The Valuation Is Doing More Talking Than the Product

What people were saying

The dominant thread today was arithmetic. A widely quoted post pairing Instinct's $2.5B valuation with Linear's $2.5B (at $100M ARR and 177% net revenue retention) became the load-bearing beam of the whole discourse. @Emmettphaley compared it to the AI note-taker boom and counted at least ten inevitable competitors within six months. @prukalpa, who lived through the 2022 modern data stack hype cycle, made the sharpest version of the point: VCs and founders are playing different games, and only one of them gets to be wrong cheaply.

@HadickM wrote the day's longest indictment, calling the round emblematic of tech groupthink, arguing the current user base is entirely highly online SF/NYC people with little product loyalty. On the other side, @joshcrnls argued the price makes sense if agents capture purchasing decisions, and @webaficionado called it expensive on fundamentals but cheap as an M&A target. Remember WhatsApp, etc.

The praise

Actual usage reports were warm. @jansenniklas had it book flights end to end and called it the first time an AI genuinely finished that job. @marlonmisra got a car rental and a flight booked better than he could have, then posted a thoughtful wishlist (OTP handoffs are clumsy, bot-blockers block it, one conversation thread for many tasks gets messy). @brexton used it for gluten-free restaurant recs in Japan and Korea for his honeymoon. @FundamentEdge, self-described reflexive skeptic of VC launch slop, admitted it carved through his personal logistics backlog anyway.

The pushback

@pax21e8 posted the most-liked skeptical take: good-morning texts begging for work, an outdated LinkedIn read aloud, an unrequested industry report, and the nagging sense that it is obviously just Claude. @brycent asked whether this is Poke with worse data policy. @yrechtman liked it but balked at handing over Gmail root access. @michaelque22 argued anyone technical should just vibecode their own on an old laptop. @0xMasonH took that literally and shared OpenInstinct, a self-hostable clone with your own password vault.

Notable anecdotes

@rexsalisbury noted parents using it to manage school communications are now very annoyed, invoking the ghost of the Facebook API era. A replier under pax's thread described it catching an unrenewed car registration that only mailed notices to a company address, then digging up the reference number itself. And invite requests kept rolling in all day, which is its own kind of data point.