Intercom如何通过All in AI从灰烬中崛起 | Eoghan McCabe（创始人兼CEO）

你别无选择。AI将以最激进、最暴烈的方式颠覆一切。如果你不参与其中，你将被彻底淘汰出局。

You don't have a choice. AI is gonna disrupt in the most aggressive, violent ways. If you're not in it, you're about to get kicked out of all of it.

你成功地将后期SaaS业务转型为以AI智能体为核心的业务。Finn是我们的AI智能体，它

You have very successfully shifted late stage SaaS business to an AI first agent based business. Finn is our AI agent who

将在不到三个季度内通过Finn实现1亿美元的年度经常性收入。

will pass a 100,000,000 ARR with Finn in less than three quarters.

让我们聊聊你是如何真正实现这一点的。

Let's talk about how you made this actually happen.

我们当时即将面临净新增ARR为零的局面，这意味着我们将陷入负增长境地。

We were about to hit, like, $0 net new ARR, which means we would have been in negative growth territory.

所以当JGPT推出时，你是否觉得就是此刻——我们必须全力押注于此？

So JGPT launches, was it just like, this is it. We gotta go all in on this thing?

我说过，我们必须成为战时状态的公司。如果不为此而战，我们就完了。我不仅全力投入AI，还重塑了企业文化。我重新撰写了价值观，旨在像锋利的手术刀一样，切除那些我明知无效的公司部分。

I said, we need to become a wartime company. If we don't fight for this, we are dead. I jumped hard on AI, but I also restarted the culture. I rewrote the values designed to be a sharp knife to cut out the parts of the company that I just knew wouldn't be effective.

如果你试图推动变革却毫无进展，可能需要进入硬核创始人模式。这种方式

If you're trying to make the shift and it's just not moving, you may need to go hardcore founder mode. The way that

成就伟大的关键在于找到一位敢于做出勇敢艰难决策并为结果负责的CEO。

greatness is created is that you find a CEO who's willing to make brave, hard decisions and own the results.

这段时间里大约有多少比例的员工经历了变动？最终大概是40%。你提到发生了软性政变，能否详细说说？今天我的嘉宾是欧文·麦凯布。

What percentage of the employees kinda turned over during this period? Ultimately, like, 40%. You said there was a a soft coup. Is there more you could share about that? Today, my guest is Owen McCabe.

这是一系列对话的第一期，我将与那些成功将成熟SaaS或市场平台业务转型为AI优先公司，并实现爆发式增长超越十年老业务的创始人们对谈。当下无数企业、产品团队和创始人正试图驾驭这个AI颠覆所有行业的复杂时期，我的目标是帮助你们在他人颠覆之前自我革新。Intercom转型为Fin的故事令人惊叹——他们价值数十亿美元的传统业务年收入达数亿，但增长停滞甚至濒临负增长。

This is the first in a series of conversations that I'm having with founders who have successfully transformed their established SaaS or marketplace businesses into an AI first company that is growing like crazy and overtaking their decade plus old business. So many companies and product teams and founders are trying to navigate this very tricky time where every industry is being disrupted by AI. And my goal here is to help you essentially disrupt yourself before somebody else does. The story of Intercom's transformation into Fin is incredible. Their traditional business was valued at billions of dollars, was making hundreds of millions of dollars in ARR, but growth started to plateau and was even about to go negative.

GPT3.5发布六周后，他们就有了Fin的可行原型，欧文与团队决定全力押注AI。如今Fin增长迅猛，ARR已达八位数，Intercom明年增速有望超越所有上市软件公司。对话中欧文坦诚分享了当前制胜的关键、他在Intercom遭遇阻力甚至软政变时扭转局面的经历、他对软件与AI变革中人们尚未认清之事的见解等。若喜欢本期播客，别忘了在常用平台订阅。年度订阅我的通讯还可获赠Lovable、Replit等顶级产品年费。

Six weeks after GPT 3.5 came out, they had a working prototype of what is now Fin, and Own and the team decided to go all in on AI. Today, Fin is growing like crazy, already at eight digits in ARR, and Intercom is on track to be growing faster than every public software company by next year. In our conversation, Ohn gets very real and honest about what it takes to win right now, what he had to do to turn the ship around at Intercom in spite of a lot of pushback and even a soft coup attempt, what he believes people still don't understand about what is happening in software and AI, and so much more. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of a bunch of incredible products, including Lovable, Replit, Bold, N8N, Linear, Superhuman, Descript, WhisperFlow, Gamma, Perplexity, Warp, Granolah, Magic Patterns, Raycast, Chat PRD, and Mobin.

详情见lenny'snewsletter.com的bundle页面。现在有请欧文·麦凯布。本期由Great Question赞助——这款Brex、Canva等团队青睐的全能UX研究平台，完美解决了PM和创始人常说的「我知道该多访谈客户，但缺时间和工具」的痛点。

Check it out at lenny'snewsletter.com and click bundle. With that, I bring you Owen McCabe. This episode is brought to you by Great Question, the all in one UX research platform loved by teams at Brex, Canva, Intuit, and more. One of the most common things I hear from PMs and founders that I talk to is, I know I should be speaking to customers more, but I just don't have the time or the tools. That's exactly the gap Great fills.

Great Question让任何成员（不仅是研究员）都能轻松招募用户、开展访谈、发送问卷、测试原型，并通过视频片段高效共享成果。只需输入「用户为何选择我们而非竞品？」这样的问题，它不仅能挖掘既有反馈，还能即时向精准用户群获取新鲜洞察。想象一下——

Great Question makes it easy for anyone on your team, not just researchers, to recruit participants, run interviews, send surveys, test prototypes, and then share it all with powerful video clips. It's everything you need to put your customers at the center of your product decisions. With a prompt as simple as why did users choose us over competitors? Great question not only reveals what your customers have already shared, but it also makes it incredibly easy to ask them in the moment for fresh insights from the right segment. Picture this.

您的路线图清晰，团队协调一致，您正充满信心地推进产品交付，并且正在构建客户真正需要的功能。立即访问greatquestion.com/lenny开始吧。本期节目由WorkOS赞助。如果您正在开发SaaS应用，迟早会有客户要求企业级功能，如SAML认证和SCIM配置。这正是WorkOS的用武之地，它能快速无痛地为您的应用添加企业功能。

Your road map's clear, your team's aligned, you're shipping with confidence, and you're building exactly what your customers need. Head to greatquestion.com/lenny to get started. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're building a SaaS app, at some point, your customers will start asking for enterprise features like SAML authentication and SCIM provisioning. That's where WorkOS comes in, making it fast and painless to add enterprise features to your app.

他们的API易于理解，让您能快速交付功能并继续开发其他特性。如今已有数百家公司采用WorkOS，包括您可能熟悉的Vercel、Webflow和Loom等。WorkOS近期还收购了精细授权服务Warrant。Warrant的产品基于突破性的Zanzibar授权系统——这套最初为谷歌设计的技术支撑着Google Docs和YouTube。它能在海量规模下实现快速授权检查，同时保持适应最复杂用例的灵活模型。

Their APIs are easy to understand so that you can ship quickly and get back to building other features. Today, hundreds of companies are already powered by WorkOS, including ones you probably know, like Vercel, Webflow, and Loom. WorkOS also recently acquired Warrant, the fine grain authorization service. Warrant's product is based on a groundbreaking authorization system called Zanzibar, which was originally designed for Google to power Google Docs and YouTube. This enables fast authorization checks at enormous scale while maintaining a flexible model that can be adapted to even the most complex use cases.

如果您正计划构建基于角色的访问控制，或其他企业功能如单点登录、SCIM或用户管理，WorkOS值得考虑。它可无缝替代Auth0，并免费支持多达100万月活跃用户。访问work0s.com了解更多。再次强调是work0s.com。Eun，非常感谢您能来参加播客，欢迎您的到来。

If you're currently looking to build role based access control or other enterprise features like single sign on, SCIM, or user management, you should consider WorkOS. It's a drop in replacement for Auth0 and supports up to 1,000,000 monthly active users for free. Check it out at work0s.com to learn more. That's work0s.com. Eun, thank you so much for being here, welcome to the podcast.

谢谢。很荣幸参与。

Thank you. Great to be here.

您在Intercom取得的成就非同寻常——这正是许多创始人和产品团队试图实现的：驾驭AI给大多数企业带来的颠覆性变革。正如您所描述的，您成功将一家后期SaaS企业转型为AI优先、基于智能代理的卓越企业。我希望通过这次对话，尽可能汲取您的经验，帮助那些正在艰难转型的人们减少痛苦，更快找到可行方案。为了让听众了解当前进展，能否分享一些业务数据？

You have done something quite extraordinary with Intercom, something that a lot of founders and product teams are trying to do, which is to navigate this very scary disruption that's happening as a result of AI to most businesses. You have very successfully shifted, as you described, late stage SaaS business to an AI first agent based, very successful business. I want to use this time to extract as much as I can out of your journey so that people that are trying to navigate this and having a hard time can have less pain, less suffering, will hopefully get to something that works. To give people a sense of just how well things have gone, can you share some stats about the current state of the business, how it's going?

目前整体业务方面，我们以120多家B2B软件上市公司为基准，ARR增长率处于前15%区间。而Finn——代表业务未来的AI代理，正在以超过300%的速度增长。

Currently across the business, you know, we benchmark ourselves against all the public software companies as like 120 something B2B software companies. We're like in the fifteenth percentile for ARR growth. So we're up there. Fin, which is our AI agent, which is, you know, the future of the business, the thing that will disrupt the old business. It's, you know, growing north of 300%.

它起步迅猛，就像其他知名AI公司第一年那样，ARR从0增长到1200万美元。现在Finn已稳定保持八位数ARR增长，不到三个季度就将突破1亿美元ARR。Finn属于客户体验领域，这类代理能处理所有客户服务工作，最初都从客服切入。在该品类中，我们的客户数量、收入规模及性能指标均为行业第一。

It took off really fast, like all these other AI companies you hear of the first year, it grew from one to 12,000,000 ARR, we're now in solid mid eight digit ARR growth there. We'll pass a 100,000,000 ARR with FIN in less than three quarters. Yeah, Finn, we're in the customer experience category with Finn. So it's one of these agents that helps do all your customer work and they all started with service. And in that category, we are the biggest by customer count, biggest by revenue, best by performance benchmarks.

我们在所有直接对决和与主要竞争对手的比拼中都胜出。在G2上我们被评为第一名。所以我认为我们做得相当不错。目前的表现远超我们最初的预期。

We win all our head to heads and our direct competitor bake offs. We're rated number one in G2. So I think we're doing pretty well. We're doing far better than we imagined at this point.

好的。这听起来像是许多创始人的梦想，尤其是那些困在现有业务中无法突破的人。那么让我们深入探讨。聊聊这段旅程的起点。你当时已经有一个运转良好的业务。

Okay. This sounds like the dream for a lot of founders, especially ones that are stuck with their existing business that isn't going very far. So let's get to that. Let's talk about the beginning of this journey. You had a business that was working.

用户量庞大且深受喜爱，我记得年经常性收入超过1亿美元。谈谈就在你决定必须做出重大改变、全面转向AI时的业务状况吧。

People used it, loved it, over over a 100,000,000 ARR, I believe. Talk about just the state of the business at the point roughly when you decided I really need to make a big change and go AI AI first.

当时规模已达数亿美元。Entercom至今已有十四年多。部分背景是2020年时，我已病了两三年。起因是霉菌毒素中毒，后来发现还遭蜱虫叮咬，这些严重影响了我的健康。因此我在2020年卸任了CEO职务。

It was already in the hundreds of millions. Entercom is fourteen years and change now. Part of the story is that in 2020, I had been sick for a couple of years. The background is I had mold toxins and later I found out that I had got a tick bite and that messed me up. And so I left the CEO role in 2020.

而且，我在生病期间犯的很多错误进一步恶化。我们变成了如今许多晚期软件公司的样子——机构臃肿。我们失去了活力，战略分散且缺乏重点，试图满足所有人的所有需求。

And, you know, a lot of the mistakes I had been making when I was sick got worse. We became what a lot of late stage software companies are today, which is a bit bloated. We lost some energy. Our strategy was diluted and unfocused. We're trying to do all the things for all the people.

我们不清楚究竟在解决什么问题，为谁解决。结果就是收入增长极其缓慢，只有个位数百分比。我离开的两年里，对业务发展方向很不满意。我们经历了后疫情时期的虚假繁荣，就像2021年许多大公司那样，估值和收入虚高。这给很多此类公司埋下了隐患。

We didn't know what problems we were really solving and for who. And the result was very slow revenue growth in like the low single digit percent. And I was away for two years unsatisfied at where the business was going. We had this post COVID sugar rush, which a lot of big companies at that stage did in 2021, everyone's valuation and revenue was through the roof. And that hit a lot of problems in a lot of these companies.

我们的净新增年经常性收入连续五个季度下滑，几乎要跌至零增长，这意味着将进入负增长区间。虽然最终没到那一步——我及时阻止了颓势——但每个季度都在恶化。尽管我渴望开启新冒险，却仍对这个事业怀有强烈自豪感，不忍目睹它背离初创时的精神。

And we had five quarters of successive sequential decline in our net new ARR. And we were about to hit like $0 net new ARR, which means we would have been in negative growth territory. We never got there. I managed to stop it before we got there, but we were falling each quarter. And I found that I, despite my wishes to go and have new adventures, still had a lot of pride for this damn thing and didn't wanna see it and in a way that was so different from the way it started.

和许多公司一样，它始于满怀希望与乐观，却即将消逝。那时我感到必须回归并做出改变。我回来后一个月，ChatGPT发布了。若说人工智能变革就此降临，那会显得过于巧合而完美。但我知道自己不能袖手旁观。

It started with so much hope and optimism like so many companies do and it was about to fade away. So that was when I felt like I need to go back and I need to make a change. I went back and one month later, ChatGPT was announced. So it would be really neat and tidy to be able to say that the AI transformation came. I knew I couldn't be on the sidelines.

我必须挽救它免遭即将到来的颠覆。实际上，我们被AI这东西当头棒喝，但最终它却成了一份礼物。

I had to save this thing from the coming disruption. Actually, got whacked across the head by this AI thing, but it also ended up being a gift.

明白了。那么ChatGPT发布时，你们是立即决定全力投入，还是先观望？你们多快意识到这就是未来，而我们原有业务行不通了？

Okay. So ChatGPT launches, was it just like, this is it, we gotta go all in on this thing? Was it like, let's watch this thing? How quickly was it clear that this is the future? This isn't working what we're doing?

我们非常幸运，因为已有一个AI团队。我们主营客户通讯业务，主要做客服。当时在开发聊天机器人，但只是初级AI。我们有自己的机器学习系统处理客服问答，但需要大量设置且效果欠佳。不过公司里已有不少AI工程师。

We and I were very lucky in that we had an AI group already. We were in the customer communication business chiefly doing customer service. We were building bots, but they were rudimentary AI. We had a bunch of our own machine learning that did Q and A for customer service, but it required a phenomenal amount of setup and was kind of crappy. But we had a number of AI engineers in the company already.

所以当GPT-3.5问世时，他们立刻发现这不同寻常。人们很快意识到这将彻底改变服务业。最初我们以为它会摧毁所有坐席销售商和传统SaaS企业，此后几年我们都认为极有可能。但GPT-3.5发布仅六周，我们就做出了Fin的测试版。

So when GPT 3.5 came out, they said this is different. And it didn't take long for people to start to imagine that this is going to be pretty disruptive to service. And it started where we imagined that this was going to just wreck everyone selling seats, everyone in the conventional SaaS game. And we believed that was quite possible for some couple of years after that moment. But we were only six weeks into the launch of GPT 3.5 when we actually had a beta version of Fin.

GPT-3.5发布约一周后，我收到联合创始人Des的短信。他说AI团队有了有趣发现，认为能做成产品。那时远没有现在这么多客服代理。我们很早就有了雏形，优势在于拥有庞大基础——3万付费客户、数十万活跃用户、数百万终端用户和数十亿数据点，可供我们大展拳脚。

So I got a text from Des my co founder a week or so after the launch of GPT 3.5. And he said the AI team have something interesting and they actually think we could make a product out of this. And this was long before there's now like no doubt a 100 service agents. We had something very early working and part of what we had to our advantage also was that we had this giant base 300, you know, sorry, 30,000 paying customers, know, hundreds of thousands of active users, millions of their users, billions of data points. So we had a lot to play with.

于是我们全力投入。现在讲述这个故事似乎是为了标榜这次大胆的叛逆之举。我承认我们确实勇敢，但当时已无退路。我们这样的规模和资历却全力转向AI并取得如此成功的公司，据我所知绝无仅有。

And so we jumped on it. Now, obviously it's fun to tell that once again, as a, to support the idea of this brave Maverick move. And I won't discount the fact that we were brave, but we were coming from a point of having nothing to lose. So, you know, like we certainly are unique. I I don't know a single company of our size and age that has pivoted this hard to AI and being as successful as we have been.

但我们之前也确实陷入困境。当时处境极其艰难，别无选择。所以我接受这些赞誉，但也对那些不像我们这般窘迫的公司深表同情。因此我们试图在维持传统业务的同时，通过新AI技术来拓展，走一条平衡之路。

But we also previously were screwed. We ran a really tough spot so had no choice. So I'll take the kudos and credit, but also have a lot of empathy for companies that weren't as in as much trouble as we were. And so try to thread the needle and sustain the old business while adding to it with the new AI stuff.

我听Intercom员工说过——如果不对请纠正——你向来反对在客服业务中使用机器人，因为你觉得那样太缺乏人情味，不符合你理想的商业理念。但现在你们却在做这个。谈谈这个转变吧。

Something I heard from someone that worked at Intercom, correct me if this is not correct, you've always been very anti bot in the customer support business because it just you didn't like how impersonal it was. It just didn't feel like the way you wanted to build a business. And then now that's what you do. Talk about just that transition. Yeah.

我知道这充满讽刺趣味。我们早期的使命是'让互联网商业更具人情味'。当我回归并开始转向AI时，我不禁质疑这个使命是否还有意义。转向AI部分源于无奈——不仅业务需要新方向，更因为这是未来趋势，你无法抗拒未来，必须参与其中。

I know it's a fun and ironic twist. Our mission from the early days was make internet business personal. And when I came back and we started to lean into AI, I started to wonder, does that mission make any sense anymore? Now, part of our lean into AI is that we had no choice, not only for the business, needed something new, but also we saw that this is the future and you can't fight the future. You must be part of it.

所以好吧，妈的，我们决定加入。人很容易给自己编些合理化故事，如果有人指出这是胡扯我也接受。但当我扪心自问时，我真心认为并非如此。无论是内心还是理智，我都确信这一点。

And so, okay, fuck, we're gonna be part of it. And ultimately, and it's very easy to tell yourself these little stories. So I'm open to anyone telling me this is bullshit. But when I interrogate myself, my soul, and my mind, I don't think it is. When I interrogate my heart and my mind, I don't think it is.

但我现在坚信：为每位客户提供全天候即时响应、专业、稳定、快速、幽默、友好且极具人格化的AI客服代理，远比让他们苦等三四天换来模板回复要人性化得多。这就是AI的讽刺与魔力——即便它迫使我们反思人性本质，但在所谓'人情味'的维度上，它竟比人类做得更好。这就是我当前的认知。也许这只是漂亮的事后合理化，但这就是我的真实立场。

But I I'm now of the belief that providing a customer with a highly engaged, instantly available, expert, consistent, fast, charismatic, funny, friendly, personal agent available for literally every single customer. And every minute of the day around the clock is so much more personal than making them wait two, three, four days for a crappy canned response. And so that's the irony and the magic and the wonder of AI, even if it does make us ask some hard questions of ourselves and think carefully about its impact on humanity, it actually is superior at the things we describe as personal and human relative to humans themselves. And so that's where I'm at today. Yeah, maybe it's a bunch of fancy post rationalization, but honestly, that's really where I stand.

确实。数据显示人们往往更倾向不与真人沟通就能解决问题。毕竟面对一个完全不了解情况的客服人员实在太让人焦虑了。

Yeah. I think I think data has shown people often prefer not to talk to humans to just solve problems that can just be solved. Like, it's it's it's a lot of stress to try to figure out how to talk to some support agent that doesn't know anything about what's going on. Yes.

AI就是更胜一筹。看看Waymo自动驾驶，它从不撞车，事故率比人类司机低3.5倍，还不会让你烦心。

And AI is just better. Look at Waymo. So Waymo doesn't crash. It has 3.5 times less crashes than humans. It doesn't bother you or bug you.

我和其他人一样喜欢与优步司机聊天，但并非总是如此。它没有卫生问题。不会走错路。我是说，它不会做这些真正让人烦恼的事情。现在看到优步为女性提供仅呼叫女性司机的选项，这真的很有趣。

I like to chat with an Uber driver as much as the next guy, but not always. It doesn't have hygiene problems. It doesn't take wrong turns. I mean, it just doesn't do all these things that really bug people. And it's really interesting to see Uber now offer women the option to call only female drivers.

我敢保证他们这样做是因为女性更喜欢Waymo，因为她们觉得更安全。就像人工智能在很多方面往往更优越，而人类在所有事情上都会表现得更好。我是支持人类的。我爱人类。我真的希望在我余生的所有事情中都有人类的参与。

And I guarantee the reason they're doing that is because women love Waymo because they feel safer. Like AI is so often superior and humans are going to be far better at all the things. I'm pro human. I love humans. I really want humans in the mix for all things in the rest of my life.

但当涉及到实用、高效、有效的价值时，我们生活中那些连接人类的部分实际上需要人工智能和机器人技术。

But when it comes to practical, productive, efficient, and effective value, the glue in between the human parts of our lives actually want AI and robotics.

在我们开始讨论你如何成功实现这一转变之前，另一段历史是你的定价策略一直不受人们欢迎。例如，我曾经在我的新闻通讯中进行过Twitter投票或调查，询问人们在所有SaaS产品和账户中为哪些产品支付最多费用？远远超过其他。我知道人们一直在抱怨它的不透明和高昂。现在你们处于如何为AI产品定价的前沿。

Before we start talking about how you actually made this transformation a success, one other piece of history is just your pricing strategy historically has been not liked by people. For example, I once had a Twitter poll or a survey on my newsletter just like, what products do you pay the most for of all your SaaS products and accounts? By far the most. I know people constantly complain about just how unclear it was and how high it was. Now you guys are at the forefront of how to price AI products.

所以我们接下来会谈到这一点，但先谈谈过去的定价策略中的教训和发生了什么。

So we're gonna get to that, but just talk about the lessons and what happened there with pricing back in the day.

是的。我想验证一下你的调查数据。没错。人们憎恨我们的定价。它甚至成了一个梗，在Twitter上流行起来，那些有趣的病毒式传播的梗都在嘲笑我们的定价。

Yeah. So I wanna just validate your survey data. Yes. People abhorred our pricing. It was a meme that were like actual funny, popular viral memes on Twitter that were making fun of our pricing.

问题的一部分，如果不是全部的话，嗯，有两个问题。一个是我们的策略。非常不集中，就像你说的。我们试图为所有人做所有事情。当你试图为所有人做所有事情时，你为了捕捉所有这些不同类型的价值所做的努力必然会导致相当复杂的定价。

Part of the problem, if not all of the problem, well, there's two problems. One was our strategy. Super unfocused, as you said. We're trying to do all the things for all the people. And when you're trying to do all the things for all the people, your efforts to capture all that different types of value are gonna necessitate pretty complex pricing.

如果你从事客户服务工作，销售席位，进行外发消息推送，需要对消息收费，或者在网站上使用类似SDR信使的功能，那么你需要对潜在客户收费。这已经是在各个方向上的指标了。而如果你试图向不同规模的客户销售，就需要分层和门槛，这最终变成了一个庞然大物。所以问题的一部分在于策略不够聚焦。另一部分问题则是缺乏勇气做出大胆决策，拒绝某些机会，选择一条道路，并为了长期利益承受短期痛苦。

If you're like customer service and you're selling seats and you're doing outbound messaging and you need to charge for messages and you're doing like SDR messenger on a website, you need to charge for leads. Already that's just metrics in every direction. And then if you're trying to sell to many different sizes of customers, you need tiers and gates and it just became a behemoth. So part of the problem was the unfocused strategy. And then the other part of the problem was an unwillingness to frankly make bold decisions, say no, pick a lane and actually take pain in the short term for the long term.

我们推出了这个新定价方案——这甚至早于你提到的Fin定价。当我回归并表态时，我说是的，我们会因此损失大量收入。具体金额我记不清了，但我们实际上已经放弃了约5000万美元的年度经常性收入。我们为许多客户降低了价格，只为提供更简单的定价方案——因为不出所料，当人们觉得定价更简单、更可预测、更公平时，他们会更长久地留下来。这不仅为公司带来更多便利，也促进了与客户之间更健康的关系。当员工发现我们在各个层面上都在变相压榨客户时，'我们关心客户'的理念就开始崩塌，继而导致更多损害客户利益的决策。

We rolled out this new pricing and this is even before the fin pricing you're talking about. When I came back and I said, yes, we're gonna lose a lot of revenue here. Like, I can't remember how much we wrote down, but we actually have already given away something like like $50,000,000 in ARR. We've reduced the prices for a lot of customers just to give them way simpler pricing because surprise, surprise, when people feel like they have far simpler, more predictable, fair pricing, they'll stick around longer and it creates so much more ease in the company and promotes a healthier relationship with the customer too. When our people saw that we were screwing customers effectively in every direction, it starts to erode the idea that we care about our customers and then they make other customer unfriendly decisions.

因此我回归后倡导的核心价值观之一就是'客户至上'。为此我们不得不推翻自己的定价体系，放弃大量收入。这就是变革背后的精神，当然如果你想讨论Fin定价，我们也可以继续探讨。

And so one of the values I promoted when I came back was that we would be customer obsessed. And so we had to kill our own pricing and give away a lot of revenue. So that was the the spirit behind the changes, but we can talk about the fin pricing if you want to also.

这个话题很重要，听众需要了解，我们稍后再谈。现在说说这个转变是如何实现的——你的描述听起来像是'反正原有模式行不通了，全力投入AI领域没什么风险'。但你们当时年经常性收入已达1.5亿美元...

Let's save that because that's a really important topic that I think people need to hear. Let's talk about the the shift and how you made this actually happen. You make you make it sound like, oh, like not fully, but it's, oh, we had to do like, it wasn't working anyway. We there's no risk to go all in on this AI thing. You're making $150,000,000 a year in ARR.

那时公司估值至少十亿美元了吧？没错。

You're worth at least a billion dollars at that point, right, as a business? Yep.

实际上估值是几十亿美元级别，我们年收入已超过数亿美元。是的。

I mean, multiple billions, we So were making more money than we were like multiple hundreds of millions. Yeah.

明白。即便感觉业务停滞不前，这种转型也极其困难。那么首先，决定性时刻是什么？是内部人员用六周时间构建Fin原型时的顿悟'就是它了'？还是另有某个'全力押注AI'的决策瞬间？

Okay. Very difficult to actually do, you know, even if things don't feel like they're growing anywhere. So first of all, just what was the moment if there was one of just like, okay, the six week experiment of someone building Fin internally was that being like, this is it? Or was there another moment of like, let's go all in on this?

这是多重因素的综合作用：公司历史较长，包括我和创始人在内的所有人都缺乏耐心。我们总在思考，能否从中有所建树？曾几何时公司估值极高，但作为非上市公司，我们虽无每日市值波动，可其他上市软件公司股价都暴跌了80%、85%甚至90%。

It was the combination of the company being older, us all, me and the founders being impatient. Like, are we gonna make something out of this? We went through a time when the company was worth a lot. We're private. So we don't have like a daily mark to market, but all the other public software companies dropped 80%, 85, 90%.

我们目睹收入增长断崖式下跌。过去习惯两位数增长，如今却只有个位数。于是部分动机是寻求突破，另一部分则源于我对公司运营现状的愤怒与不满，以及对自己所犯错误的懊悔。

We saw our revenue growth crater. We were used to nice double digits. We were in low single digits. And so part of it was like, let's do something here. Another part of it was my own kind of anger and dissatisfaction with how the company was being run and the mistakes that I made myself.

像许多创始人和初创CEO一样，我做了大量妥协——为安抚员工、因恐惧而迎合投资者，遵循行业建议和最佳实践。多年来，当最初灵感的火花蜕变成这头势不可挡的 corporate beast 时，你就在点滴间背叛了自己的直觉。每次这样的自我背叛都让你死去一点点。想想十年前那些科技宠儿，若私下接触其CEO，很少有人对其文化现状、决策方式感到自豪。他们都在细微处背叛过自己。而我当时已经离开了公司。

I made a lot of compromises as a lot of founders and founding CEOs do to pluckate employees or do it out of fear to bring investors along, you know, following advice in the industry and best practices, you know, you betray your intuition in little bits and pieces over the years when the bright spark of your original idea turns into this big unstoppable, scary corporate beast. And a little bit of you dies every single time you go and betray yourself in that way. It's very like you, you know, if you could pick in your mind three or four tech darlings from ten years ago, when you meet the CEO and talk to them privately, very few of them feel outstanding about the state of their culture and the decisions that they make and the way in which they have to work. All of them have betrayed themselves in little ways. And I was, I had left the business.

我身心俱疲。坦白说，在离职前收入增速放缓时就已精疲力竭。媒体不公正的攻击让我彻底受够了。于是我决定对所有事务采取专制、自上而下、激进式的创始人优先策略。

I was super sick. I was burned out frankly from the revenue even having started to slow down before I left. I had been attacked unfairly in the press. Just all of me was just fed up. And I decided to take a very authoritarian top down aggressive founder first approach to all the things.

这种方式让我获得深层宣泄，成为推动我行动的部分原因——其他因素包括传统逻辑思维和绝望处境。我们决定押注AI，这个既性感又激动人心的领域。我们需要新动能，AI战略合乎逻辑，而我的直觉也在强烈共鸣。

And I found that deeply cathartic and that was the thing that led to me in part, the other was just good old fashioned logic and the other was desperation saying we're doing the AI thing. The AI thing exciting and sexy. We need some new energy thing here. The new AI thing makes sense. And also just my intuition says, for it.

当人们讲述这些故事时，他们会在脑海中重构历史，使其显得优雅，同时支撑自我膨胀的才华叙事。实际上这是各种因素的混乱鸡尾酒。无论如何，这就是我对这杯鸡尾酒的解读尝试。

And so, when people tell these stories, they rewrite history in their minds for the stories to be elegant and also so that they support their own self aggrandized narratives about their brilliance. Actually, it's a big messy cocktail of things. And anyway, that's my attempt at explaining the cocktail.

我看到一个数据：最初推出原型时，每笔交易都在亏损——收取1美元却要花费120美元左右。

I saw a stat that when you first launched, when you first had this kind of prototype, you were losing money on every transaction that you're charging like a dollar, cost you a $120, something like that.

120美分。是的。是的。

120¢. Yeah. Yeah.

120美分。好的。所以如果这要达到一个真正既出色又负担得起的状态，这里需要很多愿景。

120¢. Okay. So there's a lot of vision here if this is going to get to a place where this actually will be great and affordable.

你知道，这真的很有趣。比如我们收费99美分来解决工单，也就是客户问题。而我们的解决率比任何人都高。我们对此非常自豪，甚至痴迷于此。

You know, it's really funny. Like we charge 99¢ to resolve tickets, you know, customer problems. And we have a higher resolution rate than anyone else. And we are very proud of that. We obsess over that.

这是评估这些客服人员的指标。我们希望收入与他们创造的价值完全挂钩，因为之前定价留下的伤疤让我们觉得对客户不公平。于是我们想：能找到的最公平方案是什么？调研发现，许多SaaS企业每解决一个工单要花费20到30美元，而我们当时是22美元。

It is the metric by which these agents are assessed. And we wanted our revenue to be 100% aligned with the value that they attained because we had all this scar tissue from pricing prior that felt unfair to customers. And so we said, what's the most fair that we can possibly find? And when we did all our research, we found that many SaaS businesses were spending between $20 and $30 per ticket resolved. We were spending 22.

消费者业务可能降到5美元。我们考虑过：收10美元合理吗？这是半价了。5美元呢？甚至2.5美元？但早期我们就感觉到，人们不会像重视人工服务那样重视数字化服务——尽管数字化服务更优质、更稳定、随时可用、客户满意度更高。所以我们最终选择了一个平衡点：既让我们获得最大收益，又让客户最能接受的价格。

Now consumer businesses, maybe they go down to $5 We were thinking like, can we charge $10 That seems fair. It's half price. Can we charge $5 Can we even charge 2 and a half dollars? But early on, we started to sense that people just wouldn't value the digital work as much as the human work, even though the digital work is better, more consistent, always available, makes the customer far happier. And so we actually started to lean into a price that we thought would be, you know, was the nexus between us earning the most and it being the most palatable.

我们认定：如果客户不愿付99美分让我们快速、优雅、完美地解决问题，那这生意就该收摊了。99美分就是这么来的。我一直认为定价应基于价值而非成本——成本是我们该操心的事。

We basically said that if someone is not prepared to pay 99¢ for us to rapidly and elegantly, perfectly and excellently solve their customer's problem, we need to wrap this up. We don't have a business here. So that was where the 99¢ came from. And I always believe that pricing should come from value and not from costs. Cost is our problem.

早期我们就直觉感到这东西会越来越便宜，后来确实大幅降价。利润率虽有波动，但足够让我们觉得物超所值。客户获得了超值服务，也能为他们的客户提供前所未有的服务水平。

And we just had this sense and intuition early on that this thing will get cheaper and it got a lot cheaper. And so, you know, you know, the margin moves around, but we make a margin that makes this more than worth our while. And we know our customers get an excellent deal and are able to deliver to their customers a level of service that they never could before.

这是一个非常清晰的阐述。我们刚刚在播客中采访了定价专家Madhavan，他有个绝妙的说法：定价应该追求‘极致简洁’。同时，他非常推崇基于结果的定价模式，也就是你刚才描述的按效果付费。看来你们的做法完全符合他定价建议的‘魔法象限’。

That's a very clear pitch. We just had a Madhavan on the podcast and the pricing expert, and he has this phrase beautifully simple pricing is where you want to get Also, he's a huge fan of outcome based pricing, which is what you're describing here where you could pay for an outcome. So you guys are in the magic quadrant of his pricing advice.

是的。谢天谢地。我们关于定价的争论终于结束了。

Yes. Thank God. Our pricing worlds are over.

终于达成一致了。好的，让我们回到你们具体是怎么做的。你描述的就是现在很多人所说的‘创始人模式’，自上而下推进，就像你说的第三理论那样——直接宣布‘这就是我们要做的事’。

Finally. Yeah. Okay. So going back to how you actually did this thing. So you basically, you just, you described what many people think of now as founder mode, just top down, as you said, the third theory, and just here's what we're doing.

我们不会坐等你们提供想法。你们当时具体采取了什么行动？内部执行是怎样的？

We're not gonna sit around waiting for you to give me ideas. How did, what did you do? What did that look like internally?

其实有几方面措施。首先我们当时烧钱太厉害，所以我大幅削减成本，果断叫停了很多项目。我们原本准备装修一个豪华办公室，但眼看就要进入负增长阶段，我当即叫停。很多公司还沉浸在过去的成功里，习惯了大手大脚花钱，就像醉醺醺的水手。

You know, there was a couple of things. One was we were burning a lot of money. So I cut a lot of costs aggressively, canned a bunch of different projects. We had this like big glorious office we were about to fit out and I'm like, we're about to hit negative growth territory, like stop it. And a lot of companies were really stuck in the prior world where they just were used to being super successful, rich and wealthy and spent like drunken sailors.

我终止了所有这些行为。节俭程度连我自己都没想到——直到现在我都没重新装修这间办公室，虽然我总调侃它像万豪酒店大堂。受够了。这是第一点。

So I stopped all of that. Got really frugal in ways I never thought I would. I still haven't touched the interior design of this office I'm in here, even though I call it the hotel Marriott. Sick of it. Anyway, that was one.

第二是我明确了战略方向。当时我们业务太分散，我果断决定专注做服务。Zendesk被收购几年后，他们在战略、活力和文化上都死了气沉沉，还不断得罪市场客户。

Another was I picked a lane strategically. We were all over the place and I said, we're doing service. Zendesk had been acquired a couple of years prior. They were strategically energetically, culturally dead. They were upsetting customers in the market.

那里存在一个机会。我们正在提供服务。忘掉其他所有事情。尽管公司里有很多人说，见鬼，我们还有来自其他业务的8000万美元空气球收入。而且我们在这方面非常擅长。

There's an opportunity there. We're doing service. Forget all the other stuff. Even though there was a lot of people in the company saying, well shit, we still have $80,000,000 of air orb that we're getting from the other thing. And we're really good at that.

而且这里有个巨大的机会。这个领域还有其他价值数十亿美元的公司。这是那种如果我采用职业CEO的做法就会做的决定，也就是：嘿各位，你们怎么看？收集所有人的意见，把所有选项都列在电子表格上。

And there's a big opportunity. There's other companies in this space worth billions. It was, you know, the type of decision that where I to practice the professional CEO approach, which is, hey folks, what do you all think? Let's take everyone's input. Let's put it all down on a spreadsheet.

让大家用不同颜色标注我们可能采取的各种方案，然后集体决策。但我说，抱歉，这就是我们要做的。在这方面我非常独断。当时没人做决策，必须有人站出来，即使我自己对决定也有疑虑，我无法预测未来，但总得有人拍板。

Everyone out of color beside all of the different options that we may take, let's make a group decision. I said, sorry, this is what we're doing. So I was very dictatorial in that respect. We had no one making decisions. Somebody needed to, even if I had some qualms about the decisions myself, I couldn't predict the future, but someone had to make a call.

显然当AI出现时，我立即全力投入AI，并宣布我们将自掏近1亿美元。我们投入了大量资金，同时我也重塑了企业文化。和许多公司一样，我们原本有着非常安逸的文化，过度关注社会议题，充斥着抱怨和不满。我重写了价值观宣言，像锋利的手术刀般切除那些我认为低效的部分。

Obviously as soon as AI came around, I jumped hard on AI and announced that we were going to spend nearly a $100,000,000 of our own cash on that. We allocated a lot of capital, but I also restarted the culture. We had just a very comfortable culture as a lot of companies did. There was a lot of focus on social issues and a lot of complaining and dissatisfaction. And I rewrote the values designed to be a sharp knife to cut out the parts of the company that I just knew wouldn't be effective.

所以我要求员工必须具备韧性，我们设定极高标准，将付出惊人努力。股东价值是我们最优先的优化目标。这些主张对之前的团队很有争议。然后我设计了季度绩效评估体系，不仅根据季度目标完成度打分，还会评估行为是否符合价值观。这个评分公式是我亲自编写的。

So I said that people must be resilient, that we had very high standards, that we'd work incredibly hard. That shareholder value was the most important thing that we'd optimize for. A lot of things that were controversial for this prior crowd. And then I designed these quarterly performance processes where not only would you get a mark or a grade for your performance against your goals that quarter, but you'd also get a score for your behavior against the values. And I hard coded a formula myself.

我把决定权从经理手中收回，规定如果某人评分低于标准线，我们会礼貌而诚恳地说：感谢你的付出，但我们将继续前进。只需执行几个季度，就能塑造出符合理想价值观的组织。当然这个过程充满痛苦和满足感，甚至遭遇过软性政变企图。

And so I took it out of the manager's hands to say, if people got below a certain mark respectfully and lovingly, we would say thank you for your service. We're gonna go forward without you. And so you do that just a small number of quarters and you can start to shape an organization that's designed and the image of the values you wanna create. And obviously there was a lot of pain, a lot of satisfaction. There was attempts at a soft coup.

有人给董事会写信，员工怨声载道。但风雨过后，留下的都是你能想象到最具创业精神、最勇敢、最鼓舞人心且快乐的精英。之后我们就按这个标准招聘。在我开始大刀阔斧重组机构和重塑文化约15、16个月后，我们进行了匿名员工调查。

There was letters sent to the board. People really unhappy. But on the other side of it, the people left were the most incredible entrepreneurial, brave, inspiring, happy individuals you could possibly imagine. And then you hire in their image. We ran an anonymous employee survey like I think fifteen or sixteen months after I started aggressively working through the org and rebuilding the org and rebuilding the culture.

我们对管理层领导力和新战略的认可度达到了98%到99%。要知道我刚回归时，作为CEO在Glassdoor上的评分是我见过的最低水平。我想说明的是，正是这种对文化的刻意塑造和不惜得罪很多人的做法，才能最终打造出员工极度快乐、高度投入、目标一致的团队文化。如今我们已成长为高效能组织——尽管在很多方面仍显混乱。

And we had a 98 to 99% approval of management leadership and new strategy. And this is coming from me having the lowest glass door rating for a CEO I had ever seen when I came back. So I just want to explain that like being that deliberate about your culture and upsetting a lot of people is the path through which you can create a culture where people are super happy, super engaged, super aligned. And now we have just this highly performant organization. Yes, we're messy in many ways.

这也是关键因素之一。我们战略性地选择了赛道，重塑市场策略。定价改革产生了巨大影响，禁止使用AI（后改为拥抱AI）和文化重塑同样重要。我把AI话题轻描淡写带过，因为坦白说，如果不押注AI，其他一切都毫无意义。

So that was a big part of it too. So it was kind of strategically picking a lane, you know, remaking how we go to market. The pricing was a really, really big piece that had a big effect. Banning on AI and then culture. And I kind of buried the AI thing because frankly, none of this would matter if we didn't bet on AI.

所以整个故事可以总结为：当人们问'我做了什么'时，答案就是我们创造了Fin，而它改变了一切。

So the story could all be summed up by saying, when you ask, what did I do? It was that we built Fin and that changed everything.

你提到这些举措当时非常不受欢迎。想必很多人对如此自上而下的大变革感到不满。你还提到曾发生过'软性政变'，能否详细讲讲？这个故事我从未听说过。

You said that this was very unpopular. I imagine many people were not happy with all the change and how top down this was. You said there was a a soft coup. Is there more you could share about that? I've never heard that story.

当你进行这种程度的变革，并告诉员工他们拥有控制权——就像我们在前代成熟期企业所做的那样——改变规则时必然会产生摩擦。我坚信，优秀员工和伟大企业都渴望且建立在清晰强大的层级结构之上，CEO的职责就是单方面做出勇敢而艰难的决定。当然要听取专家意见作为决策依据，并对结果负责。如果我的决策推动公司发展（所幸目前确实如此），我将获得奖励和赞誉，可以理直气壮向董事会要求更多股权。

When when you make that degree of change and you tell people that they're in control, like we did in the previous generation of late stage businesses, there's gonna be some friction when you change the rules. And it's my strong belief that great employees and great companies want and are constructed out of a very clear and strong hierarchy where it is the responsibility of the CEO to make brave and hard decisions unilaterally. Yes. Using their experts as inputs and be responsible for the outcome. If I make decisions that propel the company in the way that thankfully my decisions have, I get rewards and kudos and I get to go back to the board and say, I want a bigger grant.

如果决策失误导致公司陷入困境，我就该被解雇——也必须承担这个责任。这就是我认为应有的运作方式。据我所知，所有伟大企业莫不如此。你们偶尔会看到（我几年前也做过），有人会编制创始人领导企业的绩效指数...

If I don't, I get fired and I should get fired. If my big, unilateral decisions put us in the toilet, then I have to take responsibility for that also. So that's how in my humble opinion should work. And I, for one, don't know of a great company that doesn't work that way. You'll see from time to time, I did this a couple years ago, people will construct these indexes of the performance of companies that are founder led.

虽然这话有点自我标榜，但确是事实：不出所料，创始人领导的企业表现显著更好。因为他们具备职业CEO所没有的道德权威和冒险精神。职业CEO通常被要求'别搞砸'，而创始人若不时常冒险搞点事情反而会觉得无聊。在我看来，这正是造就伟大企业和伟大创新的源泉。

And of course this is self serving statement, but it's also true. And surprise, surprise, the founder led companies perform substantially better because they have the moral authority and the willingness to take the risks that the professional CEOs don't have the remit for. Professional CEOs are typically told don't mess things up. And the founders are bored if they're not taking the risk of messing things up from time to time. And so that's in my opinion, what creates greatness and great innovation.

但正如我所说，一家原本以民主、委员会决策、温和互动与沟通方式运作的公司，要转变为创始人主导、自上而下的管理模式，必然会产生摩擦与变革。

But like I said, there will be friction change in a company that's configured for democracy and committee decisions and soft and gentle interactions and communication to be properly founder led and top down.

所以这里的重要教训是：如果你试图推动转型却遭遇巨大阻力，可能需要切换到强硬创始人模式并实施重大变革。这段时期员工的流动率大概是多少？

So a big lesson here is if you're trying to make the shift and it's just not moving, there's a lot of resistance. You may need to go hardcore founder mode and make some significant change. What percentage of the the employees kinda turned over during this period?

最终可能达到40%左右。这是相当大规模的换血，持续了几年时间。通常文化是由极少数人塑造的，所以仅需四分之一的新人就能改变整体对话基调，但要引进那些具备新层次雄心、愿意与我们同样拼命工作、以成熟专注且充满激情的方式投入的员工，则需要更长时间。要知道，产品与市场匹配很重要。

Could be something ultimately like 40%. So it was a big, big turnover over some couple number of years. Often the culture is set by a very small number of people. So it only took a quarter to really start to change the tenure of the, the tenor of the conversations that were happening, but to bring in the people that were that new level of ambition and wanted to work as hard as the rest of us and working in a mature and engaged and excited way that took a little longer time. You know, there's such a thing as product market fit.

创始人市场匹配也很关键，还有创始人产品市场匹配——这些是成功要素。但同样存在员工-创始人-产品市场匹配的问题。你必须为所创事业找到合适的员工。有些公司需要更稳定的特质，就会倾向于招聘更稳定的个体。

There's a thing as founder market fit. There's a thing as founder product market fit, you know, that's how you're doing it right. But there's also such a thing as employee founder product market fit. You have to have the right employees for the type of business you're creating. And there are companies that want the need to be more stable and they're going to want the need to hire more stable individuals.

也会有公司追求高度协作、更民主的模式——虽然我不会投资这类企业，但它们确实存在。如果你是这样的员工，市面上有很多选择：像谷歌这样的大公司，或是招聘那些疯狂、年轻、不拘一格的初创企业。

There's going to be companies that want to do the highly collaborative, more democratic thing. I won't invest in them, but there's companies that want to do it. If you're an employee that enjoys that, there are a lot of positions out there. There are big companies like Google that do that. There are startups that hire the crazy, you know, young, wild, messy, early startup people.

这对他们和公司都是好事。关键在于人岗匹配。实现这一点不仅能创造巨大成功，更能带来更多幸福感、平衡与和谐。毕竟，那些渴望温和民主环境的员工，在Intercom、Coinbase这类强势企业里不会快乐，他们更适合其他地方。

And that's great for them and the company too. So it's really all about having the right individuals. And when you create that, not only do you create great success, but you just create a lot more happiness and balance and harmony. Ultimately the employees who wanted a more you know, gentle democratic environment, they're not gonna be happy in a company like Intercom or Coinbase or any of these strong organizations. They'll be more happy somewhere else.

因此，即使需要温和地劝退某些人，我清楚从中长期来看，这实际上是在帮他们。

So even if it requires a little bit of a loving push out the door, I know that you're actually doing them a favor in the medium to long run.

我正想说，这些人中很多在别的公司工作会更快乐。谁

I was gonna say that a lot of these people will be happier working in a different company. Who

愿意每天在组织和Slack里与人争斗？那一点都不有趣。我们别触及神经系统或灵魂层面。

wants to go to war every day with your organization and in Slack? That's just not fun. Let's not go for the nervous system or the soul.

是啊。听起来这段时间对你压力很大。你有没有后悔回来，就像，我到底把自己卷入了什么？我在对自己做什么？

Yeah. So this whole period sounds very stressful for you. Did you ever regret coming back and just like, what the hell did I get myself into? What am I what am I doing to myself?

我从未后悔回来，但有很多时刻我不享受这份工作。我回来是因为这对我有深层次的宣泄作用。当创始人逃离自己的事业时，那是对他们内心和梦想的终极背叛。当然，结束事务并退出是可以的，但像我当初那样因为生病、精疲力尽和幻灭而逃离，感觉并不好。尤其是当我以无数或上千种小方式背叛了自己的直觉后，有些东西我需要去解决。

I never regretted coming back, but I have many moments where I don't enjoy the job. I regret coming back because it was deeply cathartic for me. When a founder runs away from their business, it is the ultimate betrayal of, you know, their heart and the dream that they have. Now it's okay to wrap things up and quit, but when you kind of run away, like I kind of had to, because I was sick and burned out and kind of disenchanted, I don't know, it didn't feel good. So especially when I had done that, having betrayed in a million or a thousand small ways, my intuition, there was something I needed to exercise.

因此，在这方面它意义深远。当然，我很幸运事情有了转机。我能登上科技界第二受欢迎的播客。我可以在所有不想看到这一幕的人面前自夸。但现实是，尤其对于像我这样喜欢冒险和高自主权的人来说，日常需要做出大胆、狂野的决定。

So it has been deeply meaningful in that respect. And then of course I'm fortunate that it worked out. I get to be on the second most popular podcast in tech. I get to like pat myself on the back in front of all these people who wouldn't want that. That said, the reality is that for particularly people like me, who like the adventure and the, you know, high agency being, you know, unilateral day to day movement where you're trying to make big, wild, bold decisions.

现实是，如果你成功了，大多数日子并不会那样。而是审查明年的奖金政策，审核高管下一年的薪酬提案。参加问责会议，跟进不同工作流的进度。从一个会议赶到另一个会议，一天开八、九、十场会。我不认为这是过日子的好方式。

The reality is that if you're successful, most of your days will not be that. It'll be reviewing the bonus policy for next year and reviewing, you know, the comp proposal for your execs for the next year. It will be, you know, showing up for accountability meetings and stepping through the status of different work streams. It'll be rushing from meeting to meeting, having eight, nine, 10 meetings a day. I don't happen to believe that that's a great way to live your life.

还得处理所有必须回复的邮件，以免冒犯或伤害他人，同时以同理心和体贴的方式与员工沟通，记住他们可能和你一样度过了糟糕的一天。这不是漫画里那种特立独行的冒险故事。不知为何，我想到了丁丁航海的那种豪迈冒险。实际上，企业生活挺糟的，尤其对我这样的人来说。所以我有很多那样的日子。

It'll be trying to get to all the emails you need to get to such that all those people aren't offended and hurt and, trying to communicate in the ways with your staff and your team that is empathetic and thoughtful and keeps in mind that they may be having a shitty day as you are. Like it's not you know, you're giving me an opportunity to paint the story of this, you know, Maverick led adventure that you might imagine in a comic. Like, you know, like for some reason picturing Tintin, know, sail the seas, you know, this swashbuckling adventure. It's not, it's corporate life kind of sucks, particularly for people like me. So I have many of those days.

所以我现在还留在这里的唯一原因，是因为我有一个更广阔的使命，让这一切暂时值得。这就是为什么你会看到我们许多最优秀的创始人达到一个临界点，他们会说，好吧，我受够了企业的乐趣。这就是我能给你的最真实的答案。嗯。

And so the only reason I'm still around is that I have a broader mission that makes it worthwhile for now. That's why you see so many of our best founders get to a point where they're like, okay. I've had enough corporate fun. So that's the most authentic answer I could give you. Mhmm.

回归没有后悔，但日常中充满了痛苦。

No regrets coming back, but plenty of pain on a day to day basis.

今天的节目由DX赞助，这是一个由顶尖研究人员设计的开发者智能平台。要在AI时代蓬勃发展，组织需要快速适应。但许多组织的领导者难以回答紧迫的问题，比如哪些工具有效？它们是如何被使用的？真正驱动价值的是什么？

Today's episode is brought to you by DX, the developer intelligence platform designed by leading researchers. To thrive in the AI era, organizations need to adapt quickly. But many organization leaders struggle to answer pressing questions like which tools are working? How are they being used? What's actually driving value?

DX提供了领导者应对这一转变所需的数据和洞察。借助DX，像Dropbox、booking.com、Adyen和Intercom这样的公司能深入了解AI如何为他们的开发者提供价值，以及AI对工程生产力产生了什么影响。了解更多，请访问DX的网站getdx.com/lenny。那就是getdx.com/lenny。关于这个代理领域的一个有趣之处是，所有的代理都在接管。

DX provides the data and insights that leaders need to navigate this shift. With DX, companies like Dropbox, booking.com, Adyen, and Intercom get a deep understanding of how AI is providing value to their developers and what impact AI is having on engineering productivity. To learn more, visit DX's website at getdx.com/lenny. That's getdx.com/lenny. One of the interesting things about this space of agents, there's all stock agents are taking over.

这是软件的未来。SaaS将被代理取代。CX就像是一个经典案例。感觉就像，我猜想向前看时并不明显，但现在回头看，显然这是一个代理接管工作的绝佳领域。

It's the future of software. SaaS is gonna be replaced with agents. CX is like a classic. It just feels like like I imagine looking forward, it was not obvious. Now looking back, it's like, obviously, this is an amazing place for agents to take over work.

但总有人说代理将做所有事情，所有的SaaS软件都将被代理取代。你对这种颠覆会扩展到CX之外有多远有感觉吗？因为它已经在你的业务中发生了。

But there's always this talk of agents will do everything and all the SaaS software is going to be replaced by agents. Do you have a sense of just like how far this disruption will go outside of CX because it's already happening in your businesses?

我首先要说的是，CX看似简单，实则庞大，因为它仅由两个词、两个字母隐藏着，你知道，客户体验实际上是服务、成功、销售和营销，在我看来。这是与所有客户的互动。这是任何企业、任何消费者业务和任何B2B业务中人数最多的部分，最大的组织是销售、服务、成功。所以我稍后会谈到CX之外的事情，但我想强调的是，CX是业务运营的主要部分。当然，它会超越CX。

The first thing I'll say is that CX is deceptively large given it's hidden behind just two words, two letters, you know, customer experience really is service success, sales and marketing in my opinion. It's all engagement with all customers. It's the biggest part by headcount of any business, any consumer business and any B2B business, the biggest organizations are sales, service, success. So I'll talk about things other than CX in a moment, but I want to emphasize that CX is the majority of business operations. Of course, it'll go beyond CX.

任何需要大量重复性机械操作的工作都将被自动化，无论是追踪、收集还是开具发票。可能是员工入职或离职流程。要知道，组织中有如此多的重复性工作将被取代。一个有趣的问题是，其中有多少会是通用操作机器人？又有多少会是专家代理？

Any function that requires a lot of repetitive operational mechanical work will be automated, whether it's chasing or collecting or issuing invoices. It could be onboarding or offboarding employees. You know, there are so many repetitive jobs in an organization that it'll start to replace. One of the interesting questions is how much will be generic operations bots? How much will be expert agents?

比如法律和合同审查就有专家代理，会计领域可能也会有专家代理，但你还需要在这些代理之间起到粘合剂作用的角色。未来的组织将处处是代理。我花了很多时间思考未来会是什么样子？我想象那将是人类与代理的混合体。我不认为未来必然是人类高高在上、代理只担任AC或IC角色。

You know, there are expert agents for law and contract review. They'll probably be expert agents for accounting, but you'll need the glue in between all of these agents too, but future organizations will be agents everywhere. I have spent quite a bit of time thinking about what does it all look like in the future? And, you know, I imagine it as a medley of humans and agents. And I don't think it's obviously gonna be humans on the top and the agents all on the AC role, IC roles.

我认为会是更复杂的混合状态——既有担任管理者和领导者的人类，也会有身处IC角色的人类，他们与代理协作，配置代理以确保其成功，并监督和管理其进展，提供监督并处理边缘情况。因此，我认为这些组织未来的形态会让我们惊讶：规模肯定会更小，结构会更扁平。就算最高层也有代理，我也不会感到意外。比如我一直在思考——虽然我们现在有位出色的人类幕僚长——但想象未来有位理解你优先事项的人类幕僚长，每天与你沟通，联系不同人员获取进展，帮你整理优先级，提醒你需要问责的对象。

I think that'll be more of a complex mix where you're gonna have, you know, people that are like managers and leaders, but they'll be in IC roles, working with agents to configure them for success and monitor and manage their progress, kind of add that oversight and cover for edge cases. And so, I think we're going to be surprised in which the way that these organizations go, they'll definitely be smaller. They'll be flatter because of that. I won't be surprised if there are agents at the highest level too. I mean, I've been thinking about how, and we do have a great human chief of staff here, but imagine a future human chief of staff that like understands your priorities and actually talks to you and does a check-in each day and reaches out to different people and asks for updates and helps organize your priorities and helps you remember who you need to keep accountable.

这显然存在机会。所以你可以想象代理在客服等特定岗位，在运营岗位充当粘合剂，或像我提到的担任副驾驶/助理类角色。这一切带来的将是史诗级的效率提升，具有极强的通货紧缩效应，市场竞争也会更加激烈。

Clearly there's an opportunity for that. And so you can imagine agents in specific roles like customer service, in operational roles being glue and in being kind of like copilot or assistant roles like that, which I mentioned. But, you know, what I think that all brings is just epic levels of efficiency. It's gonna be super deflationary. There'll be a lot more competition.

AI领域本身现在就竞争白热化，激烈程度前所未有。当各行业内部运作高度自动化后，这种竞争将席卷所有领域。最终我认为这对消费者是好事——更多选择、更低价格。

AI itself is insanely competitive right now. It's so intense in a way that was never before. That's gonna come to all industries when so much of their inner workings becomes automated. And ultimately I think it's going to be great for the consumer. They'll have more options, cheaper options.

我不得不认为这对经济极有益处，可以说是经济润滑剂，会催生大量新动向和新活动。虽然我们可以继续天马行空，但就此打住。这也意味着我们需要更多人口来支撑这种经济大发展。是的，我眼中的未来就是人类与代理在各个维度上的美妙协作。

And I can't, but see that be great for the economy, a lot of economic lubricant as it were, and a lot of new movement and activity. And if we were to really go off the reservation, but I'll stop here. That means that we need more humans too. We need population growth to show up for this big growth economically. And yeah, I just see the future as just a beautiful collaboration between humans and agents in every direction.

我欣赏这种乐观态度。有人曾将其描述为——叫什么来着——代理型社会，人类与代理共存。这自然引出了就业问题。我们播客曾邀请过马克·贝尼奥夫。

I love the optimism. Someone described this once as a society, what is it, a agentic society, for us and agents living together. Right. This begs the question around just jobs. We had Marc Benioff on the podcast.

他，你知道的，满嘴都是‘代理力量、代理力量、代理力量’。我问他，你觉得哪些工作会消失？他直接说，客户体验（CX）岗位，正在消失，已经没了。销售不会消失。我们永远需要销售人员。

He's, you know, all agent force, agent force, agent force. And I asked him just like, jobs do you think are going away? And he's just like, CX, going away, gone. Sales not going away. We need salespeople.

你的直觉是什么？我知道这是个敏感话题。没人愿意说哪些工作会消失。但你感觉哪些领域的工作最可能大规模消失？

Just what's your sense? I know it's like touchy subject. No one ever wants to say jobs are going away. But just what's your sense of where jobs might be disappearing more most?

是的。其实我不觉得这特别敏感，因为工作机会向来都在消失。技术在取代重复性、侮辱性、危险性工作方面做得很好。现在因技术发展，更少人在危险工厂断肢，更少人窒息死在矿井里。人们不再弯腰驼背干农活，不再从事那些贬低人类伟大、美丽、创造性潜能的工作。我要为争夺这些糟糕工作而道歉——因为过去技术取代这些工作时，人口反而在增长。

Yeah. Well, I don't find it to be particularly touchy because jobs have always gone away and technology has done a really good job at stealing jobs that were repetitive, demeaning, dangerous. We have less people losing limbs in dangerous factories or dying and suffocating down minds because of the technology that we now have available to us. People breaking their backs on farms or just doing things that's highly demeaning to the great, beautiful creative potential of each human individual life. So I want to apologize for competing with or competing for shit work because all the while technology has done that in the past, population has increased.

GDP在增长，寿命在延长。西方世界（享受最多技术红利的地区）犯罪率持续下降。因此我们完全有理由相信这种趋势会延续——尽管转型过程必然伴随阵痛。历史上确实有矿工等职业群体需要重新就业，我并非对此视而不见，但这正是人类走向繁荣、健康与幸福的长征必经之路。

GDP has increased longevity. Crime rates have diminished in the Western world, the world that has enjoyed the most technology. So we have no good reason to not believe that that won't continue even while there is difficulty. And there has been in the past, no doubt people who were gainfully employed in dangerous working minds had to find new work. And so I don't take that for granted, but I think that this is part of the long arc of humanity flourishing and getting healthier and happier.

哪些工作会消失？所有侮辱人格的垃圾工作。数字行业也存在这种情况——让人类日复一日坐在键盘前回答相同问题，到最后你甚至不让他们手动回复，只需点击调出预设模板按钮。

What are the work the types of work that will go away? It's all the demeaning crappy stuff. And and that exists in, you know, digital businesses. You ask a human to sit at a keyboard answering the same question day in, day out, and you get to a point where you don't even ask them to answer the question manually. You ask them to click the button that brings up the macro.

这简直是对生命的可怕浪费。我接触过成千上万Intercom公司的员工，他们天赋各异，有些人可能自认智商平平，或许当时只适合做重复性工作。但只要交谈两三分钟，你就会发现他们灵魂里闪耀的火花——只要找到正确方向，他们就能绽放光芒，为世界带来无限欢乐。这就是我们共同的使命。

Like, what a horrible use of a human life. I've met thousands of people that have worked at intercom, a broad range of talents, people who they might not describe themselves as particularly high IQ. Maybe they were suited at that point in their life for this highly repetitive work. You talk to them for two or three minutes, you'll see the bright spark of a beautiful human that if they got to do the right thing, they would light up and bring so much happiness and joy to the world. And so like that's the mission we're all on.

我不是盲目乐观（如我所说），也不否认转型摩擦，但总体我们在进步。具体来说，客户体验岗位和大量基础重复岗位会消失。销售中也存在许多重复性工作，因此未来会用更少人力完成更多销售。比如销售开发代表（SDR）处理基础问题筛选的岗位。

I'm not Pollyanna ish here, like I said, and I'm suggesting that there won't be friction, but for the most part, we're doing good. And to get specific, they will be CX roles and a lot of basic repetitive roles. There is a lot of repetitive stuff in sales. And so you'll do more sales with less people. And there are SDR roles qualifying, you know, basic questions.

销售团队将不再需要那么多人手。在这方面我与马克有些分歧，但他想表达的是销售人员带来的价值在于人际联结与信任。这一点短期内不会消失，感谢上帝。

You're not gonna need as many people in sales organizations. So I'm a little misaligned with Mark in that respect, but what he's getting at is that what sales people bring to the table is human connection and trust. And that is not about to go away anytime soon. And thank God for that.

最近我请Anthropic联合创始人本·曼恩上播客，他说连他自己的工作迟早也会被取代。他还说'伦尼，你的工作未来也会被AI替代'。这个观点相当震撼，没想到他会这么说。

I had Ben Mann, the co founder of Anthropic on the podcast recently, and he said that he's like, even my job is probably gonna go at some point. He's like, Lenny, your job is gonna be replaced by AI at some point. That was pretty compelling. Did not expect him to say that.

是啊，我不确定。虽然我们会用AI代理来聚合和创造内容，但人类在生产力方面——效率固然重要，却非我们最看重的。如果效率至上，我就会永远买最便宜的衣服、家具、电脑甚至打印机纸张。但人类更珍视美感、人文故事、情感与联结。

Yeah. I don't know. I I like, it will in many ways, we're gonna have agents and AI to aggregate content and create content, but humans, as much as when it comes to productivity, value efficiency, efficiency is not the number one thing that we value. You know, if efficiency was the number one thing we value, I'd always buy the cheapest clothes, furniture, computers, even paper for my printer. But I think humans value things like beauty and human stories and human heart and connection.

人们不仅会继续渴望这些，还会愿意为像伦尼这样有独特故事、鲜明观点甚至小缺陷的人支付溢价。AI的泛滥将使自动化产物一文不值，就像YouTube廉价内容的价值。为何人们愿意订阅某些频道付费？为何花钱租电影？

And not only will they still want those, and they'll still want a Lenny that his has his own story and his own taken opinions and is a little imperfect, but they'll pay more for it. The abundance of AI is gonna make automated things worth zero. Just like the value of cheap content on YouTube. Why do people subscribe to some channels and pay more? Why do people pay to rent movies?

因为某些事物更具品质、美感、工艺、艺术性和人性温度。我相信这类事物永远有存在空间。

Because some things have more quality, more beauty, more craft, more art, more humanity. So I think there'll always be a place for that.

呼...好吧，我至少还能再干几年。在切换话题前，回顾你们转向Finn的成功转型，还有什么我们未提及的经验值得正在经历类似转型的人借鉴？

Phew. All right. I've got a couple more years at least. Yeah. Before I move on to a different topic, just kind of reflecting back on this shift to Finn and the success that you've had, are there any other just lessons that we haven't touched on that you think might be helpful for folks that are trying to go through this journey?

我认为核心在于你别无选择。我的联合创始人德斯正在写书，这正是核心理念。科技行业的历史很短，关键转折点屈指可数——微处理器、个人电脑、互联网，或许还有移动革命。

You know, I think it's ultimately that you don't have a choice. My co founder Des is writing a book at the moment and that's core to the idea here. You don't have a choice. The story of the technology industry or digital technology is really short. And it's been, it's punctuated by a small number of things, microprocessors, personal computers, the internet, maybe mobile.

现在有了人工智能。我认为AI比所有这些都更重要。所有这些技术本质上颠覆了所有领域。因此，它不仅可能颠覆所有行业，还会以最激进、最猛烈的方式进行颠覆。如果你不参与其中，你将被彻底淘汰出局。

Now there's AI. I think AI is bigger than all these things. And all of these things disrupted essentially all categories. So not only is this likely disrupt all the categories, it's gonna disrupt it in the most aggressive, violent ways. And if you're not in it, you're about to get kicked out of all of it.

所以我最强烈的建议是：卷起袖子，弄清楚什么会颠覆你，并乐在其中。你需要引进真正的人才。如果没有真正的AI科学家和领导者，我们和我都将一事无成。这是我们在这里取得成功的唯一途径。我们有一位杰出的人才，在这期节目播出时，他应该已经晋升为首席AI官——我一直宣布这些消息，向你保证，费格尔·里德。

And so my strongest advice is roll your sleeves up, figure out what's going to disrupt you, have fun with it. You need to bring in actual talent. We and I would be nothing if we didn't have actual AI scientists and leaders. It's the only way we can be successful here. We have an incredible person who by the time this is out, will have received a promotion to chief I AI keep announcing all these things and confidence to you, Fergal Reed.

他只是AI应用领域最顶尖的人才之一。我们恰好与他合作多年。所以部分关键在于发现人才，另一部分在于引入年轻人才。AI某种程度上是年轻人的游戏。我还年轻，但比不上那些构建AI的年轻人。

And he's just one of the very best in AI applications. And we happened to be working with him for many years. So part of it is finding the talent and part of it is bringing in the young talent too. AI is kind of a young man's game. And I'm young, but I'm not as young as a lot of the kids building AI.

因此，学会赋能他们、支持他们并向他们学习也非常重要。不幸的是，从他们身上学到的一点是：现在要想获胜的唯一方式就是拼命工作，因为这些由二十多岁年轻人运营的AI公司，真的每天工作12小时，一年365天无休。不开玩笑，所有公司都这样。这对我们很多人来说不是个愉快的想法，尤其是那些已经成家的人。我们这代人很多都有孩子。

And so learning to empower and enable them and learn from them too is a really big deal. And unfortunately, part of what you learn from them is the only way you're gonna win right now is if you work your ass off because all these little AI companies run by kids in their twenties are literally working twelve hours a day, literally three sixty five days a year. No joke, all of them. And that's not a fun idea for many of us, especially those who've grown up. Some people in our generation have kids or a lot of them do.

生活中需要舒适和稳定。你不想那样工作。但如果你想参与其中，这就是代价的一部分。这也是这么多新兴AI公司即将获胜的原因。因为很少有上一代公司愿意做出所有这些改变并全力以赴。

There's like comfort and stability in your life. You don't wanna work like that. But if you want in, that's part of the price. And that's how so many of these young new AI companies are going to win. Cause very few of the previous generation companies are willing to make all of those changes and go all the way in.

所以我实际的建议可能不太有用：如果上一代公司的创始人自己不愿意卷起袖子投入其中，像年轻人一样努力工作，那就雇个年轻人。你可以像我一样担任董事长，享受乐趣。你可以指导年轻人，雇个年轻人——因为老兄，你现在的位置不对。

And so my actual advice, which is not that helpful is that if founders of previous generation companies are themselves not willing to roll up their sleeves and get into it and work as hard as the kids, hire a kid. You can be a chairperson like I was, have a lot of fun. You can mentor the kid, hire a kid because you're in the wrong job buddy.

我喜欢这种务实的建议。有意思的是，当你谈到每天12小时工作时，这就像我们试图接近智能体的工作状态——它们的工作时长是这的一半，基本上就是50%的智能体工作时间。

I love how pragmatic this device is. And what's interesting as you talk about twelve hours a day, every day, it's like, we're trying to get close to what agents are doing, which is half. That's basically 50% of agents.

但这不仅仅是一句诗意、可爱的说法。它源于一个非常现实的现象：这些年轻公司懂得如何以老牌公司所不具备的方式运用AI。年轻公司正在通过氛围编程，将AI用于创意工作和职位描述。我敢保证，你去看看我们这一代的公司，甚至我们也不得不推动员工使用。在我们这一代的大多数公司，尤其是非技术型组织里，大多数人根本没有使用任何AI工具。

But that that's not just a poetic, cute phrase thing to say. That comes from something very real, which is these younger companies know how to use AI in ways that the older companies don't. The younger companies are vibe coding and using AI for their creative work and for their job descriptions. I guarantee you go to companies of our generation and even we have had to push people. You go to companies of our generation, most people in most organizations, particularly non technical organizations, they're not using any AI.

也许他们开始用ChatGPT写职位描述了，但还不是默认操作。所以这不止是个玩笑——你们正在与部分由AI构成的年轻公司竞争。

Maybe they're starting to use ChatGPT to write a job description, but they're not doing it by default. And so that's more than a joke. You're competing with young companies that are in part AI.

这让我想起去年四月（2024年4月）采访Perplexity创始人的经历。他们当时说团队运作方式是：每当有问题要问同事时，会先询问ChatGPT，再去问真人。这在当时听起来很疯狂，但现在看来理所当然——我们都这么做了。

This reminds me, I did a interview with the Perplexity founders. It was, I just checked, April 2024, so just over a year ago. And they were saying that the way they operated, and this sounded so crazy at the time, is anytime they were, they had a question for anyone else on the team, they first asked ChatGPT about it, and then they go ask the person, and I like, that is insane. And now it's just like obvious. That's what we all do now.

就像现在直接语音交流这么自然。

It's just like, hey, I'm just gonna talk voice.

这是典型例子。他们做了很多类似的事。当我提到全年无休的运作时，首先想到他们公司——这些年轻企业正在做着我们这个年纪的人觉得荒唐的事，但对他们来说只是日常。这代表着思维模式和文化范式的巨大转变，新旧世代之间存在着文化冲突。

It's prime example. They're doing many such things. When I say three sixty five days a year, they're the company I think of because they're doing exactly that. All these young companies are doing wild, and ridiculous things that people you're in my age kind of chuckle at, but it's business as usual for them. So there's just a big mind shift cultural shift, and there's a culture clash of the previous generation versus the the new generation.

越早理解这一点，就能越早开始调整自己的定位。

And the sooner you kind of wrap your head around that, the sooner you can start to on stake yourself, I think.

接着这个话题——如此拼命工作听起来很疯狂，压力大又不愉快。为什么要这样？太糟了。但正如你所说，这同时是个异常罕见的机遇。

And just to build on that, like, this sounds crazy to work this hard. Like, it sounds very stressful, not fun. Why would I do this? This sucks. But at the same time, this is, as you said, such an unusual rare opportunity.

机会如此之多。财富正在大量创造。无数企业正在诞生。如果你曾考虑过全力以赴，现在正是大好时机。

There's so much opportunity. There's so much wealth being created. There's so many businesses being created. This is the time if you were to ever work really hard, this is a good time to do it.

我也这么认为。不过我通常不提倡过度工作。我尽量避免将其神化。事实上，我认为美好生活应该包括在自然中悠闲漫步，不必总想着业绩增长或招聘首席营收官，你知道的，不必每天参加八场会议。或许你该试试一天都不开会。

I think so. I don't actually generally promote working that hard. I try to not fetishize it. I actually think a life well lived includes taking slow walks in nature where you're not thinking about a growth or hiring your chief revenue officer, you know, not going to eight meetings a day. Maybe you should go to no meetings a day.

当然更不该每天工作十二小时。我通常不建议把人生过成这样。我只是说，如果你想在这个时代竞争并享受成功——这意味着必须涉足AI领域——这就是代价。要么选择付出代价，要么退出。别半途而废。

Certainly not working twelve hours a day. I don't actually promote that in general as a thing one should do with their life. I'm simply saying that if you want to compete and, and enjoy success in this age, which means you need to be doing AI, that is the price. So you either decide to pay the price or get out. Don't half ass it.

看看那些号称做AI的公司，只是随便加点劣质AI功能，企业文化却一成不变。这行不通。但我要补充一点：所有伟大人物和成就都是通过努力工作实现的。所以我对年轻人说的这些话看似矛盾——每种生活方式都值得尊重，但有所成就的人总是勤奋工作，并且找到了享受其中的方式。尤其是在2025年做AI。

You see all these companies saying we do AI and they just sprinkle a little bit of crappy AI and they've got the same cultures. It won't work. The one thing I will say, the one little asterisk to my first point is that all great people and great things have been achieved through hard work. And so I'm speaking out of both sides of my mouth here to younger people to let them know that every way of living is valid, but people who have achieved things have always worked hard and they find a way to enjoy it too. And particularly in 2025 in AI.

我想顺着这个话题深入。早先就想问你这个问题。看看能否引出有趣的讨论。观察你的言谈举止，你非常善于自省，非常沉稳。思考时会做那种很棒的深呼吸。

I want to follow this thread. Was going to ask you this earlier, but I didn't. And I want to see if this takes us somewhere interesting. Just watching you speak and talk, you're very self reflective, very centered. Have these really good breaths you take when you think about something.

多年前在一个派对上偶然遇见你，那时Intercom刚起步。我觉得那时的你不是这样。是不是在这两年间，你经历了某种转变才...

I met you a long time ago randomly at a party when you were just starting intercom. I don't think you were like that. Was there, during this kind of two year period, was there kind of a transformation that you went through to kind of

变得如此痴迷？完全正确。是的。有几件事促成了这个转变，首先想到的有三点。

become obsessed? Absolutely. Yeah. There's a couple of things. First, I mean, there's three things that come to mind.

在初创公司工作十四年，每天都会以某种方式多次冲击你的头脑，要么击垮你，要么让你变得更强大。这是第一点。这一点谈不上优雅，但我认为我们都能确认这种经历教会你一些东西。你会迅速成长。第二点是我接受了大量心理治疗。

Working in a startup for fourteen years has a certain way of kicking you in the head many times a day that either kills you or makes you far stronger. So that's one piece. There's no elegance to that point, but I think we can all ensure that that level of experience teaches you something. You grow up very fast. Point two is I did a lot of therapy.

十二年前我遇到了这位了不起的人。他自己创办过几家科技公司，也公开演讲过。他只给CEO做教练和心理治疗。现在他处于职业生涯的后期阶段，这位了不起的人叫约西·阿姆拉姆。非常出色的人。

I found this amazing guy twelve years ago. He started a couple of his own tech companies and talked on public. He only coached and was a therapist to CEOs. He's now kind of in a later stage of his career, this amazing guy, his name is Yossi Amram. Amazing guy.

我只是碰巧遇到了他。起初我不知道自己在和谁打交道，但他是过去几十年里最伟大的思想家和导师之一。没什么人知道他，但他指导过许多CEO。他帮助我认识自我，并为自己留出时间。现在人们喜欢贬低心理治疗。

I just landed on my feet. I just didn't know who I was dealing with, but you know, one of the greatest minds and teachers of kind of the last, I don't know, many decades. People don't even know him, but he's thought and worked with many CEOs. And he just helped me get to know me and take time for myself. And people like to hate on therapy right now.

很多人认为心理治疗很糟糕，很多治疗师水平不行。他们害怕心理治疗会让他们变得迟钝，成为只会吮拇指、沉迷自我、软弱无能的失败者，失去锋芒。但经过十二年每周一次的治疗和精神修炼，有趣的是它确实磨平了你的棱角——但都是那些极其有害的棱角。那些让你变成混蛋、易被激怒、沟通不畅或在不安时反击的棱角全被去除了，然后帮助你更清楚地认识并热爱真实的自己。敢于坦然承认自己的不足，同时坚定把握自己的优势。

Think a lot of therapy sucks and a lot of therapists are not good. And they fear that actually therapy will lobotomize them and turn them into thumb sucking, navel gazing, you know, soft irrelevant losers that won't have that edge anymore. And the interesting thing about twelve years of weekly therapy and spiritual work is that it takes your edges off, but they're all edges that are super counterproductive. All the edges that made you an asshole, got you triggered, miscommunicated, or like fought back when you were insecure, they take all the edges away, then help you see yourself and love yourself so much more for who you are. Be completely unafraid to acknowledge the things you're not good at, but own the things you are.

在理解自己的过程中，你也能更好地理解他人，并以更紧密、更真实的方式进行沟通。优质的心理治疗——必须是优质的——在我看来是造就卓越领导力的秘诀。第三部分是我逃离的两年，当时我状态很差，收入增长不佳。我试图在报纸上为自己辩护，对抗一堆虚假的胡言乱语，但失败了。我是说，被彻底击垮了。

And in understanding yourself, you understand others better and can communicate in a substantially more connected and authentic way. Great, great therapy, and it has to be great, is a recipe for brilliant leadership in my opinion. And then the third part is two years away where I ran away, where I was sick, revenue growth wasn't doing so hot. I unsuccessfully tried to defend myself from a bunch of fake bullshit in the newspapers. I mean, was beat up.

在这种时刻，你对自己伟大的认知会被彻底粉碎。这很痛苦，痛苦到许多人无法恢复。我感谢那时已进行九年或十年的心理治疗，以及这位治疗师兼教练的支持，让我挺了过来。但如果你能熬过去，最终你会摆脱那些不安全感，以及所有让你效率低下、嫉妒或易怒的自我膨胀的废话，它们都消失了。

In a moment like that, your ego, sense you have of your greatness is eviscerated. And that's painful. It can be so painful that many people don't come back from it. And I credit the ten years at that point or nine years of therapy I did at that point, plus the support of this therapist and coach that I had to surviving it. But if you can survive it, what you end up with on the other side is all of those insecure well, a lot of the insecurities and all that ego bullshit that made you super ineffective, jealous, or triggered for all sorts of different reasons, it's gone.

你必须摒弃那个完美、卓越领导者的形象——这是所有成功创始人在成功时都会形成的自我认知。这之所以是好事，是因为那种认知太局限了。当你怀着'老子天下第一'的自我认同，任何挑战这一认知的时刻都变得极其可怕，任何质疑都成了冒犯。所以，无论我今天取得什么成就——我还有几十年的路要走——都要归功于这三个要素。

And your image that you are this perfect, brilliant leader that all successful founders form when they are successful had to die. And the reason that's so good is that that's so limiting. When you have this ego identity of yourself about how fucking amazing you are, then any moment that challenges that is super scary. Anyone who questions it is offensive. And so I credit wherever I am today and I have decades of learning still to go to those three components.

虽然最后一段经历很糟糕，但我仍感到非常幸运能拥有所有这些经历，现在我终于可以说，哇，它们真的帮了我大忙。

And I feel super fortunate to have had all of them, even though the last one sucked, I can finally say, wow, it really helped.

感谢分享这些。我很高兴能聊到这个。我想给你看件我办公室里偶然有的东西，是我妻子刚送给我的，我觉得你会喜欢。这是件我认为能引起共鸣的艺术品。

Thank you for sharing all that. I'm glad I went there. I want to show you something that I randomly have in my office my wife just got me that I think you're going to love. It's a piece of art that I think will resonate.

是啊，我现在看的是什么？这是一只手吗？

Yeah. What am I looking at here? So it's a hand?

这是一只打响指的手，让我看看你能不能看清上面的字。

It's a hand with a snap, and then let me see if you can see what it says.

我看不清上面写的什么。

I can't see what it says.

上面写着'自我消亡'。对，看这个。

It says ego death now. Right. Look at this.

很好，正是如此。

Good. Exactly.

就在那里

There it

是的。我们所有的自我都平静地缩小并离开这凡尘俗世。现实是，我们的自我从未真正消亡。甚至伟大的灵性导师拉姆·达斯几年前去世了。有人在他临终前问他类似的问题，比如，你是如何克服自己的胡扯或自我的？

is. All our egos peacefully become smaller and leave this mortal coil. The reality is like none of our egos ever die. And even great, there was, you know, Ram Dass is this great spiritual teacher who died a few years ago. And someone asked him on his deathbed, something like, you know, how did you get over your bullshit or your ego?

他说，我从未真正克服，只是边缘被磨平了。这个人经历了七十多年最深刻、最狂野的灵性修行。他承认，不，我还是原来的我。所以自我依然存在，我们实际上需要承认它并爱它。当你承认它时，当你有点嫉妒时就不会感到惊讶。

And he said, I never did just the edges got smoothed away. This is a guy who had like seventy years of the deepest wildest spiritual work. He acknowledged, no, still my same self. So the ego is still there and we actually need to acknowledge it and love it. And when you acknowledge it, then it's not a surprise when you're like a little jealous.

你会想，我嫉妒了。这很有趣。好吧。一切都很好。

You're like, I'm jealous. That's funny. Okay. And it's all good.

这让我想起丹尼尔·卡尼曼，他写了所有关于我们偏见的书，比如，这就是我们有缺陷的所有方式。人们问他，你是否学会了更理性地生活？他说，完全没有。知道我们有多少缺陷和思维偏见，实际上并不能让我在生活中运用这些知识。

Reminds me of Daniel Kahneman who wrote all these books about biases that we have and, like, here's all the ways we're flawed. People ask him, have you, like, learned to live more rationally? He's like, not not at all. Knowing all these things about how we're flawed and the way we think all these biases doesn't actually I can't use it in life.

我们是人类，我们应该让自己保持人性。我认为这很美。我们既是逻辑系统，也是心灵系统、身体系统和灵魂系统。这一切都很好。

We're human and we should let ourselves be human. I think it's beautiful. We're we're we're logic systems, but we're also heart systems and body systems and soul systems. All of it is good.

好吧。我想完全换个方向。最后我想谈的是，我必须提到这一点。我不知道你是否看过，但我一直在研究哪些公司培养出最好的产品领导者。我通过观察哪些公司的校友最常成为首席产品官（CPO）、在下一份工作中晋升最多、成为几家初创公司的首位产品经理、创办自己的公司来进行这项研究。

Okay. I want to go in a completely different direction. The last thing I want to talk about, I I needed to mention this. I don't know if you've seen this, but I've been doing research on which companies produce the best product leaders. And I've been doing this by looking at which alumni of companies go on to become CPOs at the highest rate, get promoted the most at their next job, become the first product manager at a few start ups, start their own companies.

Intercom在这项研究中名列前茅，紧随Palantir和Stripe之后，这就引出了一个问题：你们究竟做了什么才能培养出如此优秀的产品领导者？这既涉及招聘环节，也关乎他们在Intercom的工作方式。你们认为是什么造就了校友群体如此显著的成功？

Intercom has come in number one across this research next to like Palantir So and Stripe, the question this begs is, what are you guys doing that produces such great product leaders? There's kind of like the hiring piece and then there's what they do at intercom piece. So what do you think? What do you think is creating these sort of really big successes for your alumni group?

说实话，我没有一个非常简洁的答案。抽象地说，我们的文化是高度产品导向的。比如我和Des，我们四位创始人中，我和Des Trainer主导了很多战略决策，我们都是产品人。我本身是软件设计师，计算机科学背景，具备技术能力但从未专业从事编程。

Yeah, I don't have a really succinct answer unfortunately. I can say in the abstract, our culture is a very product y culture. So like myself and Des, those four founders and me and Des Trainer drove a lot, like all the strategy, we're product guys. I was a software designer. I studied computer science, so I'm technical, but never did it professionally.

首先，产品创新设计是我们的文化核心，人们总能感受到这一点。所以优秀人才愿意加入，我们也善于发掘人才。其次，由于我们制定了宏大的战略，需要为众多产品建立复杂架构，这包括大量拥有高度自主权的产品经理及其团队。这种庞杂战略的副产品就是，我们的产品经理能像多个CEO那样运作，从而学习到超越绘制线框图和用户访谈的更广泛技能。

So the first part is that just product innovation design was just core to our culture And people always picked up on that. So I think good people wanted to work here and we were good at finding good people. The other part was that because we had this sprawling strategy, we had all these products that we needed a complex structure for, and that included lots of PMs and PM groups that we gave a lot of autonomy to. And so like kind of the product of our big messy strategy was that we had PMs that got to act like many CEOs. And so I think that they got to learn the broader skill sets beyond designing wireframes and interviewing some customers.

他们在某种程度上确实像迷你CEO那样全权负责。还有一点很重要，我们的方法论是近乎偏执的第一性原理思考——虽然我不认为这是缺点。我们会为所有事情建立框架，比如：'我们要举办这些活动...

They really own it like a mini CEO to some degree. I think there's one other thing which is, you know, part to our approach was this deeply first principles thinking methodology almost to a fault. Although I don't think it's a fault. We would, I and we would create frameworks for everything. It's like, okay, we want to do these events.

活动面向谁？终极目标是什么？活动运作的机制为何？还有哪些替代机制能达成相同目标？这类活动的成功标准如何定义？

Who are the events for? What is the ultimate goal of the event? What's the mechanism by which events work? What are other mechanisms that can achieve that same goal? How do we define success for an event like that?

用户或参与者如何定义价值？他们还重视哪些其他事物？我们构建了复杂系统来处理所有问题，最终效果是形成了高度协调的战略体系。比如我们的首席产品官Paul Adams最近出版了《AI时代与客户服务的变革》一书...

How does the user or the attendee define value? What other things do those people find valuable? Like we create these like complex systems to try and approach everything, but the net effect was we'd have really joined up considered strategy and it's everywhere. Like Paul Adams, our chief product officer, I didn't even plan to show this. He made this book recently, The AI Age and the Transformation of Customer Service.

这本书提供了关于AI思考的系列框架。这就是我们的工作方式。我们会招聘擅长此道的人才，同时也会传授这种方法——这是可教授的，但并非所有人都会这么做。Des和我至今仍热爱在白板前进行这样的头脑风暴。

And it's a bunch of frameworks for how to think about AI, etcetera. So it's part of what we do. And so we would hire people who are good at that, but we teach that. That's teachable and not everyone does that. And so the conversations that Des and I would have, you know, we still love being on whiteboards.

我们在都柏林的第一个办公室，那个真正属于我们的小小空间，面积非常有限。一面墙边摆放着四五台电脑，另一面墙则全是白板——我们特别钟爱那面白板墙。到了下一个办公室，我们甚至有个四面都是白板的方形房间。

Our very first office, our own office in Dublin, it was a tiny office. One wall was like four, five computers. The other wall was just all whiteboards. We love that we had a whiteboard wall. In our next office we had a room, square room and all walls were whiteboards.

我们就是喜欢画各种图表来讲解概念。确实，那种充满创造力的产品氛围、第一性原则的思考方式，还有我们精心挑选的团队成员都很关键。今早我还和德斯聊到，为什么这么多Intercom员工后来都成了创业者？我想是因为我们当初招的就是创业者类型的人。

So we just love to like draw diagrams so you can teach all that stuff. So yeah, it's just all that good energy product, product energy, first principles, the people we chose. And on the founder side, was talking to Des about this this morning. Like why have so many intercom people gone on to be founders? I think it's because we've hired founder types.

我常对大家说：加入Intercom，学习如何打造伟大公司，与我们共同建设，然后去创立你自己的事业。我在全员会议上经常这么讲，但讽刺的是，那些早期招募的'创业者型'人才可能并不是最优秀的员工——他们更适合当创始人。我自己就不是个好员工。所以现在这批新成员会如何发展很有趣：他们中会诞生多少创始人？成功能否复制当年的盛况？

And my pitch to people was always come to intercom, figure out how great companies are built and build it with us and then go on to start your own. I would say that often at all hands, but the irony is that the people we hired back then, the founder types were probably not great employees, right? They were better founders. I'm not a good employee. And so I, it'll be interesting to see if this current cohort, we'll get money founders out of this current cohort, but will they convert as well as they did before?

因为现在我们招聘的是渴望参与更大事业的人，他们更成熟稳重，拥有特定领域的专长和明确发展方向。或许不再是当年那些疯狂到去创业的类型，但这很奇妙。我确实看到了你做的研究，特别是那份按创始人数量排名的公司榜单。

Because we're now hiring people who want to be part of something bigger. They're more mature and grown up, more stable and consistent. They're part of, you know, they have a certain expertise and a certain lane they wanna work in. And maybe they're not the crazy types that went on to start companies, but it's wild. I did see some of that research by you, particularly the one where you show the the companies ranked by the number of founders that they have.

我的反应是：这怎么回事？看到我们排名这么高时，我和你一样惊讶，毕竟榜单上还有许多其他优秀企业。既意外又自豪。

And I'm like, what is happening? I was as surprised that we were that high as you were, because there are many other great companies on that list. So surprised and proud.

我最喜欢听人说'我其实没有明确答案'，然后给出极其清晰的见解。这与其他上榜公司的共性高度吻合，我总结出一个关键词就是'复杂性'——这个特质反复出现。有趣的是，我快速浏览下名单：Intercom、Palantir、Revolut、N26、Dropbox、Chime、Stripe，还有Coinbase和Notion，大部分都是金融科技公司。

I love when people say, I don't really have like a clear answer, and then you have exactly a clear answer. And it resonates a lot with other companies on this list that I've had on of what the themes are, and I'll just reflect back with One you of is complexity. That comes up a lot. So like and interestingly, most of the other companies in the list, I'll read them real quick, Intercom, Palantir, Revolut, N26, Dropbox, Chime, Stripe, and then Coinbase and Notions down there. So many are fintech.

几乎全是金融科技领域。

Almost all are fintech.

没错。

Right.

其中的复杂性确实很高。这里有一个非常有趣的趋势，就像复杂性一样。所有权是另一个经常被提及的话题。许多CEO、总经理这类角色。第一性原理思维和直达本质的讨论在这些对话中频繁出现。

And the complexity there is really high. So there's like a really interesting trend there, just like complexity. Ownership is another one that comes up a lot. Many CEOs, GMs kind of roles. First principles thinking and just like going to the bare metal comes up a lot in these conversations.

还有就是招聘资深人士，招聘创始人类型的人才。

And then hiring senior people, hiring founder types.

是的。比如Stripe就做了很多这方面的工作。我认为Stripe在践行第一性原理和招募创始人类型人才方面做得很多。

Yes. Like Stripe did a lot of that. I think Stripe did a lot of first principle stuff and founder types.

另外我们甚至还没谈到这个，但你们创造了'rice'理论。你们让'待完成的工作'理论流行起来。说到框架，你们简直就是我们都在使用的各种框架的宝库。淹没

The other thing we're not even talking about this, but you guys invented rice. You guys popularized jobs to be done. Like speaking of frameworks, you guys are a wealth of frameworks that we all use. Drowning

在框架中。

in frameworks.

淹没——以一种非常积极的方式改变着每个人构建产品的方式。好的。在我们进入激动人心的闪电问答环节前，你还有什么想补充或留给听众的吗？

Drowningchanging the way everyone builds product in a really positive way. Okay. Is there anything else that you wanted to touch on or leave listeners with before we get to a very exciting lightning round?

像我这样的人参加这类播客时，总怀有隐秘动机，这既健康又正常。这是交易的一部分。其中有些动机，比如享受被当作专家的感觉，但我今天的私心是想确保人们明白Intercom本质上是一种截然不同的后期阶段公司。我们是一家庞大而成熟的初创企业。我们的每一项工作方式都保持着初创企业的特质，并在我们的代理类别中与真正的初创企业竞争并碾压它们。

When someone like me comes on a podcast like this, they always have an ulterior motive and that's healthy and good. It's part of the transaction. Some of it is to, you know, enjoy feeling like an expert, but my ulterior motive today is to make sure that people understand that Intercom is a fundamentally different type of late stage company. We are a large old startup. Every single way in which we work is as a startup and are competing with and crushing the actual startup competition in our agent categories.

之所以要让人们了解这一点，正如我先前所说，是因为优秀但处于后期阶段的公司面临的劣势就是它们已进入成熟期，人们心理上不会将其与初创公司归为同类。人们根本不会联想到这些老牌公司。如果我告诉你IBM开发了最具革命性的编程助手，你很难相信。大多数人都会如此。也许它有趣到足以让你印象深刻并去一探究竟，但默认情况下，人们不会主动关注IBM。

And the reason that that's important for people to know is just, like I said earlier, that the handicap that good, but late stage companies have is that they're late stage and people don't mentally put them in the same box. They just don't imagine these older companies. If I told you that IBM had made the most wildly innovative coding assistant, you'd find it hard to believe. Most people would. It's maybe so interesting such that it would stick in your mind and you'd go look at it, but by default, people aren't gonna look at IBM.

因此我希望人们重新审视Intercom，因为它本质上是一家全新的公司。我们的使命是帮助各类企业为每位用户提供无可挑剔、令人惊叹的优质服务。如今已有成千上万人通过Fin实现这一目标。所以请务必去看看Fin——Fin.ai。

And so I want people to take a new look at Intercom because it's a brand new company. And our mission is to help every single type of business deliver impeccable, incredible, beautiful, service to every single one of their users and people, many thousands of people are using Fin for that today. So go check out Fin, please. Fin.ai.

不知开头是否提及过，但请容我补充：您预测贵公司将成为明年所有上市软件企业中增长最快的公司。

And I don't know if you mentioned this at the beginning, but let's mention that you you, you predict that you'll be the fastest growing company across if you were to look at all public software companies next year.

大约两年前我们的增长率还是个位数低段，之后增长率翻倍。去年我们达到两位数低段增长，今年已跻身所有上市软件公司的前15%——在120多家上市软件公司中位列前15%。

So maybe, you know, two years ago we were in the low single digits growth rate. We doubled our growth rate. And last year we were in the low double digits. This year we're in the fifteenth percentile of all public software companies. So you take the 120 something public software companies were in the fifteenth percentile.

我们正快速攀升。虽然公开这类预测显然存在风险，但查看增长曲线时，很难不展望未来前景。我认为我们将成为所有上市软件公司中增长最快的企业。让我们拭目以待——但正是Finn带来的变革才造就了这种令人震惊的转型程度。一年后再来验证，或许我会尴尬，或许会感到...

So we're like getting up there fast. And if we sustain this trajectory and it's obviously dangerous to put these types of things out publicly, but I'll tell you, I look at the charts and it's hard not to imagine where this goes. I think we're going to find ourselves being the fastest growing out of all relative to all public software companies. So let's see, but that's the level of shock, surprise, and transformation that has actually happened here all because of Finn. So check-in with me in a year and maybe I'll be embarrassed or maybe I'll be feeling Or a

您太谦虚了。这完全呼应了我们对话的开场白。Intercom取得了非凡成就，能聆听并分享这个故事，我深感荣幸。

underselling it. This is just reflects back on exactly how I started our conversation. You've done something extraordinary in your comment. I'm really happy that we're hearing that we're sharing this story.

谢谢。

Thank you.

至此，我们进入激动人心的快问快答环节。我有五个问题要问你，准备好了吗？

With that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got five questions for you. Are you ready?

请开始，准备好了。

Please, ready.

你平时最常向别人推荐的两三本书是什么？

What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?

我发现随着创业压力越来越大，我逐渐失去了阅读习惯。所以偶尔会听些有声书，但最近读的一本叫《核战争情景》。这是本非虚构作品，内容吓得我魂飞魄散。如果你喜欢做噩梦，这绝对是完美的睡前读物。精彩极了。

So I found I lost the habit of reading as I started to get more and more stressed with my startup. And so I would listen to audio books here and there, but the most recent book I read is a book called Nuclear War Scenario. And it's a very much a non fiction and scared the shit out of me. So if you like nightmares, it'll be beautiful bedtime reading. Excellent.

是的。

Yeah.

最近有哪部电影或电视剧让你特别享受？

What's a recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed?

我热爱电影。我希望电视剧能更出色，但极少遇到真正精彩的剧集。我唯一从头到尾喜爱的电视剧是《真探》第一季，简直令人难以置信。而最近看的电影是《28年后》，由丹尼·博伊尔执导。

I love movies. I want TV to be better, but I very rarely find TV to be great. The one that the first and last TV show I loved was True Detective one. That was just like incredible. But the last movie I watched was twenty eight years later, and that's by Danny Boyle.

我出生在八十年代，九十年代长大，所以伴随着《猜火车》和《28天毁灭倒数》这些电影成长。后来他拍了部叫《太阳浩劫》的电影。《28年后》这种类型的电影现在已经绝迹了，它是自九十年代以来最具九十年代风格的作品，既充满摇滚精神又感人至深。

I'm I'm like, I you know, I was born in the eighties, grew up as a kid in the nineties, and so grew up with, you know you know, Trainspotting was twenty eight days later. Then he made a movie called Sunshine. So twenty eight years later is a type of movie that's just not made anymore. It's the most nineties movie made since the nineties. It's like very rock and roll and also deeply touching.

这让我非常惊喜。我很想知道年轻一代观众看这部片会怎么想，他们可能会讨厌它，但我超爱《28年后》。

So I was really surprised by that. I bet I would love to know the younger generations that are watching this, what they may think. They may hate it, but I love twenty eight years later.

所以这是拍《28天毁灭倒数》的同一个人啊。嗯，《29年后》。哇，是的。

So this is same person I made twenty eight days later. Yeah. Twenty nine years later. Wow. Yeah.

好的，非常酷。之前不知道这个。对了，你最近有没有发现什么特别喜爱的产品？

Okay. Very cool. Didn't know about that. Yeah. Do you have a favorite product you recently discovered that you really love?

可以是小工具、应用软件，或者衣服之类的。

Could be a gadget, could be an app, could be clothes.

其实我很少喜欢什么产品。我是个完美主义者，东西必须极其简单、零件极少，比如一个碗都要足够好。最近我开始更深入接触咖啡，买了Fellow品牌的产品，作为消费品来说它们出奇地好，完全是另一个层次。

So I like, I very rarely like products. I'm such a perfectionist that it has to be really simple with very little moving parts, like a bowl to actually be like good. I've started to get more into coffee. I've been buying products by Fellow. They're remarkably good for consumer products, like different, it's on a different level.

所以那里存在着某种品味和工艺水平，这在我见过的几乎所有其他消费类硬件产品中都是看不到的。在所有物件中，我最近买了一辆保时捷911，那确实是一件精美的产品。内饰考究，但仍有一堆毛病会让你恼火。所以它远非完美。是的，完美主义有时是创造产品时的天赋，但也是一种诅咒。

So there's some sort of level of taste and craft happening there that I don't see basically any other consumer hardware type products. And of all things I bought a Porsche nine eleven recently and that is a beautiful product. The interiors are exquisite and there's still a bunch of shit that is gonna annoy you. So it's like far from perfect. So, yeah, perfectionism is sometimes a gift if you're in the business of creating products, but also quite the curse.

你永远不会满足，包括对那辆保时捷911。

You're never happy, including with the Porsche nine eleven.

我想这是第三次有人推荐汽车了。Facebook的博兹曾推荐过一款豪华奔驰，还有人曾提议过Rivian。现在名单上又多了保时捷。我总想着哪天要把这些被提及的产品都奖给某人，但保时捷可能有点超出预算了。好吧，还有两个问题。

I think that's the third time someone recommended a car. Someone recommend I think Boz at Facebook recommended this fancy Mercedes, and then someone once suggested a Rivian. So now we got Porsche on the list. I always thought maybe one day I'll give someone all the prizes, all the products people have ever mentioned in this and those are getting, Porsche might be a little high. Okay, two more questions.

你有没有特别喜欢的人生格言，会在工作或生活中反复提及、与朋友分享？

Do you have a favorite life motto that you find yourself repeating, coming back to in work or in life sharing with friends?

你知道，这很老套，并不深奥，更像是一个概念而非具体的话，但核心思想是生命短暂。我深切意识到时间流逝，而我们大多活在自动驾驶模式中。我们的行为多源于不安全感或模仿崇拜/嫉妒之人，极少真正触及内心渴望并跟随心意。我们就这样困在既定轨道里度过每一天。

You know, it's, it's, it's trite. It's not sophisticated, you know, and it's more of a concept than a phrase, but it's something around the idea that life is short. I'm just so aware that time ticks by and we all live on autopilot. So much of what we do is inspired by either our insecurities or things that other people we look up to or envy do, very rarely making contact with what we really want and following our hearts and our heads. And, we just kind of like get stuck in these lanes and just live out our days.

尤其当你到了41岁——我现在41岁，谢天谢地还算年轻，任何四十多岁的人都该为此感到庆幸。但我知道二三十岁的人会觉得40很老。而我的体验是：进入四十岁后，周、月、年都过得飞快。如今我回到Intercom已两年半，看那些二十多岁的AI领域年轻人，如果下个月没能完成什么目标，他们会极度失望和焦躁。某种程度上，至少在效率方面，他们更擅长榨取时间价值——而我现在更想榨取生命的价值。

And certainly when you get, know, 41 now, you get to 41. And thankfully, still very young, anyone in their forties, congrats should feel good about that. But I know if you're in your twenties or thirties, 40 feels old, but when you're, when you're in your forties, my experience is that the weeks and the months, and then the years go by, like, it's not a big deal. I'm like back at intercom two and a half years now to, to any of these kids in AI in their twenties, if they don't get something done or achieved by next month, they'll be so disappointed themselves and so impatient. And in some ways, at least when it comes to productivity, they're better at getting more out the time, but I'm now trying to get more life out of the time too.

所以如果真要说格言，大概是'生命短暂'或'记住你终有一死'——我们都在走向终点，所以要善用所有。

So yeah, just that's if, if there is a motto, it's like life is short or like memento mori, you know, we're all on the way out. So make the use of what you've got.

有趣的是，我曾经开发过一个叫Savorable的应用，它能帮你即时省钱。这个应用每隔几小时就会给你发条短信提醒，可能一天一次，用温馨的方式提醒你珍惜当下。其中一条短信内容就是：记住，你终将死去。

Fun fact, built an app once called Savorable that helped you save at the moment. It's called Savorable and it sent you a text every few hours. I don't know, maybe once a day with little reminder of way to say remember, savor the moment. And one of the texts was just like, remember, you will die.

是啊。问题是，即便是这种提醒，我们也会瞬间忘记。如果每天收到这种短信，你最终会无视它们。人类天生就不愿在日常生活中直面这种现实。不过或许这种提醒本身很重要。

Yeah. And and and the problem is that like, even that idea, we don't, we forget it instantly. And if you start getting texts every day, you'll ignore the texts. Like by default, we just don't want to acknowledge that reality on a day to day basis. Maybe that's important.

确实。或许这样反而更好。好了，最后一个问题。

Yeah. Maybe for the best. Yeah. Okay. Final question.

说到应用，我在准备这次对话时做了些功课，才发现原来Quitter也是你开发的

Speaking of apps, I was doing research on you in preparation for this, and I didn't realize you built Quitter back

对。没错。是的。

Right. In the Yeah. Yeah.

我超爱Quitter。它特别有意思，每当有人在推特取消关注你时就会通知你。

I love Quitter. I found it so fun. It basically told you anytime someone unfollowed you on Twitter.

没错。

Right.

所以问题就在于那个应用到底怎么了？

So the question is just what happened to that app?

我想我们最终以大约1.4万美元的价格卖掉了它。哇，真不错。我记得有个叫Flippa的网站可以买卖网站，那次交易确实引起了轰动。

I think we eventually sold it for like 14 ks. Wow. That's cool. On one of these, I think there's a website called Flippa where you could sell websites. It really blew up.

那就像是个小型实验，某种社会实验。那是我第一次真切感受到：没理由人们会不想用这个产品。显然大家都会想用的。这对我很有启发性，因为它让我明白那种确信感是真实存在的。你见过太多创始人，尤其是年轻创始人，他们对自己创造的东西价值几何毫无把握。

It was like a little experiment, kind of a social experiment. It was the first time that I had this feeling that there's no reason someone wouldn't want to use this. Like, obviously people are gonna wanna use this. And it was really instructive for me because it taught me that that feeling is possible. You meet so many founders, young founders particularly, and they don't have a sense within themselves about the value of the stuff they're building.

这个产品会成功吗？得听听用户反馈。但确实有可能打造出你内心深处确信有价值的东西。所以我后来的创作公式就是：永远为自己打造产品。Quitter就是这样的，粉丝数涨涨跌跌。

Will this be good? Let's get customer feedback. And it is possible to build things that you deeply know make sense. And that's why my formula for building things was to always build things for myself. And that was what Quitter was like, followers go up, followers go down.

那时候大概有100或200个粉丝，你会想知道谁又取消关注你了。

At that point in time, had 100 followers or 200 followers And you'd wanna know who who's not my friend anymore.

天啊，我太喜欢你用这个标准来衡量成功了。就像...如果产品市场契合度能达到Quitter的水平...

Oh, man. I love that that was your bar of, like, that led you to the success later. It's like Yeah. If it's as good as Quitter in terms of product market fit and so

我是说，它的契合度简直完美。几乎所有推特用户都试图注册，结果把服务器搞崩溃了。

much I mean, it was it had the best fit ever About everyone on Twitter tried to sign up for it, and it broke.

嗯，我非常喜欢。恩，非常感谢你这么做。我喜欢你对一切事物的真实和开放态度，以及你分享的深刻见解。我也很喜欢这种氛围，光是看着你就让我感觉更加心平气和。

Well, I loved it. Eun, thank you so much for doing this. I love just how real and open you are about everything and just how much insight you have to share. I also just love the vibe. I feel like I just am more centered just watching you

哦，谢谢。

Oh, thank you.

说两句。最后两个问题：大家在哪里可以查看Finn，如果想跟进任何信息，如何关注你？另外，听众怎样才能帮到你？

Speak. Two final questions. Where can folks check out Finn, follow you if they wanna follow-up on anything? And then how can listeners be useful to you?

查看Finn，网址是Finn.ai。如果想关注我，我在Twitter上的账号是eoghan，这是爱尔兰语拼写的Owen。但如果他们想帮助我，你知道，我希望他们试试Finn。我也希望他们让经营任何客户运营业务的朋友也试试。

Check out Finn, Finn dot a I. If they wanna follow me, I'm e o g h a n on Twitter. So it's Irish spelling of own. But if they wanna be helpful to me, you know, I love them to try Finn. I'd love them to, you know, have their friends that run any kind of customer operations try it too.

这个AI领域很嘈杂。有很多炒作，但它也确实非常真实。而Finn的特别之处在于，即使是相对于那些编码应用，编码应用正在爆炸式增长，但很多人只是在试验和观望。但Finn不能只是观望。我们只有在您将其展示给客户，解决工单并让他们满意时，才能提供价值。

This AI thing is noisy. There's so much hype, but it's also really real. And the weird thing about Fin, even relative to the coding apps, the coding apps are blowing up and yet there's a lot of people experimenting and kicking tires. You can't kick tires with Fin. We only deliver value when you expose it to your customers and it closes tickets and makes them happy.

所以，AI确实正在发生。如果你认识任何有客户的人，他们应该使用Finn。这是显著提升他们业务最智能、最便宜、最简单的方式。如果他们这样做，那就是真心实意地帮助了我。

And so like AI is really, really happening. And so if you know anyone out there that has customers, they should be using Fin. It's the smartest, cheapest, easiest way to dramatically enhance their business. So if they do that, they'll be helping me sincerely.

我被说服了。欧文，真的非常感谢你。

I'm sold. Owen, thank you so so much

是的，先生。相当有趣。

Yes, for being sir. Pretty fun.

这太棒了。

This was amazing.

是的。谢谢。

Yeah. Thank you.

再见，各位。非常感谢你们的收听。如果觉得有价值，可以在苹果播客、Spotify或你喜欢的播客应用上订阅我们的节目。同时，请考虑给我们评分或留下评论，这真的能帮助其他听众发现这个播客。你可以在lenny'spodcast.com找到所有往期节目或了解更多关于本节目的信息。

Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lenny'spodcast.com.

下期节目再见。

See you in the next episode.