Genesis

• By
• Bobby Pinero

  Bobby Pinero

  15+ years of corporate finance experience, currently co-founder at Equals and board member at Intercom.

  

I first met Eoghan McCabe and Mamoon Hamid back in 2013. I was 25 years young and only three years into my career, but I was raring to help build up an early-stage company. In hindsight, I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

Intercom—the company Eoghan was CEO and co-founder of—needed help. A mere 18 people strong, they’d just raised an exciting Series A from Social Capital, and as a result one of the biggest name investors in the Valley, Mamoon Hamid, had joined their board. As the story goes, Eoghan showed up to that first board meeting with a deck highlighting the product—what’d gone well, what needed to be fixed, and their roadmap. He only covered the product.

Intercom’s founders were product visionaries, and the company quickly became one of the shining examples of what it is like to build a product-first company. Arguably, Intercom was one of the first examples of PLG (product-led growth) in SaaS. Yet, something critical was missing from that board meeting. How was the business doing? What was working? What wasn’t? Where was the business pointed?

Enter me, the first finance hire. I was brought in to align the company and investors on the story of the business. I had no idea where to start, and few resources existed to point me in the right direction. But I knew the foundational questions we needed to answer were deeply rooted in what was happening with Annual Recurring Revenue, commonly referred to as ARR.

We needed to explain how and why we were growing, uncover opportunities to grow faster, and clearly articulate where we might ultimately end up. It was clear that if we could nail ARR reporting, all the answers would flow from there.

So began an almost 8-year journey marked full of learnings, massive wins, and a lot of mistakes—many of them avoidable. We had transformed Intercom from a <$1M ARR startup to a $150M+ ARR juggernaut by the time I left.

Looking back, I wish this book had been sitting on my desk waiting for me on my first day at Intercom. It’s co-written by Chris Burgner, who joined me on the Finance team at Intercom and now runs Finance at Equals, where he’s also built all of our ARR reporting from scratch. Chris also cleaned up many of the messes I made at Intercom as we scaled. Together, we’ve written a practical guide with a clear set of steps to enable you to set up industry-best ARR reporting, minus all the mistakes we made (the hard way).