Why Being First Does Not Matter

Thank you for having me yet again.

I think we had a few different ideas. So we were originally a consultancy building software for other people. There was a few ideas on the go. Ones that, like, at times looked hilariously bad. Like, we had an idea for, like, a whiteboarding product, and that, like, ultimately looked, like not a good idea contrasted with Intercom. But then something like Miro comes out, like, years later, and you’re like, maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea. However, with Intercom, we’re building an actual way to communicate with our customers from a previous product, and we wanna communicate inside the product.

The real spark was when we realized how much more effective that was. I remember Eoghan at the time, our former CEO, current chairperson, saying to Ciaran that this could actually be a huge idea by itself, this little talk to customers in your product type thing. And when I heard that, my response whenever I think, oh, could this be an idea? I just immediately go into, what’s the actual strongest Ironman case we can push to support this or Steelman case? So I was like, right, what are the trends there?

Whether it’s messaging or whether it’s like the rise of web software, whether it’s the rise of SaaS and the need for relationships. I started to look at, right, okay, this, it supports so many current sort of tectonic shifts. And then, obviously, the real click was once we actually offered it to other people and we saw them use it and we saw them, like, rip it out of our hands and be like, oh my god. I love this thing. How did my life exist without a type of thing?

That was when it was like, right. Clearly, we’re onto something. And that was the decision then to, like, close the consultancy. Let’s get going, and let’s go all in on this.

I look at the multiple. The quality of founder times the quality of the idea. But if you’re telling me I can only have one, I’ll definitely pick the quality founder over the quality idea. I think ideas are only good until you say them out loud, and then all of sudden everyone hears about it. There’s an Intercom spin out right now called Equals. It connects spreadsheets like Excel. Like sorry. It is a spreadsheet, and it connects to, like, data warehousing. Apparently, that’s a huge idea. And everyone who’s ever used a spreadsheet, the first question you asked them is, do you connect it to other sources of information?

They’re like, oh, will I take an export from a Snowflake and import? The very second they hear that idea, they’re like, well, I’m in. I want it. Let me invest. Let me buy. I want the product right now. But now that idea is out there. So if all you had was that idea, there’s gonna be at least a 100 other people trying to copy that idea and do a quicker new and better new. And if they care about it more than you or they’re just better than you, they’re gonna ghost you.

So being first doesn’t matter. And I think, like, there’s some of the attachment to the idea of, like, the uniqueness of the idea is only useful in a world where being first matters. I think it’s very rare you can sustain the head start if somebody else is either better funded, better resourced, more passionate, and all you are is the guy who came up with the idea.

I don’t actually think that that’s true. I think, like, Google have, like, tried to put their mind to, like, god knows how many things, and you still see the emergence of God knows how many products. Like, why isn’t Slack part of the G Suite? It’s because they can’t put their mind to that. Why does Figma exist? Because they can’t put their mind to that. Like, why is Superhuman doing well? Because they can’t put their mind to that. In the case of Google, it’s more like, what do they actually prioritize?

And the answer is their core businesses, of which they have, like, five or six or seven. YouTube, G Suite, search ads, blah blah blah. Right? I think being being first doesn’t matter as in the rest of saying, let’s say me and you have a really dope idea for a really smart take up project management, and it involves if you wanna wind the clock back, let’s say it involves, like, the idea of a metaphor of Post it notes that you can drag and drop around the place.

Give it a year and everyone will have it. If it makes sense, give it a year and everyone will have it. And then what are you left with? And if what you’re left with is, well, we had it first, and you start running advertising campaigns saying the original, you’re screwed. No one actually cares. When you pick up your phone, you don’t really care if this is the first touchscreen or not. Turns out it wasn’t, but it doesn’t matter. The question is, can you sustain your advantage?

And I think if all you are is a person who had the idea, but you don’t have that much passion or you don’t have that much ability, I don’t think like a mediocre person with a unique idea will work.

Like, real defensibility, no. It does not exist. I think there are few apps I’m just trying to give a good example. Like, Figma might be one or, you know, like, Zenly, the the Snapchat app. Yeah. Yeah. Things where it’s, like, really beautifully crafted, really high end engineering, and really hard to copy. Those sort of products, when you see them first, you’re like, it’s going to take a long time to get to where these people are today. And like the way I describe that in, like, startup companies who are looking for me to invest is I describe the length of the road to the starting line.

And I would call if you say you wanna compete with Figma, I’d say, Jesus, Harry, that is a long road to the starting line, which basically means

Absolutely. And it’s the same when you say, like, oh, we’re gonna work on a new email client. I’m like, Long road to the starting line. I can tell you what your first two years of roadmap is, and then at the at the end of that, can you add something unique on top? Who knows? So I think, like, day one defensibility is rare, but every now and then some company does emerge with something that you’re like, wow. If you wanna copy that, you’ll be a long time working on that.

It might be like a year, year and a half. In Figma’s case, as you said, like, two plus years. I think anyone who’s like, right, like, let’s say Adobe probably saw Figma, and they’re probably smart enough to go, wow. This is a threat to one of our big cash cows. And if they dispatched a team of their brightest, which I’m not saying they did or didn’t, and they went out full time, in two years’ time, they’d have to hope that Figma somehow froze to give them that much time to catch up.

And Figma ain’t freezing, and Dylan’s too smart a guy to, like, not make monster progress.

If they know what they’re doing. Yeah, definitely. The only sort of test I’d say there is sometimes my advice in those cases is work on your differentiators first. So in the case of, say, an email client, oh, we have a new take on email. I would say, right, here’s what I believe. I believe you’re a competent engineer. I believe you can work out SMTP and IMAP and spam filtering and all that. Let’s just push all that aside. I don’t wanna see a single engineer working on that.

Show me the thing you’re gonna build that’s actually new to market. Even if the email stuff doesn’t work, I don’t care. I’m sure you’ll solve the rich text editor problem, but I need to see the difference early. Don’t tell me after two years’ we finally caught up with Gmail, and now with three months of runway left, we’re gonna add in the thing that makes us different. It’s a waste of time. You have to actually, like, acid test the differentiators first. But in general, I’m not against it.

We have to go dark for, like, two years to produce something monster. I don’t have a concern with that.

I don’t engage in it, and the reason is the checks I write so this is where I mean you’re slightly different in that. The volume and the size of check is probably slightly off. You’re larger than me in both ways. So for me, if it was, like, left handed dentists in Dublin, yeah, I’m not gonna invest. Right? Like, I only need the market probably to be, like, around a billion of, like, total revenue spent for this seed check to turn into a valuable series a or whatever.

It doesn’t need to be a monster. However, the way I actually do it is not like the founders will often come at you with, like, crazy projections and, like, Gartner estimates and all that. Like, what I actually try to look for is just, well, what is the problem you solve? How many people have that problem? And how big a problem is it to the people who have it? A big problem to me is something that happens often and matters a lot. Email. Communicating with your work colleagues.

These are like big problems. Talking to your customers. Frequently occurring problem that you’ll probably spend money on. Whereas when someone says, oh, this is like the app that checks in to see how your employees are doing on the third weekend of every whatever. I’m like, yeah, it doesn’t sound like as big of a problem. So I’m gonna put that into the very low category. And in that world, I’d wanna see near perfect execution because the only way that market makes sense is if you own all of it.

If that ends up being like a cottage industry of, like, 15 different bootstraps companies and you’re, like, gonna take one slice of it, them were into, like, you might tap out a $15,000,000 an hour, and you’re asking for a seed at a value of 40. That’s, like, where I’m like, alright. I’m out. But, honestly, I’m out there earlier than the market size. I’m out because I’m just not that interested because it doesn’t sound really big.

They are relevant. I think if someone’s coming to you at that earliest stage and they’ve a really, like, dialed read under CAC LTV, I’m like, how is that important? Why are you working on that versus working on, like, building a great product? All these numbers matter, but they matter at scale. They just don’t matter early on. What I’m way more interested in is how are you gonna get customers in a way that your competitors can’t? And if their answer is, like, oh, we’re gonna outbid them for CAC LTV, then sure.

Let’s dig into that. But if the answer is thought Leadership, I’m like, right. Show me sort of thought leadership you’re gonna do. If it’s like, oh, we’re gonna do YouTube. Alright. Show me an example of a video or whatever. The conversation that where most startups fail out is not the efficiency of CAC LTV. It’s a blank face after I say, do you have a differentiated route to customers, or are you just gonna be bidding it out with the rest of

Yeah. The only times I’ve been satisfied is when the best way I could describe it is, like, when it’s a closed industry. So, like, when I was talking to the folks at Hopkins, they’re like, well, we need to just reach every event organizer on Earth and every company that organizes events on Earth, and we actually have not quite their words. We’ve kinda got those lists already. The first three quarters of most marketing team’s efforts were already passed, which is find the people. We have found the people.

Now we need to have compelling reasons to get them to use it, and it’s gonna be an outbound campaign, and it’s gonna be expensive, and we’re gonna be sending them gift baskets, we’re gonna be doing all that stuff to try and get them to pay attention to us. But that’s ultimately the plan. Then I’m like, right. That makes sense. I believe you’re working in a closed market, and I believe you can actually identify all of your targets. It’s just different when someone says, we’re we’re selling to startups because their plan is go number one on Hacker News and repost on Product Hunt every two days.

I think since I wrote my very first check-in the very first company, which is gonna be called Workable, and I’ve probably written, like, 50 or 60¢, a few things I’ve learned. One is how little tolerance you have for for excuses when they’re outside of your business versus when they’re inside of your business. So when someone tries to pitch me on on a thing and they say, oh, well, the reason it hasn’t taken off yet is because, oh, well, we have to let go of our VP of engineering, and we’ve got a new one now, and she’s awesome, blah blah blah.

I just net all that out to we couldn’t get it done. And I make my decision based on that. And yet, if internally someone’s asked me why did such and such a thing happen, I’m immediately going into the same mode of, oh, well, we couldn’t blah blah blah. So I think it’s definitely sharpened my sort of appreciation of how other people will see Intercom. I think that’s one whole piece. I think secondly, seeing the internals of other companies and learning how they make decisions is really useful from understanding an Intercom buyer’s perspective.

Is in under what grounds would you adopt Intercom? And kind of relatively speaking, in all of the priorities in your world, how important are we? In your head, like, you’re the number one podcast on everyone’s list or whatever, but in practice, you’re in amongst 500. Similarly, with Intercom, we think, well, surely they’ve got at least 10 people talking about Intercom on a daily basis. But, no, it’s actually just Joey and the quarter working on in apps or whatever. So I think getting a sense of your own importance as you rank in other companies is useful as well.

I guess literally writing the check doesn’t, but the time you spend with the founder does. So my take on how I angel invest is I try to spend as little time scheduled as possible, but a lot of time unscheduled. And by unscheduled, I mean asynchronous email or whatever. Right? Because I’ve always been interested in startups. I’m just I love seeing businesses grow. I love diagnosing why why businesses are sort of flatlining or struggling. What the check does is kind of get you a stream of information about, like, a new Sudoku that you can kind of try to unravel, and you can throw in suggestions.

Or you can see the inside of, like, as is the in some of the investments, like, you just get to see inside a rocket ship that’s just humming and you learn. People don’t think this is true. I’m humble enough to say, yes, Intercom is like a Series D or whatever company. We don’t need to raise, so hence it’s not E or F or whatever, but I can. But I can learn a lot from a Series A or B person because, like, when they’re wonderful executors, they’re wonderful executors.

I’ve invested in companies that have gone on to surpass the valuation of Intercom many times over and that the founders have turned into absolute monster CEOs and monster COOs along the way. You learn lot from seeing success and how that performs.

I’ll answer this in a slightly different way. I’ve invested in companies like Stripe is on one end, just like a total absolute outlier. But I’m not gonna say blah blah blah because, like, everyone knows Stripe, and it’s kinda too easy. But a company where I’ve seen us that had had, say, more close access and watch to take off with, say, Miro, where Andreessen is the CEO there, they have just been an execution machine for a really specific problem, and they kinda had stood up against an external what could have been a threat in FigJam, and they’ve done really well through that as well.

That’s a company where I’ve just watched it pretty much from early doors really do well. Another one which is, like, earlier

Focus on speed of execution. So I think the easiest thing for a company like Miro to do, I think, is to get notions about becoming Microsoft Office and starting to branch out and becoming a document editor and all that sort of stuff. Because everyone tells you need to go to become a multiplatform suite, blah blah blah. You get all the narrative of expand your TAM now, etcetera, etcetera. Maybe that’s the right thing for them to do. What they’ve I’ve actually spent all their time doing is perfecting online multiplayer whiteboarding, and I think that’s a really important thing for them to do.

I’d say it is probably a focused, intense execution without, like, letting their newfound status distract them from it. If you have to do if you just sit down with a journalist and say, why you’re now worth whatever billion dollars they’re worth, you feel obliged to say all this new shit. You feel obliged to say, well, we’re actually gonna become a little bit of metaverse play, and we’re thinking about augmented reality, and we’re releasing some hardware. That’s the easiest thing to do, say all this dope shit that you sound famous.

But actually, the intensity of the executioner has just been awesome.

A lot of this is gonna be kind of boring and tactical, but I think that’s honestly what a lot of listeners come before. One thing you’d have to look at is starting with the boring shit. Can we actually recruit enough engineers and designers and PMs to actually own a second product in a way that doesn’t harm the first product? Because that first product still needs new people as well. You need backfills. You need to continue the investment there. So one whole piece is just very tactical.

It’s like, can we get the team in? And oftentimes that comes from opening a second office or from acquiring an, you know, acquihire or something like that. But, like, are we gonna be able to get the people in a way that doesn’t cannibalize the success on what is currently the only thing we have that works? That’s one whole piece of calculus. Are we ready to do it from a staff side? Then separately, do we credibly believe, and this is a two parter here. One is, is the ROI of adding a new product definitely greater than increasing the maturity and possibly the TAM by the going book market or whatever of the current thing we have?

So if we have a project management tool and someone wants us to do a time tracking tool, are we sure that doing the time tracking tool is going to be adding more value to the overall business than just really nailing this project management tool or whatever it is. Right? And then thirdly, is there value in doing both of these two things under the same company? This is a question of like brand architecture in a sense. Right? Because if you really if you think, hey, I can find a second team and they’re gonna go and do this other thing.

Why don’t you start a second startup? There has to be some, like, multiplicative value where actually both products end up with unfair advantages because of their cohabitation. They have to share either a source of truth, customer record or something like that. They have to have some sort of shared entities and shared workflows and shared UI. That means that you can do the second product better than some random person off the street could do it, and that your customers ideally will buy it off you because they prefer that advantage too.

The first trigger point for me is always like, are we sure we’re tapped out with what we’re currently doing? Maybe a tapped out is probably too negative. Are we very confident in the trajectory towards a really successful outcome for product A? Then if product B, are we ready to hire for product B? And then if we’re picking B, are we sure we could do it in a way that doesn’t hurt A? Are we sure that it’s valuable and it’s more valuable than just simply continuing on a?

And then lastly, does a plus b is that multiplicative or is that additive? Are you basically adding two things together or are you multiplying two things?

I I actually think you have to do both. I think you have to prove out that you have some actual alpha, that you could do something that no one else can do. Going back to the idea of chip your differentiators first, like, show me this thing working. Let’s say a project management tool and you wanna do whatever HR tool. Show me why are you better than, like, Workday or Bamboo or humans or whatever. Right? Like, give me something that says that this is actually worth building and it’s actually new to market as opposed to new to your company.

And then if you can show that, then I think you actually have to show the full set of resources out. This is where the advice would differ depending on the stage of the company. If Intercom launches a surveys tool, which we did in March, we can’t be limping in with an MVP that doesn’t work. It would actually be brand damaging. It needs to have all of the traits of Intercom, which means in context, AI, ML, reporting, mobile plus web, blah blah blah. There’s like some default assumptions we want our customers to make when they see the Intercom logo, and we need to meet all of that, which means you have to fully resource it.

Whereas, like, a Y Combinator startup would just eke away one feature at a time. We do brand damage if we ask one of our largest customers, let’s say, Atlassian or whatever. Hey, we have a new surveys product. Why don’t you give it a try? And they try it and it doesn’t work or it only has one feature. They’re like, mother of god, what are we paying you for? So you have to kind of make sure that your release matches the sort of brand posture that you wanna have with your customers.

I think one area that’s most difficult to think about is what is a product versus what is just a paid upgrade to your existing platform. And under what grounds should you say this is a new product or this is just an extra tab that you pay an extra few dollars to unlock? And I think in general, there are loads of arguments as to when you should do one versus the other. Usually, it’s around, does it have a distinct buyer that for whom the other product wouldn’t appeal to?

And if so, do you have a cross sell, upsell plan? How do make sure that these people hear about each other and buy it such that it doesn’t end up just being an entirely separate line of business? We’ve made mistakes there. We’ve definitely made mistakes there. We’ve confused products with features and features of products, and we’ve had to unroll that and fix that back again.

So I totally agree. And I think if you’re looking at it from the venture capitalist’s point of view or even maybe, like, from the CEO’s point of view, you might be tempted to think everything’s a product because you’re actually thinking about its impact on potential TAM expansion and you’re thinking about revenue and all that. I think you have to look at it from the customer’s point of view and say, for the vast majority of our customers who use our current product, would they expect this to be part of a connected workflow within the platform?

Or do they think that this is somewhat exogenous to what they’re currently doing here? And then there’s other nuanced pieces like, how are they currently solving the problem that this featureproduct solves? And if the answer is they’re doing it in Excel or whatever, then, yeah, you could probably argue you put it in as a feature. If they actually have another platform where they, like, track holidays or whatever the hell it is, right, whatever the feature might do, if they have a whole lot of solution already, that’s usually a sign that they were willing to buy two different products in this space.

So you actually could justifiably claim that this is an entirely separate product, possibly with separate buyers and all that. But I think you have to look at it not from a balance sheet or not even from a technical perspective or even a product purist perspective, but just what do your customers expect and how are they currently solving the problem? And specifically your your target customers, because your free customers will expect everything to be for free attached to everything, you’ll just end up with this amorphous blob of a product.

I think trajectory is defining trait. So over time, does this product propel itself? Is it growing or dying by default? And you might do a lot of customer marketing where you give effectively, like, incubation in a sense. So you’re putting on life support, reminding your customers every month, don’t forget about this thing over here. And they all try it once and then it fades away again. If it doesn’t have its own momentum, as a feature or a product, and if you find yourself just constantly trying to push and nudge, and you can’t get customers to stick to it, that’s generally a sign that as a feature or product, it’s not working.

Now, you could rebuild it, you could do a lot of customer research, and you could find out what’s going right or wrong. But the main point is you have to actually get to the bottom of what’s broken. And oftentimes, it’s you had an assumption about how the market worked or how your customers thought, and you were wrong. And that’s okay. Your job is to be right and wrong. And then when you’re wrong, the question is what you do about it. And the answer is you end of life, which means you stop taking on new customers.

You tell all the current customers, hey, I know you depend on this thing. It’s gonna fade away over twelve months. Here’s our suggested migration path off to some other way to get it done, if indeed they care. And you just chalk it up and just make sure you go back and delete that code and fully rip it out of everything because you don’t want these sort of zombie features hanging around.

That’s very kind of Matt. I wouldn’t really describe myself that way. One of the reasons we think it’s bad is we don’t take enough of a both user centric and a buyer centric point of view of product marketing. Oftentimes, we confuse something like AirPods marketing, which is glorious. But what we mean by glorious is, one, the buyer equals the user. There’s no buying committee. There’s no proof points that they need, and no one’s shopping based on data or a competitive feature set. It’s an entirely brand play.

So it’s very different to say Asana launching a new way to do Gantt charts or something like that. You have to think about it from a point of view, not all products can go to market the same way. Tesla can market a car a different lead on, Salesforce can market a chat client or whatever. So that’s one problem, which is we always forget that. And then specifically startup marketing, startup product marketing, generally, it is always defaulted to here’s a big screenshot and here’s a one liner.

And I think that’s totally fine in a world where the screenshot is really self evident of what is going on. So if I posted a screenshot of, like, say, Riverside FM that we’re chatting on right now, I think it’d be pretty obvious what’s happening, as in the product is self evident. Right? That’s not the case for, like, a load of, like, b to b SaaS, it’s just a load of, like, text input boxes and a graph, and you’re like, what is this? It could be anything from payroll software to Amplitude or whatever, like anything in between.

So I think you have to bear in mind, a lot of people think their product sells itself. Therefore, let’s just put a big dopey screenshot up here and say, like, data reinvented or something like that. No one has a clue what the hell is happening. I think that is the kind of like state of art at the bottom of the market. So I think the challenge for product marketing is, one, you have to work out what do your users and buyers want to know, and they’re not always the same thing.

And then two, what is the best way that you can show why you’re best at it?

The challenge there is really, like, what is the typical adoption path for a product? If we take Intercom, we’ve been trying to avoid it so far, but, like, we have a beautiful inbox. We released it, like, a couple weeks ago. It’s next generation, fanciest piece of, I would say, customer help support, customer support inbox product on the market. But the person who’s buying Intercom and adopting Intercom, they’re not actually the frontline user of the product. They’re like the VP of support in a 2,000 person company.

They actually don’t even see the inbox half the time. They might see the reports that come out of it, but honestly, even in those cases, they’re probably looking at that in Snowflake or something. So they’re really not that in the loop. All they care about is what can you do for me? And what slightly upmarket look were, when the buyer doesn’t equal the user, the buyer’s questions are basically, this is gonna sound quite reductive and it kinda is, but I have two numbers to worry about, Harry.

Are you going to make me money or save me money? And if so, how? And why should I believe you? And that’s what the buyer wants to know because they’re just trying to, like, run their own P and L and get promoted, whatever. The user has a different set of concerns, which is I’m trying to do my job and get promoted, and I need to believe that your product’s gonna make me more effective, more performative. I’m gonna enjoy using it more. Do you work on mobile?

Do you do this? How can you support me in my life? It’s basically the questions. Now as to which goes first, you absolutely have to do both. If you’re billboarding in Times Square, the actual answer would be who’s more likely to be standing in Times Square looking at that billboard? Your buyers or your users? If it’s your users, go with that and go for, like, the bottoms up adoption, like, the product led growth adoption sort of model where, like, everyone’s like, oh, I wish we could use Intercom, which works well for us.

Like, oh, I wish I could use that new inbox. It looks so nice, blah blah blah. And then you hope that enough of that groundswell pressure pops into a VP of customer support thing. I’ve been hearing a lot from my team about your product. And they’ll hit you with the real questions, which are what are your proof points? Where are your enterprise case studies? All that sort of stuff. That’s how that plays out, Bessemer.

We have a version of it. I think Notion and Masana probably go broader again and that people use them to plan weddings and shit like that. Like but I think And shit like that. I love it. The standard answer you’re gonna hear to this is gonna be some, well, well, you consider it a verticalized marketing player, what that would look like is you pick your top 10 industries and you nail the marketing for that specifically. So you say, like, Notion is for dentists or Notion is for software companies.

Generally speaking, what you’re looking for, industry times workflow. Who do you do it for and what do you do? In the case of Notion, Notion can be like an internet, it can be an externally hosted website, it can model workflows, it can be a project management or project planning tool, and it can be like a to do list, and it can be a personal knowledge storage type tool as well. So you have those, like say, 10 different ways you can use Notion. And then you have who are the people who use Notion?

In that world, you’ve got startups, you’ve got whatever, like personal productivity gurus, you’ve got dentists, whatever else you have. And then you’re basically looking for, like, what are the most compelling sizable use cases that we can actually play out here and how do we market them really, really well? The mother of this entire space for me was oh, what was that tool Atlassian bought? The one with the cards you can drag and drop around the place.

Trello. Yeah. Trello was the extreme end of this. Trello’s goal was really to create a horizontalized productivity deal, and they really were trying to avoid getting stuck into any particular hole because they were like, we want people to use us for shopping lists, weddings, house renovations, planning software products and all that. But inevitably, the problem with most of those use cases is once you start to follow the money, you end up back in B2B SaaS land, right? Or at least B2B land anyway, right? There’s not a lot of money selling software to wedding planners.

There’s lot of money selling software to IBM. So generally, the money still tends to bring you home, And as a result, you end up saying, we do our best work for other businesses, and we solve business problems. And here’s the top three businesses we work in, and here’s the top three use cases we solve. And then as you move further up market again, you’ll end up playing with the foresters and gardeners of the world who are going to say, hey, we’re doing the productivity wave for 2023.

What category would you like to be in? So before you know, all of your desperate attempts to horizontalize yourself, when it comes to marketing, you still need to pick a lane and say, here’s what we are. Even if you’re just saying it for one person, you still need to say it. Like, you can’t be everything to everyone because no one will buy you. So whenever you put in a moment, you’re still gonna instantiate yourself in a specific vertical times use case.

I think if this one kind of varies a bit, but generally speaking, you have to look at like your successful customer growth and what’s happening with your customers. And that’s the two variables you need to see. So if you think you just have loads of run room horizontally in the market, you can just keep getting more and more customers like the ones you already have, and I mean exactly like them, and you don’t have to change your product to do that, then I think you shouldn’t move upmarket.

You should just carry that growth out. Generally speaking, in all software, we all want the smallest possible product we could possibly have. Doesn’t work out that way. Like, you’re talking to somebody with, like, three different products across, like, three different use cases. Generally speaking, if we could have our way, we’d all have just a piece of software that’s just one line of code, and it has, like, no bugs and never needs anything, and it needs one engineer to maintain it. Right? That’s, like, the dream state.

The only reason you add the second and third line of code is to get more customers. So if you can avoid having to have a massive product footprint, then you should. But generally speaking, you want growth. If, for example, you find that, like, hey, without doing anything, we’re kinda taking our hands off the wheel. We’re still seeing, like, three digit percentage growth across for, like, loads of different people, all for the same sort of use case, and they’re not coming up with really bizarre different feature requests, then stay where you are.

Absolutely stay where you are. Now, the actual decision point is if one of these two things is true, we can’t keep growing horizontally because they’re asking us for specific features. The hotel customers all want a hotel booking feature.

Then we have to weigh up that work versus that market expansion against what would happen if we solved the needs of our largest customers and the ones that are out of reach from them and weigh up the value of doing that work, which is possibly not as much work because it might just be like adding roles and permissions and stuff like that onto your current platform, then you’re looking at the ROI of two efforts and saying, which is easier and also which keeps our business as simple as possible.

And simplicity is really underrated in business in, like, in loads of ways. Honestly, I could rant a bit for errors, but, like, let’s say your brand architecture just gets messier. If you had to launch 20 VC, but also for soccer teams, it’ll just be weird because everyone’s like, what’s Harry about? Right? Easier It’s to say you’re gonna do 20 VC and you’re gonna do a different one for investors and a different one for founders. That’s that’s clean. That makes sense. That’s on brand for you. You know?

So similarly, like, you have to think about what does our what can our brand architecture support? And oftentimes, that might just be a move up market. The other variables you have to look at is what’s happening to our best customers. One thing that happens to a lot of software companies that sell to software companies is that their best companies outgrow them really quickly because software companies all grow really fast, and that means you’re gonna see somebody just whistle through your target segment and come out to the side, and you’ll be like, you’ll be there going, wow.

They used to be a customer of ours. I bet you they would have paid us millions if we still kinda kept them, and you were, like, four roles and permissions and a Salesforce integration away from keeping them happy. So you have to kinda do all of this calculus against each other.

I mean, like, the short answer is you don’t, in my opinion. What you do is you fight as hard as possible, but you’re gonna lose the fight. You’re going to end up doing something because, like, you know, we have, like, you know, hundreds of people working at Intercom. They’re not all removing features, know. So, like, the product is going to get more complicated. And I think one mistake that folks make is because, like, oftentimes product decisions are made entirely within the product org or the or in the org, if you’re so inclined, they kind of forget about the ramifications everywhere else.

As an example, every complex new feature we build has to get marketed by a marketer and has to get sold by a salesperson and supported by a support person. So you have to think about the total cost of ownership of that feature, not just how hard was it to build. Generally speaking, you’re trying to find the highest leverage work, which usually involves looking for how little can we do and how much can we get from it. That’s the forcing function of simplicity.

And then for any given thing, someone will say, oh, if you just add, like, you know, a classic one for Intercom lore would be, if you only added these four more reports, you’d also be a great analytics company, to which we’ve always said, yes. That is possibly true. I don’t fully believe it’s true. But if we did do that, then we’d also have a different problem. We’d also be a fucking analytics company. Right? Like, you know? And that and that has a whole other problem, which is, like, now we have a different brand.

Now we have a different whole, like, go to market message. Now we have, like we have different needs for different types of, like, engineers, different big data storage challenges, all and that sort of stuff. So just thinking and, like, our sales reps need to know how to speak analytics and speak customer communications on the fly and adapt and all that. Like, it’s so the downstream ramifications of such an easy incremental piece of work are really, really easy to underestimate. And I so I just generally speaking, I I think, like, if there’s ever an opportunity for simplicity that isn’t, like, massively harmful to the growth of the business, I would always try to take it.

I think Mark Andreessen’s point is just unnecessarily blunt. I think Darmesh’s point is more pointy, like it’s there’s substance in it. You’re always trying to capitalize on the value you deliver for customers. You don’t wanna, like, squeeze every last drop out of it, for sure, and that’s Darmesh’s point. At the same time, I think there’s a danger of, like, if you end up doing a lot of a hard adopter of Intercom, let’s say somebody uses this for everything, we are their onboarding guides, their customer support.

We’re, like, how they how they route sales leads to their reps to close deals. Or how they do in app feature adoption, or how they launch things, where you know, and, like, where they’re also their knowledge base, and we’re, sending SMSs and WhatsApps sort of as well. Right? If you want to sustain a product that’s that larger footprint, it needs to be paying you back in a way so that you can reinvest and and maintain the health of the product. Otherwise, you you do end up in a world where, like, you basically can’t afford to work on your product in a sense.

Right? So you have to, like, kinda and and, like, you know, in HubSpot are no stranger to a price increase either. But I do think, like, the idea of, like, just raise prices is silly. I think align price to value is the thing you have to do. And and just make sure that you’re, like, building the thing that you sell people on and that when you sell them on it, that they’re actually getting the value you’re charging them for.

There’s a few big buckets that are just immovable. I’ll kind of walk through them a little bit. One is just adaptability, like, so making sure to like, our large enterprises don’t just pick up products, like, randomly. They have, like, all like, they have an MSA. Need to assign a procurement team that assesses you. You need to, like, SOC two, type two, possibly HIPAA, possibly ISO 9,000 compliant. You need to be able to do a security review and all that sort of stuff. So there’s a whole piece around just adaptability, and there’s other stuff like SCIM processing.

So like so people they they might mandate that you have to able to sign into the product through to Google, through G Suite as opposed to creating your own logins, and there’s just loads of stuff like that. Right? So that’s all one big bucket called adaptability. Startups don’t give a shit about any of that, but big companies absolutely mandate it. The other one is scalability, and I won’t say much on it, just sort of like you need to be able to meet their usage requirements. So if they want to send a million mails a minute, you need to be able to do that.

And third one is justifiability. You need to surface the data that proves that your product is delivering the value that they’re paying for. So this is often and as it does tiers to this, there’s like, generate your own reports. Let them generate custom reports all the way up to let them dump all of your data into their data warehouse or data lakehouse, whatever they wanna call it, like a Snowflake or whatever, and get all the stuff over there so that when they’re reporting out on on what value they got, they can do it for you.

But that’s all justifiability. And then the last one I talk about is interoperability. So you actually have to be a good citizen of your tech stack. So you can’t just be like, Intercom’s here. Delete everything else. They probably have 15 other tools that they use in conjunction with you to talk to their customers or to manage customer conversations or just the health of their customer base. And you need to, like, have a really good interoperability posture, meaning that you should be hydrating all the other data sources that would benefit from knowing what Intercom knows.

And similarly, you should be sucking in data from them as well to make sure that Intercom is the best Intercom it can be. And in doing so, you become, like, what they call it, an improvement to their tech stack. So in general, we would say a support stack is better when Intercom is plugged into it. Everything gets better, not just Intercom. But interoperability, like, there’s a whole world of, like, APIs and midware that you have to consider as to how people do it. So they’re kinda, like, the big four, I think, that changed.

And, like, none of them, just to know for your listeners, I didn’t describe a single user facing feature that you’re gonna do any product marketing for. Right? Like, you’re never gonna have a sexy screenshot of the Salesforce integration or the new API calls. It’s always like this behind the scenes stuff that when people say, are you enterprise ready? What they actually mean is all of that stuff, and people forget to market it. People forget to, like, showcase that in the right places because it’s not visible.

It’s not something you can, like, do a great webinar on or whatever.

That is a good question. The areas that get me excited is, like, I think taking SaaS to industries that don’t see much of it is still exciting.

That’s a problem, and it causes possibly a bit of boredom for me and you because it’s not as responsive as like launching on Product Hunt or whatever. I just think you need to bake that into you know, price that into your sort of considerations. I’ve invested in a b to b SaaS company for managing building construction projects. Right? It’s going great, but definitely the long sales cycles and the random adoption patterns and all that are very weird to me. But the business is a monster. I think it’s cool to see how SaaS will ultimately transform these things.

Definitely way slower than hey, everyone’s using using this, like, new note taking app or whatever, where we all adopt it in three days and we’re all done talking about it in, four podcasts or whatever. You know, it’s different to that. Like, it’ll take five years. In your example, like, car hire company or whatever, like, it will take five full years for that company to realize the value of the software it built in year one, which is just very foreign to us because we just think launched the thing already.

You know?

Yeah. There’s a few. I think the ones that I get most bored by, anything that smacks of all your data in one place, I just really don’t care about. And especially if it’s consumer, like, no one actually has that problem. Just engineers realized, oh, you could connect all these things into one place. This is like the age old joke about, like, standards. Like, we love standards so much. That’s why we keep inventing new ones. I think fundamentally, the product space, whenever anyone’s saying we’re gonna centralize everything, just sounds to me like you’re gonna create yet another place for things to live.

It doesn’t sound like you’re gonna solve the problem in any meaningful way. So that’s one kind of meta pattern I see. I think another one where I just really get bored is like products that are actually just Google Docs. And by that, I mean performance reviews as a product. And when you actually look at it, it’s basically like, actually, in my last company, had this really sweet template for doing a performance review. I asked what were your top three ambitions, your top three hopes. I asked for feedback, blah blah blah.

And now I’ve turned all that into a b to b SaaS app where you have different text inputs for all of this. And I’m there going like, what is the actual benefit of the structure that you’re imposing on the content? Who benefits? Why does anyone care? And then also, if you’re right, this is, like, copyable in, like, four weeks. Turning spreadsheets into SaaS apps has been a good idea forever. Turning glorified Google Docs into SaaS apps, I think, has never been a good idea.

An area I struggle with is, in general, is like radical candor. I I think I I don’t say firmly enough, like, what I actually think. But whenever whenever I’m trying to correct someone’s thinking or at least get them onto my side, I try to, like in the case of one of those startup products, I wouldn’t just be like, this is bullshit, get it out of my face. I’d be like I basically say like, hey, the most successful startups I see, generally speaking, have many of the following characteristics.

And when I look at your idea here, what I’m not seeing is any sort of moat or I’m not seeing anything that’s unique or I’m not you know, I’ll try to get them on board with the sort of principles of my thinking and then explain why this investment would, like, violate my thinking. And my goal is always that either they walk away saying you’re full of shit, Des, which is totally fine. That’s a great outcome because, like, they stood up to me and they said I’m gonna walk away and do my own thing, or they agree to me because I convinced them, and that’s a good outcome too.

And then they kinda correct their idea. I don’t mind either of those two. I I anything in between is, like, not good, and I so I’ll I’ll try to force it to one of those two outcomes, I guess. That’s maybe

I probably am more known for writing too many checks, so I’m probably more known for too many bad checks. There’s a few I couldn’t get it together to do on time or did too late or whatever. So Polywork is one where I still think there’s an interesting future ahead of them. I basically just couldn’t get the paperwork together. Like, just one of the downsides of being an operator genuinely, like as in someone who has a job when you’re trying to invest, is you’re just getting hit with, like, DocuSign’s left, right, and center or, like, due diligence things.

Or oftentimes, it’ll be like, hey, we have to form this other company, which is a special purpose vehicle to make this investment, and then you just sign these seven things. So that sort of stuff is where I’m likely scupper. Because in general, I’m probably more likely to have a go than not. There’s a few I think will turn out to be a miss. There’s a there’s a startup developer tool called Roadie that I should have invested in when I was given the first chance, and I think that will work out.

Incident.io would be another one. There’s been ones where because I invested in one area, in one product, I couldn’t invest in another. The other one has been the right investment, if you know what I mean. So that there’s ones I’ve called wrong that way. Anything else, I’d forgive myself because I didn’t have the money at the time. Like, there was a chance to invest in SpaceX, but, like, I didn’t have a $100, and that was the smallest check. And I I’m just like, I probably should have borrowed that money.

I didn’t have it. Know? Honestly, I expect to be back here in, like, five years time saying, Des, you’ve lost famously over $1,000,000 in startup investing. Tell me, what one did you get right?

Kind of. The only thing I do is if I really believe my check sizes might be, like, somewhere in, the 25 k region unless I absolutely love the product, love the space, and I’ve just been blown away, in which case I’ll push for more, and I’ll take what I can get. But, like, honestly, the nature of an of an investor like me is, like, people see me as a jigsaw piece when it comes to check sizing. They’re like, hey. We have a gap of blah that can go to Dess or whatever.

I’m never like, I know what it’s like on the other side, so I’m never gonna be the guy constantly bullying my way and going, no. Give me $300 or whatever. But I’d say I have two sizes, basically. Normal, and I really think this is a monster. And I’d say I’ve only done, like, five of the latter category.

I am generally not price sensitive with the exception of bananas rounds. And a bananas round will be like a seed above 50,000,000 or somebody who’s going above a 100 x AI or, like, a or b when they have massive questions to figure out. And I’ve seen a few. I really have. Like, I saw a couple of companies I invested in. Like, if Intercom did rounds at multiples, like, they did or will do them, we would have been a multi multi billion dollar company when we were, like, at 7,000,000 in the air or something like that.

Right? I’m sort sitting there scratching my head going, either the whole world by the way, turns out the whole world was wrong, basically. You know what I mean? Like, as in the all this is falling apart and now everyone’s licking their wounds. But, yeah, I’ve been, like, struggling to work out some of what’s happening in the market.

Yeah. I follow close I I try to avoid meetings unless someone tells me, like, no. No. The dude will really sell you on the idea or whatever. So I try not to do those. I definitely don’t do a due diligence at all, but at the same time, I always caveat my check and say, like, I’m only doing this if there’s a lead investor who is actually going to do due diligence, if you know what I mean. Don’t consider this a commitment until you tell me that somebody is actually going to do the homework here.

Prove to me the company exists type of thing.

I understand that. And if somebody wanted to have an argument, what would just basically say is, look, dude. I get, like, twenty minutes to spend max to make this decision, so I’m gonna outsource anything I can. What knowing whether or not your company has been incorporated correctly, whether there is a cap table, whether there’s some random on the cap table who owns 80% of it because they fucking did a series a in your last company, whether the bank balance is real, whether the revenue is real, whether it’s consulting revenue versus recurring revenue, I can’t find all that shit out for the sake of $10 or $20 or whatever the check might be.

Right? Like, I just can’t. There’s no fucking way. So the only option I have is to outsource that to somebody else. And the only people I can really trust gonna be somebody who does this sort of thing for a living. So, like, if Harry says he’s in, I’ll believe it. If Index said he’s in, I’ll believe it. If Joseph, who owns a large hotel chain in the middle of London, says he’s in, I’m not gonna believe it. I take the ding on the independent mindedness, but I just try to articulate the thinking behind it, you know what mean.

I think there’s a lot of things that you have to be good at for both. That’s the first thing I’d say. You realize with a kid, you have to, like, be their, how would you say, their their willpower. You have to be their discipline. Unlike yourself, like, let’s say you’re trying to obey a diet yourself. You have a very closed loop feedback mechanism there, overeat, gain weight, eat less, lose weight, whatever, exercise, feel good, don’t exercise, feel bad. Whereas when you’re trying to, like, discipline a kid, you’re trying to say eat healthy, but it doesn’t actually affect you whether or not you do it.

And in fact, the feedback mechanism, you’ll find out over five years, not in the next, like, five days. Right? Because it’s not your body. So it requires you to have a lot of, like, care and empathy and compassion for something that isn’t directly felt, like, physically by you. And you’re trying to make that happen over, like, many years as opposed to, like, many days or, like, any sort of better feedback thing. And if you’re trying to lead a group of people in a business, there’s a lot of similarity there in that you’re trying to get everyone on the same page and get them supported and have them understand the principles by which you’re trying to push towards certain things.

You’re hoping that they’re aligned, and you’re hoping that, like, that alignment won’t disappear once you leave the room or whatever. And you’re hoping that the payoff over many years will make them realize that actually, hey, that was actually he or she was looking out for me at the time. So that’s that’s one whole category, which is just understanding, like, how to communicate your best intent for them, for people without micromanaging because you can’t be there every second of your kid’s life because you’re not gonna once they walk out the door, they can do whatever they want.

You know? So, like, there’s a lot of that. The other area where I reflect on a lot is it’s a great blog post. I can’t remember who wrote it, somebody will augment, I’m sure. It’s called being demanding and supportive. You have to be both of a child or of, like, people who you work with. And they really do mean work with. Like, you have to have this stance towards your peers as well. You have to, like, ask so much of them to make them realize their true potential, and that’s the demanding side.

But then you also have to be willing to support them should they ever struggle or ever bump into any barriers or whatever. And, like so you have to basically say, like, I think you can actually change the world. I think you’re one of the best principal engineers I’ve ever seen, and I actually think you represent the products you build represent the future of this company. I need you to go and do this really, really hard technical thing for me. And then off they go and do it.

But if they fail, you need to step in and say, to be honest, that was beyond any of us. It was a ridiculous effort, but you made a phenomenal effort at it, and I’m here to cover for you. Don’t think that this has been a bad outcome.

Yeah. I think that’s the other side of performance management. And I think in those cases, like, you know, when I engage the demanding but supportive mode, it’s much more like pushing people to be the very best. It’s rare you’ve tried out with somebody who you have doubts about because you’re actually you’re trying to push them to perform to begin with.

And I think in those cases, you have to move to a slightly more structured type of conversation, which is like I mean, structured and not in the sense of like a pip or anything, but I mean, when you’re asking somebody to do something that you think they should be able to do, but you have suspicion that they might not, I think you need to outline, here’s what I think needs to be done. Here’s the sort of time frame I think it needs to be done at.

Here’s the level of quality I think it needs to be done at, and here’s the expectation. Like, I think this is really likely that we’ll get this done. Do you agree? And they say yes or no. And if they say no, then you’re just on a different page about their capability in a sense or, like, or what’s reasonable. So then they you shouldn’t be working with them. But if they say yes, then the only other question is, like, if any of that changes, let me know because this is a really important piece of work.

If you have suspicion that the timeline is wrong, that the complexity is greater than we thought, that the quality bar is lower, you need to, like, let me know because we need to correct this course quickly because you’re working on something really important here.

Earlier in my career, just being blinded by the logo, I think was probably the biggest thing. Like, such and such a person worked at such and such a company. In your head, as a naive younger founder, it’s hard to not to, like, auto complete to, therefore, what happened to that company is going to happen to us because we just got their head of recruiting or their head of people or their head of marketing or their head of sales. And I had to say hello there because I didn’t wanna imply it was only played a role.

But that’s probably the single biggest thing is, like, assuming that because somebody worked there, they were responsible for anything. And I think even the greatest companies on earth, and I really do mean this, have a few people who aren’t high on the causation index, if you know what I mean. Like, they happened to be in a great company during a period of greatness. They didn’t have their hand on the wheel. They weren’t responsible for causing a lot of it. However, their LinkedIn looks fire. You you know what I mean?

Like, they look like an absolute superstar, and it’s only really when you ask them to repeat the magic that you realize they were actually the magician’s assistant.

A thousand.

Yeah.

I think there’s sort of a few different things there. One is, like, hire for potential, not for, like, state. When we hire somebody, if we hire, like, a fresh college graduate today in Intercom, they’re not our best engineer, and I think everyone should get that. And by definition, their, like, current state is not a team. The question is, are they on a positive trajectory? Can they get there? Or can they get to what some companies call, like, acceptable, like, sort of final level? Like, so as in, if you join Intercom and it turns out, like, you end up being, like, our senior manager of podcasting or something like that.

Right? The question is, like, are we okay with you staying there, or do we need you to become the director? Do we need you to become a VP? Because the person who holds that position in succession planning needs to be on a very positive, rapid career trajectory. So you have to ask those questions. And then there are some areas where, yeah, like, you don’t you actually literally can’t have, like, nine people on a team all thinking they’re going to be the manager because then eight of them are gonna quit.

So, like, you need to kinda, like so you’re always trying to fuse youths, like I said, not youth, like, early in their career with, like, mid stage career or late stage career. You’re trying to fuse, like, relative ambition to where they are in their career at the moment. Actual capability, we actually have experts who are, like, superstars, like, who are whatever. I don’t know what you want to call them, like, A plus in your analogy or whatever. And you need all like, the ingredients of a team is not, like, just a load of people all walking around telling each other they’re best.

You actually need a mix, and people come to companies to learn. By definition, that means they’re not the best. They believe they can get better. So, like, I think there’s a lot of, like, nonsense behind it, like, a’s hire a’s, b’s hire c’s, don’t only hire a’s, blah blah blah. I wouldn’t go as far maybe as you and say, like, you’re always gonna go out to market looking for, like, the best person you can get in a position. But there’s times when you operate relative best and when you operate global best.

The chances of you operating the globe finding the globally best person is pretty slim. There are times when it’s worth the effort. But relative best, meaning we’re gonna bring somebody in who’s gonna be at the top of the org, who’s gonna set a new standard for us, this time, you probably pull that lever an awful lot more.

Probably. Unless the function’s already, like, dialed and it actually you know, oftentimes hires are made for good reason to bias towards, like, previous missteps. So you might your last leader might have been, like, very hardcore, like, bruiser, tough talker, like, harsh person to work for. And you might need to kinda, like, inject a little bit different DNA to kind of soften the org a little bit deliberately because turns out that can result in like toxicity or turnover or whatever. Similarly, the exact inverse is true. Maybe you need some teams to actually get a bit more firm and business focused and less casual.

You’re looking for the best person for where your business is at, for where that function is at, and where that team is at in any given moment. And you understand that it’s very rare you’re hiring for the rest of your life and their career. You’re hiring for contracts overseas and like like, four or five year stints or whatever is generally the sort of norm. Because in four or five years, Intercom will be a lot bigger and a lot more complex with a lot of new problems than it is today and certainly than it was five years ago too.

Sounds great.

I think it’s probably How Will You Measure Your Life by Clay Christensen. I think because he takes a lot of business strategy rules and applies them to your personal life, and it touches on everything from your own growth, your own ambition, your relationship with your parents, your relationship with your children, legacy, defensiveness, where you’re uniquely good in the world, where should you just be the same as everyone else. He applies a lot of those principles. What should you outsource in your life? What should you do?

All that sort of stuff. And it maps really, really well, and it’ll ultimately do as you begin to answer that question of how will you measure your life.

Prioritization. Like, finding the most highest leverage activities and then saying no to folks who have, like, most minus one. Picking the thing that is also really important that we just can’t do.

Either focus or, like, the idea of work on the most important thing and don’t work on anything else. Like, I I say that to focus a lot. And then when I look at my own calendar and ask myself, am I living that advice? Oftentimes, the answer is no.

From a business perspective?

The thing that would have given me most solace at the start would be knowing how it all was going to work out so far because I think, like, the anxiety and all that, like, when you’re starting out is so intense of just, like, what if this breaks? What if that kills us? What if this happens? Oh, Zendesk just released a feature. Are we should we pack up and go home? You know? I tend to be more on the sort of like I tend to like that Doctor Strange character.

I see all possible outcomes, and I see all the ways in which things can go wrong and right, but there’s oftentimes more things can go wrong. So I think that would have given me some solace. But more practically, things I wish I knew. I think probably just I have a much crisper model of how software exists and works and, like, you know, market size versus product size and, like, you know, how all those things interchange, how decisions about, like, adding a feature is actually a decision about adding a headcount, which actually confuses brand, which affects LTV CAC in the long term.

Knowing how the whole system is connected is something I’ve, like, substantially more clarity on now than I did when I was running around giving all those talks in 2011 telling everyone how the world works.

I think, like, what I’d love to change is that I would love there to be one technology publication that has two traits. One, it’s run by people who like technology, like, in they believe it generally can be a cause for good in the world. And two, it is optimistic. It actually, like, it believes of all the probable paths, a good one might happen. I think our industry is starved of that right now, and it’s got a lot of the ones that don’t fall into that category.

Personally, I would love to be with Martha, the parent of an eight year old and a five and five years and nine month year old or whatever, sitting here in Dublin. And I think, if I could change anything, maybe it would be like no. Sorry. If I any sort of professional development I’d love to make. I suspect I would still be in Intercom. I think maybe my role would change again. I’d probably, like, maybe vacate my current role and make space for somebody else and find a new area to invest myself.

The thing would be pressure in a sense. So, like, the all of the employee headcount, all of the, like, the trials and tribulations, whether it’s in the industry right now or whatever, it definitely, like, occupies, like, a reasonable chunk of my mind at any given moment. Like, I can be in the cinema watching Top Gun, but at least 28% of my mind is thinking about things that might go wrong in Intercom or might go wrong in the industry and how they might get better again. And I would love to be able to find a way just to dial that down, cut that in half maybe.

I don’t mind. I always think about things the same way I think about, like, you know, is my daughter safe in school and blah blah blah, and what will that be like tomorrow? But, like, I do think at times it takes an outsized percentage out of my brain. It’s just worrying about, like, stuff like that.

It’s doubly true for folks like us where the software industry really wakes up in, like, ten minutes time at 4PM when it’s, like, 8AM in San Francisco. One of the downsides of trying to operate a global, but a San Francisco biased business from Dublin is that, like, you get a clean run of the day, and just as all your friends are packing up over in Dublin ready to go home and go for a pint or whatever, that’s when work starts. I think that’s a type of pressure that’s just a bit tough at times.

I hope Intercom to be, like, one of max two, but possibly one of one, hopefully, one of one businesses I ever, like, go to the mat on this hard for this long. And I think the thing I care most about is like, it’s not so much me, but it’s just making sure that everyone who everyone has taken the journey like that, that they look back on it really fondly and that it works out for everyone. You know, it’s a meaningful outcome for everyone. That’s the thing I care most about, and it’s the thing I’m also like, I always feel like, oh, you know, we have to fight harder.

Have to do this. We have to do that or whatever. Like, it’s like it come it’s back to the 28% worry thing. I was just I’m always paranoid of what can go wrong. I think that’s kind of bakes type of insecurity into my mind, which is like, it’s very easy to convince me that something bad is gonna happen because I’ll immediately get on board with it, and I’ll, like, prophesize the worst version of it. So I think that’s if I could click my fingers and take anything out of my personality, I think would be probably to have more just robustness.

Randomly, as a side note, like, getting in shape and getting healthy and doing weights and all that really helped here and that, like, I feel like strong body, strong mind or whatever. Like, it definitely made me more like, no, I am strong. Intercom’s strong. We can get through this. This is just a blip. It’s just one customer. What’s the big deal? Whereas, like, you know, honestly, like twelve months prior, it would have been something like, oh my god. Well, what if everyone else here is the day quit?

You know? Like, so I think, there’s definitely something there for sure.