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Software & AI VC @BatteryVentures. Former Product Guy @Segment @Twilio, Founder @BelongCo. Views are my own, and no investment advice.
San Francisco, CA
Joined December 2009
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Agent-led Growth (ALG) is when the agent, not the human, is the buyer.
PLG: the end user finds the tool and adopts it bottoms-up.
ALG: the agent picks the vendor on the user's behalf, and the user never questions the choice.
Welcome to ALG (agent-led growth) 📈
$ALG index - Databricks Neon, ClickHouse, Vercel, Supabase…
Vercel is generating $600 million in annualized revenue, up 148% from a year earlier, as coding agents become a major source of new business.
Agents now account for about half of new business, up from less than 3% at the start of the year.
Read more details: thein.fo/4eaW4bv
If personal AI assistants take off, every consumer business will need to cater to a new customer persona: agents.
That's the bull case for Sierra and Decagon. Support is just the wedge. The real prize is becoming the interface through which businesses sell, market and serve consumers (and their agents).
💯 👏 @DecagonAI
Super excited to announce @DecagonAI’s personal agent gateway!
Personal AI assistants like Muse, Instinct, Dots, and Grok Bot are taking off. They’re already starting to buy, book, cancel, and negotiate with businesses on behalf of consumers.
This creates a new challenge for businesses… but blocking them risks turning away customers.
Everyone will need an equally smart agentic front door that can handle interactions with both agents and humans.
Personal Agent Gateway helps enterprises identify personal AI assistants and customize those requests so that you can give a great customer experience while controlling all your logic.
We’re also announcing our PACT protocol that allow personal AI assistants to prove who they represent and what they are empowered to do.
Read more:
decagon.ai/blog/personal-age…
Just finished listening to @noahrshinn. Kudos to @patrick_oshag for landing what I believe is Noah's first long-form public interview 👏
A few thoughts:
1/ Instinct delivered what Alexa, Siri and Ok Google promised a decade ago. A personal assistant that just works. You text it, it gets done. Feels like the biggest consumer moment since ChatGPT.
2/ On tech architecture, as I understood it: every user gets a dedicated VM running an always-on agent, deliberately over-provisioned on compute and multimodal intelligence so the experience never degrades. This reminds me of the early ASP model, pre-SaaS/cloud era. End result: growing ~10% mom (wow!)
3/ Instinct's biggest advantage is also its biggest constraint: iOS. iMessage gives them instant distribution to 1B+ users, but Apple ultimately decides what an agent can and can't do on the phone. Which made me think: Apple should just buy Instinct and let Noah reimagine what personal computing looks like in the age of AI.
4/ Their hardest problem isn't model quality, it's capacity planning. Over-provision and you burn cash. Under-provision and you lose a user for life. Software never had this dynamic. Instinct looks more like Uber or DoorDash than a SaaS company.
5/ We are at the beginning of a golden age of consumer AI. Meta's Muse, OpenAI's Dots and xAI's Grok Bot are all chasing the same prize as Instinct, and billions in VC and big tech capital are subsidizing the race. Just like the early days of eCommerce, ride sharing and food delivery, consumers are the biggest beneficiaries.
6/ The second-order effects of AI assistants are the most interesting part. Every business now has a new customer persona: the agent. That means rethinking core primitives (website, product catalog, checkout, returns and refunds, payments, loyalty) for a buyer that never scrolls, and doing it in a way that expands margins rather than compresses them.
7/ The bigger open question is how humanity responds. Do agents become indistinguishable from us, or do we demand a "sent by AI" label? And how willing will businesses be to transact with an agent instead of a person? We're about to find out.
Overall, what an exciting time to be alive!
My conversation with Noah Shinn (@noahrshinn), founder of Instinct.
Noah is building a personal AI assistant. It's still invite only, has spent nothing on marketing, and is growing roughly 10% A DAY.
This is his first long conversation about the company.
We discuss:
- Why Instinct doesn't have an app
- Buying compute months ahead of exponential demand
- How users learn to trust it with a credit card
- Safety and security
- Agents coordinating with other people's agents
- Instinct's business model
- Apps built on consumer inertia
- and more
Enjoy!
Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
4:11 What people are using AI agents for
15:07 Rethinking travel, reservations, and the internet
22:43 Trust, privacy, and personal data
27:50 The business model behind Instinct
38:04 How existing businesses will adapt
47:55 Designing a personal assistant people love
53:15 Growth, compute, and competing with Big Tech
1:11:44 What’s next for Instinct and personal AI
Getting asked: Company X had the same vision years earlier. Why did Instinct nail it and they didn't?
My theory:
1/ Work backwards from the desired user experience, pay for it later. Instinct over-provisioned everything (intelligence, GPU capacity, a dedicated VM per user) so the product just works. Remember, Uber started with black cars and worked its way down to +ve unit economics? It's the same playbook.
2/ iMessage as the UI for AI. No new app, no new habit. Probably the most underrated product decision in consumer AI.
3/ Capabilities that feel like a real assistant. It logs into portals as "you," calls businesses on your behalf, can make payments, respond to emails and occasionally calls you back when something's pressing. Muse doesn't do all this yet, but will likely catch up fast.
4/ Timing and founder. The models and inference infra to do this reliably only showed up recently. And Noah spent his formative years at Sierra under Bret Taylor, watching the business side of CX get transformed in real time. He probably thought a lot about A2A future before building for it.
Smart move from OpenAI. Also, finally delivering on their name - open source models :)
OpenAI serving open-source models through Baseten is a big deal. They are embracing open source.
Until now, OpenAI's pitch was "use our models."
Now it is "commit your annual AI budget to us". We will get you the best model for each job, whether it's ours, someone else's, or open source.
So if you're a large bank looking to commit $100M in AI spend, you centralize with OpenAI. One throat to choke. GPT handles the credit memos. Open-source handles the KYC volume at a fraction of the cost. A post-trained / specialized model handles fraud.
This changes OpenAI's position. It stops competing only on whose model is best this season and starts competing to own the enterprise AI budget. A layer above being just an AI lab.
Also proves AI is positive sum, not zero sum between closed and open source!
OpenAI runs like a top-tier AI game studio, and I mean that as a compliment. The moment rival has a hit, the remake is in production immediately.
Fable → Astra
Claude Code → Codex
Instinct / Grok Bot → Dots
Speed of execution at this scale is its own moat.
Sounds like Uber, but instead of Drivers, it's AI Agents.
someone (FB/Instinct/etc) will torch ~$100 a year serving agentic actions to consumers for the next 12 months with the bet that capability saturatation+costs crashing and/or a commission business will save them
by the time everyone else wakes up, they will have locked in the consumers and the behavior, conviction will be rewarded but it helps to have a strong stomach (and balance sheet)
SpaceXAI didn't "vibe code" a support tool when the ticket volume jumped... they ran Grok @bot as a support engineer inside @plainsupport, with @linear and @datadoghq wired in and scale the ops without a single new hire.
The future of SaaS: a programmable harness built for humans and agents.
We rebuilt customer support around Grok Bot to scale our operations without adding headcount.
It works autonomously to respond to customers, resolve tickets, and manage the queue.
x.ai/news/grok-bot-customer-…
This is pretty cool. But at the end of the day, it was a human who agreed to pull the video footage and share it with Instinct. I wonder if they knew they were talking to an AI agent and whether knowing would have changed their answer 🤔
Biggest risk in the AI trade: revenue concentration across chips, models, neo clouds — is this a bug or a feature?
Probably a feature in the short term and definitely a bug if it persists in the long run. How long is long… no one knows 🤷♂️
New from Ramp data: the latest threat to the AI trade. AI companies' revenues are heavily dependent on a small set of customers. 80% of OpenAI and Anthropic's enterprise revenues come from 1% of their customers, and it's not getting better.
This is a level of concentration risk unseen in any other software category we track. The companies in the top 1% skew heavily toward the tech sector and AI products and services.
What happens in a market correction? All these companies are highly correlated, and an increasing share of our economy is invested in them. Especially as we approach blockbuster IPOs for OpenAI and Anthropic.
Instinct has figured out something that FAANG couldn’t. A sophisticated product that’s dead simple to use — an AI concierge that *just works*.
Is $2.5b rich and expensive? Sure, from a fundamentals standpoint, but still cheap from a strategic M&A lens.
Remember WhatsApp? 😉
Instinct, the viral AI assistant, has already raised $350 million, including a new round that values the startup at $2.5 billion. wsj.com/tech/ai/the-latest-v…
👇 👀
Prediction:
1. Meta's Hatch flops (its not as good as Instinct, I know because I use both)
2. Meta buys Instinct for north of $20B.
3. Meta subsidizes consumer use of Instinct the way it does WhatsApp
The Big Tech dominance continues but the venture community is satisfied with the returns. Win win.
Don’t be surprised if SpaceXAI terminates their compute agreement with Anthropic next. Full vertical integration is the way to go!
We’re ending our partnership with Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX. Under our proposal, Cursor’s direct access to our models would end on November 12.
We know that the people most affected by this decision are the developers who rely on OpenAI models in Cursor. We care about their experience in this transition and we’re ready to go above and beyond to support them.
openai.com/index/our-decisio…
Anthropic knows that this could happen and is trying to side with Cursor / SpaceXAI. The next 6–12 months are going to get very interesting… 😎🌶️🍿
Call me old school (or paranoid), but am I the only one hesitant to give AI agents full access to my email and computer? 🤔
