Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Currently across the business we benchmark ourselves against all public software companies. There's like 120 something B2B software companies. We're like in the 15th percentile for ARR growth, so we're up there. Fin, which is our AI agent, which is the future of the business, the thing that will disrupt the old business. It's growing north of 300%. It took off really fast like all these other AI companies you hear of the first year, it grew from one to 12 million ARR. We're now in solid mid eight digit ARR growth there, we'll pass 100 million ARR with Fin in less than three quarters. And yeah, Fin, we're in the customer experience category with Fin, so it's one of these agents that helps do all your customer work and they all started with service and in that category we are the biggest by customer count, biggest by revenue, best by performance benchmarks. We win all our head-to-heads and our direct competitor bake-offs. We're rated number one on G2, so I think we're doing pretty well. We're doing far better than we imagined at this point. Okay. This sounds like the dream for a lot of founders, especially ones that are stuck with their existing business that isn't going very far. So, let's get to that. Let's talk about the beginning of this journey. You had a business that was working, people used it, loved it, over 100 million ARR I believe. Talk about just the state of the business at the point roughly when you decided I really need to make a big change and go AI first. It was already in the hundreds of millions, Intercom is 14 years and change now. Part of the story is that in 2020 I had been sick for a couple years. The background is I had mold toxins and later I found out that I got a tick bite and that messed me up. And so I left the CEO role in 2020 and a lot of the mistakes I had been making when I was sick got worse. We became what a lot of late stage software companies are today, which is a bit bloated. We lost some energy. Our strategy was diluted and unfocused. We're trying to do all the things for all the people. We didn't know what problems we were already solving and for who, and the result was very slow revenue growth in the low single digit percent and I was away for two years unsatisfied where the business was going. We had this post COVID sugar rush, which a lot of big companies at that stage did in 2021. Everyone's valuation and revenue was through the roof and that hit a lot of problems in a lot of these companies and we had five quarters of success of sequential decline in our net new ARR and we were about to hit $0 net new ARR which means we would've in negative growth territory. We never got there. I managed to stop it before we got there, but we were falling each quarter and I found that I, despite my wishes to go and have new adventures, still had a lot of pride for this damn thing and didn't want to see it. And in a way that was so different from the way it started, it started with so much hope and optimism like so many companies do, and it was about to fade away. So, that was when I felt like I need to go back and I need to make a change. I went back and one month later ChatGPT was announced, so it would be really neat and tidy to be able to say that the AI transformation came, I knew I couldn't be on the sidelines, I had to save this thing from the coming disruption. Actually, I got whacked across the head by this AI thing, but it also ended up being a gift.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.