AI Agents Will Cause Mass Subscription Cancellations | Rob Hadick

Rob Hadick (0:00)

A lot of companies that depend on there being sort of a long tail of customers that never cancel. So, you know, companies like Planet Fitness, Netflix.

SPEAKER_2 (0:08)

Netflix stock is down 19% in last month.

Rob Hadick (0:10)

Yeah, Netflix stock is down 19%. Planet Fitness was down a lot. A lot of the telecom companies, a lot of the wireless carriers were down a decent amount as well, because of, again, like you don't, you continue to pay.

SPEAKER_2 (0:21)

All right, we are back. We are live with Rob Hadick, who's a general partner at Dragonfly, the crypto venture firm, where he invests in stable coins, payments, and new financial infrastructure. Rob, welcome.

Rob Hadick (0:32)

Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_2 (0:33)

Absolutely. So we were talking off camera earlier about Instinct, Instinct doing various things, ordering bikinis without people's permission, just autonomously. And you mentioned that you were Bearish Instinct. So I'm curious about your thoughts on why.

Rob Hadick (0:48)

Yeah, so a couple of things. So one, I think these products have no lock-in whatsoever.

Like they've obviously done an incredibly good job of getting a core set of users quite excited. Those users are mostly power users here in Silicon Valley, and are mostly the types of people who are willing to experiment. They're also the types of people who are willing to go use a new chat agent, a new model with a drop of a hat. They don't care. And they're also willing to test things out.

There's what we're starting to see with Instinct as it's gotten bigger. And I think Noah actually went on a different podcast last week. He talked about, oh, we're doing like a billion dollars of volume very quickly. Well, billion dollars of volume is actually quite small in terms of like the ability to make money. And the second Muse dropped, you could tell that Muse, because they had better access to compute, was operating more quickly and was able to do, was able to coordinate across the different types of things that people are making them do much more quickly. And my expectation is that over time, that people will just move from agent to agent, and they will move from whatever and however things are working the best. And I think over time, actually, the agents for these, call it more financial use cases, so paying for things, which is a lot of what Noah talked about on the Invest Like the Best podcast. I think that actually doesn't exist at all in these personal agents, because they're built on top of Plaid. And what happens when you're built on top of Plaid, you have a bunch of failures, things unlinked, you have things like failure rates at 2% or so for ACH, and there's a lot of capital and efficiency in it as well, because it takes 1 to T plus 2, T plus 3 to settle. And so I actually think agents inside your financial applications will be much more important than agents like these and the ability to capture value anyways.

SPEAKER_2 (2:37)

Why do you think VCs are investing in instinct at a 10 billion valuation?

Rob Hadick (2:42)

You have to ask them. I would not be...

SPEAKER_2 (2:45)

What's the steel man of their case?

Rob Hadick (2:47)

I think, listen, if you're going to steal man of their case, you're going to say, well, the addressable market is basically endless, right? Which is that you have 330 million people here in the US., you've got billions of people worldwide. They are doing a bunch of things that are not the best use of their time, right? And so if you can have an agent that is able to do a bunch of the rote things and able to take a little bit of bips on all of those transactions, maybe monetize your data, monetize ads at some point, which we started to see come out in these, then it's just a humongous, humongous tamp. I think the problem is that Instinct was first and it grew very quickly. But with the launch of Muse, and I think we can talk a little bit about the DOTS launch and I think how that performed. But my expectation is there's probably going to be 50 of these and being first got people excited, but it didn't allow people to appropriately think about how the market would get competitive.

SPEAKER_2 (3:49)

Totally, yeah. I mean, this is my first reaction to watching people get really excited about Instincts two, three months ago. It's like, do you really think this is going to be the only such platform that will exist?

It wasn't even the first. Like Interaction, Poke was like the first instinct-like thing that existed.