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

A lot of companies claim to be the fastest-growing companies of all time. Anthropic actually is. You guys were at a billion ARR at the start of 2025. The last number I've seen is 19 billion ARR. That's 1 to $19 billion in 14 months.

Historically, we were very much the smallest, least well-funded player in this space. We didn't have the free cash flow or the distribution of a Meta or Google. We didn't have the first mover advantage of an OpenAI. It's a complete miracle that we've gotten [chuckles] to the stage that we have.

Give us just a glimpse of what it's like to be leading growth inside of Anthropic.

It's the hardest job I've had in my life. To come into Anthropic, you need to understand that 50, 60, 70% of how you operated in the past, just throw it out the door.

One of the cleverest growth moves y'all made was this idea of importing memory from ChatGPT.

Activation is a really big challenge in AI. We are starting to look at how do we automate growth. Our growth platform team is driving this effort called CASH, which is Claude Accelerates Sustainable Hypergrowth. How can we use Claude to automate growth experimentation? And it's delivering results.

You're basically living in the future.

We always talk about the exponential. The product value that we will deliver in two years' time is probably, like, 1000x what it is today. The funniest thing is I've noticed internally linear charts are just not cool. Everything is log linear. Just show me a log linear scale.

Today my guest is Amol Avasare. Amol is head of growth at Anthropic, which is on the most unprecedented growth run in history. In the past 14 months, they grew from 1 billion to over 19 billion in annual recurring revenue. Just in the past few months, their revenue doubled. They've been growing 10X year over year. This is unheard of at this scale. By the time this episode comes out, their revenue will be even higher. To put this scale in perspective, companies like Atlassian and Palantir and Snowflake, which have been around for 15 to 20 years, each do something like $4.5 to 6 billion in ARR. Anthropic is adding this much ARR every few months. And if that isn't interesting enough to you, Amol, who leads growth at Anthropic, is an incredible human. He previously led growth at Mercury and Masterclass. Before that, he was a founder and an investment banker, and most interestingly, something that most people don't know about him is that Amol suffered a severe brain injury. He had to spend nine months relearning how to walk and work and just not be nauseous all the time. He shared this story in a guest post in my newsletter a number of years ago. We actually chat about this during the conversation. These are my favorite kind of conversations because Amol and his team are living in the future, and he's come to tell us where things are heading and what's gonna change. And in this episode, Amol shares an unprecedented look at how a company like Anthropic operates and grows, including how they think about growth, what parts of the job they've automated, the future of the product and growth roles, how Amol got the job in the first place by cold emailing Mike Krieger, and so much more. Amol is wonderful, and just try to count the number of times that he blew my mind during this conversation. Before we get into it, don't forget to check out lennysproductpass.com for an incredible set of deals available exclusively to Lenny's Newsletter subscribers. With that, I bring you Amol Avasare. [gentle music] Amol, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the podcast.