Anthropic CPO: How to Start a $100M Company as a Solo Founder | Mike Krieger

In this episode of Silicon Valley Girl, Marina Mogilko sits down with Mike Krieger, co-founder of Instagram and CPO at Anthropic, to discuss how artificial intelligence is reshaping entrepreneurship and work itself. Mike's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mikeyk/ Linkedin:https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikekrieger/ Links: Follow my Newsletter:⁠⁠ https://siliconvalleygirl.beehiiv.com/⁠⁠ https://siliconvalleygirl.beehiiv.com/ Companies & Products: ⁠⁠https://Marinamogilko.co⁠⁠ https://Marinamogilko.co Instagram: ⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/ ⁠⁠ https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/ YouTube: ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@SiliconValleyGirl⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/@SiliconValleyGirl LinkedIn: ⁠⁠linkedin.com/in/marinamogilko⁠⁠ https://www.linkedin.com/in/marinamogilko/ X: ⁠⁠https://x.com/siliconvalleymm⁠⁠ https://x.com/siliconvalleymm

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  UKG is the workforce operating platform with unified HR, payroll and workforce management. Built to solve the unique challenges of frontline work. Powered by People First AI and decades of labor data, UKG turns workforce intelligence into real time decisions around staffing, pay, compliance and productivity, enabling every worker to confidently take action as work happens. Because when work works, everything works. Learn more at ukg.com/work. UKG, HR, Pay and Workforce Management.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  Welcome to the 50th Hunger Games. Witness the beginning of the revolution.

• 0:34Speaker 02

  Hey Mitch, you've been trying to take down these games from the start.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  Filmed for IMAX.

• 0:38Speaker 02

  Make them remember you.

• 0:41Speaker 01

  The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Leaping, November 20th, rated PG13.

• 0:45Marina Mogilko?

  In the AI age, anyone can become a $100 million entrepreneur, build a company solo. Do you think it is possible now?

• 0:51Speaker 04

  I think it's very.

• 0:52Marina Mogilko?

  This is Mike Krieger. A lot of you guys know him as co-founder of Instagram. He's also chief product officer at Anthropic, building Claude and shaping how we work and solve problems using AI.

• 1:02Speaker 04

  The next step there is Claude actually being an entire sort of coworker. It's going to do everything perfectly well. When you're a first time entrepreneur without a big network, you're doing all those things yourself. So why not try to bring the best of what we know into that company via something like Claude?

• 1:17Marina Mogilko?

  And it's not just hype. Claude is already helping millions of people with product building, being their lore and even being their therapist. People who just graduated from college are struggling to find jobs because a lot of entry level jobs being replaced with AI. Do you ever wake up at night and think like, oh my God, where the world is going with AI?

• 1:35Speaker 04

  This could be really positive for humanity. It also could go quite badly. And there's going to be economic impacts. There's going to be labor impacts.

• 1:42Marina Mogilko?

  So should we be hopeful or afraid? Hello, everyone. Welcome to Silicon Valley Girl. I have an amazing person here today. Mike, thank you so much for being here.

• 1:53Speaker 04

  It's good to be here.

• 1:54Marina Mogilko?

  You have this amazing story of building a huge company, but also you are at the forefront of what's happening with AI right now. And there has been this conversation that in the AI age, anyone can become a $100 million entrepreneur.

• 2:10Marina Mogilko?

  Build a company solo. Do you think it is possible now or we're still away from that?

• 2:14Speaker 04

  I think it's very possible, just even watching the journey I went on with Instagram, where we did a lot of the initial work with just me and Kevin. We were able to do a lot with just the two of us. And there's a focus and an energy when you get when you just have one or two people working on something. I think the ideal is actually two, because it's helpful having a partner when going through the ups and downs. But what I've learned is as you grow, every person you grow, the team is another person that can bring their own ideas and bring their energy, which is great, but it's also another person that you need to get on board if you need to shift where the company is going. And so I think it's very exciting now is that one, two, three person team can scale themselves up, do a lot more than they would have been able to do before, maybe do it faster and preserve that kind of,

• 2:56Speaker 04

  I call it conceptual integrity, like you have like all of what matters about that company in your head or in two heads, basically working together versus trying to steer a huge ship.

• 3:06Marina Mogilko?

  Do you think being technical is crucial to building a large company these days? Or it is unnecessary with all the existing tools?

• 3:12Speaker 04

  I think, you know, with, with increasing things like Claude Code with like products online, I think you're getting to the point where you're able to at least get to a version of your idea where you can see if there's something there, you know? Cause that's what the biggest thing that I've got, like in the age of kind of mobile apps first emerging, I'd hear from people all the time and they'd be like, Mike, I have a great idea for a mobile app. Like, do you know any mobile engineers or how do I get it built? And that was often where the idea would die. And some of those ideas maybe wouldn't have worked out, but some of them might actually have created something really novel, right? There'd be people that said, oh, I have a novel idea for a social app or a dating app or a game. And some of those ideas just kind of like, you know, kind of died at that stage. And so what I think is exciting is even if the, the tools aren't there where they're not necessarily going to get you

• 3:57Speaker 04

  from your first 10 users to your first million users in terms of the system scaling up, they'll at least get you in front of those first 10 people, right? Like get you to the prototype or even that initial version. And that seems very possible, even people who aren't technical. We see that inside Anthropic where some of our non-engineers, you know, people in marketing, people in communications who just have had An idea in the back of their heads for a while, we'll sit and talk to Claude and work with Claude Code on the weekends. And then share it internally, like, look what I built and I don't code at all.

• 4:29Marina Mogilko?

  That's super cool. So what would be your roadmap? So come up with an idea, build an MVP, share it with like 10, 20 people. You had experience where you had to shut down the company, right? Can you tell what the product was?

• 4:42Speaker 04

  It was our second company. I started a second company with the same co-founder as Instagram and it was called Artifact. And the product itself, I'm super proud of it. It was an AI-powered news recommendation product. So we would learn your interests and then we would give you a feed of, you know, different articles and stories that you might be interested in. And at like a really nuanced level, like you, people might be interested in not just graphic design, but you know, Bauhaus graphic design or Japanese architecture, like really understanding the kinds of things that people were like more deeply interested in. But the product didn't hit enough of like a product market, you know, fit and an acceleration that made it, made sense to continue to invest in it. So that process of having created something and iterated on it and built a team around it, but then also coming to the realization that

• 5:27Speaker 04

  the right thing was to move on from it was really challenging.

• 5:30Marina Mogilko?

  And the pressure was on, right? It was right after Instagram.

• 5:33Speaker 04

  It was, and you know, and then that, you know, in some ways that was really a hindrance.

• 5:37Marina Mogilko?

  When do you make this decision about an idea that you showed to maybe like 20 people? When do you say like, hey, this is it? Or do I keep pushing?

• 5:45Speaker 04

  I think for me, it's very much when you're in that phase, are you, as you're making changes and as you're showing it to people and they're giving you feedback? And then maybe, maybe you even have some people using it. Does it feel like the more you change or the, you know, as you listen to feedback and make some alterations? Is, is there like a snowball effect where energy is increasing? We definitely saw that in early Instagram and we had initially a group of maybe 20, 30 people using it in just a private beta. And, you know, it was very much a weekend product, right? Cause you're out and about and especially in the early days, that's all you were doing was just taking photos with Instagram. It wasn't that, you know, you were uploading photos from somewhere else or your camera wall. And so we would find that we would work all week and then on Friday we'd ship a new version to those like 20, 30, 40.

• 6:30Speaker 04

  Testers and then we'd see what would happen over the weekend. And every weekend, those changes that we were making, we'd hear from people, oh, I tried the new filter. I tried this thing. It's going, it's going well. So that's what I look for a lot. And I think where it's time to maybe either pivot the company or move on to something else is when you feel like, and I've tried every idea that I have, or I've added 30 things and none of them are really sticking. Or people are kind of okay about it, but they're not excited about it. And that's maybe where you might want to step back and say, there's probably energy better spent somewhere else. Like the way it's not scientific, but when you feel like one unit of input, you're getting 10 units of output. That's a good feeling. When it feels like 10 units of input, you're getting one of output, it's time to pivot to something else.

• 7:11Marina Mogilko?

  I've heard you talk about how people are not using AI enough in their businesses. What do you think are top maybe two or three cases? How entrepreneurs can use Claude to automate some operations, which doesn't require you to be very technical?

• 7:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I was actually talking to a fellow friend who's a second or third time founder. And he was telling me, he's like, Mike, I'm really glad you launched Claude Max because Claude is my product manager. Claude is my lawyer. Claude is my, you know, founder therapist as well. And what he does is he has a Claude project for each of those disciplines. So he has his product manager Claude, he has his, you know, like contracts Claude. And he just uses that for all of those things. It's let him run a very lean initial company overall and do those pieces. And so even though he happens to be fairly technical, but he's not coding with Claude really in his day to day. He's actually set up Claude to be sort of a mini version of some of these disciplines already,

• 8:09Speaker 04

  even as the models, you know, continue to get more and more powerful in those ways. Even today, with the right context and the right sort of history around something, you really can start having these sort of per job function thought partners in there. And for an entrepreneur, for sure, you know, have, you know, a model that validates your idea or sees what you might be missing. Another one doing, you know, competitive intelligence to understand what's even out there and understanding those pieces. Of course, helping you build with code is another, another part. Bit too, but even beyond that, the way I like to think of it is when you grow a company, you want to go higher. I want the best CFO. I want, you know, the best head of product, et cetera. When you're an entrepreneur, especially like I was a first time entrepreneur without a big network,

• 8:54Speaker 04

  you're doing all those things yourself. So why not try to bring the best of what we know into that company via something like Claude?

• 9:01Marina Mogilko?

  What do you think is going to happen in two or three years? How are we going to progress in advance?

• 9:05Speaker 04

  I think part of it, and I was having this conversation this morning, even with some of our researchers, the, the progression or the, the dynamic that I see is if last year, or maybe the beginning of this year, these models, and I'll use Claude as the example, were really kind of assistants that were helping you with maybe a question at a time, or maybe a task, right? This year, they're moving more into collaborators where, especially if you watch somebody use Claude code, for example, they're actually delegating what would have taken them maybe 20, 30 minutes and Claude's going off and doing it. And then you're checking in and you're more on the sort of validating or verifying work, right? Going into next year, you're going to delegate even bigger chunks of time, or even like pieces of the job out to that.

• 9:49Speaker 04

  So it's not just, I have this very specific thing, please go do it. And it could be more sort of think of it, Claude as something that's in the loop of your business. So, hey Claude, watch for any new user feedback and maybe propose a change based on that. And you can imagine evolving that. Don't just propose a change, write the code to make the change and I'll check if it's a good idea or not. And then the next step there is Claude actually being an entire sort of coworker where it has a discipline. So not just a project that happens to be a good thought partner for product management, but an actual product manager in your company.

• 10:22Marina Mogilko?

  Like being active, right? Is that what you mean? Want to, I don't know, look at your ads and say like, hey, hey, I'm going to change this.

• 10:28Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 10:29Marina Mogilko?

  Just telling you. So when do you think that's going to happen?

• 10:31Speaker 04

  I think that is when, you know, it depends a little bit on the discipline with coding sort of tasks. I think within the year, we'll start seeing Claude be able to do those things. And I think in some of these other disciplines, maybe it's more like two or three years, but it's not wildly far away. And it's not that it's going to do everything perfectly. While there's still going to be this validation, human in the loop. Perspective it, but I think the big shift is going to be this autonomy and proactivity, where you're not having to give it explicit instructions every time. And instead, you can almost describe what kind of role you want it to play. And then it will be able to play that role as long as you've connected it to the right, you know, data sources.

• 11:08Marina Mogilko?

  And how active you want it to be, right? Because now it's basically just you chatting. I want the model to be talking to me as well proactively. Like, hey, I just noticed this. That would be cool.

• 11:18Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 11:18Marina Mogilko?

  Half a year ago, Dario Amade said 90% of code would be written by AI, or percentage of code is written by AI at Anthropic now.

• 11:26Speaker 04

  It depends on the product, but for our products that are sort of the closest to being written. So Claude code, for example, they're doing almost entirely the, the development of that is using Claude to develop Claude.

• 11:37Marina Mogilko?

  How has it changed the way you work?

• 11:38Speaker 04

  Well, it's let me, who I like being technical, but my day to day often is in, you know, external commitments or doing management. It's let me remain really technical, which is fun. So like, because we've oriented the code base to being able to be written by Claude, it means somebody like me can also contribute as well. So we launched our Claude for Chrome just, it was earlier this week. And I had a little bit of time on a business trip and I said, oh, I have two hours free. What am I going to do? I was like, I'm going to contribute to this thing that I know we're shipping in a couple of weeks. And so it's broadened the group of people that can contribute for sure. I think it's also kind of moved where the bottlenecks are, where we need to pay special attention to.

• 12:18Speaker 04

  So I think we've put more time upfront now into, all right, let's get clarity across our team about what needs to get done. So that, you know, we don't have this like amazing technology that can code really quickly, but the engineers are actually not even sure what the thing is that needs to get built. So that still remains very important, right? Being aligned, having that, that consistent vision. And then on the last part, which is that, you know, code's being ready to, you know, get committed and get reviewed. The number of pull requests and changes that are going into our code base is just dramatically accelerated. One of our developer productivity engineers shared this last week. We're just on an exponential there too. So we've had to re-engineer those systems too.

• 12:57Marina Mogilko?

  Crazy. Wow. Claude for Chrome. Mentioned, is it gonna fix email? Something done first like yesterday. I just came back from a business trip. My kids went to school and they were, because they don't really, some of them, like Lily, who doesn't speak English, she doesn't understand what's going on, but she was like, tomorrow's pajamas day. And I was asking my AI, like, is it really, and it's like, no, no, no, all good. Nothing's happening at school. And of course it would come and it's pajamas.

• 13:22Speaker 04

  Pajamas day, yeah.

• 13:23Marina Mogilko?

  And I'm like, oops.

• 13:25Speaker 04

  It was interesting that what we had in front of the company was, was like Claude triaging emails. And it's still, you know, probably too slow right now still to be like the main way in which you interact with your emails. But I went through, for example, I had a lot of pending LinkedIn invites. But I, and I wanted to, you know, ignore the ones that weren't real. But I wanted to make sure that if it was somebody from Anthropic or it sounded like they knew me, that we would like make sure that we captured those. And so I had Claude just kind of triage that whole inbox for, you know, an hour, actually. And it went.

• 13:56Marina Mogilko?

  Did you have to code something or you just asked?

• 13:58Speaker 04

  Just asked it. I was like, hey.

• 13:59Marina Mogilko?

  Look, it's Claude for Chrome, right? Just ask it to go through. Oh, wow.

• 14:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, visit LinkedIn, look at my invitation.

• 14:04Marina Mogilko?

  Basically your assistant in your browser.

• 14:07Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 14:07Marina Mogilko?

  Can you share some personal practices for how you use Claude?

• 14:10Speaker 04

  For me, it's anytime I've written something, I've found that I still want to take the first draft myself. Because I, you know, sometimes writing is thinking and that's really important that you're actually, at least for me, that I'm kind of expressing myself through writing. But before showing any human, basically anything I write that's of substance, I'll basically tell Claude and say, hey, I'm writing on this, like, what am I missing? Please challenge me on what I'm, I haven't said yet. And sometimes it'll give you a suggestion and it ranges from, I can't believe I forgot to address that. It would have been really embarrassing to share this document and not have this. And then sometimes it's, oh, wow, I wasn't even thinking about this dimension. It's something like very new and different. And actually I use it less for copy editing, but I use it a lot for challenging my ideas and figuring out how to, you know, kind of.

• 14:55Speaker 04

  Understand what a very smart person looking at this would ask as the next follow up question. And then can you kind of go from there?

• 15:02Marina Mogilko?

  Do you still type? You said you're writing or you would do voice?

• 15:06Speaker 04

  It's kind of a mix. Another thing I've done with Claude, sometimes when I'm like, I'm a little bit of writer's block. I need to get started, but I still want that experience of working through an idea myself is I will turn on the voice mode and just talk to it for 20 minutes sometimes. And at the end say, all right, that was a lot. Now can you organize that into some kind of, you know, real cohesive document that you can, that I can send?

• 15:28Marina Mogilko?

  When do you think it's going to happen that AI generates ideas better than humans? Cause where I see this going, you have this marketing AI, you have this product AI. What if we just combine all of this and tell it like, hey, AI, go identify niches in the market where you can build a business, build a business, launch ads, make me money. Like when is, do you think it's going to happen? And?

• 15:51Speaker 04

  Well, it's an interesting, one experiment we ran internally is, so we have a whole team that was starting to really focus on sort of Claude in the real world or, you know, frontier applications of Claude. And what can we learn by studying him? And one of the things that we had to do is actually run a vending machine. And now it's multiple vending machines here at the office. And so people could talk to Claude. It's a great paper. It's called Project Vend. And what's interesting is in some cases, it's very capable. Like it was able to track inventory, place backup orders, like do all these things, interact with the people who were talking to it. But as a pure sort of business, it still made some like mistakes, like overestimating demand, you know, overcharging or undercharging for something.

• 16:31Speaker 04

  So I think one aspect that we need to develop before it's fully ready to be sort of an entrepreneur in a box is a little bit more of that business sense and, and how to understand the market, like what is actually sellable, et cetera. But often we find with some steering or some feedback, it actually can do very, very well. So maybe initially it's still going to be, all right, partner with a person. Let's go, you know, maybe like business school one on one, like identify a problem or a market gap. Try it out, learn from it, see what worked and what didn't, and go and build from there. But what I think is also really interesting. Interesting is that you can also set up some experiments around like what are the things that people are searching for? Like what are the demands? Like what are the feedback that other products are getting that maybe a new product could feel better?

• 17:16Speaker 04

  And then have Claude both brainstorm the idea and then also go off and build it.

• 17:20Marina Mogilko?

  Do you think it's more for you as an entrepreneur also? Is it more encouraging or discouraging when AI is getting so powerful?

• 17:27Speaker 04

  I think for me, you know, having watched over the years, like the the friction to starting something new in some ways has decreased. In other in other cases is about the same, you know, it's there's more resources out there about what is it like to incorporate? Or raise money than there was when I was when I was doing even Instagram for the first time. But building stuff is still, you know, can still be a challenge and that needs needs to continue to get easier. So I always felt like there was more good ideas than there were, you know, products that kind of surface those ideas out there. So I think it's exciting to have more of that out there. Partially also because if the cost of creating that company goes down, you should also get new funding models. Like not every idea needs to be a huge venture funded, you know, billion dollar business.

• 18:09Speaker 04

  But if you have to build a whole tech team around it and you have to go higher and then it's going to require some funding. And so I'm very excited about call it the next five years of companies that can scale from the, you know, world changing venture funded, crazy ambitious companies, but also the ones that solve a problem really well for a particular demographic. And maybe remain a one to five person team along with AI.

• 18:33Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah, this is where I think this model, because I raised a venture capital as a creator, like I was the first creator to do this. I feel like this is the age where you invest in humans because now they can iterate through so many ideas in a year. And you want to back someone who has these ideas and can execute.

• 18:49Speaker 04

  A hundred percent.

• 18:50Marina Mogilko?

  For all the entrepreneurs who are watching, where should they start today if they want to start?

• 18:55Speaker 04

  I mean, I think there's two things that I think you think about that are unique to the moment versus like generally about starting companies. One is not building for where the models are today, but where you think that they can get to in one or two model generations. By the time you've built it, the models will have done that that move on. And so the way you do that is to push the models as hard as you can, like break them almost and say, wow, wouldn't it be great if

• 19:20Speaker 04

  one experiment somebody ran internally was like they gave Claude their whole to do list, you know, and like reminders or something. It was like, hey, Claude, go do all these things. I mean, really quickly hit a point where, well, it didn't have all the information about me, so it can't do it. Or this is before we had Claude for Chrome, you can't use my browser, so it can't like go and, you know, fill out this form that I needed to fill out. But then you can imagine, well, what if it could? All right, should I be building towards that? And does that feel like a five year journey or like a, you know,

• 19:45Marina Mogilko?

  Two months.

• 19:45Speaker 04

  Two months, six months, and things are accelerating. And so that's like a very big piece, I think, is like the best companies are building like ready to, you know, take advantage of the fact that the models will continue to to improve. And your advantage as an entrepreneur is that you don't have a legacy code base. You don't have people using a product in a particular way. You can build for that, you know, kind of inflection.

• 20:07Marina Mogilko?

  It's just so hard to predict, like if the model is going to take over your whole business niche, right?

• 20:12Speaker 04

  But I think that, you know, and it definitely hard to predict in the, you know, three year range. Although at that point, you can also kind of evolve the business. But like seeing what models were bad at six months ago or in are better at now, or like okay today, but could be better at the future. I think that can really come just from like constant contact with them.

• 20:30Marina Mogilko?

  And just start iterating.

• 20:31Speaker 05

  What would be your advantage compared to a model that could do the same thing in a year?

• 20:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, then it's like, yeah, it's very much so. It's like, if you can create that, if you're building at that edge and you understand your customer segment, then you're going to be the one that is going to best be suited to say, all right, you know what also got better? Like this aspect, and I get how that's going to connect to my customer segment. And I already have the relationships because people are still, they seek trust still, right? And, you know, somebody who understands their segment and has the relationships is going to, you know, be a more trustworthy source any day than like. A brand new person or a company that they've never interacted with.

• 21:08Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah, and I like how you said in one of your interviews that every product has this vibe.

• 21:12Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 21:13Marina Mogilko?

  And if you're building something with fashion, then it definitely has your vibe, right? That some people are going to connect with and that's going to be yours.

• 21:20Speaker 04

  Exactly, right. And that's your voice coming through there, even beyond whatever AI is going to provide.

• 21:24Marina Mogilko?

  What would be your advice to entrepreneurs who are looking to start a company? What niches do you think have the most potential?

• 21:30Speaker 04

  I think people are still fundamentally like human and still have like very human needs. So I think a lot of the aspects I still think about being really important are, for example, people's health, both physical and mental. And even though there's the beginning of AI helping with those aspects, I think there's so much more potential around that as well, right? How do we relate to ourselves? How do we develop our own, you know, understanding of where we're showing up well? Where we could be showing up better, how we can continue to evolve kind of as individuals, but it's also as teams or as partners. So that's another, an area that I think I'm excited for more companies to get formed in there. Fitness and performance coaching is another, another place that's important there too.

• 22:10Speaker 04

  I think there's also going to be this renaissance of being, you know, into the physical or the real world. You know, you had

• 22:17Marina Mogilko?

  Oh, yes.

• 22:18Speaker 04

  Very much this like, you know, social media like thing that was, you know, Instagram at its best was helping people get out and see the world in a different way. At scale, maybe it became more about like watching what other people were doing than going out yourself, right? So how do we get new companies and products that are about, you know, either exploring something new? Getting to see the city through a new light, participating in a civic way that's different. I think not all of these require AI, but done right, they could be encouraged by AI.

• 22:44Marina Mogilko?

  What should be entrepreneurs focusing on? Is it getting expertise in the niche where they're building? Or just being focused on like identifying those niches and iterating ideas?

• 22:53Speaker 04

  I think a lot of the most important companies are going to come from understanding those niches or those businesses. So a friend of mine is building a company in the construction space. And she went to all of the construction conferences, got to know people really building in that space and understanding what is like uniquely important about that. So this reminds me a lot of when I was at the Stanford D School, that whole process of Developing empathy and storytelling and really getting to the heart of what the needs are, where technology actually can have an impact on an industry or a person in a positive way. That ends up being very, very important. You know, I've also met another entrepreneur who works with AI for a very specific type of legal practice.

• 23:34Speaker 04

  And they're, you know, going off to, you know, states in the US that aren't the most tech forward necessarily, spending a lot of time with people who are in that particular discipline. So that kind of expertise is, I think, what is going to differentiate the companies because it's going to be easier to build. But that knowledge of like what actually to build and how to build very specifically for that is going to be what's really valuable.

• 23:57Marina Mogilko?

  What about marketing? Cause it feels like, okay, ideas, I can generate a lot of ideas. Claude can help me, then I build the product with Claude or Replit or Lovable. What was going to happen to marketing? Everyone's talking about like, hey, everybody, what it should be on social media. Because otherwise, how do you market your idea? What do you think?

• 24:15Speaker 04

  That's definitely evolved from when we were building Instagram. The way you got your, you know, product out there, especially a social product like Instagram was for us, people sharing their Instagram creations to Facebook and to Twitter at the time. And then seeing that link and then finding that it's definitely shifted to much more of this sort of creator led, you know, whether it's Instagram or on TikTok and people telling those stories and discovering those products. It's interesting watching that evolution now and kind of wondering like, well, what comes after that as well? You know, is it going to be still like algorithmic recommendations? Are we going to return to, oh, like word of mouth? I really like this thing and it solved my very specific problem and I'm going to share it with you. And maybe there's some combination of those two that needs to, needs to happen.

• 25:00Speaker 04

  But I completely agree that the, what will also differentiate beyond an understanding of a market is also the ability to tell the story around that.

• 25:07Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah. What was going to happen to content, you think in two or three years? Cause my feed is like maybe 50% AI, something like crazy going on. Or I see an AI generated image.

• 25:18Speaker 04

  It's been interesting. I like trying to use social products from all around the world. And for a while, I was using a social media app that was like very popular in China. And the thing that struck me was that you had creators that were really good at AI-generated, sort of fantastical architecture. And they had a real following, even though their work was all generated, because they had a voice. And so I think that is the next piece that not a lot of people are doing well, which is, yes, you can be using AI for generating videos or text. But if it's just generic, or if it's just, you know, kind of a bunch of random things that you manage to generate, I don't think that's going to generate following, or I think it's not going to generate like a real presence on these platforms. Whereas,

• 26:02Speaker 04

  I remember there was a photographer, that early Instagram photographer, like probably one of our first 10,000 users. And he took a photo of the same hill, like outside his window, like every day. And it was like, that was like a photographic practice that he had. And that was really cool, because then his followers could see that he had a view of the world and kind of a perspective. And I think the same thing needs to be true to succeed as a creator, even if you're using AI tools.

• 26:26Speaker 00

  UKG is the workforce operating platform with unified HR, payroll, and workforce management. Built to solve the unique challenges of frontline work. Powered by People First AI and decades of labor data, UKG turns workforce intelligence into real time decisions around staffing, pay, compliance, and productivity, enabling every worker to confidently take action as work happens. Because when work works, everything works. Learn more at ukg.com/work. UKG, HR, pay, and workforce management.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  Welcome to the 50th Hunger Games. Witness the beginning of the revolution.

• 27:00Speaker 02

  Hey Mitch, you've been trying to take down these games from the start.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  Filmed for IMAX.

• 27:04Speaker 02

  Make them remember you.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, November 20th, rated PG-13.

• 27:11Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah, that's fascinating. Let's talk about people who don't have entrepreneurial ambitions, but they're like, I want to work for a company. Your hiring strategy at Anthropic has changed recently, right? You're hiring more high-level people, is that right?

• 27:26Speaker 04

  It's kind of a shift. So the way I think about it is you want people that are going to be defined more about the problems that they want to solve and how they can creatively solve them in a very specific sort of, I know JavaScript and I'm going to work in this exact environment. And so I'm still really drawn to the folks that on the weekends or in their, you know, spare time are prototyping ideas. Like they came up with something, they're bringing that even to the interview process. You know, some of our product managers that we've talked to have had like a culture of experimentation that they've been working through. And I think that's very, very interesting. I really look for that when I'm hiring. The interesting thing is it's not so different than when I was hiring for Instagram. The people I always gravitated towards were ones that, you know,

• 28:09Speaker 04

  you talk to them on a Monday morning, tell you all about the new thing that they got interested. It doesn't have to even be tech-related, but there is that sort of curiosity.

• 28:16Marina Mogilko?

  Excitement, yeah.

• 28:17Speaker 04

  Exactly, and I still absolutely look for, look for that as well. And then in terms of the kind of makeup of the teams that we want to build, you know, we, we haven't had a like summer internship program. So we've tended less to hire the like kind of fresh college grads. But I've been talking to a lot of people who maybe are going through college now or recent graduates, you know, they're also enabling themselves via AI to sort of understand the market, understand the dynamics, be entrepreneurial in their own way, even if they're not starting their own companies, and then coming into companies and telling that story.

• 28:48Marina Mogilko?

  How do you learn that? How do you learn how to become entrepreneurial or generate ideas? Are you teaching your kids that?

• 28:53Speaker 04

  I, I mean, our kids are pretty young. I do try to, to, to encourage the idea of like, observe the world and be, you know, open to what is there, you know? The thing I did early on was I had a little, yeah, little notebook that I would carry around everywhere and basically just always kind of writing and ideating and like making space for that sort of quiet ideation time, you know, is, is really useful. And one of the ways I've seen people use Claude. You know, if you ask Claude for one idea, it'll generate an idea. Maybe it'll be a good one. But the thing that's unique about it is it can also generate 50 or 100 ideas. So practice that I find is useful is give it, you know, five or 10, and then ask it to fill in the next 30. And maybe one of those sparks something else. There's a lot of research where asking people to brainstorm together in a room

• 29:38Speaker 04

  is not as effective as asking one person to write down 10 ideas and pass those 10 ideas to the next person, have them kind of generate the next 10. So you can simulate that same process, but with AI now.

• 29:48Marina Mogilko?

  What is your ritual for generating ideas? You said quiet time. Do you go on a walk or?

• 29:53Speaker 04

  Walks are really helpful for me. I also just like any kind of repeated action. I really like, I got one of those Peloton rowing machines. And I found some of these are like, again, it's a very repetitive action. But then your mind can kind of start wandering and start thinking about what those different things are. And also, you need to give your brain the opportunity to make new connections while you're not focusing on it. And then maybe later it'll come and say, oh, yeah, that actually does connect really well.

• 30:15Marina Mogilko?

  Is it like every day that you make time for this?

• 30:17Speaker 04

  I wish it were every day. It's more probably like once or twice a week these days. But I always, every time I do it, I'm like, I really should be doing this, you know, more regularly. And I'll also be excited to like, sit down and like, put pen to paper and then share that with the team.

• 30:30Marina Mogilko?

  What about going back to your kids? I have two small kids. And sometimes I read these articles where like, oh, people who just graduated from college are struggling to find jobs because a lot of entry level jobs being replaced with AI. And I'm like, okay, I'm worrying about myself. And now I have to worry about them as well. What are you teaching your kids? What do you think they're gonna do in 10 years when they go out to the job market?

• 30:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's so far hard to predict like what that market looks like. I have a six and a four year old. So it's gonna be, the what might change a lot. And even some of the how will change. But I think there's a few things that are kind of worth calling out. One is, I talked a little bit before about being curious and observant about the world. That remains really powerful. They did this whole like, whole school event at my kid's school around like, even having the kindergarteners observe what could be better about the school. And then like, create posters about like, ideas about how to improve them.

• 31:24Marina Mogilko?

  That's a great mental exercise for kids.

• 31:26Speaker 04

  And like, you can ask that question, you know? Some of the ideas are like creative and some of them are kind of silly, but even like having that mentality is something I think will serve anybody well as they grow up. Cause that's a change that you could try to make within your school or your community or your company and so forth. So I think that piece matters. And I think the other one that should remain constant, like there was a lot of energy around like learn to code, everybody should learn to code. And I think too many people interpreted that as like, you should learn Python. And it's like, yes, you can learn Python. That's going to be helpful through to something. But more than that, it's can you think in terms of systems? Can you think systematically? And the folks that internalized that, I think, even with the advent of AI generating coding, you can still apply those same techniques.

• 32:09Speaker 04

  We're the ones that were just like, oh yeah, I learned to code and now I'm like feeling adrift because of that. So I think what I hope to encourage in my kids is that that sense of curiosity and observation. And then also this ability to think in terms of systems, like how do these things interrelate? You know, whenever they they got, because of all the politics and news, they were like interested in tariffs. And like my wife had a really wonderful sort of interactive example of like how, you know, interdependent economies might interact. And you could see their eyes kind of their gears kind of turn. So that kind of like, explain the system, don't just explain the facts.

• 32:41Marina Mogilko?

  Love that. Can we talk a little bit about your English? Cause I started my YouTube journey talking about English, because I'm originally from Russia. I came with an accent and then I learned how to speak like an American. You sound like an American. Like, how did that happen?

• 32:55Speaker 04

  I think it was a couple of things. So one was I was interested in music from a very early age and especially like American and British bands. I loved Oasis. Actually, I'm going to go see them in a couple of weeks. I'm excited, but I never saw them.

• 33:07Marina Mogilko?

  Are they coming here?

• 33:07Speaker 04

  They're coming to Pasadena, so I'm going to play there. But like, if you're singing that language, you know, you have to kind of hear, you know, for it to even rhyme or sound good, you have to kind of hear yourself. And so I think music was a big part of it as well. And then we moved around a bunch when I was a kid and the one constant were international schools. And so, you know, starting from a fairly early age, I was bilingual, but only lived in the States when I turned 18. And so there was some words that I had never really said out loud because I just read them and then. Internalize them over here, but it is funny. I mean, we've had maybe had this experience too. And now I'm been here for a while. I'm a citizen here now, but will never feel fully like I'm from here

• 33:49Speaker 04

  because I grew up in Brazil, but when I go to Brazil, I don't feel fully there. So kind of from both and from neither now.

• 33:55Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah, that's super cool. I wanted to ask for advice for all the immigrants who are watching. Do you think if we want to build a company in AI, do you think it makes sense to move to Silicon Valley? Or again, with AI, doesn't matter where you are.

• 34:08Speaker 04

  I think the barrier to creating products is really, really shortened. We're now, you know, before in Brazil, especially when I was growing up there, there wasn't really a talent market of really good engineers. I mean, now there is much more because there's been generations of companies that have been created, but that might not be the case for every single kind of city or every single country. AI can definitely help there as well. There's also such a broader set of, you know, information and content around what to look for in a co-founder. How do you think about that initial idea? How do you build from there? How do you market? And what I've been really excited about is, you know, whenever I talk to, for example, Brazilian entrepreneurs where I'm from, who are understanding uniquely Brazilian problems or uniquely Brazilian opportunities around our unique payment system.

• 34:50Speaker 04

  You know, how Brazilian, the economy works, like the public safety questions, and then applying AI or applying technology to those problems. I think there is a tremendous opportunity there. And one of the things I get excited about is in the past, if you had some idea there, your only path would have been, well, I hope I can go fundraise from Silicon Valley VCs. I think there's much more of an opportunity to build that locally and then try to fundraise if you need to.

• 35:17Marina Mogilko?

  You don't need funds to build an MVP now.

• 35:19Speaker 04

  You can at least get to that point where you've gotten something exciting.

• 35:22Marina Mogilko?

  Wanted to wrap up the language part.

• 35:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:24Marina Mogilko?

  Do you think language learning is going to be replaced by AI?

• 35:26Speaker 04

  I really think about this because, you know, I, I've been out of Brazil for long enough where all of the sort of like colloquialism or slang has moved on and I just haven't lived there in a long time. And so I've used, even though I fluent in Portuguese, I'll now use Claude and say, you know, I'm about to send this to somebody who's like my age, like, do I sound old or do I sound like out of date? And I'll be like, well, you might want to use this. This kind of language instead or something, you know, kind of nuanced there. I still think the the value of learning the nuances of languages is still important. You know, we went to Korea with a lot of the Ar- Anthropic team in March and Claude is actually quite good at Korean. We heard from people on the ground that it's the best of the of the of the models at Korean.

• 36:07Speaker 04

  But even so, they said it still sounds like a really cool Korean that like grew up in LA and then like moved back. And I was like, that's nuanced. Like, I'm not sure.

• 36:15Marina Mogilko?

  American vibes.

• 36:16Speaker 04

  Yeah. So how do we like continue to push that as well? But, you know, we're definitely getting to the point where that sort of vision of like you can be in a country and, you know, interact, you know, that with.

• 36:27Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah, AI is going to become natural at some point. And then do you think there's going to be a wearable that we're wearing and it just interacts for you, listens for you?

• 36:35Speaker 04

  I think so, although there's also the value of having like technology free interactions. And so there's, I think, always still going to be that the appeal of, I actually learned this language. I'm going to go and be with somebody in full presence rather than feel like we're being intermediated by technology.

• 36:51Marina Mogilko?

  Do you have any rituals, any hard no's because you're a dad, you're a husband? But you're also a CPO at this huge company. Can you talk about your day to day?

• 37:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, I really focus on, you know, the the routines that kind of anchor my day are, you know, for a long time I resisted being a morning person. But now I've just realized that.

• 37:09Marina Mogilko?

  You have to. In the US, you have to. It's like 4:00 AM people everywhere.

• 37:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, and the kids, you know, that they're going to start school at eight, then you got to get up early. But we have breakfast together and we wake up early enough where we actually have time to dedicate to breakfast. And that ends up being like this really great morning ritual. And sometimes we'll also do, you know, like longer dinners with the kids and like get to download the day. But those are more unpredictable. Sometimes they're exhausted and they just want to get through it and go into, you know, bedtime. So breakfast is a more reliable kind of opportunity to kind of set intentions and think about the day. So we'll we'll always we'll always kind of anchor on that. And then we read to them every night and that's been fun to see the evolution from, you know, you're reading your very simple board books to now picking up these stories. And and then now our six year old can sort of start reading to our four year old, which is also very cute.

• 37:54Marina Mogilko?

  Oh, that's the best. They can take care of themselves.

• 37:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's kind of that. So I think like those that that start and the the start and finish anchors are really valuable. It's like no matter what, you know, even if later I'm going to have to take back some project that I'm doing, like really stopping and spending that time. And like anchoring either side of the day has been great.

• 38:11Marina Mogilko?

  Anything around travel? Do you have to travel a lot?

• 38:13Speaker 04

  The travel pieces I've tried to do, one that was a newer thing and it's not even using very much AI. But I discovered time shifter this year and it's been like the biggest game changer. Yeah, it's like the jet lag thing. And when we were in Viva Tech, actually where we met, I used that app going, you know, into that trip and it was, you know, the rest of the team would laugh at me because I was like, all right, everybody stop drinking coffee. It's, you know, three in the afternoon and, you know, start taking this, take melatonin. It really worked. So now I'm like a real believer in that kind of piece.

• 38:43Marina Mogilko?

  Couple of final questions. Do you ever wake up at night and think like, oh my God, where the world is going with AI? Like, because you see all the headlines, right? And all the things happening. Are you optimistic or pessimistic?

• 38:56Speaker 04

  I'm generally optimistic, but I'm also maybe like cautious optimism or like that. It's optimism if you believe you can actually help steer things towards a good outcome. So one of the biggest things I want to do coming out of the artifact experience, I knew I wanted to go work at a frontier model lab. I thought that that's where, you know, the maximum impact that was going to have in the next few years. But I really wanted to be somewhere where I felt really aligned with the, you know, the founding team and the kind of core ethics of the company around how they thought about scaling AI, right? So it's not just build the most powerful AI you possibly can. It's also dedicate effort to understanding how these models work and how we can control them and how we can responsibly scale them.

• 39:37Speaker 04

  And so there's definitely, you know, inside Anthropic and outside, a lot of conversations around like, well, this could be really positive for humanity. It also could go quite badly. And there's going to be economic impacts. There's going to be labor impacts. There's models that we don't understand yet and how they scale. So I wanted to be somewhere where we were also asking and working on those questions alongside the, you know, more purely like, let's just make the models really good.

• 40:03Marina Mogilko?

  So you think, do you think we're going to have universal basic income at some stage? And would companies like Anthropic sponsor it or?

• 40:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that like how we help society navigate is very much an open question. I think that the, the, the big open question that we'll also have to tackle is what is, where do people draw meaning? From in a place where not everybody has to work anymore, like what is the source of both meaning and challenges? And is it, you know, finding ways in which people stay engaged? Is it that a lot of people will be entrepreneurial? As you mentioned, not everybody is going to have that kind of drive. And so for those folks, what is the, you know, what is the community that they find? What is their personal challenge that they find even beyond that that retains that meaning?

• 40:41Marina Mogilko?

  What do you think?

• 40:43Speaker 04

  I think, you know, I look to sports as a kind of an interesting example where we draw a lot of meaning and sort of like high stakes from an environment that is actually completely fabricated. And so not everything should be exactly like sports, but whether it's, you know, who's contributing the most to their city or their community, or who's like mastered this particular thing? Or even artistic pursuits, like, you know, getting really into art or music or something like that. I find inspiration in those fields and maybe more of people will draw meaning from those kinds of pursuits where the yardstick is not necessarily, how much money did you make? Or is your company at the top of the leaderboard, but more around, okay, I have some personal yardstick that I'm working towards.

• 41:27Marina Mogilko?

  Like a hobby, like some likes, that sounds like a dream life, right? When you can just focus on your hobby and have all the basics.

• 41:33Speaker 04

  And if there's enough of the, you know, challenge or meaning in there to still, to still matter.

• 41:37Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah. What are your top three favorite AI apps?

• 41:40Speaker 04

  That's a good question. Of course, Claude Code. I spent a lot of time like coding in Claude Code and doing that. One interesting one I've been using, you know, for a long time, I would like, you know, log my meals and like my macros and protein. It's always like such a huge like annoyance where you're like, I don't know, I'm going to like estimate and like, what's the portion size? And all these years of computer vision research, I think, just got completely taken over by just feeding them into an LLM. And so I've been using like an AI powered meal tracking app that does such a good, you just take a photo and you go back to your life.

• 42:11Marina Mogilko?

  And it has all your proteins and everything.

• 42:13Speaker 04

  It's amazing and it like estimates your, your like portion sizes, et cetera, levels. But what I love is it's actually very much a technology that hopefully it makes me healthier, but also just helps me stay present where I'm not spending like the extra five minutes on my phone finding the thing. And it can just be like, take a photo, like move on and then, and then kind of go on and go from there as well. And then. Last but not least, I also just like anything that has to do with learning. So like any like AI powered learning, I've been enjoying with my kids using dual language A B C now to learn some of the alphabet, but also seeing what they've been doing, for example, is like advancing language learning. So anything that like brings in that kind of AI powered, you know, conversational piece.

• 42:58Speaker 04

  Within Claude, we launched learning mode recently to like not just give people answers, but help people understand and learn and kind of iterate from there as well.

• 43:05Marina Mogilko?

  Thank you so much, Mike.

• 43:07Speaker 04

  Of course, thanks for having me.

• 43:07Marina Mogilko?

  Very inspiring. Thank you.

• 43:09Speaker 00

  UKG is the workforce operating platform with unified HR, payroll and workforce management. Built to solve the unique challenges of frontline work. Powered by people first AI and decades of labor data. UKG turns workforce intelligence into real time decisions around staffing, pay, compliance and productivity, enabling every worker to confidently take action as work happens. Because when work works, everything works. Learn more at ukg.com/work. UKG, HR, Pay and Workforce Management.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  Welcome to the 50th Hunger Games. Witness the beginning of the revolution.

• 43:44Speaker 02

  Hey Mitch, you've been trying to take down these games from the start.

• 43:46Speaker 01

  Film for IMAX.

• 43:48Speaker 02

  Make them remember you.

• 43:50Speaker 01

  The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, November 20th, rated PG 13.