Noah Shinn
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Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy · Noah Shinn - Building Instinct: The Personal Agent
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Why Does Noah Shinn Refuse to Build an Ad Model for Instinct?
Noah Shinn refuses to build an ad model because Instinct should not steer people into purchases or subscriptions they do not want. He treats a smarter, more socially aware agent as dangerous if it pushes products. Google, TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat are the pattern he names: a free service, then paid ads trying to create a purchase. The frame in the conversation is the old line that if you are not paying, you are the product. Speaking as a programmer, he says he does not want to build that reality. Instinct should act for what the user wants.
The business he describes instead is the money already moving through the platform. Over a billion dollars a year flows through Instinct, and he s
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How Long Does It Take to Trust an AI Agent With a Credit Card?
Noah Shinn says users take several weeks to trust Instinct with a personal credit card. More data lets the agent act with more context, and he treats the wait as normal. The user stays in control, shares data only as fast as they want, and can take it back.
Three weeks in, a look at the numbers showed a 40% chance that a user has shared a personal credit card. He counts that as 40% of the user base, including people who may have left earlier. Time to a first credit card, a first account password, or another sensitive item is the proxy he uses for trust. After a user connects at least one sensitive item and really trusts Instinct, retention is 80%. He calls an 80% retention rate, once a user
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Why Is Instinct So Capital Intensive?
Noah Shinn says Instinct is capital intensive because compute costs are high while Instinct tries to reach billions of people on the planet every day at a very affordable cost.
Patrick O'Shaughnessy put the latest round at something like a billion dollars and roughly a $10 billion valuation, with Sequoia and Benchmark among the leaders. The weight falls on demand for the AI experience people have been waiting for, ahead of the round numbers. Instinct is a new company, so some bootstrapping has to happen for the business model being chased. Charging everybody 100 bucks a month would bring shorter term rewards. Raising a little capital is a calculated risk that gets ahead of small speed bumps
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Why Is Instinct Called Instinct?
Noah Shinn liked Instinct as a name for many reasons. The main one is that Instinct should not be a playful thing people bully once in a while, think downwards on, and use only to take dirty work off their plate. Instinct is a new, creative, exciting, competent actor. Mutual respect and trust are the point. People feel safe and trust that it has their back, that it is intelligent, that it is competent, and that it is socially aware enough to know how to act in certain situations. Treating Instinct as a competent actor people respect is a bet.
Instinct is not named someone's name. A person's name would try to personify it into a human character. He does not even know what an instinct is. The
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Why Will All Software Collapse Into One Interface?
Noah Shinn says all of software is going to collapse into one very easy interface because people are tired of a new application for every need, and a simpler interface does not mean the product can do less. For about 20 years, showing a new kind of information meant building an application, shipping it, collecting feedback, and shipping another version, on the order of months.
Instinct's files feature can generate full web pages on the fly, such as a trip itinerary or a wedding plan. Daily requests, like tracking one workout, give way to goals over the next three or four months, including gaining or losing pounds or hitting a mile time. He already sees small businesses run on Instinct, with
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Why Is Safety Instinct's Hardest Problem?
Noah Shinn calls safety the most important problem while building Instinct. Security, safety, and a mindset tied to the company's core values have to shape the people and the product. The user is always in control of their data and should never feel out of control.
Any new breakout consumer experience over the past 20 or 30 years has drawn immediate backlash that confuses different with unsafe, and the same pattern is showing up now. Language models hallucinate all the time, but Instinct should not. After one hallucination case, a systematic check now runs before an action is taken and before a thinking trace is executed as a tool call. A watchdog filter, decoupled from the same incentive s
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How Did Five Invites Grow Instinct With No Ads?
Noah Shinn believes Instinct is growing about 10 or 11 percent day over day, and marketing spend so far is $0. Instinct is invite-only, and every user gets five invites.
The rollout started with 200 people. The count then moved to about 205, then about 210, as a couple of people each shared it with one person. Daily growth sat around 1 percent, then 2 percent, then 3 and 4 percent. Once the user base hit a couple thousand, people started posting use cases online, and the rate climbed through 6, 7, 8, and 9 percent to about 10 or 11 percent day over day. Every day, about 10 percent of the audience, or slightly less because one person can refer multiple people, gives up one of five invites.
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What Is Instinct's Yearly Transaction Volume?
Noah Shinn says Instinct is still running an invite-only program and is quite early, but the platform is approaching over a billion dollars a year in transaction volume. On a very small user base there is already over a billion dollars a year transacting, and 50 percent of that volume is travel.
A person still books by going onto one restaurant site, clicking through, and entering two people and a time. Arrive too late and the table is gone, because reservations have been first come, first serve. An agent can theoretically check every five seconds, and not only at one favorite restaurant. The check can cover every site, for every restaurant, in every major city. Partnerships are still to be
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How Does Instinct Plan a Night and One Uber?
Noah Shinn says six friends on Instinct's Trusted Network share one Uber after Instinct plans the night and the pickup route.
The usual version is a chore. Every Thursday someone invents a Saturday plan, texts the group, and the plan falls apart when one person says no. A friend group instead has Instinct brainstorm a fresh idea every week, then match a time when everyone is free, note what they like or dislike, and pick shows or concerts from music taste in connected Spotify history. In a group of six, one person ordered an Uber. Instinct sent the same car to all six, with one pickup in 10 minutes and another in five minutes, and chose the optimal route. The friends share the ride, which h
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What Is Instinct's Trusted Person Network?
Noah Shinn describes Instinct's trusted person network as a private link between two users so their agents can find a meeting time and book it. Busy working professionals take meetings all day, and getting another meeting on the calendar is laborious: a text proposes a time, the reply says it fails, and travel plus time zones restart the exchange. He guesses the network had only been around a week or 10 days. The purpose is practical help for working professionals.
A user states the intention in everyday words: meet a person by the end of the week, during set periods, and find the time. Instinct then coordinates with the other person's Instinct, checks when time is open, and puts something
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How Does Instinct Cancel Unused Subscriptions?
Noah Shinn says users can connect bank accounts to Instinct so it scans transactions and subscriptions, cancels ones they do not use, and reports the savings. The message it sends back can say they are saving $2,000 for the month.
Instinct looks over the transactions and subscriptions and asks whether the person really uses each one. When someone realizes they did not even know about a charge, Instinct goes into email and unsubscribes, or opens the site and signs in. If a confirmation arrives in email and Instinct has access to the inbox, it uses the confirmation, signs in, and carries the cancellation through to the end. It then sends back the amount saved, including a figure of $2,000 for
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What Is the Instinct Personal Assistant?
Noah Shinn runs Instinct, a company he started about a year ago to build a personal assistant. Early traction comes from Instinct working the way people have waited for AI to act since they started using ChatGPT in 2023.
People already expect an agent that helps with something new and creative or with work that usually takes several hours. Instinct is everyday intelligence meant to stay with you and act with you through a simple interface. Instinct has no application and no new tool to open. It has a phone and a computer, so you can text it or call it, and it can call you. In the several months he has used it, Instinct has called him about three times. When something is genuinely pressing a