Don't Just Look at Now—Think Two Steps Ahead | Mike Krieger, Instagram Co-Founder & Anthropic CPO | EO

Extracting things, strip them all away, and then focus on what would eventually become Instagram.

I think a lot of the art, and it's a part both art and science of building great products, especially with emerging technologies.

So Instagram, it was the rise of the mobile phone.

Finding the technologies that are ready for broader adoption than they currently have, and then finding how do you build the product around it to make it usable for many, many people.

That's a common sort of through line.

And I think the kinds of things you can look for in terms of that early energy is, are there some people already starting to do something interesting in the space, but it's all the early adopters? That's an interesting kind of area.

Um, the other thing I look at often is the rate of change.

So if you look at the iPhone 3 to the 3GS to the 4, and you look at the quality of the photos and the quality of the networking, um, stack and the ability to connect, you can see the jumps.

So you're like, "Okay, if it goes one or two more jumps, it's gonna be incredible." Same with LLMs.

I joined Anthropic, we had just come out with Claude 3, and Claude 3 was our first model that really started to get more usage.

It was still, you know, limited in a lot of ways.

But then you see the next we did Claude 3.5, and that was a big leap.

So you can imagine that we're gonna continue to get these large jumps.

And so as a product builder, you have to start thinking, "I wanna build a product that's useful today, but is also ready to catch the wave of what the next big leap is."

Extracting things, strip them all away, and then focus on what would eventually become Instagram.

I think a lot of the art, and it's a part both art and science of building great products, especially with emerging technologies.

So Instagram, it was the rise of the mobile phone.

Finding the technologies that are ready for broader adoption than they currently have, and then finding how do you build the product around it to make it usable for many, many people.

That's a common sort of through line.

And I think the kinds of things you can look for in terms of that early energy is, are there some people already starting to do something interesting in the space, but it's all the early adopters? That's an interesting kind of area.

Um, the other thing I look at often is the rate of change.

So if you look at the iPhone 3 to the 3GS to the 4, and you look at the quality of the photos and the quality of the networking, um, stack and the ability to connect, you can see the jumps.

So you're like, "Okay, if it goes one or two more jumps, it's gonna be incredible." Same with LLMs.

I joined Anthropic, we had just come out with Claude 3, and Claude 3 was our first model that really started to get more usage.

It was still, you know, limited in a lot of ways.

But then you see the next we did Claude 3.5, and that was a big leap.

So you can imagine that we're gonna continue to get these large jumps.

And so as a product builder, you have to start thinking, "I wanna build a product that's useful today, but is also ready to catch the wave of what the next big leap is."