Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare
Lenny's Podcast · 2026-04-05 · 1h 53m
Episode 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 -
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