![]() (In these ways, it’s a direct competitor to Salesforce.) While public interest in bots waned, Intercom has continued to invest in the technology. Since then, Intercom has added machine learning to automate more of those conversations, along with various other tools for generating and managing sales leads. The idea was that a website should say hello to customers the same way a barista might when you enter a coffee shop - and then sell you on something available for purchase. (Intercom released a tool to let businesses build custom chat bots earlier this month.) Founded in 2011, Intercom’s first product was a (human-powered) chat box that popped up when you visited a company’s website. And as Intercom’s own story has shown, businesses’ appetites for the automation they enable is only increasing. More automated messaging can be found on companies’ websites and apps than ever before. “Have there ever been any super destructive, sexy technology innovations that haven’t actually worked that way?” he says. “You’re just never going to be able to perpetuate that excitement for the amount of time it actually takes for actual innovation to actually take hold in a market.” In other words, the bots never really went away they just became invisible. Eoghan (pronounced “Owen”) McCabe, co-founder and CEO of the fast-growing marketing startup Intercom, says the collapse was predictable. And so bots largely receded into the background as another Silicon Valley innovation that arrived before its time. It turned out that typing into text boxes - often while trying to guess the appropriate commands - felt frustrating compared to the visual interfaces people were used to. The advantages of conversational interfaces paled next to their drawbacks. But when bots became available the public, the public largely shrugged. Facebook and Microsoft announced major investments into conversational user interfaces, and Slack launched a fund to capitalize on the bots hoping to build on its platform. ![]() He lives in San Francisco.Īs with all of our events, seating may be limited you can guarantee a seat by pre-purchasing the book below - when checking out, just be sure to include a note that you'd like to attend the event. If you cannot attend the event but would like to request a signed copy of Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber, order below and put your request in the comments field.The hype cycle for bots exploded in 2016 as developers poured time and money into the dream of personal digital assistants. He writes frequently about Uber, Facebook, and other Silicon Valley giants for the Times, and appears often on CNBC and MSNBC. Mike Isaac is a technology reporter at the New York Times whose Uber coverage won the Gerald Loeb Award for distinguished business reporting. Based on hundreds of interviews with current and former Uber employees, along with previously unpublished documents, Super Pumped is a page-turning story of ambition and deception, obscene wealth, and bad behavior that explores how blistering technological and financial innovation culminated in one of the most catastrophic twelve-month periods in American corporate history. Mike Isaac has been covering Uber for years. With billions of dollars in the balance, Isaac shows how venture capitalists asserted their power and seized control of the startup as it fought its way toward its fateful IPO. Isaac recounts Uber’s pitched battles with taxi unions and drivers, the company’s toxic internal culture, and the bare-knuckle tactics it devised to overcome obstacles in its quest for dominance. What followed would become a corporate cautionary tale about the perils of startup culture and a vivid example of how blind worship of startup founders can go wildly wrong. ![]() A near instant “unicorn,” Uber seemed poised to take its place next to Amazon, Apple, and Google as a technology giant. Backed by billions in venture capital dollars and led by a brash and ambitious founder, Uber promised to revolutionize the way we move people and goods through the world. Uber had catapulted to the top of the tech world, yet for many came to symbolize everything wrong with Silicon Valley.Īward-winning New York Times technology correspondent Mike Isaac’s Super Pumped presents the dramatic rise and fall of Uber, set against an era of rapid upheaval in Silicon Valley. In June 2017, Travis Kalanick, the hard-charging CEO of Uber, was ousted in a boardroom coup that capped a brutal year for the transportation giant. With Mike in conversation is Casey Newton (The Interface). ![]() Booksmith hosts New York Times technology correspondent Mike Isaac for the San Francisco launch of Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber.
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