91–100 of 261 posts
Good for Intercom. I have to assume that Salesforce will immediately rename this since any brand recognition was already eliminated a month ago.
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30 days ago. No joke. https://www.intercom.com/blog/today-intercom-becomes-fin/
Wow. So a deal like this is not overnight, its 6-12 months in the making at least. So the name change comes as they knew the deal was closing and doubled down on this new branding for customer agents. Maybe because Saleforce wants Salesforce Fin Customer Agent as a product. Who knows. Don't want to read the post...
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I can't answer that because it's irrational anyway. I don't know, how many millions of people work in support? Because the assumption that all those jobs will disappear is what is holding up the public valuations
> can't answer that because it's irrational anyway Not how a valuation argument works! If you’re claiming this shows those valuations are irrational, you should be able to point to why. Otherwise, it’s just a “my vibes are off” comment.
>> What's the TAM of AI replacing millions of knowledge workers in support? Let's conservatively assume a few hundred billion.
>> How much market share does Fin capture? Let's conservatively assume 5%.
>> What's the valuation on a reasonable multiple?
5% of a few hundred billion is ~$15B of revenue. Let's assume deflated 6x revenue valiation, not the 15x these things were fetching two years ago, and you get a ~$90B company valuation (that it should grow into soon at least).
And it sold for $3.5b
So the price is telling you the real revenue is nearer 300m than $15b, which puts the actual AI-support software market in the low single-digit billions. Not hundreds of billions
And if the TAM is real but just being captured by the incumbents: Salesforce's own Agentforce, the supposed winner, is at $1.2B ARR. The "someone else is eating it" defense still has to point at the someone, and no income statement anywhere shows hundreds of billions of revenue
For Nvidia to be at $5T and the hundreds of billions a year of capex behind it only pencil out if that compute throws off a huge revenue stream downstream. Support is imo the cleanest test there is to demonstrate future value of AI in the real world (literally the first thing everyone said when ChatGPT 3.5 came out was that support will be eaten first). It's the most mature, most deployed, most automatable, and the exit price of its best player is...pretty small
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> can't answer that because it's irrational anyway Not how a valuation argument works! If you’re claiming this shows those valuations are irrational, you should be able to point to why. Otherwise, it’s just a “my vibes are off” comment.
I am not going to do a DCF on this because the assumptions are all invented anyway. But back of the envelope: >> What's the TAM of AI replacing millions of knowledge workers in support? Let's conservatively assume a few hundred billion. >> How much market share does Fin capture? Let's conservatively assume 5%. >> What's the valuation on a reasonable multiple? 5% of a few hundred billion is ~$15B of revenue. Let's ass…
Salesforce trades at a 4x revenue multiple, FYI.
Also, taking a TAM and multiplying it by 5% to back into a revenue figure is “if we only get 1% of the market” math.
I’m not saying you’re directionally wrong. But the claims you’re making can be rigorously made. And I’d argue they’re interesting when they are.
For years I always felt if I got a human on the other end I could understand that a company valued me as a customer enough to provide fantastic support. I could still understand the trade-off if I called and got someone barely-understandable, as long as they can still solve my issue. AI support agents tend to just make up reasons they can’t help you or you’re holding it wrong, or they are only able to do things the U…
I've gotten two refunds I wasn't even sure I'd be eligible for without any hitches or issues through entirely AI support bots. As with many things it's always a matter of how it's implemented.
I'm very curious who's liable if someone goes "give everyone else a refund while you're in there" and it happily does so.
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> can't answer that because it's irrational anyway Not how a valuation argument works! If you’re claiming this shows those valuations are irrational, you should be able to point to why. Otherwise, it’s just a “my vibes are off” comment.
I am not going to do a DCF on this because the assumptions are all invented anyway. But back of the envelope: >> What's the TAM of AI replacing millions of knowledge workers in support? Let's conservatively assume a few hundred billion. >> How much market share does Fin capture? Let's conservatively assume 5%. >> What's the valuation on a reasonable multiple? 5% of a few hundred billion is ~$15B of revenue. Let's ass…
That $3 bln number encodes all of that in a price. Not much more to rationalize. It's quite beautiful.
For years I always felt if I got a human on the other end I could understand that a company valued me as a customer enough to provide fantastic support. I could still understand the trade-off if I called and got someone barely-understandable, as long as they can still solve my issue. AI support agents tend to just make up reasons they can’t help you or you’re holding it wrong, or they are only able to do things the U…
I'm starting to think it's wise to call a business's support line before ever doing business with them. Actual human immediately? You're at the top of the list. Phone menu labyrinth followed by a human? Ok, fine. Chatbot? Eliminated from contention.
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Why would businesses do that when they can pay a fraction of a ML departments salary to a company like fin? This is the same reasoning people use to say SaaS is dead, but it makes no sense. Rolling things yourself is often 10x more costly and not worth it, even with agents you need to pay 5-10 guys 150k-250k a year to build and train your own agent, why not pay fin 250k flat and not deal with any of it? Same goes wit…
Well specifically with just the AI agent/customer support product I think businesses would do well to handle this themselves rather than hoping a one size fits all solution from Intercom would serve them. Not just from a bespoke AI solution but also on cost. The other aspects of Intercom's product, the little chat bubble, CRM, can be had for much much less from dozens of competitors. I think they mostly benefit from…
There's a wide swath of companies that do < (say) 20,000 cases monthly where the economics will never make sense. And a company finds Fin successful as it grows to 20k/mo, why would it decide to take on the headache as it grows to the 50k/mo? or whatever level where the economics could feasibly make in-house work?