Number
Instinct hit a $10B valuation about two months after launch
Instinct, the iMessage-based AI personal assistant, went from a $2.5B round to $5B to $10B within a three-to-four-week span, only a couple of months after launching.
$10000M
Instinct valuation ~2 months after launch · USD
“Yeah, it only launched a couple months ago, like 2 months ago, and it's now valued at $10 billion. So they raised their first— they raised a round at $2.5 billion 3 weeks ago, and then $5 billion and $10 billion, all in like a 3 to 4 week span.”
Number
Instinct's founder claims 10% compounding growth per day
Instinct's founder says the app is growing 10% a day, compounding, and Shaan notes it has slowed down under the load. Later in the episode Meta's Muse dismisses the claim, pointing out that 10% daily for a year would be about $1.3 quadrillion, so it only works off a tiny base.
$10
Instinct daily compounding growth rate (founder claim) · %/day
“Instinct pretty quickly took over my GrokBot usage. GrokBot feels slow and heavy compared to this. And not even slow, it's just that it's this whole separate thing to manage, whereas Instinct is literally just like texting somebody. Instinct was great, but Instinct has been getting so popular. The guy, the founder said they're growing 10% compounding daily. Daily.”
Number
Instinct has passed $1B in transactions while still invite-only
Instinct's founder plans to keep the assistant free and earn a cut of every transaction. Still invite-only, it has already run over $1B in purchases, 40-50% of them travel, which Shaan says is a threat to Booking.com and Expedia.
$1000M
Transactions run through Instinct while invite-only · USD
“So the founder of Instinct said he wants us to be free forever, and he wants to make his money taking a cut on all the transactions. He said that already, while they're in invite only, they've already crossed $1 billion of transactions that like through the platform where people use Instinct to buy something, that 40 or 50% of that was travel. So imagine you're Booking.com or you're Expedia. Sorry boys, game's over.”
Tactic
Call it a 'personal assistant,' not an 'AI agent'
Shaan credits Instinct's founder with avoiding techno-nerd branding: a five-sentence website and the plain label "personal assistant." He says "AI agent" will age the way "information superhighway" and "cyberspace" did for the internet.
“I think this guy's done a good job of building a more like a less techno nerdy product. So for example, just saying it's a personal assistant instead of saying it's an AI agent. That, I mean, AI agent is like back when people used to call the internet the information superhighway. And like that, you know, calling it cyberspace, you know, that's how people used to talk about the internet.”
Steal thisName your product by the job it does for a normal person, not by the technology underneath it.