Intercom Eoghan McCabe and Ciaran Lee talk to Bridget Hourican about their Trinity days and how they founded Intercom, one of the most successful Irish software companies, which achieved unicorn status in 2018, after raising $125 million to take its valuation to over $1 billion Eoghan McCabe reminisces fondly on the pioneer days of the software revolution in Ireland: I look back very fondly on those early meet-ups. This was 2006 and there were no Silicon Valley companies in Ireland, but there was that spark and energy of early software development and we’d meet up in different places round the city centre. No one was there for their careers – we were just straight-up interested in this stuff. It was the raw energy of the maker, builder, creator, nerd, geek, dork - really primordial energy,’ ‘Yeah,’ agrees Ciaran Lee, ‘we’d rent a small room in a hotel, someone might give a talk, we’d have a few beers and nerd out over a slide show – maybe ten, or twenty of us, all in our twenties. Nowadays these tech meet-ups are huge and they’re sponsored by companies and often operate like networking events or job fairs, which can be great, but it wasn’t like that for us. We all just wanted to build.’ Intercom develops online products to enable companies to communicate with their customers. Their most famous product is a household name: the ‘chat bubble’. The company currently employs 600 people round the world, half of them in Dublin, and has more than a billion end- users, and over 30,000 paying customers, including Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Aer Lingus, IBM, Shopify and Sotheby’s. After a decade as CEO, Eoghan is now chairman and ‘looking forward to doing a range of different stuff’. Almost ten years to the day he co-founded the company, Ciaran is moving on from the position of CTO to other ventures. It has been an extraordinary journey for the two Trinity graduates. They didn’t know each other in college – Ciaran graduated in computer engineering in 2004, and Eoghan in computer science in 2006 – and they had quite different campus experiences. ‘I wasn’t a first-class honours student,’ says Ciaran ‘but I loved being given a project, told to build something without guidance, and figuring it out from first principles. I learnt to love staying on in the lab to build.’ He describes himself as ‘a simple, single-threaded person, not a multi-tasker’ and his other great passion, then and now, was ski-ing. ‘I started in Kilternan as a child and by college I was a mediocre ski racer and I spent all my time trying to get as good as I could, which was not very good, but I had lots of fun.’ Eoghan describes himself as ‘a little nerd; I wanted to make cool things. Going in to computer science, I was finally in a peer set of similar minded people and their energy was inspiring. I wasn’t a big one for societies but I did go along to NetSoc a few times and that was hardcore - I thought “I’m not the nerd I thought I was! It goes deeper!” But I really respected their passion.’ His fondest memories of college ‘are sitting in the Old Library, not studying like I was supposed to, but daydreaming about what I wanted to do in the future. That was really important – having the space and time to start to imagine what your life might look like – and seeing other entrepreneurial people like Steve Collins [who founded Havok] – that was really important in terms of growing my ambition.’
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