This Week in Startups - What startups need to succeed | Scaling Your Startup S2 E10 with Intercom’s Des Traynor | E1234

Episode Date: June 18, 2021

Intercom CEO Des Traynor discusses why startups need to grow fast (7:44), how to execute at speed (10:48), build an effective culture (33:35) & more!

Hey everybody, hey everybody, welcome to season two of scaling your startup. This is episode 10. What an amazing season we've had. If you want to watch all of these videos from some of the greatest founders in the industry, you just go to this week at startups.com slash scale. This week at startups.com slash scale. What I would recommend doing, since we're all working from home, is that you take these 10 episodes and you have a watch party. Maybe you do one per week over 10 weeks, two per week, over five weeks with your team. And you watch these together and you take notes or you watch them on your own, you take your notes and then you have a conversation about it afterwards. But this is some of the greatest advice you're going to get on topics including this season,

growth, social media, copyrighting, critically important, sales, fundraising product, also critically important. SEO and conversions, something that's very tactical, but very important, how to build a great culture and how to operate efficiently with low burn. We also get into customer success, but today we're ending with a bang. One of the great product people is with us today. My good friend, Des Traynor, the CEO of Intercom, a company that has hit 150 million in revenue in 2020, and it's probably much more in 2021. Dez is going to share a brand new talk for the first time here, which is his very best advice for Seed and Series A startups, and he knocks it out of the park. do some Q&A with them at the end of the episode where we get into work from home and the

efficiency that it has brought about for running startups. But he really breaks down the importance of speed in a startup and how to have a product customer fit discussion within your startup and make that your true Nordstar talks about interviewing users and defining important metrics, not hackable metrics, things you can fake. And just everything you need to know about scaling your startup. It's really just the cherry on top of a great season. Thank you to Emmy Award-winning producer, Jackie, for putting together season two, and thank you to our partners who sponsored this series,

which millions of people will watch this year and into the future years, to really just sharpen your blade and to be a better founder or a better executive at your startup so that you increase your chances of winning and you increase your chances of winning big. We talk about efficiency in this episode and repeatability for, startups, it's just tremendous. And in many ways, this is a great video to start with. So if even have it, if you're just getting to the series, starting with this video and then working backwards to the more tactical talks might actually be a better order. Kind of like reading

the last chapter of a novel, which some people tell me they do. I think that's a terrible idea, but I've heard that before. All right. So stick with us. Scaling your startup season two is brought to you by NetSuite. Don't let old software and spreadsheets slow you down anymore. Upgrade to NetSuite, the world's number one cloud business system. Head to NetSuite.com slash twist for the special financing program. Our crowd helps you invest early in pre-IPO companies alongside professional VCs. If you're interested in investing, you can join Our Crowd for free at OUR, CRO, WD.com slash

Twist and Brainbase. Protecting your ideas should be simple. Built by founders, for founders, BrainBase File is a clean and automated trademark filing platform that gives anyone the ability to protect their idea. File now for just $169 at BrainBase.com slash twist by using code Twist. Thanks, Jason. I'm excited to give this presentation. In prepping it, I really wanted to focus on what are the important pieces of startup advice, the stuff that I wish we had known back then. And in that regard, I'm trying to separate us from this epidemic of startup advice.

And if you're in a startup, you're probably one of the most over-advised people in the world up there with politicians and world leaders. There is a never-ending diluge of just people telling you all the stuff you need to do, and it just doesn't stop. And if you read it all, you'll never build a startup, I promised to you. I hope to tell you about the bits that I believe matter a lot. It's not to say the other stuff doesn't matter,

but there are some fundamental invariance about startups that succeed. And that's what I want to talk about today. There's four areas I'm going to cover. The importance of a vision and a mission for a company. The need for speed, not to be totally Tom Cruise like about it, product customer fit and product market fit. And I think these two things are best considered separate. So starting with vision and mission, there is a tendency to say, start a startup with the idea that you want to explore a certain space.

We think we should do something in the ticket tracking space or project management or whatever. Doing it without a mission leaves you at a really blurry pitch or way to charm people into joining your company, investing in your company, you know, adopting your product, referring it, even just listening to you. A mission answers the question, why do you exist other than making money? Most companies exist to make money, but they usually have some higher order purpose that they're trying to serve. And I think at Intercom we say our mission is to make internet business personal. That's what we want to do. Stripe's mission is to increase the GDP of the internet.

I think Uber's is to make transportation as reliable as running water. There are like great missions out there, but they're very clear about what will be better afterwards. And a vision is kind of the sort of the landscape after you've succeeded. Like what does the future look like because of your company? What change are you trying to bring about in the world? And it's really important in the early days to kind of get these things down. They will inspire people to want to listen to you, to follow your company.

They will like inform decisions you make. If everyone knows what the end goal is, there's less existential discussion about like, should we do X or Y, because the mission usually answers that question. Your brand becomes a lot clearer, what you actually stand for. Customers know what they're buying into. Do you think that project management should be run one way or the other? Do you think that online commerce should be easy or hard? Do you think it should be legally compliant or should it be built for developers?

These are the sort of things that will bleed out of having a strong mission and strong vision. And lastly, your employees, you want a team inspired, by shared purpose, a shared purpose. And it can't just be revenue growth or like monthly metrics. And I think you should be skeptical if people are excited about owning a chunk of your company, but not excited about what the company does. It's frankly dangerous. You want people to really believe in the mission.

That's a short section. I really think it's fundamental to early stage startups, specifically when I'm advising or investing, whenever I get a blurry answer to what the hell is the whole thing about, what is the mission. Usually that blurriness shows up everywhere, the features you build, the types of customers, you attract,

the employees you have. It's never, never good. It's also impossible to move fast without it. Moving fast is perhaps the dominant characteristic of a successful startup. We used the word startup a lot here. And people might, it often gets overused and that people would refer to

like a new coffee shop as a startup or a cinema or a restaurant or a law firm. And the key difference to me is like startups are just designed in every way to grow fast. And speed is literally the thing. It is what makes them backable as businesses. I share this chart a lot in Intercom to make a single point. At Intercom we grew really fast and we continue to grow really fast. But specifically in one period we went from $1 million to $50 million in three years.

That's obviously quite fast, right? You 50X in three years. It's a phenomenal amount when you get to like, you know, tens of millions of dollars. The point I always have to stress to folks is it's not the 50 million that makes us valuable. It's the three years that makes us valuable. And that is like the core idea of speed. It's like everything has to happen at breakneck speed. You should be really uncomfortable with things moving at a normal pace or even a fast pace.

The challenge is really, how can everything move as fast as it possibly can? With obviously some requirement of sustainability in that it can't break along the way, but it needs to be moving damn fast. I also tell a story of two different companies. This is obviously a sort of parable. I'm not talking with specific companies, but I would say having invested and advised in, I don't know, 50 companies at this stage,

there's some just generic truth to this. Companies that ship fast always, always outperform. In all cases, I've never seen anything to the exception. School's out for summer, but if your business is running on outdated software, you'll never get a break. Failing to graduate to NetSuite is like being stuck in summer school while your friends are free to party in the roaring 20s. Here we go. Manual processes, integration difficulties, and glitchy delays will leave you scrambling for the numbers you need. And you need to know your numbers cold, whether you're raising money or you're making a prediction or you're eventually going to go public. Maybe you're going to SPAC.

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But if they're moving fast, what you'll see is they're just constantly shipping to this drum. And because they're constantly shipping, they can grow a user base. And by the time they hit month six, they have a lot of people who've been hearing about the product, using the product. And most crucially, giving feedback about the product. And that is just a really valuable place to be after six months. We've released two or three things. we've got a swarm of customers and we know what they want to use us for, and we're talking to them regularly and we're learning about our space.

Companies that don't tend to basically take six months and maybe release, and the danger there is they have no users, they have no feedback, they've no understanding. Which company would you rather be of these two? We want to be the one that is just moving phenomenally quickly. And it's easy to say sure thing, right, so you get it move fast. What are the ingredients of speed? For me, like, there are lots, but there's a lot, but there's a lot, few I'll call it that really matter at the early stages, culture, tooling, focus, and process.

So starting with culture, there are things that we baked into Intercom from the early days that I encourage everyone to do, to keep the speed alive. One of them is we just made it very clear at the very start. The very first blog post, our VP of Engineering wrote, was simply this, shipping is our heartbeat. We have to do it on a regular rhythm, consistent. And we tell everyone that as we interviewed them, we tell them as they start. We say, this is a company. that ships maniacally fast. Today, we'll be 10 years old in August. We still deploy new changes to production about 200 times a day.

We ship about 180 to 200 user facing significant product changes a year. We care deeply about this. Every Friday, the whole team get together and literally teams demo what they've shipped that week. And if your team has gone a while without demoing, that is usually a sign that something's not good here. We also make the same claim to our customers, that our product, will continuously get better as you use it. And we hold ourselves accountable to this standard. And it's just leaked into every aspect of how we think

is that this is a company that produces software at a really rapid pace. We also build stuff that helps. For example, we track a thing called a velocity risk register. Now, this is probably too much for the stage you're at. But basically what this is, is a register that asks simply, what is slowing us down? Is anything slowing us down?

And everything is allowed to be put in here. Des is on holidays or it takes too long to get a decision made or this code base is janky or disintegration is like not working or whatever. But anything that slows us down, we will invest in solving because we believe that much about speed. There are two things we do. We build value for our customers and we increase our ability to do that fast. That's the only two things we do. The other area is like we invest in any sort of repurposeable or reuse.

usable technology. So we built out a pattern library, which meant that instead of having to redesign every piece of UI every single time, we just build stuff that lets us consistently take components off the shelf. Again, not because it's fun, not because it's cool, entirely because it speeds us up. A third degree of speed is just pure focus. Is everyone focused on the right thing? You can have a large team of really valuable people, but if they're not all working together. You will not be moving fast. If you can get them to actually work in a specific direction and all be aligned around a mission or product strategy, you will get a lot more speed. We spend so much time reminding people, here's what we're doing, here's the objective,

here's what this product will do, here's the customer we're building it for, here's why they want it, here's the metrics they help the impact. We just consistently focus our people on exactly what matters and really fight against any distraction. And even within that, that's just a product org in a sense. As you grow, you will add things like product, marketing, you'll add brand, analytics sales. And you actually need all those focused on the same thing too. Because if they're unfocused, it will slow you down. And lastly, process.

Now, process is a funny thing to talk about in the same breath of speed. And I would say you should be skeptical of a lot of process, but some amount essential. Good process, generally speaking. It stops you from doing bad, but it doesn't prevent. you from being world-class. Bad process stops you from doing anything bad at the cost of doing anything good. You should, one, probably have some process to hold you accountable to doing regular good work in your company, but two, be really wary if that process is in anything looking like slowing you down, you should be worried. Because speed is literally the piece that startups trade

by. It's the difference between a startup and everything else. People will often question you about, But as you're talking about just going monically fast, but we want to build a really beautiful artisanal fancy product, to which I say fast gets good before good gets fast. That is consistently my experience. There is a famous old story about this competition of who could make the perfect vase. Team A was told they have to make 100 vases in one error. And team B was told you have to make one perfect vase and you have one error to do it.

Who do you think makes more perfect vases? the answer is always team out. Why? Because they iterate and they learn and they learn and they keep getting faster and better. Speed is just essential and it's the surest thing that turns me off a startup is if they don't move quickly.

Once you know what you're doing, the first step, everyone jumps into this idea of product market fit. And my fear about startups focusing on product market fit is that they can often skip the step of actually just generally good product fit. Product market fit asks questions about how do we reach all our customers

and how do we get them in like deep and cheap SEO friendly ways and all that sort of stuff. None of that matters until you have a good product. None of it. Your product has to be loved before you could even tolerate people only liking your product. And I really worry when I see folks chasing the hacks and the optimizations and the tests and the loops to try and like, you know, make the best of what they have when what they have isn't something that fundamentally solves the user problem.

All products solve problems. That's what there exists to do. And for me, product customer fit means, for a given customer, did they use our product every time the problem occurs? And does it solve their product every time? And I say customer here, and I really want to be careful. A lot of early stage startups will count their friends, their family, their friends within the same incubator, et cetera, as their customers.

They're too forgiven. They won't uninstall you or delete you or whatever. You need to have people who have no reason to use you other than the fact that you solve their problem. That's the sort of people you need to be listening to at this stage. And you need to find out, do they use the product every time this problem occurs and does it solve their problem every time? One area that we often, one methodology, if we apply as this idea of jobs we don't. There's a whole heap to be said about jobs we don't. And I won't be saying it now. I did write a book and then intercoms published a lot of stuff on it. But generally speaking,

the more you understand the problem, the more the solution becomes self-evident. A simple example of this would be to take this scenario here. So what I'm going to show you is a situation where the more precisely you can define a situation, the more obvious the solution is. If you're just hungry, loads of things, soups, salads, steaks, sandwiches, everything can solve. I'm just hungry problem. What if you're in a rush?

Well, I guess you're not going to order a steak. You might not want to wait around for a salad to be prepped. What if you're in a rush and you're starving? Well, maybe that takes the salad off the table for sure. What if you're in a rush and you're starving and you need to eat with one hand while you're on to go because you don't know when you're getting another chance to eat? Well, now you're taking everything off the table except for stuff that can be eaten quickly, ordered quickly, and perhaps is even a little bit tidy to eat.

And you start to get a more refined definition of what it is you're supposed to do. In this case, it's pizza or a burger or whatever. But this is a simple example. I'll give you some softer examples in a simple. second, but the idea is, the more you can specify the exact problem, the more you can specify the exact solution. So you really need to understand the job that your product does. There's three components to understanding the job. You first want to be interviewing your users. Secondly, you use that information to scope your product down and kind of right where does it start and where does it stop.

And lastly, you want to pick metrics then that matter for your definition of do we solve the job. So when it comes to interviewing your users, what a lot of people will do is just start a conversation with everyone who uses their product. And that's dangerous because you can't tell one group from another. It's really useful if you can break them down into specific types of people. People who just started trying to use your product today.

People who used it last week but stopped this week. People who are trying it out. So if you have a trial function or if they're in their first few days, people who are shopping around as in they downloaded it, but they download a lot of stuff at the time. Your actual active customers, like as in the people who are using your product, it seems, and then people who became inactive,

they were once active. Now, you won't have all of these at the early days of a startup. You'll definitely have new, you'll definitely have active if things are going okay, and you'll definitely have churned. But it's really useful to be able to break these apart in terms of the points in the life cycle because you'll learn different things from each of them.

New customers will tell you, I downloaded your app because I wanted to blah, whereas a churned customers would be like, I thought you did X, but you don't or you don't do it well enough. You're daily active or your monthly active, like the people who you define to be your actual customers,

they'll tell you exactly what it is that you do for them in this world. But more importantly, something to listen out for is what caused them initially to go looking for your product? What actually was the trigger point that had them go and download the app or visit your side or sign up or whatever?

And also, what makes them launch it on a regular basis? When you have all this information, you can use this to draw what we call storyboards. A storyboard is something that just summarizes everything that we know about why people start using the product. For us, this is just, where does the product start and stop? So we're like, you know, this is an actual real intercom one from a few years ago. One of the jobs was, I have a problem with customer support, help me fix that problem today. And all these words are deliberately chosen. So today means I want to like install the thing and make the problem go away in the next 24 hours.

It does not mean I want to begin on a journey or whatever. The thing we look out for the sort of storyline you see at the bottom, it's like the Pixar pitch, like once upon a time, every day, until one day. What we're really trying to drill in there like a detective almost, we're just trying to drill into specifically what happened in your life such that our product came into it. And we do this for every release that we have in Intercom, right? We want to find out what happened such that you started needing our product. What did it feel like to start using our product? How did you know our product was the right one for you? What was your definition of success?

And do you ever think you'll stop using our product? These are the things that you want to hear from your customers. And we use all of this to define metrics that matter. It's time for another R Crowd deal of the week. Right now, you can join our crowd's investment in Zipin. Zippin is building checkout free technology for the trillion-dollar retail industry. According to the deal memo, Zippin, ZIPP-I-N, is already deployed by the world's largest food service company, so they're ahead of the game as the retail world adopts the safety and efficiency of contact list payments.

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Again, the RCredit account is free. Just go to O-U-R-C-R-O-W-D.com slash twist. A lot of startups early on will tend to just use what I would call hackable metrics, monthly active users or DAOs or email opens or something like that. But they don't tell you what you need to know. It's very easy to sort of hack these things. And I think the actual question you really need to know is, do they use my product every time it matters?

So the question you need to learn from users is what's the expected problem frequency or the trigger that causes me to use it? So when X happens, I use Y. When I land in a new city, I use Uber or every X I use Y. Every day I check my mail or every day I support my customers or whatever. And that's the definition of are they using it frequently enough? And every product has some expected frequency. If you're building payroll software, payrolls paid once per month,

support teams use their product every day. News apps are used probably every day, probably in short bursts. Fitness apps are probably used on a weekly basis, social apps on a daily basis. But that's just a frequency. The second piece is, are you fully solving the problem?

So don't just look at did they log in or did they launch the app, but you actually have to go a step further and say, well, what does it look like to meaningfully solve the problem? And it could be like they started their workout. They were active for more than five minutes. They recorded it, saved it, and maybe they shared it too.

That might be like the full soup to nuts of what it takes to actually solve that problem. Or they scanned a section, they read an article, they opened the newsletter or something like that. That might be what it takes to say, solve that I'm bored on a commute or whatever problem. But you should be able to represent these things in metrics. So when people ask you how many users do you have, it's easy to say 7,000 or whatever. But that 7,000 could be a load of people, you know, possibly using it, dabbling, not doing anything meaningful. What we obsess about an intercom is what we call active, engaged, fully configured customers.

They're using the best of intercom according to the price plan. They're using it in all the ways they can. And they're not using competing products in any way. So we know like, hey, if support volume drops from a customer, the chances are getting that support volume somewhere else. So we care about these things. But it's really important to focus on these metrics that matter and not just these superficial ones. Superficial ones are fine when you're pitching an investor because they might

not give you the time to explain all of these variables. But before you're pitching a investor, you're pitching yourself, is this working? And this is the stuff you care about. And you know you've product customer fit when for some amount of people. And it doesn't need to be a huge amount. It doesn't need to be thousands yet. When you, you could even just have like 40 or 50 people, but every time they have the problem, they use your product and it solves it completely. And I, I remember like a, I think superhuman focused and I think just like 50 regular, fully onboarded email customers. Obviously, it more today.

But initially, they focus on just, we need to solve email for a small number of people. Once you've done that, the hundreds and the thousands will follow because for a small group of unforgiving customers, every time this problem exists, they adopt your software. And that is exactly what when you have product customer fit. Product market fit is the next stage for me. you have like a product market fit when you have a repeatable, reliable and efficient way to reach the people who have the problem your product solves. And all three are necessary.

Repeatable meaning it's not just a one-time thing. Hey, we went on product hunt or hey, we sponsored a show or a podcast or whatever. Has to be something that'll just consistently work. And the reason to say sponsors won't consist any work is because it's usually the same audience you're going back to. You need to have a repeatable way. they'll keep going, right? Reliable in that, you know,

it should produce some sort of conversion rate that works and it shouldn't suddenly break in the middle of nowhere. You shouldn't be able to get out bid on it or anything like that. And efficient is when you get into the depths of things like LTV, lifetime value of the customer versus KAC, customer acquisition cost and all of that sort of stuff. But generally speaking, efficient means you can actually afford to do this, right? And product market fit means you have a way to bring the product to the market.

And these are the characteristics of it. Generally, when you think about entering a market, you'll be forced to look at your funnel. And most people look at their funnel and they look at it from a point of view. We've got thousands of people in our audience. Some of them click the ads. Some of them will visit our website. Some of them sign up, some on board,

some become active users, some go in trial and some start paying. And generally, marketers will typically say, we just need to grow the audience. And the danger with startups at your stage is that that's almost certainly the wrong way to go. It's so much more effective, efficient and reliable to start at the end and work backwards. So the temptation is to start with this sort of audience, right, and start your marketing there. And like let the whole world hear about our buggy product that doesn't solve the problem. That's a terrible thing to do.

Instead, if you could focus, like, you know, the danger of this is like you'll find yourself, you know, tweaking adword copy, playing around with experiments that ultimately don't matter, you can do things like it's easy to spend 100 grand on a large amount of like, say, AdWord plays. And that might feel like progress because you might actually species signups spike or whatever.

And to be clear, there are so many startups who will happily take money off you to do things like this. But if your customers aren't happy, engaged and profitable and sticking around for long enough, the last thing you want is more of them. So what I would say is the best marketing starts with happy paying customers. And you start at that stage, you make sure your customers are happy.

They are paying. If paying is your thing. If they're not paying, you just want high engagement so you can monetize through eyeballs, adverts, whatever. But generally speaking, you work backwards from there. You first of all focus on, you know, happy people. Then you focus on your trial lists. Then you focus on making your onboard of people all active.

Then you make all your startups on board. And you work backwards through the funnel. That means that you are in a much, richer position to actually blow up your audience at the end of all this. The last piece I'd say on this is it's important to think about how people will hear about and ultimately find your product. Again, people often think, well, we just need to have a product marketing page and an adword and we'll advertise against our brand name and if we're ticket tracking, we might even buy

the word ticket tracking and then we're done, right? There are so many ways people will actually try to find you that you can reach On the far right-hand side here, you see the Intercom logo, what that is is like people think, I need one of those. So like, I'm trying to listen to a podcast. I should listen to this week in startups. That's just entirely brand driven. It's brilliant because you don't have to pay for it.

It's direct, but it's, you know, that's the piece that's hard to grow, right? The next step is competition based. This is a larger market. This is people who are, say, in our case, they might be frustrated with their current support or engagement to a. where in the case of a podcast, they might be frustrated with the boredom that they're listening in all these other podcasts.

So they start looking for different versions. And in that world, you want to run competitive marketing. You want to have competitive landing pages. You want to say, stop using the boring old incumbent and start using us. Another way people will shop is to look at things like, you know, category by category.

So like they might have something like, I think I need to use something in the customer engagement space. And they might look at one of those, you know, grids that maps it every type of piece of software out there. And you need to make sure that you're putting your hand up to be in the right category. And lastly, there are people who actually don't know how to solve their problem. So oftentimes we get a lot of, say, traffic for people who are asking the question,

why do all my signups quit? And that is like quite a distance away from you should buy customer engagement software that embeds in your product. And we have to build all those bridges for them so that they realize their problem, actually it is attached to a category, there are a set of competitors, and we are the best of them. Now, there are lots more people who shop for,

you know, problems than there are, say, people who shop for Intercom. In Intercom language, this is exactly like, this is a very real example for us from a few years ago. People are coming to a website, not buying. That's a problem. And everyone's bidding on that, like conferences, growth people, AB testing software, all these sort of things.

That's one area where we have to compete. We also need to sell a tool to talk to customers. We also need to bid against Zendesk and like Salesforce and all these other companies. And then lastly, we also need to be the number one result for Intercom and we need everyone to actually want Intercom. And that's the full spectrum of how we think about like reaching the market. We have to be present in all ways people think about buying anything that Intercom solves. So just to conclude, I would say at the stage, at the early stage of a software company,

the first thing that matters is get your mission and your vision straight. Know exactly what the purpose of your company is and make sure all your employees know it. And they all buy into it much more than they buy into any other reason to work there. Lots of people want to work in tech, but do they want to work on your mission? It's a huge question. Secondly, speed is the fundamental characteristic of a successful startup. Yes, that means hard work. Yes, that means hiring for talent.

Yes, that means focus. Yes, that means diligence. it can mean long errors, it can mean all of these things. But speed is not an option. It's a mandatory requirement. Thirdly, product market fit. Sorry, product customer fit. Make sure you can find a small group of people

who don't have any emotional connection or loyalty to you. And make sure you can solve their problem specifically. And lastly, enter the market with your solution when you have done that. And enter it fast. I'm Des trainer from Intercom. And that's all. I wanted to say. Thank you very much. Every startup needs to ensure that they own their intellectual property. And that all starts with filing your trademarks. I have had tons of hassles with different

trademarks. I'm not going to get into all the details here. But imagine you have a really great name and a great domain name and then somebody adds a word to it. And then they create a competing product. And you didn't file your trademark. Now they go and file their trademark. And now they are going to try to stop you from using the trademark that you forgot. file. Don't be this person. You want to get your trademarks done. And if you don't know where start, look no further than brain-based file, a clean, simple, and automated trademark filing platform that gives anyone the ability to protect their best ideas. There is no need to spend thousands of dollars on a fancy law firm to file your trademark for you. Nope, you can do everything

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Brainbase.com slash twist. All right, Dad's great job, as always. Let's get into speed. Obviously, the reason why startups win is because they move faster than the incumbents. That is a great asset. You spend a lot of time talking about speed and hiring people who want to go fast. Is there a type of personality that is aligned with this, you know, going fast? Or can everybody go fast?

and it's just a matter of during the interview process telling somebody, we're going to move fast. And if you're not comfortable with moving fast, because you came from a big company that went slow because that was important for their mission is to go slow and be cautious. Maybe they work at GE in a nuclear division and going slow as an asset. How do you get talented people to embrace going fast? I think the characteristic you're looking for is risk tolerance,

because going fast inevitably means you're going to make more mistakes. That's the thing that's going to happen. And like people will get freaked out about, oh my God, we shipped that thing and it didn't work and the customers didn't like it. And I'm like, yeah, and that's why we unshipped it. And now we're on to the next project.

Whereas I think if your previous company was one where like, and you know, there are valid reasons to move slowly like banking software or nuclear power plants, whatever, right? But if your previous company was one where like, hey, we only have 500 enterprise customers and they'll quit if we make a mistake, yeah, fine. That's, you know, I can understand why you'd be trained that way, but you need to like have an

appetite for a risk. I think that's the invariance that's hard to fix. Like most people, like in Intercom, if you, you kind of jump on this like very, very fast conveyor belt in a sense. So you being slow isn't really an option, but you need to be okay with the idea that every and then we'll make a wrong decision, we'll abandon the strategy, we'll change something, we'll, you know, reorg, whatever. And we're okay with the fact that we make mistakes.

And like, you know, making mistakes means we're making things. And that's like, that's the tradeoff. That's the real characterist you're looking for. Are you okay? Moving fast, taking risks, putting your name on something and realizing it didn't work, et cetera. So that ownership combined with permission to make mistakes is part of this social contract when you come join a startup. I think that's just a great way you framed it. Okay.

So let's talk about something interesting that happened during the pandemic, which was we were all forced to work remote. and, with the exception of frontline workers, thank you for your service. And that, what I found is things are now moving at a breakneck speed. And people are being cutthroat about being efficient. So as but one example, founders used to love to meet in person. Their goal was to get that in-person meeting because they thought they could sway you. And that was the important thing was to get in the room and spend 90 minutes, you know, and extend the meeting for as long as possible.

Now I'm seeing founders say, hey, let's do a quick 20-minute call. I'll run you through the short deck. You can ask me questions. Then let me know if you think it's a fit, we can go deeper. And so now I'm seeing three, four companies in the time I used to take to see one.

And I'm doing twice as many deals at twice the investment amount per deal, all because of the pandemic. And I have a thesis, which is, hey, during the pandemic, you're getting to meet more companies, therefore you're finding more fits and therefore you can place more bets and then vice versa. The reason why so many people are getting funded is because they're getting to meet more investors and therefore there's more fit. So a long way of sort of asking, have you seen something simpler in the product space or running

companies where, gosh, everybody being forced to be remote is making people more cutthroat, brisk, fast, whatever. Yes. The thing I notice most is, and we see this in Intercom, too, people are realizing that like meetings of like 30 minute blocks of time chunks, which is kind of the norm, right? They're quite expensive and maybe not as necessary as we often taught. And I think the Zoom fatigue is a real thing.

So we have a lot of meetings. Like today I had like four or five meetings that lasted like seven minutes, you know, They just needed to hear it from me straight about what we were doing. And I said it to them. But what I also see is a lot of meetings getting replaced by just, you know, moving towards a written culture. Like you're probably the same at launch where you have just, you know, people just post in Slack.

Here's what I'm doing today. They don't need to meet you every morning. You don't have a daily stand-up routine. They just say, like, people are finally realizing that like reading is twice as fast as as listening. And that's like when you realize that, you realize, well, if your culture really wants to speed up, you move to a written culture. You move to an asynchronous, written culture.

where business moves at the speed of thought. And I think like, so we see that on Intercom where just things are happening so much faster because I'm realizing I can send you a Google Doc that outlines my thinking. And if I take the time to write it well, we don't need to talk. And that's an actual time save,

even though it takes me longer to write the doc. If it deletes the meeting, that's a win. And specifically, if it can be reused and trickle down the org, that's double so. I'm seeing a little bit of fallback onto things like looms, you know,

when you send a video that narrates through a piece. Yeah. That's working as well. And then on the investing side, I'm getting the same thing. I'm like literally, for me, I'm very grateful for this. Like we don't need to meet. I'm also trying to get out of the meetings as well. I'm like, hey, look, I actually, if you need a decision by Sunday,

can we just back and forth this over email or SMS or whatever? Yeah. Because, you know, and I'm totally comfortable writing a check based on what I heard in email. I don't feel like looking the founder in the eye is that important to me for the types of checks I'm writing and for like the early stage I'm going in. It's already loaded the risk anyway. So like, you know, character testing isn't going to be something. that that's a useful variable for me.

So I think, like, we are seeing everything speeding up because of the move to written, the async nature, people are pissed off jumping on Zoom calls all day. And I just, I don't think we're going to necessarily bounce back to like, hey, let's all go and, you know, meet in our local coffee shops and go back to one hour pitch decks and all that. I don't see it happening. Yeah, I am now thinking I'm going to have a lunch with, you know, key members of the team, every other week or, you know, different members. And, you know, I have to eat lunch at some point anyway.

And it's primarily going to be for socialization. Totally. And, you know, to hear how they're doing, hear how their kids are, what's going on in their life and enjoy a meal together. And then I love this written word. I've been using notion and I've become addicted to it. Other people are using Rome and some other solutions. And we used to use Google Docs for it, but it doesn't have that sort of singular

giant document wiki effect. And I'm telling everybody, if you're explaining this to me, I want in your daily start of day or end of day, start a week, end of week, a link to the notion page that explains this. Please make a notion page about this best practice and share it with folks. And now when we do our weekly staff meeting, we used to go through a bunch of charts. Now I tell everybody, post the charts into Slack, and everybody comment on the charts what questions you have, and then I'll read the questions.

and if there's no questions, we don't need to pull up the chart. And now we're having higher level discussion. So it's really fascinating. I miss all the people I work with greatly and I want to see them and hang out with them. But the fact that people are happier being around their families, you know, having their own schedule, you know, it really has made me double down on work from home. But it doesn't work for everybody. So how do you think about mentorship and young people or young in their career? It doesn't necessarily be an age thing, but there's a mentorship that occurs in person.

So we're building on the fabric that we've built for the last decade, you and I, in our companies. Would we have this strong culture at launch or at intercom? I wonder if we didn't have that time together, you know, in the trenches. So how do you think about that? What's lost? I think lost is like the sense like when people have left intercom during the pandemic I often joke that they're just swapping us for a different tab in the same browser

because that's what that's what moving company really is at this point it's like you know of course it's going to be another Slack channel but like none of these things are unique in the sense I think like the sense of company identity like the idea that I am an intercomrade and that I have friends in this company that we met you know as we were watching the product demos over you know having beers or whatever, you lose all of that.

And I think people will struggle to recreate this. And I don't think anyone has a great answer yet. I'm seeing all these epic blog posts written about here's how to make hybrid work, but mostly written by people who have yet to make hybrid work in a sense. We all know we're going back to this three day a week thing. None of us know how it's going to work. There's a lot of software companies targeting it saying, oh, here's a way to automatically calendar so you're always in work at the same time as your colleagues, whatever.

I think there might be some apps that could be useful here. but generally speaking, I don't know what it would be like to be a 22 year old, fresh out of college, joining a company today, going a year without meeting anyone. Bear in mind,

like for those specifically at that point in life, that's where people find their friends, potentially future partners, just a social scene. It's probably often where they find their next job through people in the current job and all that. So there's a lot of that's kind of been stolen, a lot of like to say like post work drinks chatter

that would happen that would spread other pieces of information. There's a lot of that that's being cut out. I actually don't have an immediate, oh, here's what you should do. I think your point about moving to like deliberate social gatherings with your team is really valuable. We do that at Instagram as well. One shift we've made recently is, you know that Jeff Bezos style thing where like if for anyone who's presenting, they write a six page memo or maximum six pages. We all read it at the start of the meeting and we just comment either major or minor.

And major means like we have to go through this before I approve and minor means just FYI. Here's some shit that you should think about. But we do that. And because of that, we get through the meeting in like, oftentimes like 20, 30 minutes. What would have been like a two hour conversation? And then we've like 90 minutes for like,

how's your weekend? How are the kids? Oh, has your son recording well, whatever. And like we're now joking about like there. Our next, our first and next actual offsite when I get back to San Francisco, we're probably just going to hang out. Like we don't actually need a big agenda because we were getting sure our topics pretty well.

And I think like that hangout is just as important because there will be hard. Like interms on a tear right now, but there will be hard times ahead. And there's a lot of folks who are new to the exact team that I've yet to even meet in person. Like, I've never met a CFO or a CRO in real life. And we have to go to war together over the next few years. So, like, there's a lot of, like, we, it's more important for me that we build the social bonds than it is that we like, you know, have the serious conversation eyeball to eyeball

about optimizing some advertising campaign or whatever. It is so interesting when you think about it. The cost of quitting a job where you've never met anybody and you have no fabric and no real stake in the company other than the transactional nature of compensation is, it gives people the ability to say, yeah, I'm just going to change tabs. I'm just going to move over to another tab. I'll try that. And then I can flip back and forth.

In a way, there's something lost there, which is you didn't get a chance to bond with a group of people and we're social beings. In another way, you get to find a perfect fit for yourself. And this idea that you're going to stay in a job because you don't want to have on your resume that you flipped after six months. That's actually kind of a good thing as well, because you really don't want people who are unhappy or it's not a fit for grinding it out and then creating a toxic culture feeling resentful. Yeah, that's definitely true.

I think in general, exploring the solution space as a young employee is a good thing. I definitely don't negatively look at people who have hopped too often. I do become skeptical if they've hopped and like frequently. advanced at the same time. So like entry level engineer, senior engineer, and like a principle of engineering all in the space of like, you know, four or five months per student or whatever. And I think I'm seeing a bit of that happen because the market is so

competitive for tech talent right now that like people are just basically offering slightly more senior roles to try and get people out of companies, regardless of merit. And there's definitely an opportunistic thing you can do right now, which is I think if you're smart, you can kind of outrun your BS by like, talk a big game. get the job, quit before they find you out, take the next role, the next company, whatever.

Title inflation each time. And then people on the other side of the table, like, sure, if you want a VP title, we'll give it to you, if that gets you in the door, because we got to fill the seat. That's exactly it. Like so, and you do see that. And you don't see it in engineering generally because at some point, it's like, yo, can you code?

You know, like there's actual, there's a hard test, right? Like, yeah, but in the areas where you, yeah, exactly. Well, in the areas where, like, we're frankly, like, talking is the skill. And when it went like some per person's under pressure to hire, like, as it we really need this head of blah, blah, blah, you'll see like mishire is all over the place. And I think that's, that is something or it's going to be cleaned up post-corona. Everyone's going to be like, oh, we really adopted a lot of people here who aren't as sharp as they seemed initially an interview, you know?

Is this the end of middle management or management in general because people are managing themselves and in a remote way, you're forced to manage yourself or you can't have the job? I, if, like, I've definitely seen more self-directed people or just generally, like, the written culture forces a lot more, just own your stuff. If you think about middle management as just being like, I listen to Peter and I tell Paul what to do or whatever, yeah, I think that type of role is less useful. I think like, you know, in Intercom's definition of middle management, it's usually like, you know, I control these seven teams and I report to this director of the support product or whatever. So that type of role is still essential because you're still doing resource balancing

and all that sort of stuff within your own group. Do you think there's going to be a grand reorganization at some of these giant tech companies? We've seen folks say, hey, listen, you got to come back three days a week. People saying, I never want to come back. One of the things I'm realizing is there are people who want to go to offices. Okay, that's easy. We let them go to the office. There are people who are A-level performance. And I'm thinking about this matrix in my mind, high performer, medium performer, low performer. And then you have fully remote work from the office. Well, any great company should be getting rid of low performers,

whether it's 10%, 1% or 25% your workforce, there's no debate there. And then on the other end, anybody who's a real contributor, who cares if they're at home or if they're at the office, this is a killer sales executive, this is a killer developer, it need not matter where they do their work from. And then you have everything in the middle. let's say average performers, but who have potential to maybe become serious contributors, maybe people who are low average, above average.

That's where I think we're going to see maybe a two-class system come in. You're an average performer, but we want to invest in you. It might be hard to do without you being in person more, and they would not have the option, whereas the A-list players would get to pick. Anybody in the middle, you know, you've got to come to the office or the company picks, and then obviously you want to get rid of folks who don't. Do you think that's what we'll see here in this grand reconciliation when we go back to offices?

I think the first thing, like, I think everyone's going to run back initially and everyone will, there'll be this sudden realization that, hey, turns out work spaces with good air conditioning and nice food and purposely designed for work with nice meetings and all that nice meeting rooms. People are going to love it initially.

That's what, like we've been dabbling. We're returning to office a little bit and intercom. Like the appetite is there from the employees. They, like, they do realize. like people actually, you know, architects design offices for work and there's something useful about that. So I think there'll be an initial storm back.

Remote people will, fully remote people will always be fully remote and that's fine. Companies will have to come to their own decision about what percentage, what's the threshold for doing that? Obviously, like, you know, you don't want a junior person who's like super inexperienced and needs a lot of mentorship and wants to like learn from other senior engineers. It's just going to be tough for them to be doing it from a bedroom somewhere.

However, I think that the next stage, So once everyone rushes back, this three day a week thing is going to be complicated because I think we're going to realize maybe we let each team decide its own cadence, but we want people, we want a team behaving the same. I think that's what you're going to realize. If it's like six people in a room and one person on dial in, it's just going to be messy, right? Like, that person might as well not be there because you even forget there. Somebody forget, I mean, how many times do people forget to dial that person in?

And that person's calling on the phone. Can somebody pick up their phone and dial me in? Totally. And like, that's just a horrible experience on both sides. And it's not like, it's not fair on either side, in my opinion. If the six people in the room having a very high bandwidth conversation, it's just weird to stop and go, okay, let's go over to Johnny now. Johnny, you know, so like I think what does work is we say like Monday's and Tuesdays or Wednesdays or whatever,

we're in the office. And that's all the office stuff. After that, we have dished out the work. We ever knows what they're doing. We don't need to contact regularly. We move to written async, Slack, docks, whatever, for the other two or three days or whatever your ratio is. I think just teams will need to set that operational cadence themselves.

I think what, you know, I suspect that it'll be like three months after everyone's back before people realize that this is what we need to do. And there will be some kind of re-bundling of like some teams will be fully in office. Some teams will be fully remote. And the hybrids will have to agree on the days that they behave like either of those other two teams. And that's when you're like, but ultimately I think you can't just dabble with remote. I think once you're saying some people, especially as you move up senior people,

aren't in the office all the time, to shift towards a written culture becomes kind of mandatory, because it's either that or just a shitload of meetings to share random pieces of context. And I think that'll get quite expensive, and people will work it out. Yeah. All right, listen, Des, this has been amazing.

Thank you so much. Everybody knows Intercom. I don't need to tell you it's the industry standard. Great product. Go use it. I don't know if you have a special URL for startups to go to. We do. We have intercom.coms forward slash early stage.

Perfect. And I'm sure you'll get a great deal there. and all of our startups use the product and love it. So continued success, and it's been great to get to know you over these years. And I really appreciate you sharing your wisdom with the This Weekend Startups community. Thank you, Jason. All right. We'll see you all next time on This Weekend Startups.

Bye-bye.