Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger leaves C-suite for coding

por Vojtech: Mike Krieger

Mike Krieger could have checked out completely after Instagram. He's the co-founder who built a photo app with a single filter, sold it to Facebook in 2012 for a billion dollars (everyone thought they overpaid), watched it hit 2 billion users, ran it for six years, and then left. Huge exit, could retire anywhere, do nothing forever. Instead, in 2024, he joins Anthropic as chief product officer. Two years in the exec seat, watching everyone around him build, the FOMO gets unbearable. So he deletes his own C-suite role, goes to Labs as an individual contributor with no reports and no title games. Then he spends a weekend having Claude port 200k lines of Python to TypeScript and comes back Monday to a finished, deployable port. The guy who sold Instagram for a billion just wanted to build again. Different game.