Noah Shinn - Building Instinct: The Personal Agent - [Invest Like the Best, EP.493]
September 28, 2026
AI Summary
5 min readThe Personal Agent Is Here—And It's Already Transacting a Billion Dollars a Year
Noah Shinn's company Instinct has been running an invite-only personal agent for less than a year, and users are already moving over a billion dollars in annual transaction volume through it—50 percent of that in travel alone. The product has no app. Users interact with it through iMessage, WhatsApp, voice, email, or phone calls. It has its own email address. It can call you. And it is compounding at roughly 10 percent day-over-day growth with zero marketing spend.
What Instinct Actually Does
Instinct is a personal assistant that has access to a phone and a computer. That is the entire framing. Shinn is deliberate about not overcomplicating it: "It's really just a personal assistant." The interface is deliberately minimal—no new application to download, no new tool to learn. You text it, call it, or email it, and it acts on your behalf across the internet.
The product's architecture is built for proactivity, not just task completion. Instinct can wake up at 6 AM because it knows you wake up at 7, scan your calendar and email, prepare your day, and then decide whether to notify you or go back to sleep. If you are running late for a meeting, it can order an Uber without being asked. If a document needs signing by 3 PM and it is 2:55, it will call you.
Continue reading the full summary in the app — free to try.
Read Full Summary →Free • No credit card required
Never miss an episode of Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Get every new episode summarized in your inbox — free, ~5 minutes to read.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
What you'll learn
- 1 (02:18) **Why Noah Shinn Built Instinct** - Shinn introduces Instinct as a personal assistant that "just works," fulfilling the vision of what AI should act like since 2023.
- 2 (05:40) **Wildest User Stories: Wardrobe Planning & Autonomous Shopping** - A user scanned their entire wardrobe and body to have Instinct plan weekly outfits and shop for new clothes, showing itself wearing the items.
- 3 (08:44) **The Instinct-to-Instinct Network: Trusted Person Network** - A new feature lets Instinct users connect their agents to coordinate scheduling, avoiding the laborious back-and-forth of finding meeting times.
- 4 (13:22) **New Social Dynamics Emerge from Agent Coordination** - A friend group of six uses Instinct to brainstorm weekly plans, coordinate interests from Spotify history, and even order a single Uber that picks everyone up via an optimal route.
- 5 (15:40) **Reordering the World: From Reservations to Travel** - Shinn explains that agents will rewrite how the internet works, starting with traditional models like restaurant reservations.
- 6 (23:58) **Building User Trust: The Data Flywheel** - Shinn reveals that it takes several weeks for users to build trust, measured by when they share sensitive data like a credit card.
- 7 (26:50) **Security Architecture: Firewalls and Decoupled Monitors** - Shinn breaks the security problem into storage (tractable) and new surface areas (agents acting autonomously).
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
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.
-----
Become a Colossus member to get our quarterly print magazine and private audio experience, including exclusive profiles and early access to select episodes. Subscribe at colossus.com/subscribe.
-----
Ramp’s mission is to help companies manage their spend in a way that reduces expenses and frees up time for teams to work on more valuable projects. Go to ramp.com/invest to sign up for free and get a $250 welcome bonus.
-----
Trusted by thousands of businesses, Vanta continuously monitors your security posture and streamlines audits so you can win enterprise deals and build customer trust without the traditional overhead. Invest Like the Best listeners get a special offer of $1,000 off Vanta when you go to vanta.com/invest.
-----
WorkOS is the infrastructure B2B and AI-native companies use to sell to enterprise.
More from this podcast
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy →