20VC: Anthropic CPO Mike Krieger: Where Will Value Be Created in a World of AI | Have Foundation Models Commoditized | When Do Model Providers Become Application Providers | What Anthropic Learned from Deepseek

**Mike Krieger** (0:00)
I think models over time get more different rather than more similar. I still think we are in like day one around, is AI an indispensable part of most people's work? And I think the answer is no. I think the deep sink piece, people seem surprised that there were cutting edge research teams there, and if you were paying attention, that part should not have been the surprising piece. I think we've, if anything, under invested a bit in two things. One is just having a faster duration to speed up first-party products, and then the second part on the API side.

**Harry Stebbings** (0:33)
This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and today our guest is incredible, Mike Krieger, co-founder of Instagram and now CPO at Anthropic. One of the best placed individuals to speak about the state of models today and where they are going. This was an incredible discussion for me to have, and I so appreciate Mike being so open. But before we dive in today, turning your back of a napkin idea into a billion dollar startup requires countless hours of collaboration and teamwork. It can be really difficult to build a team that's aligned on everything from values to workflow, but that's exactly what Coda was made to do. Coda is an all-in-one collaborative workspace that started as a napkin sketch. Now, just five years since launching in beta, Coda has helped 50,000 teams all over the world get on the same page. Now, at 20VC, we've used Coda to bring structure to our content planning and episode prep, and it's made a huge difference. Instead of bouncing between different tools, we can keep everything from guest research to scheduling and notes all in one place, which saves us so much time. With Coda, you get the flexibility of docs, the structure of spreadsheets, and the power of applications, all built for enterprise, and it's got the intelligence of AI which makes it even more awesome. If you're a startup team looking to increase alignment and agility, Coda can help you move from planning to execution in record time. To try it for yourself, go to coda.io/20vctoday and get six free months of the team plan for startups. That's coda.io/20vc to get started for free and get six free months of the team plan. Now that your team is aligned and collaborating, let's tackle those messy expense reports. You know, those receipts that seem to multiply like rabbits in your wallet, the endless email chains asking, can you approve this? Don't even get me started on a month end panic when you realize you have to reconcile it all. Well, PLEO offers smart company cards, physical, virtual and vendor specific, so teams can buy what they need while finance stays in control. Automate your expense reports, process invoices seamlessly and manage reimbursements effortlessly, all in one platform. With integrations to tools like Xero, QuickBooks and NetSuite, PLEO fits right into your workflow, saving time and giving you full visibility over every entity, payment and subscription. Join over 37,000 companies already using PLEO to streamline their finances. Try PLEO today. It's like magic, but with fewer rabbits. Find out more at pleo.io/20vc.
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**Mike Krieger** (3:56)
You have now arrived at your destination.

**Harry Stebbings** (3:59)
Mike, dude, I am so excited for this. I've literally just been out for a walk and I've been listening to like every show that you've done in the last year. And so I told you before, I don't want to start with, oh, how did you get into tech and all the normal rubbish? I want to start with a very challenging first question, which is, I, as a venture investor today, have to determine where value is in the future. And I look at the world today and I don't know. And so my question to you is, when we look forward, where will value be generated in an AI driven decade that we have ahead of us?

**Mike Krieger** (4:28)
Yeah, I think it's an awesome question. I get a version of this question often from entrepreneurs who I went from, you know, purely building startups myself to now running a company that is partly enabling new startups to get created or helping boost their fortunes. And the question I get often is like, well, what can I build that is not going to be in the lane of an Anthropic or another one of these labs? And I don't have a perfect answer because sort of the crystal ball. But my sense of where it ends up being most valuable to exist is places where you have some differentiated go to market, some differentiated knowledge of some particular industry or some special data that only you have access to, ideally two or even three of those as well. So companies that are within a financial sector, within a legal sector, within health care, I mean, health care, I've like gotten exposed to and it is, you know, a tremendously complex ball of yarn. And like the work up front, it's not the sexy work. It's actually not the work that you're going to be able to really do in a accelerator or, you know, a short amount of time, but it is the worth that the legwork that you've put in. I think those are durable places to generate value. And then, you know, you can sit in a place where you can pull on what's great from the foundation models. You can do your own fine tuning if you need it. You can do your own AI specialization if needed. But the thing that's going to give you legs and like be durable over longer is being able to sell into those places, have something that you understand about those places uniquely, and then get better for being deployed there over time.