Mike Krieger, the co-founder of Instagram, who held about 10% of the company when Facebook acquired it for $1 billion in 2012, is now involved in a billion-dollar technological dispute, leading an Anthropic division focused on exploring the potential of artificial intelligence (AI).
Krieger's journey in Silicon Valley began before the acquisition of Instagram. In 2004, at age 18, he, whose name is Michel, left São Paulo to study at Stanford University in California, USA, where he adopted the nickname Mike. The son of a beverage industry executive, he lived in various global cities, such as Lisbon, Buenos Aires, and Miami, in addition to Alphaville, in Greater São Paulo, and his education in a bilingual school facilitated these moves.
At university, he chose Symbolic Systems, a course that integrates computer science, psychology, linguistics, and philosophy. He later completed a master's degree at the same institution, where he met Kevin Systrom, with whom he would develop the project that changed their lives.
Before entrepreneurship, Krieger worked as a software engineer at Meebo, a service that combined several online chat tools. Shortly after, he received an invitation from Systrom to create an application that would allow sharing photos, locations, and comments. The duo's first project was Burbn, a multifunctional check-in platform, but the proposal proved excessively complex. During testing, both noticed that users were more interested in one specific function: publishing and sharing photographs.
Instead of sticking to the initial idea, they decided to focus on developing this functionality, which led to the creation of Instagram, a name derived from the English words 'instant' and 'telegram'. Between September and October 2010, Krieger and Systrom spent nights programming the new platform, which was launched on the Apple store in October of that year, initially only for iPhones, and achieved rapid success.
While Systrom handled the product and business vision, Krieger was responsible for engineering and technological infrastructure, ensuring the service functioned despite the rapid increase in access and posts. The success attracted large technology companies, culminating in Facebook's purchase of Instagram in April 2012, for about $1 billion, just over two years after its launch.
Krieger owned approximately 10% of the company, which represented about $100 million upon sale, as mentioned in his biography 'The Click of a Billion Dollars' by Filipe Vilicic. This deal established Krieger as one of the most notable entrepreneurs of his generation in Silicon Valley. Despite the acquisition, he maintained his role as CTO, while Systrom remained in charge of the company. Under Facebook's control, Instagram expanded its global presence and surpassed the one billion monthly user mark.
In 2015, Krieger was included in the Forbes Under 30 list, which recognizes young professionals and entrepreneurs from various fields. Three years later, in September 2018, he and Systrom announced their departure from the company after eight years of collaboration, stating that they wished to explore new ideas.
Outside of Instagram, Krieger did not stop innovating. During the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, he collaborated again with Systrom on an initiative focused on monitoring the disease in the United States. They developed a website that used statistical models to track the progression of coronavirus cases across different American states, aiding in tracking the transmission rate during a period of great health uncertainty.
In 2023, the two launched a new AI-focused project called Artifact. This application provided personalized news using machine learning to select content aligned with each user's interests. Although the intention was to offer an adapted reading experience, the project had a short lifespan, being shut down in January 2024, and its technology was acquired by Yahoo in April of the same year.
Artifact marked a more direct transition for Krieger into AI, an area that would dominate his career. His experience in automated recommendation services complemented his knowledge in creating large-scale digital platforms. On May 15, 2024, Anthropic announced the hiring of the Brazilian as its first Chief Product Officer (CPO). Anthropic, founded in 2021 by former OpenAI members, including Dario and Daniela Amodei, develops AI models, with Claude as its main competitor to ChatGPT.
Krieger's arrival came at a time of strong company expansion, having received billions in investment from giants like Amazon and Alphabet (Google's parent company). His mission was to increase product offerings, consolidate Claude's presence in the corporate market, and create more intuitive ways to interact with AI systems. Dario Amodei highlighted the value of Mike's experience in developing intuitive products for creating new interactions with Claude.
Krieger expressed enthusiasm about the move, mentioning in a LinkedIn post that the Anthropic team was exceptional and that he felt welcomed from the first contacts. He expressed anticipation about contributing to shaping the future of AI-powered products.
During his tenure in product leadership, he oversaw the expansion of Claude's applications to meet various demands from users and businesses. In July 2025, he also joined the board of directors of Figma, a design tool company, but left that position in April 2026. In January 2026, Krieger took on a new role at Anthropic, working in Labs, the division dedicated to experimentation and the development of products based on the latest capabilities of the company's models, sharing leadership with Ben Mann.
Among the team's developments are Claude Code, which assists with coding and editing, and Claude Cowork, which applies similar features to professional tasks without requiring programming knowledge. Another advancement is the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a protocol that facilitates linking AI models with external applications, tools, and data sources. The division's philosophy is to design not just what the models do today, but what they can achieve soon.
In an interview with The Verge earlier this year, Krieger justified the importance of this moment for developing new applications: 'We have reached a decisive moment in AI: the capabilities of the models are advancing so rapidly that the window of opportunity to define how they will be used is now. That is why I am returning to creator mode.'
The speed of current development differs greatly from the time he created Instagram. In April 2026, during the Brazil at Silicon Valley conference in Sunnyvale, California, Krieger reported being able to recreate Burbn with AI assistance in 'basically two hours.' This exercise demonstrated how current tools drastically shorten the time between idea and functional prototype. However, he emphasized, quoting Exame magazine, that 'there is still a lot of human in entrepreneurship.'
This perspective defines the role he seeks at Anthropic: while AI optimizes coding and experimentation, it is crucial to identify problems, understand human behavior, and find solutions of real value. In a conversation with the Big Technology podcast, Krieger detailed how the team anticipates opportunities by analyzing the difference between the current capabilities of the models and the actual use of the technology by people. He proposes: 'Imagine something where the models still have deficiencies today, but where they will be really good in six months, and let's ensure we have a product ready for that by that date. Think about the gap between what the models can do today and how most people use them. Can we fill that gap?'
This ability to identify opportunities has accompanied Krieger since the beginning of his career, whether by simplifying Instagram to focus on photos or by proposing Artifact to reorganize news consumption with AI. Currently, at Anthropic, the challenge is to explore applications for a technology that is still in the development phase.
