Mike Krieger reflects on opportunities to build major AI companies, advising against crafting product strategy solely to chase consumer "hits". He recommends embracing a company’s authentic strengths (e.g., a strong developer brand) and notes that consumer adoption can be unpredictable, citing Instagram as an example.
Chapters
I think there's room for several generationally important companies to be built in AI right now. How do we figure out what we want to be when we grow up versus like what we currently aren't or wish that we were or like see other players in the space being. I think maybe two things are true. One is consumer adoption is really lightning in a bottle and we saw it at Instagram. So like almost maybe more than anybody I can look internally and say like look, we'll keep building interesting products, one of them may hit. But to kind of craft an entire product strategy around like trying to find that hit is probably not wise. And then instead look yourself in the mirror and embrace who you are and what you could be rather than like who others are is maybe the way I've been looking at it which is we have a super strong developer brand. People build on top of us all the time.