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 Krieger2. 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 productive4. Why activation is the single highest-leverage growth problem in AI5. Why Anthropic indexes 70/30 toward big bets (the opposite of most growth teams)6. How he uses Cowork to detect team misalignment in Slack7. 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 MAUsVanta—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:

Introduction to Amol and Anthropic’s growth

The story of cold emailing Mike Krieger to get the job

What it’s like leading growth at the fastest-growing company ever

What the growth team actually does at Anthropic

The concept of “success disasters”

Why activation is the biggest challenge in AI products

Improving Mercury’s onboarding experience

The importance of adding the right kind of friction

Anthropic’s org structure

Why Anthropic focuses on big bets over micro-optimizations

Automating growth experiments with Claude (CASH)

How AI is starting to identify what experiments to run

The future of PM, engineering, and design roles

Why you might need more PMs as engineers get more productive

How Amol uses AI to prototype ideas and skip PRDs

Amol’s morning routine: AI analyzes 20 to 25 charts automatically

Getting coaching from an AI version of your manager

How Anthropic’s focus on coding and B2B drove their success

Balancing growth with AI safety as a core mission

Advice for thriving in an AI-first future

Anthropic’s culture and the “notebook channels” on Slack

Failure corner: Shutting down his startup after raising money

The traumatic brain injury that changed everything