Silicon Valley Girl: AI, Tech and Career Growth - Anthropic CPO: How to Start a $100M Company as a Solo Founder | Mike Krieger

Episode Date: September 19, 2025

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/⁠⁠Companies & Products: ⁠⁠https://Marinamogilko.co⁠⁠Instagram: ⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/ ⁠⁠YouTube: ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@SiliconValleyGirl⁠⁠LinkedIn: ⁠⁠linkedin.com/in/marinamogilko⁠⁠X: ⁠⁠https://x.com/siliconvalleymm⁠⁠

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Tickets on sale now at Yamavat Theater.com, only at Yamava Resort and Casino, celebrating its 40th anniversary. U.N. must be 21 to enter. In the AI age, anyone can become a $100 million entrepreneur, build a company solo. Do you think it is possible now? I think it's very... 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.

The next step there is Claude actually being an entire sort of coworker. It's going to do everything perfectly well. 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, yeah, something like Claude. And it's not just hype. Clod 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? 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. 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. It's good to be here.

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, like build a company solo. Do you think it is possible now or we're still away from that? 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 too 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 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. Do you think being technical is crucial to building a large company these days or it is unnecessary with all the existing tools?

I think, you know, with increasing things like Claude, 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, because that's, like, the biggest thing that I've got, like, in the age of kind of mobile apps first emerging, I would 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 would be people that said, oh, I have a novel idea for a social

app or a dating app or a game. And so many 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 tools aren't there where they're not necessarily going to get you 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 World Cook Cloud Code on the weekends and then

share it internally like, look what I built and I don't code at all. 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? It was our second company. I started a second company with the same co-founder's 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'd give you a feed of different articles and stories that you might be interested in. And at a really nuanced level, like, 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 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 the right thing was to move on from it, was really challenging. And the pressure was on, right? It was right after Instagram. It was. And, you know, and that, you know, in some of the realization. ways that was really a hindrance. When do you make this decision about an idea that you show to maybe like 20 people? When do you say like, hey, this is it? Or do I keep pushing? 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 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 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? Because you're out and about, 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 roll. 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 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.

and people, oh, I tried the new filter. I tried this thing. 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. 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. Yeah. So I was actually talking to a fellow friend

who's a second or third time founder. And he was telling me, he was like, Mike, I'm really glad you launched Claude Max because Claude. is my product manager, Claude is my lawyer, Claude is my 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, even as the models will 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 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 part of it 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, 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. What do you think is going to happen in two or three years? How are we going to progress in advance? I think part of it, and I was having this conversation this morning, even with some of

our researchers, the progression of the dynamic that I see is if last year, maybe the beginning of this year, these models, and I'll use Claude as the example, were really kind of assistance 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. 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 is 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. 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. Like being active, right? Is that what you mean?

When it, I don't know, look at your ads and say like, hey, hey, I'm going to change this. Exactly. Yeah. So when do you think that's going to happen? I think that is when 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 well. There's still going to be this validation human in the loop aspect of 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 wanted to play. And then it will be able to play that role as long as you've connected it to the right data sources. And how active you wanted to be, right? Because now is 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. Exactly. Half a year ago, Dario Amadei said 90% of code would be written by AI, or percentage of code is written by AI at Anthropic now. 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 development of that is using Clod to develop Cloud.

How has it changed the way you work? 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. 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 Cloud for Chrome just 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. So I think we've put more time up front 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 consistent vision. And then on the last part, which is that, you know, codes 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 dramatic.

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. Crazy. Wow. Claude, for Chrome, you mentioned, is it going to 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 was like, no, no, no, all good. Nothing's happening at school. And of course, it would come in his pajamas.

Yeah. No. Oops. It was interesting. The demo we had in front of the company was like cloud 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 wanted to, you know, ignore the ones that weren't real.

But I wanted to make sure that if there was somebody from Anthropic or it. sounded like they knew me that we would like make sure that we, uh, captured those. And so I had Claude just kind of triage that whole inbox for, you know, an hour actually. And it went, did you have to code something where you just asked? Just asked it. I was like, hey, look at it. So that's Claude for Chrome, right? Just ask it to go through. Oh, wow. Yeah. Visit LinkedIn. Look at my invitation. It's basically your assistant in your browser. Exactly. Can you share some personal practices for how you use Claude? For me, it's any time I've written something. I found that I still want to take the first draft myself because 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 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 used it less for copy editing, but I use it a lot for challenging my ideas and figuring out how to, you know, kind of 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? Do you still type? You said you're writing? Or you would do voice. 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 a 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, yeah, that I can send? When do you think is going to happen that AI generates ideas better than humans? Because where I see this going, you have this marketing AI, you have this product AI.

What if we just combine all 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, do you think it's going to happen? 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 and the real world or, you know, frontier applications of cloud 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 some things. 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 how to have. 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 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 and then have clod both brainstorm the idea and then also go off and build it do you think it's more for you as an entrepreneur also is it more encouraging or discouraging when AI is getting so powerful 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 or raise money than there 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 to continue to get it 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, a billion dollar business. 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 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. 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 that, 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. For all the entrepreneurs who are watching, where should they start today if they want to start? I mean, I think there's two things that I think you'd 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 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 one experiment somebody ran internally was like they gave Claude their whole to-do list, you know, in 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 was before we had Cloud 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, two months and 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. It's just so hard to predict, like, if the model's going to take over your whole business niche, right? But I think that, you know, and it's definitely hard to predict in the, you know, three-year range. At that point, you can also kind of evolve the business. But, like, seeing what models were bad at six months ago or 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. And just start iterating. What would be your advantage compared to a model that could do the same thing in a year? Yeah. I mean, then it's like, yeah, it's very much so. 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 you

school 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 relationship. 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 it. Yeah. And I like how you said in one of your interviews that every product has this vibe. Yes. 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 your. Exactly. Right. And that's your voice coming through there, even beyond whatever AI is going to provide. What would be your advice to entrepreneurs for looking to start a company? What niches do you think have the most potential? 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 place that's important there, too. 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 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 them 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. 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?

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 it 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.

And I've also met another entrepreneur who works with AI for a very specific type of legal practice. And they're going off to states in the U.S. 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 what actually to build and how to build very specifically for that is going to be what's really valuable. What about marketing? Because it feels like, okay, ideas, I can generate a lot of ideas. Clot can help me. Then I build the product with Claude or Replit or lovable. What's going to happen to marketing? Everyone's talking about like, hey, everybody should be on social media because otherwise how do you market your idea? What do you think? That's definitely evolved. When we were building Instagram, the way you got your 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 crater 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 or are we going to

return to how like board 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 happen. But I completely agree that what will also differentiate beyond an understanding of a market is also the ability to tell the story around that. Yeah. What was going to happen to content, you think, in two or three years? Because my feed is like maybe 50% AI, something like crazy going going on or I see an AI generated image. 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 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. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work,

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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? 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 than a very specific sort of I know JavaScript and I'm going to work in this exact environment. 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, if you talked to them on a Monday morning, tell you all about the new thing that they got interested.

It doesn't have to be tech related, but there is that sort of curiosity. It's excitement, yeah. Exactly. And I still absolutely 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 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 we were 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. How do you learn how do you learn how to become entrepreneurial or generate ideas? Are you teaching your kids that? I mean, their kids are pretty young. I do try 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 notebook that I would carry around everywhere and basically just always kind of writing

and ideating and like making space for that. that sort of quiet ideation time, you know, 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 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. What is your ritual for generating ideas? You said, quiet time. Do you go in a walk? Walks are really helpful for me. I also just like any kind of repeated action I really like, I got one of those pellets on rowing machines. And I found something as you're like, it's like a very repetitive action. But then your mind can kind of start wandering and start thinking about what those different things. 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. Is it like every day that you make time for this? I wish it were every day. It's more probably like once or twice a week these days. But I always, every time I did, 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. What about going back to your kids? I have two small kids. And sometimes I read these articles where like, oh, people who are, 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 going to do in 10 years when they go out to the job market? Yeah, it's so hard to predict what that market looks like, right? It was a six and a four-year-old. So it's going to 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 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 kids school around like even having the kindergartners observe what could be better about the school and then like create posters about like ideas

about how to improve them. That's a great mental exercise for kids. And I just even ask that question, you know, and 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 because 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. 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 to something. But more than that, it's can you think in terms of systems? Can you think systematically? And the folks that internalize that, I think, even with the actualized that, I think, even with the

advent of AI generating coding, you can still apply those same techniques. We're the ones that were just like, oh, yeah, I learned to code and now I'm like feeling a drift 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 it's 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. Love that. Can we talk a little bit about your English? Because 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? 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. So I loved Oasis. I'm actually going to go see them in a couple weeks. I'm excited, but I never saw them. Oh, are they coming here?

They're coming to Pasadena, so I'm going to reply down. 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 had just read them and then internalized them over here.

But it is funny. I mean, we've had this experience too. We're now, you know, I've been here for all. I'm a citizen here now. But we'll never feel fully like I'm from here 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. Yeah.

That's super cool. I wanted to ask for advice for all the immigrants who are watching. Do you think if you 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. I think the barrier to creating products is really, really, you know, 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 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 systems, 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. You don't need funds to

build an opinion. You can at least get to that point where you've gotten something exciting. Wanted to wrap up the language part? Yeah. Do you think language learning is going to be replaced by AI? I really think about this because, you know, 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 flew it 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 it'll be like, well, you might want to use this kind of language instead or something, you know, kind of nuance there. I still think the value of learning the nuances of languages is still important. You know, we went to Korea with a lot of the 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 models at Korean. But even so they said, it still sounds like a really cool Korean that like grew up in L.A. And then like moved back.

And I was like, that's nuanced. Like I'm not sure. American vibes. 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. know, 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? 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 appeal of 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. Do you have any rituals, any hard nose 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? Yeah, I really focus on, you know, 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 like kids are

in the U.S. you have to. It's like 4 a.m. people everywhere. Yeah, and the kids, you know, they're going to start school at 8, then you've 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 a lot of.

longer dinners with the kids and, like, get to download the day. But those are more unpredictable. So, 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 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 pretty simple board books to now picking up these stories. And then now our six-year-old can start to start reading to our four-year-old, which is also very cute. Oh, that's the best. They can take care of themselves.

Yeah, it's cool. You can kind of be that. So I think like those start and the start and finish anchors are really valuable. So like no matter what, you know, even if later I'm going to pick 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. Anything around travel? Do you have to travel a lot or? 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 like the jet like thing. And when we were in Vibata, actually where we met, I used that. app going, you know, into that trip. And it was, you know, the best of the team would laugh at me because I was like, all right, everybody, stop drinking coffee. It's, you know, three in them afternoon. And, you know, start taking this, take melaton. But it really worked. So now I'm like a real believer in that kind of piece. A 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? I'm generally optimistic, but I'm also maybe a 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 wanted 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 I 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. 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. So do you think we're going to have universal basic income at some stage? And would companies like Anthropic sponsor it or? Yeah, I think that like how we help society navigate is very much an open question. I think that the big open question that we'll also have to tackle is what is where do people draw meaning from in a place for not everybody else 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 what do you think 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. Yeah, like a hobby. Like some, like that sounds like a dream life, right? When you can just focus on your hobby and have all the basics. And if there's enough of the, you know, challenge or meaning in there to still matter.

Yeah. What are your top three favorite AI apps? That's a good question. Of course, Claude Code. I spent a lot of time like coding in CloudCode 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. So it's 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. And it has all your proteins and everything. And it's amazing. And it like estimates your like portion sizes, et cetera. It's the main point. But what I love is it's actually very much a technology that hopefully makes me healthier, but also just helps me stay present where I'm not spending like the extra five minutes of my phone finding the thing.

And it can just be like, pick a photo, like move on and then kind of go on and go from there as well. And then last one, at least like I also just like anything that has to do with learning. So like any like AI powered learning, I've been enjoying both my kids using dual-lango-a-bc 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. Within Cloud, 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. Thank you so much, Mike.

Of course. Thanks for having me. Very inspiring. Relax and let Ralph's delivery handle your grocery shopping this week. We start with only the freshest items, then review your list and carefully choose each one. Then we pack it all up and deliver it in as little as 30 minutes, so you can feel confident it's what you ordered. Fresh groceries, your way, with Ralph's delivery and pickup.

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