I've seen a lot of frankly dumb takes on Instinct's raise. The product is free, and the inference behind it is ludicrously expensive. For context, Anthropic's $200/month plan can cost $3-6K a month per user to service. So why raise $350M, and potentially another $1B? Because if you're giving this away, you need an enormous balance sheet. And your biggest competitor has limitless cash AND compute (Muse). Why invite-only? Partly hype. But mostly cost control. You can't let a million users onto a free, inference-heavy product overnight unless you're prepared to burn through a fortune in tokens (which Meta is doing). Instinct might win the category or it might not. But seeing a billion-dollar valuation, saying it's the next Clubhouse, and calling it a VC hype cycle without running the math is lazy analysis. But hey, that's most VCs on X 🤷‍♂️