Instinct founder said more than 50% of transactions on the platform are travel-related
- ID
- 29849
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 29 Sep 2026, 11:12 PM
- Fetched
- 30 Sep 2026, 1:02 AM
- Provider
- TechCrunch
- Category
- technology
- Original URL
- https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/29/instinct-founder-said-more-than-50-of-transactions-on-the-platform-are-travel-related/
- Source URL
- https://techcrunch.com/feed/
Summary
- Score
- 4.0
- Created
- 30 Sep 2026, 1:03 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersai_ml_learnersai_agent_userssaas_startup_founders
What happened
On an interview with investor Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Instinct founder Noah Shinn said more than 50% of transactions on the invite-only agent platform are travel-related, and that the platform is approaching a billion dollars in annual transactions while growing "10% day-by-day" with transaction volume rising at a similar rate. Shinn did not specify how the transaction rate is calculated. He also described agents checking restaurant sites every five seconds for open slots and said he wants to "reinvent reservations" to give users preferential treatment, comments that drew criticism.
Why it matters
Treat the numbers as self-reported with no stated methodology: a 10% day-over-day growth rate and ~$1B annual transaction figure would be extraordinary at that compounding rate, so don't use them for capacity planning, market sizing, or a pitch deck without your own verification. The one reusable technical detail is the pattern of an agent polling a third-party restaurant site every five seconds for availability — if you build anything similar, expect rate limits, bot blocking, and server-cost questions from the sites you scrape, and design caching or webhook/API fallbacks rather than tight polling loops.
Discussion angle
The polling pattern: an agent hitting restaurant sites every five seconds to find a slot. Who pays for that traffic, what happens when the site blocks the agent, and is there a defensible product there beyond being a faster refresh button?