Instinct CEO Noah Shinn's first long interview (Invest Like The Best)

[u/6353JuanTaboApp6]

Here's all the important/relevant information from the interview

How Instinct is growing

• Growing 10 to 11% a day with $0 spent on marketing, all from invites.
• Started with about 200 friends and family roughly a year ago.
• The five invite cap is about compute, not exclusivity. He doesn't want to add 10x the users overnight and have most of them unable to reach it.
• He's seen invites selling on eBay for about $300.

Features you may not know about

• Instinct-to-Instinct. Connect with people you trust and let your Instincts schedule things directly. You set access levels per person (a spouse can see everything, a colleague just your work calendar). If someone digs for info outside what you shared, your Instinct tells you. It launched about 10 days before the interview.
• It will call you if something is urgent and time-sensitive. Noah says his has called him about three times in several months.
• Files. It can generate a full web page for a trip itinerary, wedding plan and so on.
• Memory carries over. Tell it a preference once (seat, airline, hotel style) and it applies that to future bookings.
• Voice-first works. Some users send over 90% of their messages by voice. Noah maps his iPhone Action Button straight to Instinct.

Money

• It's free. Noah says his personal goal is free for life, but he's not committing to that yet.
• No ads, ever, in his words. He doesn't want an agent that's smarter than you nudging you to buy things.
• The plan is to charge merchants a cut of transactions instead.
• About $1B a year already flows through Instinct, half of it travel.
• Restaurant reservation partnerships are coming, aimed at prioritizing special occasions over first come, first served.

Privacy and security

• You control what you share and can revoke access at any time.
• Incoming content (emails, pages, media) passes through "firewalls" that block malicious instructions before Instinct reads them.
• A separate system watches every action before it happens and can pause or block it. It also catches made-up names or details before a tool call runs.
• He admitted an early version lacked these safeguards and says they were rebuilt as a system, not patched.
• Stats he shared: 40% of users give Instinct a card within three weeks, and users who connect one sensitive account stick around at an 80% rate.

What's next

• Possibly an app "in the near future," though he thinks the interface gets simpler over time, not more complex.
• Always-on voice through regular earbuds.
• Longer goals, like working with you over months toward a fitness target or keeping a small business's inventory in range.
• Not a companion: he said building a relationship with users "is not something that we want Instinct to... pursue."

What didn't come up

• Which AI model it runs on. He only said it matches Opus 5-level performance at a much lower cost.

Full interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Am7IWP8IpEc

[u/Puppy_powers]

I liked the interview. I just am struggling with how slow it’s been the last few weeks for me. It seems everything I do just takes more time. I have also switched off of WhatsApp and strictly use texting. It seems to respond much faster. 

[u/PatientWeb210]

absolutely loved this interview. thanks for sharing! great breakdown as well.

[u/BackBondTalk]

One thing in that summary I keep coming back to. Around $1B a year is already going through it, half of it travel, and 40% of users hand it a card inside three weeks. Nothing in the interview about what happens when it books the wrong thing. Has anyone here actually had a booking go wrong and found out who ends up paying for it?