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Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B

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Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B

#31

Post by Tadpole9181 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #23
hienyimba wrote: post #20

The "AI" "agent" "helpdesk" they pivoted into is such a grift. AI agents still does not solve the main issues that makes a person contact support in the first place. How do I know? I was a founder in the space. but good for them that they got salesforce to buy it.

I guess I'll bite, what is this main issue that seemingly everyone but you are able to see?

If I had to guess, there's two things they feel AI doesn't address:

1. People wouldn't need to contact support if you just made quality goods and services. Outside of rare exceptions and inquiries, of course.

2. AI has not advanced enough to trust it outright, nor does it have a physical body. So it can't really do anything you wouldn't already just be able to put in the UI for the customer, without needing it's actions reviewed and confirmed by an accountable human. See: accidental truck giveaways.

So investing into AI support over making your business better is seen as misallocation. And using AI support instead of just improving the service is seen as inconvenient. And using AI support when it needs humans to do the support anyway is seen as inefficient.

Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B

#32

Post by derektank »

s_dev wrote: post #13
asim wrote: post #10

When did intercom change its name to Fin?

30 days ago. No joke. https://www.intercom.com/blog/today-intercom-becomes-fin/

That prose is painful to read. It has such a cloying quality to it, even when compared against other name change announcements like the rebrand of Google to Alphabet

https://blog.google/alphabet/google-alphabet/

Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B

#34

Post by ceejayoz »

embedding-shape wrote: post #23
hienyimba wrote: post #20

The "AI" "agent" "helpdesk" they pivoted into is such a grift. AI agents still does not solve the main issues that makes a person contact support in the first place. How do I know? I was a founder in the space. but good for them that they got salesforce to buy it.

I guess I'll bite, what is this main issue that seemingly everyone but you are able to see?

Talk to random non tech people about customer service bots for five minutes and you’ll find most people see it.

Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B

#36

Post by cyanydeez »

light_triad wrote: post #28

Interesting they agreed to sell after their rebrand to Fin a month ago. There's increasing competition in the customer support AI agent space: Sierra valued at $15.8 billion, Decagon at $4.5 billion. It looks like Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is trying to compete directly with Sierra, which was started by his ex-Co-CEO Bret Taylor. Also about preventing independent AI support agents from becoming a control point outsi…

customer support -> customer disassociation

Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B

#37

Post by merlindru »

embedding-shape wrote: post #26
re-thc wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can't possibly mean a glorified editor-shell isn't as valuable as say Nike That's a glorified feet-shell. So like-for-like?

Say you grabbed a random selection of just 100 million people in the world, then ask them two questions, "Have you heard about Nike?" and "Have you heard about Cursor?", what would you guess the ratio would be like? Even when you use "Nike the Company" vs "Cursor as a general search term" to compare search history in Google Trends, it's 71/5, so I'm guessing most people would say they've heard about Nike, while proba…

If you asked the same selection of people about Saudi Aramco or SK Hynix none of them would know what those are either though, right?

I do think 60B for Cursor is way overvalued. Just not sure how to quantify

Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B

#38

Post by nerder92 »

jmuguy wrote: post #30

Intercom is definitely one of those SaaS that I figured had essentially zero value prop once businesses figured out how to train their own support agents, so congrats to them for exiting before that happens.

This is extremely naive and I’ll invite to try and built something like this and compare it with Fin performance

Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B

#40

Post by jbs789 »

alex_suzuki wrote: post #7
3uler wrote: post #2

What the hell? That is so cheap? I would value this at least as much as cursor? What gives?

Intercom allegedly has ~400M of annual revenue, making the multiplier less than 10X. Huge customer base and established brand. Looks like a steal indeed!

The world we live in… 10x revenue is a “steal”.

Lots of embedded assumptions about growth and margins to convert that revenue multiple to discounted cash flows.

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