Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare

Anthropic’s Head of Growth on scaling in 14 months through big bets, intentional onboarding friction, deep focus, and CASH—an internal AI system for autonomous growth experiments

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.

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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

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Where to find Amol Avasare:

• X: https://x.com/TheAmolAvasare

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amolavasare

Referenced:

• How a traumatic brain injury made me a better PM—and person: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-a-traumatic-brain-injury-made

• Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com

• Snowflake: https://www.snowflake.com

• Canva: https://www.canva.com

• Palantir: https://www.palantir.com

• Atlassian: https://www.atlassian.com

• Anthropic’s CPO on what comes next | Mike Krieger (co-founder of Instagram): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/anthropics-cpo-heres-what-comes-next

• Claude Code: https://code.claude.com

• Dario Amodei on X: https://x.com/DarioAmodei

• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com

• Uber: https://www.uber.com

• DoorDash: https://www.doordash.com

• Anthropic co-founder on quitting OpenAI, AGI predictions, $100M talent wars, 20% unemployment, and the nightmare scenarios keeping him up at night | Ben Mann: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/anthropic-co-founder-benjamin-mann

• Mercury: https://mercury.com

• MasterClass: https://www.masterclass.com

• Calm: https://www.calm.com

• Alexey Komissarouk’s website: https://alexeymk.com

• Alexey’s “Mastering Growth Engineering” course: https://www.reforge.com/courses/mastering-growth-engineering

• Claude Cowork: https://www.anthropic.com/product/claude-cowork

• Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/authenticity-and-curiosity-ami-vora

• Ami Vora’s Substack: https://amivora.substack.com

• Benepass: https://getbenepass.com

• Brex: https://www.brex.com

• Granola: https://www.granola.ai

• The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-design-process-is-dead

• Marc Andreessen: The real AI boom hasn’t even started yet: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/marc-andreessen-the-real-ai-boom

• John Egan’s website: https://jwegan.com

• Workday: https://www.workday.com

• Figma: https://www.figma.com

• Spirit Rock: https://www.spiritrock.org

• This will make you a better decision-maker | Annie Duke (author of “Thinking in Bets” and “Quit,” former pro poker player): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/making-better-decisions-annie-duke

• Marty Supreme: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt32916440

• Maruhachi Shinsui Maruhachi Pro: https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/Maruhachi-Shinsui-Feather-Pillow-Blissful/dp/B081DNVD3K

Recommended books:

• The Joy of Living: Unlocking the Secret and Science of Happiness: https://www.amazon.com/Joy-Living-Unlocking-Science-Happiness/dp/0307347311

• Awareness: Conversations with the Masters: https://www.amazon.com/Awareness-Opportunities-Reality-Anthony-Mello/dp/0385249373

• Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts: https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Bets-Making-Smarter-Decisions/dp/0735216371

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.

My biggest takeaways from this conversation:

  1. Anthropic is on a legendary run. The company went from $1B ARR to over $19B in 14 months. It’s been growing over 10x year-over-year since 2023 ($0 to $100M, then $100M to $1B, then $1B to around $10B), and Amol says the $19B figure is already out of date. Internally, nobody uses linear charts anymore—everything is viewed on a log-linear scale because the raw numbers are too exponential to be useful otherwise.

  2. Engineering is getting the most AI leverage—and it’s squeezing PMs and designers. With Claude Code, a five-engineer team now produces the output of 15 to 20 engineers. But PM and design productivity haven’t scaled proportionally. The result is a compressed ratio where one PM is effectively managing the output of a much larger engineering team. Anthropic's growth team is responding in two ways: hiring more PMs, and formally deputizing product-minded engineers to act as mini-PMs for any project with less than two weeks of engineering time.

  3. Adding friction to onboarding works—if the friction helps users understand why the product is for them. At Mercury, MasterClass, Calm, and Anthropic, adding steps to onboarding flows consistently improved conversion. The key: cut annoying friction that doesn’t add value, but add friction that helps users understand why the product is for them. Breaking five form inputs into two screens reduces cognitive load and performs better than one long form.

  4. Anthropic is using AI to automate growth experimentation—and it’s delivering results. The internal initiative is called CASH (Claude Accelerates Sustainable Hypergrowth). It works across four stages: identifying opportunities, building features, testing quality, and analyzing results. Right now it handles copy changes and minor UI tweaks. The win rate is comparable to a junior PM with two to three years of experience, and improving rapidly.

  5. The one part of PM work that AI can’t automate yet: getting six people in a room to agree. Amol and his head of design joke that even with AGI, it’ll still be impossible to align six stakeholders. Cross-functional coordination—managing opinions, navigating politics, mediating tradeoffs—remains the bottleneck that AI doesn’t touch for larger projects. This is why Amol believes PM roles aren’t going away, and may actually grow in demand.

  6. Sixty to eighty percent of what Anthropic’s growth team ships has no PRD. For smaller work, kickoffs happen on Slack—messages back and forth with product-minded engineers who can push back and ask the right questions. For larger projects, Amol believes in a proper 30-minute cross-functional kickoff (legal, safeguards, stakeholders) to surface concerns early. But the default bias is toward action: skip the document, jump to prototyping, iterate in motion.

  7. Amol uses AI agents to detect organizational misalignment, monitor his dashboards, and coach him as a manager. He has a Cowork scheduled task that checks 20 to 25 Hex charts every morning and flags what he should pay attention to. He even asks Claude to simulate his manager’s perspective and give him weekly coaching based on what his manager has written publicly and said internally.

  8. AI companies need to focus on bigger bets, not better A/B tests. Amol’s argument: if your core product value is driven by AI, then the future value is orders of magnitude higher than today’s value, because model capabilities grow exponentially. In that world, micro-optimizations capture a shrinking share of a growing pie. Traditional growth teams do 60% to 70% small optimizations and 20% to 30% big swings. At Anthropic, they flip this ratio.

  9. The biggest strategic mistake growth teams make is trying to squeeze every last dollar from users. Amol calls this a core principle: “We are very comfortable forgoing metric impact in order to prioritize safety, protect our brand, hold a high quality bar, and maintain a great user experience.” He argues that this is how every great product operates if you zoom out beyond the quarter. At Anthropic, it also ties directly to the company’s identity as an AI safety organization—they’ve repeatedly taken commercial hits for safety and believe it will become a competitive advantage as AI stakes rise.

  10. A traumatic brain injury taught Amol the principle that now drives his work: freedom through constraints. In early 2022, a kick to the head during a Muay Thai sparring session caused a traumatic brain injury. Amol spent nine months off work and months relearning to walk, unable to look at screens or listen to music for more than 20 seconds. He was re-injured a month after joining Mercury and had to take two more months off. He’s still not fully healed. But the constraints—no alcohol, no caffeine, mandatory breaks, daily meditation—have become the habits that let him operate at the intensity Anthropic demands. “The true freedom in life is learning how to be content when you don’t get what you want.”