Lenny's Podcast

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

with Amol Avasare
5 Apr 2026 18 min read 1h 35m
TL;DR

Anthropic's hypergrowth isn't purely product magic—70% of growth leadership is fighting "success disasters" (scaling problems that arise from rapid growth), while 30% is proactive strategy. The key insight: good friction (like onboarding questions that match users to the right features) outperforms removing friction, and the team obsesses over exponential thinking rather than linear optimization.

Key Moments
Amol Avasare
“It's 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.”
Amol describes what it's like to lead growth at the fastest-growing company in history
▶ 0:33
Amol Avasare
“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 they really they obviously don't have a growth team. And uh what I did was I just sent Mike Krieger a cold email.”
Amol explains how he landed his role at Anthropic without applying through normal channels
▶ 4:37
Amol Avasare
“I would say like roughly 70% of what I I spend my time on is 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”
Amol breaks down his actual daily work priorities despite Anthropic's magical product
▶ 12:17
Amol Avasare
“I've just seen time and time again at every job I've been in in growth that adding friction and adding the right steps uh leads to high-end conversion and and higher funnel completion.”
Amol explains a counterintuitive principle about onboarding design that applies across multiple companies
▶ 21:02
Amol Avasare
“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.”
Amol describes the company's obsession with exponential thinking over linear growth metrics
▶ 1:16
About Amol Avasare
›
Amol Avasare is Head of Growth at Anthropic, where he leads the team behind one of the fastest-growing companies in history—scaling from $1B to $19B ARR in 14 months. Previously, he led growth at Mercury and Masterclass, and was a founder and investment banker. He recovered from a severe brain injury that required 9 months of rehabilitation.
Takeaways
1
Good friction beats frictionless onboarding Adding strategic steps to understand user interests (quizzes, segmentation questions) outperforms fast sign-ups. At Mercury, Masterclass, and now Anthropic, this friction drives higher activation and retention—as long as it helps users understand why the product is for them.
2
Scaling growth is 70% firefighting, 30% strategy At Anthropic's scale, most growth work isn't optimizing funnels—it's solving "success disasters," the infrastructure and product breakdowns that come from hypergrowth. This requires rethinking 50-70% of traditional growth playbooks.
3
Obsess over exponential product value, not incremental gains Anthropic prioritizes large swings over micro-optimizations because new model capabilities unlock entirely new markets every few months. A 1% improvement is dwarfed by the next model release, so growth teams must think in terms of the 1000x product improvement coming in 2 years, not next quarter's KPI gains.