NEW: Interview with Paul Adams, Chief Product Officer of Fin (formerly Intercom) @Padday helped lead one of the most successful AI refoundings in software: @intercom bet a $300M/yr business to build @fin_ai, an AI customer service agent. We sat down on Onward to talk about what that bet looked like from the inside, and where he thinks AI takes knowledge work next. Full disclosure: $VCX is a proud investor in Fin. In this episode, we cover: - The internal memo that called ChatGPT "the iPhone moment" and the $300M business Intercom bet on it - Why going all-in on AI was the easy decision, and why the culture change nearly broke the company - How the bet refortified the legacy business instead of killing it - Customer service as the canary in the coal mine for AI and knowledge work - The three layers Fin runs on, including the models Intercom trains itself - Read vs. write: the line where an AI agent's risk and power both live - Why we judge AI against a standard no human meets (a chaotic Vodafone call center) - Claude Code as "magic": a non-coder turning one prompt into a finished video - @Fundrise is a customer of Fin with: ~94% resolution and ~$600K in support cost reduced - Why technology moves fast and people move slowly (and what retail's collapse teaches) - Scenario planning the next few years: real pain and a wave of one-person companies - Why Paul calls himself a "delusional optimist," not a doomer Watch the full episode below → 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 (00:00) Paul Adams, CPO of Fin (formerly Intercom) (00:51) Competing with the AI labs, and the three layers Fin runs on (05:46) Technology moves fast, people move slowly (09:33) The Block layoffs (12:24) Intercom's refounding: IPO, ChatGPT, all-in on AI (15:31) Why the culture change was the hardest part (15:59) How the AI bet refortified the legacy business (20:20) Customer interview: Fundrise on Fin (22:48) The economics (~$600K saved vs. ~$80K) (24:45) Customer service as the canary in the coal mine (26:12) New jobs that didn't exist, like agent orchestration (30:11) Read vs. write to the database (the Delta story) (31:53) Hallucinations and the Vodafone call center (37:00) Claude Code as "magic" (40:25) Scenario planning the next few years (44:35) Europe vs. the US and China (49:37) Cancer, optimism, and governing AI well (52:40) Wrap

In 2011, I pitched a top securities attorney in New York on democratizing investing. After hearing me list all of the ways I believed retail investors were disadvantaged by the financial system, he just looked at me and said: “Why would you bother with the little guy?” Today, 15 later, we’re listing the @fundrise Innovation Fund on the NYSE under the ticker $VCX. The financial system has a structural problem that most people can feel but few can name. The most valuable private technology companies are worth hundreds of billions, even over a trillion dollars, and they’ve never gone public. The wealth creation that used to flow through public markets—enabling everyone to participate—now happens behind a wall that excludes everyday investors. AI compounds the urgency. The companies building the most transformative technology in a generation are growing at rates we’ve never seen before, and the gap between who owns that growth and who benefits from it widens every quarter. We started working on the Fundrise Innovation Fund in 2021 to test whether a public venture capital fund could work. Over 100,000 investors now own a portfolio concentrated in the leading private AI and technology companies, making VCX one of the largest funds of its kind to ever list on a major exchange. No accredited investor requirement. Now available in any brokerage account. When that attorney asked me why I’d bother with the little guy, I told him: because they’re getting screwed! But I believe today marks another step in building a better financial system for the individual investor. Onward

For decades, venture capital was reserved for institutions and the ultra-wealthy. That changes today. For the first time ever, @SoFi investors can invest in venture capital with @Fundrise, directly from the SoFi app.

"If you have neither the Trump put nor the Fed put, that would be an ingredient for a deep recession on top of the actual economics of it—which is that, when you have higher trade barriers, it leads to perhaps manufacturing inefficiency. And cost of production is higher. It slows down the potential GDP growth of the U.S. over the next 4-8 years." -@AnnaEconomist

How will tariffs impact the US economy? My latest podcast with @AnnaEconomist, Chief Economist for Bloomberg. Anna Wong is one of the most balanced economists in the nation. She worked in the Trump White House, Obama Treasury Dept., and the Fed!

What will AI be worth? Our team did a few months of research and found a surprising pattern in the financial data, which @BusinessInsider wrote an article about yesterday. We agreed to wait 24 hours before we published the full results.

Business Insider: Everyone wants to know what AI is worth. One investor looked to the past for the $20 trillion answer. Phenomenal writeup of our research by @emmacos. @BusinessInsider

“Literally, you are a masochist” —@profgalloway I loved spending 25 minutes chatting with Scott and @edels0n on the Prof G Markets Podcast. We discussed the evolution of private markets, and why entrepreneurs have to “embrace the suck.”