Episode summary
The $10B AI Assistant Challenging Meta's Muse, Grok's Bots, and OpenAI's Dots
Invest Like the Best
· · Hosts: Patrick O'Shaughnessy · Guests: Noah Shinn
Summary
Noah Shinn says Instinct is building a personal assistant that feels less like an app and more like a socially aware agent you can text, call, or email. The product is designed to handle real-world tasks end to end, from travel and restaurant bookings to wardrobe planning, subscription cancellations, and calendar coordination, with the core idea that users should simply state an intent and let the agent execute. He argues that the biggest unlock is not raw capability but understandability: the experience should feel predictable, simple, and trustworthy enough that people quickly start delegating important tasks.
Trust and control are central to the product thesis. Noah says users should always control their data, can share it gradually, and often begin exposing sensitive information only after several weeks. He claims that three weeks in, 40% of users have shared a personal credit card, and that once users share at least one sensitive piece of information, retention rises to 80%. To make that safe, Instinct uses firewalls and a separate monitoring system that can pause or reject actions before they happen.
On the business side, Noah says Instinct will not try to manipulate users the way ad-driven platforms do. Instead, he expects the company to charge a take rate on transactions, especially where it can add value to merchants and users in travel and other high-friction categories. He says the platform is already processing over a billion dollars a year in transaction volume, 50% of it travel, while growing 10% day over day.
Key takeaways
- Noah Shinn says Instinct is designed as a no-app personal assistant that acts through text, voice, email, and proactive calls.
- He says users typically build trust over weeks, with 40% sharing a personal credit card by week 3 and 80% retention once they share one sensitive item.
- Noah argues Instinct should be aligned with the user, not ad incentives, so the company plans to monetize through transaction take rates rather than behavioral manipulation.
- He says more than half of the platform’s volume is travel-related and that total transaction volume is already over $1 billion a year.
- The core product principle, according to Noah, is understandability: users should be able to predict what Instinct will do before they delegate a task.
Notable quotes
“I think out of this will come a new way that that most people on the planet interact with technology broadly”
“we actually don't even have an application. Like this is not a new app. This is not a new tool. It's a new experience”
“What we find in the data is actually that it takes actually several weeks to build trust”
“40% of the user base 3 weeks in are sharing a credit card”
“We don't want instinct to influence the user's behavior in a way that is not aligned with what the user wants”
How the episode opens
I can't help but wonder about the sort of grand game that is a foot here. When you really step back and think about like what is happening right now, like what is the game? What is going on here right now? Like if you had to sum it up, the thing you're in the middle of.
You're going up against the biggest players in the world. The window to do it is actually on the order of months. The compute required to it is is overs this year alone. And you have no distribution advantage, but you have this massively growing viral product. What do you do?
This is probably the most exciting software race ever
And the outcome is like trillions of dollars. No, I know this is the first time that you're talking about the business in this long form like this. I'm incredibly excited to ask you all about it.
It seems like we're in a moment with personal agents that is very similar and arguably probably bigger than what we saw with code generation a year or so ago. Maybe frame this up for us to begin like how are you thinking about the impact that of course your product but these agents are going to have on the world. Why is this the area that you've chosen to dedicate yourself to completely?
I think out of this will come a new way that that most people on the planet interact with technology broadly. I run Instinct. Um, it's a new company that I've started uh about about a year ago.
So, it's it's still a new new company. And we're building a personal assistant. I'm not going to spice it up because it's really just a personal assistant.
And I think that the thing that has really enabled us to gain quite a bit of traction early and quite a bit of excitement early is it just works.
From the episode’s captions: roughly the first two minutes, lightly cleaned. Keep watching on YouTube →
Topics
- ai personal assistants
- agentic automation
- compute challenges
- trust and privacy
- competition with big tech
Companies and tickers mentioned
- META
- Instinct
- Meta
- Grok
- OpenAI
Watch the episode
Watch “The $10B AI Assistant Challenging Meta's Muse, Grok's Bots, and OpenAI's Dots” on YouTube
Summary, takeaways and quote selection by Octagon. Quotes are short excerpts; the full conversation is in the episode.
More from Invest Like the Best
Invest Like the Best, this episode and its artwork belong to Colossus | Investing & Business Podcasts. Octagon is not affiliated with the show; this page is an independent summary.
