Intercom's Eoghan McCabe on rebooting a 15-year-old SaaS company: AI reinvigoration, founder energy, and why turnarounds don't work

Summary

Eoghan McCabe built Intercom into a successful SaaS business over fifteen years, then watched it stall. Five consecutive quarters of decelerating revenue, cultural drift tied to early success, and a health-related departure from the CEO role all compounded the problem. When he returned, the fix wasn't strategic reinvention. He repriced customers fairly and removed the sales requirement for product access. Over the following eight quarters, core SaaS growth improved 10x.

AI accelerated what came next. When GPT-3.5 arrived, Intercom moved into customer agents—software handling customer success, service, sales, and marketing work that humans used to do. Finn, Intercom's customer agent product, now wins competitive bake-offs against primary competitors and leads its category in customers and ARR, according to McCabe. He frames Intercom as a rare case of a previous-generation SaaS company actually leading in AI. Beyond commercial results, AI gave him a reason to keep showing up.

Energy as the real variable

McCabe attributes momentum loss in established companies not to structure but to the founder. The CEO stops pushing. By year fifteen of running a SaaS business, the intellectual excitement of churn math and roadmaps is gone. People around a disengaged founder pick up on it immediately, and the organization slows accordingly. His advice to founders in that position is direct: if you don't want to do it anymore, leave. Many late-stage CEOs, including some running public companies with flat stock prices for five to eight years, can't separate their identity from the title.

For Intercom, AI solved this. McCabe says he wouldn't still be running the company if it were pure SaaS. The re-engagement from the top, not any specific management technique, is what he credits for the turnaround.

Hiring young, tolerating chaos

On keeping energy alive at scale, McCabe is skeptical of the conventional advice to bring in seasoned executives. Gray-haired operators stabilize organizations by ironing out chaos, but the chaos is often the point. Young, high-energy people are messy, sloppy, and don't know how to run global organizations, but they bring the obsession that older cultures lose. His approach at Intercom is to identify roles narrow enough that a single sharp 30-year-old can own a problem independently, without needing to coordinate across eight time zones. The key qualifier is self-awareness: the hire knows what they don't know.

McCabe is direct about how non-fungible talent is. Replacing one person with a backfill doesn't preserve what was there. Entire organizations shift when individuals change.

The turnaround opportunity VCs ignore

Venture capital is poorly set up for turnarounds, McCabe argues, because VCs are pattern matchers and turnarounds don't fit the pattern. The canonical VC success story runs from zero to ten billion through invention, not recovery. When a company with $100M in ARR starts decelerating, investors tend to write it down and move on rather than treat it as an opportunity.

McCabe thinks that's a mistake. A talented founder who took a first company through YC and got a clean exit could potentially generate more wealth by taking a $100M-revenue business with an established customer base to several hundred million than by starting from scratch. Going from $100M to $300M can be easier than going from zero to $10M. Private equity has built empires on exactly that logic. Venture, largely, hasn't followed.