Instagram CTO to Anthropic Labs: Mike Krieger’s Career

Brian Nichols is the co-founder of Angel Squad, an angel investing community where aspiring and active angels learn from Hustle Fund’s approach, review curated deal flow, and connect with peers.

Mike Krieger’s Instagram title still follows him into conversations about artificial intelligence (AI). His work since then includes a second startup, a product-leadership role, and a return to experimental building. Separating those chapters helps explain what he does at Anthropic and what his background brings to it.

What does Mike Krieger do at Anthropic?

Mike Krieger, Instagram’s co-founder and former chief technology officer (CTO), is now Head of Anthropic Labs. Anthropic identifies him by that title in its October 2026 event program.

He joined Anthropic as chief product officer (CPO) in May 2024 and moved into Labs in January 2026. The CTO title refers to his earlier role at Instagram.

When Anthropic announced his hiring, Krieger’s remit covered product engineering, management, and design. The work included expanding enterprise applications and making Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant, accessible to a wider audience.

The January 2026 Labs announcement marked a change in focus. Krieger joined co-founder Ben Mann in a group dedicated to experimental products at the frontier of Claude’s capabilities. Ami Vora took responsibility for the Product organization, working with CTO Rahul Patil on scaling Claude experiences.

What happens inside Anthropic Labs?

Labs gives small teams room to explore ideas before they have the polish or predictability expected of a widely used product. Anthropic described the group as a place to work closely with early users and learn what new model capabilities make possible.

Krieger explained in a September 2026 conversation that Labs builds months ahead of the main product organization. When an experiment becomes a product, the people who built it move with it. He described that continuity as a way to avoid a handoff that kills the project.

The job also involves deciding which ideas deserve to survive. In the same conversation, Krieger described how improvements in an underlying model can overtake elaborate workarounds built around an earlier model’s limitations. A product team can spend weeks solving a problem that the next model makes disappear.

From São Paulo to Instagram

Krieger was born in São Paulo, Brazil, and moved to California in 2004 to attend Stanford. He studied Symbolic Systems with a focus on human-computer interaction. His master’s work explored interfaces for large-scale collaboration, according to Stanford’s speaker biography.

Before Instagram, he spent 18 months at Meebo as a user-experience designer and front-end engineer. That combination of interface design and engineering would remain a thread through his career.

He connected with fellow Stanford alumnus Kevin Systrom while Systrom was working on Burbn, a mobile app with several social features. In a Stanford retrospective, Krieger described how watching what people used helped the pair focus on photo sharing.

Instagram, 2010–2018

Krieger and Systrom co-founded Instagram in 2010. Krieger led engineering as CTO, while Systrom served as chief executive officer (CEO). The company grew from an early photo-sharing app into a platform with more than a billion users during Krieger’s tenure. During his tenure, Instagram’s engineering team grew to more than 450 people.

In 2012, Facebook announced an agreement to acquire Instagram for approximately $1 billion in cash and shares. Krieger continued working on Instagram until 2018.

Burbn had accumulated features; Instagram emerged from narrowing the product around an activity users cared about. The judgment was in choosing what to remove as well as what to build.

Our co-founder Eric Bahn defines hustle as “great execution meets high velocity.” We look for evidence of that combination in how founders turn user behavior into decisions. The Burbn-to-Instagram shift is a concrete example of product direction changing in response to use.

Artifact: a second startup with a different outcome

Krieger and Systrom reunited to build Artifact, a personalized news app that launched in 2023. Krieger was its co-founder and CTO.

Artifact used AI to recommend reading material. Its path was very different from Instagram’s. On January 12, 2024, the team announced plans to wind down. Systrom wrote that, despite a core group of users who loved the product, the market opportunity was not large enough to justify continued investment.

Yahoo subsequently acquired Artifact’s technology. The deal closed on March 29, 2024, and Yahoo announced it on April 2. Its acquisition announcement said Artifact would no longer operate as a standalone app. Yahoo planned to incorporate its AI-powered personalization technology into its products, including Yahoo News, with Systrom and Krieger advising during the transition.

An experienced team can build something a small group loves without finding a market large enough to sustain the business. Our framework for product-market fit signals centers on whether a product becomes a must-have for a defined customer. A founder’s earlier success does not answer that question for the next company.

Mike Krieger’s angel investments and Figma board history

Krieger’s angel investments include Figma and Udio:

• Figma: CEO Dylan Field described Krieger as an early angel investor when announcing his board appointment in July 2025. That board role ended the following year. Figma’s April 2026 securities filing records his resignation, effective April 14, 2026, and says it did not result from a disagreement over the company’s operations, policies, or practices.
• Udio: The AI music company named Krieger among its seed investors in its April 2024 launch announcement. The announcement also identified him as a product advisor.

What operators can learn from his career

Krieger’s career spans several kinds of product work: finding a narrow use case, scaling a large engineering organization, closing a standalone product, and exploring capabilities that are still developing.

For an operator considering angel investing, those chapters offer better questions than a famous founder’s résumé alone:

• Product judgment: What behavior led the team to change its direction?
• Market evidence: Does enthusiasm extend beyond a small, committed group?
• Adaptability: Which parts of the product remain useful when the technology changes?

Our co-founder Elizabeth Yin writes in Democratizing Knowledge, “The more disciplined you are in your thought process/rubric, the more you can improve over time.” We apply that discipline by separating evidence about the current business from admiration for a founder’s past work.

Startup investing is risky, and most bets may fail. Even a successful operator’s involvement does not remove the possibility of losing the entire amount invested.

If you want to practice evaluating founders and product decisions alongside other operators and investors, apply to Angel Squad.