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

The episode opens with Anthropic’s reported rise from $1 billion to $19 billion in annual recurring revenue over 14 months. Avasare places that growth in context: Anthropic lacked the funding, free cash flow, distribution, and first-mover advantage of larger or earlier competitors. He describes joining through a cold email to Chief Product Officer Mike Krieger after noticing Claude’s product quality and the absence of a growth team. The email was concise and targeted, but its success also depended on timing: Anthropic had just begun considering a growth team.

Avasare describes joining Anthropic as the hardest job of his life because old operating habits quickly become obsolete. The company’s growth team still works on familiar categories, but Anthropic’s model and intelligence capabilities are the main drivers of its success. The team thinks in log-linear terms because model improvements can change the scale of the opportunity, and the group is trying to manage growth rather than claim sole credit for it.

The discussion also introduces two linked challenges. Activation is difficult because new users must discover what an AI system can do, while growth itself is beginning to become an automation target. Anthropic’s CASH initiative asks how Claude can support growth experimentation, suggesting that the growth function may increasingly use the product’s own capabilities to improve its adoption.

Amol Avasare describes Anthropic’s growth work as familiar in category but unusual in proportion. The team still works on acquisition, activation, monetization, pricing, packaging, and product adoption. Yet about 70% of his time goes to what he calls “success disasters”: problems created because demand and usage have scaled so quickly that other systems break. The charts can all point upward while the work remains emotionally difficult, requiring constant firefighting across the funnel. The remaining 30% is more proactive planning, such as choosing which products deserve resources, setting long-term pricing as technology and behavior change, and deciding when to optimize adoption for a new product like Cowork.