Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare
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:
- How Amol landed his role by cold emailing Anthropic’s CPO Mike Krieger
- How Anthropic is automating growth experiments with Claude (their internal tool called “CASH”)
- Why the ratio of PMs to engineers might need to flip (more PMs than engineers) as AI makes engineers exponentially more productive
- Why activation is the single highest-leverage growth problem in AI
- Why Anthropic indexes 70/30 toward big bets (the opposite of most growth teams)
- How he uses Cowork to detect team misalignment in Slack
- How the company’s focus on AI coding created a research flywheel that accelerated their models
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Episode transcript: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/anthropics-1b-to-19b-growth-run
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Archive of all Lenny's Podcast transcripts: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/yxi4s2w998p1gvtpu4193/AMdNPR8AOw0lMklwtnC0TrQ?rlkey=j06x0nipoti519e0xgm23zsn9&st=ahz0fj11&dl=0
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Where to find Amol Avasare:
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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
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References: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/anthropics-1b-to-19b-growth-run
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Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.
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