This Week in Startups - Great Builders & Success First with Intercom’s Eoghan McCabe | E1962

Episode Date: June 8, 2024

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 http://www.linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups .Tech Domains - Don’t miss our “Jam with JCal” contest! To apply and get more details go to https://www.jamwithjcal.tech brought to you by .tech domains. Northwest Registered Agent - Northwest Registered Agent will form your business quickly and easily. In just 10 clicks and 10 minutes, set up your entire business identity—name, address, mail service, phone, email, website, and domain. For just $39 plus state fees, Northwest will handle your complete business identity. Visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today. * Todays show: Intercom’s Eoghan McCabe joins Jason to discuss: the state of the business at Intercom and his return as CEO (8:33), the future of customer service with AI (24:28), what makes a great manager (59:36), and more! * Timestamps: (0:00) Intercom’s Eoghan McCabe joins Jason. (1:50) Family history of the two McCabe’s: Jason and Eoghan. (5:49) The kindness and dedication of Intercom’s co-founder Des Traynor. (8:33) What Intercom is, the state of the business and Eoghan’s return as CEO. (10:41) LinkedIn Ads - Get a $100 LinkedIn ad credit at http://www.linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups (12:37) Looking at overlap and adjacencies when you are building SaaS products. (16:36) The brilliance of the pre-seed pricing model, and is it broken? (19:47) .Tech Domains - Apply for the “Jam with JCal” contest today at https://www.jamwithjcal.tech (22:16) What is next for companies with. SaaS-based pricing. (24:28) The future of customer service and AI. (30:30) Northwest Registered Agent - For just $39 plus state fees, Northwest will handle your complete business identity. Visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today. (36:09) Expectations from AI one year from now. (45:23) Breaking down the negative press and social reaction to the Humane Pin. (52:34) What the world will look like as conversational AI develops. (59:36) What makes a great manager and the “return of the king” at Intercom. * Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp * Check out Intercom: https://www.intercom.com/ * Follow Eoghan: X: https://x.com/eoghan LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eoghanmccabe/ * Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Thank you to our partners: (10:41) LinkedIn Ads - Get a $100 LinkedIn ad credit at http://www.linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups (19:47) .Tech Domains - Apply for the “Jam with JCal” contest today at https://www.jamwithjcal.tech (30:30) Northwest Registered Agent - For just $39 plus state fees, Northwest will handle your complete business identity. Visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today. * Great 2023 interviews: Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland * Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow TWiST: Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.founder.university/podcast

A smart founder, particularly one who loves to think about technology and landscapes. It's just a fun conversation for the right minds. I like to imagine the magic and beauty that could come from building the master system. Yes. Right? The last system to rule them all. Of course. What's not beautiful and elegant about that?

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 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 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. This Week in Startups is brought to you by LinkedIn Ads. To redeem a $100 LinkedIn Ads. 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.com. Brought to you by dottech 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 Registeredagent.com slash twist. Hailing from County Cork. Cork. Cork. Yeah. And then the Kennedys were the other side of the family. Seventh generation, we were in the five points in New York.

Cool. That's the real deal. They're pretty hardcore, I'm sure. I did, you know, we did all of our ancestry and started to find all this great stuff out. Yeah. One of my cousins who did 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. fighter and he retired recently and I was going to be a cop. A little known fact.

Wow. I think you would have made a fun cop. It's a good story. Actually, we'll include this in the cold open here. It's funny that we're both McCabes. Yeah. And Owen, your first name is like youth or tree. What is it exactly mean?

I should know. Gallic culture. I think it means like youth. Oh yeah, that's what is. Born of a yew tree. Yeah. You knows what that means. It sounds cool.

You know, all this Gaelic stuff is cool. Yeah, 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 one one detail. It's all there. I mean, it took great records in Ireland, I think. Yeah, but a bunch of them I think were burned down in 1916 during the revolution. And so there was like some destroyed, et cetera.

So they don't have great records. What happened with our family was we found a bunch in Ellis Island because our family came through Ellis Island in New York. On my father's side, my grief father, that's where Calicanus 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 Calcanus, my grandfather. I asked my dad, like, why did he go through Ellis Island 10 times? What's the story here? He said, what did your grandfather do for living? He was a head engineer on a merchant marine ship. What do you think his cargo was? I don't know, open islands, all these things from Venezuela and South America and Ireland and Italy.

I don't know. And he said, people turn of the century. Everybody was coming to America. That was the place to be. So when he came through Ellis Island, he had to go through immigration every time. Right. That's why I'm just like such a proponent of America. Of course.

And like a defender of like just how amazing this country is. Of course. Of course. And we think somehow it's different now, but actually there are brand new generations of immigrants 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 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 so they came here. They were illegal. Sure. They were illegals. Sure. And we paid them in our restaurants off the books.

Very low wages. And the hardest workers you ever met. 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 bully grow up 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 here, the builders and the dreamers, they still hold America up as this land of great opportunity. And it is. My guest today on this weekend startup, Owen McCabe. And he's the co-founder, CEO of Intercom with my guy, Des Traynor, one of your co-founder? You had a third co-founder, I think. We had a total of four. Oh, four. Three or still with the company. Yeah. I think, Des, you know, I think does has been on your show a couple of times. Yes, is, was, you know, I just love your guy, Des, because he was so

generous with, you know, the startups when I started angel investing and this is Sequoia 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 high profile as I am now. And he just said, yeah, I'll come anytime, just 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. And it's like that dedication. You could tell it wasn't about money. It wasn't about selling intercom. He loves it. His pure passion for innovation. I just love that guy. And Des is also the 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, very nice. We'll see. We'll see. We haven't discussed that. Doesn't that's like, off. That's me making that up. But he just is a consummate teacher. And he loves to teach. But we got right into the discussion here. I was so excited that you said yes to come on the program because intercom has been quite a story. I've watched you build these tools. And the reason I know the company so well is because founders use the tools. And we'll talk about the tool set 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 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 came back to Intercom for run the show. One month before ChatGPT was launched.

Yeah. Sorry to finish your sentence there, but I presume that's what you're getting. That's exactly what I was going to say is the timing was spectacular. I love, I've seen CEOs. listen, I don't know if you were ousted or left on your own, where we can get into it or not. I don't care really, but I know you're back. And I, you know, my guy, Travis got ousted at Uber.

I've seen this movie before. And it's always heartbreaking because I think founder authority, there's nothing like, right? Like, the 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 maybe let's start with what is intercom,

what is the state of the business? And then let's get into coming back. back, Steve Jobstyle to your own company. Sure, sure. Remind me if I forget to explain that I wasn't asked it. For some reason, that's a point of pride for me. Well, I know. I think it's important because, you know, we just had this very weird moment in technology

where the world got very anti-technology and anti-capitalism. And we started our discussion off here about talking to how great America is in capitalism. Sure. There's something happening here. 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 a really interesting topic to both you and I. I agree. I agree. And we share this common accessory between these two countries. So let's just talk, Berkeley, about what the product is today. Yeah, I'll be too. So the product is in the customer service category. Every business in 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 has become an 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 midmarket for customer service was Zendesk, did an outstanding job in the heady days post-COVID 2021 sugar rush. They were worth $20 billion. You know, we're bought out by P.E. You know, a good deal less than that, but still an outstanding outcome.

But, you know, with respect to those guys that hadn't been in. for quite some time. They were a little stale. They were an outstanding go-to-market organization. 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-S people, and I'm like, oh, shit, now I get it. And they're now just really fucking smart.

The go-to-market people just really sophisticated. CMO, Stripe is X-Sand-esque, the president or, you know, had to go-market at Figma X-Send-Sk, president at Asana-Send-Sand-Sk. No. Quite an alumni package. Pretty 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. Navigating the B to B maze can feel really tough, huh? You're trying to hit the mark with all those top tier executives. You want them to pay attention to your enterprise product. But where can you find all those big fish, the whales? The ones who call the shots and make the buying decisions for corporations, for startups, and everybody in between. Well, here's where LinkedIn ads is going to solve that problem for you.

And I've used this. It is one of my secret weapons. LinkedIn means business. Business equals LinkedIn in people's minds. When you're on LinkedIn, you're in the business mindset. So you're going to really be thinking about business products and services. You're open to those opportunities. And LinkedIn recently passed a billion users.

180 million of those billion are senior executives, 18%. But, hey, we all know about the 1%. 10 million C-suite executives. That's your CFO, CTO, CIO. These are the people who are always looking for a new product or service to make their organization run better. But they are on LinkedIn. That's why LinkedIn's ad platform delivers two to five times greater return on investment compared to other social media platforms. So easy to understand why this is, because this is where all the business people are and they're in that business mindset.

Super easy call to action. Make your B2B marketing everything it can be and get a $100 credit on your next campaign. Go to LinkedIn.com slash this week. in startups to claim your credit. That's LinkedIn.com slash this week in startups, no spaces, no dashes, terms and conditions apply because they're giving you a hundee. Everybody, 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 about if you have any questions about the product. I remember Des explaining how this 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 this kind of HubSpot, Zendesk, a lot of these SaaS 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 SaaS pool for Unite the Mall. What are your thoughts on when you're building these SaaS products, the adjacencies, and when to add to them and when not to. It's super important to focus on 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 to unite them all. Of course. What's not beautiful and elegant about that? 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 experiencing our adverts or looking at our 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 if all you're doing is having a fun, academic, a tech strategy conversation.

But if you're interested in 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 problem? pitch. It's a hard pitch. It's 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

topics. Are you really going to be able to build that, you know, Seamus platform? And then just they go to market and pricing just gets in. any complex. We fell for this trap. We fell for this trap. It's part of the Intercom story. We built a cool horizontal tool at the start, messenger, user 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. Then later on, we said, hey, it could be good for sales. Could be great for marketing. Could be 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 pricing 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 and the market and people use your product and support people use your product, that's going to be some pretty gnarly pricing and it was and we suffer because of it.

And now you're faced with another C change in pricing. We have this sort of SaaS. 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 for obvious reasons, they've had a flat number of employees for like three years while growing 30%. Right. So the whole SaaS 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 going to charge you for 25. So we're just going to be totally honest. You don't need to worry about it. 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 SaaS companies in our portfolio who they keep adding customers, but because of the consolidation in SaaS where some CFO is like, you know, we got 50 SaaS products in this organization and they just send some you dick down. It's going down to 30. So clean it up. And then they also say, you know what, hey, we got 10 salespeople 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 talk about the Percy pricing model and how brilliant it was.

And then is it broken now? And then what comes next? I think over time it's broken. We can get back to that on the AI 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 SaaS products.

We need to 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 lose financial control, but actually delivering killer value. That's how you create great, 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 that now is ready to face the world that only values meaning. So that's like my whole thing on the consolidation piece. It makes a lot of sense because, you know, I'm on the board of a couple companies that are, let's say, over 10 million in SaaS revenue, right? There are ones that we incubated, be seated. And, you know, that really has been a big conversation. Ideal customer profile. Do they actually need our software? And, you know, salespeople are in their best sense, you know, like I tell people, it's like what are going down to hill. It's just going to take the fastest path, 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 black truffle for the white truffle or supplement. It's like, why wouldn't we order this? It's white truffle season, but it's not white truffle season now.

But Jason, it happened everywhere. Like Intercom, you know, a successful, high-quality company, profitable, the whole thing. But we're not opening eye, 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 slightly different, but you're like, right, wait a second. How different are they? So it's really 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 it's amazing how quickly that happened. I came up with a system where we use, you know, certain credit 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 SaaS software. Make one for finance software. And I just had somebody in operations do this. And then the end of the year, we do the same thing every year.

I just say, take the limit from $10 in a month down to $100. Right. And then tell me what turns off of bricks. Right. And if nobody notices, by the way, and this SaaS company is going to find you. They're going to find somebody there because there's a commission associated with or whatever. And 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. 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 two million funding. We want to do this for startups. And you've got to have an awesome.com domain name. So apply and get more details. Jam with jCal.com. Jam with jCal.com. It's in the show notes. And I'm partnering with my friends over dot tech domains because all these great innovative startups are starting to use dot tech. I see it all over the place. Rabbit.orgora.org.org. Onex.com. And of course, founder Fridays. Dot tech. If you're using a dot tech domain name for your website, I want to hear about it, apply for the jam session with jacal.com.com.com.com.

Jam with J-Cal.Tech.com.com. 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. And the Creighton Christians, 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 like to invest too. They're so under-resourced that they, like again, And great restraint, you know, great limitations. People get very creative in what they do. And the way I found Athena and these virtual assistants, Jonathan's new company, 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 a $36,000 person. We don't like them. They swap them out. We never have to deal with any HR issues. It's like operations as a service. It's almost like an EWS 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 SaaS-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? It doesn't keep me up at night. 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 and you won.

Now everything's changing and you have to really stay in 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 point here, but the specific angle I think about is, I guess this one piece, I'll try and touch on on years. First, does the advent of AI technologies within corporations change, you know, the number of employees within them and the amount of seats that they buy, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Like, certainly 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 may change tomorrow, actually, it takes time for companies to adopt new technologies, takes time for new technologies to be kind of shaped 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 sustainable, like strong, resilient software, right?

Absolutely. Yeah, that people aren't just going to 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 people rightly are quite hesitant. and very careful. So yes, over some long enough time frame, companies get smaller.

The seats thing just goes away across the board. Oh, so that's where, that's 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 out where does customer service go in the future, all customer service will be done by AI. You know, over what time period?

Is it 10 years? 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 a highly sophisticated assistant that's available right there and then to offer them personalized service. And though, in fact, based on what you're saying, they're going to prefer it. They'll prefer it.

I mean, they'll prefer it 100%. Because if it works, it's just easier and faster and better. People already prefer Waymo because it's super consistent. No one tries to talk to them. It's like it's the same packaged thing. 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 with another person in the car. Now, Waymo all of a sudden, it's not just a fill in for humans. it's better than humans. And guess what? It's not going to run over people on the street. I had the same experience with toast. I don't know if you've been to... A little bit.

Or if you have kids. No kids, yeah. Yeah. So when you have kids and you're at a restaurant, you know, and you see this like little QR code, right? Your kids are hungry. And 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.

And like, okay, boom, dumplings are on the way. Right. And I don't 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 kids. Totally. It's amazing. I don't think you've any kids for that. I mean, like, if you're on your own, you can browse for the thing. I mean, like, we almost don't want to admit that this automation is more than just sufficiency. It actually is superior than humans in someone. This is not an anti-human statement at all. I mean, I love humans. 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 fucking 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 sec, it's better than humans, it's faster than humans,

it's cheaper than humans. Oh shit. Yeah, so this is an old adage and you know what? I was coming off of the, I was coming back from Tahoe

and you actually have a billboard with that statement on it. That's right. Coming off the, 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 and say, well, 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 inside or did that come from us? Where did that come from? But that wasn't an agency. That happened in a meeting. No, it's actually our brand guy. So we have a VP of brand, Wilburroughs. I'm like, I like that. You get. You give us like 10 different options. I'm like, sorry, you can't get over the first one. Yeah, first best. I have never remembered a billboard.

I don't think. I can't tell you another billboard I remember. So if I remember the billboard, I was like, yep, that is AI. It is going to be all of those things. And of course, we're trying to say this is what Intercom is, but it's what AI is. Yes. Yes. And you only need to look at how frustrating it was to work with a travel agent or, you know,

before that, our parents with phone operators. Anything. It was just wasted time for everybody. Or call PG&E today. I mean, PG&E are actually one of the good ones. They're right, call Comcast. I mean, any of these companies, 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. That'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, cool. And what have you a con? Because you've been there 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. Joe. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's very good. Good job, Joe. You know, I'm friends with Mumoon and the team over there. I think the world of them guys, they're really hard working. I'm on a board with Ilya. He's just a hardworking dude. What's working today in terms of tickets, customer support, people type into a box. And then what don't you trust it with yet? So today, we have many thousands of intercom customers who've turned on this thing called Finn. 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 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 clarification. Like, is this what you meant?

Whatever. Oh, a little. That's key, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. Is that what you 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. It's like, oh, shit. Like, whoa. The numbers are really real. Hey, startups. Are you ready to launch your business without the headache? Well, with Northwest registered agent,

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And so theoretically, although Uber is a highly complex operations, 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 SaaS company like Intercom, we're at like 45% resolution rate. But that's still a giant.

That's a giant. So our customer service team hasn't grown into you, give a take. See, this is the key. And then for people who are scared by this concept, it's going to 90% in every 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 the wouldn't it? And like you kind of get to move 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 is repeating back as a customer support agent,

you know, for the 17th time today. Right. 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 space bar? And so I just started telling people hit the space bar. It's the long bar on the bottom. Okay, boom. And that just was my little way. This is why you're no longer in customer service. That's very impressive.

Exactly. That's just like, oh my lord. This is unbelievable. The second best story from my IT days was I said, to the woman, take the floppy disk out of the sheath 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-inch floppy disk, which you still remember. And she had ripped it open. Oh, no. The glue and everything and pulled the magnetic dial out. Which, 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 took 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 are way more interesting than the typical customer service job experience. 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 month, year after year. It's a terrible use of human potential. I have one more. It's so funny. I just one of the third one. This is such a great clip for a YouTube short or something. I was with the woman one time.

And I was charged with putting lawyers onto the internet. This is the early 90s. And they were using document management. Now, lawyers, the idea of using a keyboard for a certain generation of Buma lawyers was like asking them to take out the crash. 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?

I'm like, well, it's a computer. We can do a 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 like, oh, yeah, it can stay on the mouse pad when you move it. And I turned it over and I showed it the track ball.

This was 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 thought the pointer would move if she, She used it like a laser pointer. I love it. She was just a couple decades ahead of her time. Literally, yes.

She anticipated where this was all going. Right, right. So if we're getting through 40% 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. Totally.

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? What does this look like in one year? Yeah. So in one year, we go from not just, just answering knowledge questions like, hey, can I do it? Can you ship to Africa?

Can you ship to Australia, whatever? To actually doing things like, hey, my package never arrived. It's like, oh, no worries. I'll like it, resent you. So we'll go from answering questions to doing things. Really, the game here, if you just imagine a pie chart of the different categories of things you call customer service is 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. 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 or something that's not quite right. It's another thing if you refund my customer at $9,000 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 hopefully Intercom customers are not listening right now. That's could never happen. Anything's possible. So it's on us to actually build the technology to ensure it's that it doesn't. So that's like one of the next frontiers. It goes a lot further than that, but 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. a ton of tons. And all of a sudden, too much paper towels comes to the restaurant. Of course. But this is the next piece, which is letting the AI take a behavior.

It's a digital behavior, but it's a behavior in the real world. Yeah, but it doesn't have to be digital. Yeah. Doesn't have to be. And like we live in a digital world. So it's things like refunds, resetting passwords.

It could be security implications, everything else. So to build that in a really robust way is a big deal, but it's got to go there and it will. Yeah. So are you actually, you must be working on that now.

Take me through how different this is than everything you've done before it because now this is where, and you alluded to this, which I bookmarked in my brain for this conversation to get to, and we might as well get there now, which is, oh my God, safety, security,

open AI just like nuke the safety team. And they're like, yeah, we don't need a safety. But what we're talking about right here is safety. And making sure it doesn't run amok. Sure. So how do you think about deploying the first one? Are you going to have somebody watching the agent 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 returned it and it's out of warranty. You know, you lose a point. Right. Tell me, tell me about this process and this war room where you're doing this. Right. It's obvious that long term, we will hire this super agent that's smarter than any SVP, 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 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 not only moot, but, you know, hilariously a pedestrian. However, we're talking about safety and security, comfort with customers. So there'll need to be checks and balances, and there'll need to be a combination of allowing 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 up how the bots will need to be collaborative, but also work off a set of rules. And that's where these things evolve from being wrappers on GPD4 to actually full, deep, complex, pen and he has to build applications and systems. Yes. And that's where people lose a little bit of 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 service. Yes. in a way, if you were to think about a teller at a bank, and when you were talking about this,

like, if you come in and you deposit your check, it's like, 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. Who cares? And then, you know, we don't have to arrest you. Like, we're just trying to protect downside here. But I'm depositing this check.

I'm a new customer, and I'm asking you to cash it and give me cash. Right. Oh, yeah. I'll be right back. I'm going to talk to my manager. If it's a fake check, the person B-lines it out if you're checking with the manager. So the check with the manager is the- Totally. We've had checks and balances in the human world for years.

So we're just going to need checks and balances in the AI world, too. You mentioned something about like the personality of people pursuing AI versus, 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. I am amazed that people are taking this technology as impressive as the demo where we, see is. Anybody who uses this, I can't believe the credit we're giving for work not done to LLMs. People like Google put out this searched summary at the top and I don't know if you saw it over the last like we where it was like, yeah, here's how you eat rocks. And it's like 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. But nobody actually questions a startup doing yet. They're like, oh, yeah, it's going to hallucinate. And like, this is where now we're at. Are people giving too much credit to the technology here for work not done? I'll tell you what the interesting part about this topic is that we talk a lot about the incumbents have an advantage in this AI world, the distribution, 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 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, 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, et cetera. 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.

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, and intercom is that, okay, the incumbents have a shot too. They have all these advantages. We can play just as hard as a startup. So you touch on a really interesting set of points that we discuss internally at a ton. Yeah, it's, it is the innovator's dilemma, like, just realized in a way that is the most vibrant of our career.

You can just yolo this stuff and be like, yeah, let it book you a ticket. And 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 me, which, I don't know if it was, we can. Sure.

I mean, it was fucking boring language. Yeah. But we were like, wow, it's amazing, it's talking. Then when Google comes out, and for all we know, the Google AI is really good, but they have hundreds of millions, maybe billions of users. And all I has to say is two really dumb things, like eat rocks or put glue in your pizza. And then it's a screenshot and then they're roasted for it. So it's just different standards for the big guys.

And that's the really interesting challenge about how you bring this to market. Yeah, expectations are high for brands. Like Apple, I mean, Siri is such an embarrassment for Apple already. And can you imagine, like, I mean, just the fact that Siri 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 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 you're a founder and you got to feel bad for founders doing something creative. I felt really bad for them. I went to visit them that day. I didn't know them. You did. Yeah, I ping them on Twitter and say, can I come visit you? I almost wanted to give them a hug, but I didn't know them well enough to give them a hook. But I wanted to be there to tell them. My heart

breaks a little bit for people who are. It broke for them too. I had the same exact reaction. They worked so hard. And they're actually onto something. Like, 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 he's 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 a 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 tend to not criticize people who are trying to do something brand new. They're trying to build like a new CRM product, like a new SaaS CRM product.

And it just wasn't good enough. It was really slow. I'm like, what are you doing? You ever see this movie, Rat Tatoui? No, I haven't, but there's a line at the end that people have quoted to me. Give it to me. Yeah. You have to see the film. It's my favorite Pixar film. But at the end, there was a guy, Anton Ego. I have to think Steve Jobs, who was the owner of Pixar, had a bit to do with this. And I actually asked Ed Catnell, who was on my program about it. And he did indicate that this was like something they had talked about, Stephen and Ed. It was one of my favorite episodes that I've ever done. And at the end, at the end, He says, you know, the life of a critic is very unique in the world because we hold the position above people who create things. This is very powerful position and we lord it over them and we can, you know, 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 being a critic is meaningless is kind of what he comes to the 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 thrown, you know, rocks at other people creating stuff. I'm not targeting any specific people, but people do come to mind. And

he said, you know, actually now I realize the one thing we can do is we can support the new. Right. Tears. Yeah. And shot. Anton Ego's taken back to his childhood and remembers his mom making him the simple French dish, Rattatatoui. And he tastes the ratatouille. And he tastes the ratatouille

that's made by this rat. He's a cook. And he just says, wow, this was the best rat to two I've had since my mom had. And just an incredible moment. And just a very deep moment. When I saw this review, I watched it because I'm a fan of Marquez

and I co-created and gadget, you know, which did this kind of stuff. And he says so many amazing things about the form factor, the product, 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,

but the actual actor headline was, this thing gets so many things right. But it's really just for developers right now. 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. And that was the mistake they made.

But how did the conversation go? go with them. They must have been crestfallen or were they resilient? Let me tell you, but a quick reaction to what you just said there, I cared, I was upset less about the Marquise, how I say his name. Marquez. Marquez. And more about just the piling, the dog piling, where I was like, ah, ha, ha, you guys are idiots. I'm like, come on, what have you made? Like, what have you built? Exactly. 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 what did they say? They're like, yeah, I know we kind of messed up. Yeah, we went out

too soon. But we believe in this thing. And beautiful. You know, these guys are builders. This is a problem. They're just builders. You know, they're from Apple. They were protected in this large apple. Ah, the mothershits. And I think part of Apple's secret problem. I'm just going to make this up because I know a thing about it. Yeah. Is they protect idealists and dreamers. And 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 at Apple. And so when they're out on their- That's such a good observation. Yeah. Yeah. When they're out on their own, exactly. I don't know if they had the comms people around them. They were getting wrecked.

So, you know, raise a ton of money. They were the number one news in tech. They were getting wrecked and they had no, no comms help. So, you know, my hat is off to them and anyone who tries to make anything new. And those guys in particular, they're 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 I think the observation about Apple is such a good one. If 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. This is for people who will imagine what's capable of. If you're a civilian and you buy it, okay, you know, you can do that. But it's kind of like buying Google Glass or like, you know, some prototype. And it would just sound the whole situation. 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 technique. It's kind of the reverse of the negative review in the pylon, which is, I squint. You know, people have told me I'm 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 it. 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

around the world. But if it did work, what would be the next dominole of the 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 as we do this here, what do you think the world looks like when conversational AI is not the Syria experience? And it's not, even what Sam showed with Omni or O, it's like the next, like three generations from now where you can interrupt that you can have a conversation as fluid as ours, even on Zoom.

That just is awesome. Yeah. 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. And I don't like to leave early. And it's like, I got you. United.

It's in your thing. Yeah. It's a refundable ticket anyway. Totally. So there's a bunch of things that are. One is that the LLMs will get super fast and you'll be able to just chit out with them. No problem. I can speak as quickly as I'm 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 all right. That's a given. So now we're going to have assistance 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. 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 pains and stuff. We want text, right?

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. rather than a 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. 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 phone apps. Yeah. It's the only way I can get off my down phone. Just to be more present, you do this. You leave the house with more proud. Yeah, more productive, whatever. Yeah, exactly. I'll leave the house with that.

It still does stuff. So we're going to have some sort of new. devices, maybe they'll have screens, but, you know, how will we talk to this thing? Well, we have earbuds in our ears all the time, probably not. Well, we have glasses, maybe, but that's like a big fashion step if everyone's gone 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, and it's got a screen, et cetera, 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 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 the demand for personal computing. We're going to do more personal computing. But during our day, we'll be doing more to 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.

the last telegram was sent in just 2013 in India. Yeah, facts. The fax is still around. Still going. 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 your main pin,

rabbit. There's this new, what are they called, TinyPod. Have you seen that tiny little phone? Tiny pod looks awesome. You've got the daylight tablet thing. You've seen that? I did see the daylight one. There's new things happening.

There's new things happening in personal computing. It seems like a reaction to the distraction culture and the addiction issue too. So it's almost like, you know, if you want to have a couple of beers that are a little bit lighter in alcohol than this one or, you know, here's a milder version of the same thing that maybe there's a remarkable tablet that people love. Right. So there's has that. He likes that.

He's the exact market for it. Somebody who's like thoughtful wants to capture their stuff. It's elegant. I bought one. I don't use it. I've just become a fan. of speaking into my phone. I just love this product grammarly.

Oh, right. Yeah, I know. I've never used it. Yeah. Just download it and pay for it. Yeah. And then check back with me a month of how much better a writer and communicator you are. I force everybody on my team to do it.

And as a professional writer, which is where I started, what, AI has done is taken. You know what? In every organization, there were like 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 at writing, but the time from sucking to being good, the meantime from suckage to good is like, compressed enough. 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? Yeah. There'll be things that we realized, though, that the AI can't do. And there'll be the things that 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, like, holy shit.

Yeah. That's the kind of like, Geneseecois that, like, AI is not about to solve anytime soon. I agree with you. And also, if everybody becomes a good writer, how much, how more important is an excellent writer? How much more obvious it is that the person becomes like extraordinary or excellent. Like if,

like all films, like if you watch TV shows and films, they're all pretty good. You know, like they're not terrible. They're all done in a very, you know, the CGI's good.

Like you can't make bad CGI today. It's like almost impossible. So then when somebody makes 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, that's craftsmanship.

I wonder, though, will we get to a place where we really value artisanally 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 graphics in camera, right? And will we be at a place in 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-a-old.

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 that are created rises, but I think we'll start to just appreciate handcrafted. It sounds silly, but like, you know, a 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 it, I mean, that you do stand out when you write that handwritten note. Of course. We talked about being a great manager and you're, you know, returning, the return of the

king here, segment of the pod. I heard you said another pod, you got Savage on Glass Door, which by the way, glass door is where incompetent people you fired come back to get revenge on. If you're at a high performance culture, like a startup, you have to fire people for not performing. And then that's how they get their retribution. It's not like people who love working for you. You're going to be like, you know what I'm going to do today?

I'm going to write a great review. Sure. Sure. No, of course not. It's the last out of resort for people who are unhappy. I get it. It's very human.

It's normal. It's a place to vent. It's like 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. Putting that aside,

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. And I was like, huh, I always know when you come back to a company or you get revitalized like you seem to have been, obviously, by AI. You get some new ideas about management. Sure.

You kind of look at how you did things previously. Right. What comes to mind when I'm saying those two things? Yeah. 2.0. Totally. Yeah. I, this is a whole multi-series podcast in itself, if anyone is ever interested.

But, you know, part of it was just a willingness to be okay with not being liked. You know, and this doesn't mean I'm trying to make enemies at all. 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 going to ruthlessly stick to what I believe will be good for us. I may be wrong, but I will entertain.

no dissent on that topic whatsoever. And that was 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 going to love them and we're going to advertise them on our site. Like we don't do employee activism, stuff, social issues at Intercom. Oh, really? You're not there to solve the world's diversity?

You're not going to solve equality inside your software company doing customer service? I'm shocked. I'll tell you, the ironic thing is that if you create a really great company, that's 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 DEI programs.

So I'm like, why is that? And my theory was, we were just an open, mind, open-hearted, good company that just accepted all the types of people. And they wanted a worker.

So anyway, that's another piece. And I would just lay it out for people. 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 need to see the receipts. And I was like, all right, I am not basing my investments in companies based on the gender or race of the people. Like, do you want me to be sexist? Do you want me to be racist? Right. And I'm trying to reconcile this as like a Gen Xer who was told about this meritocracy in America. And that's what made

that moment hard because all of us were like, oh, wait a sec. Are we wrong? Yeah. So I'm literally second guessing myself saying like, okay, wait, I know I'm a good person, but you're telling me I'm not. And I have 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 going to 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 to 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, oh, and do you like to sleep? Are you okay? Are you good? Are you good? Are you?

Are you good? Or nobody? Like, I can't ask you that question. That's illegal. So we had on one side. And it's not of my business. You don't care. Who cares?

It's irrelevant. So we were asked to do this crazy task that is actually illegal. And I had to have this conversation with my team because it turned out in my company, four out of the five top positions were female. Now, why is that? I don't know. I just hired the most competent, hardworking 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 to women. I don't 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 invest in. And you know what happened? There's a lawsuit now against a firm that is investing in black women. Do you know who they're being sued by? Asian women. Wow. Yeah. So now you think of the cul-de-sac, the dead end that is intersectionality and identity

politics. It takes you to a circular shooting squad. Right. It makes no sense. Anyway, I'm going to get up my speech here. You're good. I could talk about this for a long time 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 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'm much happier for any of the women that are in tech or say like I've younger sisters, one of which was in business, I'm much happier when they're successful 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 they needed women,

like tokenizing women and people of color and all this stuff. It was just not good for them, not good for anyone. Or you were invested in by a fund. Right. That's for this demographic. So then what does that say to the other venture firms?

Oh, so you couldn't raise money from a venture firm that does it based on merit. You had to go to one that does it based on your Asian, your, you know, whatever, Irish. Yeah. Irish need not apply. Yeah. I wish we got some special attention. I mean, we did it 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 insane, difficult to think independently from that. Yes. And when you've been through a 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. A little bit of healthy, respectful skepticism, but super down hard.

Yeah. Tell me about this 52-week charge you did, this discipline you imposed on yourself and then doing the all hands again and then. just 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. 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 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 what you did in terms of these devices and why you deployed them. Because I'm always interested in successful people then coming up with devices or toolkits. Right? Yeah. This was premeditated, you know, when you came back 18 months.

Yeah. All of this is built of the central idea that great people, let's just say great builders of any level at any level. in a company of any discipline, great builders, there's a small set 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 what are those things? Great people, great builders. They actually love honesty. about the challenging game at heart. And so 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 to, because they feel themselves as a partner to me

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, ooh, I don't, that's not for me. Shareholder value. But business-minded people who are ambitious, 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 going to actually quite a, you're going to 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, ooh, that's not good. We need an aggressive new plan to win. And so, again, good people. Trigger warning. Exactly. Exactly.

Exactly. There was a multiple of those things I was given. I also said it's wartime. And people are 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.

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? This is a disgrace. This is disgusting. This is horrible. I'm upset. I'm offended.

I'm offended for him. I'm offended for some person I've ever met. Resilent people are like, oh, I get it. This is a war. This is a fight. We're going to 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 laid by this drama. So there was another thing I promoted, which is, 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 SaaS 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, coach employees from. Like, I want you to be getting 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. Yeah. Like you were saying before about the Zen Desk diaspora. Right. Like they were shot

after. So there was something going on in the water there. Absolutely. And I love the fact that you use a metaphor, right? I think 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. It's like the ultimate tell. It's like, I'm looking for something to be offended by it. 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 8 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 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 round and down these people. Yeah, no.

One of the best 1,000 people we could find. One of the things that I think founders have this drift, and you seem to in your 1.0 of your career falling into, which is likeability. And here's the thing. You obviously want to be loved and liked by winners, by hardcore people who want to change the world. Right. Now, it would it be nice to be liked by everybody else? Of course, nobody wants to be disliked.

But if you are disliked by somebody who is unfocused in their career, well, maybe that's actually a positive signal. Yeah, that's where I was going to go. Like, 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 smile on my face, because I was sincerely positive about it, Hey, if this is exciting to you, these apply. If it's not, there are so many great companies out there. Don't waste your time. Don't waste your time, right? And that's what I feel about people at Intercom who were not a fit.

I'm like, listen, again, one career, you can have one job at a time. Hopefully you've only had one job at a time. Oh, find somewhere where you're a great fit where they love you. Can you imagine how much happier you would be? Absolutely. Find somewhere along with your values. It's not inherently wrong to want to be activists. It's just not what we're doing here.

I had this realization with people as well where told them, like, you realize when you're a venture capitalist, you have a fund and you invest in, we invest in 100 companies a year. We're like running an accelerator and we make a lot of small bets. I said, you know, if the founders call us, they text us. The SLA, a 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 movie and answer the call. Some people will be like, whoa, lifework balance, you're with your kids and phone call. Now, 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 Futurosa, like I took my 14 year old, I could miss five minutes of that movie to just say, is everything okay? I'm in a movie.

I can step out. It's not a problem. 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 integrate it with your life and enjoy it.

Like, you have to find it a way to make it healthy. But the reality is that they're just our tradeoffs. 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 spend more time with our kids 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 it just kind of is what it is. You know, it's like 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 when LeBron James, he's going to 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 the board meetings with this CEO immediately would pay. But you have no experience in this.

Like, it's not going to work. You have never developed software. You've never invest 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 and Saks and Craft, like and Bill Gurley or Michael Moritz, like they were responding to emails on the weekend. Right. Right. They weren't fucking off. Right. That's just not how Google was built. Yeah. Whether it's right or wrong or smart or great for your help. Game on the field. That is the game. Game on the field, you know, and that's it.

Hey, listen, I can talk to you for hours, and then we did. I'm going to book you right now for six months from now. Please. Will you come on in six months? I love to. I'd love to. I'm just, it's going to 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 going to do it every six month going forward to check in. I would love to. I would love to. Thank you for other questions. Well, no, 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, this one startups over 14 years.

It started 14 years ago when iPods were with these own iPods and they're like, hey, you're still doing all this. And I'm like, hey, you know what? It's the highlight of my week to do three or four episodes of this. And I learn 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 winning.

Thank you for calling me a winner. No, you are. Like, I mean, I'll watch you build a winner. this business from 2011 until now. And I know you took a lot of bad beats and five quarters of getting your ass kick. That cannot be fun. Sure. The resiliency, you know, is, it really is like when I watch founders, I have now confirmed

like there's like a competency level and then there's resiliency. Yeah, it's true. Can I add one more thing into the mix though? It's like do it. Let's go. Experience. Because like maybe own McCabe 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. It 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, oh, no, I'll tell you what it is. I call it blood in the mouth. Have you ever gotten actually punched in a bar fight? Thank you from Ireland. You're from Dublin. You really haven't gotten soft? I don't know if I should be offended by that or not. I'll take it familiar Irishman, but no, I haven't. I have not. I, you know, like, I tell you, when you get punched in the face, it's a very interesting experience. Like, I'm talking

when you get really sock, 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 robbing 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, and it's pouring out of your mouth. Like, I've had this happen a couple of times 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 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 quitting.

Or someone who's upset about something. something you said in the all hands or whatever. You're like, let's figure it out. Take a number and then you go right to the problem. And this is what age 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

in another 10 years. You're just going to be like, oh, okay. And there's so much proof of this, but I heard an interview with Bari Weiss interviewed from the free press. and she's becoming quite a good interviewer on our podcast that's called, I've got the name of it. It's like candidly or frankly or something.

Honestly. Right. She had Jerry Seinfeld on. And she brings that 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 was one thing that always stuck with me that I thought they got right, which is when there's a problem, just go right to it and address it immediately.

And it just like the power of it goes down, like the anxiety. It's always the right thing to do when there's a problem or there's a problem or there's a problem. some tension to just immediately go to that. That's what the great founders do later in their ears. For me, it's just like, companies themselves are super resilient. All sorts of shit can happen. And they keep going. The world keeps going. The world keeps going.

It's not existential. When you're younger, you're like, oh, my God, it's all over. I'm a failure. You're like, no. No. Keeps going. That's actually the role I've coveted most in my career now. It's like sitting, what are the Jewish people called?

Sitting Shiva, when you sit, when, you know, after somebody's, died or a hospice when somebody's in the process of dying. I've sat Shiva or done hospice with people whose companies have died. And I say, hey, 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 are the regrets? What are the mistakes? And enjoy your three years at Facebook or LinkedIn or wherever you're sold the assets. when the team landed.

Yeah. And you'll be out of there, by the way, in 18 months or 12 months, even though you've got this three-year thing, they're going to let you out early. And then let's talk about your next company. Right. You're going to be okay. Don't forget that there are five beautiful days in the future. 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 with them. And nobody has the presence of mind to pull these people aside and say you're bigger than your last idea. It was just an idea. Yeah. But you can tell someone that, and I could have been told that many times when I was failing. And it's one thing being told and it's another knowing it.

And we just tie up our whole identities and self, sense of self and our importance and validity and lovability in these projects of ours. The founder and CEO of Intercom, the founder and CEO of a billion dollar company. Right? It's just like people say it to over and over again. The article say it or the pocket server. And then you're like, oh, you know, oh, yeah, no, that doesn't matter. matter. It's just still. Takes time. 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 well. But I'm also like, you know what? I'm like good independent of Intercom. Yeah. It's like as an artist, if you think of yourself as an artist creation, you know, if an artist creates an album, you know, and they become so identified with that specific song or that particular album or that particular album or that particular. particular movie, especially young artists who hit like something perfectly, it can be so crippling

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. 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 walk to three or four people or slightly ahead of you on the track. And they'll explain it to you. Yeah. Don't ever do this final solution thing. Like, it's so tragic when people get too caught up in their companies and their projects that they think, ah, you know, this is who I am. It's not. I agree. I agree. It's a good note to it. It's a good that we got here because a lot of people don't want to

talk about this stuff. You're such a great guest. Thank you. Everybody check out intercom.com. If you're 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. Well, you better be, you better love to build. That's it. You got to love to build.

That's it. There's a lot of talkers in our industry. Like, building is just so, it's so rewarding, but it's like, we had this moment at time where they're like, the talkers started taking all the slots. Yeah. You ripped out a lot of that, I think. Yeah. And I think American needs to rip out a lot of that, too.

It's time to build. It's cliche as that is. Mark can be, like, bombastic and whatever. He's so right. Like, 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. Right. Or a high-speed train. Right.

And it's like, in California, it's like, yeah, we've spent tens of billions on the high-speed train. And it's like, yeah, I haven't taken it yet. And then in Texas, like, I was talking to Elon, like, about the gigafactory at one point. And I was at the opening with them. We were just sitting there, you know, and like one of those behind the stage moments and talking.

about like this kind of surreal, right? Like, that you built this. 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 what this has taken in California? I'm just curious.

He's like, I'd still be in the paperwork. I mean, how long did it take to build that toilet in San Francisco? I think it was like closer to 10 years than five and it was $1.7 million. Right. To build a single toilet. It's probably a pretty nice toilet. I think that toilet has checked off every DEI checkbox. Nice.

Every potential ethnicity contributed to that one bathroom. Every screw was a different person and everybody got to have there. I need to check it out. I'm going to go check out that toilet. Actually, you and I should do that. That would be a great bromance date. You and I can just go. And just check out that toilet. Like, it ought to be amazing for $1.7 million.

It symbolizes all that is great about America. It does. It does. We'll talk about the American exceptionalism next time. And we'll see you next time on this week and start us. Bye-bye. Thank you, sir.