Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:00:00 · Lenny Rachitsky, Amol Avasare
[00:00:00] S0: 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. [00:00:14] S1: 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 to the stage that we have. [00:00:29] S0: Give us just a glimpse of what is like to be leading growth inside of Anthropic. [00:00:34] S1: 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 operate in the past, just throw it out the door. [00:00:41] S0: One of the cleverest growth moves you all made was this idea of importing memory from ChatGPT. [00:00:47] S1: 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 accelerate sustainable hypergrowth. How can we use Claude to automate growth experimentation? [00:01:04] S0: And it's delivering results, you're basically living in the future. [00:01:06] S1: 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. So show me at log linear scale.
00:01:22 · Lenny Rachitsky, Amol Avasare
[00:01:22] S0: 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 the 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 going to change. [00:03:22] S1: Pleasure to be here.
00:03:22 · Amol Avasare, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:03:22] S1: Pleasure to be here. [00:03:24] S0: 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 4 billion mid 2025, then 9 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 $1 to $19 billion in 14 months. I have so many questions. First of all, the story of how you actually landed this role is really interesting. Talk about how you got this role.
00:04:15 · Amol Avasare, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:04:15] S1: Yeah, it's a little unorthodox. So it's funny, when I did my onboarding, they walked through what percentage of the cohort came through referrals, what percentage came through applying on the website, what percentage came through sourcing? And I was on none of those. And I was like, "Okay, this is interesting." And basically the way that I got to Anthropic was that I was actually a user of Claude and I was using a lot. I was like, "Man, these guys, great product, great company, but they really obviously don't have a growth team." And what I did was I just sent Mike Krieger a cold email. He was the chief product officer. I sent him a cold email saying like, "Hey, love what you guys do, love the product. I think you guys badly need a growth team. Want to chat." And I didn't expect he would respond. And he responds and says, "Hey, yeah, I'm interested. Let's talk." And it's funny, I didn't know. I wouldn't have known. They were not hiring for a growth team. There were no growth PM roles listed, but they were just at that time starting to think about hiring a growth team. So it was very good timing. But yeah, spoke to Mike and one thing led to another. He said, "I'm the only PM that he's hired from cold email." And I feel very lucky that he decided to respond to my email. [00:05:31] S0: I did not know the story. That is another absurd fact. Clearly you're good at cold email. What did you do in this cold email to get his attention?
00:05:31 · Lenny Rachitsky, Amol Avasare
[00:05:31] S0: I did not know the story. That is another absurd fact. Clearly you're good at cold email. What did you do in this cold email to get his attention? [00:05:40] S1: I would say I've basically perfected cold email over the years. So when I was a founder, I had to get really, really good at this. So I sent a lot of cold emails out and just honed the subject line, the message, and the tone. And so basically in the subject line, the first thing is from a conversion standpoint, someone sees the email, they need to click on it. And so I have a copy that I've tested that is very, very high open rate. And so- [00:06:10] S0: Wait, what is this copy? Or is this a secret? [00:06:12] S1: It's a secret. I think [inaudible 00:06:12]. [00:06:11] S0: Okay. We'll keep it a secret.
00:06:11 · Lenny Rachitsky, Amol Avasare
[00:06:11] S0: Okay. We'll keep it a secret. [00:06:12] S1: It's a secret. So that's one, getting them to open. I think the second is then the tactics of you need to understand where are people getting outreach. And if everyone's getting outreach in one area and then you reach out to them there, then you're not going to get as high of a response rate. So you can think about LinkedIn, you can think about work email. These are things that everyone is emailing. So there's ways to get people's personal emails out there. And so that's one thing that I did. And so okay, I've got this personal email, I know the copy that works, and then it's just keeping it very short on here's who I am, here's why I'd be a good fit, and we should chat. And these things typically don't work. And then you should always follow up a few times. I think my role of thumb is like, if I really care about it, I should just keep reaching out to them until they tell me, "Please stop." And so I would've kept doing that, but he responded the first time. [00:07:03] S0: It makes sense that a talented growth person would be very good at cold email and getting people's attention. So that's almost like an interview step is just, did I want to read this email?