YouSaid · the spoken record

Amol Avasare

lines on the record: 118
first: 2026-04-05
most recent: 2026-04-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Can find me on my LinkedIn. It's just a more OSRA. I'm boring. That's it. You can look online to apply on our jobs page as it rolls across growth, engineering, growth product, growth design. We are looking for great people on the growth team. So please come and join us. And I think being helpful to me is just two things, trying our products, giving us feedback, giving us harsh feedback in particular on welcoming you better. And then please send great people our way. We are looking for the best of the best to join the team and we would love to hear from anyone you know off as well who could be for one of our roles.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Watching, but certainly not playing. My wife's from Michigan, and she took me to a game at the big house and it just changed my life. From then on, I was like, I'm a Wolverines fan. And Big Wolverines fan, big 49ers fan. I just love football. So that's probably the one that comes to mind.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think I'm just like quite tied on time for hobbies. I would say it's largely just like work and have my body function and then like, you know, take care of the most important relationships around me. I think maybe the one hobby I'd say is just I'm really into sports and I've gotten more into sports at football in particular watching.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maine wanted to say is just she'll be right. This is a very common Aussie setting. It's like she will be right. She'll be right. It's a common Aussie saying when we're faced with like a tough or difficult situation. You're kind of like dismissing the severity of it in a way by saying like it'll be fine. And I think that that's just like such a good metaphor. It's such a good tactic in many, many cases. And then I think the other one is just like sometimes in life you just have to go for it. And that is something that the guy Eros Rez Mini, who was the CMO of Discord, who was a very close advisor to me as a founder, he would push me on this. And that was something that he would often say. He's just like, just go for it. And I think that that's a very helpful thing of you can sit there thinking, should I do this? Should I not? And sometimes in life, you just have to go for it.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so this is a funny one. I was in Japan last week and I was on this, sitting in this hotel. And I just really loved the pillow that I had in this hotel. It was very random. I just had at times had like neck and upper trap pain. And sometimes I've been frustrated with my pillow because I sometimes sleep facing up, sometimes sideways. And like the height's not quite right. And I was just like, this pillow is just great. And basically this pillow is like it kind of, it's full of beads. And so you can like naturally shift the height of the pillow while you're sleeping like even like unconsciously without thinking. And so I looked at the tag or like, what is this? I ordered it to imp by Amazon Japan and I brought it back with me on the plane. And so I have the name here. It's called the Maruhachi Shinsui Maruhachi Pro pillow. And you can only get it in Japan, but they're shipped to the US. No affiliation.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think movie is probably Muddy Supreme. It's one of the only ones I watched recently. I thought it was great. I thought it was just insane, absolutely insane movie. It was ridiculous, but I loved it. TV show, I have not watched TV in a while. I think it's probably the Olympics would be the one if that counts.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is thinking in bets by Annie Duke. I think just being able to break down a situation when someone's like, I don't know, it'll get done in time. Okay, like, can you put a number to that? Like, what percentage likelihood is it? Those types of things, I think, are just so tactically helpful in product.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably ties to a lot of what I just talked about. I think a lot about meditation and my emotional state as what I spend most of my time thinking and like reading and researching and working on outside of work. So my recommendation is very related to that. The first is a book called Joy of Living by a Buddhist monk whose name's Yongi Mingya Ringpoche. It's just really about how you can start to think about your life experience in a different way and have tactics of what to do to kind of change just how you think about things. This is one where like I've recommended to people it's not like yeah recommends a lot of people and they they've really really enjoyed it. I think another one is awareness by Anthony Demello which is a kind of similar thing but from a different angle those two I consistently recommend to people and then the third one is more relevant to product in many ways.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Accept the situation and like not let that affect you emotionally. It's not to say, I need everything, man. I was like, every single thing I could do, diet. I was like, I'm on it. Every action I can take, I'm on it. But then you have a choice of, are you going to let the impact of that define your happiness or not? And I think that that's the thing when you, when the impacts maybe are not coming, you have to then adapt to, okay, what do I want my happiness to be? And what are the meditation teachers said, like the true freedom in life is learning how to be content when you don't get what you want. And it's not to say you shouldn't do something when you don't get what you want, but I think that that takeaway of just can you be content and like not have your happiness rely on getting something, I think it's a challenge. I'm not perfect at it, but I think it's probably one of the biggest takeaways from that whole thing.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that freedom through constraints is one of the big takeaways I've had during that time. Because if you have these constraints, you're forced to adapt and it creates, you gives you in a business setting, you have to focus more in a personal setting. And like if the constraint is, I can't do anything and I'm injured. I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know I'm going to get better. You have two choices. You're like, one, are you going to let that, are you just going to resist and fight with reality and really suffer from that? Or are you going to”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Blowing and so that relationship between awareness and reality, that's where you have choice that you sort of learn from deep meditation on how to shift that and apply your choice there. I think that that is the thing that has helped me significantly with just keeping a more level head. I think a lot of staying in this game in this level of intensity is just keep your head. Just don't lose your head in like the crazy times. I think all of that that I've gone through has like helped me do this without resorting to like unhealthy coping mechanisms.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Short break, even on the craziest days with like model launches, et cetera. I'm lucky we have like a meditation area in the office that I'll go to and then the whole side of things around meditation that I talked about in that post. I think both you and I have done a retreat of spirit rock and doing a meditation retreat changed my life and it's something that I do at least once a year now. I have one coming up relatively soon as well. And just I think all of that has helped with better managing the physical side of it because this job is very taxing. And then emotionally having a little bit of space to what happens. You have sort of awareness on one side, you have the reality on the other side. And reality is crazy here, man. Like reality is insane. Like there's so much happening every day. There's so much noise. It's mindful.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was off work for two months when I was one month into joining Mercury. Like one month in, I'm like, sorry, guys, I need to peace out for three months. And that then it was a very, very long recovery from that. And I'm actually still not 100% healed. So I'm like, I'm like mostly good, but I have times when I have like dizziness and headaches and other things that I need to work around. Overall, I feel like it's one of the best things that could have happened to me. And I think that keeping that mindset helps. And there's a point when you can take that too far when that view is detached from reality. But I think it's just made me so much better and effective, more effective as a person. A lot of the same habits, like I don't drink alcohol, I don't drink caffeine. I have to do a bunch of these things for my physical health. I just have to do them. So I keep doing them. I take breaks. This is like a really big one. You might think even a place like anthropic, like, how do you survive in this way? It's like even on the craziest days, Lenny, between the start of the day and lunch and between lunch and the end of the day, I take a”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That newsletter. And a month later, I got reinjured actually because when you have a brain injury until you're 100% healed, your risk of another concussion or brain injury is elevated when you're 100% healed, your risk falls down to that of a non-concussed population. But until that time, like you need like 95% healed, you're not 100% healed. And it was just an innocuous sort of in everyday life getting off a plane bag sort of hit me on the head type thing.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would listen to music for maybe like 20 seconds and feel like I need to vomit. I couldn't look at screens at all. And it was a very, very long recovery. It was not clear to me that I would ever work again for a while, actually. And it was like we'd have been discussing with my wife, like, what would we do in that case, et cetera? And we had to think even on those levels. through a lot of pushing and really working through myself and you have to just slowly increase your tolerance to things. It's a brutal process, but you need to slowly expose yourself to different things and just get better and better at each little thing, actively work on that. Don't push it too far. Otherwise, you have a big setback. It basically got to the point then where over nine months, then after that returned to work and then it slowly got better. And the part Lenny, you don't know is we in mid-2023, we posted.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was the toughest time in my life? It made shutting down a company being like, oh, that was nothing, actually. It's funny how perspective works that way. Back in early 2022, I had a traumatic brain injury. So I'd done MMA for many years. I'd done Muay Thai, which is a type of martial arts for many years. Never had a problem. It's just like one of the things that happens, like the wrong session, the wrong. It's just a normal day of sparring, nothing crazy. You get the wrong hip to the head in the wrong way. And my whole life changed. And basically, I spent nine months. I was off work for nine months. The first couple of months were brutal. It took me roughly half a year until I was comfortable walking again. It was very, very difficult. The first two, three months beyond just showering and going to the bathroom, my wife did everything for me, like including like texting my friends.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that it's a tough thing, but you get so much from that experience that it's hard to see in the moment. And I think without doing that, I would not have gone into this. I was not a PM before. I didn't have any of these skills. I'd never worked on products. I didn't know how to code email really. And so it was through that job that I learned a ton of the skills that made this career path viable. It's just a tough thing, but the positives can come from”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were like in our early 20s, we had like no idea what we're doing at the time. And many things I do differently. But that was just a very, very, very painful process. I think the good thing was we kept our investors in the loop the whole time. So Tony founders who are struggling out there, like send those monthly investor updates. It's really easy to send those when things are great. It's really hard to send those. When things are bad, you just bat it down. You need to sit down and send an update to your investors about why everything you talked about last month did not go to plan. But it's just the right thing to do. And it keeps people in the loop and it avoids surprises. But it's still so tough when you're then calling up the investors to be like, hey, we're shutting down or making that decision. Everyone who believed in you and it becomes such a big part of the identity. It's very, very tough. So, man, that was just brutal. Like it's brutal. And it took me, I think, like a number of years to truly get over.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have a couple I think it's very much not that way. I feel like it was a lot of squiggly lines to get here. The biggest I'd say is just founding a company, raising a bunch of money, having employees and then having to shut it down and tell your investors that you've lost the money and that you had a vision of what you're going to do and that it's not going to happen. And so that I think is probably the biggest one. We spent three years on it. It was not like, oh, we tried something part-time. It was like, no, we went for it. We spent three years, raised a couple of mil. We had maybe seven, ten employees at our biggest. And it was something that we really believed in. It was around mental health and how you can quantify mental health to help understand or get early predictors of things like generalized anxiety, major depression. So it's stuff that we really, really believed in, but ultimately.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're doing great, and then you have ways to influence that, okay, these are the principles and put that into the conversation and make more people sort of believe in those things.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think we actually believe in this stuff more strongly than we say externally. So, like, it is just such a key part of how we think internally that sometimes we just like reword your statements because it's like people might just think we're being like too over the top. But internally, that's how we think and what we're putting out is a softer version of that at times. And then I think the third piece is that is going to what Ben said where we think a lot of our driving the race to the top. And so it's like if you're not in the game and you're shouting from the sidelines, no one cares. It's just the reality of how the world works. Like no one really cares. If you're in the game and you're a leading player, and what you're doing is working, you can influence people who are also in the game to take the right actions. And so that is like the core of it. Like if we just pack up and go home, you have no influence on this thing. And if you stay in the game and you're like, commercial.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About the risks, I think, in productive ways and who have the know-how of the risks. I think there's people who may talk about the risks but are not in the game. And so they don't actually know fully. They're not surgical on what the specific risks are. But we're in the game. We understand what's happening. And so that's one piece. I think the second is like.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That happens. Yeah, I think three things that come to mind there. First is. Go back to something I said earlier, which is that we very much think about things from an exponential lens. And if you are thinking about things from a linear lens, you'll see the world very, very differently, right? Because you look at where we are today and you're like, okay, but like how much better can it be in two, three years? I think if you're looking at it from an exponential lens and you understand how exponentials work, then you just realize that like a lot of this stuff is actually going to be happening than people think if you're looking at it from a linear lens. And then if you understand that there could be upsides and downsides and the range of outcomes here, you need to like, I think we very much need to be talking about the downsides so we can avoid them and push towards the upsides. I think most people at the company are optimists. We're very optimistic about the future. I think it's just we understand the risk is like it is not a guaranteed that we end up in a good place and not enough people at all.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a really, I think it's a really complicated picture, right? Like there's a number of things that we just build internally ourselves. As time goes on, the ability for Claude to do that better increases. And at the same time, we use Figma a ton. We use Slack a ton. We use Workday. We use a lot of these products. And I don't see that changing in the immediate future. And so, yeah, I think there's probably some truth to some of this. I think the other parts are like it's overblown and many of these products are like the customers of ours. We value them a lot as customers and we use their products very, very heavily. And I don't see that changing in any.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, that is very, very correct. It is something that goes to Claude, you know, that there are certain documents in onboarding where it's like the HR team has written before editing anything on this document, please check with this person because this is a document that Claude references as like a key thing, right? And so more and more these types of things of, okay, how does the growth team think about this? How does safeguards think about this? Your army clawed with that context to get better and better at helping in the future.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, oh, okay, this is like different to what we had we've known before, right? So I think it's like good for the openness, but it's also good as a leader of how you can scale your views as an organization to like get people more up to speed on the way that things are done, which is, I think, really important to like avoid that drift, which where you have so many new people signing up, that drift can lead to a lot of drift in strategy and sort of perception. So it just helps run a tighter ship in that way.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's basically it. It's an internal feed where it's not just Aaron. Everyone has one, and you basically share your internal thoughts. It's a way to keep people updated on things, on what's working. It's a way where people share provocative things. I think from a leadership level, and we also think about that as it's a way to scale your beliefs and views across an org as it grows quickly, right? So like if you're now adding a lot of people in the organization, you need to think about, okay, what are the like behaviors that we want to model? What are the principles that are top of mind to us? And if you think about like, yeah, you can have a bunch of these meetings where you talk about it. You can model that behavior. But if you have a channel, which is like, here's my top of mind and you say these things, right? Like if I have a post, which I did the other week of like, this is the importance of being comfortable leaving money on the table. Now all the new engineers on growth who've joined have seen that.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like another dude on the team. All of that, I think, is just very special. My favorite here is in the couple of months ago, we had our on-site company-wide on-site. And Toba and I'm walking around, I see this guy. He's just walking around eating popcorn by himself. I go up to him and I'm like, you're Jeff, right? And he's like, I am. And I'm like, you are literally the U.S. ambassador to my country, Australia. And you're just an employee here. I'm like, this is insane. I'm like talking to our prime ministers of our country and all these things. And it's just the talent combined with that culture, I think, is just this secret source that is the reason that I think we are as successful as we are.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Through a level of trust. And all of that together, I think it just means that we have this very, very deep sense of togetherness that, man, I have just like never, I've never experienced anything like it. And then you get to the talent, right? I think that is the thing where the talent density is like, I feel like I'm playing for like Real Madrid at times. I look around and I'm like, man, I'm playing for Madrid. Or it's like, you just like have the best people in the world. I think it's most, I think it's most the case on research. We have like the very, very best researchers in the world. But even you look on like product, we have Hamivora, like she is phenomenal. We have Mike Krieger. You're like, okay, casually started Instagram. He's here, you know, on growth. We have John Egan, who's my engineering counterpart. He's like the OG and growth engineering. He's great. We have Alexei. He's like guy who teaches growth engineering at Reforge. He's just.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, leadership is very, very transparent with us on things. Slack is like a, it's a whole maze. There's so many things that play out on Slack. We're very open. Everyone has these notebook channels where you kind of have like your own Twitter feed in a way where you're just talking about your thoughts about things. And so you can go and like join the Slack channel, the notebook channels of people and research and all these other areas. And you can learn whatever you want. And you can spend so much time getting lost in that as well. But that openness where we even encourage people can just argue with Dario. There was an all hands. He said something where someone didn't agree. And a person goes onto Dario's notebook channel and just says, like, hey, I didn't appreciate how you said this and this and that. And then it sparked a whole big debate. But like that sort of thing where like it's encouraged go to leadership and disagree with them, challenge them publicly and like that I think that just leads.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In it. And so I think that leads to this releases energy that is just very, very hard to describe. I think you have that energy, you have that mission-driven nature. And then it's such an open culture.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The divergent ranges of how this may go for humanity and how different of a future that could be. And I think when you understand that of how different this could be as a future for all of us and like our children and our grandchildren, et cetera, I think it leads through a lot of passion for what we do. It just leads to a lot of belief in what we're doing. And so I kind of look at Every other job I've had in the past. There's some degree of people at the company who are just checked out where it's like, you know, I'm here. I'm sick of this, but I don't have a better option or I'm getting paid too much to leave, et cetera. That is just like not the case here. I have not met a single person. I'm saying a single person who's checked out. Everyone is putting everything they have on the table. Everyone is pouring it out and like leaving nothing behind and is just fully, fully.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Daniel Andario, they really believe in this a lot. And Ing just created a very special culture. So I would say that this is truly a mission-driven company. And I was not 100% sure of that when I joined. Like I was like, I think that this is an exciting company. I very much agree with their principles, but I didn't know anyone at the company. I didn't have any references on what it was like inside. So I was a little skeptical when I joined. I'm like, at least they're talking about it, but like, I don't know. Are they serious about this? And then I came in very early on. I was like, oh, oh, okay. Maybe even more serious about this in terms. They talk externally. And so it's just like that's a mission-driven company where people viscerally, viscerally understand both the upsides and the downsides of the technology and therefore understand the”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The thing that maybe comes to mind is just And the people that we have here, I really think it's our secret source. I think it's the thing that is the most defensible, the thing that no one else is going to be able to replicate. And I don't think it's an accident. Like leadership has really invested in this a lot.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know. But like the guy who's running that Nick Lynn came from investment banking, he came from private equity. And it just has such a competitive advantage where he's building that product. And he's like, I know this. I know this. Like he's like built for this. And so I think just understanding what are those interdisciplinary areas you can lean into to make yourself more just like higher impact is really important. And then the last one is just being adaptable. Anyone who is trying to just keep applying old playbooks, I think you're going to make life a lot harder for yourself. So one of the biggest things you come into anthropic is you need to understand that probably, yeah, 50, 60, 70% of how you operate in the past, just throw it out the door. It's not going to be relevant. And if you try to stick to that, you're going to have a lot of friction and it's not going to be helpful. So just being adaptable and understanding, okay, the jobs change this way. I'm going to go that way.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I look at what's benefited me, it's probably a version of this. I think that for me, it came from a founder background. So like the mix of the founder background, the financial as an investment banker, so like the finance background and numbers and then sales, like I was, I almost became an account exec instead of going into product. I was right on the edge of should I go into sales of product. And I think like a combination of those along with growth is probably what's led to like there are certain areas and situations where I can just have outsized impact to other people. And so understanding what that is for you is really important. I look at our financial services product. You know, we've launched like Cord for Sheets, Quad for Excel.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The same thing is true for PMs where it's like, okay, now in this ratio, if the design is really stretched and you're a PM who can design, you are also a unicorn now. The chances of a company letting you go has gone down dramatically because you are now just so much more useful. And so I think that is just like really, really important. I think.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are some people, some PMs who are really good at croft, for example, and there's others who you'll throw them into a situation with all these stakeholders who have all these strong opinions. And there's no way they're going to mediate this and they come out. And it's like everyone's kind of swimming in the right direction. And so if you think about like, what is the major skill set that you have where you spike that can be tied to delivering driving impact for a company and a product role? I would just double down on that and like almost like forget the weaknesses, just what can you do to become like the best person at that thing? Because that's very, very valuable. And I think that ties to the notion of just leaning into being interdisciplinary. So going back to some of what we mentioned earlier on, where it's like, okay, in this world of engineers and mini PMs, the engineer who is like highly product-minded is a unicorn, is an absolute unicorn, I think.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me, a couple of things come up like one thing that everyone says is use the tools, you need to be on top of the tools. I think you need to be using clawed code. You need to be using cowork and understanding just each model release, what is the new things you can do with this? How can you apply this to your job? It'll work well in some things. It'll work terribly in other things. And then one model launched later, it's like, oh shit, that other thing worked. But if you didn't go back to try it, you would not have known and now many months have passed that you didn't know that that was possible. And so I think that being on top of the tools is really important, both for improving your own productivity, but also for getting product sense around AI products, which I think is just going to become increasingly important. I think then zooming out beyond that, I kind of look at it as like just leaning into where you have a competitive advantage and an unfair advantage. And so to me, it's like if.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As the risks get higher and the stakes get higher, I think the fact that we are taking a stance and safety is like critical to what we do is actually going to become a significant competitive advantage for us that I think is going to help us in the long run.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But like you can run the test and see what impact it has. And if it's a high level of cringe or ick, then I. Particularly just like hardcore growth practitioners is just trying to squeeze every last dollar. This is like, I think this is a general principle also in life. Like if you're a founder raising money and just trying to squeeze that last dollar, like you don't want to do that because you want people to come back next time as well is my view. And I think in growth, I think it's really important that you just need to be okay leaving money on the table. And that's a core principle for us as a growth team where we are very comfortable for going metric impact in order to prioritize safety, in order to protect our brand, in order to hold a high quality bar and to maintain a great user experience. And if you like look beyond the short term and like, okay, what are the numbers for this quarter and you zoom out and you think about what are the very best products out there, you realize this is how they all operate. And that's actually the thing that's going to drive more growth long term as well. And so I think that actually ties back to safety where.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like a growth lens, you know, I look at it as growth teams can often push the boundaries of what is good user X, UX, et cetera, because they're trying to very, very much like eke out metrics at times. When I think about if a controversial test is bought to me, I sort of look at it as like there's two types of tests that are controversial. One is when that test is so controversial that you just should not run the thing because the results don't matter because you would not ship it for a combination of brand and sort of customer friendliness and values. And then the second is where it's like, it's controversial. Like, I don't like it. I certainly don't love it. But it's like, it's not like a red line. And so you're like, you know, if someone comes to you with conviction and is like, I have a really good hypothesis around this. And you're like, I don't love it.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From there, and it ladders down from there for us, you know, our purpose, our mission ultimately is to make sure that the transition to powerful AI goes well and is net beneficial for humanity. I think internally, we are very excited. And I think honestly, we're like very, very optimistic about where this can go. But we also understand what the risks are. And so for us, that top line objective of this just like this needs to go well for humanity. This just needs to go well for humanity. That is something that we are happy to take a significant commercial hit for. And we've done that time and time again, right? So like we have a, you know, like back then, okay, you had Claude, but you don't want to release it because you're like, there's these safety risks. And so there's time and time again that I've seen we've been happy to take that hit. And it's actually worked out well for us in other ways.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, I think it's something we take very, very seriously. And it's the whole reason the company exists. And if you think about it's all the way from, it's why they left to start the company. It's deep in our corporate structure itself. So historically, everyone raising money is like, go create a Delaware Corp. And that's like the structure you do. And with a corporation, you have a fiduciary duty to maximize returns for shareholders, maximize shareholder value. And from the beginning, they went a different way. We went to and created a public benefit corporation, PVC, which allows you to legally say that maximizing shareholder value is not the overarching umbrella goal of this company. And you can optimize for public benefits. So really, I think it starts.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And I would say I very much agree. I think a lot of that, like we, I think a lot of that comes down to our leadership team. We have a number of people who've worked at, like, call it the best companies, you know, in the world, very senior people. And I think almost uniformly everyone's like, this is the strongest leadership team out of any of those companies. And so I think a lot comes from them. And then we're just very lucky to have incredible people. I think that helps a lot as well.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that that's also just related to how history played out, right? So it was well before my time. But Anthropic had a version of Claude. We had a chatbot before ChatGPT was launched. And we had ultimately chosen not to launch it for safety reasons. I think the team didn't want to kick off effectively, a global arms race. And ChatGPT launched and like they got like insane traction, right? And that just naturally sort of pulled them towards consumer. There's another world where Philanthropic had launched Claude first, like maybe the other way around, even with all that focused stuff. So who knows? It's always hard to say looking back at some of these things.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Much like the smallest, least well funded player in this space. Like, in many ways, it's a complete miracle that I think we've gone into the stage that we have. 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. And so like, what do you do, right? I think there's like this broader principle I have just around life of the freedom through constraints that when you have a bunch of constraints applied on you, whether that's in personal life or at work, I think that that can just, it can bring a lot of freedom because it just frees up all this excess choice. You're like, okay, like this is clearly the path. And I think for us, it's like, okay, you don't have a ton of funding. You're a small player. You don't have distribution. You just have to really pick a very narrow focus. And even for a very generalizable technology to maximize your chances of getting to escape velocity.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe if you okay, that this is going to be commercially beneficial to tackle. And then also the side of it around accelerating research. So I'd say it's a pretty mainstream view now. I've now heard people from various labs talking about this, you know, the importance of coding to accelerate research. But that is just being like a very firm view that we have been laser focused on internally of, okay, if you have the best models, that's going to accelerate your researches and that's going to accelerate the research loop, then I think that's something that Dario has seen very clearly for a number of years. So I would say that that's probably one of a lot. I think a lot comes from Dario. I think a lot comes from leadership and just our DNA. I think the second though is probably just like necessity where if you're, you know, it's now changed with more well-known company raise lots of money, blah, blah, blah. But historically, we were very.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's a foundational part of the company. I think it's been there from the very, very early days. And it really comes from leadership. And I think they've just done a phenomenal job of distilling that. I think that I saw this doc come up recently. It was, I don't know where it was shared. It was something that then man is one of our founders yet on the podcast had written. It's dated in 2021, I think a few months after they started the company. And it was like, here's why we should just focus on AI coding. And this is like, you know, this is like five years ago. This is long before anyone knew what the actual market opportunities were around this. And I think this is just like a deep focus that we have had internally from the start on the importance of coding and B2B. I think there's like two lenses to write.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you go on to Crow work, download the desktop app on cowork, connect the Slack MCP. That's where you need to, depending on how big the organization is, you may need to get sort of team or enterprise admin permissions to someone with those permissions to enable that. But once you have the Slack MCP connected and on COHED, you just ask Claude. That's it.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source