Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
00:10:54 · Noah Shinn
[00:10:54] S2: With the trusted network, we find a lot of very interesting cases. Example, use cases that are shared because it is the one part about the platform that is if every other area of the platform, the user generally has a good feeling of what it should act like, here is just something new and creative. For example, I heard the other day of when you're scheduling plans with friends or with a spouse or something like that, it's always an active act. Right? It's like, okay. Every Thursday, I'll think about something on the Saturday night about what I should do, and it's always this active act, and then you text the group chat like, hey. Do you wanna do this? And then always somebody is not willing to do it, and then it eventually, like, falls apart. And that happens, like, every time. And then finally, when you get people together, that's when we are able to actually attend that event or whatever it might be. There's a friend group that put in every week, just brainstorm something creative that is interesting that we all like and actually just make it a different experience every week. But then it'll go through that every week and not only coordinate when everybody is available and what their interests are and if they like certain things or not like certain things or what shows are available, what concerts, you know, based on their music taste because all of their Spotify history connected and all, you know, that same friend group, a group of, like, six. They had one person order an Uber, but then that Uber to go around to all the six people and coordinate, hey. We'll pick you up in ten minutes. And then the other person, we'll pick you up in five minutes from here. And I found the optimal route to go and pick up all the people. And now they're all just sharing one Uber, so it's economically friendly. So there's, like, all these random examples there of people discovering new use cases when you can finally remove the barriers of a lot of the rote social communication here and just remove all of the logistical burden.
00:12:28 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:12:28] S1: It's almost crazy how simple the explanation of this is, that it's easiest to literally just pretend you have a superhuman person with a phone, a computer, an email address. They can call you just like dealing with a person, and that's it. That makes me wonder how you think about everyone in the world having one of these, having an instinct, having an agent, and how that will reorder things. Code has been incredibly exciting to watch, of course. Everyone listening has had their own version of a magical experience with making something, but not that many people were software engineers before this. It's a relatively small sect of people that have made code historically. Maybe now it's gonna be way more. But this just seems like a different new market, new paradigm. How do you think this will start to reorder the world, the Internet, commerce, etcetera? What's the future of interfaces, I guess, is another way of saying it?
00:13:17 · Noah Shinn
[00:13:17] S2: I'll break this down in two parts just so that we don't sound like complete abstract visionaries in saying that we're gonna reinvent the Internet. Although, I'll be clear, I do think the Internet's going to be rewritten. I think that the way that most people on the planet interact with software is going to be very, very different. To break it down, though, in the short and medium term, famously reservations, is one where booking a reservation. Historically, how is that done? The human has to go on to the site to whatever restaurant that they care about and then click through the site and then put their, you know, two people this time and try to get it. Right? And then if they don't get it, they're just too late, it's first come, first served. But then now when you have an agent, you can theoretically just have the agent check every five seconds, not just across that one restaurant that you really care about that's your favorite restaurant you can't get in. Sure. That's one case. But what if it's doing that across every site in the world for every restaurant in the world in every major city? Now you can see how the agent is able to exploit just something simple like restaurant reservations. So if I go into that a little bit deeper, we have some exciting partnerships to be released in the future, but we are reinventing what the reservation system is just in this one category because it's important to our users, which is actually better for both sides. So if you take restaurant reservations from scratch, from the user's end, they want the reservation for the significant life event that they might have. It's a birthday. It's an anniversary. It's a friend coming in from out of town. And on the restaurant's end, they want interesting people. They want special occasions. They want to cater to those rather than maybe the local who keeps taking up a table once a night and there's no special event there. And, traditionally, because of the way that the Internet has worked, at least for reservations, it's been first come, first served. So anyone that comes in, matter how important or how not important it might be, whoever gets in first gets the reservation. But what if you had the ability for the agent to be able to communicate on both sides? Communicate, hey. This is important. This is actually the person's spouse's thirtieth birthday.
00:15:12 · Noah Shinn
A very special event is coming up. And the restaurant too can say, let's actually prioritize birthdays or major decade birthdays or major anniversaries or these certain people. I don't know. Whatever it might be. With all the logistical burden of having to describe exactly what your case is and what's happening and why it's important, now we have the ability to perfectly match what does the restaurant want, what does the user want. That will result in more special events for the users being able to actually have a spot in the restaurant. And then on the restaurant's end, for them to be able to have a much better audience of people who... It's all these different special events or special occasions. So I don't mean to go so deep on restaurant reservations. That's just one example of a traditional model that is changing. I think the same case with a lot of the major travel agencies, honestly. 50% of transaction volume that goes through our platform is due to travel. We're still running the invite only program, and it's quite early for us now. But we're approaching over a billion dollars a year in transaction volume through the platform. On a very small user base, there's already over $1,000,000,000 a year transacting. 50% of that is travel alone. Travel agencies that people not on instinct yet use today to book hotels or flights or other things like that. What is the benefit of that interface? They properly unify from so many different services and so many different hotel chains and airlines and present it in a nice way to the user when now they can just click on an option, check out immediately through there, and just see it in their email. It's a great experience. But I think there's an even better experience through Instinct or other similar interfaces where you can just say, I'm using voice recording again because I'm trying to describe how easy it is. Hey. I need to be in New York tonight. This is immediate, and that's it. Well, what does that entail? That means that... First, where is the user right now? Maybe you're in San Francisco. Maybe you're in LA. You're somewhere. Instinct. If you want, it can see your location. So it'll say, okay. You're in San Francisco. You need to be in New York. Let me first find all the options, all of the nuance too. What's the person's preferred airline that they'd like to fly at? What's the preferred seat type?
00:17:08 · Noah Shinn, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
In what class do you wanna sit in? Do you wanna be in an aisle seat or window seat or in the middle seat, etcetera? What food options do you want to be delivered to you as well? What credit card would you like to use? Okay. And then it books that. That's the flight. Then it moves on to the hotel. [00:17:23] S1: Yeah. Presumably, all your... It learns about you constantly, so it's... Your preferences are stored.
00:17:27 · Noah Shinn
[00:17:27] S2: That is the nice thing. If you tell it one thing, this is my style. This is what I like. This is where I like to stay. When you're staying anywhere in the future, it will be able to use that memory and be able to now make it a much easier experience for you in the future to be able to book that according to exactly what you want. But it'll be able to take that general taste, that general preference, and actually extrapolate that to anything else that you might want to book. So things just become very easy as you start to give it more preferences over time. So, anyway, just to close out this example, it'll find the ideal hotel. Maybe you've already stayed there the last seven times, and so it's very easy in that way. It'll book it end to end, line it up with your calendar. So it'll put the flight and the Uber ride that you need to take to get to the airport, the Uber ride to get back from the airport down to the hotel, and then all of the events that you might want to do there. Just take a step back because I talked so much about what's happening under the hood. The user really just recorded a voice recording saying, I need to be in New York tonight, and everything else is solved. So that's what I mean when I say meet the users where they are. Where is the delightful experience? Well, this is a new delightful experience that I believe is going to transform even the travel agency alone. And so for these businesses that traditionally make a lot of money from providing standardized interfaces, what happens when a new standardized interface comes into play that is just that much easier? What does that mean? And I'm not saying that we're in the business of trying to disrupt those businesses. I think they do provide quite a bit of value from the data that they've collected over time and the networks that they have. It'll be a collaboration over the next year, couple years to be able to redefine what that industry acts.