Today Intercom becomes Fin

Sometimes you see a corporate announcement that’s so obvious and so late, it’s almost an admission of failure.

And I’m open to feedback on how I should have pulled the trigger on this change much sooner. But the tech industry is so littered with awkward and arguably unsuccessful name changes that I thought it prudent to procrastinate on this one.

But finally, today, we’re changing the name of our company to Fin. The name Intercom will still live on as the name of our customer service software platform that increasingly the best brands are choosing as their primary help desk; we just launched a complete rebuild, Intercom 2, and we’re dramatically increasing our investment in it. But the company behind it will be named after our leading customer agent platform, Fin. All of our 1,400 employees are now employed by Fin. You’re reading a post by the CEO of Fin.

In this moment of great change, for our industry, and for all economic players, the winners of yesteryear have largely been left holding on to their former positions that brought them so much glory. Yet, as I’ve written before, the only path to success in the future is through destroying your past. We’ve done this with our culture, our pricing model, our product lineup, and our investment priorities. But the company name stayed the same.

However, when we started the service agent category three years ago, we promoted our new technology with the name Fin, with Intercom very much in the background, and usually not even mentioned at all. The simple reason is that humans are very good at mapping meaning onto the world and then updating that map rarely, with a very strong bias for the things that are new and shiny. We couldn’t possibly wake up every morning questioning what a chair was and how it works. But when a new type of drone or artificially intelligent software product reaches our attention, we do our best to understand it and add it to the repertoire of things we understand about the world.

This is true in all aspects of life, including with companies and their brand names and the positions they hold in the market. I believe this so thoroughly that I actually think that the relative success of the newcomers in our category, despite the fact that we have provably superior technology, is a result of the fact that they have no baggage. They don’t need to convince anyone of their new position in the market, because they never had an old one.

So, today we say, “baggage be gone.” Fin is clearly our future, and the future of this new customer agent category. It’s driving our renaissance and is about to be the largest part of our business. We thank sincerely everyone who supported Intercom in these past 15 years. And again, the product and its name will very much live on. But our company is now finally, fully reborn and its name is Fin.