Intercom CEO Eoghan McCabe explains why he’s back ‘to fight’

McCabe’s decision may come as a surprise to some.

Why is he going back to work now?

“I was asked by the board members if I would consider returning,” he says, speaking to Independent.ie.

Intercom is a specialist in customer communication software. Its most recognized feature is its Messenger client chat bubble, used by thousands of businesses on their websites.

The company, founded by McCabe, Des Traynor, Ciaran Lee and David Barrett, divides its hundreds of employees between its engineering center in Dublin and San Francisco, where it focuses on sales and marketing.

“I stepped down as CEO in the summer of 2020,” McCabe says.

“At that point, I felt I had accomplished everything. When we launched Intercom, I hoped it could be a $50 million business. In 2020, it was well over $1 billion. The time had come. I was ready for a break to try new things. I had brought Karen [Peacock] as COO with the expectation that she would become CEO at some point. So I got my break and started some fun new projects.

But he remained president of the company.

“It was remarkable how much I still cared about it and how much I still felt very attached to it,” he says.

McCabe has spent much of the past two years as an angel investor, backing several software startups, including trucking logistics company TrueNorth, CRM company North and AI text analytics company Monkeylearn.

As he returns to the CEO role, his plans for the company are now “aggressive”. Intercom, he says, has been a successful – but secondary – player in the key markets it pursues. He now wants to scale up to once again become the giant in the sector. This means targeting Zendesk.

“For me, finishing what I started means becoming super aggressive,” he says. “We pick a path and pick a fight. We decide that we are going to be one of the great leaders in space. In particular, we are targeting Zendesk in customer support. They were the leader and did a phenomenal job. And yet their technology, you know, represents a way of doing things that hasn’t really changed in a few decades. We know we have a new way to solve this same problem. So we will pursue them. »

Zendesk is about 10 times the size of Intercom and has an office in Dublin with hundreds of employees.

“Intercom is used by many well-respected, major brands,” says McCabe. “But it’s often used alongside tools like Zendesk. If this big next step works, it won’t be a companion anymore. This will be the platform.

Asked what a “next big step” might mean, McCabe said the company will launch a major product update next week.

“The big highlight is a total refresh of our messenger,” he says. “You see it now on every website, and it’s become a fundamental expectation of consumers when they want to contact businesses. There are a lot of copycats. So it’s very important that we stay ahead of the pack. This refresh will once again outpace the competition.”

McCabe’s return as CEO marks the end of a two-year stint under Karen Peacock, who stepped down as the company’s chief operating officer to take on the top job in 2020. Ms. Peacock, who jointly made the announcement to staff today, will remain an advisor to the board. Was she okay with Mr. McCabe returning as CEO?

“Karen has been a phenomenal leader and leader for us,” he says. “We have matured a lot under her. She really fundamentally changed the business and is now a key part of our story. We are just very grateful to him.

In a statement, Ms Peacock said: “Serving as CEO of Intercom has been a privilege and I would like to thank the Intercom team for all that we have been able to accomplish together. I’m excited about where Intercom is heading and what its next chapter looks like.

Last year, Peacock said the company was in the early stages of preparing for an IPO. Is it still on the cards?

“Everyone can see that the IPO window is closed right now,” McCabe says. “Technology is facing this insane headwind. So I feel like everyone is on the back burner.

But McCabe says the company is committed to “achieving an outcome for all of the thousands of stakeholders involved,” including “investors and employees past and present.”

“It could be an IPO or something else,” he says. “The company is 12 years old at this point. It feels like a big milestone for the company to reach this point.

The tech industry has seen a slump in valuations this year, affecting private companies like Stripe as much as some publicly listed multinational giants like Google.

How is the valuation of Intercom’s “unicorn” holding up?

“I really couldn’t say,” he said.

Is Intercom profitable right now?

“Well, we’ve always been close to it for the past few years,” he says. “There were times when we were profitable and times when we weren’t. I think at the moment we may not be.

Intercom still intends to move forward with a giant new head office adjacent to St Stephens Green, it adds.

It counts more than 25,000 companies, including Amazon, Microsoft and Atlassian, among its customers. The company says its platform is used to send more than 500 million messages per month and that it “enables interactions” with more than 600 million “active end users” per month.

Its latest valuation, at $1.27 billion, is based on $240 million in funding from global venture capitalists, including Kleiner Perkins, Bessemer Venture Partners and Social Capital.

However, the return of McCabe to the head of Intercom is also likely to revive questions around a controversy with which he was associated. In 2019, he was named in a US publication in connection with the harassment of a co-worker at a social event in 2015. After the story was published, McCabe apologized for what he described as a “bad judgment” in the “early years of the company”.

A resulting investigation by the company, aided by outside counsel from a leading US law firm, cleared him of any wrongdoing. No formal complaint has been filed. However, the investigation called for some improvements to Intercom’s internal policies. These included a set of recommendations “increasing emphasis on our anti-harassment provisions and “building on current harassment training”.

The story attracted a lot of attention in Ireland. Was that why he quit as CEO when he did?

“Absolutely not. I left a year after the investigation was concluded.

So that didn’t contribute at all, even tangentially, to why he wanted to step back?

“It had nothing to do with it. I made an advance on someone at the very beginning of the business. I was naive. I thought we were all on the same level. But it was the subject of a thorough investigation by HR, the Board of Directors and outside attorneys appointed by the Board of Directors, after which the Board of Directors determined that no action was required against me and they voted to unanimously to support me as CEO.

Does he think that’s the kind of thing that can persist as a problem?

“I think my track record for creating inclusive and open cultures speaks for itself,” he says. “Anyone I worked with in the beginning will tell you that I am passionate about keeping a good, healthy and open environment. When I left, something like 46% of all promotions and hires of managers and above were women. It was without any kind of directive. It was just because of the culture and the environment. So I think that’s the thing that will be most pervasive and in the minds of employees.

McCabe describes the next period of the Intercom chapter as one where it must become a bigger company.

“Our big innovation was making it very easy for companies to get personal with their customers,” he says. “We had the messenger and we had bots and that sort of thing. But we have never been the decisive leader. Yes, we are a multi-billion dollar company, but there are higher levels.