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

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:00)
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 one to 19 billion dollars in 14 months.

**Amol Avasare** (0:14)
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 open AI. It's a complete miracle that we've gotten to the stage that we have.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:29)
Give us just a glimpse of what it's like to be leading growth inside of Anthropic.

**Amol Avasare** (0:33)
It's the hardest job I've had in my life. You come into Anthropic, you need to understand that 50, 60, 70 percent of how you operate in the past just fell out the door.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:41)
One of the cleverest growth moves you all made was this idea of importing memory from ChatGPT.

**Amol Avasare** (0:47)
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 Cache, which is Claude Accelerate Sustainable Hypergrowth. How can we use Claude to automate growth experimentation? And it's delivering results.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:05)
You're basically living in the future.

**Amol Avasare** (1:06)
We always talk about the exponential. The product value that we will deliver in two years time is probably like a thousand X. What it is today. The funniest thing is I've noticed internally linear charts are just not cool. Everything is log linear. It's just showing me at log linear scale.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:22)
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. Here and most interestingly, something that most people don't know about him, is that Amol suffered a severe brain injury. He had to spend 9 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 chatted 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 going to 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 Lennys Newsletter subscribers. With that, I bring you Amol Avasare.
Amol, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the podcast.

**Amol Avasare** (3:22)
Pleasure to be here.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:23)
Head of Growth at Anthropic, no big deal. I've had a lot of people come on this podcast from companies that claim to be the fastest growing companies of all time, and Anthropic actually is, if you look at the trajectory, I just have some of the numbers here just so people understand how absurd this is. So you guys were at a billion ARR at the start of 2025, then hit something like four billion mid 2025, then nine billion ARR at the end of 2025, and the last number I've seen is you guys are at 19 billion ARR, which just to put a couple pieces of context here, one is that's from one to $19 billion in 14 months.