SPEAKER_00: a smart founder particularly one who loves to think about technology and landscapes it's just it's a fun conversation for the right minds i like to imagine the magic and beauty that could come from building the master system yes you're right the last system of course what's not

SPEAKER_03: beautiful and elegant about that like the engineering mind loves that say if you think about the customer world it's like hey it's all one customer let's provide one seamless beautiful flow

SPEAKER_00: and one incredible platform to do all the above and that's actually not wrong thinking if all you're doing is having a fun academic tech strategy conversation but if you're interested in the

SPEAKER_03: matters of building successful businesses then you run up with really practical matters like positioning like what are people going to know you as if you're trying to be the everything tool

SPEAKER_06: is that your pitch it's a hard pitch this week in startups is brought to you by linkedin ads to redeem a 100 linkedin ad credit and launch your first campaign go to linkedin.com slash this week in startups dot tech domains don't miss the jam session with jcal contest for your chance to join jason on air to showcase your startup and potentially take it to the next level to apply and get more details go to jam with jcal dot tech brought to you by dot tech domains and northwest registered agent start your business fast and secure with northwest registered agent in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes set up your entire business identity name address mail service phone email website and domain everything you need to launch your business in minutes for 39 business formation visit northwest

SPEAKER_13: registered agent dot com slash twist hailing from county cork cork cork cork yeah and then uh the

SPEAKER_15: kennedys were the other side of the family seventh generation we were in the five points uh in new york

SPEAKER_17: cool that's the real deal they're pretty hardcore i'm sure pretty hardcore i did you know we did

SPEAKER_15: all of our ancestry and uh started to find all this great stuff out yeah one of my cousins who did

SPEAKER_20: it was like holy cow like we came to brooklyn and then we went to manhattan and then we were police officers and firefighters in new york and my brother was a police officer and a firefighter and he

SPEAKER_15: retired recently and i was going to be a cop little known fact wow i think you would have made a fun cop

SPEAKER_24: uh it's a good story actually we'll include this in the cold open here it's kind of funny that we're

David Friedberg: both mccabes yeah uh and owen your first name is like youth or tree what what does it exactly mean

SPEAKER_28: and i should know gallic culture i think it means like youth oh yeah that's what it is born of a youth

SPEAKER_32: tree yeah who knows what that means that sounds cool and you know all this gallic stuff is cool yeah

SPEAKER_03: i should look if you think it's about time i'm 40 i just turned 40 it's time i kind of found out that

SPEAKER_20: one one detail it's all there i mean they took great records in ireland i think yeah but a bunch

SPEAKER_00: of them i think were burned down in 1916 during the revolution and so there was like some destroyed

SPEAKER_34: etc so they don't have great records what happened with our family was we found a bunch in ellis island

SPEAKER_15: because our family came through ellis island new york on my father's side my greek father that's where calacanus comes from he went through ellis island like 10 times so if you go to the ellis island website and you look up calacanus you'll find james john calacanus my grandfather i asked my dad like why did he go through ellis island 10 times what's the story here he said well what did your grandfather do

SPEAKER_39: for a living he was a head engineer on a merchant marine ship what do you think his cargo was i don't know bananas all these things from venezuela and south america and ireland and italy i don't know and

SPEAKER_41: he said people turn of the century everybody was coming to america that was the place to be

SPEAKER_15: yeah so when he came through ellis island he had to go through immigration every time right um that's why i'm just like such a proponent of america of course and like a defender of like just how amazing

SPEAKER_03: this country is when it's at its best of course and we think somehow it's different now but actually there are brand new generations of immigrants yeah coming on board the good ship america doing the same thing they leave the rest of the world because they see that there's more freedom and opportunity here they build create there's new jobs there's population growth more taxes i mean it's just a

SPEAKER_15: really healthy virtuous thing it's still happening yeah and you know it's ireland and the united states have such a rich strong history in the 80s when i was a teenager i used to work at you know different bars and restaurants the ones my dad owned and then other people and the area i grew up in brooklyn bay ridge was irish swedish immigrants a little bit of korean and the italians were in bensonhurst and if you needed workers best workers you could get were irish and so there were all these young people who left ireland in the 70s and 80s and now they call them boomerangs right a lot of them have come back in their 40s and 50s like gen xers i understand but they all came to america there's no jobs in ireland at the time in the 80s and 90s and so they came here they were illegal sure were illegals sure and that we paid them in our restaurants off the books very low wages and the hardest workers you ever met

SPEAKER_03: sure i believe it i believe it yeah but it's still happening today that's the thing that i really just think americans don't fully grok that how america feels to the rest of the world like the rest of the world really still hold america up particularly the types of people you want to the builders and the dreamers they still hold america up as this land of great opportunity and it is my guest today on

SPEAKER_53: this weekend startup owen mccabe and he's the co-founder ceo of intercom with uh my guy des trainer one of your co-founders that's right yeah you had a third co-founder i think we had a total of

SPEAKER_49: four three or three or so with the company yeah as you know i think guys has been on your show a couple

SPEAKER_15: of times yes this was you know i just love your guy des because he was so generous with you know the

SPEAKER_20: startups when i was started angel investing and this is to call a scout anytime i asked him to come to talk to but seven founders in a tiny little accelerator 10 years ago when listen i wasn't as

SPEAKER_15: high profile as i am now and he just said yeah i'll come anytime just you know tell me where to be and he'd come and he would be the first to show up he'd give his talk he'd hear their pitches and then des would stay for an hour and then we'd go get a drink after he'd stay for another hour

SPEAKER_67: and it was like that dedication you could tell it wasn't about money it wasn't about selling

SPEAKER_69: intercom he loves his pure passion for innovation i just really like that and des is also the

SPEAKER_03: consummate teacher he was a lecturer right before he kind of got into technology i think give the arc enough time to play out he'll end as a teacher too oh we'll see we'll see i we haven't discussed

SPEAKER_29: that doesn't that's like oh like that's me making that up but he just is a consummate teacher and he

SPEAKER_72: loves to teach but we got right into the discussion here um i was so excited that you said yes to come

David Friedberg: on the program because intercom has been quite a story i've watched you build these tools and you

SPEAKER_20: know the reason i know the company so well is because founders use the tools and we'll talk about the tool set and and all that you guys were founded 2010 2011 yeah yeah it's been over 10 years raised a couple hundred million but making a couple of hundred million from what i understand you got ousted or something at some point or left because you were sick yeah you left and then you

David Friedberg: came back return of the king and you did a lot of radical things coming back so i think a good place for us to start is you know you're in your second decade with the same company maybe you could just give us an overview of what the business is now and then you came back the timing's kind of wild you

SPEAKER_35: came back to intercom to run the show one month yeah before chat gpt was launched yeah sorry to finish your sentence there but i presume that's that's exactly what i was going to say is the timing was

SPEAKER_20: spectacular i love i've seen ceos listen i don't know if you were ousted or left on your own but we or we can get into or not i don't care really but i know you're back and i you know my guy travis got ousted at uber yeah i've seen this movie before and it's always heartbreaking because i think founder

David Friedberg: authority there's nothing like right like sure founder sets a tone and then you guys got really professional you brought in all this management from what i understand you ripped it all out so right maybe let's start with what is intercom what is the state of the business and then let's get

SPEAKER_81: into coming back steve job style to your own company sure sure remind me if i forget to explain

SPEAKER_87: that i wasn't asked for some reason yeah for some reason that's a point of pride for me well i know i

David Friedberg: think it's important because you know we just had this very weird moment in technology where the world got very anti-technology and sure anti-capitalism and we started our discussion off here by talking about how great america is in capitalism sure there's something happening here

SPEAKER_81: and you know i don't know that you're part of it necessarily but where america is fighting for its soul and it's like a really interesting topic to both you and i agree i agree and we share this

SPEAKER_15: common ancestry between these two countries so you know let's let's just talk turkey about what the

SPEAKER_07: product is today yeah happy too so the product is in the customer service category every business in

SPEAKER_03: the world is becoming an internet business still you know digitalization or whatever you want to call it companies are still coming online every single business is becoming a digital business and every single digital business needs some way to do service you know at internet scale and the last champion of kind of smb in the mid market for customer service was zendesk did an outstanding job in the heady days post-covered 2021 sugar rush they were worth 20 billion dollars you know were bought out by p you know a good deal less than that but still an outstanding outcome but you know with respect to those guys they hadn't been innovating for quite some time they were a little stale they were an outstanding go-to-market organization well for years i'd wonder like what made them so great and then when i was hiring for a president had to go to market started to meet x and s people and i'm like oh now i get it and they're not just really smart the the go-to-market people just really sophisticated cmo stripe is x and desk the president or you know how to go to market at figma x and desk president at asana x and desk no quite an alumni pattern interesting yeah so anyway they kind of stopped innovating we saw this opportunity and so that's why i said let's go after customer service

SPEAKER_100: navigating the b2b maze can feel really tough huh you're trying to hit the mark with all those top

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SPEAKER_15: i know in the startup community uses it and when you go to a website you see that little box come up hey talk to us uh about if you have any questions about the product i remember des explaining how this

David Friedberg: like sort of evolved over time and i think there's a little bit of sort of crm and understanding your customer at a deep level retargeting them and building relationships with them so there's kind

SPEAKER_107: of hubspot zendesk a lot of these sas products and including the whole salesforce suite of products they all seem to because you go after adjacencies overlapping or there might be some sort of sas pool

SPEAKER_41: to unite them all what what are your thoughts on when you're building these sas products the

SPEAKER_29: adjacencies and when to add them and when not to it's super important to focus on a smart founder

SPEAKER_00: particularly one who loves to think about technology and landscapes it's just it's a fun conversation for the right minds i like to imagine the magic and beauty that could come from building the master system yes you're right the last one ring to them all of course what's not beautiful in elkin about

SPEAKER_03: that like the engineering mind loves that so certainly say if you think about the customer world it's like hey it's all one customer we want one relationship with the customer whether they're you know experiencing our adverts or looking at us tired or signing up trialing the product talking to sales talking to service they want to upgrade just one customer let's provide one seamless beautiful flow and one incredible platform to do all the above and that's actually not wrong thinking

SPEAKER_00: if all you're doing is having a fun academic tech strategy conversation but if you're interested in

SPEAKER_03: the matters of building successful businesses then you run up with really practical matters like positioning like what are people going to know you as if you're trying to be the everything tool is that your pitch it's a hard pitch certainly a hard place to get started from then what about the other thing like the fact that you have to build all this and you've only got one management team and sure you can raise more money and theoretically you can get more leaders to own different parts of the product but this one ceo brain no matter how big brain that ceo is it can deal with finite finite topics are you really going to be able to build that you know seamless platform and then just they go to market and the pricing just gets insanely complex we fell for this trap yes yeah we fell for this trap it's part of the intercom story you know we built a cool horizontal tool at the start messenger use it for all the things we sold it to little companies they didn't have sales marketing support teams so it's all very fluid great yeah then later on we said hey it could be good for sales could be great for marketing cover great for support we built a different use case specific features but as you start to go market the requirements in each of those areas get probably exponentially complex yeah and trying to do all the things i mean we you know we certainly broke and one of the key places in which we broke was our pricing our price was just so complex because if you're trying to have a pricing model that captures the value that maps onto how the sales people use your product the marketing people

SPEAKER_17: use your product and support people use your product that's going to be some pretty gnarly pricing

SPEAKER_122: and it was and we suffered because of it and now you're faced with another sea change in pricing we

David Friedberg: have this sort of sas consolidation that's occurred and then we have consolidation of teams and staffing where you know again a company like uber which i track a lot uh for obvious reasons they've had a flat number of employees for like three years while growing 30 percent right so the whole sas model was very freeing hey just pay for what you use you got 10 people in sales 100 people in sales you pay for 10 seats you pay for 100 whatever you use and then even some clever companies like slack were like hey by the way you have 50 people who have signed up but 25 of them didn't use it we're gonna charge you for 25 so we're just going to be totally honest you don't need to worry about it uh so don't worry about like turning off accounts or whatever we're just going to charge you for the ones that log in beautiful but hey how does the business grow we've got a bunch of sas companies in our portfolio

SPEAKER_107: who they keep adding customers but because of the consolidation in sas where you know some cfos like you know we got 50 sas products in this organization and they just send some edict down it's going down

David Friedberg: to 30. so clean it up and then they also say you know what hey we got 10 sales people who are getting 50 better at their job every year because of ai and because of the tools we're not going to add another five seats so so talk about the percy pricing model and how brilliant it was and then is it

SPEAKER_00: broken now and then what comes next i think over time it's broken we can get back to that on the ai

SPEAKER_03: piece just generally on the consolidation you know how markets work they get greedy and fearful they get loose and tight and we've gone through a constriction where we've said hey we're buying too many soft sas products we need to you know slow down or tighten our belts it's going to loosen up again like it's not good growth none of us companies should be excited to get that sloppy growth but it'll kind of come back you know we're at a particularly tight time right now you know frankly you should want to build a company where the business you win comes from not loose financial control but actually delivering killer value that's how you create great companies and by the way that's probably why some companies that achieve billion dollar valuations in 2021 who are well below that now are kind of struggling because they didn't build a deeply meaningful business uh that now uh is ready to face the world that only values uh meaning so that's like my whole

SPEAKER_20: thing on the console i mean it makes a lot of sense because you know i'm on the board of a couple of companies that are let's say over 10 million in sas revenue right there are ones that we incubated we

David Friedberg: seeded and you know that really has been a big conversation ideal customer profile do they actually need

SPEAKER_131: our software and you know sales people are in their best sense you know like i tell people it's like water going down a hill it's just going to take the fastest path sure the easiest path and then just they're going to sell what people are buying and they might sell tools to people that you know they don't actually need it then they churn but in a loose environment where everybody's got a corporate card and hey the company's throwing off massive profits it's loosey-goosey like you're saying everybody's ordering you know the uh black truffle or the white truffle or supplement it's like why

SPEAKER_132: wouldn't we order this it's white truffle season but it's not white trouble season now but jason it

SPEAKER_03: happened everywhere like intercom you know a successful high quality company profitable the whole thing but we're not open ai which is like a wash with cash right even at intercom in the loose days we're like wait a sec we're paying for like sana coda notion this thing and i know that they're all

SPEAKER_135: slightly different but you're like right wait a second how different are they so it's really

SPEAKER_03: interesting that that just happens really quickly and yeah maybe it starts with one team buying that and the other team buying the other thing but it just seeps and everyone has seats on the thing and

SPEAKER_15: it's amazing how quickly that happened i came up with a system where we use you know certain credit

SPEAKER_122: cards that you can put a limit on right so i said hey make one for periodicals we'll shoot journal whatever right you know make one for sas software make one for finance software and i just had somebody

David Friedberg: in operations do this and then at the end of the year we do the same thing every year i just say take the limit from ten dollars in a month down to a hundred dollars right and then tell me what turns off a brick right and if nobody notices by the way this last company is going to find you

SPEAKER_122: they're going to find somebody there because there's a commission associated with or whatever

SPEAKER_146: and um it's just the way we cycle through stuff okay i am passionate about innovation and tech and i love hearing from the founders themselves and now i've got an exciting opportunity for you i'm hosting a jam session with jcal it's powered by my friends over at dot tech domains and it's over this summer i'm going to have five founders get on a call with me and i'm going to give them my unfiltered feedback and the best part is these mentorship sessions these jam sessions where we go back and forth and talk about your customers your product your team your problems your victories the things that are going well the things that aren't going well in these jam sessions we're going to take them and we're going to publish them on this week in startups think about how great that is you're going to get to have a jam session with me that's awesome and fun and educational and hopefully helpful and you get to share it with the world so all you have to do if you want to be part of this insanity this awesome beautiful insanity is you need to have less than 2 million funding we want to do this for startups and you got to have an awesome dot tech domain name so apply and get more details jam with jcal dot tech jam with jcal dot tech it's in the show notes and i'm partnering with my friends over dot tech

SPEAKER_149: domains because all these great innovative startups are starting to use dot tech i see it all over the place rabbit dot tech aurora dot tech one x dot tech and of course founder fridays dot tech if you're using

SPEAKER_146: a dot tech domain name for your website i want to hear about it apply for the jam session with jacal today

SPEAKER_81: jam with jacal dot tech jam with jacal dot tech jam with jacal dot tech what comes next i mean ai is so powerful and i've been thinking about jobs to be done i know that you're into that framework uh and you're the creighton christianson you know what work's got to be done next and start looking at my own behavior and i start looking at these young founders that i invest in seed companies i know you

David Friedberg: like to invest too they're so under resourced that they like again you know great restraint you know

SPEAKER_81: great limitations people get very creative in what they do and the way i found athena and these virtual assistants uh jonathan's new company um athena was like all my companies were like yeah we have a virtual assistant that does that from the manila and in the philippines it's 36 000 person we don't

SPEAKER_20: like them they swap them out we never have to deal with any hr issues it's like operations as a

SPEAKER_131: service it's almost like an aws layer and they're so clever about how they do things that i see them putting jobs in weird places like athena you know or putting them into ai so what do you think companies are going to do next obviously the big companies they've got these sas-based pricing they're not thinking about ripping this stuff out it's not it's a fair price it gets them a lot done or are they thinking about ripping it out and just asking a chat interface to solve the problem and how far are we from that and does that keep you up at night um it doesn't keep me up at night

SPEAKER_00: i will say that building software in the ai world is like doing everything on hard mode like boy was it so much easier 10 years ago man like you could just build something new and different and interesting

SPEAKER_03: you and you won now everything's changing and you have to really stay on your toes and so you're constantly having very deeply existential conversations like the one that you're kind of promoting or provoking here that specific angle i don't know if it quite gets to your your point here but the specific angle i think about is i guess this one piece i'll try and touch on on

SPEAKER_00: on yours first does the advent of ai technologies within corporations change you know the you know number of employees within them and the amount of seats that they buy etc etc etc like certainly

SPEAKER_03: over time certainly the big difficult hard and fun question is just timeline here and maybe it's a 10-year thing honestly as much as it's easy to get super excited about how the world might change tomorrow actually it takes time for companies to adopt new technologies takes time for new technologies to be kind of shaped uh into the way that the real world wants to use them right yeah there's a big difference between theoretical cute demos and actual hardcore real enterprise software so

SPEAKER_20: sustainable like strong resilient software right absolutely yeah that people aren't just going to

SPEAKER_172: experiment with and then sharing from especially not in your line of business which is customers like you don't want this stuff touching customers and screwing up a customer relationship of course so

SPEAKER_03: people rightly are quite hesitant and very careful so yes over some long enough time frame companies

SPEAKER_35: get smaller the seats thing just goes away uh across the board okay oh so that's that's where that's

SPEAKER_174: the end state the seats go away there's a different pricing model coming which is based on consumption or value creation so like it's hard for us to escape a focus on consumption like if you play

SPEAKER_03: out where does customer service go in the future all customer service will be done by ai well you know over what time period is it 10 years uh and when we say all for sure you'll still want humans to bring some degree of empathy and connection there'll be times when customers and businesses want to bring humans into the mix that's great but essentially all repeatable customer service will be done by ai and it'll be done in a really great way the customer will be delighted to get to speak to the highly sophisticated assistant that's available right there and then to offer them personalized service i mean

SPEAKER_178: and though in fact based on what you're saying they're going to prefer it they'll prefer it i mean they prefer it 100 because if it works it's just easier and faster and better people already prefer

SPEAKER_03: waymo because it's super consistent no one tries to talk to them it's like it's the same package thing i didn't i never imagined that but there's people out there that i don't mind the uber driver but there's people that don't want to talk to another person or there's women who feel unsafe at night and with another person in the car now waymo all of a sudden

SPEAKER_29: it's not just a fill-in for humans it's better than humans and guess what it's not going to run

SPEAKER_15: over people on the street i had the same experience with toast i don't know if you've been to a little or if you i don't know if you have kids no kids yeah yeah so when you have kids and you're at a restaurant you know and you right see this like little uh qr code right your kids are hungry and

SPEAKER_122: when kids are not hungry it's not a good situation for the parents and when they're fighting over like the last two dumplings and there's three of them not a good situation for the parents either you might remember from your childhood and toast is like the greatest parenting thing ever you just take a picture and it's like i want the dumplings like okay boom dumplings are on the way right and i don't

David Friedberg: have to flag a waiter down and oh the kids need to go to bed boom i paid the oh the check's already paid so when you take out those two friction items flagging down a person and you know retrieving a check you know that could save you 10 minutes 15 minutes with totally it's amazing i don't think

SPEAKER_185: you have any kids for that i mean like if you're on your own you can browse through the thing i mean

SPEAKER_03: like we almost don't want to admit that this automation is more than just efficiency it actually is

SPEAKER_189: superior than humans in so many ways this is not an anti-human statement at all i mean i love humans

SPEAKER_03: i want humans to thrive i actually don't believe that we're really close to agi i think that the way that the ai nerds think about the future of intelligence is really limited they don't value the body and the spirit consciousness either so i love humans right yeah but sorry some of this automation actually creates superior experiences 100 and that's interesting to reckon with that's why we have this campaign i'm not trying to make it about intercom but we have this campaign where our main pitch is cheaper faster better pick three because ai is this weird paradigm it's like wait a

SPEAKER_29: sec it's better than humans it's faster than humans it's cheaper than humans oh yeah so this is

SPEAKER_122: an old adage and you know what i was coming uh off of the uh i was coming back from tahoe and you actually have a billboard with that statement on it that statement uh coming off the uh bay bridge or no actually i was taking my daughters to an arcade in alameda right like an old classic arcade it was so much fun and i saw it and you know there is this classic thing you hire a consultant they say well

David Friedberg: do you want it better and cheaper well you can't have it fast do you want it fast and cheaper well it's not going to be better and you that is just such a profound insight did you come up with that insight or did that come from us where did that come from but that wasn't an agency that happened

SPEAKER_00: you know it's actually our brand guy so we have a vp of brand will burroughs i'm like i like that he

SPEAKER_87: gave us like he gave us like 10 different options i'm like sorry you can't get over the first one yeah

SPEAKER_214: first best i'm sorry i have never remembered a billboard i don't think i can't tell you another

SPEAKER_107: billboard i remember so if i remember the billboard i was like yep that is ai it is going to be all of

SPEAKER_133: those things and of course we're trying to say this is what intercom is but it's what ai is yes yes

SPEAKER_81: you only need to look at how frustrating it was to work with a travel agent or you know before that

SPEAKER_41: our parents with phone operators like anything it yeah it was it was just wasted time for everybody

SPEAKER_29: we're called pg and e today i mean pg and e are actually one of the good ones they're right called

SPEAKER_07: conca i mean any of these companies yeah it's not even their fault i mean even try to talk to intercom before the ai days we get back to you in one to two days right that's not good enough

SPEAKER_131: it's a lifetime yeah it's a lifetime you want to solve this problem right now talk to me about like what is actually happening today in the tool and what have you account because you've been there

SPEAKER_81: for 18 months i heard you on another pod i think kleiner's got a pod now called grit so i'll give them a promo i don't know who the host is but he's pretty darn good yeah yeah yeah it's very good job joe

SPEAKER_15: you know i'm friends with mamoon and the team over there ilia i think the world of them guys they're really hard working i'm on a board with ilia he's just a hard-working dude um what's working

SPEAKER_147: today in terms of tickets customer support people type into a box and then what don't you trust it

SPEAKER_07: with yet so today we have many thousands of intercom customers who've turned on this thing called fin

SPEAKER_03: it's an ai agent it looks at your public knowledge base and your website but also your internal knowledge base but it also looks at the prior conversations from your support reps and it will have a little

SPEAKER_29: conversation with the customer it'll only jump in when it thinks it has a chance of answering it jumps in about one out of two times so 50 of the time it jumps in it'll ask for like um clarification like

SPEAKER_237: oh is this what you meant whatever oh a little that's key isn't it yeah yeah yeah is that what you

SPEAKER_03: want this thing so there's a conversation it doesn't pretend to be human by the way i think is important on average 43 of the time it gets involved in the conversation it resolves to take it

SPEAKER_185: it's like oh like whoa the numbers are really real hey startups are you ready to launch your business

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SPEAKER_03: agent.com twist today we have customers where it's 80 90 and these are companies that have a thinner kind of surface area on their product so consumer companies like uber uber only wants you doing a few things in the app yeah right they only wanted you to do a few things and so the the theoretically although uber is a highly complex operation which makes it more difficult let's think of something else like amazon amazon we're great at this they've done it for forever they only want you to do a certain number of little things and so for these consumer businesses to use finn they get like 80 resolution rate but for a big sas company like intercom we're at like 45 resolution right but

SPEAKER_95: that's still a giant that's a giant so our customer service team hasn't grown in two years

SPEAKER_20: this is the key yeah and then yeah for people who are scared by this concept it's going to 90 in every

David Friedberg: company and what i've tried to do with my team is explain to them what do you see more senior people in this company doing every day that you covet what is it that you would like to be doing right and in our firm we're sorting through incoming applications from founders the sorting it's kind of inspiring to see what people are trying to build but it would be kind of cool to do the calls with the founders and hear the pitch directly from you wouldn't it and like you kind of get to move

SPEAKER_131: up the stack is what i tell people and just constantly moving up the stack means more interesting work to be done totally and this is where your point about humanity yes is repeating back as a customer support agent you know for the 17th time today right this the problem that everybody has because they literally can't see when you say click any button when i was in customer support it's a great story to click any button and i had this woman call me and she said i said yeah you can just click any button she says i've been doing this for an hour jason i can't find the any button i said how about we try picking the button of your choice or the spacebar and so i just started telling people hit the space bar it's the long bar on the bottom okay boom and and that just was my little this is

SPEAKER_35: why you're no longer in customer service that's very impressive exactly that's just like oh my lord

David Friedberg: this is unbelievable the second best story from my it days was i said to the woman take the floppy disc out of the sheet and put it in the drive she said i've done that already and it's making a weird noise i said what floor are you on i'm going to come down there she had taken it out of the sleeve the paper sleeve and then she had taking a floppy disk a five and an inch floppy disk which you still

SPEAKER_232: remember and she had ripped it open oh no the glue and everything and pulled the magnetic dial out which

David Friedberg: yeah given the instructions of take it out of the sleeve it wasn't in a sleeve right when she had the thing it was already in the drive so she took it out of the drive and then put it out of the sleeve and put it back in destroyed the software desk whatever's no big deal i have to say your stories

SPEAKER_03: are way more interesting than the typical customer service job experience and and what you were getting at is that it's deeply inhumane to ask beautiful unique humans with so much potential in their lives to do the same damn thing hour after hour day after day week after week month after

SPEAKER_189: month year after year it's a terrible use of human potential i have one more so funny one of the third

SPEAKER_257: one this is such a great clip for a youtube short or something i was with the woman one time and i was

David Friedberg: charged with putting lawyers onto the internet this is the early 90s and they were using document match now lawyers the idea of using a keyboard for a certain generation of boomer lawyers was like

SPEAKER_272: asking them to take out the trash like i would never touch a keyboard we have the typing pool for that i'm an attorney why would i touch a keyboard a typewriter like well it's computer it can do a

SPEAKER_105: lot of things so i say to the woman hey just pick up the mouse and just move the mouse and she literally picks it up off the ground i'm moving my phone right now and she starts waving it in the air and i was

David Friedberg: like oh yeah it can stay on the mouse pad when you move it and i turned it over i showed her the trackball this is back when they had a ball and take the ball out and clean it that was another great moment and it customer support was the waving of the mouse in front of the screen she she thought the pointer would move if she used it like a laser pointer she was just a couple decades ahead of her time uh literally yes she anticipated where this was all right right so if we're getting through 40

SPEAKER_147: now right and i love this idea of like confirming with the customer because that's not something that llms do that's something you designed your software somebody had a great observation at some point of just like hey let's just confirm with them so they feel more safe or secure and we get the answer right

SPEAKER_03: what does this look like in one year yeah so in one year we go from not just answering knowledge questions like hey can i do it can you ship to africa can you ship to australia wherever to actually doing things like hey i um my package never arrived it's like oh no worries i'll like get it re-sent to you so we'll we'll we'll go from answering questions to doing things really the game here

SPEAKER_00: if you just imagine a pie chart of the different categories of things you call customer service is

SPEAKER_03: checking off each of those categories and the easy one obviously was knowledge and llms were always going to be good at that in spite of the fact that it actually took a ton of work to stop it from hallucinating i know you're talking about the things that you could talk about yeah but the next big stuff is taking action and that's where it's a lot riskier yet again because it's one thing if you tell my customer something that's not quite right it's another thing if you refund my customer nine thousand dollars for that grill that they bought and got delivered now we've just got a big mess in our hands what if you just do that a thousand times obviously i'm making this up and

SPEAKER_29: hopefully income customers are not listening right now that this could never happen

SPEAKER_03: uh anything's possible anything's possible and so it's on us to actually build the technology to ensure us that it doesn't so that's like one of the next frontiers it goes a lot further than

SPEAKER_122: that but that's that's the next logical step i mean there's been many instances in the early days of e-commerce where people you know thought they were ordering a gross of something and they typed in the number for gross which is 12 times 12 and then realized they ordered a gross of grosses right a ton of tons and like all of a sudden too much paper towels comes to the restaurant of course

David Friedberg: um but this is the next piece which is letting the ai take a behavior it's a digital behavior but

SPEAKER_45: it's a behavior in the real world yeah but it doesn't have to be digital yeah yeah it doesn't have to be and like we live in a digital world so it's things like refunds resetting passwords

SPEAKER_03: it could be security implications everything else so to build that in a really robust way

SPEAKER_298: is a big deal but it's got to go there and it will yeah so are you actually you must be working

David Friedberg: on that now take me through how different this is than everything you've done before it because now this is where and you you alluded to this which are you know i bookmarked in my brain for this conversation to get to we might as well get there now which is oh my god safety security open ai just like nuke the uh safety team uh and they're like yeah we don't need a safety team but what we're talking about right here is safety and making sure it doesn't run you know run amok so how do you think about deploying the first one are you going to have somebody watching the agent

SPEAKER_81: and then confirming each behavior and saying good agent here's your token here's your you know you get one point for getting it right oh no you you you returned it and it's out of warranty you know you lose a point right tell me tell me about this process in this war room where you're doing this

SPEAKER_03: right it's obvious that long term we will hire this super agent that's smarter than any svp of customer service you would ever hire and they don't ask you questions like you know how do i find about refunds they actually say which model of customer service are you interested in or like can i propose some values for how we do customer service together you know so clearly we're headed to that world where all the little details we're talking about right now are uh not only moot but you know hilariously pedestrian however we're talking about safety and security comfort with customers so they'll need to be checks and balances and they'll need to be a combination of allowing the the kind of heuristic machines that are the llms work within a set of constraints and so just like you have written policies for your employees like never give a refund this large or any refunds greater than this you check with the vp of whoever the bots will have to do the same and so that hints at how the bots will

SPEAKER_00: need to be collaborative um but also work off a set of rules and that's where these things evolve from

SPEAKER_03: being rappers on gpt4 to actually full deep complex pain in the ass to build applications and systems yes and that's where people lose a little bit of the the the magic that a company like intercom can bring of course once again that all goes out the window if gpt10 just says hey i'm your new svp of

SPEAKER_122: service yes in a way if you were to think about a teller at a bank yeah and when you were talking about this like if you come in and you deposit your check okay we deposited your check there's no possible downside here if it was a bogus check who cares like we'll find out in an hour or tomorrow

SPEAKER_300: who cares and then you know we don't have to arrest you like we we're just trying to protect downside

SPEAKER_122: here but i'm depositing this check i'm a new customer and i'm asking you to cash it and give me

SPEAKER_105: cash right let me oh yeah no i'll be right back i'm going to talk to my manager right now if it's a fake check the person beelines it out if you're checking with the manager so the manager is totally we've

SPEAKER_29: had checks and balances in the human world for years so we're just going to need checks and balances in

SPEAKER_309: the ai world too and you mentioned something about like the personality of people pursuing ai versus

SPEAKER_81: let's say you know people who are building software with care for you know a specific group of people and there might be different standards uh i am amazed that people are taking this technology as impressive as the demo where we see is yeah anybody who uses this i can't believe the credit we're

SPEAKER_131: giving for work not done to llms people like google put out this searched summary at the top and i don't

SPEAKER_295: know if you saw it over the last like week where it was like yeah here's how you eat rocks and it's like

SPEAKER_131: you should eat three rocks a day and it's like this is exactly what google was trying to avoid right right is like releasing technology that tells people to eat rocks and like how to consume rocks and right but nobody actually questions a startup doing yet they're like oh yeah it's gonna hallucinate and like this is where now we're at are people giving too much credit to the technology here for work not

SPEAKER_03: done i'll tell you what the interesting part about this this topic is that we talk a lot about the incumbents having advantage in this ai world the distribution and and and how they can just apply it to their existing customer base early stage startups have an advantage over the big guys in that they can make mistakes they don't need a lot of early traction they don't need to sell to you know the big 10 000 person company they're selling to a two-person company and so it's really interesting to see everyone in the ai for customer service space most of them are tiny startups and actually the level of hallucination with which they're happy with is way above what we would get shot for so it's kind of interesting it makes us look bad in a sense where it's like all right fin your fin ai product is the same as these literally literally 50 other products and we're in this kind of lemon market where we have to try and explain to people yeah but their startups their standards are way lower etc yeah and this has always been the advantage of early stage companies that sell to small companies the bottoms up approach you can have just a substantially less sophisticated product and so i think that that's how ai technologies will evolve they'll be used in lower stakes use cases yeah and the companies the small companies to get traction in these lower stakes use cases will grow with those companies and evolve over time particularly if it's a new category of course the whole intercom bet if you're going to try and be bullish in intercom is that okay the incumbents have a shot too they've all these advantages we can play uh just as hard as a startup so uh you touch on a really interesting set of points too that we discuss

SPEAKER_319: internally a ton yeah it's it is the innovators dilemma like just realized in in a way that is the

SPEAKER_321: most vibrant of our career you can just yolo this stuff and be like yeah let it book you a ticket and

SPEAKER_185: it's like really it's not ready to do that yeah the google example is yet another example like gpt when it came out chat gpt said all sorts of crazy fucking shit excuse my language i don't know it was

SPEAKER_329: weekend i mean it was it was fucking language yeah yeah but we were like wow it's amazing it's talking

SPEAKER_03: then when google comes out and i you for all we know the google ai is really good but they have hundreds of millions maybe billions of users and all it has to say is two really dumb things like eat rocks or put glue in your pizza yeah and then it's a screenshot and then they're roasted for it so it's it's just different standards for the big guys and that's the really interesting challenge

SPEAKER_20: about how you bring this to market yeah expectations are high for brands like apple i mean

SPEAKER_81: siri is such an embarrassment for apple already and can you imagine like i mean just the fact that siri right can only do like such a narrow cohort of things and they're like well why don't they let it do what the rabbit's doing or you know this ai pin or this other thing and it's like did you see

SPEAKER_131: marquez's review of the humane ai pin right right he demolished it now of course they could have avoided the whole thing i don't know what was your take when you saw that demolition of that product because

SPEAKER_300: you're a founder and you got to feel bad for founders doing something creative really bad for them

SPEAKER_03: i went to visit them that day i didn't know them yeah i pinged them on twitter and said can i come

SPEAKER_87: visit you i almost wanted to give them a hug but i didn't know them well enough to give them a hug but i wanted to be there to tell them my heart breaks a little bit for people who are for them too i had

SPEAKER_03: the same exact reaction they worked so hard and they're actually onto something like yes i believe the future of computing is a lot more ambient than us in our phones yes i believe that the future of computing thankfully is probably a lot more conversational certainly in the future you're driving your car you'll actually have really interesting and useful conversations with your assistant and they'll go and do a bunch of helpful stuff for you right now sir is terrible for that so they're on to the fact that the future computing is probably ambient and it's conversational and it probably therefore takes new form factor there's nothing wrong with the pin no it just wasn't ready for prime time they should never have put it out and sent it to these reviewers i imagine they were under a lot of pressure to do so they're building for five or six years we've all seen magic leap and many other companies with their under that pressure i mean it's insane it's so hard to do and they went out a little too early so i don't know you can criticize people but i i tend to not criticize people who are trying to do something brand new if they're trying to build like a new crm product like a new sassy ram product and it just wasn't good enough it was really slow i'm like

SPEAKER_346: what are you doing you ever see this movie uh rat tattooing uh with the rat no i haven't but

SPEAKER_185: there's a line at the end that people have quoted give it to me yeah you have to see the film it's my

SPEAKER_122: favorite pixar film but at the end there was a guy anton ego i have to thank steve jobs who was the owner of pixar had a bit to do with this and i actually asked ed catnall who was on my program

SPEAKER_15: about it and he did indicate that this was like um something they had talked about steven and ed it's one of my favorite episodes that i've ever done and at the end he says you know the life of a

David Friedberg: critic is very unique in the world because we hold the position above people who create things this very powerful position and we lord it over them and we can you know right the sharper the criticism like the more we all get out of it yada yada but there is one thing we can do in our lives that actually does have meaning because the being a critic is meaningless is kind of what he comes to the

SPEAKER_122: realization after he's just like you know pick your pundit in tech who probably is a little high on their own supply you can think of a number of them who think they're the story and you know they've created nothing in their lives but but thrown you know rocks at other people creating stuff

SPEAKER_15: i'm not targeting any specific people but people do come to mind and um he said you know actually now

SPEAKER_353: i realize the one thing we can do is we can support the new right cheers yeah and shot anton ego is

David Friedberg: taken back to his childhood and remembers his mom making him this simple french dish ratatouille and

SPEAKER_131: he tastes the ratatouille that's made by this rat who's a cook and he just says wow this this was the best ratatouille i've had since my mom made it and just an incredible moment and just a very deep moment when i saw this review i i watched it because i'm a fan of marquez and i co-created in gadget you

SPEAKER_69: know which did this kind of stuff and he says so many amazing things about the form factor the product

SPEAKER_131: the ambition and then he just says hey listen it's not worth it for a consumer to buy this right now and the battery's too hot and here's the limitations but the headline was worst product i've ever reviewed and so the link baiting headline destroyed them but if you actually watched it without that it would say it would have the actual accurate headline was this thing gets so many things right but it's really just for developers right now you don't buy it for your mom but if you're a geek geek out on it if you don't care about the cost geek out on it it's all good if you and

SPEAKER_360: that was the the the mistake they made but how did the conversation go with them they must have been

SPEAKER_03: crestfallen or were they resilient let me tell you but a quick reaction to what what you just said there i cared i was upset less about the mark keys the high says name marquis marquez review and more

SPEAKER_181: about just the piling the dog piling where it was like you guys are idiots i'm like come on what have

SPEAKER_03: you made like what have you built exactly i i guarantee there was not one person who's put their heart and soul into making something new that laughed at them i guarantee a hundred percent guarantee so so what did they say they're like uh yeah i know we kind of messed up uh yeah we went out too soon um but we believe in this thing and beautiful you know these guys are builders this is a problem they're just builders you know that's that's that's they're from apple they were protected in this large apple ah the mothership and i think part of apple's secret probably i'm just going to make this up because i don't know a thing about it yeah is they they protect um idealists and dreamers and they they create space for craft and obsession like it's a really special environment and circumstance you need to create to allow people to obsess the degree that they do in apple and so when they're out on

SPEAKER_378: such a good observation yeah yeah when they're out on their own exactly i don't know if they had

SPEAKER_03: the comms people around them like they were getting wrecked so you know raise a ton of money they were the number one using tech they were getting wrecked and they had no no comms help so yeah you know i my hat is off to them and anyone who tries to make anything new and those guys in particular they're

SPEAKER_81: good people actually you know what i thought was very interesting with it as well was there would have been such a simple solution and and i think the observation about apple is such a good one if

SPEAKER_131: somebody had just told them put on this box developer preview right that's it that's all they had to do this is a developer kit and then you don't do a pr campaign you don't oversell it you don't try to sell it to consumers hey when you buy it it's a developer kit yeah this is for people to imagine what it's capable of if you're a civilian and you buy it okay you know you can do

SPEAKER_81: that but it's kind of like buying google glass or like you know some prototype and it would just sound the whole situation right but i'm very interested in this theory you have as well of where this is going in ambient computing because whenever a new technology comes out i have a little bit of a

SPEAKER_131: technique it's kind of the reverse of the negative review in the pylon which is i squint you know people

SPEAKER_122: have told me i'm like very good at investing in startups and i tried to examine my technique and my technique has always been assume it works just assume it works and people fall in love with

David Friedberg: it what how does the world change what does it look like if it does work so yeah it's crazy to think uber you can get a car anywhere in the world but if it did work right what would be the next domino fall well okay i guess you could have food go anywhere or i guess people wouldn't have to buy a car or i guess drunk driving would go away and so i've always just tried to say assume it works assume that the pendant works and that is a great device and assume the battery lasts forever and assume that the llms are fast so in as we do this here what do you think the world looks like when conversational ai is not the siri experience and it's not even what sam showed with omni or oh it's like the next like three generations from now where you could interrupt it you could have a conversation as fluid as ours even on zoom that just is awesome yeah what what does the world look like if it knows when you say i want to buy this ticket right and i want business class but i don't want to overspend

SPEAKER_122: and i don't like to leave early and it's like i gotcha united it's in your thing yeah it's a

SPEAKER_03: refundable ticket anyway totally so there's a bunch of things that are again one is that the llms will get super fast and you'll be able to just chit chat with them no problem i could speak as quickly as i am right now they'll pick it up no problem so that's a given we're probably there we're there that's a given the other is that some of the big consumer tech companies will get us to a place where it's connected with our accounts and our credit cards and everything else and it'll be out there in the world doing things with us google will definitely do that apple will definitely do that i don't know who else will do that but certainly those two guys will right that's a given so now we're going to have assistants and we'll be happy to have those assistants do things for us the big open questions are what are the modes of interaction what do they look like it will not be the case that screens will go away we'll want to look at photos of things sometimes but you might buy a jacket you want to look at multiple photos of different jackets so you want to explore you want tactile stuff video calls etc so we want screens and panes and stuff we want text right um sometimes actually seeing a number of options is superior than someone reading out a thing like with your toast example sometimes it's better going through a menu like oh i want this beer or whatever yeah rather than the person give you a list of 16 beers right yeah so we'll still want screens but we won't want them all the time we will probably increasingly start to run from our screens and i have two phones i have like a little iphone mini that i use in the weekends that i've like turned off all the the phone apps yeah yeah it's the only way i can get off my down phone just to be more present you do this just leave the house with yeah more present myself more productive whatever yeah exactly i'll leave the house with that it still does stuff so we're gonna have some sort of new devices maybe they'll have screens but you know how will we talk to this thing will we have ear pods in our ears all the time probably not but we have glasses maybe but that's like a big fashion step if everyone's going around with glasses but maybe maybe that's totally the future right maybe there's a pin i really think the pin is an opportunity or maybe a watch that can kind of hear you from multiple places yeah and it's got a screen etc the watch you kind of have to do this with so it's a little awkward yeah so it's going to be really interesting like the big question is a form factor and and i just i think you know these disruptive technologies they grow the demand for the area in which they cause disruption so in this instance it's going to grow to demand for personal commute computing we're going to do more personal computing just yeah but during our day we'll be doing more little personal computing different things it's going to grow to demand for it but also they never immediately kill the older forms i mean i had to look this up because i try to make this point all the time

SPEAKER_29: the last telegram was sent in just 2013 in india yeah and the facts the facts is still going

SPEAKER_03: still going so and now we have you know email and everything else so screens will be around so tbd on the form factor but that's why you're seeing people do you maintain rabbit there's this new what are they called tiny pod have you seen that tiny little phone tiny pod looks awesome you've got the daylight tablet yeah you've seen that i did see the day new things happening there's new things happening in personal computing it seems like a reaction to the distraction culture and the

SPEAKER_107: addiction issue too that's right so it's almost like you know if you want to have a couple of beers that are a little bit lighter and alcohol than this one or sure you know here's here's a

SPEAKER_122: milder version of the same thing that maybe there's a remarkable tablet that people love right there's has that he likes yeah he's the exact market for it as somebody who's like thoughtful

David Friedberg: wants to capture their stuff it's elegant i bought one i don't use it yeah i've just become a fan of speaking into my phone i just love this product grammarly i don't know right yeah i know i've never used it yeah just download it and pay for it and then check back with me a month of how much better

SPEAKER_15: a writer and communicator you are i force everybody on my team to do it and as a professional writer

SPEAKER_122: which is where i started what ai has done is taken you know in every organization there were like

SPEAKER_413: one out of 20 people who could write well right and like everybody comes to them hey can you help me i suck at writing now everybody's good at writing sure now you may not be elite at writing or great

David Friedberg: at writing but the time from sucking to being good right the mean time from suckage to good is like compressed now yeah it's like a weird observation but i think everybody becomes good at everything that's a weird world everybody was good at something that previously took a year to become good right like what if everybody could play you know a dire straight song on guitar in a good fashion

SPEAKER_45: what there'll be things that we realize though that the ai can't do and they'll be the things that

SPEAKER_03: people will really value in humans like that creativity and connection and spark and the x factor when you meet someone you know a founder you know there's lots of great founders but sometimes you meet a founder you're like holy shit yeah on the charts that's the kind of like je ne sais quoi that like ai is not about to solve anytime soon i agree with you and also if everybody becomes a good

SPEAKER_427: writer how much how more important is an excellent writer how much more obvious is that the person

David Friedberg: becomes like extraordinary or excellent like if like all films like if you watch tv shows and films

SPEAKER_122: they're all pretty good you know like they're not terrible they're all done in a very you know cgi's good like you can't make bad cgi today it's like almost impossible so then when somebody makes

SPEAKER_295: something that's truly transcendent you know you go see dune 2 or whatever i don't know what your jam is but there's been some pretty great spectacular films oppenheimer or whatever you're like yeah

SPEAKER_176: yep that's craftsmanship i wonder though will we get to a place where we really value artisanally

SPEAKER_00: made human made things like tarantino only shoots on film because that's how he likes to do it and there's certain directors that only do no longer effects in camera right and will we be at a place

SPEAKER_03: in the future where it's like i don't want to watch an ai generated thing yeah i want to know that a soul that really went through so much pain and birth this from their deepest places made this piece of art i want to experience that that resonates a little right so i think the floor of all things

SPEAKER_29: that are created rises but i think we'll start to just appreciate and it sounds silly but like you

David Friedberg: know handcrafted email it makes total sense that like this wasn't written by ai right i took the time to do this it's like when you get a handwritten note like you ever have that person who you interview of course and they send a handwritten note and you're like at least they i mean that you do stand out when you write that handwritten note of course um we talked about being a great manager and you're

SPEAKER_81: you know returning the return of the king here segment of the pod i heard you say on another pod you got savaged on glass door which by the way glass door is where incompetent people you fired

SPEAKER_131: come back to get revenge on you if you're in a high performance culture like a startup you have to fire

SPEAKER_442: people for not performing and then that's how they get their retribution it's not like people sure who

SPEAKER_131: love working for you are gonna be like you know what i'm gonna do today i'm gonna write a great review

SPEAKER_00: sure sure no it's it's the last outlet of resort for people who are unhappy i get it it's very human

SPEAKER_131: it's normal very human it's a place event it's like sure i i had to wait 30 minutes for my table and my reservation i'm upset i'm giving this restaurant one star even though i think it was the best sushi i ever had but on that side i i i heard you say that on the other podcast like a very vulnerable moment about your return and then this 52 week countdown you did right and i was like huh i always know when you come back to a company or you you know get revitalized like you seem to have been obviously by ai you get some new ideas about management you kind of look at how you did things

SPEAKER_69: previously right what comes to mind when i'm saying those two things yeah 2.0 totally yeah i i this is a

SPEAKER_03: whole multi-series podcast in itself if anyone is ever interested but um you know part of it was just a willingness to be okay with not being liked you know this doesn't mean i'm trying to make enemies at all but it's just like you know what if i don't have a strong opinion about what's going to make us successful no one does and every time i compromise those strong opinions just to be a little more copacetic the business has a lower slightly lower chance of success and so i'm just gonna ruthlessly

SPEAKER_00: stick to what i believe will be good for us i may be wrong but i will entertain no dissent on that topic

SPEAKER_03: whatsoever and that was one one that's one major thing i did then i also just was increasingly transparent with people and said here's our values here's our policies some people are gonna love them and we're gonna advertise them on our site like we don't do employee activism stuff social issues at

SPEAKER_450: intercom oh really you're not there to solve the world's diversity and you're not going to solve

SPEAKER_451: a quality inside your software company doing customer service i'm shocked no that's but you

SPEAKER_452: know that i'll tell you the i the iron ironic thing is that if you create a really great company that's

SPEAKER_03: just got chill nice loving accepting people it actually becomes healthily diverse you know all types of people want to work there like i had before i left the ceo are the percentage of you know just women in the company female leaders female promotions are better than like google slack all these other companies and we never had any di programs so i'm like why is that and my theory was we were just an open-minded open-hearted good company that just accepted all the types of people um and they wanted a worker so anyway that's another piece and i would just lay it out for people

SPEAKER_147: that was a very interesting moment in time i think because i was put under extreme pressure as an investor right and they were like tell us about your investments and we need to see the statistics we

SPEAKER_105: need to see the receipts and i was like all right i am not basing my investments in companies based on

SPEAKER_07: the gender right or race of the like do you want me to be sexist do you want me to be racist right and

SPEAKER_105: i'm trying to reconcile this as like a gen xer who was told about this meritocracy in america and that's

SPEAKER_185: what made that moment hard because all of us were like oh wait a sec are we wrong yeah so i'm literally

David Friedberg: second guessing myself saying like okay wait i i know i'm a good person but you're telling me i'm not

SPEAKER_131: and i have to do this but wait a second if it's a meritocracy and i'm picking the companies based on their product velocity and the skill set of the founders to build products and that was my thesis for my funds or is my thesis to this day how fast is the product velocity how much of the customers love it that's the lens but now i'm being asked to make my lens the color of a person's skin their age their gender how they affiliate who they want to have sex with wait a second and i need to fill out a form like in california i'm gonna need to fill out a form that i have to go ask my found this is the level of insanity this got to and they were asking us in venture who say i'm going to ask my founders if i was an investor in intercom i wish i was i'd have to ask you uh owen do you like to sleep

SPEAKER_458: are you like to sleep with boys or girls yeah or nobody like i i can't ask you that question

Chamath Palihapitiya: that's illegal and so we had on one side and it's not my business you don't care who cares like it's irrelevant so we were asked to do this like crazy task that right is actually illegal and i had to

David Friedberg: have this conversation with my team because it turned out in my company four of the five top

SPEAKER_122: positions were female right now why is that i don't know i i just hired the most competent hard working people it turned out to be 80 female i don't know why that happened it's a small company it could be a statistic anomaly it could be i'm a great boss it could be i'm a great boss women i don't

David Friedberg: know i didn't consciously think of it but i did know hey wait a second it's illegal to make these investments based on this and so i said to my team i do not want anybody to ever bring up these topics while we're making an investment decision and if you do i have to fire you because it's illegal now this broke people's brains for a second and we had to have this like well don't we want to support women and people of color or underrepresented people i said we can do that through this podcast this week in startups we can do it through founder university our free event there are things we can do to help more people participate in this but we can't make this investment and you know what happened there's a lawsuit now against a firm right that is investing in black women do you know who they're

SPEAKER_232: being sued by asian women wow yeah so now you think of the cul-de-sac the dead end that is

SPEAKER_126: intersectionality and identity politics it takes you to a circular shooting squad right it makes no

SPEAKER_128: sense anyway i'm gonna get my speech here no you're you're good i could talk about this for a long time

SPEAKER_03: too but thankfully we moved on from that world i think we're in such a healthier place and the good thing about it is that i'm seeing and maybe this is just wrong but it feels to me like there's a lot more women in early stage startups now when when you go to like these like i speak at early stage events a lot more female founders i think it's just happening naturally like i i'm much happier for any of the women that are in tech or say like my younger sisters one of which was in business i'm much happier when they're successful on the on their own virtues not because of their sex yeah and i just don't think it did anyone any favor to say oh is she on the board because she's a woman because california required that yeah i needed women you token like tokenizing women and people of color and all this stuff yeah it was just not good for them not good for anyone or you were invested in by a fund right

David Friedberg: that's for this demographic so then what does that say to the other venture firms oh so you couldn't

SPEAKER_122: raise money from a venture firm that does it based on merit you had to go to a one that does it based on

SPEAKER_476: you're asian you're you know whatever irish yeah irish need not apply yeah i wish we got some special

SPEAKER_03: attention um i mean we did back in the day it's amazing what mass hysteria can do and it's also amazing how when the world has a certain narrative that it's incredibly insanely difficult to think independently from that yes and and when you've been through a few few moments like this and this was a relatively quick one like really the height of it was like five years in tech i think that teaches you to have a little bit of skepticism about whatever the next thing is yes you know a little bit of healthy respectful skepticism um but super damn hard yeah uh tell me about this 52-week charge

David Friedberg: you did this discipline you imposed on yourself and then doing the all hands again and then just

SPEAKER_20: ripping out the comms team like elon did at twitter and other places i give a lot of credit to elon for what he showed us could be done and then i give a lot of credit to brian armstrong for saying listen

SPEAKER_131: amazing also because he flipped his position he's like yeah i think we want diversity i'm not a bad person and then he's like wait a second you can't talk about all these issues at work that's not why we're here right it's just it's mission drift our mission is you know crypto and financial freedom and financial independence for the world from crypto the end if you want to discuss other things you can do that it's called your life outside of work so maybe talk about yeah what you what you did in terms of these devices and why you deployed them because i'm always interested in successful people

SPEAKER_81: then coming up with devices or toolkits right like yeah you you do this was premeditated you know when

SPEAKER_03: you came back 18 months all of this is built off the central idea that great people let's just say great

SPEAKER_29: builders of at any level in a company of any discipline great builders there's a small set

SPEAKER_03: of fundamentals and ideals that they love what are they right so and i say that because and i'll speak to them in a second because this is just as much about promoting an environment for those people as much as it's cutting out the stuff that's a distraction so so what are those things great people great builders they actually love honesty about the challenging game at heart and so the one of the values i wrote was success first and i said our number one mission is to create shareholder value and great people are like yes i want it because they they feel themselves as a partner to me in their in this business and they are i say you're my business partners we're in this together let's create shareholder value we're all shareholders let's build an incredibly valuable organization so great people love that other types of people who feel like that's not for them or they resent certain types of people maybe ideas about power and capitalism they're like oh i don't i don't that's not for me so shareholder value but business-minded people who are ambitious who who want a true partnership they like that idea so that's one another is hard work let's work really hard and let's bring an intensity and i started to use the word aggression i got a little feedback someone saying oh you're gonna actually quite you're gonna offend some people using the word aggression so i made sure to say aggression in every single all hands let's get aggressive let's get aggressive i mean come on what's wrong with aggression we had five quarters of declining revenue growth i'm like oh that's not good we need an aggressive new plan to win and so again good people trigger warning aggressive exactly exactly exactly there was a multiple of those things i was given i was also also said it's wartime and people like hey there's some people that are in war and i'm like hey i'm sorry yeah i'm sorry the metaphor is being misinterpreted by you princess and cupcake totally right and again that's another way in which you typify a great builder they're resilient so some people are like you said wartime what are you doing

SPEAKER_185: this is a disgrace this is disgusting this is horrible i'm upset i'm offended i'm offended for him

SPEAKER_03: i'm offended for some person i've ever met resilient people are like oh i get it this is a war this is a fight we're gonna die as a company if we don't get into this battle like let's go so great people have that degree of resilience and they don't like the drama they're like hey i'm here i only get to have one career and at any one point in my career i only have one company i work with let's do something great let's not get distracted and way light waylaid by this drama so there was like another thing i promoted which is um you know that degree of maturity and then another is just new ambition it's not like okay we're going to be another nice sass company that you've never heard of it's like let's build a truly iconic technology company let's contribute to this moment in time in tech let's be one of the greatest brands and organizations that people want to learn from steal from copy poach employees from like i want you to begin and hit up by the very best startups of our time because they know intercom employees are incredible people and i want you to say you know what they treat me great here they pay me great here i love this mission and they stay but thanks

SPEAKER_309: yeah like you were saying before about the zendesk uh diaspora right like they were shot after so

David Friedberg: there's something going on in the water there absolutely and i love the fact that you use a metaphor right like we all went to school and they explained metaphors are just ways to understand the world a little different or communicate they're not perfect that's why they're metaphors and you use a metaphor and it offended somebody and they were offended for people they've never met this is a tell that this person is not focused on the work right it's like the ultimate tell it's like i'm

SPEAKER_03: looking for something to be offended by totally look i could rant all day long about why it's ridiculous to get offended about a metaphor that's actually not my point my only point is we have only a thousand seats in intercom we have only a thousand seats in intercom there are eight billion people in the world okay it's my job and responsibility as ceo to all shareholders that i make sure that every one of those seats is filled by a person who really wants to be here really believes in our future wants to work hard super resilient and actually isn't too bothered by the sideshow of who's offended maybe they actually are like yeah you know what it'd be nice if we didn't offend them that's fine but yeah i don't care enough because i want to win not that i don't care enough but i don't care enough about that like minor little conversation above this thing where we're trying to build something special together so that's it it's not really about yes i could i could i could write about these people but yeah no one of the best 1000 people we could find one of the things that i think founders they have this drift and

David Friedberg: you seem to in your 1.0 of your career falling into which is likability and here's the thing you

SPEAKER_272: obviously want to be loved and liked by winners by hardcore people who want to change the world right

David Friedberg: now it would it be nice to be liked by everybody else of course nobody wants to be disliked but

SPEAKER_232: if you are disliked by somebody who is unfocused in their career well maybe that's actually a positive

SPEAKER_03: signal yeah that's where i was gonna go like i'm not i'm not really trying to create enemies now the reality is when you see your company going in the wrong direction it's really fun to come rip up the rules and actually ruffle a few feathers i'm not really trying to create enemies however strong values and clear opinions that means something not like we want to win but actually strong opinionated things like the most important thing is shareholder value they are designed to repel as much as they are designed to attract early on i recorded a video and we put it on our careers page and i said with a

SPEAKER_45: smile on my face because i was sincerely positive about it hey if this is exciting to you please

SPEAKER_03: apply if it's not there are so many great companies out there don't waste your time don't waste your time right yeah and and that's what i feel about people at intercom who were not a fit i'm like listen

SPEAKER_00: again one career you can have one job at a time hopefully you've only had one job at a time

SPEAKER_526: uh we'll find somewhere where where you're a great fit where they love you can you imagine how much happier you would be absolutely somewhere along with your values it's not inherently wrong to want

SPEAKER_07: to be activists it's just not what we're doing here i had this like realization with people as well

SPEAKER_20: where i told them like you realize when you're a venture capitalist you have a fund and you invest and we invest in 100 companies a year we're like running an accelerator and we make a lot of small bets i

SPEAKER_15: said you know if the founders call us they text us the sla the service level agreement is respond immediately right and when i email you or text you the service level agreement is respond immediately if you are in a movie with your kids it is not a problem the founder calls you who step out of a

David Friedberg: movie and answer the call some people be like whoa life work found you're with your kids in a phone call now i i don't think you should be doing that all the time and ignoring your kids but if a founder is in trouble and we are a 10 owner in their business and we're their business partner and they're in a panic and your 14 year olds watching futuroso like i took my 14 year old i

SPEAKER_131: could miss five minutes of that movie to just say is everything okay i'm in a movie um i can step out it's not a problem you know i told people i judge you based on your response time when off working hours and i just tell people that and i said if you can't work 50 60 hours a week you cannot be in venture capital it is a competitive pursuit yeah and not be in it yeah and integrate

SPEAKER_03: it with your life and enjoy it like you have to find a way to make it healthy but the reality is that there just are trade-offs you know if you weren't a vc if you weren't trying to be i mean this is one of the things that people say like if you're trying to be the ceo of a unicorn company you're trying to be like an nba player here there's more nba players than there are ceos of unicorn companies and these players as we acknowledge with people all people who lead fields make egregious sacrifices i'm not even trying to fetishize those sacrifices they may actually be holistically wrong we may all get to the end of our days and be like oh damn it we should like spend more time with our kids or days or painted or whatever it is like that's an okay thing but these are decisions we make because this building and creating gives us a degree of purpose and you know you should live your life according to whatever you know gets you going and so nobody is what it is you know it's like

SPEAKER_15: an interesting thing like if the nba analogy is amazing because if you and i got on the court and they blew the whistle and you and i were on the team with the lakers and lebron james he's going to

David Friedberg: lose right immediately right the game will be a blowout immediately we're not built for that right period full stop now if you took two random nba players and you said hey you be a vc and you go to

SPEAKER_122: the board meetings with this ceo immediately would fail like you have no experience in this like it's

David Friedberg: not going to work you have never developed software you've never invested in technology companies so understand that even with these crazy pursuits it will become immediately apparent if you are built for it or not right but we lived under some weird delusion for a period of time that like everybody gets to do this and everybody gets to have life work balance i can tell you like if you're up against sequoia and kleiner totally you know and sax and craft like and bill gurley or michael moritz like they

SPEAKER_551: were responding to emails on the weekend right they weren't off right that's just not how google was

SPEAKER_07: built yeah whether it's right or wrong or smart or great for your health game on the field that that is

SPEAKER_93: the game game on the field you know and that's it hey listen i could talk to you for hours and we did

SPEAKER_15: i'm gonna book you uh right now for six months from now please will you come on in six months

David Friedberg: i would love to i'm just it's gonna be a twice a year thing for us because you're so thoughtful and like the story is so great and we got to only so much here but i can't keep you for three hours in the first one we're just gonna do it every six months i would love to check in i would love to thank you for all the questions well no i you know what it's like the greatest gig i have in the world people were like you know this i'm about to do 2 000 episodes of this podcast that's when you start ups over 14 years it started 14 years ago when ipods were with this one up and they're like hey

SPEAKER_15: you're still doing all this and i'm like hey you know what like it's the highlight of my week to do

David Friedberg: three or four episodes of this and i learned so much and then i get out of a discussion like this with a winner like imagine you get to talk to winners all day long thank you for calling me a

SPEAKER_81: winner no you are like i mean i watched you build this business from 2011 till now and i know you

SPEAKER_107: took a lot of bad beats and five quarters of getting your ass kicked that cannot be fun sure the resiliency you know is it really is like when i watch founders i have now determined like there's like a competency level and then there's resiliency yeah it's true can i add one more thing into the

SPEAKER_03: mix though it's like do it let's go experience because like maybe maybe own mccabe is is a tough cookie but actually 10 years ago when i was beaten up the way i even get beat up today it was not as fun now i'm kind of like this is what it's like stick to your guns i have my principles figured out doesn't mean every day is easy and there's like different stress and different problems on any given day but like it's to be expected but when you're i'm 40 now when you're 30. yeah no i'll

SPEAKER_451: tell you what it is i call it blood in the mouth have you ever gotten actually punched in a bar fight thankfully from ireland you're from dublin you really don't know if i should be offended by that

SPEAKER_367: or not i'll take it from another irishman but no i haven't i have not you know like i tell you

SPEAKER_413: i mean you get punched in the face it's a very interesting experience like i'm talking when you get really socked not like a graze because what happens is the world goes away for 10 seconds and you wake up on your back looking at the ceiling and the throbbing pain of it's crazy and then you taste blood in your mouth and you put your hand like this and you look at it it's pouring out of your mouth like i've had this happen a couple times uh in brooklyn then there's something that happens like the fifth time it happens where you're like okay blood in the mouth now it's on and you become built for it and what you're experiencing in your 30s and 40s is you're not built for it it's getting punched in the face does not phase you like the first time each

SPEAKER_571: time it goes down by half right and now when somebody comes to you and they're like hey we got a legal letter you've been served you're like okay that goes in this stack yeah or someone's

SPEAKER_03: quitting or someone's upset about something you said in the all hands or whatever you're like

SPEAKER_131: oh let's figure it out take a number and then you go right to the problem and and this is what age

SPEAKER_81: does in the resiliency it's such a good combination because for young people listening to this week startups understand that the stuff that panics you now is going to just not even change your pulse

David Friedberg: in another 10 years you're just gonna be like oh okay and there's there's so much proof of this but

SPEAKER_15: i i heard an interview with barry weiss uh interviewed from the free press and she's becoming quite a good interviewer um on our podcast that's called it's got the name of it's like candidly or frankly or

David Friedberg: something honestly right she had jerry seinfeld on and she brings up with jerry seinfeld you were in scientology you took a couple courses or whatever what was that like and like he says you know there

SPEAKER_576: was one thing that always stuck with me that i thought they got right which is when there's a

SPEAKER_413: problem uh just go right to it and address it immediately and it just like the power of it goes down like the the anxiety it's always the right thing to do when there's a problem or there's some tension to

SPEAKER_107: just immediately go to that that's what the great founders do later in their in their years for me

SPEAKER_03: it's just like companies themselves are super resilient all sorts of can happen and they keep going the world keeps going yeah the world keeps going it's not existential when you're younger you're

SPEAKER_582: like oh my god it's all over i'm a failure you're like no no keeps going that that's actually the

SPEAKER_15: role i've coveted most in my career now it's like sitting uh what are the jewish people call it sitting shiva when you sit when you know after somebody's died or a hospice when somebody's in the process of dying right i've sat shiva or done hospice with people uh whose companies have died and i say hey you know i know you shut the company down let's go talk about it yeah let's go have a meal let's have a beer let's go for a walk whatever the jam is and i'll just sit with them and say tell me everything you're feeling just let it all out how do you feel about it what the regrets what are the mistakes and uh enjoy your three years at facebook or linkedin or wherever you sold the assets to and the team landed yeah and uh you'll be out of there by the way in 18 months or 12 months even though you get this three-year thing they're gonna let you out early and then let's talk about your next

SPEAKER_00: company right you're gonna be okay don't forget that there are five beautiful days in the future

SPEAKER_15: 100 and you know tragically we've had like you know one or two people have committed suicide in our industry because of that profound failure and the impact it has on them and nobody has the presence

SPEAKER_413: of mind to pull these people aside and say you're bigger than your last idea it was just an idea

SPEAKER_00: yeah but you can tell someone that and i could have been told that many times when i was failing

SPEAKER_29: and it's one thing being told and it's another knowing it and we just tie up our whole identities

SPEAKER_73: and selves sense of self and our importance and validity and lovability in these yes projects of

SPEAKER_592: ours you know the founder and ceo of intercom the founder and ceo of a billion dollar company

SPEAKER_413: right it's just like people say it to you over and over again the articles say or the pockets and

SPEAKER_544: then you're like oh you know oh yeah no that doesn't matter it's you know just don't takes time

SPEAKER_03: take some time yeah and maybe it's good if it never really goes still got the fire a little bit but yeah you can manage it you can see it in you like i'm aware of it in me i really want intercom to do

SPEAKER_00: well but i'm also like you know what i'm like good independent of intercom yeah it's like as an

SPEAKER_434: artist if you think of yourself as an artist creation you know if an artist creates an album

SPEAKER_413: you know and they become so identified with that specific song or that particular album or that particular movie especially young artists who hit like something perfectly it can be so crippling

David Friedberg: because this idea that like what can never get better than this and it's like of course it can steve jobs created a bunch of computers and then he created the iphone right and then he did pixar you know like there's always going to be something next so just if you ever have that despair just

SPEAKER_15: walk to three or four people who are slightly ahead of you on the track yeah and they'll explain it to you yeah don't ever do this final solution thing like it's it's so tragic when people get too caught up in their companies and their projects that they think uh you know this this is who i am it's not i agree i agree anyway it's a good note to it's good that we got here because a lot of people don't want to talk about this stuff you're such a great guest uh thank you everybody check out intercom.com if you're

SPEAKER_434: running a startup i don't need to tell you that they always do right by startups i know that they got a startup program you give like absurd discounts i've always appreciated that about you so we'll do that you're hiring but there's only a thousand seats so you better be elite or you better be you

SPEAKER_603: better love to build that's it better love to build that's it there's a lot of talkers in our industry

SPEAKER_604: like the building is just so it's so rewarding but it's like we had this moment in time where they're like the talkers started taking all the slots yeah yeah you ripped out a lot of that i think

SPEAKER_03: yeah and i think uh america needs to rip out a lot of that too it's time to build this

SPEAKER_107: mark can be like bombastic and whatever he's so right like i i have i don't know if you spent time in the middle east at all like dubai or whatever i got to spend some time there and then texas and florida and i'm now judging like a big part about how i judge regions of the world is how quickly they can build something awesome for their citizens like a school right or a bridge or a

SPEAKER_131: high-speed train right and it's like in california is like yeah we've spent tens of billions on the

SPEAKER_15: high-speed train it's like yeah i haven't taken it yet and then in texas like i was talking to elon like about the uh gigafactory at one point and i was at the opening with them we're just sitting there you know like one of those behind the stage moments and talking about like this kind of surreal right like that you built this uh i don't know if you've ever seen the gigafactory in texas yeah it's like one of the largest buildings on the planet and he built it in like a couple years i said how long would this have taken in california i'm just curious he's like i'd still be in the

SPEAKER_367: paperwork i mean how long did it take to build that toilet in san francisco i think it was like closer

SPEAKER_521: to 10 years than five and it was 1.7 million right to build a single toilet probably a pretty nice

SPEAKER_413: toilet i think that toilet has checked off every dei checkbox nice every like every potential ethnicity

Chamath Palihapitiya: contributed to that one bathroom every screw was a different person and everybody got to check it

SPEAKER_92: out i'm gonna go check out that toilet we should that would be like actually you and i should do that that would be great there'd be a great bromance date you and i can just go yeah you let me just

Chamath Palihapitiya: check out that toilet like that'd be amazing for 1.7 million symbolizes all that is great about

SPEAKER_147: america it does it does we'll talk about the american uh american exceptionalism next time and we'll see you next time on this week's service bye-bye thank you sir