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

“Yeah, it's a very great question, and I like that he brings up. I talk about the product a lot. So worked on the growth team at Mercury, I think it's a fantastic product. It's something many people use. And the reason they use it is because the better banking experience.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Capabilities that makes all these learnings irrelevant, right? So, like, it's actually just a really difficult problem to stay on top of. I think that many of the same things, same old trends in growth and activation remain, I think, accurate, where to me it's like ultimately some of the highest leverages from finding the right product or the right feature for the right user. And I think that one learning, seeing this time and time again across companies actually like the right friction helps and adding more friction usually works if you do it the right way. I think that's something I've consistently seen that we've seen here as well. So to me, I think it's really being able to identify which what are the characteristics of a user that allows you to then recommend them to the right feature or product and not being shy about adding friction to do that. I think is probably like the single biggest.”
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 if you think about more broadly for most people, you may have a model that is like, yeah, you may have AGI or some model that can do all sorts of crazy things. But if people's instinct is to come there and be like, hey, what's the weather in SF, then they're not going to get the most out of the product. And so I think that it's tough because the model capabilities are rising so much. So like if I think about, okay. back when we had, I don't know, say like Opus 4 at that, there's a series of things the model can do at that point and Opus 4.5 unlocked a whole bunch of new things. You think about, okay, we sit there, we've got this new model, Opus 4. The time to then go and run a bunch of tests, figure out, okay, there's the capabilities from this new model, what are the right on-ramps to guide people to those features? You're on tests, you get the learnings, you then ship a new flow. By then, you may already have the next model, which unlocks new.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a good question. I think that activation is critical, right? And defining that as like early activation, call it day zero, day one product experience. I think that historically anyone who's been in growth or been in product understands that that's usually one of the highest levers that you have to actually even increase longer-term retention. And I think that the importance of that is just gotten exponentially higher now. Zooming out, I feel like one of the biggest problems in the industry is capability overhang where the models are just getting better so quickly. And the real challenge is on the product side of how do we start to diffuse those benefits to people, even internally, like these new models coming internally and you're sitting there, you're so busy. And when a new model is available, you need to really carve out time to be like, what can this do? How do I need to update my priors?”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thinking about what can we do to improve the cold start problem and improve the new user experience, I think that activation is a really big challenge in AI. And so that's one example of something that we shipped that was very specific to a moment in time. But ultimately, you zoom out. It's like, okay, how do you really make it easier for people who are signing up to have Claude understand who they are and understand how Claude can help them and get them to the right place?”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Firefighting of success disasters. And I think the 30% remaining is just much more standard bread and butter growth work where it's like more proactive. So you think about, okay, if we have limited resources, which of the products, we have many different products, which are the products do we want to put some juice behind? What is our long-term pricing and packaging look like, especially given that the technology is changing a lot and behavior and engagement trends are shifting? And then, you know, things like we have a lot of new products coming up like, okay, you ship co-work. Now what? Like when is the right time that we should lean in as a growth team to start optimizing the core adoption funnel for co-work? So it's probably 70% just crazy firefighting, 30% more bread and butter stuff.”
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 say that like roughly 70% of what I spend my time on is what we internally refer to as success disasters. And that is where like things have gone so well that other things are breaking now. And I think anyone who's worked at companies that have gone through rapid growth, you think like Facebook or Uber or Doodash early on, like they understand this viscerally. We're scaling this much just brings a lot of challenges. So if you think about each of those categories on acquisition, on activation, on monetization, there's just a ton of firefighting jumping from like one urgent thing to another. And it's often like extremely painful. And like, it's funny because you look at all the charts, all the charts are like green, like fully up into the right. And everyone's just like, it can be quite tough emotionally still. And so you need to sort of step back and just realize we're very lucky to have these problems. But that sort of 70% of my time, I'd say, is just these 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
“I would say they're not fully wrong, right? Like, we're very, very lucky to have the best models in the world. We're very lucky to have products like Claude Code and Co-Work. It certainly makes life a lot easier. Having said that, I would say this is like the hardest job I've had in my life. And that's, you know, having been a founder, having been an investment banker and other things like that, it's tough. And if I look at what do we do as a growth team here, I think it's ultimately it's the same categories of things that you would think about at a normal company. So we care about acquisition, how we getting more people in the door, the intent of the people coming through the door. We care about activation, the signup flow, funneling people to the right products, making them successful. We care about things like monetization, free-to-paid conversion, pricing and packaging, all of that stuff, the categories of work is the same. I think then probably the big differences is.”
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 funniest thing is something that I've noticed internally is like linear charts are just like not cool. Like no one cares about linear charts. Everything is log linear. I have so many at log linear scale. And that's kind of a scale we think. And I think overall we're just, you know, 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”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 Darius pushing the aggressive case scenario and people are freaking out being like, how the hell are we going to hit that? And Darius like, I think we can actually go much higher than that. And I'm coming in like this place is crazy. There's absolutely no way. And that happened, right? 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 Europe baseline rate of 10 billion, how you're going to keep growing at this rate. And it just like has not slowed down. And there's numbers of public, the 19 Philly number you quoted is from the end of Feb. So that is also out of date. And it's look, it's absolutely insane.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's very much a company wide effort, right? 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, the growth trajectory has just been insane. That 10x year on year revenue growth trend has been there since the beginning. I think 2023 was zero to 100 mil, 2024 was 100 to 1 last year was one to roughly 10.”
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 that's one getting them to open. I think the second is then the tactics of you need to understand like where are people getting outreach? And if you 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 like work email. These are things that everyone is emailing. So there's ways to get people's personal emails out there. And so like that's one thing that I did. And so, okay, I've got his personal email. I know the copy that works. And then it's just keeping it very short. 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 rule of thumb is like if I really care about it, I should just keep reaching out to them until they tell me, like, please stop. And so I would have, I would have kept doing that, but he responded the first time.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say I've basically perfected code 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 code emails out and just honed the subject line, the message and the tone. And so basically I've in the subject line, the first thing is like 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 like very, very high open rate.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For Growth team, there were no growth GM 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, one. 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.”
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 little unorthodox. So it was 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 Anthropic was that I was actually a user of Claude and I was using a lot. I was like, man, these guys like 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 you would respond. And, you know, he responds and says, hey, yeah, I'm interested. Let's talk. And it's funny, I didn't know. I mean, I wouldn't have known they were not hiring.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Activation is a really big challenge in AI. We are starting to look at how 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. Living in the future. We always talk about the exponential the product value that we will deliver in two years' time is probably like a thousand X. I got it today. The funniest thing is I've noticed internally linear charts are just not cool. Everything is log linear. So show me it log linear scale.”
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 hottest job I've had in my life. You come into anthropic, you need to understand that 50 60, 70% of how you operate in the past, just throw it out the door.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2026-04-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source