Product @SierraPlatform | Ex-Enterprise PM @Dune, FDE @PalantirTech, Founder @Vurudotco
San Francisco, CA
Joined March 2012
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The speed and compounding effect of AI is insane.
But they can be a double-edged sword if you’re going in the wrong direction.
I’m seeing this with a lot of startups where founders lack strong opinions about the domains they’re building in and end up building bespoke solutions for every customer request. You want platform leverage not one-off products.
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Niles Lawrence retweeted
We now serve almost 50% of the Fortune 50, and their ambition is driving our growth. Today, we hit $400M+ in ARR, adding over $150M+ in ARR in Q3 alone - that's more in one quarter than we generated all of last year. Also, our growth is accelerating: we took 6 months to double from $100M to $200M ARR, and only 5 months to double from $200M to $400M. Read more: sierra.ai/blog/our-customers…
Taking “show, don’t tell” to another level
Instinct in group chats
Starting today, early access users can add Instinct to group chats. A new Instinct joins and works for the whole group.
Making plans with friends usually turns into a frustrating back-and-forth over times and places. With Instinct in the group, you can explore options together, agree on a plan and get it done, all in one thread. Your friends don't even need Instinct to join in.
A few things it’s good at:
- Planning a weekend trip with friends, including dates and arrival times
- Coordinating logistics with a roommate
- Getting tickets as soon as they go on sale, then splitting the cost and sending one to everyone
- Running a fantasy league, keeping standings, settling rules disputes, and reminding everyone to set their lineups
- Sorting out carpool schedules - works out who’s driving each day from everyone’s schedules
- Organizing Thanksgiving, keeping track of who’s bringing what and ordering the shopping list
Group chats are new territory for Instinct, and we put a lot of care into getting the permissions right. Here’s how it works:
- Your personal Instinct asks before connecting with the group’s Instinct. You choose which groups to trust and can remove trust at any time.
- The group’s Instinct has no direct access to your personal accounts. Your Instinct checks your permissions before sharing information or taking action.
- If someone new joins the group, all pending replies from your Instinct are held until you grant it permission to share with the expanded group.
Group chats are available to all of our early access users, and will be rolling out to everyone soon. To join early access for this release, ask your Instinct to put you on the list.
Great work with @GajanNagaraj @anuda_w and @saagarwashere
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The most impressive part about what @noahrshinn and team have accomplished is building trust so quickly.
A friend inviting you to try a new product (essentially vouching for it) makes you more likely to trust it with sensitive data like a credit card or password. Well done!
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
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We’re at the point where AI agents have enough context to be able to create moments of delight for users and customers. The ultimate compliment has become “wow I wouldn’t have thought of that”.
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I thought this was edited lol teapaw.org/salesforce/status/2099…
Live: @DarioAmodei x @Benioff
The @AnthropicAI co-founder & CEO joins us at @Dreamforce for a conversation worth hearing ☁️
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It’s abundantly clear, the best founders can navigate uncertainty to will the outcomes they want into existence.
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Brand value is one of the clearest lasting moats with AI and now Voice Personas enable every company to personalize the voice that is engaging with their customers. The impact is already real across customers!
Today, Sierra’s launching Voice Personas, which enable you to give your agent not just a voice, but a personality. Voice AIs shouldn't sound the same. It's time to empower every company to define their own brand voice. And we had a ton of fun messing around, as you’ll see in the video.
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Niles Lawrence retweeted
The key insight of Sierra Horizon is your company's moat is the context you have about your customers, and that will compound as more of your customer experience is powered by AI agents.
With every agent conversation, the context about your customers gets richer and your agents become more effective. That proprietary context remains yours as frontier intelligence improves, enabling you to deepen your differentiation and benefit from new models without fear that doing so could help your competitors.
And with Horizon, you don’t pay for tokens, you pay for business outcomes delivered. We bear the burden of managing token spend, and you can focus on what matters most to your business: growing your customer base and driving revenue. teapaw.org/btaylor/status/2077767…
Neil’s post is a peak into why and how we built Sierra’s internal agent called Pinecone.
Pinecone is increasingly becoming the place where the whole company starts their work.
It integrates with our core systems (GitHub, Slack, Linear, Gong, Gdrive, etc) and manages context to take on the full set of tasks a team needs to get done.
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Everyone is talking about AI replacing people. I’m more excited about a future where AI becomes the Iron Man suit for the best operators.
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Niles Lawrence retweeted
Sierra is raising $950 million from new and existing investors, led by Tiger Global and GV, at a valuation of over $15 billion. We now have more than $1 billion to invest in becoming the global standard for companies wanting to transform their customer experiences with AI.
We’ve never had such conviction in the opportunity for Sierra and our customers. Just a couple of years ago, we had four design partners. Now, Sierra is serving over 40% of the Fortune 50, and agents built on our platform are powering billions of customer interactions — everything from refinancing homes to processing insurance claims, returning orders, and helping people raise millions in fundraisers.
We’re deeply grateful to our customers for helping show what’s possible. If you’re not yet using Sierra, we’d love to partner with you. sierra.ai/blog/better-custom…
Niles Lawrence retweeted
Today, Sierra is releasing Ghostwriter, our agent for building agents. With Ghostwriter, you can create an AI agent for your customer experience — one that can chat, pick up the phone, speak dozens of languages, take action on your systems of record, and be protected with industry-leading guardrails — simply by having a conversation. No clicking, no forms, no menus.
Codex and Claude Code have transformed how we build software, making it possible for software engineers to orchestrate and review the work rather than doing all the work themselves. We think the same transformation will happen for all software. Rather than every enterprise app having a web app for humans and an API for automation, every software platform’s UI will be an agent that can do the work on your behalf.
I recorded a demo of my building and optimizing an agent with Ghostwriter so you can see how powerful and easy it is to use. It’s completely changed the way our early adopters build agents, and it’s changed the way I think about the software industry. Let me know what you think, and, if you’re interested in trying it out at your business, please reach out directly.