How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO)

Owen McCabe:You don't have a choice AI is gonna disrupt in the most aggressive violent ways if you're not in it you're about to get kicked out of all of it.

Lenny Rachitsky:You have very successfully shifted late stage SaaS business to an AI first agent based business Finn is our

Owen McCabe:AI agent who will pass a $100,000,000 ARR with Finn in less than three quarters.

Lenny Rachitsky:Let's talk about how you made this actually happen.

Owen McCabe:We were about to hit like $0 net new ARR which means we would have been in negative growth territory.

Lenny Rachitsky:So ChatGPT launches was it just like this is it we gotta go all in on this thing?

Owen McCabe:I said we need to become a wartime company if we don't fight for this we are dead I jumped hard on AI but I also restarted the culture I rewrote the values designed to be a sharp knife to cut out the parts of the company that I just knew wouldn't be effective.

Lenny Rachitsky:If you're trying to make the shift and it's just not moving you may need to go hardcore founder mode the way that

Owen McCabe:Greatness is created is that you find a CEO who's willing to make brave hard decisions and own the results.

Lenny Rachitsky:What percentage of the employees turned over during this period?

Owen McCabe:Ultimately like 40% you said there.

Lenny Rachitsky:Was a soft coup is there more you could share about that today my guest is Owen McCabe this is the first in a series of conversations that I'm having with founders who have successfully transformed their established SaaS or marketplace businesses into an AI first company that is growing like crazy and overtaking their decade plus old business so many companies and product teams and founders are trying to navigate this very tricky time where every industry is being disrupted by AI and my goal here is to help you essentially disrupt yourself before somebody else does the story of Intercom's transformation into Fin is incredible their traditional business was valued at billions of dollars was making hundreds of millions of dollars in ARR but growth started to plateau and was even about to go negative six weeks after GPT 3.5 came out they had a working prototype of what is now Fin and Owen and the team decided to go all in on AI today Finn is growing like crazy already at eight digits in ARR and Intercom is on track to be growing faster than every public software company by next year in our conversation Owen gets very real and honest about what it takes to win right now what he had to do to turn the ship around at Intercom in spite of a lot of pushback and even a soft coup attempt what he believes people still don't understand about what is happening in software and AI and so much more if you enjoy this podcast don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube also you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter you get a year free of a bunch of incredible products including Lovable Replit Bold NA10 Linear Superhuman Descript Whisperflow Gamma Perplexity Warp Granolah Magic Patterns Raycast Chappy RD and Mobin check it out at Lenny's newsletter dot com and click bundle with that I bring you Owen McCabe this episode is brought to you by Great Question the all in one UX research platform loved by teams at Brex Canva Intuit and more one of the most common things I hear from PMs and founders that I talk to is I know I should be speaking to customers more but I just don't have the time or the tools that's exactly the gap Great fills Great Question makes it easy for anyone on your team not just researchers to recruit participants run interviews send surveys test prototypes and then share it all with powerful video clips it's everything you need to put your customers at the center of your product decisions with a prompt as simple as why did users choose us over competitors Great Question not only reveals what your customers have already shared but it also makes it incredibly easy to ask them in the moment for fresh insights from the right segment picture this your roadmap's clear your team's aligned you're shipping with confidence and you're building exactly what your customers need head to greatquestion.com/leni to get started this episode is brought to you by WorkOS if you're building a SaaS app at some point your customers will start asking for enterprise features like SAML authentication and SCIM provisioning that's where WorkOS comes in making it fast and painless to add enterprise features to your app their APIs are easy to understand so that you can ship quickly and get back to building other features today hundreds of companies are already powered by WorkOS including ones you probably know like Vercel Webflow and Loom WorkOS also recently acquired Warrant the fine grain authorization service Warrant's product is based on a groundbreaking authorization system called Zanzibar which was originally designed for Google to power Google Docs and YouTube this enables fast authorization checks at enormous scale while maintaining a flexible model that can be adapted to even the most complex use cases if you're currently looking to build role based access control or other enterprise features like single sign on SCIM or user management you should consider WorkOS it's a drop in replacement for Auth0 and supports up to 1,000,000 monthly active users for free check it out at workos.com to learn more that's work0s.com

Lenny Rachitsky:Oh and thank you so much for being here welcome to the podcast.

Owen McCabe:Thank you great to be here.

Lenny Rachitsky:You have done something quite extraordinary with Intercom something that a lot of founders and product teams are trying to do which is to navigate this very scary disruption that's happening as a result of AI to most businesses you have very successfully shifted as you described a late stage SaaS business to an AI first agent based very successful business I want to use this time to extract as much as I can out of your journey so that people that are trying to navigate this and having a hard time can have less pain less suffering hopefully get to something that works to give people a sense of just how well things have gone can you share some stats about the current state of the business how it's going

Owen McCabe:Currently across the business you know we benchmark ourselves against all the public software companies there's like 120 something B2B software companies we're like in the fifteenth percentile for ARR growth so we're up there Fin which is our AI agent which is you know the future of the business the thing that will disrupt the old business it's you know growing north of 300% it took off really fast like all these other AI companies you hear of the first year it grew from 1 to 12 million ARR we're now in solid mid eight digit ARR growth there we'll pass a 100,000,000 ARR with Fin in less than three quarters and yeah Fin you know we're in the customer experience category with Fin so it's one of these agents that helps do all your customer work and they all started with service and in that category are the biggest by customer count biggest by revenue best by performance benchmarks we win all our head to heads and our direct competitor bake offs we're rated number one on G2 so I think we're doing we're doing pretty well we're doing far better than we imagined at this point

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay this sounds like the dream for a lot of founders especially ones that are stuck with their existing business that isn't going very far so let's get to that let's talk about the beginning of this journey you had a business that was working people used it loved it and over over a 100,000,000 ARR I believe talk about just the state of the business at the point roughly when you decided I really need to make a big change and go AI first

Owen McCabe:It was already in the hundreds of millions Intercom is fourteen years and change now part of the story is that in 2020 had been sick for a couple of years the background is I had mold toxins and later I found out that I had got a tick bite and that messed me up and so I left the CEO role in 2020 and you know a lot of the mistakes I had been making when I was sick got worse we became what a lot of late stage software companies are today which is a bit bloated we lost some energy our strategy was diluted and unfocused we're trying to do all the things for all the people we didn't know what problems we were really solving and for who and the result was very slow revenue growth in like the low single digit percent and I was away for two years unsatisfied where the business was going we had this post covid sugar rush which a lot of big companies at that stage did in 2021 everyone's valuation and revenue was through the roof and that hit a lot of problems in a lot of these companies and we had five quarters of success of sequential decline in our net new ARR and we were about to hit like $0 net new ARR which means we would have been in negative growth territory we never got there I managed to stop it before we got there but we were falling each quarter and I found that I despite my wishes to go and have new adventures still had a lot of pride for this damn thing and didn't wanna see it and in a way that was so different from the way it started it started with so much hope and optimism like so many companies do and it was about to fade away so that was when I felt like I need to go back and I need to make a change I went back and one month later ChatGPT was announced so it would be really neat and tidy to be able to say that the AI transformation came I knew I couldn't be on the sidelines I had to save this thing from the coming disruption actually got whacked across the head by this AI thing but it also ended up being a gift

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay so ChatGPT launches was it just like this is it we gotta go all in on this thing was it like let's watch this thing how quickly was it clear that this is the future this isn't working what we're doing

Owen McCabe:We and I were very lucky in that we had an AI group already we were in the customer communication business chiefly doing customer service we were building bots but they were rudimentary AI we had a bunch of our own machine learning that did Q and A for customer service but it required a phenomenal amount of setup and was kind of crappy but we had a number of AI engineers in the company already so when GPT 3.5 came out they said this is different and it didn't take long for people to start to imagine that this is going to be pretty disruptive to service and it started where we imagined that this was going to just wreck everyone selling seats everyone in the conventional SaaS game and we believe that was quite possible for some couple of years after that moment but we were only six weeks into the launch of GPT 3.5 when we actually had a beta version of Fin so I got a text from Des my co founder a week or so after the launch of GPT 3.5 and he said the AI team have something interesting and they actually think we could make a product out of this and this was long before there's now like no doubt a 100 service agents we had something very early working and part of what we had to our advantage also was that we had this giant base 300 you know sorry 30,000 paying customers you know hundreds of thousands of active users you know millions of their users billions of data points so we had a lot to play with and so we jumped on it now obviously it's fun to tell that once again a you know to to to support the idea of this brave maverick move and I won't discount the fact that we were brave but we were coming from a point of having nothing to lose so you know like we certainly are unique I don't know a single company of our size and age that has pivoted this hard to AI and being as successful as we have been we also previously were screwed we ran a really tough spot so had no choice so I'll take the kudos and credit but also have a lot of empathy for companies that weren't as in as much trouble as we were and so try to thread the needle and sustain the old business while adding to it with the new AI stuff

Lenny Rachitsky:Something I heard from someone that worked at Intercom correct me if this is not correct you've always been very anti bot in the customer support business because it just you didn't like how impersonal it was it just didn't feel like the way you wanted to build a business and then now that's what you do talk about that transition

Owen McCabe:Yeah I know it's a fun and ironic twist our mission from the early days was make internet business personal and when I came back and we started to lean into AI I started to wonder does that mission make any sense anymore now part of our lean into AI is that we had no choice not only for the business we needed something new but also we saw that this is the future and you can't fight the future you must be part of it so okay fuck we're going be part of it and

Owen McCabe:Ultimately and it's very easy to tell yourself these little stories so I'm open to anyone telling me this is bullshit but when I interrogate myself my soul and my mind I don't think it is when I interrogate my heart and my mind I don't think it is but I now have the belief that providing a customer with a highly engaged instantly available expert consistent fast charismatic funny friendly personal agent available for literally every single customer and every minute of the day around the clock is so much more personal than making them wait two three four days for a crappy canned response and so that's the irony and the magic and the wonder of AI even if it does make us ask some hard questions of ourselves and think carefully about its impact on humanity it actually is superior at the things we describe as personal and human relative to humans themselves and so that's where I'm at today yeah maybe it's a bunch of fancy post rationalization but honestly that's that's really where I stand

Lenny Rachitsky:Yeah I think I think data has shown people often prefer not to talk to humans they're just to solve problems that can just be solved like it's it's it's a lot of stress to try to figure out how to talk to some support agent that doesn't know anything about what's going on

Owen McCabe:Yes and AI is just better look at Waymo so Waymo doesn't crash it has 3.5 times less crashes than humans it doesn't bother you or bug you I like to chat with an Uber driver as much as the next guy but not always it doesn't have hygiene problems it doesn't take wrong turns I mean it just doesn't do all these things that really bug people and it's really interesting to see Uber now offer women the option to call only female drivers and I guarantee the reason they're doing that is because women love Waymo because they feel safer like AI is so often superior and humans are going to be far better at all the things I'm pro human I love humans I really want humans in the mix for all things in the rest of my life but when it comes to practical productive efficient and effective value the glue in between the human parts of our lives actually want AI and robotics

Lenny Rachitsky:Before we start talking about how you actually made this transformation a success one other piece of history is just your pricing strategy historically has been not liked by people for example I once had a Twitter poll or a survey on my newsletter just like what products do you pay the most for of all your SaaS products and your accounts by far the most know people constantly complain about just how unclear it was and how high it was now you guys are at the forefront of how to price AI products so we're gonna get to that but just talk about the lessons and what happened there with pricing back in the day

Owen McCabe:Yeah so I wanna just validate your survey data yes people abhorred our pricing it was a meme that were like actual funny popular viral memes on Twitter that were making fun of our pricing part of the problem if not all of the problem well there's two problems one was our strategy super unfocused as you said we're trying to do all the things for all the people and when you're trying to do all the things for all the people your efforts to capture all that different types of value are gonna necessitate pretty complex pricing you're like customer service and you're selling seats and you're doing outbound messaging and you need to charge for messages and you're doing like SDR messenger on a website you need to charge for leads already that's just metrics in every direction and then if you're trying to sell to many different sizes of customers you need tiers and gates and it just became a behemoth so part of the problem was the unfocused strategy and then the other part of the problem was an unwillingness to frankly make bold decisions say no pick a lane and actually take pain in the short term for the long term we rolled out this new pricing and this is even before the Fin pricing you're talking about when I came back and I said yes we're going to lose a lot of revenue here like I can't remember how much we wrote down but we actually have already given away something like something like $50,000,000 in ARR we've reduced the prices for a lot of customers just to give them way simpler pricing because surprise surprise when people feel like they have far simpler more predictable fair pricing they'll stick around longer and it creates so much more ease in the company and promotes a healthier relationship with the customer too when our people saw that we were screwing customers effectively in every direction it starts to erode the idea that we care about our customers and then they make other customer unfriendly decisions so one of the values I promoted when I came back was that we would be customer obsessed and so we had to kill our own pry our old pricing and give away a lot of revenue so that was the spirit behind the changes but we can talk about the Fin pricing if you want to also

Lenny Rachitsky:Let's save that because that's a really important topic that I think people need to hear let's talk about the shift and how you made this actually happen you make it sound like oh not fully it's oh we had to do it wasn't working anyway there's no risk to go all in on this AI thing you're making $150,000,000 a year in AR you're worth at least a billion dollars at that point right as a business

Owen McCabe:Yep I mean multiple billions of dollars more money than that we were like multiple hundreds of millions yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay very difficult to actually do you know even if things don't feel like they're growing anywhere so first of all just what was the moment if there was one of just like okay the six week ex experiment of someone building fin internally was was it that being like this is it or was there another moment of like let's go all in on this.

Owen McCabe:It was the combination of the company being older us all me and the founders being impatient like are we gonna make something out of this we went through a time when the company's worth a lot we're private so we don't have like a daily mark to market but all the other public software companies dropped 80% 85 90% 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 like let's do something here another part of it was my own kind of anger and dissatisfaction with how the company was being run and the mistakes that i made myself i made a lot of compromises as a lot of founders and founding ceos do to placate employees or do it out of fear to bring investors along you know following advice in the industry and best practices you know you betray your intuition in little bits and pieces over the years when the bright spark of your original idea turns into this big unstoppable scary corporate beast and a little bit of you dies every single time you go and betray yourself in that way it's very like you you know if you could pick in your mind three or four tech darlings from ten years ago when you meet the ceo and talk to them privately very few of them feel outstanding about the state of their culture and the decisions that they make and the way in which they have to work all of them have betrayed themselves in little ways and i was i had left the business i was super sick i was burned out frankly from the revenue even having started to slow down before i left i had been attacked unfairly in the press just all of me was just fed up and i decided to take a very authoritarian top down aggressive founder first approach to all the things and i found that deeply cathartic and that was the thing that led to me.

Owen McCabe:In part the other was just good old fashioned logic and the other was desperation saying we're doing the ai thing the ai thing exciting sexy we need some new energy thing here the new ai thing makes sense and also just my intuition says go for it and so when people tell these stories they rewrite history in their minds for the stories to be elegant and also so that they support their own self aggrandized narratives about their brilliance actually it's a big messy cocktail of things and anyway that's my attempt at explaining the cocktail.

Lenny Rachitsky:I saw a stat that when you first launched when you first had this kind of prototype you were losing money on every transaction that you're charging like a dollar cost you $120 something like that.

Owen McCabe:20¢ yeah yeah 120¢.

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay so there's a lot of vision here if this is going to get to a place where this actually will be great and affordable.

Owen McCabe:You know it's really funny like we charge 99¢ to resolve tickets you know customer problems and we have a higher resolution rate than anyone else and we are very proud of that we obsess over that it is the metric by which these agents are assessed and we wanted our revenue to be 100% aligned with the value that they attained because we had all this scar tissue from pricing prior that felt unfair to customers and we so we said what's the most fair that we can possibly find now when we did all our research we found that many saas businesses were spending between $20 and $30 per ticket resolved we were spending $22 now consumer businesses maybe they go down to $5 we were thinking like can we charge $10 that seems fair it's half price can we charge $5 can we even charge 2 and a half dollars but early on we started the sense that people just wouldn't value the digital work as much as the human work even though the digital work is better more consistent always available makes the customer far happier and so we actually started to lean into a price that we thought would be you know was the nexus between us earning the most and it being the most palatable we basically said that if someone is not prepared to pay 99¢ for us to rapidly and elegantly perfectly and excellently solve their customer's problem we need to wrap this up we don't have a business here so that was where the 99¢ came from and i always believe that value should that pricing should come from value and not from costs cost is our problem and we just had this sense and intuition early on that this thing will get cheaper and it got a lot cheaper and so you know you know the margin moves around but we make a margin that makes this more than worth our while and we know our customers get an excellent deal and are able to deliver to their customers a level of service that they never could before.

Lenny Rachitsky:That's a very clear pitch we just had a Madhavan on the podcast and the pricing expert and he has this phrase beautifully simple pricing is where you want to get to also he's a huge fan of outcome based pricing which is what you're describing here where you pay for an outcome you guys are in the magic quadrant of his pricing advice.

Owen McCabe:Yes thank god our pricing worlds are over finally yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay so going back to how you actually did this thing so you basically you just you described what many people think of now as founder mode just top down as you said the third theory and just here's what we're doing we're not gonna sit around waiting for you to give me ideas how did what did you do what did that look like internally.

Owen McCabe:You know there was a couple of things one was we were burning a lot of money so i cut a lot of costs aggressively canned a bunch of different projects we had this like big glorious office we were about to fit out and i'm like we're about to hit negative growth territory like stop it and a lot of companies were really stuck in the prior world where they just were used to being super successful rich and wealthy and spent like drunken sailors so i stopped all of that got really frugal in ways i never thought i would i still haven't touched the interior design of this office i'm in here even though i call it the hotel marriott was sick of it anyway that was one another was i picked a lane strategically we were all over the place and i said we're doing service zendesk had been acquired a couple of years prior they were strategically energetically culturally dead they were upsetting customers in the market there's an opportunity there we're doing service forget all the other stuff even though there was a lot of people in the company saying well shit we still have $80,000,000 of air orb that we're getting from the other thing and we're really good at that and there's a big opportunity there's other companies in this space worth billions it was you know type of decision that where i to practice the professional ceo approach which is hey folks what do you all think let's take everyone's input let's put it all down on a spreadsheet everyone out of color beside all of the different options that we may take let's make a group decision i said sorry this is what we're doing so i was very dictatorial in that respect we had no one making decisions somebody needed to even if i had some qualms about the decisions myself i couldn't predict the future but someone had to make a call obviously as soon as ai came around i jumped hard on ai and announced that we were gonna spend nearly a $100,000,000 of our own cash on that we allocated a lot of capital but i also restarted the culture we had just a very comfortable culture as a lot of companies did there was a lot of focus on social issues and a lot of complaining and dissatisfaction and i rewrote the values designed to be a sharp knife to cut out the parts of the company that i just knew wouldn't be effective so i said that people must be resilient that we had very high standards that we'd work incredibly hard that shareholder value was the most important thing that we'd optimize for a lot of things that were controversial for this prior crowd and then i designed these quarterly performance processes where not only would you get a mark or a grade for your performance against your goals that quarter but you'd also get a score for your behavior against the values and i hard coded a formula myself and so i took it out of the manager's hands to say if people got below a certain mark respectfully and lovingly we would say thank you for your service we're gonna go forward without you and so you do that just a small number of quarters and you can start to shape an organization that's designed and the image of the values you wanna create and obviously there was a lot of pain lot of satisfaction there was attempts at a soft coup there was letters sent to the board people really unhappy but on the other side of it the people left were.

Owen McCabe:The most incredible entrepreneurial brave inspiring happy individuals you could possibly imagine and then you hire in their image we ran an anonymous employee survey i think fifteen or sixteen months after i started aggressively working through the org and rebuilding the org and rebuilding the culture and we had a 98 to 99 approval of management leadership and new strategy and this is coming from me having the lowest glass door rating for a ceo i had ever seen when i came back so i just want to explain that like being that deliberate about your culture and upsetting a lot of people is the path through which you can create a culture where people are super happy super engaged super aligned and now we have just this highly performant organization yes we're messy in many ways so that was a big part of it too so it was kind of strategically picking a lane you know remaking how we go to market the pricing was a really really big piece that had a big effect banning on ai and then culture and i kind of buried the ai thing because frankly none of this would matter if we didn't bet on ai so the story could all be summed up by saying when you ask what did i do it was that we built fin and that changed everything.

Lenny Rachitsky:You said that this was very unpopular i imagine many people were not happy with all the change and how top down this was you said there was a soft coup is there more you could share about that i've never heard that story.

Owen McCabe:When you make that degree of change and you tell people that they're in control like we did in the previous generation of late stage businesses there's gonna be some friction when you change the rules and it's my strong belief that great employees and great companies want and are constructed out of a very clear and strong hierarchy where it is the responsibility of the CEO to make brave and hard decisions unilaterally yes using their experts as inputs and be responsible for the outcome if I make decisions that propel the company in the way that thankfully my decisions have I get rewards and kudos and I get to go back to the board and say I want a bigger grant if I don't I get fired and I should get fired if my big brave unilateral decisions put us in the toilet then I have to take responsibility for that also so that's how in my humble opinion should work and I for one don't know of a great company that doesn't work that way you'll see from time to time I did this a couple years ago people will construct these indexes of the performance of companies that are founder led and of course this is self serving statement but it's also true and surprise surprise the founder led companies perform substantially better because they have the moral authority and the willingness to take the risks that the professional CEOs don't have the remit for professional CEOs are typically told don't mess things up and the founders are bored if they're not taking the risk of messing things up from time to time and so that's in my opinion creates greatness and great innovation but like I said there will be friction change in a company that's configured for democracy and committee decisions and soft and gentle interactions and communication to be properly founder led and top down

Lenny Rachitsky:So a big lesson here is if you're trying to make the shift and it's just not moving there's a lot of resistance you may need to go hardcore founder mode and make some significant change what percentage of the the employees kinda turned over during this period

Owen McCabe:Could be something ultimately like 40% so it was a big turnover over some couple number of years often the culture is set by a very small number of people so it only took a quarter to really start to change the tenure of conversations that were happening but to bring in the people that were that new level of ambition and wanted to work as hard as the rest of us and work in a mature and engaged and excited way that took a little longer time you know there's such a thing as product market fit there's a thing as founder market fit there's a thing as founder product market fit you know that's how you're doing it right but there's also such a thing as employee founder product market fit you have to have the right employees for the type of business you're creating and there are companies that want the need to be more stable and they're going to want the need to hire more stable individuals there's going be companies that want to do the highly collaborative more democratic thing I won't invest in them but there's companies that want to do it if you're an employee that enjoys that there are a lot of positions out there there are big companies like Google that do that there are startups that hire the crazy you know young wild messy early startup people and that's great for them and the company too so it's really all about having the right individuals and when you create that not only do you create great success but you just create a lot more happiness and balance and harmony ultimately the employees who wanted a more you know gentle democratic environment they're not gonna be happy in a company like Intercom or Coinbase or any of these strong organizations they'll be more happy somewhere else so even if it requires a little bit of a loving push out the door I know that you're actually doing them a favor in the medium to long run

Lenny Rachitsky:I was gonna say that a lot of these people will be happier working in a different company who

Owen McCabe:Wants to go to war every day with your organization and in Slack that's just not fun let's not go for the nervous system or the soul

Lenny Rachitsky:Yeah so this whole period sounds very stressful for you did you ever regret coming back and just like what the hell did I get myself into what am I what am I doing to myself

Owen McCabe:I never regretted coming back but I have many moments where I don't enjoy the job I regret coming back because it was deeply cathartic for me when a founder runs away from their business it is the ultimate betrayal of you know their heart and the dream that they have now it's okay to wrap things up and quit but when you kind of run away like I kind of had to because I was sick and burned out and kind of disenchanted I don't know it didn't feel good so especially when I had done that having betrayed in a million or a thousand small ways my intuition there was something I needed to exercise so it has been deeply meaningful in that respect and then of course I'm fortunate that it worked out I get to be on the second most popular podcast in tech I get to like pat myself on the back in front of all these people who wouldn't want that that said the reality is that for particularly people like me who like the adventure and you know high agency being you know unilateral day to day movement where you're trying to make big wild bold decisions the reality is that if you're successful most of your days will not be that it'll be reviewing the bonus policy for next year and reviewing you know the comp proposal for your execs for the next year it will be you know showing up for accountability meetings and stepping through the status of different work streams it'll be rushing from meeting to meeting having eight nine 10 meetings a day I don't happen to believe that that's a great way to live your life it'll be trying to get to all the emails you need to get to such that all those people aren't offended and hurt and you know trying to communicate in the ways with your staff and your team that is empathetic and thoughtful and keeps in mind that they may be having a shitty day as you are like it's not you're giving me an opportunity to paint the story of this you know maverick led adventure that you might imagine in a comic like you know like I'm for some reason picturing Tintin you know sail the seas you know this swashbuckling adventure it's not it's corporate life kind of sucks particularly for people like me so I have many of those days and so the only reason I'm still around is that I have a broader mission that makes it worthwhile for now that's why you see so many of our best founders get to a point where they're like okay I've had enough corporate fun so that's the most authentic answer I could give you no regrets coming back but plenty of pain on a day to day basis

Lenny Rachitsky:Today's episode is brought to you by DX the developer intelligence platform designed by leading researchers to thrive in the AI era organizations need to adapt quickly but many organization leaders struggle to answer pressing questions like which tools are working how are they being used what's actually driving value DX provides the data and insights that leaders need to navigate this shift with DX companies like Dropbox Booking.com Adyen and Intercom get a deep understanding of how AI is providing value to their developers and what impact AI is having on engineering productivity to learn more visit DX's website at getdx.com/lenny that's getdx.com/lenny one of the interesting things about this space of agents there's all stock agents are taking over it's the future of software SaaS is gonna be replaced with agents CX is like a classic it just feels like like I imagine looking forward it was not obvious now looking back it's like obviously this is an amazing place for agents to take over work but there's always this talk of agents will do everything and all the SaaS software is going to be replaced by agents do you have a sense of just like how far this disruption will go outside of CX because it's already happening in your businesses

Owen McCabe:The first thing I'll say is that CX is deceptively large given it's hidden behind just two words two letters you know customer experience really is service success sales and marketing in my opinion it's all engagement with all customers it's the biggest part by headcount of any business any consumer business and any B2B business the biggest organizations are sales service success so I'll talk about things other than CX in a moment but I want to emphasize that CX is the majority of business operations of course it'll go beyond CX any function that requires a lot of repetitive operational mechanical work will be automated whether it's chasing or collecting or issuing invoices it could be onboarding or offboarding employees you know there are so many repetitive jobs in an organization that it'll start to replace one of the interesting questions is how much will be generic operations bots how much will be expert agents you know there are expert agents for law and contract review they'll probably be expert agents for accounting but you'll need the glue in between all of these agents too but future organizations will be agents everywhere I have spent quite a bit of time thinking about what does it all look like in the future and you know I imagine it as a medley of humans and agents and I don't think it's obviously gonna be humans on the top and the agents all on the AC role IC roles I think that'll be more of a complex mix where you're gonna have you know people that are like managers and leaders but they'll be in IC roles working with agents to configure them for success and monitor and manage their progress kind of add that oversight and cover for edge cases and so I think we're going to be surprised in which the way that these organizations go they'll definitely be smaller they'll be flatter because of that I won't be surprised if there are agents at the highest level too I mean I've been thinking about how and we do have a great human chief of staff here but imagine a future human chief of staff that like understands your priorities and actually talks to you and does a check-in each day and reaches out to different people and asks for updates and helps organize your priorities and helps you remember who you need to keep accountable clearly there's an opportunity for that and so you can imagine agents in specific roles like customer service in operational roles being glue and in being kind of like copilot or assistant roles like that which I mentioned but you know what I think that all brings is just epic levels of efficiency it's gonna be super deflationary there'll be a lot more competition AI itself is insanely competitive right now it's so intense in a way that was never before that's going to come to all industries when so much of their inner workings becomes automated and ultimately I think it's gonna be great for the consumer they'll have more options cheaper options and I can't see that be great for the economy a lot of economic lubricant as it were and a lot of new movement and activity and if we were to really go off the reservation but I'll stop here that means that we need more humans too we need population growth to show up for this big growth economically and yeah I just see the future as just a beautiful collaboration between humans and agents in every direction

Owen McCabe:Yeah I don't know I I like it will in many ways we're gonna have agents in AI to aggregate content and create content but humans as much as when it comes to productivity value efficiency efficiency is not the number one thing that we value you know if efficiency was the number one thing we value I'd always buy the cheapest clothes furniture computers even paper for my printer but I think humans value things like beauty and human stories and human heart and connection and not only will they still want those and they'll still want a Lenny that his has his own story and his own taken opinions and is a little imperfect but they'll pay more for it the abundance of AI is gonna make automated things worth zero just like the value of cheap content on YouTube why do people subscribe to some channels and pay more why do people pay to rent movies because some things have more quality more beauty more craft more art more humanity so I think there'll always be a place for that

Lenny Rachitsky:Phew all right I've got a couple more years at least yeah before I move on to a different topic just kind of reflecting back on this shift to Finn and the success that you've had are there any other just lessons that we haven't touched on that you think might be helpful for folks that are trying to go through this journey

Owen McCabe:You know I think it's ultimately that you don't have a choice my co founder Des is writing a book at the moment and that's core to the idea here you don't have a choice the story of the technology industry or digital technology is really short and it's been it's punctuated by a small number of things microprocessors personal computers the internet maybe mobile now there's AI I think AI is bigger than all these things and all of these things disrupted essentially all categories so not only is this likely disrupt all the categories it's gonna disrupt it in the most aggressive violent ways and if you're not in it you're about to get kicked out of all of it and so my strongest advice is roll your sleeves up figure out what's gonna disrupt you have fun with it you need to bring in actual talent we and I would be nothing if we didn't have actual AI scientists and leaders it's the only way we can be successful here we have an incredible person who by the time this is out will have received a promotion to chief I AI keep announcing all these things and confidence to you Fergal Reed and he's just one of the very best in AI applications and we happened to be working with him for many years so part of it is finding the talent and part of it is bringing in the young talent too AI is kind of a young man's game and I'm young but I'm not as young as a lot of the kids building AI and so learning to empower and enable them and learn from them too is a really big deal and unfortunately part of what you learn from them is the only way you're gonna 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 twelve hours a day literally three sixty five days a year no joke all of them and that's not a fun idea for many of us especially those who've grown up some some people in our generation have kids or a lot of them do there's like 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 companies are going to win cause 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

Lenny Rachitsky:I love how pragmatic this device is and what's interesting as you talk about twelve hours a day every day it's like we're trying to get close to what agents are doing yes which is half that's basically 50% of agents

Owen McCabe:But that that's not just a poetic cute phrase thing to say that comes from something very real which is these younger companies know how to use AI in ways that the older companies don't the younger companies are vibe coding and using AI for their creative work and for their job descriptions I guarantee you go to companies of our generation and even we have had to push people you go to companies of our generation most people in most organizations particularly non technical organizations they're not using any AI maybe they're starting to use ChatGPT to write a job description but they're not doing it by default and so that's more than a joke you're competing with young companies that are in part AI

Lenny Rachitsky:This reminds me I did a interview with the Perplexity founders it was I just checked April 2024 so just over a year ago and they were saying that the way they operated and this sounded so crazy at the time is anytime they were they had a question for anyone else on the team they first asked ChatGPT about it and then they asked the person I was like that is insane and now it's just like obvious that's what we all do now just like hey I'm just gonna talk voice

Owen McCabe:It's a prime example they're doing many such things when I say three sixty five days a year they're the company I think of because they're doing exactly that all these young companies are doing wild and ridiculous things that people you're in my age kind of chuckle at but it's business as usual for them so there's just a big mind shift cultural shift and there's a culture clash of the previous generation versus the new generation and the sooner you kind of wrap your head around that the sooner you can start to unstick yourself I think

Lenny Rachitsky:And just to build on that like this sounds crazy to work this hard like it sounds very stressful not fun why would I do this this sucks but at the same time this is as you said such an unusual rare opportunity there's so much opportunity there's so much wealth being created there's so many businesses being created this is the time if you were to ever work really hard this is a good time to do it

Owen McCabe:I think so I don't actually generally promote working that hard I try to not fetishize it I actually think a life well lived includes taking slow walks in nature where you're not thinking about AOR growth or hiring your chief revenue officer you know not going to eight meetings a day maybe you should go to no meetings a day certainly not working twelve hours a day I don't actually promote that in general as a thing one should do with their life I'm simply saying that if you want to compete and and enjoy success in this age which means you need to be doing AI that is the price so 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 just sprinkle a little bit of crappy AI and they've got the same cultures it won't work the one thing I will say the one little asterisk to my first point is that all great people and great things have been achieved through hard work and so I'm speaking out of both sides of my mouth here to younger people to let them know that every way of living is valid but people who have achieved things have always worked hard and they find a way to enjoy it too and particularly in 2025 in AI

Lenny Rachitsky:I wanna follow this thread I was gonna ask you this earlier but I didn't and I wanna see if this takes us somewhere interesting just watching you speak and talk you're very self reflective very centered you have these really good breaths you take when you think about something I met you a long time ago randomly at a party when you were just starting Intercom I don't think you were like that was there during this kind of two year period was there kind of a transformation that you went through to kind of

Owen McCabe:Become absolutely yeah there there's a couple of things first I mean there's three things that come to mind working in a startup for fourteen years has a certain way of kicking you in the head many times a day that either kills you or makes you far stronger so that's one piece there's no elegance to that point but I think we can all ensure that that level of experience teaches you something you grow up very fast point two is I did a lot of therapy I found this amazing guy twelve years ago he started a couple of his own tech companies and took them public he only coached and was a therapist to CEOs he's now kind of in a later stage of his career this amazing guy his name is Yossi Amram amazing guy I just landed on my feet I just didn't know who I was dealing with but you know one of the greatest minds and teachers of kind of the last I don't know many decades people don't even know him but he's thought and worked with many CEOs and he just helped me get to know me and take time for myself and people like to hate on therapy right now think a lot of therapy sucks and a lot of therapists are not good and they fear that actually therapy will lobotomize them and turn them into thumb sucking navel gazing you know soft irrelevant losers that won't have that edge anymore and the interesting thing about twelve years of weekly therapy and spiritual work is that it takes your edges off but they're all edges that are super counterproductive all the edges that made you an asshole got you triggered miscommunicated or like you know fought back when you were insecure they take all the edges away then help you see yourself and love yourself so much more for who you are be completely unafraid to acknowledge the things you're not good at but own the things you are and in understanding yourself you understand others better and can communicate in a substantially more connected and authentic way great great therapy and it has to be great is a recipe for brilliant leadership in my opinion and then the third part is two years away where I ran away where I was sick revenue growth wasn't doing so hot I unsuccessfully tried to defend myself from a bunch of fake bullshit in the newspapers I mean was beat up in a moment like that your ego sense you have of your greatness is eviscerated and that's painful it can be so painful that many people don't come back from it and I credit the ten years at that point or nine years of therapy I did at that point plus the support of this therapist and coach that I had to surviving it but if you can survive it what you end up with on the other side is all of those insecure well a lot of the insecurities and all that ego bullshit that made you super ineffective jealous or triggered for all sorts of different reasons it's gone your image that you are this perfect brilliant leader that all successful founders form when they are successful had to die and the reason that's so good is that that's so limiting when you have this ego identity of yourself about how fucking amazing you are then any moment that challenges that is super scary anyone who questions it is offensive and so I credit wherever I am today and I have decades of learning still to go to those three components and I feel super fortunate to have had all of them even though the last one sucked I can finally say wow it really helped

Lenny Rachitsky:Thank you for sharing all that yeah I'm glad I went there I want to show you something that I randomly have in my office my wife just got me that I think you're gonna love it's a piece of art that I think will resonate with

Owen McCabe:Yeah what am I looking at here so it's

Lenny Rachitsky:A it's a hand with a snap and then let me see if you can see what it says

Owen McCabe:I can't see what it says.

Lenny Rachitsky:It says ego death now, right? Look at this.

Owen McCabe:Good, exactly.

Lenny Rachitsky:There it is.

Owen McCabe:May, may all our egos peacefully become smaller and leave this mortal coil. The reality is like none of our egos ever die and even great, there was, you know, Ram Dass is this great spiritual teacher who died a few years ago and someone asked him on his deathbed something like, you know, how did you get over your bullshit or your ego and he said I never did, just the edges got smoothed away. This is a guy who had like seventy years of the deepest wildest spiritual work. He acknowledged no, still my same self, so the ego is still there and we actually need to acknowledge it and love it. When you acknowledge it then it's not a surprise when you're like a little jealous, you're like I'm jealous, that's funny, okay and it's all, it's all good.

Lenny Rachitsky:Reminds me of Daniel Kahneman who wrote all these books about biases that we have and like here's all the ways we're flawed. If people ask him have you like learn to live more rationally he's like not, not at all. Knowing all these things about how we're flawed in the way we think, all these biases doesn't actually, I can't use we're, it in human and we

Owen McCabe:Should let ourselves be human. I think it's beautiful. We're, we're, we're logic systems but we're also heart systems and body systems and soul systems so all of it is good.

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay I want to go in a completely different direction. The last thing I want to talk about I needed to mention this. I don't know if you've seen this but I've been doing research on which companies produce the best product leaders and I've been doing this by looking at which alumni of companies go on to become CPOs at the highest rate, get promoted the most at their next job, become the first product manager at few startups, start their own companies. Intercom has come in number one across this research next to like Palantir and Stripe, Revolut. So the question this begs is what you guys doing that produces such great product leaders? There's kind of like the hiring piece and then there's what they do at Intercom piece. So what do you think? What do you think is creating these sort of really big successes from your alumni group?

Owen McCabe:Yeah I don't have a really succinct answer unfortunately. I can say in the abstract our culture is a very product-y culture so like myself and Des, you know those four founders and me and Des trainer drove a lot like all the strategy we're product guys. You know I was, I was like a, I was a software designer, you know I studied computer science so I'm tech technical but never did it professionally. So the first part is that just product innovation design just core was just core to our culture and people always picked up on that so I think good people wanted to work here and we were good at finding good people. The other part was that because we had this sprawling strategy we had all these products that we needed a complex structure for and that included lots of PMs and PM groups that we gave a lot of autonomy to and so like kind of a product of our big messy strategy was that we had PMs that got to act like many CEOs and so I think that they got to learn the broader skill sets beyond designing wireframes and interviewing some customers they really owned it like a mini CEO to some degree. I think there's one other thing which is you know part to our approach was this deeply first principles thinking methodology almost to a fault although I don't think it's a fault we would, I and we would create frameworks for everything. It's like okay we want to do these events, who are the events for, what is the ultimate goal of the event, what's the mechanism by which events work, what are other mechanisms that can achieve that same goal, how do we define success for an event like that, how does the user or the attendee define value, what other things do those people find valuable. Like we create these like complex systems to try and approach everything but the net effect was we'd have really joined up considered strategy and it's everywhere. Paul Adams our Chief Product Officer I didn't even plan to show this he made this book recently The AI Age and the Transformation of Customer Service and it's a bunch of frameworks for how to think about AI etcetera so it's part of what we do and so we would hire people who are good at that but we teach that that's teachable and not everyone does that and so the conversations that Des and I would have you know we still love being on whiteboards. Our very first office, our own office in Dublin was a tiny office one wall was like four five computer computers, the other wall was just all whiteboards. We love that. We had a whiteboard wall in our next office we had a room square room and all walls were whiteboards so we just love to like 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 founder side I was talking to Daz about this this morning like why have so many Intercom people gone on to be founders. I think it's because we've 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 right? They were better founders. I'm not a good employee and so I it'll be interesting to see if this current cohort we'll get money founders that is current cohort but will they convert as well as they did before because we're now hiring people who want to be part of something bigger they're more mature and grown up more stable and consistent they're part of you know they have a certain expertise and a certain lane they want to work in and maybe they're not the crazy types that went on to start companies but it's wild. I did see some of that research by you particularly the one where you show the the companies ranked by the number of founders that they have and I'm like what is happening. I was as surprised that we were that high as you were because there are many other great companies on that list so surprised and proud.

Lenny Rachitsky:I love when people say I don't really have like a clear answer and then you have exactly a clear answer and it resonates a lot with other companies on this list that I've had on of what the themes are I'll just reflect back with you one is complexity that comes up a lot like and interestingly most of the other companies in the list I'll read them real quick Intercom, Palantir, Revolut, N26, Dropbox, Chime, Stripe and then Coinbase and Notion's down there so many are fintech almost all are fintech.

Owen McCabe:Right.

Lenny Rachitsky:And the complexity there is really high so there's like a really interesting trend there just like complexity ownership is another one that comes up a lot many CEOs, GMs kind of roles first principles thinking and just like going to the bare metal comes up a lot in these conversations and then hiring senior people hiring founder types.

Owen McCabe:Yes like Stripe did a lot of that I think Stripe did a lot of first principle stuff and founder types.

Lenny Rachitsky:The other thing we're not we wouldn't even talk about this but you guys invented RICE you guys popularized Jobs to be Done speaking of frameworks you guys are

Owen McCabe:A wealth of frameworks that we all use drowning in frameworks.

Lenny Rachitsky:Drowning, changing the way everyone builds product in a really positive way. Okay, is there anything else that you wanted to touch on or leave listeners with before we get to a very exciting lightning round?

Owen McCabe:When someone like me comes on a podcast like this they always have an ulterior motive and that's healthy and good it's part of the transaction some of it is to you know enjoy feeling like an expert but my ulterior motive today is to make sure that people understand that intercom is a fundamentally different type of late stage company we are a large old startup every single way in which we work is as a startup and are competing with and crushing the actual startup competition in our agent categories and the reason that that's important for people to know is just like i said earlier that the handicap that good but late stage companies have is that they're late stage and people don't mentally put them in the same box they just don't imagine these older companies if i told you that ibm had made the most wildly innovative coding assistant you'd find it hard to believe most people would it's maybe so interesting such that it would stick in your mind and you'd go look at it but by default aren't going to look at ibm and so i want people to take a new look at intercom because it's a brand new company and our mission is to help every single type of business deliver impeccable incredible beautiful personal service to every single one of their users and people many thousands of people are using fin for that today so go check out fin please fin.ai

Lenny Rachitsky:And I don't know if you mentioned this at beginning but let's mention that you predict that you'll be the fastest growing company across if you were to look at all public software companies next year.

Owen McCabe:So maybe you know two years ago we were in the low single digits growth rate we doubled our growth rate and last year we were in the low double digits this year we're in the fifteenth percentile of all public software companies so you take the 120 something public software companies were in the fifteenth percentile so we're like getting up there fast and if we sustain this trajectory and it's obviously dangerous to put these types of things out publicly but you know i'll tell you i look at the charts and it's hard not to imagine where this goes i think we're going to find ourselves being the fastest growing out of all relative to all public software companies so let's see but that's the level of shock surprise and transformation that has actually happened here all because of finn so check-in with me in a year and maybe i'll be embarrassed or maybe i'll be feeling or a

Lenny Rachitsky:Underselling it this is just reflects back on exactly how i started our conversation you've done something extraordinary in intercom and i'm really happy that we're hearing the we're sharing this story.

Owen McCabe:Thank you.

Lenny Rachitsky:With that we've reached our very exciting lightning round i've got five questions for you are you ready?

Owen McCabe:Please ready.

Lenny Rachitsky:What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?

Owen McCabe:So i found i lost the habit of reading as i started to get more and more stressed with my startup and so i would listen to audio books here and there the most recent book i read is a book called nuclear war scenario and it's a very much a non fiction and scared the shit out of me so if you like nightmares it'll be beautiful bedtime reading.

Lenny Rachitsky:Excellent yeah what's a recent movie or tv show you've really enjoyed?

Owen McCabe:I love movies i want tv to be better but i very rarely find tv to be great the the one the the first and last tv show i loved was true detective one that was just like incredible but the last movie i watched was twenty eight years later and that's by danny boyle i'm i'm like you know i was born in the eighties grew up as a kid in the nineties and so grew up with you know you know trainspotting it was twenty eight days later then he made a movie called sunshine so twenty eight years later is a type of movie that's just not made anymore it's the most nineties movie made since the nineties it's like very rock and roll and also deeply touching so i was really surprised by that i bet i would love to know the younger generations that are watching this what they may think they may hate it but i love twenty eight years later.

Lenny Rachitsky:So this is the same person i made twenty eight days later yeah twenty nine years later wow yeah okay very cool didn't know about that.

Lenny Rachitsky:Have a favorite product you recently discovered that you really love could be a gadget could be an app could be clothes

Owen McCabe:Yeah do you

Owen McCabe:So I like I very rarely like products I'm such a perfectionist that it has to be really simple with very little moving parts like a bowl to actually be like good I've started to get more into coffee I've been buying products by Fellow they're remarkably good for consumer products like different it's on a different level so there's some sort of level of taste and craft happening there that I don't see basically any other consumer hardware type products and of all things I bought a Porsche nine eleven recently and that is a beautiful product the interiors are exquisite and there's still a bunch of shit that is gonna annoy you and so it's like far from perfect so yeah perfectionism is sometimes a gift if you're in the business of creating products but also quite the curse you're never happy including with the Porsche nine eleven

Lenny Rachitsky:I think that's the third time someone recommended a car someone recommend I think Boz at Facebook recommended a fancy Mercedes and then someone once suggested a Rivian so now we got Porsche on the list I always thought maybe one day I'll give someone all the prizes all the products people have ever mentioned in this and those are getting know Porsche might be a little high okay two more questions do you have a favorite life motto that you find yourself repeating coming back to in work or in life sharing with friends

Owen McCabe:You know it's trite it's not sophisticated you know and it's more of a concept than a phrase but it's something around the idea that life is short I'm just so aware that time ticks by and we all live on autopilot so much of what we do is inspired by either our insecurities or things that other people we look up to or envy do very rarely making contact with what we really want and following our hearts and our heads and yeah we just kind of like get stuck in these lanes and just live out our days and certainly when you get you know 41 now you get to 41 and thankfully still very young anyone in their forties congrats should feel good about that but I know if you're in your twenties or thirties 40 feels old but when you're when you're in your forties my experience is that the weeks and the months and then the years go by like it's not a big deal I'm like back at Intercom two and a half years now to to any of these kids in AI in their twenties if they don't get something done or achieved by next month they'll be so disappointed themselves and so impatient and in some ways at least when it comes to productivity they're better at getting more out of the time but I'm now trying to get more life out of the time too so yeah just that's if there is a motto it's like life is short or like memento mori you know we're all on the way out so make the use of what you've got

Lenny Rachitsky:Fun fact I built an app once called Savorable that helps you save at the moment it's called Savorable and it sent you a text every few hours I don't know maybe once a day with little reminder of way to say remember savor the moment and one of the texts was just like remember you will die

Owen McCabe:Yeah and and and the problem is that like even that idea we forget it instantly and if you start getting texts every day you'll ignore the text like by default we just don't wanna acknowledge that reality on a day to day basis maybe that's important

Lenny Rachitsky:Yeah maybe for the best yeah okay final question speaking of apps I was doing research on you in preparation for this and I didn't realize you built Quitter back

Owen McCabe:In right the yeah yeah

Lenny Rachitsky:I love Quitter I found it so fun it basically told you anytime someone unfollowed you on Twitter

Owen McCabe:Right

Lenny Rachitsky:So the question is just what happened to that app

Owen McCabe:I think we eventually sold it for like 14 Ks wow on that's one of these I think there's a website called flip it where you could sell websites it really blew up it was like a little experiment kind of a social experiment it was the first time that I had this feeling that there's no reason someone wouldn't want to use this like obviously people are gonna wanna use this and it was really instructive for me because it taught me that that feeling is possible you meet so many founders young founders particularly and they don't have a sense within themselves about the value of the stuff they're building will this be good let's get customer feedback and it is possible to build things that you deeply know make sense and that's why my formula for building things was to always build things for myself and that was what quitter was like you know followers go up followers go down at that point in time had 100 followers or 200 followers and you'd want to know who who's not my friend anymore

Lenny Rachitsky:Oh man I love that that was your bar of like that led you to the success later it's like yeah if it's as good as quitter in terms of product market fit and so much

Owen McCabe:I mean it was it had the best fit ever about everyone on twitter tried to sign up for it and it broke

Lenny Rachitsky:Well I loved it Eun thank you so much for doing this I love just how real and open you are about everything and just how much insight you have to share I also just love the vibe I feel like I just am more centered just watching you

Owen McCabe:Oh thank you

Lenny Rachitsky:Speak two final questions where can folks check out Finn follow you if they wanna follow-up on anything and then how can listeners be useful to you

Owen McCabe:Check out Finn finn.ai if they wanna follow me I'm E O G H A N on Twitter so it's Irish spelling of own but if they wanna be helpful to me you know I'd love them to try Finn I'd love them to you know have their friends that run any kind of customer operations try it too this AI thing is noisy there's so much hype but it's also really real and the weird thing about Fin even relative to the coding apps the coding apps are blowing up and yet there's a lot of people experimenting and kicking tires you can't kick tires with Fin we only deliver value when you expose it to your customers and it closes tickets and makes them happy and so like AI is really really happening and so if you know anyone out there that has customers they should be using Fin it's the smartest cheapest easiest way to dramatically enhance their business so if they do that they'll be helping me sincerely

Lenny Rachitsky:I'm sold Owen thank you so so much for

Owen McCabe:Sir pretty fun

Lenny Rachitsky:This was amazing

Owen McCabe:Yeah thank you bye everyone

Lenny Rachitsky:Thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com see you in the next episode