Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare
Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | GrowthShow Notes
Amol Avasare is Head of Growth at Anthropic, which is going through the most unprecedented growth trajectory in history—scaling from $1 billion to over $19 billion in ARR in just 14 months. Previously, Amol worked on the growth teams at Mercury and MasterClass. Before that he was a founder, and he cold emailed his way into the Anthropic role when no job listing existed. Most remarkably, he overcame a traumatic brain injury from a Muay Thai match that meant he couldn't work for nearly a year.
In our in-depth discussion, Amol shares: 1. How Amol landed his role by cold emailing Anthropic’s CPO Mike Krieger 2. How Anthropic is automating growth experiments with Claude (their internal tool called “CASH”) 3. Why the ratio of PMs to engineers might need to flip (more PMs than engineers) as AI makes engineers exponentially more productive 4. Why activation is the single highest-leverage growth problem in AI 5. Why Anthropic indexes 70/30 toward big bets (the opposite of most growth teams) 6. How he uses Cowork to detect team misalignment in Slack 7. How the company’s focus on AI coding created a research flywheel that accelerated their models — Brought to you by: WorkOS—Modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, free up to 1 million MAUs Vanta—Automate compliance, manage risk, and accelerate trust with AI — Episode transcript: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/anthropics-1b-to-19b-growth-run — Archive of all Lenny's Podcast transcripts: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/yxi4s2w998p1gvtpu4193/AMdNPR8AOw0lMklwtnC0TrQ?rlkey=j06x0nipoti519e0xgm23zsn9&st=ahz0fj11&dl=0 — Where to find Amol Avasare: • X: https://x.com/TheAmolAvasare • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amolavasare — Where to find Lenny: • Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com • X: https://twitter.com/lennysan • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/ — In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Introduction to Amol and Anthropic’s growth (03:15) The story of cold emailing Mike Krieger to get the job (08:28) What it’s like leading growth at the fastest-growing company ever (10:46) What the growth team actually does at Anthropic (12:16) The concept of “success disasters” (13:55) Why activation is the biggest challenge in AI products (18:05) Improving Mercury’s onboarding experience (20:57) The importance of adding the right kind of friction (25:10) Anthropic’s org structure (27:06) Why Anthropic focuses on big bets over micro-optimizations (33:34) Automating growth experiments with Claude (CASH) (38:20) How AI is starting to identify what experiments to run (41:07) The future of PM, engineering, and design roles (47:19) Why you might need more PMs as engineers get more productive (51:13) How Amol uses AI to prototype ideas and skip PRDs (58:10) Amol’s morning routine: AI analyzes 20 to 25 charts automatically (1:03:31) Getting coaching from an AI version of your manager (1:06:27) How Anthropic’s focus on coding and B2B drove their success (1:12:10) Balancing growth with AI safety as a core mission (1:18:09) Advice for thriving in an AI-first future (1:22:53) Anthropic’s culture and the “notebook channels” on Slack (1:35:12) Failure corner: Shutting down his startup after raising money (1:38:25) The traumatic brain injury that changed everything (1:46:49) Lightning round — References: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/anthropics-1b-to-19b-growth-run — Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected]. — Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.
To hear more, visit www.lennysnewsletter.com
More from Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
Emmanuel Ameisen is an interpretability researcher at Anthropic, where he looks inside LLMs like Claude to understand how they think. Before joining Anthropic, he spent years in applied ML at Stripe and Insight, and is the author of Building Machine Learning Powered Applications. His research has produced some of the most striking findings in the field: that models form general representations of concepts, plan many tokens ahead without stating those plans explicitly, and may exhibit something structurally similar to the distinction between conscious and unconscious processing in humans.
Josh Woodward is the head of Google Labs, the Gemini app, and AI Studio. He has spent over 17 years at Google and oversees its longest-running and largest labs team, whose products include NotebookLM (now Gemini Notebook), Project Genie, and Flow. His job is to find, experiment with, and scale new AI products, and he has built one of the most distinctive product cultures in the industry for generating ideas, running experiments, and, even more importantly, knowing when to quit.
Tibo Sottiaux leads ChatGPT and Codex at OpenAI. Under his stewardship, OpenAI has shipped some of its most consequential consumer launches: Codex, ChatGPT Work, and most recently, the new Dots personal agent platform. He joined me at DevDay, hours after his team launched more than 20 new products, to talk about where things are heading.
Molly Graham is back for round two, and this one is even more powerful. Molly has spent more than 20 years helping organizations and the humans inside them navigate growth and change. She’s held leadership roles at Google, Facebook, Quip, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and is the host of TED’s WorkLife podcast (which she took over from Adam Grant). She also runs Glue Club, a leadership community for senior operators, and writes a popular newsletter called Lessons.
Peter Sellis was the first product manager at Snapchat, where he spent seven years building one of the most beloved consumer products in history. He went on to serve as Head of Product at Discord, where he helped drive some of the fastest user growth the platform had seen. Having left his role at Discord, he gets to be especially real and unfiltered — nothing to promote, no PR, no comms team.