Anthropic’s hunt for the next Claude Code

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You're never going to be able to fully replicate the feeling of two or three of us against the world. We have X amount of dollars. And if we don't manage to make something work, we're going to have to go wind it down, return the money to investors. That's like you and Kevin back in the day. Exactly. What's Anthropic's next big product after Claude Code? This week on the show, we've got Mike Krieger, the co-founder of Instagram, who now leads the team at Anthropic working on its moonshot bets. One of the dark days of my Anthropic tenure. Name me a 3-5-B-2 and I can tell you why I ended up that way. Okay. Mike and I recorded this conversation in person on the sidelines of Anthropic's recent Claude Code conference in San Francisco, where the company announced a big new compute deal with Elon Musk. Hence you guys apparently going to space with Elon. Exactly, right? Yeah, finding new sources of unexpected sources of compute. We get into what Mike is working on now, Anthropic's fierce competition with OpenAI, and the human work that Mike thinks will continue to matter even as AI gets better and better. This is Access. Mike, it's good to see you here at Claude Code and SF. I was thinking back to our last conversation and you were more recent in your labs tenure, but it's been a few months now. Yeah, it's been almost four months now. For almost four months now. For people who don't understand labs, I'd actually like to start there because it's a pretty unique setup. We were talking about it when I was at the office a couple of months ago. What is it? What is the mission of labs and Anthropic? Yeah, in a nutshell, the way I think about labs. I would call this Labs V2, and we can go into what Labs V1 sort of did and what Labs V2 is meant to do. But I think of it as doing two things. One is closing the gap between what Claude is theoretically capable of and how that actually shows up for people in their kind of everyday lives, right? So what products or prototypes or projects do we build that sort of illustrate how you could unlock more of that sort of potential, like close more of that gap? We can unpack what that means. And the second piece is, where are the sort? I think it's really sort of advanced scouts figuring out where the model is going to need to go in the future to meet different needs for people. And so, you know, a successful labs project might look like a prototype that we build and then say, you know what? The models actually aren't good enough to do this yet. Let's put this on the shelf and we'll revisit it, you know, next model release or we'll use that as an evaluation for future model development and basically iterate from there. So what, you know, versus, you know, a product lab at a pure product company where maybe the success criteria are different. So, you know, I mean, I don't know what the success criteria is. Did you ship a product or not? There's other ways in which this labs initiative can sort of inform the direction of where Anthropic is going. And labs has produced some hits, right? It's Cloud Code is one, MCP. What are the others? Ancient Skills is another, you know, big piece from from labs as well. And then maybe I'll talk about one other one, which was one we didn't ship at the time, but actually was one of those research informing ones, which was computer use. So, so I joined Anthropic May 2024. We had a two year anniversary, we call it. Is it an anniversary? Yeah, everything's ants, which I resisted at first. No, we don't dog food, we eat ant food. Oh, my God. Two year anniversary. And when we started, you know, one of the first we were spinning up labs and one of the first projects that was pitched was, hey, why don't we try having Cloud use a computer and do computer use? And this was in the Sonnet what era? This is Sonnet 3.5. So the first model I was sort of part of. Launching was Sonnet 3.5. That was my third week. Like we joke that Anthropic doesn't do onboarding projects. They just stick like a very hard project with you. And mine was like, right, great. Week three, like ship a model and actually 3.5 is a really interesting model because it's one of the first ones that really unlocked some coding use cases. Not quite full agentic coding, but, you know, the beginnings of that. So we put Sonnet 3.5 and we built a computer use product around it and it had a lot of problems. Like it was too slow at doing. The computer use piece. It was not accurate enough. Like it couldn't see very well. And so it would see the screen and say, oh, I need to click on that button and then click on something else. That was actually very helpful to have built that sort of not quite working harness because then when Sonnet 3, at the time we call it 3.5 v2, we can get into that. That was one of the dark days of my Anthropic tenure, naming it 3.5 v2. And I can tell you why we ended up that way. And then now we've retconned it to 3.6. 3.6, still not quite good enough, some signs of life. And then 3.7, I remember this day really vividly because I was in New York on a trip to visit the New York team and I got a ping like, hey, we think this actually that thing that we had built in labs at that point was nine months old is showing real signs of life with Sonnet 3.7. And we think it's time to actually open up computer use as a capability that we talk about externally. That was nine months of, you know, trying out new models every couple of months and trying it in the harness. So even though at that point, labs had kind of let that project go by the wayside, it still was very useful in being an evaluation set for how, you know, computer use is evolving in the malls as well. When you joined, I mean, you were chief product officer when you first joined. And I remember going, huh, Mike, who, you know, co-founded Instagram, who I think of as a very consumer forward founder, is joining the enterprise AI company. Yeah. And we may have even talked about it at the time, but I was just like, that's an interesting bet in hindsight. A correct bet. And you obviously, the timing was incredible. I'm curious, you know, from joining as CPO where you're overseeing all of product and product and AI is kind of a nebulous term and it changes quite a bit, right? Yeah. How did you get to four-ish, five-ish months ago going to labs where my understanding is you're an IC? Do you actually manage anywhere? Yeah, I have no, we're actually entering our performance review cycle and. That's what you wanted. You wanted to get out of performance reviews. Exactly. I was like, I went into the portal. You know, where you get your list of all the reviews you're going to have to write and it was like, you have to write your own review, your review, your manager review, then that's it. Now Claude does the reviews. Claude does, Claude actually does help with reviews, which is, which is helpful, you know, it won't write all of it for you, but it's useful. And even being like, what did, what did I do the last six months? I think the company has been through phases and it's, and different parts of it, I think it's been more or less suited to like what truly drives me. So when I joined all of product engineering was maybe 30 people. Maybe split evenly across the product and like product engineers, so we had engineering teams like working on research infrastructure and, and some scalability pieces, but there's like core people working on building at the time Claude AI and what we called the API, we didn't even call it the cloud platform at the time, maybe 30 people, maybe 35, like very, very small, still felt very much like in the beginning. And there was still so much, I still think there is, but there was still much at the time shaping of what the product even meant, you know, at the time Claude AI had no projects, no artwork. And there was still so much, I still think there is, but there was still so much, I still think there is. And even though my background was more on consumer, the reason I got very excited was the time between Instagram and Anthropic, one of the things that Kevin, my Instagram co-founder and I did is spend a lot of time doing investing. And we had a whole sort of set of investments that we were looking at in terms of what is the future of work and how is work going to get done? And Anthropic felt very much like it could help unlock a lot of that kind of that theme, right? Which is what happens when you have a really intelligent assistant helping you. And I don't think I even foresaw how transformative it would be at the time. Interesting little AI company. This may help with my investing. Right. This might help with some of the, you know, some of the themes that we've been thinking about. But of course, it transformed it much more. So that was phase one where tiny team, you know, you could count the number of initiatives we had going on one hand. Then we can talk to some of the different chapters in depth, but you fast forward it to the end of last year and the product team is hundreds of people. We have a portfolio of projects and a lot of the work is deploying, understanding, customer facing. And I think that's one of the things that's going to be really, really important for us in the future, is that it's going to be really, really important for us in the future to be able to do the work that we're doing, to be able to do the work that we're doing, to be able to do the work that we're doing, to be able to do the work that we're doing. I entered Q4 of last year and started having conversations with Danielle like this you know we've grown up already we've we've speed run a lot of the growth that usually would take five years you know so even though it'd only been about two years or yeah it's like growth's been decent yeah it's been you know and the team growth and the product portfolio um I was like I think I want to go and do another a new company and she was like well you know is it about leaving Anthropic or is it about shifting what you want to do and I was like I love the company like the people here are amazing I love the technology, the mission, et cetera. And so that was also when we were spinning labs back up. Because Labs Reborn was so successful that all the projects graduated and left nobody behind. And so we kind of wound it down and had it kind of on ice. So let's spin labs back up, and I'm going to go back to being a builder. And it's, you know, everybody who sees me in and out of work is like, Mike, you look so happy. Some of your colleagues were telling me that earlier today. They were like, Mike's having the best time right now. And, you know, I still am my own harshest critic. So I'm always every day, I'm like, how do I, like, you know, what can we do? What can we build? What are we proving out here? So it's definitely not easy, but it is definitely much more aligned with, like, the things that truly drive me. We don't have to spend too much time on this, but I am fascinated by tech companies doing these kind of moonshot zero-to-one labs things. I mean, Alphabet's probably the greatest example. But, I mean, history is littered with these. And some of them work. Some of them don't. V1 of labs in Anthropic Search. Certainly worked if you look at the products. Yeah. I imagine that puts a lot of pressure on you right now to go, okay, cloud code is, like, the thing that I have to live up to. Right. Well, it's funny because one of the, like, sort of internal mission statements I have is, like, oh, we want to find the next cloud code. Right. Which was already a high bar when we started LabsV2. But since then, it's, like, grown. It's much higher. So it's, like, even higher. So I think there's a few things that you need to do. And I think it's helpful that I've had the startup experience a couple of times. Because you're never going to be able to fully. Replicate the feeling of there's two or three of us against the world. Exactly. And, like, I remember that existential sort of question. Like, I lived with me every single day. Like, this doesn't work. Like, you know, I'm not going to go and have this independence. I'm not going to be able to work on this thing that I really care about. That's hard to manufacture inside a company unless you want to create some very complicated structure. And I've seen that as well. Before we kick-started LabsV2, I went through and studied as many of these sort of company labs initiatives. And you had ones where they get equity in the thing that they create. Which Alphabet still does. Yeah. And, you know, they're all trying to patch around the sense of it. The thing that we have found works well. One, because I think Anthropic has attracted just a lot of really high-agency, ambitious, but also mission-aligned people. Is that the thing to watch out for is less make sure that people are incentivized. To like, do their best work or, you know, put, you know, everything they can into the project. And it's more, how do you make it not just a comfortable place for okay ideas to get, like, pulled out for months at a time. And so the way we've gone about doing this is actually shortening the timeline. So LabsV1, we are on effectively four to six-week review cadences where a project would be sort of funded. And then they would have about six weeks to prove some sort of things. Here, we actually run two-week sprints. And every two weeks, every project goes in front of those. The whole lab's leadership. And it's not like a murder board-type meeting. It's usually, you know, a reasonable meeting unless the project is really going off the rails. But we really hold every project, and we truly do, to this question of what have you learned the last two weeks and have we learned enough? Like, sometimes you've learned enough in the project. You say, that project was great. It did what it needed to do. And we don't actually need to spend another two weeks on it. And right now, things are moving so fast and you can build so quickly with these models that the opportunity cost of letting a project languish for an extra four weeks is actually quite high. And that's, I think, the best thing we've done with Labs V2 is better sort of turn the crank so that we're at least measuring our learning, if not the external impact, every two weeks. And most of the people in labs are former founders? A lot of them are former founders. Because that's a criteria you have? We have sort of two roles in labs. There's the, we call them all bets because they're all, you know, pretty high variance, right? So we have bets and then we have bet leads. So, you know, if you're the kind of spiritual. Directly responsible individual, those tend to be founders almost exclusively, and then we have just people on labs and those might just be builders that were maybe the first employee at a startup have seen that zero to one or just love to build one person to join. She was early at her last startup and then, you know, early to lab. So she's got that sort of I can span the stack. I can do whatever needs to get done. And that's as important, I think, as the you don't just pure founders. You also need that complimentary, like founding team energy to my cohost else can be here. But he sent me some questions to ask you, and one of them was, is this founder super group essentially with labs that you formed? Is this a new model for company structure in general, especially with AI, or is this a thing that you think is unique to a company like Anthropic? I it's a really good question. I think there is going to be much more money, more teams like this, where a small group with the models, the models are not perfect. So you still need. You know, founders with taste and direction. And there's you know, I spent yesterday example, I spent about two hours debating this project I'm working on, like what the shape of, you know, in this case, like what multiplayer looks like within this product. That was time that was really valuable and very human. It was all like in a room, us hashing stuff out. And then I had Claude work on all the ideas asynchronously for the next like 12 hours. Right. But to have that taste of what are the things we need to debate up front, what are the things that we should just go and implement? Right. Because the models. We'll make a lot of decisions for you if you don't specify them. So I think that's still a useful, very important role that like a founder type can play. But once you get that right structure, you can do a lot. Like I was looking, I did a little retrospective of what we build in labs so far. It's been four months and there are projects that we sort of conceived of in January and like shipped to testing in February and wound down in March or conceived of in February and are now cloud design. Right. Like there's all these different things that have already happened. And so I think that's something that we need to think about as we go forward. So I think that's something that we need to think about as we go forward. And I think more companies are going to shift to this model of smaller teams, give them autonomy, have a person that feels accountable and sort of can drive that. And then don't overstaff it to begin with. We've really learned that with Lousry, too. Like you don't want to add five people to a project up front. You want to start with two or three, much more like a startup. This is the fun part where I try to get to tease out for you as much as possible about these projects. So in March, when we met last, you told me that you were applying Claude to running for a really long time. This kind of long horizon problem. And you were leading that project. Are you still leading that project? No, so that's a great one where we actually put that project on ice. But the learnings graduated into outcomes, which we announced today in Managed Agents. So that whole idea of rubric-based sort of autonomy for Claude to be able to perform a task towards an end or a goal rather than a sort of just an individual prompt that you gave it. Very spiritually based on the things that we had been exploring in the lab. And so that I was mapping out exactly that project and where all the tendrils became, you know, and it's a couple of two themes that you saw on stage this morning that were kind of direct derivatives of that labs project. One was outcomes. And the other one in Boris's demo, you had the Claude code actually verify its work by taking screenshots and testing out what it was doing. That was a big part of what we were pushing on with that project, because it's one thing for Claude to look at its code and say, looks good to me. It's another one for it to fully explore. And we in the project, I was. We were even looking at things like having Claude take videos of all the work that it had done and then have it scrubbed through its own videos and say, oh, that animation is broken and it wouldn't have been able to tell just from pure screenshot verification. So, yeah, that was one that we chatted in March was in development. We've since basically put on ice. It's still run. So internally, we still use it for some demos, but it's mostly been useful as a sort of source of upstream energy. The other one was Claude choosing its own form was, I think, the way you put it and introspecting and being like. For this next conversation, instead of a command line interface, I'm going to be a website. Yeah, was that Claude design or is that something else? So there's a lot of spiritual alignment. It is something else, although we're the kind of question we're pulling on now is like Claude design is an instance of effectively like agent plus canvas. Right. And you can imagine a lot more of those. And even within Claude design, you know, I've done everything from writing technical specs is my new favorite way of writing technical documentation is actually in Claude design because you can have it visualize, like, how's the information flow? Work and how could it work differently and actually just watch it evolve? And that's actually my probably like number two use case behind slides, which I use to sign all the time for. But you can imagine other formats that could live in that canvas as well. And so that's one thing that we're pulling on is like like Claude design, but for even more sort of types or applications and things like that. And that's, I think, an exciting. Is it just more generalized productivity software? Is that the idea? I think that's like, yeah, that's definitely a theme to pull on, which is like and productivity software that hopefully can be like pretty. Custom to you, I think it's an interesting, interesting trend to think about. What are the other just kind of white spaces that you're thinking about right now in AI? I mean, I think as the models improve their ability to be useful partners in things like life sciences, I think is really interesting. I've started to see more and more. There was a great threat on X of somebody that did their full genome sequencing at home, and actually he's now a professional professionalized it. So he'll come over to your house and do it for you. I'm very interested in this because I'm like a, you know. Self knowledge geek, so I'm like, want to figure out how to do this and what I've told from people that like know the space is that even. know the gap between models three four months ago and something like opus four seven and being actually useful sort of parsers of you know genetic data and like finding inferences or ingesting your labs like it's now actually useful versus like oh yeah cute like yes that is the thing that a doctor would have said if it looked at it um or you know we already knew from heuristics that's one white space interesting area like i'm very interested in that whole area of like personalized medicine um and where those things are going to evolve to i feel like we're at the cusp there you know and i feel like there's still so much um overhang you know what we call like the gap between like what's now possible well there's all these startups popping up like you know super human and or superpower and row and like all these companies that are function health i mean yeah that are doing stuff like this yeah exactly and we'd like in january when we did our our like initial cloud for health care one of the things we did is we partnered with function so you can bring your lab results into cloud and do that i started using a uh service this week called supco for supplements so you put all your supplements in it um uh it knows uh how they interact and then it kind of gives you a recommendation of like you don't need to take all eight of these oh that's actually really helpful down to four and now the next step which they don't have but like i could imagine somebody doing is and you know based on your last run of your you know labs or based on your um genetics data we think you might be a super responder to this or that so that whole area like there's there's so much interesting and that's even just on like call those the like optimization sites you know there's a lot of different things that you can do and then you're So I think about all of the sort of like areas that are like currently underserved by medicine either because they don't have like local access to good health care and like we can help supplement that. So a lot of interesting white space there that I think is super interesting. The other area that is funny, I was on stage maybe a year ago at a consumer AI conference that Forerunner put together and I was talking to founders like, what is going to be the consumer AI breakout case beyond chat and list assistance? And I still haven't seen it. You know, maybe health feels like it's not quite in the theme of what I'm describing, you know, and like AI powered dating feels like there's maybe something there. But there's kind of a natural. Oh, we're going to see a cloud dating service? Yeah, I don't think we'll see a cloud dating service, but maybe, you know, the downstream cloud, you know, one of our API customers might create something like that. I don't think we could build that one in-house. But yeah, like I think it's still interesting white space around can AI actually be useful in helping us either understand ourselves or our world or our communities in a way that is connecting rather than distancing? An interesting example, I've been getting interested in civic engagement and how. How you get representative groups together for civic debate. It's not an expert, it's not an area I'm an expert in, but I've gotten interested in it. And that's where, you know, AI could be helpful in sourcing a representative group rather than trying to make decisions for you, for example, like keep the humans in there, but make sure that we're listening to the right voices, for example. Yeah, I was wondering if you still have the social media bug in you or not? Less the social media bug, you know, and it's like probably the most interesting-ish idea. And that has been something that they actually explored in Sora. I thought that was interesting was describe the algorithm you want and we will like generate it for you. That's coming everywhere now. I mean, that's in threads. X has it to a degree. Yeah. I think that's going to be standardized. I agree. But I think, yeah, I use that in Spotify. Spotify, I create these really cursed playlists where my daughter and I can't agree what to listen to. We just make a Spotify playlist that is the intersection of what you like. So we end up with like pavement plus frozen music. Oh, wow. It's very good. Okay, I like that. The Spotify AI DJ has some thoughts. That's great. But yeah, I think that that. I think is one way in which it's personalizing us. You know, an idea I was kicking around more recently, I don't think this is quite labs shaped, but maybe somebody should build it, is can AI be a useful sort of like filter of all the noise out there? I've started using dispatch and co-work for this reason. Like I have, otherwise I am a like incurable news junkie and I will like check every news site and like read a lot. And there's value to that. But at some point I'm like, am I, I'm reading the same stories over again. So I have my like. Now kind of channeling artifact, my previous startup, like my daily brief of the places I tend to check and often I'll click through and read those stories, but it's a useful sort of, I don't feel like I need to go check these 12 websites, you know, first thing in the morning. It can kind of give me the trends and I can go deeper on what's, what's, you know. As long as you're still reading the sources newsletter, Mike, you can synthesize. Exactly. That goes straight to the inbox. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I did actually read, I don't know if it was a leak on X or what, that you guys are thinking about something more proactive. I don't know. Maybe it's orbit or something. Or you may do that, what you're talking about more proactively, bring things into, I don't know if it's co-work or another part of the interface, but for the more consumer audience, do you, do you think that's an opportunity? Yeah, I think that proactive sort of, we, anytime you see your power users create those kinds of use cases, it's an interesting question to ask, like, what would it mean to build more of that built in? And that for sure is, you know, the scheduled daily briefing or, you know, proactive, you know. Monitoring of, of either, you know, we are a very slack heavy shop at Anthropic, so sort of proactive slack monitoring or email. I've started doing this as well. Like where my, my morning cloud routine is the news one I just talked about. I also have it scanned superhuman, which is what I use for my personal email, launched a MCP. So now, uh, it'll go through and it's great because it knows about the splits. So it kind of is like, okay, you really should look at this one. And like, uh, some of these are like things you could read later. And it's actually what I check first before I open my inbox. Um, oh, and then like, there's like some. Shopping thing that I'm looking at where I'm like waiting for the thing to pop up and like, rather than like, uh, obsessively check every morning. I'm like, quad can go, is this a sneaker drop? What's that? So I should, I should use it for, it's probably not even fast enough for sneaker jobs. You need faster than that, you know, um, or it's all the rabbit holes, you know, and, and, you know, there's always that balance. You don't want to remove the joy of sometimes it's fun to get lost in internet rabbit hole every once in a while, but maybe do it a little bit more consciously rather than the thing that you're just like noodling on in the background. Yeah. Um, I am a cowork power user. I use it every day. Uh, I used it to work on this interview actually. And I use it to write, they use it for everything and it's been pretty transformational and it's something that I've like personally gotten my wife on and friends on. And, um, I do feel like it's still early. Like I think most people are probably not doing what I'm doing. Uh, and cowork is still fairly, I don't know, uh, from a product perspective, it's a little bit divorced still from chat, classic cloud chat and, and cloud. These are three things that I don't think really long-term will be three things. I agree with that. Um, and the thing, some of your colleagues were telling me when I was in the office a couple months ago was like, maybe cowork is the front end interface for everything eventually. Um, and cowork was a labs thing before you got to labs. Right. So I'm, but you were CPO in that ship. So I'm curious, um, yeah. What was the insight with cowork when you guys shipped that, like, was there a moment where you were like, we have to abstract away the coding for normies and that's an opportunity or was it something else? It was. Um, so I give Dario a lot of credit here. He, um, you know, Anthropic has such a diverse set of things that we're thinking about at a given time, like the research side, the product side, the commercial side, compute policy, societal impact that it's not a typical company where like the product and the go to market are the two things that matter. And that's like what the CEO is spending a lot of time on. So Dario's attention kind of shifts between different areas, depending on what's most urgent. But, um, shortly before cowork ship, he he's like, look, I've been seeing this interesting trend of people. Using cloud code for personal use cases. It's very hard to do that for most people. They don't have to get a terminal. That's feels like, and it's like, what would it mean to build cloud code for everything else? And that was a very useful. And I think it's like how he operates. He wasn't like, here's the mockup or here's the, like, that was your problem. It was like, yeah, like that's a product. You felt like go and go and solve that. Um, and, um, and it actually took a combination of like two, of course the, the many people were involved here, but I think of like two personalities that really like combined. Um, one was Felix, who was the, um, creator, he was like one of the main electron maintainers, like knows desktop software, at least like desktop web software really, really well, and have been like noodling on this problem of like, how do you enable people to do work on their computers? And then Boris, who has obviously like deep cloud code knowledge. And, uh, once we put the two of them together, plus their teams, you know, working together, it was only a couple of weeks before we were able to ship cowork because not because all the work happened in those two weeks, but because a lot of thinking. Yeah. Had been happening both on the cloud code side and the desktop side around how do we enable this use case for more than just coders because the models are powerful, authentic engines and how do we give that engine to more people, but I completely agree with you that right now it feels like it's less that we're shipping our org chart because, you know, it kind of feels that way, but we are shipping our, um, harness strategy or something like in a way that I don't think makes sense to most people as well. And I think it's also a bad product experience because like my cowork thread. Can't sync to my cloud mobile app. Yes. So like, I couldn't take the interview prep doc. I had been spending time in cowork with, with me on my phone. Right. And, and some of these projects or products naturally suggest their next evolution. Like I'm a huge dispatch power user. So dispatch lets you access your cowork remotely, but you got to run your computer, right? So your next logical thing is like, well, this would be great if I didn't have to leave my computer on all the time. So like, how can we evolve it in that direction? Whereas cloud code has been on that journey, but you know, a year ahead of maybe six months. Six months ahead of it, where cloud code remote, you know, I use all the time where I'm out on the go and I can kick off a coding task. And by the time I'm back, it's often put up a pull request. So you can imagine similar things for cowork, but I agree we're, we're definitely in the, uh, we let a lot of, you know, things proliferate, which is great for innovation, but now I think there's even for, uh, like context and continuity. value the fact that you had a conversation here versus here shouldn't be something you should ever think of my wife is all the times like i don't remember did i was that a coding thing i did or did i ask it in chat or was it like that feels like a broken abstraction that we need to fix and it makes a lot of sense when i'd spend time with the open ai folks and their super app strategy and what they're going at with codex because it is the end state of kind of what you guys got to first with co-work it's unifying all of that and i'm wondering if a you think that super app approach is the right one for ai and if that puts more pressure on you guys because i think open ai has realized that this is a huge opportunity to bring coding the power of coding to people who aren't coders right and they're going at it very fast yeah and codex is good the new model is good and codex is doing well for them so i'm curious you know claude had that huge surge with coding and is still considered you know widely i think leading in code but codex is really nipping at your all seals isn't it yeah i mean it's gotten i i always had the most interesting times at instagram when we had like a snap for example like as a you know uh interesting competitor in the same space but with a different approach in some ways and you know in a fast developing market you end up like having some ideas that you borrow from them some ideas they borrow from you but i think so answer the snap in this analogy what's that i don't know which is which is which i mean we're the market dynamics are different but at least like we're market caps are also a little different yeah and actually the approach the the person that i'm talking about is the person that i'm talking about is the person that i'm talking about is the person that i'm talking about is the person that i'm talking about is the person that i'm talking about and the personalities of the companies are very very different uh but at least in terms of you know the way i always thought about it was um and i don't know that every competitive situation resolves to this but at least that one felt like it did which is we each had our own strengths and we each saw the future in sort of not exactly the same way but directionally similar ways and it was a really interesting question of like how each company evolved to get to those different places um for instagram for example we were known as like the really precious once a week photo and we were known as like the really precious once a week photo and we wanted to get to a place where people were more free to share and that's where you know being able to adopt stories really made a difference for us and then i think for snap it was they wanted more of the influencer celebrity piece as well because that you know there was growing interest in there and it's like how many managing both as well maybe an overextended metaphor but like when i think about for us like um it is really interesting i think to have um opening the space as well and i think for us it's um the two things i think are most important one is what we were just talking about just like reconciling and making sure that like our product makes sense you know whether it's on the web or whether it's on the desktop i don't think it needs to be a single app or super app but at least that you're sort of building blocks all talk to each other and all make sense together and then two is continue to close that gap because even co-work or any of the products right now the gap between even inside anthropic i was just talking to one of our recruiters he is like the most extreme co-work power user he's actually our top co-work user uh who's not a coder at the company um and you see his workflows and they're amazing but that is not how most of the recruiting team operates even at anthropic right so that is i think whether the shape is super app or not like that is the goal is can you again back to labs like that's part of what we need to do is can we create the shapes the form factors that actually make it so either that one recruiter's knowledge spreads really quickly and it's very easy for everybody else to adopt that workflow or for everybody to get to that level of sort of uh confidence in using clod i was hoping to hear more about co-work today i mean i know it's a developer conference but i'm curious like how is co-work growing relative to cloud code is it growing faster anything on that i think index to i don't know relative to like overall coding coding is growing really really fast but definitely on the like trajectory that clod code was on or faster which is really exciting like i feel like every couple of days one of our slacks that is more like a productivity oriented will show some like you know new milestone of work co-workers and it's like it's very exciting to see that grow i think personally very exciting because i always wanted us to reach beyond kind of pure code in terms of like impact um so the growth has been really really good and we talked to enterprises and they'll say great i adopted co-work and i'm seeing that phenomenon of some people really get it some people still need a lot of hand-holding different departments are using it differently um it's a good problem to have because you know the product is capable of the right things in the right sort of shape and with the right person but there's definitely still a delta there and i think the remaining like it'll accelerate growth a lot further when we can actually feel like for most people it doesn't take a lot of ramp up to get to that level of like oh yeah ai is actually really helping me yeah this episode is brought to you by accenture when your advertising 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and a half ago at a conference was competing with customers and this was before you guys had launched claude code the product i think this was we were and we were talking about well you know you have some of these like cursor was a giant customer like how is that going to work and you had to make that call and you don't have to do that as cpo anymore i assume but as not as not the cpo anymore but um how is that these days um and we've danced around it but there was claude design and the figma controversy and you were on the figma board and you had to step down and dylan has said nice things about you and it didn't seem like it was necessarily you but uh that was an example where i think the market and everyone broadly looks at what's happening it goes oh man anthropic is just like coming for every key vertical yeah and that was a the figma one felt a little dicey it's definitely more complicated than it was when we had you know the cloud the cloud ai yeah i came in and was like well this is not really competing with anything it's like a brand new form factor um and we're still i think careful and thoughtful about the products that we build and i think it's only when there is something the value that we are bringing by shipping something because we have amazing customers on the cloud platform right like and a lot of people inside the company who are really invested in these customers sort of you know success as well is are we showing some direction that they think we think the industry could go and hopefully it's like a rising tide where a lot of companies kind of adopt that way of thinking cloud code being a great example where the attention wasn't in the terminal it was more in the editor right and it's really shifted how like almost the entire industry has gone even though yes there were people who were thinking about the terminal beforehand right like that i think shipping cloud code in the way that we did and giving the attention that we did uh did that as well um i think that's my hope for any of these products is not that they become the only product in their space that would be a tragedy i'd like a diversity of products to exist but instead that they are you know one they make sense within our product portfolio so you know the fact that you've got all your mcps connected and cloud ai should hopefully make these other products better for example and two that they showed the way forward where you know with cloud design for example it was being really agent first and giving the agent like a lot of sort of control over what it outputs it leads to a really specific product experience like for me it's really useful for things like you know slides where i can kind of think along with the agent but also be producing alongside you don't see it as cannibalizing figma i think they're different use cases like i like there is production and there is like refinement and that there is collaboration and that like is a real big most strong so i love those folks right um i think that like that product is really well tuned for that use case and then there is what i tend to use cloud design for because i'm not a full-time designer you know so i'm doing more like either production of you know a you know visual communication uh uh kind of artifact lowercase a artifact um or some exploration of interactivity where the purpose is not the polish or production it's the sort of early mock-up feel of it i was mocking something up in our ios app in cloud design and the pixels looked quite different than the things that we would eventually ship but it pointed the way at what i thought we should be able to do um in the future i think that's a really good point in that space and so i think they'll both i mean use cloud design and figma as an example but in any of these like they're all continuing to evolve and again i think good ideas from us will hopefully make their way in other places and vice versa and i think it's more around we're all together figuring out what shape of product do we need to build to make the most of the agents i was having a good conversation with one of our researchers this week and they were saying look the more you constrain the agent's behavior try to be over specific on it the less sort of naturally emergent magic is going to happen in there as well and like that was i mean cloud code i think channeled that even co-work channeled that a little bit versus cloud ai where it was more like you are chatting you are doing these really specific things and i think we'll build products of that shape and that thing that that primarily does is have more people rock that and build really great experiences into their own products like great because hopefully those are cloud power and hopefully cloud remains the best or one of the best at being a great sort of agentic underpinning for these sort of next generation ai products um and But the headline is, it's definitely more complicated. But I think the same principles we try to apply then, which is, you know, being thoughtful about where we enter and then making sure that the building blocks are still available on the platform. Like managed agents, like the things that you can now build on top of managed agents are, you know, as powerful as anything that we can build inside the house. And we're not like, other than for safety reasons, like not releasing a model because, you know, it gives us an edge. That's been a very principled approach that we've taken. And then we're only going to ship a fully featured product if we think it says something new. So you and Dylan are good. I love Dylan. Okay. I, you know, we. He's a former guest, so I gotta, I gotta just make sure I clear that up. I love Dylan and I like, I have so much respect for what they're doing. This is another Ellis question on this topic. Everyone, especially in the early stage communities, debating the viability of, I think, consumer startups more right now. Especially with just like, what is Anthropic going to do next? What's the next cloud design? Or what is open AI going to do next? And enterprise feels a little safer. Dario was talking today about, you know, he thinks there'll be a billion dollar one person company this year. I bet that would be an enterprise company, but what do you think about, yeah, the state of consumer startups. And if you were yourself when you were starting Instagram with Kevin and you were looking at what's happening, what would you have done differently now? Because like the world's changed quite a bit and it's, it seems like a harder time. Yeah. To be doing this. I think a radically oversimplified version of consumer like breakouts is there needs to be some like new capability or form factor. Like for us, it was the camera phone. Right. And nobody calls it the camera phone anymore because that's just what phones do. They have cameras, you know, or, you know, maybe it was more, more rich media like the TikToks and reels of the world because there was now the ability to stream. Right. And then some distribution mechanism that lets you break out. And for us, it was the fact that it was a little bit wild west still. Like you could share Instagram photos to Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr and Posterous just to date how Posterous was when Instagram launched and all of those allowed you to freely link back to your product. And so you could create that, that cycle such a different time these days. Right. And so when I talk to founders like Matt, who founded Lockit, they're, you know, they have found ways of like, all right. You're in the conversation on TikTok and therefore like that leads you to some interesting kind of growth moments. I think it's a much harder, like it's a, it's a far less predictable sort of distribution ecosystem than we were working with. And so I think more than any AI player, I think that's actually probably the biggest trend or biggest challenge right now is how do you break out when you have, you know, before maybe you were competing with Facebook and maybe their time spent, I'm kind of making this up was like 15 minutes a day. Now you're competing. You're competing with TikTok, which I bet their time spent might be over an hour a day, which is frankly kind of crazy, but it is the way it is. You're just like trying to displace some of that. So if you have those two components on the former side, you know, maybe it's around some novel interaction with some, you know, AI powered being or the opposite where it's AI helping you get outside and, you know, touching grass and having more of those real world interactions, whatever that is. But you still have to solve that second piece. And if you think about where a lot of attention is. I mean, it's not just shifting these days, it is to these chat agents and I don't think anybody has like really figured out what it means to, what does it mean to go viral on a chatbot? It doesn't, it's kind of a nonsensical question today. Maybe there's something there where, you know, we launched MCP apps as an open standard, maybe that's a new app store kind of distribution potentially. And you can bring that in and like, maybe that will be the first, like is the first MCP app to go viral is something consumery. That would be interesting, right? That's a novel distribution mechanism. Um, I was talking to, um, Somebody, oh, it was somebody who works at like a nonprofit Explorer and, um, we, uh, featured them in like a, we did an article about how like MCP is being used for a new thing. And he's like, oh, it was really interesting seeing like what constitutes viral growth for a nonprofit Explorer thing, which is like huge numbers. But he was like, I liked, I checked the connector list and we were in the top five next, like Gmail and Slack for a couple of days. And he's like, I got a ton of attention. So, huh. Yeah. So maybe, you know, I'm thinking out loud here and this is very much like exploring thoughts with you, which is, uh, fun, but maybe, you know, And I'm like the perfect answer, but maybe that is a thing that we'll, we'll start seeing is can you provide enough utility within the sort of frame of, uh, you know, a Claude or a chat GPT or a Gemini and then figure out how that spreads in some interesting way. I'd love to see that. I think that'd be interesting. Yeah. You did a pod with, uh, Dan shipper from every recently, and I was listening to it and you were talking about using Claude to rebuild bourbon, which for people who don't know was the app that predated Instagram that you guys turned into Instagram and it did it in like a few minutes. And I was wondering a, like, how did you feel emotionally that, that experience saying an AI just like build that thing that you and Kevin toiled on for, I don't know how long, uh, like in a few minutes. And also if 2010, Mike had access to Claude today, would Instagram still happen? Yeah, that's a really good question because I would imagine the AI would have maybe not gotten there by itself. Yeah. I think that was my, my reflection having built it. It was a one. I knew exactly. But I told it to build and actually, and I told Dan, this was really funny because it over built, it actually built filters into bourbon, which did not have, we launched that with Instagram because bourbon was totally web-based and the time there wasn't anything like web GL to do filtering. Right. So it's pretty interesting to see what it came up with even in that, I think so much of product going back to our conversation on like the founder teams inside Anthropic, so much of the work is still asking the hard questions, putting it in front of people. I love both love and hate the feeling of. Like getting smacked in the face. The first time you put out a product and somebody, somebody, and they're like, what, I have no idea what this is. Or like, I'm so confused. Right. My first job out of school is a UX researcher. We can wake out, bring people into the lab. I still love that. Or you bring people in and the fact that it was built using Claude or hand written doesn't matter to the end user. They just carries the product useful and usable. And, you know, does it create some kind of moment of delight? That's so hard. Like Claude is not going to solve for that. So, I mean, my, if we had Claude. Back in 2010, for sure, there were like ways in which we were slower at, at delivering on things that I would have wanted us to be, especially when the thing to build became really clear, right? We launched, we knew we wanted to build app mentions and that was probably a week of wiring it up from the user interface, fighting with the text layout engine at the time, like persisting on the server could have done that faster and delivered value to users quicker. But I don't think that the journey from Instagram, from bourbon to Instagram is something that Claude would have changed. of other than in some of the like coding sports that we that we did but zero to one coding at least the time i didn't feel like often like that was the limiting factor it was the thinking and the exploration process as well and so um i think the hard things are still hard i guess is maybe how i would put it and um a fear or a concern would be if the llm provides too much out of the box in terms of decisions that are being made does it actually yeah like prevent you from finding the orthogonal shape now you can use it to your advantage and say great i wanted to generate three alternatives and then see like which of these feels good and i've done that before too um but yeah i think it definitely does not absolve you of making hard product decisions and in fact it's important that you do so it's like it's more important yeah i feel that in my work which is not even just building software but just building media is i could give myself over to claude more and i could just let the skill file hopefully like remind it of what i like and all that stuff but then i could give myself over to claude more and i could just let the skill file hopefully like remind it of what i like and all that stuff but then i do that and then i really read it and i'm like ah like and i'm talking to it like i would talk to a reporter when i was an editor in a newsroom yeah and i feel like that's more important now as it gets more capable because i don't want to lose like my intuition in the process yeah i feel like a lot of people maybe are with how coding has taken off or starting to maybe give in a little too much to it and i hope that we kind of shift back towards that i think the the human instinct is um i like the reporter editor piece unless the reporter has like really gone off the rails i imagine what's happening and i did in the day yeah most of the time the editor's like okay this is like 90 percent close to what i want and maybe with some edits i'll get to 95 yeah or maybe it's like 80 to 85 right versus if you're seeking it from the beginning you might try to get to closer to 100 percent right um not that these things are perfectly measurable um i have that experience building even within labs where i've learned now that um it's much better if i sort of hash things out with claude and much more of a conversation before it writes a line of code and then say all right this feels good like we've collaborated effectively on a spec and now go and implement the spec versus if i just give it the high level feature it will build the feature it will like it will work all the verification stuff we're building will mean that it functionally works and then i'll look and i'll be like i would have done that a little bit differently but now it's done and now you know and i don't like that feeling of it being like it's a little hollow it's not quite yeah so like moving to a place where um somebody put it really well internally which is like the whole our whole job we wouldn't do it if we weren't doing it when coding with claude is like um expressing the north star with clarity and then helping you know make sure claude converges on that north star efficiently and effectively and like that is the role of a sort of guide slash in some ways manager although managers at least in software tend to be more on the like human development side so it's really uh architect there's not a great word i've found for it but it's that sort of sherpa of you know project and claude towards that end versus expecting that one it's just going to do it out of the box um or two that you don't have a hand early in actually shaping that north star yeah i mean there's so many interesting parallels within Instagram. And I think I remember you guys had suffered with a lot early and Facebook helped with was was compute and like serving the app. Right. And your servers, you didn't have the servers you needed. And there was a moment where like you had to do something. Yeah. And that deal came together very fast. And now it's funny, like over a decade later, like compute is still the problem. And I imagine, you know, I know you're not working on compute directly, but I imagine compute is a thing you have to think about a lot internally in a way that you probably didn't envision when you decided to join a little AI lab two years ago. It was maybe two sort of vignettes that really illustrate it for me. One was and showing like, you know, I've learned a lot in two years, but when three five launched, you know, day of even we're so much smaller than we are now. But day of like people were adopting it. We were starting to get like near like the, you know, like fully maximizing our like whatever chips we had allocated to at the time. And I remember asking the infrared team, like, great. So what do we do when, when we're out? Do we just like add capacity? Because in my world, like from the Instagram days, like unless you were doing some very specialized hardware on AWS, there was more hardware out there to do. And they're like, no, no, no. When we run out of this, that's like, that's it. Like those are all the GPU is fully allocated. And like, yes, we're working on getting more. And I was like, oh, this is a very different environment because, you know, they, you know, you can't just, it was naive, right? You can't just like hit new instance and do that. And so that's- Hence you guys apparently going to space with Elon. Exactly. Right. Yeah. And finding new sources of unexpected sources of compute. But that was a very quick lesson learned. I learned that internalize that immediately. But yeah, we think a lot about, you know, even within a given product, you don't want to sacrifice intelligence. So how do you deliver as much of that as possible without being sort of wasteful on computer, being thoughtful about what you do asynchronously or being thoughtful about when you need the biggest model versus small. So it is a, it is a consideration. And I think it's a healthy one for a bunch of people. I think it's a healthy one for a lot of reasons, but I think it also brings us closer to the, I mean, you were talking about customers before, you know, they're operating in a world where they're buying tokens effectively and then reselling it in some, you know, sort of product. And I think we're very aligned with them in a lot of ways in wanting to make sure that that's a healthy ecosystem for people. So you've seen a bigger shift towards token based sort of usage based pricing. That has been a shift over the last year. I remember looking at, you know, the ecosystem a year ago and saying, you know, you're going to have to, you're going to have to, you're saying, look, our customers want to charge more or they want to deliver more value and they're kind of constrained by their current pricing models. And now so many more of them are able to actually deliver on intelligence or at least make it customizable, right? Where you can say, great, I'm trying to optimize for cost. I'm going to use less frontier model, but know that I'm going to get this value or I really want to get this done. I'm going to use fast mode. I'm going to burn tokens, but it's because I have that knob that I can tune. But yeah, compute, definitely way more of a consideration here than IG. But in a similar way, like Instagram had felt like, and probably was if you do the math, like exponential growth, at least. Yeah, Dario said you guys had like an ADX Q1 in terms of cloud code. I don't know if Instagram had ADX quarters. No, I think we've definitely, I mean, other than maybe week one, right? Yeah. From 100 to 100,000. But yeah, it's, you know, we had steady, very good, you know, percentage growth, but nothing, nothing like this. We can land it here. I mean, you were, you've been very early. You've been very early. I mean, I say early, it's been two years, but that is early in AI world. And I think the culture of Anthropic is very fascinating. And it's something that I've been learning more as I spend more time with the people in the company. And I think people look at the headlines, they look at mythos, they look at how Dario talks about, you know, maybe 50% of jobs will go away. And a lot of people are, oh, they're just fear mongering. Or there's like, there's tactics here that are about regulatory capture, all these things. The culture is very unique, I find. And I'm curious to hear from you. Is there, if you could identify a disconnect between how a lot of people externally perceive what you guys do and how people internally believe about what you're doing, is there something there that you could put your finger on? It's a hard thing to convince people of because I can say all day, like we are like a profoundly transparent company. Like when we say things, we are saying what we think, right? And Dario probably more so than any person I've ever met, like speaks his mind, not in a calculated, oh, this will like help me fundraise and like that. I've just like, having gotten to know him and seen him operate both internally and externally, like it is not the sort of motivating force behind like the communications or the rollout strategy. Of course, it's one thing to say that and it's another thing to live that. But I mean, I think if it's a helpful like illustration, even internally, you know, this year has been great from commercial growth, like great from usage growth, et cetera. But I think the reason the company has stayed grounded is that the point of Anthropic is not to build a large commercial enterprise. The point of Anthropic is to, you know, do our best to nudge the world towards a good future with AI. And once you see everything through that lens, like it explains all the downstream decisions. Now, I can't ask people not to be cynical. It's outside. So ultimately, we'll have to continue to hopefully demonstrate to our actions that like we're not trying to fearmonger or we're not trying to like pull things back because we think it'll be perceived as more frontier. I guess maybe I'll illustrate one thing, which is like the internal belief is like we should be able to release a mythos class model safely. And the fact that we haven't yet is like bad, like it's not we're not proud of it. Right. It's that if we do it right, then all of the positive use cases can be had as well. You know, we talked about life sciences earlier. There's definitely some interesting things that could happen in mythos. They're like, I built a lot of soldiers. I built a lot of soldiers. They're like, I built a lot of software using mythos internally. It's really good at it. There's no cybersecurity risk for your internal software. Right. Exactly. Well, actually, we've like figured out how to like, you know, do it as safely as possible. But like that is how we see the world. Right. Like we want to usher. We want to give people these capabilities. We don't want to like hold them back. And we're working really hard so that that's not the case. So, you know, it'll be a prove it. I think that that's fair enough. But sometimes, you know, when I see people like, oh, they're they're they're just trying to like inflate their next valuation or they're like trying to make themselves sound cool or they don't really believe this, like that is to the extent that you believe me, that is not like the motivating force internally. But again, I think it's a our journey is to show that over time. Okay. Lastly, when people come to you, especially because you work at Anthropic and they say, Mike, I'm worried about my job. I'm worried about my family member, my kid, my grandparent, their economic security. What do you tell them? I don't tell them not to be worried, because I think that there are going to be big shifts. You know, we don't know exactly how fast you can disagree on the timeline, but it is already shifting and happening. And I get actually a whole class of email that I've gotten recently is parents of college grads, like people I know either socially or professionally who have kids who are graduating. And what do we do? And I think the thing that I think is what I believe is that it is not one company or one sort of branch of government is going to solve this. It's going to take the kind of sort of societal level conversation. If there's anything that we've been trying to do, it has been to try to spark that conversation. Again, it gets read as fear-mongering sometimes. Whether that's, you know, everything ranging from like figuring out like different tax structures, rescaling, like it's actually going to take all of these things. I think one of the things that you've seen from us is being more specific about some of those policy proposals might look like. This is a long answer that I would tell somebody, but it's a complicated question. But yeah, I think what I tell folks is you're not alone. This is a shared kind of complicated thing. I think the things that will still remain human and ineffable and important are still relationships and curiosity and creativity and the ability to organize people towards an end. But that's still going to be really, really important. I don't see AI replacing that anytime soon, to the extent that that's a skill that you can pick up or at least develop or at least continue to nurture. I think that's really, really important. And then also not get as like, things will continue to shift. So even if in the current moment with all the uncertainty, maybe, you know, our friend's kid doesn't land in exactly the job that they wanted, things will continue to shift. Like nothing is set in stone. And I think if people remain sort of curious and actively exploring what the frontier looks like, they might then either be part of creating a whole new category of jobs or progressing to a different place in their own companies. Like I think the landscape is still going to continue to shift. So not treating the current moment as uncertain as and in some cases, challenging as it is, is like a static thing that will lock people in. All right, Mike, I'll let you get back to the lab. Thanks for doing this. Great to see you. All right. Thanks. Thanks. Don't go anywhere. After the break, Ellis is joining me to recap my conversation with Mike and talk about how old we are. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Learn more at Accenture.com. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. And we're back. Surprise. It's me, the Hamburger Helper here with Alex Heath to discuss an event I was not at for a variety of extemporaneous, extenuating, spontaneous circumstances that may or may not involve founder clients and two year olds. But I'm very jealous that you got to go. How was how was your trip? It was good. I yeah, I feel bad for you that you can't do the Burbank test day trip every week like I do. You know, it's something that I wish on everyone. Just kidding. But no, this was great. It was great to go. This was Anthropic's second developer conference. They've ever done. And the scale of it kind of maps to how Anthropic has grown. So I didn't go last year, but it was only a couple hundred people. And Anthropic has now obviously become like the fastest growing company of all time, you know, value around a trillion dollars. And this was like 2000 people with three satellite events and like different cities. And I think they'll probably go even bigger next year. So it's actually kind of cool to just see this culture of this company. The events are this really cool physical manifestation of how these companies are changing and evolving, especially in tech. I mean, gosh, I I just finished with therapy 30 minutes ago. So now I can borrow some language and say, can we just pause and sit with that for a second? How far Anthropic has come in just a year? Oh, this is good. So you should always do therapy before I record. Yeah. Because it's an absolute 180, is it not? I mean, gosh, I feel like, open AI was just absolutely unassailable in terms of momentum product. And now all these companies are kind of seemingly trying to focus, bring back maybe some of the apps they built over the last year that were distracting them from gains as the market enters turmoil. So much has changed. I feel like with the vibe, there's been a vibe shift, one may say. There has. And Anthropic is causing the turmoil. So I think they feel pretty good. But it was also kind of interesting. I saw a lot of chatter on social media about people like the day before seeing the Claude with Code conference signage going up in SF going like, wait, this is happening. Like people also didn't know that this was happening. And it was also reflected in the reporters who were there. There were the, you know, typical, you know, the tech reporters that I see all the time at these events. But I was amazed at all of the publications that did not have people there. And it was clearly just like not on their radar that, you know, maybe the hottest company in the world. The most influential tech company right now was doing this big event with their co-founders and, you know, Dario and Daniela were there and did a chat and all of that. And the headlines poked through because of the Elon thing where they announced that they were working with Elon on compute. But other than that, I don't know if this would have really poked through into the mainstream like I'm sure Anthropic hoped it would have. Most importantly, where do all the reporters sit now? I've always been a goody two shoes sitting at the front of the class. So back when I was reporting, I used to sit at the front right next to our old friend, Josh Constein from TechCrunch. Where do you sit these days? They put you in a press room, you know, to kind of toil away, away from the normal attendees, right? Because part of that is they also don't want you interacting with the non-press attendees as much as possible. So you have to work harder for the scoops. The creators don't have any hard questions. Don't poison their minds. But no, it was very nice. The Anthropic folks did a great job. The food was actually quite good, which it usually is not at these events. So I give them props there. And they did have reserved seats for us in the keynote, which I always appreciate. It's nice to still get something as a member of the media these days. One of the other reasons I missed it, I was thinking back to my interview, which we can bring up on screen for those watching on video with Mike Krieger back in 2013, I think. Oh, wow. You beat me. Just kind of a crazy amount of time. A crazy amount of time ago, 13 years ago. 2013? Yes. They'd just been acquired. They must have just gotten bought. Yeah. Yeah. Just acquired by Fartbook. And he has a quote about the last year being crazy because Instagram grew from 30 million users to 100 million users. Just incredible. It is incredible. As Instagram grows, he goes, we got to think about the world here. We got to optimize, for a lot of phones. Not everybody has an iPhone 5. And it's just like, wow, so much has changed. Man, of course you beat me because he and I started before we were recording Reminiscing. And the last time I did something on camera with him for like a podcast type thing was in 2018. And it was for the New York office opening of Instagram. And it was the year before Kevin Systrom and Mike, the two co-founders, very dramatically, I'm sure you remember that, dramatically left. Facebook, right? Over like the power clash with Zuck. If you were told both of us where we'd be in 2018, I mean, Mike, you're a little bit more accomplished, but it was definitely wild to think back to that. Well, so this is funny. I'm actually looking at the URL for the article right now. It was almost exactly 13 years ago. It was May 13th. And when this episode airs, it's going to be May 14th. Yeah. So that would have been a funny coinkydink. You feel old, doesn't it? Yeah. And that's the segue into my next question. Well, it wasn't really a question, but now I have a question. So I know that Mike, since he's been back at Anthropic and just recently has kind of let go of the reins for the chief product officer and now is kind of back to an IC role. I feel like that's always kind of the dream for a lot of engineers. But I was also reading back in this interview I did with him that he was talking about waking up around 2 p.m. and coding until 6 a.m. Is he still in that mode or is this a different type of IC mode now being the world's most famous co-founder Emeritus? Right. I mean, Mike is looking very healthy and well-rested. So I would be shocked if he was doing that still. But who knows, man? A lot can happen these days. Like with modern advances in health technology, you can do a lot. It's a very different job, though, isn't it? I mean, I just appreciate like he's always been a very kind, humble guy. And I also. Interacted with him a bit when he was on the board at the browser company when I was there for a couple of years. And he's just kind of a real one, I think. And it's fun to see people in that position who, you know, frankly, have all the money in the world, just kind of want to get back to work and help work on some skunk work stuff and actually be able to bring the urgency that in some ways only founders can if they can retain that energy, you know? And I was talking with the Anthropic comms team too about this. He's also like the dream spokesperson for a company, especially a company like Anthropic, because he is, you know, legit. He's personable. He's charismatic. He'll go and talk about things, right, that may be considered passe for, you know, maybe you're more cerebral, you know, AI co-founders to talk about. But at the same time, he can say a lot without saying too much. And that's a rare skill. Well, did he say too much when he made the Instagram for Snapchat comparison? No, I think that's great. I think that's like that's podcast gold, right? I think. Of course it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Did the PR people bite their nails? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I mean, he you saw how the way he reacted to Figma, which was, you know, very diplomatic. I had to ask him about that situation for and, you know, I don't know. Mike's good. He's good at what he does. And he's a great interviewee. And I really appreciated the time with him. I think it was nice to get into his head and hear kind of the areas that Anthropic is exploring next. That was the goal for me because, you know, we talked about this, like if the team he's on, the last big thing they did was literally Claude Code, literally the thing that has made Anthropic the most valuable company in the world. That's a tremendous amount of pressure. And even for the co-founder of Instagram, that's a lot of pressure. And so I wanted to hear that. That's a lot of pressure. And I think that's a lot of pressure. I think that's a lot of pressure. And I do feel like he gave us a lot of good detail on that, which I appreciated. Yeah. Now that it's been a little bit of time between the interview, what do you feel like you've been thinking about the most and connecting the dots in your sources, personal knowledge management system? What are the big themes? Right. I need Mike to build me that. I think I think that what I've been thinking about is it's clear that health is a thing they're going to go into next. So if you were an investor type, you would short all the health stocks, right? Given how things have gone with Claude design and Figma or what have you. It's very clear they're focused on health. There were two things he said that really stuck out to me about Anthropic's culture, which I think is very unique. And I think people discount how unique it is and how much it drives the decisions Anthropic makes. But he said at one point that the point of the company is not to build a large commercial enterprise, which is, I think, ironic given that it's the fastest growing commercial entity of all time, but to quote, nudge the world towards a good future I think there's reasons to shine a light on that and a magnifying glass and go, well, like, okay, then how does that make sense? Partnering with Elon or the Department of War stuff or whatever. But I do think a lot of people, the vast majority of people inside Anthropic do feel that it, I was talking about this actually with another senior leader there just off the record that day, that the culture of Anthropic really reminds me of Apple in a lot of ways, the good and the bad. It has the good of really focusing on the craft, the commitment to detail, the world building, the kind of reality distortion field of what's going on, the focus on product. But also you get a little bit of that chip on your shoulder, a little bit of that reality distortion field, which can also potentially be negative. And it has a bit of a insular culture like Apple, where it's very much like you're in, I don't want to say cold, but it is kind of like a cold, like you're in it or you're not, and you get it or you don't. It's not really like a normal big tech company can just, an employee can just show up to Anthropic and necessarily succeed. So I thought that was interesting. Well, what do you think that's due to? I mean, I'm a believer in kind of two schools of thought. One is heavily documenting very specific beliefs and philosophy. And I think they've done that better than anybody else. I mean, I feel like I have like three to four browser tabs open that I just can't seem to make time for, that are all the different essays that they've written. I think the most recent one was kind of like teaching Claude why. It's been a lot of great stuff. You know, they had the Constitution, obviously Dario's essays. But then, on the other hand, it all just still comes back to people hire people like them. And it just comes back to the top and the founders, you know, hiring people all the way down. I think that's what it is. I think it's very much a safety aligned culture and the culture interview part. I think the culture of the hiring process is very serious. It's way more intense than most companies. I know they have some very specific questions to. Yeah. They ask things about like what are the hardest like moral trade-offs you've had to make? Like when have you, you know, put your morals ahead of like financial gain? Would you be willing to do that at Anthropic? That kind of thing. Did you ever go to detention in middle school and if so, why? Right, right. But yeah, I mean, the culture is super unique. And it's probably a rare thing. For someone like Mike to come in and succeed in a culture like that because he was, you know, in the Facebook machine for so long and he joined, you know, almost two years ago, two-ish years ago, which is an eternity in AI, especially for Anthropic. Anthropic was like not on the map really at all two years ago. So he obviously saw something and made a bet on something that he didn't need to make a bet on because he's, you know, he's the freaking co-founder of Instagram. Like he doesn't need to do anything. But he clearly saw that there was something happening here. And yeah, not that he needed another break, but he certainly got one. I mean, it's a testament to him to just that he stayed in touch with everything happening in the world and in culture, which isn't always or maybe even usually the case for people who've kind of been around and had such big success. I mean, I appreciated, you know, his recognition of kind of like the distribution challenges of building product today. Like back in the old days, Facebook had 15 minutes of time per day that you had to compete with, you know, and now it's an hour from TikTok and it's the most addictive content format ever created. And he's clearly still plugged in, which I really genuinely appreciate. You know, you meet founders or people in this industry all the time who may even celebrate not being in touch anymore and just kind of moving beyond it. You know, whether it's with politics. And it seems like he's retained that even going to the point of rebuilding bourbon from scratch, which was really fun. And then coming away from it with an actually cool insight, which is that even though it helped us build it so quickly, I think he said something along the lines of like, if you just use LLMs for everything, it might actually prevent you from finding the surprising or non-obvious or culturally edgy things that might make a product work. Certainly speaking of Snapchat. I mean. What AI in the world would have ever suggested that ephemerality was going to be the solution to the pressures of social media? Like, that was just a crazy one. And every single person said Evan was wrong about that until it started working. No, I mean, his point about how human intuition and relationships and creativity become more valuable, I think, was really good to hear. And I do agree with that. And I think the people who are really plugged in on AI and where it's going are all saying that. And it was good to hear that from him. I don't know if you also caught he's he's very focused on. Distribution still having built something that obviously has tremendous distribution, billions of users with Instagram. I thought his thing about I don't know if you caught this like MCP as a distribution mechanism was interesting, like an MCP leaderboard and hearing from partners on MCP that, you know, they get tremendous inflow of traffic via MCP if anthropic features them. So it's almost like this new app store model being created where instead of downloading apps, you're in an MCP store or something. I could see them productizing that as well. It sounded like he was really focused on that. And that's his consumer mindset, right? Being brought to bear on AI. Yeah, I'm trying to picture what that might look like. And I mean, if MCP turns everything into a pipe and there's a lot of competition, then the fundamentals underlying those pipes, whether it has to do with the fees that you get charged by platform or even to send a transaction, are just going to get lower and lower, I think, which is which is definitely a good thing for consumers. Obviously, the moats are very thin, and we'll see what happens to venture capital and consequentially to myself as a result of that. But yeah, it seems like storytelling is going to be all right, Alice. That's that's my takeaway of the last. So I just feel like everyone feels that way. I think I think marketers and CMOs and brand people are going to become more valuable because that's how you're going to stand out. You know, when anyone can mix anything, that's what matters. I guess that's why our friends at TPBN are over at OpenAI now. Have you have you chatted with them? How are they feeling being back in the slack of a big company? I need to check in with John and Jordi about their X views cratering since the deal and see how they're feeling about that. That's a good reminder. But yeah, no, look, man, this was a great episode with Mike. Bummed you couldn't do it with Mielis when we were actually charting out early guests that we wanted to have on the show. Mike was someone you put forward that you wanted. So I tried to do you I tried to do you right and ask a few of your questions you sent me. I don't know if you caught one of them. I did. I took he took a moment and said, that's a really good question. When I said it was also a question, which one it was the one about his lab being a broader structure for companies in general. Yeah, these like these founder lean, you know, based companies that don't have a ton of, you know, rank and file. And the answer was basically, yes, of course. But that's, that's the future, man. No, all I sees. I'm picturing in 50 years, we have 500,000 clones of Brian Chesky that are all spitting up $1 billion companies simultaneously with a fleet of AI agents. I mean, Brian's cool, like, come on the pod, Brian, but Brian, he's just he's got that, you know, New York hustler mindset, tone, body. Who's the who's the. Who's the perfect apex founder these days? I feel like a lot of people say it's him. You heard it straight from Ellis, folks. How could any of us compete? Well, this episode will be dropping the day that we're having our live show and launch party at notions headquarters with the CEO of Substack, Chris Bass at Ellis. Do you have your your toast for the room prepared? Have you written a speech? Oh, Jesus. No, but I did. You told me to get in a way suitcase instead of my room. Radial travel pro. So I did upgrade. Good. And I did get some nothing headphone a ear cans so I could look cool on the plane as well. Oh, yeah. Shout out, Carl. So, yeah, I'm trying to to to pump myself up. I'm excited to have several former guests there and it's going to be a great group and hope we can do more live stuff down the road. But, yeah, hopefully they show up instead of just talking to their agents. Yeah. I mean, that's the one thing I think that may last in A.I. is. Is events, because what is the joy of sending your agent to an event? You can't taste the drinks that we've creatively named. You can't have the apps, the past apps that will be delicious. You can't hear the DJ will have. You can't potentially meet your future partner. You know, what kind of partner are you talking about? Business or love partner? Either one. That would be sweet. I'd be quite an accomplishment if we had people like making out on the dance floor at our party. That'd be awesome. We'll see. All right. Well, should we wrap it there? And that's it for this week's show. Thanks to Mike for coming on. If you like the show, don't forget to like and subscribe everywhere you get podcasts. We are access.show online. That's where you can find all of our links. And you can find us in video. Lovely high definition at access pod on YouTube. If you really like this episode, we'd love a five star review or even share with a friend or agent. You can find my newsletter at sources.news. And you can find me at Hamburger on Twitter and at meaning.company for your startup storytelling needs. as long as they remain relevant. - I think they will. as part of the Vox Media Podcast Network and the show is produced by Hooked Creators. Bye. Booking.com is the easiest way from a day surrounded by noise to a stay surrounded by nature. 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