From Artium Co-Founder Henry Meller: Just had a great conversation with one of my heroes… Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger! He had some amazing lessons to share for founders looking to build a consumer app and founding tech team.

1. “You don’t need many people to get started - the founder should be the product visionary, a couple of full stack iOS devs, an ops / infra specialist, a PM and a kick ass designer… although right now maybe you want an ML specialist if algorithms are going to be a part of the experience, which they probably will be… but that’s all you need 7 people MAX!”
   
   

2. “But you should focus on building with quality from the get go - getting all your cloud infra set up right from day one will save you so much time in the future.”
   
   

3. “Work in one week iterations - have a short all hands planning meeting on Monday morning and define the work you intend to do in the coming week in force ranked order… then just work your way through it between then and Friday”
   
   

4. “You don’t need complex product management software or too much process or complexity generally… it should always be easy to know what to work on next at Artifact (his new startup) we run everything off a Notion doc which we run as a prioritized check list - then we just spend all our time and focus checking things off”
   
   

5. “Do the simple thing… and then launch it quickly”

Mike told me that his current team is only 7 people - fascinating to see someone who has the ability to raise untold millions at will start with a small and nimble team.

We also reminisced about his time working with Pivotal Labs when he was at Instagram and his excitement that we are carrying the Pivotal Labs legacy forward here at Artium where we help founders and leaders do extraordinary things with small but powerful teams.

I couldn’t help but be struck by the fact that ALL of Mike’s advice was perfectly aligned with the advice we give our clients - if you want to build teams and products the way they do at Instagram and now at Mike’s new start up Artifact ping me and let’s talk 😉