Back in August 2011, Ciaran Lee and Eoghan McCabe shared a beer at Club 93, a dive bar in San Francisco’s South of Market district. Along with two other friends, Des Traynor and David Barrett, they had just started a new company together.
At 30 years old, Mr. Lee was the oldest of the four founders. He is a former Irish international skier and chief technical officer. At 27 years old, McCabe was the youngest, but he was energetic, creative, and already a leader.
Traynor was a Ph.D. researcher and user experience expert, while Barrett was a front-end developer.
There are 4 founders. A certain company. Intercom.
Lee told me in 2021 how he was shocked by America. “The level of ambition in the American technology industry was intoxicating. I said to Eoghan, ‘If we pull this off, we can create a $10 million business in four years.’ We didn’t think we could do that, but we just decided to pick something crazy and go for it,” he said.
Fifteen years later, the four friends have sold their product, an AI agent for customer service businesses, for 360 times their original goal. This is, quite simply, one of the greatest business stories in Irish history.
The $3.6 billion sale to Salesforce isn’t just a huge amount, it’s also a great story of restarting a flagging startup by reinventing itself for the AI era.
When I spoke with Mr. Lee in 2021, it was his last day working at the company he loved. Ireland was in the middle of a heat wave so we went swimming. Although he spoke warmly and positively about Intercom, he was clearly burnt out.
Intercom was preparing for an IPO and was no longer the category-defining startup it was when it started. I lost my sense of direction.
McCabe was also adrift. McCabe was hurt by a May 2019 article that raised “allegations of harassment” against him. The alleged incident occurred five years ago, when the business was much smaller, and internal and external investigations had cleared McCabe of wrongdoing.
But when the story resurfaced, a new investigation was ordered. Again, McCabe was cleared. McCabe misread the situation on a night out, but did not harass anyone.
Nevertheless, he apologized for his “poor judgment.” His health continued to deteriorate, and while Mr. McCabe took over as chairman, he was absent from day-to-day activities and searching for answers about his condition.
Intercom has hit a plateau in sales and is now trying too many things. The company was preparing to move into a comfortable, palatial office in Dublin, befitting an investment bank.
Although it was still a business with hundreds of millions of dollars in recurring revenue, it was slowly beginning to decline.
McCabe’s dramatic return as CEO in October 2022, with support from his co-founders and major shareholders, came as a soft coup.
“I came back here to make a lot of big changes and have a lot of fun.The plan I presented to management and Des was [Traynor] “And for others the day and night change completely,” he told me on the day this happened. That’s part of the motivation. We can’t get excited about this if we weren’t really going to grow. ”
Over the next few months, business restructuring took place. Hundreds of people either resigned voluntarily or were fired.
McCabe fought to reset the business, but was criticized for his approach. Like other technology companies, employee-focused initiatives like Pride suffered setbacks as McCabe sought to focus Intercom on the big risks facing its products and business.
McCabe wanted the company to rediscover its startup spirit, and he worked hard to do so.
Then, OpenAI released ChatGPT 3.5 in November 2022 and changed everything.
McCabe quickly realized that if he didn’t make a change soon, his business would be destroyed.
It was almost impossible to find AI engineers in San Francisco, but Intercom had a great team in Dublin.
They were building rudimentary bots for customer service, but now they’re starting to focus on this new technology.
A week later, Traynor messaged McCabe and said, “It sounds like the AI team has something interesting that they think we can actually use to build a product.”
Six weeks later, Intercom released a beta version of its AI-driven customer agent solution called Fin.
Even better, since Intercom was an older company, it had 30,000 customers, hundreds of thousands of active individual users, and billions of data touch points that could be used to train Fin.
McCabe decided to forget about iterative growth and instead bet the entire company that Fin would work.
He brought with him a team of talented trainers, including a returning Lee, chief product officer Paul Adams, chief AI officer Fergal Reid, and head of engineering Darragh Curran.
They gave Finn their all, even if it meant killing Intercom and bankrupting the business.
Looking back at Lenny’s Podcast, a hugely popular technology podcast in the US, McCabe said in August 2025, after Finn really started to see results. “I don’t ignore the fact that we were brave, but we came from a place where we had nothing to lose.”
Fin has become a very fast-growing software business, reaching $100 million in revenue by March 2026. The company replaced its old, unpopular pricing strategy with a new one that charges only for usage.
The company was then rebranded to Fin, and the business was exciting again, attracting interest from the likes of Salesforce.
“We are certainly unique; I don’t know of any other company of our size and age that has as much focus on AI as we do,” McCabe said.
“But we also suffered badly. We were in a really tough situation and we had no choice.”
“There was a reluctance to make bold decisions. You have to pick your lane and suffer in the short term and in the long term.”
Finn took the pain. It later made a profit of $3.6 billion.
Inside Intercom: 10 lessons from a front row seat to Irish tech success stories
