee may, if they wish to, share their reflections with their manager, how they did in the last quarter, that's fine. The manager simply rates the employee's performance against their goals for the quarter, because we set goals every quarter and their behavior against each value from one to five, plugs that into a little form, some very basic, uh, algebra is done, spits out a number. Everyone in the organization is then ranked based on that number.

So say there's 200 people in the engineering organization. And then I, uh, decide what percentage of that org is going to fit into each of the categories. So it's a form of stack ranking based on the curves from last time. So imagine 2 percent of people got the bottom rating, but I, my, by my own appraisal, look around the organization and say, this is not good enough.

I want. Three, four, 5% of people that get the bottom rating. Then you're very prescriptive about what the bottom rating means. The bottom rate rating means a performance improvement plan, which will, uh, uh, move pretty quickly to, to, uh, , breaking the relationship with the,, the employee. And I decided we'd do that every single quarter.

We do a light wean, uh, uh, uh, every two quarters and a heavy one every two quarters. I'll stay outta the details, but the point is that it's now very little work for the employees. They don't hate it because they don't have to do anything. Um, It takes all the judgment out of the hands. 

A lot of the judgment out of the hands from the managers, because we're really prescriptive about how we want them to rate employees against goals and values. It uses the values as hard code, not as motivational posters. Like this person wasn't resilient. Also takes out of the hands of the managers, the calculation used to determine where in the scale they sit. Um, And it then calibrates against the entire organization so that on average, the quality of employee is trending upwards.

 Um, I'm not saying I invented all that from scratch. It's an example of where my determination for us to be an actual, actually high performing organization that was actually values aligned, um, that was actually getting better quarter each quarter, um, came to be, um, it's just an example. And again, It's actually an example I've I've least energy for.

I hate HR and performance management practices. Part of why I hate it the most because it's so squishy and there's a lot of judgment and I want to try and create a really, really simple operating system for the company to run so they only have to think about their work. If people are thinking about their performance management and their comp and everything else all the time, we've screwed it up big time.

Brett: On that last one, just outta my own curiosity, how do the goals fit into a numeric number that ends up becoming some standardized way to sort of force rank the entire org?

Eoghan: It depends on how good the org is at setting goals. Some are better than others, some it's easier than others, sales, it's very easy 

Brett: because the inputs and outputs are tied. 

Eoghan: Yeah. but we're getting ever better. And, in human machines, you actually want human judgment and there is still human judgment involved there.

So, it's not as precise as like a bunch of AI agents that you can actually very deliberately and specifically and accurately set up output goals, but with good communication and clear goal setting, you can get aligned as as an organization, a team, and an employee on what the intention is for their quarter to be.

Brett: In the case of the goals though, is that being translated into the managers then turning that into a standardized score for each one of 

those? 

Eoghan: Yeah, soo imagine that Make it easy, salesperson has a quota of a million dollars that they had to bring in that amount of revenue. Um, if they got a million dollars, then it's up to the manager to translate that into a goal. Um, that probably means that they met expectations. If they got 10 percent over, that probably means they exceeded.

If they got 25 and above over it, that means greater than that. Again, the sales team is going to have their own heuristics for like, or thresholds for where they sit. But it's some. Translation that looks like that.

Brett: Can you talk a little bit more about how you you go talk to somebody that's obviously very smart and talented and whatever they're doing, how you spend the time with them to actually make it useful for you in the context of how you're trying to build intercom.

Eoghan: Have no idea if I'm any good at it. It involves spending time with them, asking them one or two questions. And that's kind of it. Sometimes I'll hear a novel story

oftentimes it's actually validation of intuition that we've had ourselves internally. Maybe we've had an idea. Um, the processing part is important. I'll take it back to my team and my co founders and they'll say, I just met with such and such. Check what they did with their, whatever, approach to outbound sales.

Continue to bring up the pieces I'm least excited about, but these are the problems we're currently working on right now. Um, and we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll tease it out and we'll say, Oh, that makes sense. You know, recently I saw Brian Halligan from HubSpot, former CEO, now chairman tweet. So I didn't even meet the guy to get this knowledge, tweet that, uh, he typically doesn't favor.

Contracts, um, because it hides customer dissatisfaction and lack and inactive users, and they eventually churn. And I didn't share that with my exec team and say, this is what we've been saying. Like, It makes sense, Brian thinks it too. So it kind of, that's like a little, that adds more weight to the neural network that you share amongst your team.

We're like, yeah, he's, we were probably right. And it only takes one of them. And, you know, we have great respect for Brian and for HubSpot. So you only need that once. I'm not out there surveying the industry and meeting a hundred people a week. You only need to meet two smart people a year to really like change your double trajectory of your life and your business.

I think.

So it's really, It's a very organic approach. I think there's people who are very structured in it. And I, And I kind of, um, sometimes feel a little inferior to them. I imagine that they go meet all these great CEOs and they have these big structured set of questions. They're like 16 questions.

They probably have them all memorized and they write them up after. That's not me. I'll go and I won't even have my questions ready. Um, but I'll share the one problem that we're working on. We'll have a conversation. A conversation with a smart person could go a long way. Even being in their presence and seeing how to react to your um, statements is, is a game changer, right?

Like a smart person, the little tells, you know, when you said something stupid in the presence of someone really smart and that, that's, it's, that, that's a lot. You know, we, we, we, uh, Silicon Valley is over intellectualized in my opinion. Um, you know, People use really big words like memetics and they read like impressive books with like, you know, , boring, uh, covers.

Um, uh, and And they imagine that great CEOs are these like, you know, uh, uh, sages filled with academic knowledge about business and, um, actually, we're squishy animals and our inputs are, you know,, facial expressions and how we feel about a thing and the types of people we like and our ego and our insecurities and just the things that give us energy.

You know, like Go to market doesn't give me energy, particularly sales. No shit that 13 years into the company, that's our least impressive part of the business. 

You know, so, I only say that to try and reassure the other founders who, like me, don't find themselves to be deep intellectuals.

There's a lot of great founders out there that aren't either. Um, I'm not saying you don't need to be smart, but the process of learning isn't about, um, reading all these books and asking all the right questions of all the right people. It's almost just being in the presence of greatness and experience.

Brett: Do you look for highly intuitive people when you think about your senior leaders in the company, that you want people that have intuition for their part of the business in the way that you have intuition? Or you think that's mainly your role as a founder and you're fine if that kind of way of being doesn't show up in team leads or, or your exec team or however you want to define it. 

Eoghan: I'm unclear what intuition is exactly. Is it just good judgment? If so, then yes, I want that in all my leaders, not trying to be a smart ass, but you know, absolutely., Um, yeah, you want people who look, I'll tell you about my favorite type of people, my least favorite type of people. My favorite type of people who have strong opinions.

Um, It's important that they can have their minds changed, but they have strong opinions. They show up and they say, we need to do X, Y, Z with our pricing. I'm sorry. We're doing it wrong. We need to do, We have a certain approach we need to take that my co founder Ciaran does this a lot and it's inconvenient, his statements and sentiments. That is so much more useful to me than the other type of people who are like, um, there's clearly multiple approaches here. I looked at Zoom and Slack and also Salesforce, and they have the three different ways. And I talked to this pricing expert and we had them do just an initial, um, study. And they've came back with similarly about three categories. . They looked at 58 different types of companies and when we run this analysis, we see that there's pros and cons to each

professional managerial class that's the MBA way and that's Useless in building great companies. You need people with strong opinions. In my humble opinion.

Brett: But I guess I'm curious then maybe you could talk about how that maps specifically to like your executive team. 

Eoghan: They're the people I'm talking about. So professional CEOs they actually want to be told what to do. So they do want the CRO from the blue chip company to come and tell them. Here's how sales is done because they don't have an opinion. Sorry, I interrupted you, but part of the answer to the question that you haven't even got to finish yet is there are different ways of doing this.

And I think that there's the startup way and, you know, the late stage professional corporate way. And the startup way wants people who have strong opinions and don't necessarily always agree.

 What have you figured out about hiring executives that are successful in the context of what you're trying to

Brett: do? 

Eoghan: The last piece is really important, which is the context in which you're, you're, you're operating. Um, cause it's just different at different stages of companies, different types of companies. I can only speak for, for, for me, for Intercom, we're a 13 year old company, which is an old startup, but we refuse to not be a startup.

We're taking very big swings. We're certainly betting the entire company on AI. AI turns out to be all hype. We're done. Completely done. And in that environment, you want people who are a little maverick themselves, up for an adventure, want to roll their sleeves up and build, want to be in it. Um, and they have something to prove.

And, there's X factor. , uh, you need experience and particularly I look for experience that we don't have. The experience we have, we'll find execs from our ranks and we'll promote them. I'd much rather, promote someone, from our organization that things were good at. 

And so I promoted a mid level person too. To a senior leadership role, go to market was not our strength. And so we brought in someone from outside that had a lot of experience, but still she is like us. You know, about our age, we're all in our kind of like early forties. So we're not kids anymore, but we're not that older generation too.

 So we're the somewhat how the mid generation in tech at the moment. Um, it's all relative and, she's, She's got that energy and something to prove, but just a lot of experience that we don't have. for me, you're trying to create. And it's so different for everyone, but for me, anyway, I want a group that can get on well enough.

We don't have to be buddies, but it's important that you enjoy your time together. So if you go for a dinner or drinks, it's fun. It's actually fun. Outside of that environment, it's wholly acceptable to have

disagreements. disagreements And sometimes there is a little bit of tension because people are different. If there's constant, long lasting tension, it means you have a problem.

But if there's acute momentary tension, that's the process of things getting figured out. And if there's no tension, it means that there's not active figuring. You know, there's, there's, , there's just, , ambivalence or apathy or, you know, it's a little too peaceful. Um, I want people who bring different things to the table,

, but who are also are able to intellectually engage on other topics too. So a lot of our commercialization conversations, pricing, how we bring our technologies to market, our head of engineering and our, uh, co my co founder who was former, used to be our CTO our CTO is now our chief engineer, make major contributions.

 I think it's important that everyone is like a broad business leader and that they want to pitch in, you know, I'm a fan of generalists. Everyone has like maybe their background and experience and inclination, but but pretty much all of my execs, give or take, some areas are more specialized than others, could do a good job at a different role, if that's the one that they'd come up in. Now, they didn't come up in that one cause that's not their area of interest. So the very best one that they're likely to do is the one that they're already in, but they can pitch in. I'm a really, really big fan of giving great people stuff that they're not supposed to have.

Eoghan: So, you know, Our head of product, I gave him product marketing. I gave him a marketing function or two. Our head of engineering, I gave him pricing because these are the best people around the table. Um, There's some go to market projects right now I've given our, our co founder who was an engineer. , so yeah, a Team of generalists who like each other, not afraid to have arguments, a little healthy tension, totally fine.

Brett: Why for you, do you like that generalist sort of orientation and the ability to work on the other parts of the 

Eoghan: business?

 I think it's because I fundamentally disagree with the idea that any area is rocket science and that there's a right way to do things absolutely and completely um, and that the Silicon way, Silicon Valley way is the way, and that that leader must tell the CEO what to do. Like, Most heads of HR I've met are substantially inferior when it comes to the basics of what makes a good organization run than, say, our CTO, Dara Curran. And Dara Curran doesn't have all, maybe all the soft skills of your typical HR leader, but he runs a great organization extremely thoughtfully. He listens to people on the ground. He's sensitive to their compensation issues. Um, he's kind of a bit more of a man of the people. And so, you know, the other model for building these companies is the professional CEO way. You bring in a super experienced chief product, uh, people officer. They tell you how things should be done. They import everything from Salesforce or wherever else they were last time.

And you don't have an opinion because you don't have opinions. You're a manager, you're an operator, and that creates a soulless, lifeless, disconnected, dysfunctional shit organization, in my humble opinion. There's ways to make it work, kind of. Um, And I'd much rather have an alive, living Um, org that is being built on the fly by people with real opinions who want to create something great and special.

There's so much nuance there. I'm not talking about reinventing the wheel, but I'm also not talking about importing carte blanche, a bunch of policies and practices from incompatible companies. So for example, when I went back to intercom, we had a bunch of big company stuff and we were only 1, 200 people.

It's not actually a big company. To to, to small startups, early stage people. That's a big company. It's not a big company. It doesn't feel big. Um, it's not big. Um, It's only big if you want it to be big. And a big company people want it to be big and they'll do a bunch of big company stuff. And it'll grind that company to a halt.

Let me give you a couple of little interesting examples. When I went back, I decreased the size of the company by 27%. Got rid of most of the HR, got rid of most of our policies and practices and all the grownup stuff, um, made the company a lot messier. All the structure, ripped out all the structure. Put a lot of pressure on to, um, work rather than talk about work.

And we saw the following type of statistic across the organization. In the 12 months after I went back, um, pull requests, which are the kind of, uh, atomic component of shipped code were up 41 percent over the 12 months prior. So we took out all this stuff that's supposed to make companies great. Took out all the professional HR people, all their policies and practices.

We took out all the industry best practice stuff. Productivity went up 41%. Interesting. And you'll find that again and again in so many different areas of a company.

So what was it like when you came back? Like, what was the first week like and 

Brett: what were 

Eoghan: you thinking about?

 It It was madness. The first week, the first month or three months was, was chaos.

What does that

look like? 

An attempt at organ rejection. Like you ruining our company, you're ruining our culture.

Did it bother you at all?

Few founders will know the deeply cathartic feeling that one can attain from going back to their company and ripping up all the bad sh*t and bringing it back to fundamentals, bringing it back to itself.

It's a, It's a deeply, deeply enjoyable thing. And the reason it was so enjoyable is because I've focused on making this a place for great people to work. So I talk about the rules and the policies and firing people. What I actually really focused on was I made a top talent program and paid a small number of people a shit ton of money, really, really brilliant people I wanted to be the kind of vanguards of here's how we do things here. I made sure that we force fit certain people to the bottom end of the curve and move them out of the company. But also forced the great people to the top end of the curve and gave them salary increases, bigger bonuses, more equity.

They were in line for promotions. And then certain of those people we'd bring to the offsites, I'd make sure to get to know them personally. I'd ask for their feedback. And if you just follow this process quarter after quarter, where you respectfully, lovingly, part ways with the people who hate you and you reward and show a phenomenal amount of love to people who are great hard workers, who want to be successful, who are happy.

that goes along with people who are happy.

Um, You really quickly can create a brilliant organization and I'll throw another stat at you. I try to kind of keep these stats close because there's a lot of, uh, what would I say, intensity in the way I speak about how I operate. I want to prove that it delivers too. We ran a, a anonymous employee survey three months ago.

We had 16 questions and the questions were, you know, um, I, uh, I agree. These leaders, I agree with the leadership of this company and they will make us successful. I agree with our new policies, I agree with our new values, agree with our new strategy. And you've read, you can like, You can like strongly disagree or strongly agree.

 You basically are getting a very anonymous read on how do people feel about the company. And in short for every single question, we had one to 2 percent negative. We had the highest engagement scores in the entire history of the company. And the people we did the survey with said we were in the high 90 90s percentile of all of the companies that they run surveys for.

People are super aligned and really happy even after that intensity. And I, And I bring that up to demonstrate and prove that if you, with no apology and taking no prisoners, create with a high amount of principle, a company that is perfectly configured for great people to be very successful, you will create a thriving organization, and I think as a company will be best set up for success. We're now seeing it in our numbers. We've got like six or seven quarters of accelerating a, uh, ARR growth. Um, Our logos were decreasing for two years. Now we've like turned that around and like total number of logos are now increasing for six months.

So we really did turn the entire company around based on a very small amount of principles, but with a dogged marriage to those principles.

Brett: Do you think it was an equal balance of changing the way that you ran the company as well as creating more clarity so the people there were the ones that actually wanted to be there, 

and instead of trying to contort yourself in all sorts of different ways, you were just radically more clear about this is what the company is? 

Eoghan: So many leaders are afraid of their employees because they know that they have no job if their employees decide tomorrow that they're done. It's kind of scary for a lot of people. Somehow I realized that the worst way to keep people engaged is to Was to bullshit. 

And most leaders, they don't exactly bullshit. Some totally do. 

I'd say like probably 50 percent of CEOs are consistently telling little white lies, but the remaining 48 percent of them are lying by omission. They won't say the thing on their mind. 

Basically all CEOs, they think the same. They want people who work hard. They want people who agree with their strategy. They want people who are going to be happy and positive and not cause problems.

 Um, simple stuff. And they are deathly afraid to say that. They've been afraid for a decade to say, we want people who work really hard. And it turns out that if you refuse to lie explicitly or implicitly, and you make that promise to the company that I'm always going to be honest with you, even when I'm going to say things that are going to upset you, you can build a phenomenal amount of trust that people who don't want to be there opt out and the people who remain are, by and large, those who subscribe to your dogma.

You only get there through honesty and it's important that your honesty contains nuance and it comes not from a place of anger, but actual compassion. So what you spoke there about. Uh, uh, the frame of mind that you might part ways with an employee uh, uh, with is really, really important.

My attitude is that life is short, careers are shorter. Any given individual is doing themselves an egregious disservice if they're at a company that's making them really unhappy. There are so many interesting technology companies out there and different types of companies and different ways of,, of making a living. The world would be a better place if people went and aligned themselves with places that made them happy. 

Brett: Why do you think that doesn't happen more often 

Eoghan: it's scary. That's really, really, really scary. 

We live in a victim culture, 

where we're told that people's lives are not only not their fault, but they're not their responsibility that, um, the government should make things better.

The CEO should make things better. They're taught that if there's something wrong in their minds, because maybe there's disadvantages, maybe there's privileges they don't have. And you've got a lot of people who feel that they have no agency and that they don't have the ability to create the life that deep down, if they were honest with themselves, they'd admit that they want.

We need to come back to a culture and a world where we teach young people of all backgrounds, that you have the capacity to shape and change your own life, that who you are and where you come from certainly is deeply part of your character and your story and who you will be. Um, There is a phenomenal world of possibility there available for you.

We live in a very wealthy time of great opportunity. And I don't care who you are what your identity is, your race, your background. There are so many ways in which you can be happy. And the step to getting there is to believe in that idea. And we used to believe that a lot more in the West and we've kind of lost that a little bit.

So one of my own personal missions is to, I say as intensely as I possibly can to as many young people, that they have the capacity to achieve happiness. And satisfaction and fulfillment in their life, because it is true. Um, and, and that's really a big, that's a real big problem here. 

And, even in the hardest of times, even now when it's harder to get a job in tech than it was years ago, still, employment is back to levels it was at in 2019, it's only 5 years ago. There are great jobs for many people and the difference is that some believe they can get them and they try and others don't.

Brett: ,

You touched on this in a few different sort of ways, but I would, I'm interested to get more of the context of when you showed up. 

What was going on, the specific things that you chose to change. 

Eoghan: We've touched on a lot of, a lot of things. There's one, we have not, One was our strategy. We were unfocused. That was my fault. We built a horizontal tool at the start, try to do all the things we moved up market, needed to pick a lane. The second was our culture.

We were weak focused, um, hiring the wrong types of people. And the third was our commercialization strategy. we had a lot of customer unfriendly, toxic ways of doing business. We just spoke a bunch about the last two pieces. Um, on strategy, I just looked for something that was a very big market. Customer service software by our measure is about a 30 billion market.

Ecommerce software is like 19. It's one of the biggest categories. It's the biggest part of salesforce's business service. Now, arguably big service business. it's 120 billion dollar company. I look for a big category. And I looked for category where there wasn't a lot of energy, one had really like made much effort or energy to build anything new in customer service for the longest time.

Zendesk were the heroes in the mid market and, um, and, you know, the founders left, they got bought out by PE, et cetera. And then finally I looked at something I knew that we could do well. We sold to support sales and marketing teams. Um, And support was one of our big ones. And so those three things said, customer support is probably the thing we need to focus on. And I believe we can be a winner there. It was very easy to do that from the outside. It's incredibly difficult to do it on the inside. So I had the great benefit of, you know, the distance that let me, , not get bogged down by the details and the minutia of the day to day and thinking in the big picture and, and one of the things I did differently that we had never done before is that I said, we're going to let other parts of our business get de prioritized, that we're going to pick a specific part of the market and certain type of customer we'll sell to. And very specifically that we're going to, uh, pick a fight and name our competitors.

And I think when I went back Back, I could be wrong, but I think when I went back and announced that I was returning, I said we were going to take on Zendesk and that was something that we had never done before, both because we were quite vague in our offering. And I think we were a little shy and, and I learned in my time away that you can't afford that hedging, you know, Oh, you know, we hope to be a strong player in this category, just substantially reduces your potential there. 

Brett: you think eventually it makes sense? Like it seems true that if you look at any company, that's worth more than a hundred billion, they end up doing all sorts

of things.

Eoghan: Oh, eventually it makes sense. 

Brett: But just not at that point in

, not at that point in time, because we had, we were selling to three different teams, 

Eoghan: three, 

Brett: three different product categories, and we weren't winning in any of them, and that just didn't look like, success to me and, 

Eoghan: you know, 

Brett: our revenue was slowing down, especially post 2021, the sugar rush of the post COVID era, like all software, our revenue growth came down and, we were just building things across the map.

It was just crystal clear that if we wanted to not only thrive, but survive that we needed a large amount of focus and discipline. you know, I talk a lot about the types of people that I want to work with. Those people will refuse to work in an environment where they don't have a clear, 

uh, 

objective.

Eoghan: And 

Brett: And a lot of these great people, it's really remarkable. 

Eoghan: I'm 

Brett: I'm not quite wired this way, but a lot of these great people, they'll say, 

Eoghan: um, you know, 

Brett: Hey, I'm down to work on any three of these problems. Just tell me which one it is. Whereas for me, 

I, 

I'll work on things that get me personally excited. They're like, you tell me we'll go, but you have to tell me.

Eoghan: And 

Brett: so like great people want really clear direction. And so that was the third thing. 

Eoghan: Um, 

Brett: picking a lane. 

Eoghan: Um, 

Brett: AI 

Eoghan: I 

Brett: became a thing about a month after I came back.

You made that decision before, sort of, it clear that LLMs were going to be interesting.

Well, before I went back, automation was a key part of the story for us. We had an ML team for five years prior, we were playing with LLMs.

So before chat GPT came out, we already had a lot of familiarity there, a lot of Automation, a lot of bots. We had some, certainly I think our resolution bot was the strongest bot in the market, even though we hadn't marketed it very well. 

Eoghan: Um, 

Brett: And then when ChatGPT came out and it demonstrated the power of GPT 3.

5, we realized that this is something we needed to jump on. We shipped the world's first AI service agent in March 23, a whole year and change ahead of Zendesk all the incumbents. 

Eoghan: Um,

Brett: And that focus and that clarity and that willingness to bet the company on AI, 

Eoghan: um, 

Brett: you know, thank God, paid off and not only have we been just substantially more productive, but we're now objectively leading in this AI customer service race.

You know, we've got, as far as I understand, much greater, stronger revenue than anyone else in the space. We've got hundreds of people working on this, the closest upstart, upstart . working on AI, CS has 10 people. 

Um, and when we measure our performance, we measure the performance of say the Zendesk bot versus the intercom bot.

Zendesk bot has a resolution rate of 29 percent or high twenties by our benchmark, which is the rate at which it successfully closes the ticket. Ours is currently 48%. 

Um, and that's what a year headstart gets you. So in this instance, willingness to make big bets and go crazy and take no prisoners and be just deeply principled paid off.

And I can imagine lots of instances in which it would not pay off, but I do think that that's the difference between a founder and a professional manager and, and great founders. And I'm not saying I'm trying to put myself in that category, but great founders, I think that their bets tend to pay off more than others. You look at great founders like Mark Zuckerberg, for example, you know, his company is actually, the product of obviously a phenomenal amount of small, great decisions, a number of very public, big, incredible decisions. Their successful move to mobile, their acquisition of Instagram, then WhatsApp, their pivots in Instagram, 

Eoghan: uh, 

Brett: and Instagram as snap, um, innovated.

There's like probably 10 really big risky bet the company decisions that they made and pulled off. Um, so yeah, I, I, it's an, Again, you know, we talk about a system of knowledge and you talked a little bit about how you can't plug and play, take one thing from another company. For companies with big aspirations who want to hire great people who want to have fun and be relevant, and invent in this time and achieve their measure of greatness, um, you want certain type of people and you also want a certain mode of operating and decision making and they want that adventure. Like these great people, they'd much rather be in a bet the company situation with a high beta outcome than a We're going to play out three strategies and see which one works.

They don't want that. And they may be foolhardy. It may be like, you know, when you like net out all the probabilities, it may actually be the wrong decision, but you'll find that, great people, really X factor people, they make these really irresponsible decisions to be associated with this type of craziness.

I'd be interested in you sharing a little bit more about once you landed on, we're going to go all in and push hard on, 

on 

customer service, are there specific choices or approaches that you took that are reflective of the fact that it's a mature, crowded category with people saying similar things?

Eoghan: People make this mistake a lot. Mature categories are very enticing because they are measurable and, there's dollars being spent on this budget, and it's extremely hard to create a new category. It does happen when there are technology changes. So for example, you know, there are people building AI, Products to assist lawyers, um, 

with contract writing. It's a new category and it comes hand in hand with this new, new technology called AI. Mobile did that, cloud did that. But for the most part, categories are pretty pervasive over decades. The only way to enter them in a way with where you can make progress on, you know, at silicon, at Silicon Valley speed and at venture pace, is to disrupt. And what that means is that you've got a new way to solve the old problem. So Intercom does not have a business if we are a prettier Zendesk, we are prettier.

Um, Great, great kudos to those people. They built an outstanding organization. If we could be even half of what they built, I'd be extremely proud 

Please don't take the egregious sacrifices to everything you value in your life by building an incrementally superior product in a big category. You will go all sorts of nowhere. It'll be the most crushing nondescript life I can possibly imagine. Don't do it.

the best example for me is there's lots of people that say, no one likes the Salesforce UI, so we're going to build a nice UI on top of Salesforce. 

It 

So disruptive means once again, that you are solving the same problem that the product category solves, but in a new way. And this new way affords some sort of new benefits. Um, The disruption comes with these technology waves or trends. So cloud offered this great disruption because it's like, Hey, we know you like CRM software tracking your, 

your 

customers, et cetera.

It makes sense. But do you really like having to get all these CDs, this out of date stuff? Do you really like that? Your CRM is different from their CRM. Do you really like that? You have to hire an it guy to set up your, 

um, 

Central database, I mean, I don't even know how painful it was. I can only imagine because it was before me.

And so the disruptive nature of Salesforce, which was CRM in the cloud. Was probably pretty powerful. Sign up today. Right. Sign up today. Uh, No install, no CDs, always up to date, always live, you know, come on. It's amazing. AI is about to do the exact same, every category, every category, um, particularly categories of software for people that do work, so customer service, which is the one I focus on and obsess about, um, probably, um, is about to be fundamentally changed because the work of customer service that is currently being done by humans who buy seats on Zendesk is about to be done by AI. So you've got the same problem being solved fundamentally in the category. It's a little bit of a stretch compared to the, to what I just spoke to earlier, but I'm going to give myself that poetic license. Hopefully most people won't notice the mistake I made. But generally the category is about providing customer service. Um, but it's so disruptive in that now the software does the work itself, the way the problem gets solved isn't humans and a help desk suite, it's actually customer service AI. And now all of the crystallized, tightly bound network effects that lock in that old category are going to have to dissolve because there's an entire new thing that people are about to spend money on.

And if everyone's spending money on AI to do the work instead of humans, they won't need seats anymore. So the only way these guys survive is if they destroy their own company and their own business and disrupt themselves and become one of these things. So, a long winded, uh, way to answer your question, which is that. or to respond to your question, which is, it's extremely difficult to enter an existing category if you don't have a disruptive way of solving the same general problem. Otherwise, don't bother.

 Was it made much easier for you to do this because the company wasn't working in a way that you wanted? Because I get to stand away, step away, and then the company wasn't working so well, you end up having a lot more license to make a lot more of these dramatic changes. The company's in the most difficult position right now, where you've got founders, we've been the CEO of some the whole time, and all the mistakes are very obviously their fault and things aren't going that bad.

Eoghan: And they have a huge revenue base that they're going to

and maybe you, you drive, I mean, we do too. We've hundreds of millions of dollars

. I mean, intercom is a successful business, it's just that we would like it to be growing faster and it now finally is, but, uh, yes, you know, you, you, you, you, you, you suddenly get this, this opportunity. People say, don't waste it, go crisis and actually software's in crisis right now.

Um, the median growth rate of public companies, public software companies is 15%, 15 percent three years ago, we were like, Oh, gross. What a loser. what's wrong with them? Maybe a giant company, maybe it's growing 15%, but that's not even the case. Salesforce has grown like 30 percent and they were in the billions.

So the median growth rate in software is 15%. And so actually I think all sorts of CEOs and founders can use this moment and say that if we want to attain anything closer to their rates of growth that we used to like, we're going to have to try something different. And given that belts have been tightened, if we're going to survive and thrive, we're going to have to excel.

And also, frankly, because of AI, because it's likely to threaten and disrupt our whole way of making and delivering value, uh, we're going to have to operate in extreme ways too. So even in spite of, even if you haven't had like revenue wobbles or CEO changes, I think that there's more than enough significant challenges that CEOs and particularly founder CEOs can use as an impetus to make really dramatic changes.

And the other thing I would add is that There's a really beautiful, like hilarious, darkly funny irony in that the only people who can start and build great companies are people who hate corporate life. And the people who love corporate life can't build and start great companies. This is a generalization, but it tends to be true. And so you'd be surprised the founders at a mid and a late stage that are facing extreme motivation challenges. 

And in my experience, one of the greatest ways to make your company exciting to work at it again, is to make it a company you're excited to work at. And that involves for founders and inventors, 

Brett: like 

Eoghan: taking big swings, ripping things up, reinventing the company, making it fun again, taking out the big company things.

And so not only is it, I think, imperative for founders to get them and CEOs to get the most out of their companies to use this moment to shake things up, I believe they will be happiest and then therefore their companies will be most successful. If they shape it to be the thing that gives them most energy.

Brett: When you decided to come and refocus the company on customer service, how did you approach what part of the market you wanted to focus on?

Eoghan: Basically we focus on the one that we're good at. You know, early stage investors talk a lot about, you know, founder market fit, or at least that's a concept I kind of have in my mind because I think it's important, you know, when founders, very young founders in their early to mid twenties talking about building enterprise products.

And I'm like, you have no idea how big companies buy. You've never worked in any company. I didn't either. Um, And so for us, we, we use the same principle, you know, we know companies are size and smaller. We're passionate about, you know, that type of scale and impact. There's a ton of money to be made in enterprise, but that's not us.

We don't know how to do it. Um, We'll gladly fit in underneath the people like Salesforce would do.

 One of the things that I've really admired the whole history of the company, and this was long before brand led software were a thing, is it felt like it's been a big part of your DNA. I haven't heard you sort of talk about how you think about brand or why you care about it or what it means in the context of what you're trying to do. Particularly as you've sort of charted this next chapter of the company, you've done just an incredible job of setting a very specific tone. And I refuse to run a software company that doesn't look good. Um, I'm actually really unexcited by the SaaS category in general, just me, you know, but probably I've been in it for 15 years, so no hate, but I just don't find enterprise software, business software, particularly exciting and it never looked exciting.

It was a lot of clip art business benefit claims and, stock photography, if you remember business software in 2010. Um, And I wanted to be associated with something that was like relevant and cool, and so I wanted it to look, um, so it was very, very personal. and I think this is more than just post rationalization because we spend a lot of money on our branding.

So I do tend to try to come up with excuses for that. Um, it's kinda like how you dress, you want to present yourself to the world. Do you want to dress in, wrinkled pants with a stain on your shirt?

By the way, I think ironing is the most underrated thing.

I tend to agree with you. I'm fascinated that I 

feel like I don't understand. I think the highest leverage 

Brett: act is, 

Eoghan: a fantastic, iron clothes. 

Brett: I agree 

with 

you. I have 

Eoghan: so, iron recommendation, by the way. 

 Good. Let's talk about the offline. Awesome. We can put it in the show notes perhaps. Um, 

If you present yourself in like a really corporate way, then people are going to think you're really corporate and you'll hire corporate people and whatnot. If you present yourself in a hip and a cool way, you'd be seen as hip and cool and you'll hire hip and cool employees. You know, right now, my kick is, I want to build one of the great AI companies, a truly iconic technology company.

I want to contribute to the human project to, you know, deliver this AI future. I'm inspired by, a beautiful combination of artificial intelligence and human intelligence. And that's why our branding at the moment, um, uses a little bit of that. There's other components to our branding too.

And there's other parts of our personality. And when you do that, it puts in context the vision you share, but it also brings in a certain type of, uh, uh, customer, uh, certain type of investor. It really is all stakeholders, employees, customers, investors, maybe even press. Um, their perception of you will be colored dramatically simply by how you present. And it's not just pictures and fonts. It's also the language that you use. So that's like, That's like just the thesis for why branding matters. For intercom, there's just many other attributes that fit in over the years. Like we didn't want to take ourselves too seriously.

I'm not inspired by software. So I wanted to look not like a software company, Um, and I also think the execution really matters too. So we would really obsess over the details. I mean, all of our billboards up to the last minute, I'm there with our designers, like nudging stuff left and right, like, Oh, fuck, I don't know if that looks right.

And we have to ship it in the end. And I think that even people who aren't designers, they really pick up on how deliberate and and with how much care and detail that thing has been executed. And so like, for me, all of brand design contains how you want people to feel, the personality, who you are, and even like the. the level of taste and care that goes into the decisions that you make. So you could kind of make an argument. This is better than my post rationalization, that it's everything actually. Certainly branding people would say that, but it's kind of everything. Like when I start new projects, I try to start with branding because it helps people understand what's this thing going to be.

Um, you know, you could, Branding can just be like a mood board. When I start brand new projects, I like pull pictures together and stuff and say like, this is the vibe. And, and, and from that, I think special things can be created. Like business is an art form there, you know, you're you and your business, you're trying to invest in hits that the hits are what everyone tries to be.

Most people are not hits. And hits in any art form, music, require a degree of like je ne sais quoi and tangible creativity and, and, and taste and, um, and brand design is our opportunity to do that. 

How do you disseminate that across the whole company? Right. You have a specific aesthetic, a voice. You 

Brett: know, 

Eoghan: part of it is I assume you are the tastemaker, are the editor, but now that you have over a thousand employees, do you think about how we scale our aesthetic and our tone and our brand across the entire team?

The only way I know how to do is to, to lead by example. The way I speak about customers in private, in the company the swag we have and our internal stuff and the actual website, um, you know, the website is as much for employees as it is for customers.

So that's the only way I know how to do it. Show people and lead by example. Uh, you can like institute this and you can make brand books, but that's actually the most sterile version of communicating what you are as a brand. So. For example, when I went back and I didn't used to do this back in the day, anytime I saw a customer complaining about our pricing, people would, our old price, we'd new pricing now it's very customer friendly, but people used to say very frequently on Twitter, Intercom has the worst pricing and software.

There were memes about it that would get thousands of likes, like not even little niche memes, like really popular. Like our pricing was a meme. It was that bad. and one by one, I would, when someone would say intercoms pricing sucks, I would say, yes, our pricing is shit. I'm embarrassed by it. Here's why it happened.

And like, give us a little bit of time, I'm going to fix that. And employees would be like, huh, you're going to say it's shit. I'm like, okay. And you start to give people permission to be honest. And, you know, uh, the reason that matters to me, of course, is that I think being honest with customers and acknowledging mistakes engenders a lot of trust. And so anyway, that was just one example of me just demonstrating to the company, here's how we talk to company customers. So I think demonstrate deeply living your values and your brand is really, really important. and I do that even when it gets me in trouble in the company when people don't like it. Um, you know, um, Part of the CEO, I think is. You're the chief employee, you're the lighthouse employee. You're the figurehead employer, the prototype employee, and I don't mean that like lead from behind, uh, like service CEO. I think that's a bunch of ego bullshit. People say that, try and look good and look cool., My humble opinion, I just mean deeply live your brand and your values and show people what that looks like. And then let people copy it and make mistakes.

Maybe we could just wrap up with, a question that we often do, which is sort of in the journey in building this company and refining your own instincts and taste and ideas, are, is there a person or people that have had an outsized influence on the way that you see things and like, what did they impart on you?

Yes, sincerely, and this person he's one of the most impactful, he's one of the most unique software leaders. One of the most successful, people don't know how successful he and they are.

They're not Silicon Valley, this person in this company, they're not Silicon Valley. They eschewed all the Silicon Valley thing. and that's why they're the wisdom is so valuable. That's Jason Fried at 37signals.

We studied him and them, me and my co founders for well over a decade. And they did so many things really right. We could try to attend series podcasts to try and study them, but we just wouldn't cover it. But simple things like plain speaking marketing. Simple storytelling, writing.

They like to write, show the product, very simple, thoughtful design. But the most important thing that they did, which basically all founders get wrong in Silicon Valley and is potentially not compatible with the VC way, I could be wrong, but it's compatible with a message I shared earlier, is that, they design the business for them, their manifesto or principle or, values around all of business or around the core of business.

And this is me, I'm not quoting them. This is just my observation. And they are right in this is that people start businesses to serve their interests and desires. The company works for them. And somehow we forget that and founders end up being a slave to their own company, are deeply unhappy, make great sacrifices in their lives. Feel stuck, operate the company in ways that are not in their interest. 37signals refuse to get big. They just never got big. They're out there always less than a hundred people, like substantially less.

I don't know how many people there are now, maybe it's 60. They refuse to raise venture capital, never raised any venture capital. Uh, Refuse to have big price plans. They only wanted simple, small plans so that they wouldn't have to do a bunch of sales. Refuse to have sales. Um, just made all of these really, really impactful decisions that made their lives easier and made them so much happier, opposed all the conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley would tell you, if you don't raise capital, you're going to have to grow slower. If you don't hire people, you're going to have to build slower. If you don't have bigger price plans, you're going to have to have too many small customers and on and on and on and on and said, no, we are going to build this company exactly the way they want.

And They actually have been one of the most successful software company of the last 10 years. And they've always been tiny and always done it their way. Never did the Silicon Valley thing. I, that's just so inspiring to me, the people who do it their way, see, there are no rules. There's just no rules in life or in business. You know, it's, it's People get really excited by these open world games like GTA or Red Dead. You know, you can do anything. Life is the ultimate open world game. You can do anything. Obviously, some things are immoral, some things are illegal. Take those off the table. Within that, you can do anything. And The best companies and in the best lives, in my humble opinion, are people who find things that suit them and they find their own path and create lives for themselves that map to their vision and their dreams, thereby becoming a model and a prototype and a hero for the rest of us, you know, civilization and humanity is actually shaped by a tiny amount of mavericks who've done the thing that everyone else wasn't doing, and then people realize I can do that too.

And so that's just all that stuff really resonates with me. And. Jason Fried and David Heinemeier. 

Heinemar Hansson of 37signals who built Basecamp, uh, are those guys.

 Perfect place to

end

Thank you for spending all

the

that

Really fun.

Brett: great.

Eoghan: It was awesome.