Des Traynor

Eoghan McCabe Verified account @eoghan · Jun 15

We’re excited to share that we just signed an agreement for @salesforce to acquire @fin_ai for ~$3.6B. The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of Salesforce’s fiscal year 2027.

Fin started as Intercom 15 years ago. We changed our name to cap our transformation just weeks ago. We were a darling of the SaaS era and invented so many of the patterns you see in software today. Nearly four years ago, in need of a reboot, we jumped on weeks-old modern LLMs to create and define the category we know as Customer Agents today.

Salesforce invented modern software and SaaS. And @benioff is like the final boss of tech founder CEOs. In seat for 27 years, he’s one of the last of his era. Still pushing, pivoting, placing big bets. It’s a privilege for @destraynor and I to get to partner with him and join forces with Salesforce upon close at this most fascinating time. And will be very fun to get their help bringing Fin to magnitudes more consumers.

To our customers: Over the past few years we’ve been shipping intensely. Including recently our groundbreaking model, Apex, and our paradigm-defining internal agent, Operator. With the resources of Salesforce this will only accelerate. And yet little will practically change. I’ll still be CEO, Des will still be running R&D, we’ll both still be committed to continuing to lead this category. Thank you very sincerely and deeply for your belief in us.

To all of our friends, our families, and our employees, past and present: While this is not the end, it is a major, pivotal, special, and emotional moment for us. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you. For everything.

To my cofounders, my exec team: Look what we built. Four young lads with a dream and nothing to lose. And a home grown exec team who pulled off the greatest and arguably only late stage software company pivot to AI, and invented one of the most important categories in AI. Thank you for sticking through all of this with me.

And now, time to get back to work. See you at our next product launch in a couple weeks. (:

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Henry Schuck Verified account @HenryLSchuck · Oct 29

You CANNOT fix CULTURE with PROCESS.

Earlier this year, one of my sales managers slacked me a new Google Form. Every sales engineer (SE) would have to fill it out before every customer call. FOREVER.

I get why he created it.

A rep on his team showed up to a call the prior week unprepared. The SE was there too, just as unprepared. He spent the call asking the customer questions we should have known the answers to before we ever dialed in.

They wasted the customer's time.

So he did what most managers would do: "I'm going to create a process so this never happens again - so now before an SE or an AM gets on a call to show the product, they have to fill out this form."

Then he spent his Saturday - his Saturday - building a 14-question intake form. Required for every SE. Before every customer call. FOREVER.

That is not the answer. You don’t fix unprepared reps with a form.
You build a culture where nobody shows up unprepared in the first place.

Every process you add is a TAX.

And you CHARGE that tax to every person on your team who never had the problem - every day, forever - to fix the one person who shouldn't have been there in the first place.

Stack enough of those and you end up with processes on top of processes and everything slows down.

Some processes are worth the tax. Most aren't. This one wasn’t, so I told him to kill the form and do this instead:

Before you build a process, say the standard OUT LOUD.
Get the team on a call, tell them what happened and tell them what the standard is.

In our case: “Competing with ZoomInfo should be a DAUNTING experience for ANY of our competitors. This is NEVER acceptable. Showing up unprepared to a customer call doesn't live up to that. Full stop.”

Point back to that standard every time someone misses it. Let the people who can't meet it self-select out.

Manager: "But Henry, what if it happens again?"

Then it happens again. And you have the conversation again. Louder this time.

Process fixes broken systems - it doesn’t fix broken standards. Start with the standards.

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Brian Scanlan @brian_scanlan · Oct 26

Ship more and have fewer incidents. Why not have both?

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