Mike Krieger
Chief Product Officer, Anthropic. On 5 shows, 11 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveengineer@mikeyk ↗LinkedIn ↗anthropic.com ↗Wikipedia ↗Instagram ↗
Mike Krieger co-founded Instagram in 2010 alongside Kevin Systrom, serving as its Chief Technology Officer through its acquisition by Facebook. In 2024, after co-founding the AI-powered news platform Artifact, he joined Anthropic as Chief Product Officer.
5shows
11appearances
175statements
14resolved
14supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
77said about them ↓ Everything Mike Krieger said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Krieger: DeepSeek release had almost no impact on Anthropic's go-to-market
“I got this question a bunch with deep seek when deep seek came out, like, all right, what does deep seek mean for you? And I think there's things that we learned from on the tech side, just looking at what they were doing, but from a go to market and place in …”
Mike Krieger estimates Claude Code is over 95% written by AI
“At this point, I would be shocked if it wasn't 95% plus.”
Krieger: Nations Should Not Distill AI Models From Other Countries
“I think the places where this gets interesting are, one, do we want any nation to be able to be able to distill models from any other ones? Like, My personal answer is no. I think that there's value in like, even like as AI gains and capabilities being really …”
Krieger agrees with Alexandr Wang: Most future friends will be AI
“I've had so many conversations with Alex Wang about this because he has this whole thing about how in the future most friends will be AI friends. And you know, I don't think he's wrong.”
Krieger: Top token users do not correlate with top performers
“We found that there's not a lot of correlation between
[10288] Mike Krieger: Like the person who's using the most tokens and like the person that I like, it's an interesting thought. I just made you at your companies like write down your 10 most productive peo…”
Krieger: Instagram could have reached sale with 4 to 6 people using AI
“I think we could have gotten there with like four to six, you know?”
Krieger: Anthropic found little correlation between employee token usage and actual productivity.
“We found that there's not a lot of correlation between
Like the person who's using the most tokens and like the person that I like, it's an interesting thought.
I just made you at your companies like write down your 10 most productive people that you think a…”
Krieger: AI would have allowed Instagram to scale with just 4-6 employees.
“I think we could have gotten there with like four to six, you know?”
Anthropic's Claude Code team uses Claude to write and review itself
“The team that works in the most futuristic way is the Claude code team, because they're using Claude code to build Claude code in a very self-improving kind of way. And, you know, early on in that project, they would do very line by line pull request reviews, …”
Mike Krieger expects AI to autonomously resolve user feedback by 2025
“Hey, I'm in the discord, the, you know, the, Cloud anthropic discord. I'm in the user for I'm on X and I'm reading things and like, here's what's emergent. That's step one. Models can do that today. Step two, which the models probably can do today. We just hav…”
Mike Krieger says MCP is more promising for agents than computer use
“To really have agency and have these agentic use cases. Like one way you approach it is computer use, but computer use has a bunch of limitations. The way I get way more excited about everything is an MCP and our models are really good at using MCPs. All of a …”
Krieger: AI foundation models will differentiate over time, not converge
“I think models over time get more different rather than more similar.”
Krieger: DeepSeek's cutting-edge AI capabilities should not surprise observers
“I think the DeepSync piece, people seem surprised that there were cutting-edge research teams there, and if you were paying attention, that part should not have been the surprising piece.”
Krieger: AI Startups Need Domain Knowledge and Proprietary Data for Long-Term Value
“My sense of where it ends up being most valuable to exist is places where you have some differentiated go to market, some differentiated knowledge of some particular industry or some special data that only you have access to ideally two or even three of those …”
Krieger: Selling pure API token access is a terminal failure mode
“I think the more you are just, like, maybe it's good inverting that all to see, like, what the failure mode looks like. I think it is resting on your laurels or not retaining your best people. Just believing that making the models incrementally better in every…”
Krieger: Creating multi-step task environments is the main AI blocker
“Figuring out how we better either break that down into component parts, which is probably part of the story, but also think about it holistically is the biggest blocker to at least one slice of progress, which is how do models go from being extremely good at e…”
Krieger: Top AI models will require both human and synthetic data
“So I think it absolutely has to be a mix. And I think the best models will come from that combination of great, like for code it's, you know, being, having good foundational understanding of code and good examples, but then also being able to explore a really …”
Krieger: Underestimating China's frontier AI capabilities is a mistake
“It was absolutely. Be a mistake to have underestimated or continue to underestimate like China's ability to both train at the frontier especially like if they get access to compute and then continue to innovate there too.”
Krieger: Anthropic will build general-purpose software, not bespoke vertical AI
“We are going to be building things that are general purpose as a rule with maybe some specialization at the, like, user level, but not at the, I don't anticipate us building a lot of verticalized experiences that are, like, fairly bespoke to a given workflow o…”
Krieger: Anthropic is focusing on agentic tools, not building an IDE
“So when I think about the coding space and where we can play and add value, it really is on the agentic side. It's not on the ID side.”
Krieger: AI coding models cannot run autonomously for hours without humans
“Recognize that they're not yet at the place where for many use cases, you can let them kind of run free for hours. You need that more human in the loop piece.”
Krieger: Software engineers will become AI delegators within three years
“How do we evolve from being mostly code writers to mostly Delegators to the models and code reviewers. That's what I think the work looks like three years from now. It's coming up with the right ideas, doing the right user interaction design, figuring out a de…”
Krieger: AI models are three-plus years from solving product strategy
“That, that's still a very human problem that I think we're at least three years away from the models being, being solving at that level of abstraction.”
The other half of the tape: Mike Krieger's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 69 times in 41 episodes across the shows. 8 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Lenny Rachitsky 17Guy Raz 10Alex Kantrowitz 7Peter Deng 6Harry Stebbings 6Adam Mosseri 5Gina Gotthilf 4Bangaly Kaba 4
Statements about Mike Krieger, by other people (8)
Systrom: Founders must rely on dashboards over gut feelings during volatility
“Just trust the instruments. And like, my god, we have instruments, dashboards, et cetera, just trust the instruments. Forget about what people are saying, forget about what issue you had yesterday with the server, trust the instruments. And it doesn't make it …”
Rachitsky: Anthropic CPO claimed Dario Amodei's past predictions were all accurate
“I actually had Mike on the podcast, their CPO, Mike Krieger, and he pointed out that Dario, every prediction he's had so far has been right over the past few years.”
Deng: Indecision harms startups more than being wrong with conviction
“Having a strong point of view is really important because like, you know, there's a saying that Mike and Kevin had it at Instagram, which is we may not be right, but at least we're not confused. I think that just, it was, it's a beautiful phrase. I thought, be…”
Systrom left Facebook due to exhaustion and desire for new projects
“That's why I think we ended up leaving, because you want a little break and recovery time, and then my personality is such that I'm excited about doing something new. Like, I, I'm just like, I'm always on to some new idea, And I don't know, it probably won't b…”
Mike Krieger told Avasare he was his only cold-email PM hire
“He said, I'm the only PM that he's hired from cold email.”
Kantrowitz: Former Instagram Executives Now Lead Product at OpenAI and Anthropic
“At Anthropic, it is Mike Krieger. The co-founder of Instagram. Yep. At OpenAI, it's Kevin Wheel, the former head of product, At Instagram.”
Systrom: Instagram co-founders met in person only five times last year
“Mike and I haven't done a remote company before. We've seen each other how many times in person in the last year? Like, five?”
Systrom: Smartphone cameras would spark a visual communication revolution
“The fact that like these devices had a camera that would lead to a visual communication revolution where like all of a sudden people weren't just communicating with text and voice, but they had the chance to communicate with an image.”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Lenny's Podcast 29
20VC 18
How I Built This 12
Big Technology 7
Latent Space 3
2026 6 mentions in 5 episodes 1 per episode
- Cliff Weitzman: What I Learned from 100 of the World’s Top CEOs & Why Tokens Will Outspend Salaries · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Why The AI Bubble Will Burst: The Most Logical Case — With Paul Kedrosky
- The Agent-Native Cloud: 3M Users, 100K Signups/Wk, Data Centers, & Death PRs — Jake Cooper, Railway
- Anthropic’s Felix Rieseberg on AI Coworkers, Local-First Agents, and the Future of Knowledge Work
- "Cursor is Dead" is Total BS: Here is Why | Miles Clements · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2026, scene by scene →
2025 33 mentions in 17 episodes 2 per episode
- From ChatGPT to Instagram to Uber: The quiet architect behind the world’s most popular products
- Snap: Evan Spiegel
- Sora 2 & AI’s Slop Era, Death Of The Creator Economy?, Apple’s SmartGlasses Roadmap
- Why ChatGPT will be the next big growth channel (and how to capitalize on it) | Brian Balfour
- The $1B Al company training ChatGPT, Claude & Gemini on the path to responsible AGI | Edwin Chen
- Can We Trust Silicon Valley With Superintelligence? — With Nick Clegg
- ⚡ Inside GitHub’s AI Revolution: Jared Palmer Reveals Agent HQ & The Future of Coding Agents
- OpenAI and AMD's Megadeal, Sam Altman and Jony Ive’s Bumpy Start. Meta vs. Apple
- 9 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 6 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
2023 11 mentions in 5 episodes 2 per episode
- Adam Mosseri: Why Video Is Bad For Business; Does Feed Matter Anymore? | E1039 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Gina Gotthilf: Lessons Scaling Duolingo from 3-200M Users; How to Master PR and Comms | E1028 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Everlane: Michael Preysman
- Scaling Duolingo, embracing failure, and insight into Latin America’s tech scene | Gina Gotthilf
- David Tisch: The 3 Most Important Variables When Raising Your Seed Round | 20VC #983 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2023, scene by scene →
2022 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2021 3 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode
- 20Growth: The Biggest Growth Lessons from Leading Teams at Instagram & Instacart, How To Structure The Hiring Process for Growth Teams, How To Onboard Growth Reps Efficiently and The Relationship Between Growth and The Rest of the Org with Bangaly Kaba, H
- 20VC: Evernote & mmhmm Founder Phil Libin on Why We are Beginning a Multi-Trillion Dollar Restructuring of the World, Why Shortcuts are the Biggest Mistakes Startups Make & The Future of Video and The Unbundling of Zoom
- Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam
- every mention in 2021, scene by scene →
2019 4 mentions in 4 episodes 1 per episode
2018 4 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Mike's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Chief Product Officer, Anthropic | 2 | 61 | 100% 4/4 | full record on 20VC → |
| BIG TECHNOLOGYLEDGER | Chief Product Officer, Anthropic | 3 | 56 | 100% 5/5 | full record on Big Technology → |
| LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Chief Product Officer, Anthropic | 2 | 34 | 100% 2/2 | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |
| HOW I BUILT THISLEDGER | Chief Product Officer, Anthropic | 3 | 12 | 100% 3/3 | full record on How I Built This → |
| LATENT SPACELEDGER | Chief Product Officer, Anthropic | 1 | 12 | — | full record on Latent Space → |