Head Of Growth Anthropic Claude Is Growing Itself At This Point

TITLE: Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” CHANNEL: Lenny’s Podcast DATE: 2026-04-05 ---TRANSCRIPT--- A lot of companies claim to be the fastest growing companies of all time. Anthropic actually is. You guys were at a billion ARR at the start of 2025. The last number I’ve seen is 19 billion ARR. That’s 1 to19 billion in 14 months. Historically, we were very much the smallest, least wellunded 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 OpenAI. It’s a complete miracle that we’ve gotten to the stage that we have. give us just a glimpse of what it’s like to be leading growth inside of Anthropic.

This is the hardest job I’ve had in my life. To come into anthropic, you need to understand that 50 60 70% of how you operate in the past, just throw it out the door. One of the cleverest growth moves you all made was this idea of importing memory from chat GPT. Activation is a really big challenge in AI. We are starting to look at how do we automate growth. Our growth platform team is driving this effort called cash which is claude accelerate sustainable hyperrowth. How can we use claude to automate growth experimentation and it’s delivering results. You’re basically living in the future. We always talk about the exponential. The product value that we will deliver in 2 years time is probably like a,000x what it is today. The funniest thing is I’ve noticed internally linear charts are just not cool. Everything is log linear. Just show me at log linear scale. Today my guest is Amole Evasari. Amole is head of growth at Anthropic which is on the most unprecedented growth run in history. In the past 14 months, they grew from 1 billion to over 19 billion in annual recurring revenue. Just in the past few months, their revenue doubled. They’ve been growing 10x year-over-year. This is unheard of at this scale. By the time this episode comes out, their revenue will be even higher. To put this scale in perspective, companies like Atlassian and Palunteer and Snowflake, which have been around for 15 to 20 years, each do something like 4 1/2 to 6 billion in ARR. Anthropic is adding this much ARR every few months. And if that isn’t interesting enough to you, Amole who leads growth at Anthropic is an incredible human. He previously led growth at Mercury and Masterclass. Before that, he was a founder and an investment banker. And most interestingly, something that most people don’t know about him is that Amole suffered a severe brain injury. He had to spend 9 months relearning how to walk and work and just not be nauseous all the time. He shared this story in a guest post in my newsletter a number of years ago. We actually chat about this during the conversation. These are my favorite kind of conversations because Amole and his team are living in the future and he’s come to tell us where things are heading and what’s going to change. And in this episode, AMOLE shares an unprecedented look at how a company like Anthropic operates and grows, including how they think about growth, what parts of the job they’ve automated, the future of the product and growth roles, how Mole got the job in the first place by cold emailing my Kreger, and so much more. A mole is wonderful, and just try to count the number of times that he blew my mind during this conversation. Before we get into it, don’t forget to check out Lenny’s productass.com for an incredible set of deals available exclusively to Lenny’s newsletter subscribers. With that, I bring you Amole Avisari. Amole, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Pleasure to be here. Head of growth at Anthropic. No big deal. I’ve had a lot of people come on this podcast from companies that claim to be the fastest growing companies of all time. And Anthropic actually is. is if you look at the trajectory, I just have some of the numbers here just so people understand how absurd this is. So you guys were at a billion ARR at the start of 2025, then hit something like 4 billion mid2025, then 9 billion ARR at the end of 2025. And the last number I’ve seen is you guys are at 19 billion ARR, which uh just to put a couple pieces of context here. One is that’s from1 to$19 billion in 14 months. Um I have so many questions. First of all, the story of how you actually landed this role is really interesting. Talk about how you how you got this role. Yeah, it’s a little unorthodox. So, it was funny when I when I did my onboarding, they they walk through what percentage of the cohort came through referrals, what percentage came through applying on the website, what percentage came through uh sourcing. And I was on none of those. And I was like, okay, this is interesting. And basically the the way that I I got to 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 they really like obviously don’t have a growth team. And uh what I did was I just sent Mike Creger 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 uh I didn’t expect he would respond. And uh you know, he responds and says, “Hey, yeah, I’m interested. Let’s let’s talk.” And it’s funny, I didn’t know. I mean, I wouldn’t have known. They were not hiring for a 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 one spoke to spoke to Mike and and one thing led to another. He said, “I’m the only PM that he’s hired from from cold email and I I feel very lucky that he decided to respond to my email.”