Noah Shinn - Building Instinct: The Personal Agent - [Invest Like the Best, EP.493]
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Agents Pursue Long-Term Objectives
Noah Shinn sees agents evolving from task completion toward pursuing personal goals and autonomously operating parts of small businesses.
My guest today is Noah Shinn. Noah is the founder of Instinct, a personal assistant that you text, call, or email the same way you would a person. It has its own phone and its own computer, and it can do almost anything on your behalf that you would do yourself online. Instinct is about a year old, still invite-only, and growing roughly 10% day over day without any marketing spend.
We discuss the surprising ways people are already using Instinct, the trusted network that lets two people's agents coordinate directly, and what Noah has learned about how long it takes users to trust an agent with their credit card, inbox, and calendar. He explains why he refuses to build an ad model and why he believes a personal agent should never influence users against their own interests.
We also cover the take rate model behind the more than $1 billion a year now flowing through the platform, how travel and food delivery businesses should prepare for a world of agents, why he spends 40% of his time thinking about compute, and why he believes all of software will eventually collapse into one simple interface.
Please enjoy my conversation with Noah Shinn.
For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.
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Timestamps:
(00:00:00) The Most Exciting Software Race Ever
(00:00:49) What Instinct Is
(00:04:11) The Wildest Things Users Have Done With Instinct
(00:07:15) The Instinct to Instinct Trusted Network
(00:13:24) How Agents Will Reorder the Internet
(00:14:44) Reinventing Restaurant Reservations
(00:17:23) Travel and $1 Billion in Transaction Volume
(00:21:00) How Users Learn to Trust an Agent
(00:23:25) Keeping Sensitive Data Safe
(00:26:08) Alignment and the Business Model
(00:31:07) Take Rates and the Payments Stack
(00:34:52) When Incumbents Push Back on Agents
(00:40:46) How Businesses Should Prepare for Agents
(00:44:43) Designing for Understandability
(00:48:15) Taste Versus Data
(00:50:03) Invite-Only Growth at 10% a Day
(00:54:46) How Far Ahead to Buy Compute
(00:56:58) The Cost to Serve Each User
(00:59:24) How Much Compute Proactive Agents Will Need
(01:02:30) Thoughts on Muse
(01:03:59) Mistakes and Staying Proactive
(01:05:34) The Future of Security
(01:08:32) Where the Interface Goes Next
(01:12:35) Agents That Pursue Goals
(01:14:35) Personality and the Movie Her
(01:16:27) Why It's Called Instinct
(01:17:34) Allies, Enemies, and Distribution Channels
(01:18:43) Raising Capital
(01:20:34) The Kindest Thing
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