It is 2018 and Dublin-born entrepreneur Eoghan McCabe is at the height of his technology powers. His company Intercom has just raised $125 million dollars and become a unicorn. McCabe is working on his computer in his office on San Francisco’s Second Street. He sees that his finger has hit a key that it was never meant to hit. That night he woke with tremors and twitching. Fatigue soon set in. 

Things were about to change dramatically for Eoghan McCabe and Intercom. The autoimmune disorder which was eventually diagnosed was a big factor in forcing him to give up his job as CEO of the technology giant two years later to become chairman.

Today he is back in the CEO’s chair of the company he co-founded in 2011. He is re-wiring what was once one of Ireland’s hottest start-ups, which was planning to float on the stock markets in the US at a multi-billion-dollar valuation.

It is now October 2023 and a year since McCabe returned as CEO of Intercom. He is sitting in a nondescript hotel meeting room as he recalls those days. He is wearing a black baseball cap and looks fit and healthy. He swings his laptop around so I can see the outline of the New York skyline on a dull day. It is the morning before he meets his leadership team to discuss Intercom’s plans for the next year. I want to ask McCabe about how Intercom is doing as a business, how it is reinventing itself, and the challenges and controversies he has faced. “We are cash flow positive again with $129 million in the bank,” McCabe tells me. 

“Trials are up, revenue is materially stronger from customers due to big bets we’ve made on technology and how we sell,” McCabe said, adding that Intercom’s engineering team had shipped 180 product releases since January 1 and almost 1,000 customers are now using its artificial intelligence to answer half of their support questions instantly and consistently. 

His priority had been to get Intercom to refocus since his return. 

The business was “too horizontal”, serving too many different types of companies, and it was chasing too many segments as it tried to win over everybody from startups to some of the biggest companies in the world, he said.

“One of the things we struggled with for the longest time was picking a lane,” McCabe said. “We sold to sales, marketing, support teams and had many different types of use cases. It was too much for a relatively tiny company. Intercom was winning big customers but to the detriment of missing out on mid-market firms. Startups are told to start at the bottom and work up to enterprise. It is easy to stretch yourself too thin. From doing lots of stuff, Intercom decided to focus on customer service, and target the mid-market. It was just so clear there was a giant gap,” McCabe explained.

McCabe came back to Intercom, at a time not only when he believed it had lost focus, but also the market had become much more difficult. Crunchbase had described the year before his return as a “record year for the public markets”. Notable tech listings included Qualtrics ($15 billion), Bumble ($8.2 billion), Monday.com ($7.5 billion), Robinhood ($32 billion) and Toast ($20 billion). But 2022 was a different animal.

A nice general tool but not essential

“There was an incredible boom for all software in 2021,” McCabe said. “Everything just grew like crazy and everyone wanted more, more, more, more.”

Intercom’s revenues and customer numbers were all growing too. But then very quickly, all started to contract. “Des Traynor (another co-founder of Intercom) jokes about ‘21 saying that it was a hell of a drug and 2022 was a hell of a comedown,’” McCabe said. 

“Every software business saw a big pullback in their existing business. Intercom saw a relatively bigger one because we were just a little too vague, a little too unfocused.” 

Companies started to cut Intercom from their technology stack. “For some, we were just not a must-have,” McCabe said, adding that Intercom was seen as a “nice general tool” but not essential.

McCabe wanted to change that: “It is what really kind of energised my desire to go back. The company needed a new founding moment.”

“Intercom was a giant success, but in the last few years we definitely lost our way a little,” he said. “We had an unfocused strategy, the culture was a little too comfortable.”

Intercom, he felt, had ridden the wave in 2021, but not addressed its weaknesses when it went back out again the following year. “Companies like Intercom without a clear winning strategy and culture were exposed,” McCabe said. “That is why I came back. I came back to fix the strategy and fix the culture and to set us up to win in an environment where money wasn’t flowing as readily and, I would say, irresponsibly, as it was in 2021.” 

A line-by-line review of costs

McCabe started by making cuts. In September 2022, its previous chief executive Karen Peacock had let go 49 people, five per cent of its workforce. After McCabe came back, this increased to 13 per cent. I spoke to some of these people at the time, and it hit them hard as lots of other tech companies were also laying large numbers off.

Intercom shut down parts of its business it no longer intended to focus on, so people who were doing their jobs well were being made redundant. Intercom, however, was determined to cut costs in order to have enough cash to invest in the business without raising fresh capital. Part of its new offices in Dublin was sublet out, and there was a line-by-line review of costs. 

“We were spending on the wrong things for a company that was trying to be a startup again,” McCabe said. “We were sloppy like many other companies. I really tightened things up. We were on course to lose $50 million in 2022, the year I came back.”

This was manageable if the business was going to float at a multi-billion valuation the following year, but it was life-threatening if this was no longer possible. “We had quarters where we lost more per quarter than we had in our entire history, and then we went from one-quarter of record losses to cash flow positive again. We’ve been profitable since.”

With $129 million in the bank, he says Intercom now has an infinite runway. “We’ve got a budget in the hundreds of millions to make big bets and all the time we need,” McCabe said. “It’s a really, really strong position to be in.” 

*****

Before we get to the big bets, our conversation shifts to the early days of Intercom as McCabe tries to explain the culture he wanted Intercom to recapture, as well as his previous decision to step down as chief executive.  

McCabe recalls drawing on a whiteboard in his mid-20s with his co-founders Des Traynor, Ciaran Lee and David Barrett. They were trying to capture their ideas for what the Internet might look like in the future.

Borderline arrogance but with a great passion

“We were listing out all of the things others were doing wrong, and how we could do it better,” he said. “It was borderline arrogance, but there was great passion too for the history of technology.” Companies like Apple, and 37signals, the creator of Basecamp, were inspirations. 

In 2010, the first lines of code for what became Intercom were written, and its co-founders decided to give it six months to see if they had a business. “Intercom started with this incredible magic, and insane level of ambition,” McCabe recalled.

The business needed money to build its product, so McCabe scrambled $1 million together from an eclectic mix of Irish and American angels, and some Tokyo investors he met on a Skype call. This seed round set Intercom on a path to create a new technology category that is now ubiquitous. 

“We’re the reason that now every digital business has that little messenger in the bottom right-hand corner,” McCabe said. “It may be the Intercom messenger, it may be Intercom copycats, but we’re the reason that the online digital world trades and communicates in that way.” 

In less than ten years this idea became a $1 billion business. “That early ambition and naïve self-confidence and magic and desire to contribute to technology led to something really special,” McCabe said. But in more recent years, he said, it had lost this. 

McCabe said he had to take responsibility for this. “I made some poor decisions around pricing for example,” he said. 

In his last years as chief executive Intercom had sales of low-digit hundreds of millions, and outwardly was flying.

“Objectively, financially, our contribution to technology, measured against everyone else was successful,” McCabe said. “But that’s not how the human works.” 

“It was getting harder and harder, and we were within the category of tonnes of companies that were going public. We weren’t objectively a failure but we were just not where we should be. Given the level of ambition we had any slip was crushing. I started to think of myself as a failure.

“My self-confidence was tightly wrapped up with the arc of Intercom’s success.”

The year Intercom became a unicorn in 2018 by raising a $125 million series D from Kleiner Perkins, was when McCabe first began to notice his health was suffering.

“I remember it very clearly. I was in our Second Street office at my keyboard and my finger typed a key I had not planned to type, and I was like ‘Huh, quirky, I haven’t seen that before’ but it didn’t deeply worry me, and then that night I woke up in the middle of the night with this tremor and twitching, and then pretty quickly after I had fatigue, and I couldn’t figure out what it was,” McCabe recalled. 

He went to neurologists and the medics began the search to find out what was wrong. “I thought I had a tumour, or multiple sclerosis, or whatever. I couldn’t figure it out.  It got so bad such that in March 2020 when I decided I was going to go, I couldn’t actually see the screen sometimes,” McCabe said. “I would be at my laptop or computer, and I couldn’t actually read the screen.”

Disorder triggered by a component of gluten

Eoghan McCabe can talk about his ill health now. About a year ago, he started to recover and he is now back to full strength. He hasn’t spoken publicly about this before, but his renewed energy has allowed him to determinedly lead the rebuilding of Intercom.

He has an autoimmune disorder, essentially triggered by a component of gluten. He changed his diet on the advice of LA-based Dr Ryan Monahan, the founder of Peaceful Mountain Medicine, and finally, his health improved. He looks stronger and healthier than when we last met over a year ago in Dublin.

But was his diet all that was wrong? It was a big part, but there were other factors. 

On May 9 2019, The Information reported that McCabe had made “unwanted advances,” towards female Intercom staff members. 

#Metoo had begun two years earlier, but it was now focused on the tech industry. Whistleblower Susan Fowler had exposed the toxic culture of ride-sharing app Uber in a blog post, and more and more was coming out about abusive powerful men at the top of Silicon Valley. The Information had exposed serious allegations about a captain of venture capital, and it, and many other publications were looking for more.

McCabe recalls being shell-shocked when he was asked if he was one of those men. He apologised for “poor judgement” in relation to events that took place years earlier. Intercom said its board had previously looked into the matter, and concluded it wasn’t a resigning matter. 

But now it announced a “new review and investigation”. After months this concluded that McCabe’s description of his actions previously was accurate. 

He had made mistakes, but it wasn’t worse than that. “Everyone knew I never harassed anyone. I misread a situation. I said some awkward things, but to say I harassed someone was not only false, but just so cruel. I didn’t know how to deal with that,” McCabe said. 

“The board started an investigation and commissioned someone externally. After it concluded the board supported me in full as CEO and sent me back to work.” 

Sick as a dog and totally burned out

McCabe admits the experience was a factor in his decision to step down as CEO, but his health was the bigger driver. “I was as sick as a dog, and I was burned out and I was crushed by the allegations and the investigation,” McCabe said. “It’s very hard to have to live in a world that has certain beliefs about you that you know are not true.” 

He had wanted to defend himself after the investigation concluded, but Intercom was by then thinking about the stock market, so it wasn’t the time for the company to rake over old ground. “I learned in hindsight you always have to defend the truth, but back then it was a very complex and difficult time,” McCabe said. “I’m good at telling the Intercom story, but I never really engaged with the press on personal matters, so to have someone else tell a story for you and you don’t know how that world works, was difficult.” 

Less than a year later, McCabe asked his chief operating officer Karen Peacock, a respected industry veteran, if she wanted to take over as chief executive as he moved to chair. 

“I had always told Karen that maybe she’d be CEO someday. Thankfully she took the role. I ran from it. I was now watching Intercom somewhat from afar,” he said.

But as he watched from the perspective of an outsider he could see its problems. 

Chasing Zendesk

Zendesk is a name that comes up repeatedly in conversation with McCabe. It was founded in 2007 by three friends in Copenhagen. Like Intercom it moved to San Francisco, raised a tonne of money, and became a unicorn. McCabe remembers being in awe of them as he ran his fledgling business which only employed a few tens of people. He met them in 2012 and found their story inspiring. They were not much older than him, but just two years away from going public at a $1.7 billion valuation. Zendesk raced ahead of Intercom, but in 2021 it announced plans to buy the owner of SurveyMonkey for $4.13 billion.

It was a big bet, but its investors didn’t like it. They blocked the deal, putting Zendesk in play. In June 2022 equity giants Hellman & Friedman and Permira bought the company for $10.2 billion. Zendesk’s chief executive Mikkel Svane was out the door not long afterwards. McCabe is convinced that Intercom now has what it takes to challenge Zendesk, a business many times its size. 

“Zendesk is now a totally different game,” he said. “PE firms are not passionate about technology. We can take bigger risks, and think more long-term.” 

Intercom has now put up billboards along highways near San Francisco promoting its commitment to AI-driven customer service. “In the past, we were doing so many things that we really didn’t have a message to put out there in the world,” McCabe said.

“Before I went back, we were calling ourselves an engagement operating system. No one knew what that was. It was just so vague, and we sold to so many teams. We could go out now and declare on a billboard We’re the next Zendesk. But we probably won’t do that. 

“However, you will see other cheeky billboards. When you’re focused like we are you can say something as simple as that, and the world gets it. We’re seeing a lot of people leaving Zendesk for Intercom specifically for our AI stuff. But there’s just such a giant pie that we can all be very successful.  Zendesk’s place in the industry as the dominant force in the mid-market is the place we want”.

Investing in people with energy

Over the summer Eoghan McCabe quietly built his own website. It is old-school like something that might have been made on Geocities in the mid-1990s. It starts with a picture of McCabe with his mother, grandmother and sister. McCabe is little more than a toddler but wearing a bright red jumper emblazoned with the words: “Computer.” 

It is a personal essay describing how a boy born in Dublin in 1984 fell in love with computers and the internet. It provides a glimpse of a young McCabe and his early taste of entrepreneurship and mixing with other young techies like Paul Campbell the founder of Tito, serial entrepreneur Eamon Leonard and finally the other three young men with whom he founded Intercom.

The story describes how Intercom struggled to raise its first $1 million from a “raggle-taggle group of amazing wonderful humans,” and a “crazier set of people in Tokyo” who pitched in after being convinced by a Skype call. It then follows the story to great success. McCabe says that  Intercom went from being worth nothing, to billions of dollars, and changed fundamental components of the Internet.

This is a different McCabe from the one that has sometimes made the headlines in recent years  for the wrong reasons. It is McCabe the dreamer, the risk taker, the self-doubting innovator. In writing it down, he clearly wants people to understand his story.

I asked McCabe why he made the site. “I got on the internet in 1996, and it was a very raw time. There was so much innocence and naivety and really beautiful, simple, personal expression.

“People were not talking about product-led growth and worrying about SaaS metrics, and they didn’t even have analytics tools to measure all the different ways in which people were visiting their sites.  It was simple for people to express themselves and connect with others, and the essence of that had just stuck with me. That was the coming of age for the technologist in me, the person who wanted to contribute to technology. 

I read things about Steve Jobs and other great technology entrepreneurs, and I wanted to be like that too. That energy is an important part of it for me, and so that’s why I tried to make it look like back then and it’s actually really hard these days to make it look like it did.”

Along with telling his personal story, a small portion of the site shows he has invested in 11 unicorns. In order they are: Superhuman, Stripe, Culture Amp, Figma, Coda, Productboard, Cameo, Notion, Workstream, Pipe and Miro. McCabe downplays his track-record as an investor and describes his stakes as “tiny yet valuable slices.” 

“One of the little secrets is that when you are running a successful business, investors will pull you into these deals along the way to add credibility to those deals, and get your support and advice, so a lot of these landed in my lap,” he said. “These companies were growing. They were already hot so I really don’t want to take a lot of credit for having bet on these companies. But,I will say that you know the phrase ‘It takes one to know one?’ The type of companies that I’ve invested in over the years are led by people who just love technology and they love building and they love inventing and they have a high bar for themselves. Anyone I’ve invested in, I’ve seen that in them too.”  

“There’s an argument to make that technology investing, at least at a very early stage, isn’t that hard,” McCabe added. “If you just continue to invest in bright young people with that type of energy.  You won’t go wrong.  I really don’t want to take much credit for the success of these companies. A lot of those have just landed on my lap. I find it a bit of a distraction but if you stay close to the principle of investing in people with that energy, you can’t go wrong”.

Betting the company on AI customer service

Sam Altman has been described as “the Oppenheimer of our Age” by New York Magazine. His company OpenAI’s work is revolutionary. Microsoft invested $10 billion in his company in January. The Wall Street Journal said last month that OpenAI could be worth $90 billion. When Altman says things, people listen as they can see how groundbreaking Chat GPT is. 

It uses a multimodal large language model (LLM) to create artificial intelligence capable of answering highly complex questions. Entire industries are all trying to figure out what this technology means for them while worrying that their competitors will find out before them. In March 2023, Altman appeared on the Lex Friedman podcast. Asked what industry his technology would disrupt most in the near term, he pointed to customer service. 

“I am trying to think of a big category that I believe can be massively impacted,” Altman said. “I guess I would say customer service is a category that I could see where there are just way fewer jobs relatively soon. I am not even certain about that but I could believe it.”

McCabe recalls listening to Altman talking about this on a podcast. It didn’t surprise him, as months earlier he had pivoted Intercom towards using artificial intelligence to rebuild the business as the only AI customer solution needed by any company.

“It was a few months after we made this big bet when I heard the podcast but it’s so obvious, customer service is all about people talking and communicating and solving issues, and LLMs do that well. We’ve essentially bet the company on it because we can see exactly what it’s going to do to this space,” McCabe said. “The interesting thing is that we’re now a year ahead of the competition. Really big players are a year behind us.” 

Will Intercom enable its customers to fire people? “To our knowledge, not one of our customers has fired someone in their customer service team,” McCabe said.

Restarting and bringing back big bets

“The low-level hot take on AI is, it is going to take a lot of jobs,” McCabe said, but he doesn’t agree: “It is going to reduce response times and increase consistency. It will do repetitive stuff that humans don’t want to do. It will allow humans to focus on stuff that requires ingenuity, creativity, and humanity.” 

To rebuild Intercom as an AI-driven business hasn’t been easy. “We’ve put hundreds of people on this project. We spent $10 million we had not budgeted for hiring, building, and promoting this,” he said.

It was a big bet, which McCabe had the confidence to take. “There are moments when I think you need a founder’s intuition,” McCabe said. “A professional CEO has a clear remit not to screw it up. A founder has the room to make those big swings.” 

“Part of restarting the start-up is bringing back crazy bets,” McCabe said. “In the founding moment, you need to look at the future, take those big swings.”

Intercom, he said, had been working on its AI offering for five years before it decided to really go for it. Much of the $10 million over the planned budget has been spent building what Intercom believes is the best AI-driven customer service in the market.

Intercom took the decision to build a project called Fin which McCabe describes as an AI-powered customer service bot. Fin has been used by almost 1,000 companies in over one million conversations with people. Already it can answer almost half of the questions it is asked. “Fin ensures the customer gets a far better experience,” McCabe said. “They get instant and really consistent answers.”

This means people working in customer service are freed up to deal with tricker questions or customers who require additional help. “There was a lot of reinvention, a lot of rethinking to create Fin,” McCabe said. “It was long hours, but for the first time I heard people say: ‘It feels like a start-up again.’” 

Bringing back a co-founder

Ciaran Lee left Intercom after ten years in July 2021. Lee didn’t say it, but he was tired. The next big push was the stock market, so he wanted to get out of the company before that. Darragh Curran, who worked alongside him since 2012 as head of engineering, was ready to become CTO. In March 2023, Lee rejoined the company. His task was to rebuild Intercom’s billing systems, which were fragmented. 

From now on, Stripe is going to power this part of its business, and McCabe believes fixing this part of its business is a big step forward. He said he was lucky that his senior team had worked with him for many years.

“Darragh Curran, Paul Adams (chief product officer), and others could be outstanding founders themselves,” McCabe said. Lauren Cullen, who joined Intercom from Twitter as one of its first people managers, is now head of HR. Megan Sheridan, who ran Intercom’s world tours in 2016 and 2017 has rejoined the company from Web Summit to lead its events team.  

“One of the biggest changes I made internally was to empower great creators and inventors,” McCabe said. “I want people with unreasonable ambitions, who themselves have something to prove.”

 But there were also lots of exits. “We had some executives and middle management who were not the right fit for a start-up,” McCabe said.

I ask him about a new performance management system, which sounds unforgiving. “Every quarter each employee is rated, not just on the performance against their own goals, but also behaviour against Intercom’s values, and then they’re ranked. The bottom few are respectfully moved out of the company,” McCabe said, adding that high performers were rewarded. “Every single quarter, you move out the people who are really not aligned, and celebrate the people who are. If you do that enough quarters, you transform company culture.” 

Some people didn’t want a high-energy start-up

I asked McCabe about reports of staff “unrest.”

“Some people signed up for a different organisation, a company that was on its way to a nice IPO,” McCabe said. “They didn’t want a high-energy, high-intensity startup. That’s not their fault. Some people complain about these changes, but I really want people to know that they are in a position to change their lives.

“I want them to go and work in places where they feel connected and appreciated, they feel purpose.  Life is just way too short. I sincerely see the changes we make and the actions we do as a form of tough love.” 

During the summer The Irish Times reported on complaints by staff that Intercom no longer supported Pride. “Intercom didn’t end support for Pride,” McCabe said, adding that Intercom is building a “radically inclusive” work culture that was “accepting of all views.”

“The stats speak for themselves, whether it’s sales team performance, whether it’s engineering performance, whether it’s the rates at which we retain employees. Even though I’ve applied so much pressure and so much change, applications for our roles are up 300 per cent, which is remarkable.

“I developed over the years an idea of what a modern healthy corporate structure should look like. It should be open and welcoming to different people and perspectives. We want to leave the culture wars at the door along with polarisation. True openness means respect, appreciation, radical acceptance which ironically is controversial.” 

A little capital constraint is healthy

Just as Eoghan McCabe has been tough in moving some staff on, he has also taken steps to hold onto others. Intercom has introduced a sabbatical programme, and current staff can sell their stock on a secondary market if they wish to. “That has taken some of the pressure off. I want there to be no rational reason for good people to leave.” 

Will Intercom ever IPO? “The broad liquidity that we all want will come by way of an IPO, or maybe someone buys us along the way, or maybe we sell a big chunk of the company to an investor,” McCabe said. “But right now we’re really enjoying being private.  We were going to go public on the 15^th of June last year but thank God we did not.” 

Intercom’s IPO was advanced enough that it even had its own stock market ticker. What was it? “I don’t want to say it, because it was no good,” McCabe laughed. “Some people have really great names.  Like Instacart has CART,  beautiful, but we did not have any such ticker! If we were public right now, we could not make the big swings we’re making.”  

“I couldn’t say that I’m going to put a few hundred people on this new product that was enabled literally weeks ago by, say, an announcement by OpenAI that the whole world never saw. You just couldn’t do that.  You’ve got to sweat and toil about every single quarter, so we’re enjoying our private status.  Intercom is absolutely back and the industry is seeing it.” 

Will Intercom raise more capital? “If it becomes the case that new capital would be helpful, I don’t think we’d have trouble raising,” McCabe said. “But I think raising just because we can is the wrong approach. I don’t think we’re capital constrained.  We have some big swings we’re going to make this coming year,” McCabe said. To achieve that, he said, it was possible cash in Intercom might fall to $100 million. 

McCabe said being efficient with capital was drilled into him from when he had to borrow €2,200 to first fly in San Francisco to start Intercom. “A little bit of constraint is extremely healthy. It keeps you focused, keeps you lean, buys optionality. We are now a profitable independent business that will be around for probably decades to come if we want to be.”

Pick the head up and get out into the world

Eoghan McCabe is in New York, he told me, for an off-site meeting with the top 100 people in Intercom to discuss year two of the new Intercom. What will that look like?

“The next period is unimaginatively called Intercom 2 Year 2,” McCabe said. “When I went back, I didn’t talk about Intercom 2, because I felt like it was a little bit too much of a change.” 

“It was almost a little too obnoxious to tell people that we’re starting a brand-new company and everything you cared about and loved is gone.”  Year 2 is about starting to try and fly the plane we built in Year 1,” McCabe said. “There’ll still be a lot of building, but Year 2 is really about hitting the market, starting to tackle Zendesk. We want to start a movement behind the idea of the importance of great service.”  

“Customer service online is just so poor, so miserable. Our approach, our blend of human and AI customer service can fundamentally change customer service forever.  It can deliver incredible experiences for consumers, and it represents the future. Year 1 was heads down, making changes.  Year 2 is pick the head up and get out into the world,” McCabe said. “Our goal now is to revolutionise digital business with this human plus AI bot experience. Year 2 is just one step along the journey.  It’s probably another decade’s journey,” he said. Intercom he said was uniquely positioned between the might of Zendesk, and rising new startups seeking to disrupt the customer service space. 

“If you’re Zendesk, acquired by a private equity firm, you don’t have the inclination, interest, or room to go and do a bunch of crazy new stuff,” he said. “It’s hard for them to move on a dime and take the kind of risks that we can take. They are, however, a great go-to-market organisation, and that is a big challenge for us.”

“On the other side, there are small companies starting from zero, that don’t have the resources we have to build. We have $130 million in the bank, and can spend hundreds of millions a year growing this company. We’ve also been working on AI for a long time. New companies will have to raise capital, build a team and get the basics right. We’ve been able to build more quickly, because we’ve done that and we can fund it, so I think that’s going to lead to great things for us.” 

McCabe has now been working with Des Traynor, Ciaran Lee and many of his senior team for more than ten years. “You don’t usually get people as experienced as us all working back together in a startup,” he said. “The gang’s back together, building their second start-up within their first start-up. The magic is happening again.

“We can take swings only a startup makes, but what is really unique is we can do it on an epic scale with hundreds of millions behind us,” McCabe said. “We are both a start-up and a late-stage company. I don’t see anyone at a late stage making the big bets that we have placed. Startups are struggling to keep up as they don’t have the resources we have. Intercom is a mega-startup.”