Profile Aug 03, 2025 7 min read

Lessons from Eoghan McCabe, founder and CEO of Intercom

On Leadership and Authenticity

On the importance of being yourself: "You're fucking awesome. Be you more. Focus on what you're passionate about. Be real and real people will want to be around you and work with and for you." [1]
Authenticity in leadership: "The first key to making a massive change is to do so with absolutely no apologies to be wholly true to yourself and to never ever ask for permission." [2]
On shedding limiting identities: "These identities that we build for ourselves, this armor, these images, they're our place of comfort and safety and we latch onto them... You've been a great CEO, but you're more than just a CEO." [3]
Leadership requires a mission: "I don't think you can have leadership without purpose or a strong grounding in a mission. A hunger, desire, thirst, ability to motivate, inspire and bring people along." [4]
Trusting your gut: "For me personally, the big lessons are all about trusting my instinct and my principles." [5]
The messy reality of innovation: "Silicon Valley as a culture and a place and a community is a, is made up of a phenomenal amount of young people doing what they do for the very first time. And. More specifically, it's a bunch of raw talent with no experience. And that has very predictable results in that great things are produced in a very messy way." [5]
On personal growth through challenges: "The things that bruise our egos the most tend to eviscerate the parts of our ego that were making us so fragile in the first place." [6]
The journey of self-discovery: "The trite and clichéd lesson is that we find out that that's not what we needed at all, that everything we needed was within us. But you kind of have to go that journey, you kind of have to prove yourself wrong before you can do the harder work.” [3]
On living truthfully: "We must strive to live according to truth. Every action we take or word we speak or thought we think that is not in accordance with the truth creates friction and suffering for us and others. We must live our true authentic lives." [7]
On dealing with expectations: To manage the weight of expectation, it's crucial to separate your identity from your company's success and to find your authentic self. [8]

On Startups and Building a Company

Question everything: "I don't believe that there are any rules in work and life. I have always taken a healthy approach to any endeavor where I try and question all the assumptions." [3]
The power of naivety: "There was a phenomenal amount of naivety that allowed people to do things that were kind of like conventionally the wrong thing to do.” [6]
Founder-market fit is crucial: "People talk so much about product market fit, but what is not talked about enough is founder market fit... the product can change, but what doesn't easily change is the founders or the market." [9]
The freedom and fear of starting up: "The best thing was the freedom to do things our way and be successful. And the worst thing was the freedom to do things our way and fail." [1]
On being contrarian: "If you talk to 100 funds right now and you can't raise money, change the damn idea.” [6]
Think bigger: "I'm pretty sure that all other things being equal, if I was able to go back in time and start Intercom again, by this stage, it probably would be 10X the size, only because I now know that I can think bigger, and that simply doing so gives you just so many more benefits." [3]
Vision determines scale: "Our potential for accomplishment is massively determined by the scale of our thinking, and that was a big lesson for me." [3]
On the importance of a unique mission: The idea of Intercom as a single platform for all customer communication was heavily contested, but sticking to that vision was key to its success. [1]
Great companies ride multiple waves: "Great companies are built on successive waves… secular movements. They either create them themselves or they jump on ones that have started already.” [6]
Reinvention is key to longevity: "Great companies reinvent themselves all the time. they constantly operate with a small company mindset." [10]

On Work Ethic and Company Culture

Hard work is essential: "Most likely you're going to want to need to work seven days a week and 12 hours a day to get your thing off the ground.” [6]
Homogeneity in early-stage startups: "In early-stage startups, you want extreme homogeneity. You want people who believe what you believe.” [6]
Be unapologetic about your values: When building a team, it's crucial to be clear about your values and part ways with those who don't align. [6]
Maintaining a high bar in hiring: "The most difficult aspect is keeping your bar high. You have new people hiring new people! It's so easy for the company at large to lose sense of what you value and what type of people made you successful in the first place." [1]
The value of in-person work: "In person is better. And I think that the people who promote remote working are lazy and antisocial.” [6]
Ripping up the big company playbook: "I ripped up the big company values. I asked the company... what are all the ways which were big and slow and shitty... and I changed a lot of processes." [10]
Hiring brilliant people is paramount: "The people who put that team together had an eye for that X factor.” [6]
It's more fun to be original: "It's a company where we've been able to stick to our principles and values, doing things our way, rather than copying anyone else, and have that strategy actually be successful and result in incredible growth." [1]
Leaders as founders: "I tell all of the leaders at intercom that they're Founders." [10]
Work as a primary interest: "My work is my primary “interest.” I love starting businesses, running businesses, growing businesses. I love building important and cool technology before anyone else." [7]

On Product and Customers

Customer intimacy is everything: Successful startups "will obsess about talking to customers… getting inside not just their heads but their hearts.” [6]
Build by intuition: "We build primarily by touch and feel, by intuition. We just built the smallest, simplest thing we thought would be awesome, shared it with the world, and took it from there." [1]
Ship early and simple: "We ship features and products to customers very, very early. So we frequently find that the simpler solutions are all we need." [1]
The importance of empathy for the customer: Founders and sales teams must have empathy for the customer to be successful. [11]
Focus on a remarkable product: "We obsessed about building something unique and very awesome and literally remarkable, such that people would tell their friends about it." [1]
Design as a force multiplier: For designer-founders, it's essential to understand that while design is a powerful advantage, it must be built on a solid foundation of understanding the technology. [9]
The problem with traditional customer support: "Generally internet companies sending their customers to support forms... It was and is the most impersonal and disrespectful thing you could do to your customers." [1]
Betting the company on AI: "We're certainly betting the entire company on AI. AI turns out to be all hype. We're done. Completely done. And in that environment, you want people who are a little maverick themselves, up for an adventure, want to roll their sleeves up and build, want to be in it." [5]
The future of software is AI: "I think that all the next great software companies the big category leaders will actually be AI companies not just applying AI but selling AI." [6]
Passion for the technology: "I wasn't as passionate about solving particular business problems I was passionate about building cool technology that's it it's okay and it led to a multibillion dollar company." [6]

On Personal Philosophy and Life

Follow your passion: "Please follow your passion. Please do the thing that you love.” [6]
The value of money: "For me money is exciting because it is a resource that I can put to ever greater use: towards my passions and the things I really care about." [12]
Life is short: "I have an incredibly high bar for myself, and am very conscious that life is incredibly short. I have a lot I want to get done, and I know we could have moved even faster. That's what keeps me going." [1]
Early failure strengthens you: Experiencing and overcoming rejection early on can make you more resilient. [6]
The illusion of free time: "I learned actually that there's not that much time, we don't have this much that much time on this Earth. the days go by so quick even if you're not doing things." [10]
Choosing your battles: "I used to like to do everything from scratch... and now I deeply choose my battles and there's areas of the company I have little interest or passion in or for exploring and reinventing." [5]
On being a founder vs. a designer: "If you are absolutely and completely passionate about the process of designing founding a company will make sure that you never get to do designing." [9]
The wonder of the early internet: "I'll never forget that sense of wonder at the early Internet. I can feel it now." [7]
On taking advice: "Your goal is not to figure out what a Mark Benioff once did... your goal is to build a model of the universe... and you know you'll ask Mark, you'll ask a bunch of other people and that knowledge will eventually overlap." [2]
Art is not about pleasing everyone: "It's just not art if you're trying to find the lowest common denominator and something that satisfies everyone." [13]

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Written by Antoine Buteau

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