Eoghan McCabe
speaker
119 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard Oct 2024
Eoghan McCabe’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And so talking about moats, it's kind of silly. Now that said, some of the greatest technology companies of our generation then go on to build networks and other things that do become defensible. whether it's Apple's iMessages or their ecosystem, whether it's Google's data, whether it's Facebook's network.
At some point, you can build some degree of defensibility, but software companies and technology companies in particular, they don't tend to have any defensibility other than the fact that they can build better and faster than anyone else. And that's okay.
It's one of them. Working your ass off, working very hard.
I think it was really acute and fun branding for a thing that anyone who's built a company has deployed since the start of companies. There's nothing new about it. There's countless books about Steve Jobs and how he operated. Maybe it gives permission now to founders to trust their gut and instinct, which I think is a really, really good thing.
But business is very much an art, particularly starting a business from scratch is a deeply creative endeavor. The worst type of art is art produced by committee. I would say it's just not art if you're trying to find the lowest common denominator and something that satisfies everyone.
And so highly agentic individuals and acting on their own intuition, I think is how greatness has always been made.
It's in the hundreds of millions. So we'd be one of the larger private software companies. Why don't you go public?
I mean, of course a VC would say go public. These VCs need liquidity. Founders who have a different mission and a longer time horizon and who actually need to operate the businesses, unlike Gurley, have different priorities. My goal is to build a giant, highly impactful, really fucking cool technology company.
It means absolutely nothing to me whether or not my stock is traded on the public market or the private market.
They're the things that the analyst. want. They're the things that the investors want. I want a shit ton of customers, a shit ton of revenue. I want a really impactful organization. I want to have a really, really big amount of influence on technology at large. I don't need all of the regulatory compliance to do any of that. All the regulatory compliance gets in the way of that.
But the reason that people take public companies private during crazy moments like this post COVID, now post AI is is so that they can make really big swings and big bets without all of the rigmarole of being public. We nearly went public in 2022, and I'm so grateful that we did not. Talk to me about that. I didn't know that. Yeah, 2022. I think it was June 15. We had a stock ticker that I hated.
Nothing cool was available. We had written our S1, and the markets collapsed. We were not the only ones. How did people respond?
Liquidity coming. The right investors want value long term. And they know that in these moments of great change that the best value will be created behind closed doors. All the big swings and changes I made at Intercom that has dramatically accelerated our revenue growth. I don't think I could have made that if I was a public company CEO.
There will be IPOs, there will be liquidity, maybe on private markets. M&A will warm up again. There's a lot of money in PE. It'll have to unstick itself. But admittedly, we're currently in an awkward patch where a lot of people are asking themselves, does this VC model even make sense? I mean, Intercom is a 13-year-old company. When people were invested
Investing in Intercom, they thought maybe they'd get liquidity in, what, eight years? And we are by far not the only company of that tenure. So the game has changed. Do you think the VC model still works? The amount of capital at an early stage available today suggests to me that that's got to be a crappy end of the market for VCs. It's just a raw commodity now.
Early stage VC, I don't know how you make a return there.
We forced more and more customers to talk to sales. It certainly increased ACVs, but it actually cut out a phenomenal amount of growth in SMBs and small customers. And those small customers were actually the lifeblood for our sales customers. They just needed some time to grow. That was a really, really, really, really big mistake. Our total customer count started to shrink. That's one example.
Others were pricing. We got greedy. We wanted people to sign big contracts up front rather than allow them to expand into them. So it was just going against all our intuition. Bad commercialization. That was the main thing. Do we want to talk about the internal changes at Intercom about restarting the startup and the culture? Yeah. Companies are this deeply interconnected system.
You know, you can't change one thing without changing another. You can't pick and choose. It's not an a la carte menu. It's a deeply interconnected system. We needed to totally change our values, make clear that hard work and a focus on our mission was key, was crucial. I gave permission to people to act in quick and scrappy and messy ways. I rolled up my sleeves and got involved myself.
I set this project called Project 52, where I gave us 52 weeks to reinvent the company. I spoke to the company every single week. I just created this very high degree of intensity.
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