Brian Nichols is the co-founder of Angel Squad, a community where you’ll learn how to angel invest and get a chance to invest as little as $1k into Hustle Fund's top performing early-stage startups

Mike Krieger was born in São Paulo, Brazil and moved to California at 18 to attend Stanford, where he studied symbolic systems, a discipline sitting between computer science and psychology. There he met Kevin Systrom and the two spent years prototyping different ideas before founding Instagram in 2010.

Krieger's symbolic systems degree is worth noting. The program combines computer science with cognitive science, linguistics, and philosophy of mind, specifically to understand how people interact with technology. That background shaped his approach to Instagram's product: he was as interested in how people experienced the app psychologically as he was in the engineering that made it run.

Instagram launched as a photo-sharing app in October 2010. Within two months it had 1 million users. Facebook acquired it in April 2012 for $1 billion, then a shocking price for a 13-person company with no revenue. Krieger stayed on as CTO and grew the engineering team from a handful of people to over 450. Monthly active users reached 1 billion during his tenure.

The Meta Departure and Artifact

Krieger and Systrom left Meta in September 2018 after conflicts with Facebook's leadership over the direction of the product. They spent the next few years building quietly before launching Artifact in January 2023. The app used AI-powered recommendation systems to surface personalized news. It was a well-reviewed product with a loyal core user base.

They shut it down in January 2024. The shutdown note said what relatively few founders say: the market opportunity was not big enough to justify continued investment. Krieger has explained the decision in terms of specific metrics and timelines. They had written down experiments that would need to show results before they would continue. Those experiments ran. The numbers moved, but not enough. They stopped.

The technology was acquired by Yahoo in April 2024 for an undisclosed amount. Krieger and Systrom worked with Yahoo in an advisory capacity during the transition.

Elizabeth Yin of Hustle Fund has talked about how the willingness to shut something down when the data says to is one of the most important and underrated founder skills. Most founders keep going long past when the evidence says they should stop. Krieger and Systrom's disciplined exit from Artifact is a case study in applying product thinking to the meta-question of whether to continue at all. Angel Squad members learn to evaluate that kind of founder self-awareness as a signal in early stage diligence.

Anthropic

In May 2024, Anthropic hired Krieger as its first chief product officer. He oversaw product engineering, product management, and product design as the company worked to scale Claude into both enterprise and consumer markets. He helped ship Claude 3.7 Sonnet in February 2025, which introduced new capabilities for user-controlled AI reasoning.

In January 2026, Krieger transitioned from CPO to co-lead Anthropic's internal Labs team alongside Ben Mann, reporting to President Daniela Amodei. Labs is Anthropic's experimental products incubator, focused on building early-stage AI products rather than scaling existing ones. He is back in a smaller, more exploratory unit the same operating mode where he has historically done his best work.

Beyond Anthropic, Krieger sits on the board of Figma, which he joined in July 2025 following Figma's IPO. He has made 43 angel investments, including backing The Browser Company, the makers of the Arc browser.

The Angel Portfolio

Mike Krieger has made 43 angel investments outside his major ventures, according to PitchBook. His most notable angel bet is The Browser Company, the startup that built the Arc browser and later pivoted to AI-native browser technology. He serves as an advisor to SignalFire, the venture firm.

In July 2025, he joined the board of Figma following the company's IPO, which valued Figma at $68 billion. The board seat connects the Instagram engineering legacy with the design tool ecosystem. Krieger's background scaling visual media infrastructure at Instagram made him a natural board fit for a company whose entire product is about visual creation and collaboration.

His angel investing approach appears to follow his product instincts: backing companies building tools for creators and developers, often at the intersection of design and AI.

Shiyan Koh of Hustle Fund has noted that the best operator-investors are those who remain active builders rather than retiring to pure capital allocation. Krieger's trajectory co-founding Instagram, building Artifact, joining Anthropic at a formative stage, sitting on Figma's board reflects someone still deeply embedded in the product creation cycle. Angel Squad members who are operators building alongside their investments understand that instinct well. Find the community at hustlefund.vc/squad.