Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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?
00:08:36 · Amol Avasare
[00:08:36] S1: Yeah, I'd say it's very much a company-wide effort. So yes, we are the growth team. We have done great. I think we've driven a lot of impact. But honestly, man, we can't claim too much credit for the success of the company. We as Anthropic are really a model company and an intelligence company first and foremost. And so the lion's share of what has driven our success is our research team. We have, I think, the best research team in the world. We have great teams on inference and compute, and then there's many other teams like Claude Code, go to-market, et cetera, who I think deserve much more credit than us. I think just zooming out, going to some of what you said earlier, that the growth trajectory's just been insane. That 10X year-on-year revenue growth trend has been there since the beginning. I think 2023 was 0 to 100 mil, 2024 was 100 to 1, last year was 1 to roughly 10. And I look back to when I joined in 2024, revenue was in the hundreds of millions and just that trajectory through the end of 2024 and 2025, week two of when I joined, we're going into 2025 revenue planning and we have these base case and aggressive case scenarios and Dario's pushing the aggressive case scenario and people are freaking out being like, "How the hell are we going to hit that?" And Dario's like, "I think we can actually go much higher than that." And I'm coming in, this place is crazy, there's absolutely no way. And that happened. And then you get to the end of 2025 and it's like, okay, law of large numbers, there's going to be a pretty big slowdown here based on your baseline rate of 10 billion, how are you going to keep growing at this rate? And it just has not slowed down. And those numbers are public. The 19 billion number you quoted is from the end of Feb, so that is also out of date. And look, it's absolutely insane. The funniest thing is something that I've noticed internally is linear charts are just not cool. No one cares about linear charts. Everything is log linear. You have to show me at log linear scale, and that's a scale we think. And I think overall, we're just really hanging on by the seat of our pants. So we're trying to manage the growth and do the best that we can for our users.