Ten Billion Dollars, One Perm In Copenhagen

What people were saying

The day had one gravitational center: @wallstengine relayed a report that Instinct is in talks to raise roughly $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation, weeks after a $250 million round at $2.25 billion, with 100,000+ users, no revenue, and compute constraints already biting. @PolymarketMoney wrote out all the zeros, which somehow made it worse.

From there the timeline split neatly into two groups: people doing arithmetic and people doing errands.

The pushback

@rene_sultan put the number next to Robinhood's market cap and asked someone to make it make sense. @RealNickMugalli listed the greentext version (zero revenue, fighting Meta, riding Meta's WhatsApp to do it). @DavidPawlan liked the product and still wanted to know what black magic justifies $10B. The Clubhouse comparison got enough traction that @stanine publicly declared that anyone making it hasn't used the thing, which mostly produced more people making it.

Reliability was the sharper complaint. @adambn described emails and events queued three to five hours and concluded it feels like a shared computer, which is a polite way of saying the compute crunch is now a user-facing feature. @MilksandMatcha, who used it to chase a refund after a passenger bled all over her flight and to snag a long-impossible reservation, said everything works but nothing is fast; Muse won on speed. @michaelmiraflor asked, genuinely, how anyone got comfortable handing over passwords, and @Abbasshaikh predicted regret at scale. @mhui1109 flagged a softer worry about the new phone-call feature: service workers getting bombarded by agents.

The praise

The anecdotes were the best part. @coleywoleyyy has it rebuilding a restaurant's Squarespace site, running his Facebook Marketplace listings, booking CPA meetings, cancelling forgotten subscriptions, and managing his fantasy football team (second place, noted). @startupideaspod had it assemble a Bali arrival card from emails and Airbnb receipts and produce a visa PDF, then sweated at the gate; separately it found a Copenhagen salon and emailed a booking that the salon apparently read as human. @bolau_ has it apartment hunting in NYC, scheduling tours and filling rental applications. @jpatel41 called it the first life-changing product since ChatGPT.

Notable anecdotes

@regulargio set a reminder to intro two friends, then discovered it had already done it unsupervised two days earlier, digging one address out of a 2019 thread, and wrote that he doesn't know how to feel. @lefttailguy argued the real ending is a Google acquisition: product-market fit throttled by infrastructure, which is very 2006 YouTube.