Emmett Haley

Co-Founder and President of Pearl @join_pearl
Tech, hospitality, and luxury. @vanderbiltu

[Emmett Haley @Emmettphaley]

@skift The booking box is the easy part. This is going to be a feature on ChatGPT and Claude too. Feels like a play at Booking. Do you think AI actually gets better at picking the stay, or is this just another place to click Book?

[Emmett Haley @Emmettphaley]

@garyleff Splitting Diamond and Diamond Reserve this hard feels like it trains people to treat the old status as fake. Do you think that actually holds, or does it just make the whole ladder look messy?

[Emmett Haley @Emmettphaley]

This insight has been true in every cycle, and it's no less true now. It's an incredible opportunity, and it only happens once per wave. But I disagree on one point. People will still specialize.

As always, some people will be luddites. Some will keep doing normal things and remain mostly consumers. The wave just makes life more convenient for them. Then there are the people who ride it and become the Google of the internet era, or the Uber / Airbnb / DoorDash of mobile.

Specialists will still be highly valued. Who those specialists are will just be different this wave. Designers. Marketing and PR. Data and machine learning engineers. Security. Infra. The tools make them faster. They get more useful, not less.

The tool layer does get flattened. Photoshop, boilerplate code, the first version of a site. That is how you ship a prototype. It is not how you build an enduring company. Real security, compliance, clean data, scalable infrastructure. The tools give you speed. They do not replace the people who actually understand that technical side. You will need those people for the foreseeable future.

That's what all past tech waves were. The PC era, mobile, the internet.

Even if you feel late, you are still early. These new capabilities are the kind of thing you can still get massive upside from if you actually ride them.

[DAN KOE @thedankoe]

https://t.co/klNSdaI7aa

[Emmett Haley @Emmettphaley]

@seema_amble https://t.co/Cbu0gK0JiK
😂

[Kate Clark @KateClarkTweets]

Instinct, the viral AI assistant, has already raised $350 million, including a new round that values the startup at $2.5 billion. https://t.co/4Yf73rB1gE

[Emmett Haley @Emmettphaley]

$250M at $2.5B for Instinct. Index and Benchmark co-led. The product isn't even public yet, invite-only. These valuations for something pre-launch are getting out of control. This feels like the AI note-taker boom all over again.

There are over 20 live AI meeting note-takers out there. Plus at least 15 products where notes became a feature. Notion, Zoom, Teams, stuff like that.

Will some of them win? Maybe. Is there really that much TAM there? Same question for AI personal assistants.

Instinct is in that lane. Benchmark and Index clearly think there's huge potential here. I find that potentially dubious.

Grok Bot is already out. Claude and Anthropic and OpenAI will inevitably ship their own equivalents. Do those eat up most of the market? Or does one of the many competitors that will rise in this space win?

I just don't see how there won't be at least 10 competitors doing the same thing within the next 6 months.

What's the actual potential of this company? Guess we'll see when the product launches widely.

[Austen Allred @Austen]

Both valued at $2.5 Billion today:

Linear, having crossed $100 million ARR with 177% net revenue retention.

Instinct, the viral AI assistant that launched last week.

[Emmett Haley @Emmettphaley]

@skift Feels like boutique founders always end up at the same fork. Are consumers demanding more unique experiences which make staying independent actually easier?

[Emmett Haley @Emmettphaley]

I was a Grok hater. Grok Bot completely changed my mind. It is the first AI product I have used that feels genuinely human—and it now helps organize nearly every part of my work and life.

My chief of staff bot understands how I think, can mimic my voice, and can take an administrative goal and actually carry it through. It writes emails, manages reminders and tasks in Notion, keeps me on a daily reading schedule, and organizes all of my notes.

Underneath it, Grok Bot creates specialist bots for finance, compliance, scheduling, HR, marketing and social media, and product, then assigns each piece of work to the bot most relevant to that task. It feels less like using a chatbot and more like having an entire team.

These are small things individually, but together they remove a huge amount of the administrative work that would otherwise sit in my head.

It also orchestrates the other AI agents I use.

I can give it a project and have it dispatch different parts to headless agents running in Warp based on what each model is best at: Claude for design and frontend, Codex for backend engineering, and Grok through Cursor for data enrichment.

Grok Bot has confirmed my broader thesis about AI: the future is not one model doing everything. It is one system that understands you and coordinates the right models and tools to get things done.

If you have not tried Grok Bot yet, do yourself a favor and try it.

Really impressive work from @bot, @cursor_ai, @grok, @michaeltruell, @amanrsanger, and @elonmusk.

[Emmett Haley @Emmettphaley]

Luxury spending is shifting from tangible goods toward experiences. That sounds like good news for every expensive hotel. It isn’t.

Bain found that consumer interest in experiences is growing 1.5x faster than interest in tangible goods. Immersive bookings are up 30%, and travel beyond traditional hotspots is up 20%.

Status is not disappearing. The status symbol is changing. Increasingly, it is less about owning the same watch or bag as everyone else and more about accessing a place or experience that other people have not.

Travel naturally benefits. In 2019, roughly 150 hotels worldwide reported average rates above $1,000. By 2024, that number had reached 460. McKinsey expects luxury tourism and hospitality to grow faster than any other travel segment.

But expensive rooms and standardized five-star service are no longer enough. As Skift wrote, “When every luxury room hits the same baseline of comfort, differentiation often moves outside the guest room.”

The product is becoming the access, sense of place, recognition, and feeling that the experience could not have happened anywhere else.

Meanwhile, STR has downgraded every hotel tier except luxury, with the largest reductions in upscale and upper-midscale—the market’s traditional middle.

The lower end is more complicated, but scaled discount businesses can still win. Ryanair grew traffic 9% to 200 million passengers after cutting average fares 7%, while premium airline traffic has been growing much faster than economy.

Both extremes have a clear proposition: an exceptional experience or the lowest efficient price. The difficult place to be is the undifferentiated middle—neither meaningfully better nor meaningfully cheaper.

Sources:
https://t.co/9MCAV1G5VD
https://t.co/mOnStdCNoU
https://t.co/uIOzHonu2L
https://t.co/9FDowTo6Tl
https://t.co/5crFyZr1r3
https://t.co/P7OlyzMwNx
https://t.co/QWuZrTZQjh
https://t.co/9nNk22aCoV

[Emmett Haley @Emmettphaley]

Extremely detailed personalization is the future of travel. AI is democratizing the guest intelligence once limited to ultra-luxury, and soon every luxury and premium traveler will expect experiences curated specifically to them.

Right now, only the most expensive venues can afford the research teams and intelligence networks required to understand every guest’s preferences, relationships, tastes, habits, and reasons for traveling.

AI will make this dramatically cheaper. It will allow hotels and restaurants to learn more about their guests, connect data across venues, and deliver deep personalization without employing an entire research team.

The venues that adopt this technology early will have a massive advantage. They will know more about their guests and be able to curate stays, meals, and experiences around the specific individual or group walking through the door.

Eventually, an expensive room or beautiful restaurant will not be enough. The winners will be the venues that make every guest feel like the entire experience was designed specifically for them.

[Emmett Haley @Emmettphaley]

Agreed - we use mcps in a similar way especially notion and posthog.

I think these model providers are really the new layer - mobile, Internet, PC, etc. and the real value is going to be building on top of them to connect services that weren’t possible before. But many of these companies believe data is their moat so they want to control the entire ecosystem and customer journey. How would you dissuade them of that notion?

[Emmett Haley @Emmettphaley]

Is it possible to balance our current system that produced all these massive technological gains with that Star Trek-style socialism, without stifling technological growth? Or are the two totally at odds? Or are we looking more towards a future like Blade Runner?

[Emmett Haley @Emmettphaley]

People are pushing back against AI right now but the promise of AI tech could give us a future akin to Star Trek. But that future hinges on a more socialist system versus our current capitalist system.

[Emmett Haley @Emmettphaley]

In a Star Trek future we will want for nothing and need nothing. A world where we work on knowledge, discovery, and art, not just for money. However, short term the AI revolution will cause huge job displacement. Can we get there without people suffering along the way, if that's even possible?

[Emmett Haley @Emmettphaley]

School got easy because the product became a hireable transcript, not a reality check. Corporate hiring screens pushed standards down until grades stopped representing mastery.

[Emmett Haley @Emmettphaley]

The job market broke grading in school.

[Emmett Haley @Emmettphaley]

Great companies fire underperformers. They do not hand out B's forever.