Anthropic’s CPO on what comes next | Mike Krieger (co-founder of Instagram)
Mike Krieger is the chief product officer of Anthropic and the co-founder of Instagram. After leaving Meta, he co-founded Artifact, an AI-powered news app that I absolutely loved, and joined Anthropic to lead product in 2024.
In this episode, you'll learn:
- How Anthropic uses AI to write 90-95% of code for some products and the surprising new bottlenecks this creates
- Why embedding product managers with AI researchers yields 10x the impact of traditional product development
- The three areas where product teams can still add massive value as AI gets smarter
- How Anthropic plans to compete with OpenAI long-term
- How to use Claude as your product strategy partner (with specific prompting techniques)
- Why Mike shut down Artifact despite loving the product, and what founders can learn from it
- Where AI startups should build to avoid getting killed by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google
- Why MCP (Model Context Protocol) might reshape how all software works
- The counterintuitive product metrics that matter for AI
- How to evaluate whether your company is maximizing AI’s potential or just scratching the surface
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Where to find Mike Krieger:
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Where to find Lenny:
- Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com
- X: https://twitter.com/lennysan
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/
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In this episode, we cover:
(00:00) Introduction to Mike Krieger
(04:20) What Mike has changed his mind about regarding AI capabilities
(07:38) How to avoid scary AI scenarios
(08:55) Skills kids will need in an AI world
(11:53) How product development changes when 90% of code is written by AI
(17:07) Claude helping with product strategy
(21:16) A new way of working
(23:55) The future value of product teams in an AI world
(27:18) Prompting tricks to get more out of Claude
(29:52) The Rick Rubin collaboration on “vibe coding”
(32:42) How Mike was recruited to Anthropic
(35:55) Why Mike shut down Artifact
(42:41) Anthropic vs. OpenAI
(47:11) Where AI founders should play to avoid getting squashed
(51:58) How companies can best leverage Anthropic’s models and APIs
(54:29) The role of MCPs (Model Context Protocols)
(58:25) Claude’s questions for Mike
(01:03:15) Claude’s heartfelt message to Mike
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Referenced:
- Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/
- Claude Opus 4: https://www.anthropic.com/claude/opus
- Dario Amodei on X: https://x.com/darioamodei
- AI 2027: https://ai-2027.com/
- Tobi Lütke’s leadership playbook: Playing infinite games, operating from first principles, and maximizing human potential (founder and CEO of Shopify): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/tobi-lutkes-leadership-playbook
- Claude Shannon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon
- Information theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory
- TypeScript: https://www.typescriptlang.org/
- Python: https://www.python.org/
- Rust: https://www.rust-lang.org/
- Bending the universe in your favor | Claire Vo (LaunchDarkly, Color, Optimizely, ChatPRD): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/bending-the-universe-in-your-favor
- Announcing a brand-new podcast: “How I AI” with Claire Vo: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/announcing-a-brand-new-podcast-how
- A conversation with OpenAI’s CPO Kevin Weil, Anthropic’s CPO Mike Krieger, and Sarah Guo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxkvVZua28k
- Jack Clark on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jack-clark-5a320317/
- Artifact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artifact_(app)
- Joel Lewenstein on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joel-lewenstein/
- Daniela Amodei on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniela-amodei-790bb22a/
- Boris Cherny on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bcherny/
- Gunnar Gray on L
