Why has Irish tech firm Intercom been so dogged by ‘unnecessary chaos’?

When Intercom hit the headlines last week, it was not for the usual reasons. The company, founded in 2011 by Eoghan McCabe, Des Traynor, Ciaran Lee and David Barrett, has blazed a trail across the tech sector, reaching unicorn status in 2018 and winning over customers that included everyone from smaller businesses to household names.

It was doing something different, yet simple and necessary: enabling its clients to communicate directly with customers through their own websites and mobile apps.

It struck a chord with businesses. In the year to end-January 2019, turnover jumped to almost $90 million (€80 million); a year later, revenues were more than $125 million. And its losses were shrinking, falling from $27.1 million in January 2020 to just over $9 million in the year ended January 31st, 2021. The company said subsequently that it had reached the $200 million milestone in recurring revenue during the year ending January 2022 for which accounts are due to be filed shortly.

At that point, the business seemed headed for a stock market flotation. But then the tech crunch came and companies that had seemed impervious to global uncertainty began to feel the pinch.

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Intercom was no different. It announced two rounds of jobs cuts in 2022 – one in September and a second in November – that led to the overall loss of 13 per cent of its global workforce of about 1,000 people.

And in between the two rounds of cuts, Karen Peacock, who had joined Intercom as chief operating officer in 2017 before being made chief executive in 2020, abruptly left in October. McCabe, who had been serving as chairman since Peacock’s promotion in July 2020, returned to head the company.

There are few people who question 39-year-old McCabe’s business acumen. He led the company to its first $100 million in revenue and its $1.3 billion valuation. And two of the team that founded the business with him are still alongside him. Traynor is chief strategy officer and Lee – who left the business in 2021 – returned earlier this year as chief engineer, taking on special strategic projects.

“We’re incredibly proud of the culture of radical acceptance and maturity that we’re building at Intercom,” the company said in a statement when approached to comment for this article. “The renewed levels of energy and engagement here since Eoghan’s return are palpable, and the focus that he’s been driving is yielding significantly improved business metrics too.”

But McCabe’s return has also brought a change to company policies – one the company has since acknowledged was poorly communicated – and with it, some argue, the company culture that Intercom had previously been so proud of. There was a clue about the company’s future priorities in the message that he sent employees announcing his return.

“I have a very specific vision for what we need to be and what we need to do to get there. It involves going back to our roots, some extreme focus, and a bet that we’ve never been willing to make before: picking a lane and being clear about what we’re not going to do,” he said. “We’re going to become the dominant platform in the customer support space, and redefine that space. We will go head-to-head with [rival customer service platform] Zendesk.”

The first high-profile casualty in the pursuit of that focus has been the company’s public support for Pride, something Intercom had previously been vocal about, including during McCabe’s first tenure as chief executive.

The first outward sign came with a video. Intercom’s in-house team had created some content for Pride month that featured staff talking about their experiences, including being an ally for the transgender community. It was a short video that would go on the company’s social media channels, as videos often had in the past.

In early June, the video was posted to the company’s YouTube Shorts and TikTok channels. Within a couple of hours, it had been removed, although the LinkedIn post that pointed towards the video stayed up for some time before it, too, vanished.

This was the company that had, in 2022, supported Pride with the theme “out in the world and bringing people in”, sharing the experiences of those who were out, and equipping allies with the knowledge to provide support to people in the community. It had organised education sessions, events for staff, donations to charities.

“Pride is, first and foremost, a protest, but it’s also a celebration and a display of solidarity,” the company’s blog read last year.

But 2023 was a different story. Aside from the deleted Pride video, flags that had been put up in the company’s Dublin office – in the building that formerly housed Anglo Irish Bank’s headquarters on St Stephen’s Green – were removed days later without notice, a decision chief executive Eoghan McCabe would later describe as “knee-jerk” and “hasty”.

Meanwhile, employee resource groups (ERGs) were told they would no longer be able to promote those groups in general Slack channels to which all employees had access. The groups are a diversity and inclusion initiative, common in industry and led by employees, usually with the backing of the company. In Intercom, that previously meant an executive sponsor for the group.

But now, support for the groups would be scaled back as the company was “deprioritising” everything that was not focused on building the business.

At an all-hands meeting in June, the chief executive faced questions from concerned staff. Pride, he said, had “got wrapped up, unfortunately, within some circles in kind of more divisive and political issues”. He didn’t go into any detail on what he viewed those issues as, but said it had been a tough decision as he had previously been involved in organising Pride celebrations for the company.

Intercom has since said that the company, while it pulled public support for Pride this year (as per reports in The Irish Times), had marked the occasion with internal events that had been “personally approved” by McCabe.

The focus on company success and the work that Intercom is doing is nothing new for McCabe. In an interview with The Irish Times in 2015 in his first stint as chief executive, he was proud of the lack of Silicon Valley trappings about Intercom. The focus was on building the business, rather than improving your foosball score.

“People think that start-ups are all about acting the idiot and wasting your life; then you come into Intercom and you see the opposite – that really benefits us,” he said at the time.

But ERGs don’t come under the “Silicon Valley” umbrella; according to McKinsey, 90 per cent of Fortune 500 companies have ERGs, with the most effective groups acting as a tool to foster inclusion, and attract and retain employees in these companies. They are usually seen as an asset rather than a distraction.

Intercom isn’t banning the ERGs outright – just no longer devoting resources to their work and directing them to keep their activities private.

That was something that Intercom’s executives, McCabe included, were at pains to point out in a follow-up meeting with staff. The chief executive described the situation with the new policies on ERGs as a “communications f**k up” to staff.

In new policies circulated to staff on Thursday, the company says: “EGs [employee groups] should keep their communications within their group forums and spaces and not shared externally.” It stipulates that employee groups will not hold companywide events or host external events and “will not communicate publicly or externally”.

On social and political dialogue, the company states that “our policy is not to advocate on behalf of the company or our employees on any social or political topic, and to keep such topics out of our internal and external communications in general”, noting that society has become polarised along political lines and where social issues have also become politicised.

It says that the company will not take a stance externally on political or social topics, or celebrate/comment on such topics on the company’s social media accounts. However, they add: “Everyone is free to discuss any such topics outside of our public forums, in their personal lives and on their personal social accounts.”

While staff may decorate their own desks – as long as the company does not deem it “inappropriate or offensive” – Intercom says it will continue to decorate the office for “some holidays that leadership determines are not related to social or political issues, like halloween or Christmas”.

“Personally, I really love when employees find points of connection and reasons to get closer. It’s really healthy for the culture, it’s healthy for the organisation,” he told staff. “That’s one of the reasons I’m bringing us back to the offices in the way that we’re doing right now. Because I really worry that we’ve lost our connection when we’re at home.”

He said he wanted to build a “deeply radical accepting culture” at Intercom, “not just one where a select few who we call ‘diverse’ are celebrated, but all types of people”.

Perhaps the reason it was such a surprise was because McCabe had been involved early on in driving Intercom’s Pride support. Explaining his position to staff at last week’s all-hands meeting, McCabe pointed out his long history of involvement with various initiatives at Intercom.

“This is not about Pride, this has nothing to do with Pride. For whatever it’s worth, I have long supported Pride, Intercom has long supported Pride. I’ve personally been involved in and pushed a lot of initiatives that have helped certain groups, certain people, with the support they needed at any point in time,” he told staff.

“I pushed a lot of our early Pride involvement. I started a Muslim support initiative at the start of Trump’s term, it was a period of time ... where people from certain countries felt persecuted in the United States, I donated a lot of my personal money behind that and set up an initiative at Intercom where we helped people move from the US to our Irish office and Ireland if they wanted to. And I’ve pushed many other charitable initiatives.”

The early Pride T-shirts that Intercom produced, in which McCabe was involved in creating, are in a nostalgia box in his garage.

It would be inaccurate to say that the decision on Pride had been solely responsible for the unrest among staff; for some, it had begun months before, with Peacock’s departure after just over two years at the helm to pursue other projects outside Intercom and become a board adviser.

She was a well-liked leader by all accounts, and staff were unsettled by the move. In internal communications, seen by The Irish Times, they raised concerns over the abruptness of her departure from the role, the lack of transition, concerns that it would change Intercom.

McCabe had, he said, been asked back by some of the board. “I could never stay too far from this company,” he said at the time. “I still deeply cared about its success and its place in the world. Recently, some of our board members asked if I’d come back and I felt called to finish what I started.”

There were also questions raised about the events before McCabe’s initial departure from the chief executive role. In 2019, he faced allegations of harassment from women staff members, some dating back to the early days of the company. Intercom carried out an internal investigation at the time, followed by an external review.

At the time, McCabe apologised for “poor judgment” he had demonstrated, and the “distraction” it had caused from the business. An additional external review of the incident, commissioned by Intercom’s board, backed him as chief executive.

Staff had also expressed concern about McCabe’s activity on Twitter, where his profile identifies him as “CEO and founder at @intercom”. Following the announcement of the leadership change late last year, a letter was sent from the leaders of the ERGs to the board, raising a number of concerns surrounding his reappointment. And among them was his engagement on Twitter through what the groups described as official Intercom accounts with accounts “espousing regressive views on the rights of sexual, gender and racial minorities”.

The letter said there were “understandable concerns among those who identified in those ways, about whether they will remain equal and respected at their place of work”.

McCabe’s activity on the social media platform is varied. Among the work-related tweets where he praises the various teams and products at Intercom, there are retweets of the right-wing former Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson, posts that back the United States supreme court decision on affirmative action, complaints about censorship and calls for free speech. There are “likes” of tweets that could be perceived as mocking transgender issues, and one particularly contentious one that drew comparisons between Pride flags on Regent Street to a photo of Nazi flags on the street, talking about ideologies.

McCabe told staff he is being “misunderstood” on social media, and that people may be guessing as to his personal ideologies. He is, he says, a moderate on key issues.

“I’ve learned too many times that Twitter is exactly the wrong way to communicate. It’s just a shitty communication channel. And I’m going to be a lot more thoughtful about what I engage in,” he told staff.

“It’s super important here that everyone, including me, is allowed to be themselves in their personal lives. We want people to be their whole, deep, authentic human selves. And that includes in our personal social accounts. We live in a digital world now, life is online. But I’m being really misunderstood in some of the more extreme examples and some of the things that have been pointed to.

“There is just no nuance allowed for in me casually liking a pithy, smartass tweet with an obscure reference that, for example, people have equated to Eoghan ‘hating Pride’, which as I’ve shared is the precise opposite of my take on Pride.

“So I’m learning that until we get to a place as a culture of where we can genuinely celebrate all types of ideas, till I’m communicating more broadly and more effectively, on certain topics, rather than just liking certain tweets, I’m learning that if I don’t want to be misunderstood and create a bunch of questions and distraction, I need to slow down.”

In the meantime, though, the company is talking up its prospects, despite what executives see as the “unnecessary chaos” that has surrounded it in recent weeks. Intercom has moved into artificial intelligence, linking up with Open AI and launching its own customer-service chatbot Fin.

“Intercom is moving fast, and we’re getting a lot right,” McCabe told staff at last week’s meeting. “There’s objectively very clear signs of life on multiple metrics in our business; our new strategy focus is actually working, which is really exciting. But the chaos involved in making the changes we’re making and moving as fast as we are, can at points be too much. And we have a little bit of unnecessary chaos.”

Has his explanation placated staff? That remains to be seen. Staff have been active in recent days on tech app Blind, expressing their feelings on the matter anonymously in the private channel dedicated to verified employees of Intercom. Access is granted only to people with an Intercom email address. While some have welcomed McCabe’s new policies, on the basis of exchanges seen by The Irish Times, the general feeling seems to be one of disquiet at the changes being brought in to Intercom and at the attention directed at the company.

If Intercom was concerned about distractions, the current one is one of its own making.