SaaStr 202: Intercom COO Karen Peacock on Lessons Learned Running A $2.2Bn Line of Business at Intuit, The Most Important Metric You Probably Aren't Tracking & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO

Karen Peacock is the COO @ Intercom, the company that provides a new and better way to acquire, engage and retain customers. To date, Intercom have raised over $240m in VC funding from some of the very best in VC including GV, Kleiner Perkins, Bessemer, ICONIQ and then individuals such as Mark Zuckerberg, John Collison, Biz Stone and Andy McLoughlin. As for Karen, prior to Intercom, she spent an incredible 17 years at Intuit leading all of Intuit’s small business products and services worldwide, a $2.2B business including QuickBooks, Accounting, Payments, and Payroll. As part of that, Karen managed a team of 500 and helped build one of the world’s largest SaaS businesses.

In Today’s Episode We Discuss:

• How Karen made her way into the world of SaaS with Intuit and how that led to becoming COO @ Intercom today? What were Karen’s biggest takeaways from her time at Intuit?
• What does Karen mean when she says “watch what customers do, not what they say”? How does Karen think about the difference between being customer driven vs customer informed? Why is it important to fall in love with the problem and not the solution as an entrepreneur?
• Karen has grown Intercom from 350 to 600 in 18 months, what would Karen’s biggest advice and learnings be when it comes to team assembly and hiring the best? What can one do to stress test the fit of the candidate pre-hire? What does Karen always find to be the most revealing questions to ask?
• When does Karen believe is the right time to hire a COO? How does one know when they have the right COO fit? What are some best practices for onboarding a new COO? What is the optimal relationship between CEO and COO?
• Karen has seen incredible scaling first hand both with Intercom and Intuit, what would some of her biggest takeaways and advice be on scaling? Where does Karen see many make mistakes in the scaling phases? What does Karen mean when she speaks about “the most important metric that you probably aren’t tracking?”

Karen’s 60 Second SaaStr:

1. What does Karen know now that she wishes she had known at the beginning?
2. What motto or quote does Karen frequently revert back to?
3. What is the most challenging element in Karen’s role today?

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Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

Karen Peacock