Eoghan McCabe: moving to America to build Intercom into a unicorn + the benefits of naivety, hard work, and rejection.

Eoghan McCabe is the CEO and co-founder of Intercom

This was an incredible talk recorded live during the ODF22 cohort. Thanks again to Intercom for hosting.

10 important ideas (and timestamps) from this conversation:

1/ Innocence and Naivety Can Be a Superpower

7:58 - “There was a phenomenal amount of naivety that allowed people to do things that were kind of like conventionally the wrong thing to do.”

2/ Be Contrarian, but Not Recklessly So

10:05 - “If you talk to 100 funds right now and you can’t raise money, change the damn idea.”

3/ In-Person Work is Better

11:55 - “In person is better. And I think that the people who promote remote working are lazy and antisocial.”

4/ Find Your True Passion—or You'll Fail

17:55 - “Please follow your passion. Please do the thing that you love.”

5/ Great Companies Ride Multiple Waves

21:23 - “Great companies are built on successive waves… secular movements. They either create them themselves or they jump on ones that have started already.”

6/ Hard Work is Under Attack—But It's Essential

23:37 - “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.”

7/ Extreme Homogeneity Early On Beats Diversity

25:03 - “In early-stage startups, you want extreme homogeneity. You want people who believe what you believe.”

8/ Customer Intimacy Over Everything

26:29 - “They’ll obsess about talking to customers… getting inside not just their heads but their hearts.”

9/ Early Failure and Rejection Strengthens You

29:08 - “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.”

10/ Hiring Brilliant People is More Important than the Idea

41:51 - “The people who put that team together had an eye for that X factor.”

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If you're exploring starting a company apply for ODF - our 23rd cohort kicks off November 8th in San Francisco