20VC: Intercom Founder, Eoghan McCabe on How To Deal with the Weight of Expectation, Having Your Identity Tied To Your Company, How To Be Your Authentic Self Even with Stakeholders & Why There Are No Rules

These identities that we build for ourselves, this armor, these images—they're our place of comfort and safety, and we latch onto them. They're everything to us ... We believe it so strongly that we will answer questions by saying things like 'Oh, I'm a founder. I'm a tech guy. I am a VC.' And you're not; you're so much more than that.

Real leadership equates to a deep connection with your purpose and your values, and any deviation from that makes for a bad leader and poor leadership.

Any endeavor I face into, I ask 'How can we do things differently here?' And it's the different and it's the new and unique that gets all the attention. It's where the value floods to. It's what the talent wants to be around. It's what the money wants to invest in. The mainstream and the masses, the top of the bell curve—that's old news. The leading cutting-edge things that are different—that's where the real magic happens.

Building a... $50 billion dollar company, I don't think is substantially harder than building a $1 billion dollar company, quite frankly.

One thing we do to medicate that is we try and attain these external things ... The lesson, the trite and cliché lesson, is that we find out that's not what we needed at all; everything we needed was within. [But] you kind of have to go [on] that journey, you kind of have to prove yourself wrong before you can do the harder work.

If there's an issue you care about, roll your sleeves up and do something about it—not just tweeting or saying things to your employees that you think they want to hear. If you care about a topic, do something about it.

You will be most respected when you speak the truth to your stakeholders, whoever they are, even when the truth is somewhat difficult. [It's] the only way to build real trust and respect, and they'll appreciate you so much more for it.

Our potential for accomplishment is massively determined by the scale of our thinking.

...Man has two lives: one that starts the day he's born and the other that starts the day he gets to learn his purpose.

Just because you disagree with a certain topic or you have an opinion does not mean that you need to weigh in on it and let the world know.

I think it's shocking the degree to which our ambition and our vision determines outcome.

Most people I come across, even the greatest companies I've had the pleasure of investing in, I think they're still thinking too small.