Anthropic grew from $1 billion to over $19 billion in ARR in 14 months. Amol Avasare, Head of Growth at Anthropic, sat down with Lenny's Newsletter to explain how. He landed the role by cold emailing CPO Mike Krieger when no job listing existed, previously building growth teams at Mercury and MasterClass after a stint as a founder.
The tactical details are worth your time. Anthropic built an internal tool called CASH that automates growth experiments using Claude itself. Their team runs a 70/30 split favoring big bets over incremental tests, the inverse of standard growth playbooks. Avasare argues activation is the single highest-leverage problem in AI products, and he uses a tool called Cowork to surface team misalignment directly inside Slack. He also makes the case that PM-to-engineer ratios may need to invert as AI makes individual engineers dramatically more productive.
The structural argument buried in this interview is the most important part: Anthropic's focus on AI coding created a research flywheel that accelerated their own models. That loop, product usage feeding model improvement feeding product quality, is what separates this growth run from a typical ramp. Read the full transcript to understand how the flywheel was built and whether it can be replicated.
[READ ORIGINAL →]