Head of Growth (Anthropic): Anthropic is automating its own growth

A lot of companies claim to be the fastest-growing companies of all time. Anthropic actually is. You guys were at $1 billion ARR at the start of 2025. The last number I've seen is $19 billion ARR. That's $1 to $19 billion in 14 months.

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 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.

It's the hardest job I've had in my life. To come into Anthropic, you need to understand that 50%, 60%, 70% of how you operated 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 ChatGPT.

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? 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 1,000 times 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 a log-linear scale.

Today, my guest is Amol Avasare. Amol 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. In just the past few months, their revenue doubled. They've been growing 10 times 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, Palantir, and Snowflake, which have been around for 15 to 20 years, each do something like $4.5 to $6 billion in ARR. Anthropic is adding this much ARR every few months. If that isn't interesting enough to you, Amol, 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.

Most interestingly, something that most people don't know about him is that Amol 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 kinds of conversations because Amol 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. In this episode, Amol 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 Amol got the job in the first place by cold-emailing Mike Krieger, and so much more. Amol 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 lennysproductpass.com for an incredible set of deals available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers. With that, I bring you Amol Avasarala.

Amol, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the podcast.

Pleasure to be here.

1. Anthropic Growth Miracle

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, if you look at the trajectory. I just have some of the numbers here so people understand how absurd this is.

You guys were at $1 billion ARR at the start of 2025, then hit something like $4 billion in mid-2025, then $9 billion ARR at the end of 2025. The last number I've seen is that you guys are at $19 billion ARR. To put a couple of pieces of context around this, that's from $1 billion to $19 billion in 14 months.

I have so many questions. First of all, the story of how you actually landed this role is really interesting. Talk about how you got this role.

Yeah, it's a little unorthodox. When I did my onboarding, they walked through what percentage of the cohort came through referrals, what percentage came through applying on the website, and what percentage came through sourcing. I was on none of those, and I was like, "Okay, this is interesting."

Basically, the way that I got to Anthropic was that I was actually a user of Claude, and I was using it a lot. I was like, "Man, these guys have a great product and a great company, but they obviously don't have a growth team." What I did was send Mike Krieger, who was the chief product officer, a cold email saying, "Hey, love what you guys do. Love the product. I think you guys badly need a growth team. Want to chat?"

I didn't expect he would respond, but he responded and said, "Hey, yeah, I'm interested. Let's talk." I didn't know—they were not hiring for a growth team. There were no growth PM roles listed, but they were just starting to think about hiring a growth team, so it was very good timing.

I spoke to Mike, and one thing led to another. He said I'm the only PM that he's hired from a cold email, and I feel very lucky that he decided to respond to my email.

I did not know this story. That is another absurd fact. Clearly, you're good at cold email. What did you do in this cold email to get his attention?

I would say I've basically perfected cold email over the years. When I was a founder, I had to get really, really good at this, so I sent a lot of cold emails and just honed the subject line, the message, and the tone.

Basically, from a conversion standpoint, someone sees the email, and they need to click on it. I have copy that I've tested that has a very, very high open rate.

Wait, what is this copy? Or is this a secret?

It's a secret.

Okay, we'll keep some trade secrets today.

It's a secret. That's one part: getting them to open it. I think the second part is understanding where people are getting outreach. If everyone's getting outreach in one area and then you reach out to them there, you're not going to get as high of a response rate.

If you think about LinkedIn or work email, these are things that everyone is emailing. There are ways to get people's personal emails, and that's one thing that I did. So, I had his personal email, I knew the copy that worked, and then it was just keeping it very short: "Here's who I am, here's why I'd be a good fit, and we should chat."

These things typically don't work, and you should always follow up a few times. My rule of thumb is that if I really care about it, I should just keep reaching out until they tell me, "Please stop." I would have kept doing that, but he responded the first time.

It makes sense that a talented growth person would be very good at cold email and getting people's attention. That's almost like an interview step: Did I want to read this email?

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Okay. So, give us just a glimpse of what it's like to be leading growth inside of Anthropic right now, the most by far fastest-growing company in history. What is it like?

It's very much a company-wide effort. Yes, we are the growth team. We have done great, and I think we've driven a lot of impact. But honestly, we can't claim too much credit for the success of the company.

Anthropic is really a model company and an intelligence company first and foremost. 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 working on inference and compute, and there are many other teams, like Claude Code and go-to-market, that deserve much more credit than us.

I think, just zooming out and 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 $0 to $100 million, 2024 was $100 million to $1 billion, and last year was $1 billion to roughly $10 billion.

I look back to when I joined in 2024, when revenue was in the hundreds of millions, and just that trajectory through the end of 2024 and 2025. In week 2 after I joined, we were going into 2025 revenue planning, and we had these base-case and aggressive-case scenarios. Dario was pushing the aggressive-case scenario, and people were freaking out, saying, “How the hell are we going to hit that?” And Dario was like, “I think we can actually go much higher than that.”

I was coming in thinking, “This place is crazy. There’s absolutely no way.” And that happened, right? 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 your baseline rate of $10 billion, how are you going to keep growing at this rate? It just has not slowed down.

Those numbers are public. The $19 billion number you quoted is from the end of February, so that is also out of date. It’s absolutely insane. The funniest thing I’ve noticed internally is that linear charts are just not cool. No one cares about linear charts. Everything is log-linear, so show me a log-linear scale. That’s the scale we think in.

Overall, we’re really hanging on by the seat of our pants. We’re trying to manage the growth and do the best that we can for our users.

I was talking to somebody at Anthropic about you, and they said that basically anytime they want something to grow, they ask you to help, and it works. You talked about how things are magical and amazing, and Claude and all the tools you’ve built are innately amazing. That’s a big part of the reason they grow.

I think many people listening to this will be like, “What do you actually do, Amol, with a magical micro-god that can do anything for you? Why do we need a growth person? What do you even do?” Talk about the stuff that you focus on and maybe a couple of the wins that your team has shipped that have helped accelerate growth.

I would say they’re not fully wrong, right? We’re very lucky to have the best models in the world. We’re very lucky to have products like Claude Code and Cowork. It certainly makes life a lot easier.

Having said that, this is the hardest job I’ve had in my life, having been a founder, an investment banker, and other things like that. It’s tough. If I look at what we do as a growth team here, it’s ultimately the same categories of things that you would think about at a normal company.

We care about acquisition: how are we getting more people in the door, and what is the intent of the people coming through the door? We care about activation: the sign-up flow, funneling people to the right products, and making them successful. We care about monetization, free-to-paid conversion, pricing and packaging—all of that stuff. The categories of work are the same.

I think the big difference is that roughly 70% of what I spend my time on is what we internally refer to as “success disasters.” That is where things have gone so well that other things are breaking now. Anyone who’s worked at companies that have gone through rapid growth—Facebook, Uber, or DoorDash early on—understands this viscerally. Scaling this much just brings a lot of challenges.

If you think about each of those categories—acquisition, activation, and monetization—there’s a ton of firefighting, jumping from one urgent thing to another, and it’s often extremely painful. It’s funny because you look at all the charts, and all the charts are green, fully up and to the right, and everyone’s just like… It can still be quite tough emotionally. You need to step back and realize that we’re very lucky to have these problems.

That’s roughly 70% of my time: firefighting around these success disasters. The remaining 30% is more standard, bread-and-butter growth work, where it’s more proactive. If we have limited resources, which of our many products do we want to put some juice behind? What does our long-term pricing and packaging look like, especially given that the technology is changing a lot and behavior and engagement trends are shifting?

We also have a lot of new products coming up. You ship Cowork—now what? When is the right time for us to lean in as a growth team and start optimizing the core adoption funnel for Cowork? So it’s roughly 70% crazy firefighting and 30% more bread-and-butter stuff.

Okay, I’m going to dig into a lot of that stuff. One of the cleverest growth moves you made recently was importing memory from ChatGPT, where you made it really easy and jumped on this trend of people getting really excited about Anthropic. Is there anything you could share about the behind-the-scenes story of that feature?

We’re always thinking about what we can do to improve the cold-start problem and improve the new-user experience. I think activation is a really big challenge in AI. That’s one example of something that we shipped that was very specific to a moment in time.

Ultimately, when you zoom out, it’s like: how do you really make it easier for people who are signing up to have Claude understand who they are, understand how Claude can help them, and get them to the right place?

I want to follow that thread: activation. That’s something that comes up a ton when I talk to people leading and driving growth on AI products. There’s so much stuff trying to get your attention these days, and getting people to a place where they say, “Okay, wow, this is really going to be something I want to keep using,” proves to be really hard.

It’s also just unreliable. Sometimes it’s not going to be magical. It’s AI; it’s nondeterministic. I guess one question is: how important is focusing on activation and getting people to that aha moment with AI products? And second, what are some things you’ve learned about how to do that well with Claude or AI in general?

Yeah, it’s a good question. I think activation is critical, right? Defining that as early activation—call it the day 0, day 1 product experience—I think historically anyone who’s been in growth or product understands that it’s usually one of the highest levers you have to increase longer-term retention. I think the importance of that has just gotten exponentially higher.

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. The real challenge is on the product side: how do we start to diffuse those benefits to people? Even internally, there are new models coming, and you’re sitting there, so busy. When a new model is available, you need to carve out time to ask, “What can this do? How do I need to update my priors?”

If you think about it 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 say, “Hey, what’s the weather in San Francisco?” then they’re not going to get the most out of the product.

The challenge is that model capabilities are rising so much. If I think about Opus 4, there was a series of things the model could do at that point, and Opus 4.5 unlocked a whole bunch of new things. You can think about it like this: we sit there with this new model, Opus 4, and ask, “What are the capabilities from this new model? What are the right on-ramps to guide people to those features?”

You run tests, get the learnings, and then ship a new flow. By then, you may already have the next model, which unlocks newer capabilities that make all those learnings irrelevant. It’s a really difficult problem to stay on top of.

I think many of the same old trends in growth and activation remain accurate. To me, some of the highest leverage comes from finding the right product or the right feature for the right user. One learning—you’ve seen this time and time again across companies—is that the right friction helps. Adding more friction usually works if you do it the right way. That’s something I’ve consistently seen, and we’ve seen it here as well.

So to me, I think it's really understanding and being able to identify which characteristics of a user allow you to recommend them to the right feature or product. Not being shy about adding friction to do that is probably the single biggest thing that's important here.

When I asked Ben Mann, one of the co-founders and a former podcast guest, what to ask you about, this is what he highlighted: your experience, especially at Mercury, redoing onboarding and making it magical. He's in the same place as you in terms of how important it is for people to understand what the AI tool is capable of, to help people decide to use it and stick with it. Is there an example of something you changed in onboarding that helped significantly improve activation?

Yeah. It's a great question, and I like that he brings up Mercury. I talk about their product a lot. I 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 it's a better banking experience than most.

Yeah, I'm a very happy customer, just to put that out there. I love it.

It's a great product. Highly recommend it. They have personal banking. Everyone should go and use it.

Right, they just launched that.

And so I think the interesting thing about Mercury is that the core value is that it's a better experience, right? That's the reason you use it. It's just a better product experience. That ethos is very deeply held within the company. It comes from a number of the founders.

I think we had a big push one quarter when I was there on the onboarding flow. Onboarding flows for banking institutions and regulated entities are extremely complex. The amount of time I've spent on the difference between a registered agent address, a legal address, and a physical address—these things are very complex.

We basically looked at the onboarding flow and said, “Okay, we've invested so much in quality in the rest of the product, but we haven't really done it here, and this is the first experience that people have.” So we said, “Forget metrics, forget growth, forget everything else. As the growth team focused on conversion, we're going to spend a whole quarter fixing quality in this flow.”

That's all we did. We forgot the metrics and just made this as good an experience as we could, fixing issues like going back from one field to another and adding in your beneficial ownership details. It ended up being, probably until I joined here, the single most impactful quarter that I've ever had as a growth PM in terms of the impact that it had.

We saw a significant uplift in basically our onboarding start-to-completion rate from just focusing on quality. To me, that's a broader learning around how quality drives growth that I've tried to bring to Anthropic.

I think for us at Anthropic, some of the things that we've done in the onboarding flow are basically asking users questions about who they are and what their interest areas are. We then use that to recommend different products and features. A number of people look at the flow and they're like, “You have so much friction. It's such a long flow.” And I'm like, “Yeah, we have the data. We're happy with how that's performing.”

What is your philosophy on friction—good friction versus bad friction?

I've seen time and time again at every job I've been in growth that adding friction and adding the right steps leads to higher conversion and higher funnel completion. You want to get rid of annoying friction that doesn't add value. If you have high volume, you should test the majority of this, learn, and see whether it applies to your business as well.

I think the simplest understanding people have is: just solve time to value. Cut all the steps and just get them into the product. That doesn't work most of the time. If you've thoroughly tested your flows, I look at the companies I've been at—MasterClass, for example. If you go through MasterClass's purchase flow right now, you'll go through all these steps in this quiz when you're trying to buy, and you're like, “I came here to buy, and it's taking me through all these questions. What are you here for?” et cetera.

I think it's easy to look at that and be like, “Why do they have this? This is a terrible thing. Just cut it all.” And it's like, no, that's been thoroughly tested, and it was actually a significant revenue driver because it helps users feel that the product is for them by understanding what their interests are and then recommending the content and classes that are relevant to them.

One of the growth PMs on our team left to join Calm, the meditation app. If you go to Calm's landing page and go through its purchase flow or login flow, you'll see a quiz. It's not a coincidence.

At Mercury, we also tested—I think Emad posted on Twitter that we broke out some steps in onboarding. If you have 5 or 6 different form inputs on 1 screen and you break that into 2 screens, it reduces the cognitive load for people. That's something that performs well. We added steps into the flow there that actually performed well. Same at Anthropic.

So the takeaway to me is: cut friction when it doesn't add to the experience of helping a user understand why the product is for them. But if you can help users understand why a product is for them, how to use it, and what's most relevant to them, and that's going to add friction, don't shy away from it. Test it and confirm that it works for you. I think this is something that most growth practitioners deeply understand.

And the “for them” is really important there. What you described is adding friction to better understand who they are, so that you know how to recommend the right thing for them.

Correct. Yes. Done right, that just flows through, right? It helps you with activation, but then it helps you with the lifecycle. You know more about those users and why they're here. Most sophisticated businesses can then, even if someone drops off, do look-alike targeting and get them at the ad layer as well.

That initial piece of understanding who the user is just keeps on giving if you use it right further down the funnel.

Everyone's about to go do a bunch of teardowns of Claude's onboarding, MasterClass's onboarding, and Mercury's onboarding. As a tangent, I was at a PM dinner recently, and I was asking all the PMs, “How has your role as a PM changed most with AI? Where has AI most impacted what you do?”

One of the PMs answered that it's actually doing competitive analysis—doing a bunch of teardowns of what other people are doing for pricing pages and onboarding. It's easy to do now. It's just, “Hey, Cowork.” I don't know. Would you use Cowork for this or Claude? What would you use for that?

Okay, this is good. Help people pick which tool to use. If you want to go do a bunch of teardowns of other competitors' onboarding flows, what would you use?

You can use Cowork for this. If you have Cowork with the Chrome extension, you can task Cowork to go and look for these flows and give you a view of what's working and what's not. That's definitely something that Cowork can do.

Cool. I think one of the challenges is that you have all these tools now, and it's just, which one is for me? By the way, I use the Chrome extension all the time. It's amazing. I want to drill a little bit further into the growth org.

Yep.

There was this whole meme on Twitter the other day about having 1 growth marketer driving all growth at Anthropic, and it's like, okay, that's crazy. How many growth people are there? What's the rough org structure of the growth team?

2. Growth Teams Take Bigger Bets

We're roughly 40 people now. We're structured very much like a traditional growth team, in that we have horizontals for growth platform and monetization. We think about the sphere of growth across the entirety of our products, and then we have more audience-focused growth pods.

You can think about B2B growth, Claude Code growth, knowledge worker growth, and API growth. These audiences keep a narrow focus, which is the thing you have to do when you have so many different products. Then we have these horizontals that think about things across the board.

And is it a cross-functional team of engineers, designers, PMs, and data scientists? What are the functions within this growth org?

Yeah. The team includes engineers, designers, PMs, and data scientists. I think that overall, the shape of the org is quite similar to, I'd say, a traditional growth team.

Probably the things that are different are that we index a lot more towards larger swings as opposed to smaller optimizations. If I think about a traditional growth team, I would've probably done maybe 60 to 70% of my time on small to medium bets and 20 to 30% on larger swings. I think that for us, we flip it a lot. We do much more the other way, where it's sort of 70/30 or more like 50/50, rather than indexing towards smaller bets. That's probably one of the biggest changes, I think.

Just to highlight that, what's interesting there is that at the scale you guys are at, a 1% win is massive in the scheme of things. So it's interesting that even at the scale you're at, you're not focusing on these micro-optimizations.

It is easy. You could easily focus on these small optimizations, and then you tally them up at the end of the quarter and you're like, “Look how much impact we made.” You could do that.

Another billion. No big deal.

Yeah. But the thing is, we've been tracking at 10x year on year, and that's the thing that we keep in mind. I think it ultimately comes down to our fixation at this company about the exponential. If you look at anyone talking from Anthropic about basically anything, we always talk about the exponential.

As model capabilities continue to grow exponentially, and the tools around them enable us to do a better job of diffusing that into useful use cases, you basically just keep unlocking new markets where the value of those markets significantly dwarfs the value of the previous markets. Agentic coding is a great example. It didn't exist a year or a year and a half ago, and now the value of agentic coding is bigger than the previous market of AI coding use.

I think that is the core thing here: the future product value is an order of magnitude higher than it is today. I think about a number of companies that I've maybe mentioned. If you think about a trading app or a grocery delivery product, the leading companies are great businesses. But if I think about the product value that a standard grocery delivery app provides to an end user today versus 2 years from now, I look at it as, again, 2 years from now, even if you're shipping all these new products, the value you get from that product maybe goes up 30 to 50% if the company has done a really good job of shipping new features.

It's not exponential, though. If you're here today and in 2 years you're going to have 30 to 50% more product value, then as a growth team, the relative differential of the product value 2 years from now relative to today, I can actually capture a decent percentage of that with the small to medium optimizations that typically have higher conviction, as opposed to larger bets.

But for Anthropic, it's not really that way because of the exponential and the product value coming from AI. The product value that we will deliver in 2 years' time is probably 100 to 1,000x what it is today. If I think about that, there's so much value on offer. You need to shift more towards, “Okay, we need to take larger bets, and we need to not miss the forest for the trees.”

We still do all the small optimizations. They really matter, and no one else is going to do some of these things, so we need to do them. The compounding value is not immaterial, but we do take on much larger, core product-type swings as well.

You mentioned the Chrome extension. That is now the thing that underpins a number of use cases on Cowork and Claude Code as well, and that's something that the growth team built. That's a very AI-heavy product and a very research-heavy product that we were just bullish on. We had an engineer who was very bullish on it, and we were just like, “Hey, no one else is doing it. We're going to do it.” That's the sort of thing that I wouldn't have done at another company.

Oh, wow. I did not know that. One takeaway here is that there is stuff to extract from your advice that's only true at Anthropic, and then there's what other companies can learn from this experience that you've had.

Is it your sense that if you're working in AI, you should shift more of the pie chart towards bigger bets because in the future the opportunity is so large that you want to find those as soon as possible, versus micro-optimizing?

To be more specific, I would say that if the primary value that your product delivers is underpinned by AI as a central element of it, then I think you should operate this way. Companies like Lovable and Cursor, all these great businesses—as the exponential rises, their value props are also going to continue to rise significantly. If you're building a product where it's an AI-first product, then I would definitely operate in this way.

I think if you're building a product where it's not necessarily an AI-first product and you have some AI features that are on the side, but it's not the core of your value, I don't know that I would operate this way. It would depend on how the rest of the product organization is staffed and how the growth organization is staffed in relation to that.

Yeah. Okay, awesome. In terms of the way you're structured, I thought that was really interesting. It's a combination of different sorts of things. There's API growth and Claude Code growth, but then there's also personas, like a vertical of knowledge workers and B2B. Is that intentional—some specific bets and one broad market opportunity?

When you have one product, it's easier to have a growth team that's more purely focused on the funnel. It's like, okay, you have conversion, activation, and monetization. But as you start to have multiple products, I think that's harder because if you do that, then if you just have one activation team, for example, but you have Claude Code, Cowork, and all the other things, they're very different audiences and very different sets of cross-functional stakeholders internally.

So we're looking at what the thing is that allows us to have as much focus. All org structures are not perfect, and they're right for a point in time, but we're looking for the structure that allows us to have as much focus on audiences, problems, and the tie-ins to cross-functional partners. That tie-in is really important as well.

The folks on our Claude Code growth team work extremely closely with Kat, Boris, and the others on that team, so that tie-in is really important as well.

So you've done growth at a lot of different companies, a lot of basically traditional growth before Anthropic. How else is growth as a function and as a skill set changing with the rise of AI, AI products, and AI startups?

I think if your core product value is very backed by AI, then it is shifting, where you're skewing more towards larger bets as opposed to smaller and medium experiments.

3. Growth Automation Starts Now

Another big thing related to this that I think will accelerate it, and which I'm really interested to see how it will play out, is that we are starting to look at how to automate growth. I think that's a really interesting area.

Our growth platform team—we're very lucky to have Alexei Komissaro, who teaches growth engineering at Reforge. He's just the guy on the team, and he is driving this effort. The name is a little cringey. I didn't come up with it, but it's called CASH, which stands for Claude Accelerates Sustainable Hypergrowth. I did not come up with that.

All right.

But really, it's an effort to look at how we can use Claude to automate growth experimentation. It is still very small and very early. We kicked it off only a couple of months ago. Before Opus 4.5, it wasn't really possible. We were just not seeing the results. More recently, with Opus 4.6, we're like, “Okay, this is headed in the right direction.”

I think this will happen more and more across the industry. If you think about it, I think this can happen all across product, but growth teams in particular have this whole body of work that's made up of very small optimizations, so I think they're just more inherently suited to tackle this earlier.

I think if you think about the life cycle of shipping, there are sort of 4 parts to it.

One is identifying opportunities: how good is Claude at actually identifying opportunities based on different trends and previous trends that Claude has seen in the past? Second is building the actual feature and getting it ready to ship. Third is testing and ensuring that it meets your quality bar and your brand bar. Fourth is analyzing the data and gathering the learnings once you’ve actually shipped the thing.

If you think about that as the loop, these are 4 things that you can evaluate and hill-climb on in each of these areas and understand how well a model is doing for you there. We basically think about it in those 4 ways, and we’re scoring how well Claude is doing in each of those areas.

We’ve been testing this on a pretty small scale so far. There have been a lot of copy changes and some very minor UI tweaks. It’s delivering results, right? You can press play with it, and it ultimately prints money. I’d say the win rate is— I would expect a senior PM to do better. If this is a junior PM who’s 2–3 years in, I would say this is the win rate that I would expect from a junior PM.

It’s not quite at the senior PM level. Although, when you look at the exponential, this wasn’t available at all a couple of months ago, so it’s getting better rapidly. I think it’s going to change, where you’ll be able to do this for larger and larger types of experiments.

When you think about the largest types of experiments, I mentioned the 4 pieces around identifying opportunities, building, testing, and shipping. The one I didn’t mention there, Lenny, is cross-functional stakeholder management.

There’s still a need for human brains.

Yes.

There is.

I think that one is going to mean that, in my eyes, the work of PMs isn’t going away anytime soon. That piece, especially for larger projects, is not going away. You just don’t need to do as much of it for smaller stuff, right?

Yeah.

You can skip it, but for larger stuff, that piece is not going away.

Until the other stakeholders are their own little agents running around.

I think that’s right. I think that would be the point where it changes. It’s funny, we had a difficult meeting a couple of weeks ago, and our head of design, Joel, and I were debriefing afterward. He pings me and says, “Amol, we will have AGI, and it will still be impossible to get 6 people in a room to get aligned.” I’m like, “Yeah, I think that’s right. I can see that.”

That’s the harder alignment problem. This is so interesting, and this is exactly where I feel like things are going. Just to be clear about what you shared here, there’s basically this tool that comes up with experiments to run to help grow Claude and all the tools. It comes up with the idea, somebody looks at them and approves: “Cool, let’s do these things.” Then it builds it, ships it, tests the results, sees how it’s doing, and comes back with, “Here are the things that are working.” Is that roughly right?

It’s roughly right. Right now, we have a human in the loop approving, but I think about scaling this by asking: week on week, are things getting better in each of the areas? Are people spending less time on each of the areas? Are the results getting better in each of the areas? As long as that’s getting better week on week, then you’re like, “Okay, this whole initiative is scaling.”

That’s roughly right. But you can think about it as—I think a lot of this can be automated, where human review is not needed.

Yeah.

We care a lot about—

Yeah.

—brand, right? That’s something that we do look at right now. We don’t want to be shipping something that goes against the brand. You can have a skill that contains your brand guidelines and very clear dos and don’ts around the brand. All of these types of accompaniments are going to get better, and the model is going to get better at understanding how to use them. Over time, I think the need to have human review really, really decreases significantly.

Yeah, and you could always unship it if it’s like, “Oh, yeah, that was actually not a great idea.”

Yes.

That’s such a good point. We think we need people to do these things forever, and it turns out a skill could do this really well. Here are our brand guidelines, here’s our vision, here’s our mission, here are our goals, and here’s what matters to us. Okay, let’s not ship that thing.

The reason I think this is so interesting is that I’ve just been watching the expansion of AI doing more of the product development process—in this case, the growth process. It went from helping you write code to writing all your code to reviewing your code. Now it feels like, what are the other ends of this—the 2 ends around this? It’s going from the middle out. The top is coming up with what to do, and then there’s the alignment stuff, which is still very hard. On the other end, it’s reviewing the code and then shipping it. Then distribution is a whole other thing I want to talk to you about.

What I’m hearing here, and this is exactly what I thought was going to start happening, is that AI is now getting really good at telling us what to do, not just taking our orders and building it. It feels like the growth version of this is where it starts because it’s so much simpler—not that growth is easy, but it’s data-driven. There’s this loop that you talk about. I think this is such an interesting sign of things to come across product generally.

Yeah, that’s it. That’s right.

Just putting that out there. Something that I’m constantly thinking about along these lines is the future of product, PM, and engineering—how those roles shift over time based on the stuff we’re talking about. How are you working together as a triad, and where do you see these roles going? What’s going to change most across these 3 roles, do you think?

4. AI Reshapes Product Work

This is something that we talk about and think about frequently, and the picture changes rapidly. Sometimes when things break and execution bottlenecks break, historically it’s been, “Okay, now you need to hire more engineers, you need to hire more designers,” et cetera. It’s more of a life-cycle question: where is the life cycle of your team in that specific pod, to identify where the bottleneck is?

Now, when things break, you still need to look at it and ask, “Okay, is it the actual ratio, or are there also underlying technological shifts that are causing this to break?” That’s an interesting thing.

I think that in smaller companies—if I’m at a 15- or 20-person company, and I’m the only PM there working with some designers and engineers—you’ll see probably the biggest blend. The PM will be doing all sorts of things: designing, shipping, et cetera. I think you just have extreme bifurcation.

At larger, more scaled organizations, I think the jury is still very much out. You speak to people even internally, and different people on different teams have different views of how much these roles are coming together versus how much they’re going to be separate. Even PMs are shipping themselves and pushing PRs, et cetera.

If I look at what I’m seeing, I think it’s clear that while PMs and designers are getting more leverage from AI, engineering is getting the most leverage right now. I look at tools like Claude Code, and the amount of leverage engineers are getting from them is higher than the leverage that designers and PMs are getting from them today. This is rapidly changing, but that’s my view today.

If you think about a default team—say, 5 engineers, 1 designer, and 1 PM—with Claude Code, those 5 engineers are effectively 2–3x’d, right? The PMs and designers have also increased their leverage, but now they’re managing what is effectively a much larger group of engineers.

Even though the headcount and org structure haven’t changed, you’re now dealing with a situation equivalent to maybe 15–20 engineers in the old world, 1.5–2 PMs, and maybe 1.5–2 designers. We’re seeing that put a lot of strain on PM and design. It’s not everywhere. I look at teams like Claude Code, and I think that org, because their product is so technical, is probably just the right thing where you—

The PMs are all basically engineers themselves anyway. We had a product and PM lead on-site the other week, and we were all talking about this. Across the board, we're feeling this: PM and design are just squeezed. They're absolutely squeezed.

And we're like, “Is the right thing here that we just need to hire a ton more PMs?” It could actually be where we land. On growth, how I think about it is: first, we are hiring a number of growth PMs. We desperately need people who are very, very good, and we are hiring.

Maybe craft an amazing cold email to you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Feel free to craft that email. So that's one thing: I think we are going to be hiring a number of PMs. But then the second thing that we do is very much hire product-minded engineers. I think this has always been the best thing to do in growth. You always want to have the engineers coming up with ideas, et cetera.

We especially want people who can really step in as mini-PMs if the PM is absent. We're more formally leveraging that right now because we are so stretched. The frame that we have is that if a project is 2 weeks of engineering time or less, then the engineer is on the hook to effectively be the PM for that.

That means talking to security, talking to legal, and talking to cross-functional stakeholders. The engineer is very much driving that. The PM will get looped in and advise if needed. If something is wildly going off track, then they'll step in, but they're much more in an advisory capacity versus execution.

If a project is more than 2 weeks of engineering time, then the default is that the PM should continue to be on the hook for making that go well. They still delegate more to engineering, but they're squarely accountable. It's not fully clean-cut. Use your head: if this is a 1-week thing but it's extremely controversial, the PM should probably still drive it.

That, I think, is the approach that I expect more companies will start to take, which is just deputizing the engineers to be mini-PMs. Not everyone can do it, right? The engineers who are more product-minded suddenly see their value go up significantly, like an order of magnitude. I think we will probably still be hiring a lot of PMs.

There is so much interesting stuff I want to follow up on here. One is this idea of 2 weeks. Briefly, I always joke that as a PM, you can go on vacation and be away from your team for a couple of weeks, and things are going to be all right. There's momentum, there's a plan, and people keep operating. It feels like that's the rule of thumb you use: if it's a 2-week project, you'll be all right without a PM. You can handle it. I love that those 2 things connect.

The other thing here is so interesting. You're saying that because engineers are so accelerated—and this all makes sense—PMs and design are just like, “Holy shit.” They're hard to keep up with this pace of engineering. What you're saying is that you need more and more PMs to keep up. That's one route. Or it's engineers who can PM, essentially, which is so funny.

It's just like, okay, great news for product managers until more of the PM work can be done by AI. But that's a really interesting trend. Is there anything else there, just like, “Oh, wow, we actually may need more PMs”? The ratio of more PMs and fewer engineers might be the future.

Yeah. I think this really depends on the industry and the size of the company. Any company where you're building something that's much more developer-focused is going to rely on the engineers a lot more. Earlier companies don't have as much of this cross-functional coordination and stakeholder-alignment nonsense that you need all these PMs for, so you can get by with less.

But then, as a company scales—if I think about how you now have this ratio where maybe the 1 PM became 2 PMs from productivity, the 5 engineers became 20 engineers, and the 1 designer maybe became 3 designers—what is the best use of time for that PM? I think this is a really interesting question: how much should PMs actually be shipping things versus everything else?

In a world where you're limited on engineering, the PM should definitely be shipping things. In today's world, it's a good way to understand the tools, which is really important, so the PM should be shipping for that reason. But if I'm 1 PM or 2 PMs and there are 20 engineers, I think about what incremental value I can add with my time. Is it actually shipping the 21st feature, or is it saying, “How am I getting a little bit better at guiding the team on what the right opportunities are?”

That's where I think, in this world, you may have all these engineers who are mini-PMs. The better that happens, the more I'd love to be doing that. Still, if you get a really good PM who can come in and improve the why and the what—particularly by 5%—that is such a high-leverage hire.

This is such an interesting insight you're making. It's so counter to how a lot of people are thinking about how PM is evolving. What I'm hearing here is that because PMs are so behind, and because engineers are just getting so much done, many people hear, “Okay, you need to be prototyping. You need to be shipping PRs as a PM.”

What you're saying, which I completely agree with, is that your time is much better spent helping PMs, basically, and helping the engineers become better PMs themselves. The leverage there is a lot higher than spending time coding and shipping PRs in most cases.

I think that's true in certain circumstances. As a smaller company, I don't know that that's the case. In a smaller company where it's all hands on deck, I think you probably need to be shipping.

If you're in a company where budgets are very tight and engineers are very tight, and you're not able to just hire because money is unlimited, then you need to do what is needed to accelerate the impact your team is going to have, right? There are going to be a number of cases where, as a PM, the right thing to do is to be like, “Screw it, I am shipping. I am going all the way.”

But if I'm talking more about larger companies and more scaled businesses, yeah, if you have 20 engineers, is it the highest-leverage use of your time to ship an extra feature, or is it to figure out how to uplevel everything that we're doing and get the user insights better, et cetera?

Yeah, and I think there's also an element of shipping to learn: building a prototype so that you can have a better opinion. A lot of people talk about, “I'm just going to try 3 things, see how it goes,” and that'll help inform the roadmap. This is now the PRD: look at it instead of talking about it. So there's a lot of value there still.

That's very true. I think that's a great point. Even for me now, where we've got a number of PMs and many engineers, there are certain times when I'm like, “I want to articulate the idea I have in my head.” It's just better for me to prototype it and show it, right? So I think that's really important.

We are very scrappy. We're a big company by name and valuation, but we're extremely scrappy, and the focus internally is just to minimize bureaucracy and go. Probably 70%—maybe 60%, 70%, 80%—of what we ship does not have a PRD.

I am averse to PRDs. I just hate documentation. I'm just like, “Go, go, go. Cut, cut, cut the blockers.” Twenty to 30% of the stuff where it's important—really important—to get right should have really good documentation, and people should spend a lot of time on it.

But by and large, I think PRDs are just outdated at this point, and you can kick things off with a good team without needing to do that sort of thing.

Say more about that. What do you do to help make sure? People can build so fast, spend a lot of time going in the wrong direction, and ship things that are not what you're asking. How do you kick off a project and clarify, “Here's what we're doing”? Is it just a conversation, or is there anything beyond that?

It really depends on the size of it, and this kind of goes back to the 2-week thing. The reason why we have that 2-week thing is more like, how do I have some filter to say, if we're investing heavily into something, we should apply more thinking behind it, versus if it's a smaller set of investments, just go for it? And as a growth team, again, you do have a decent amount of these smaller things that you do.

For very small changes, like, “Oh, there’s a thing coming. We need to have an upsell for it,” what is the thing we’re doing? This is just on Slack, right? This is purely on Slack. It’s just messages back and forth.

I think it also depends on having a good caliber of engineer in there. The engineers can understand, like, “Hey, I know you said this, but what about that for the audience?” We’re lucky that we have good, product-minded engineers in that sense. All these smaller things are very much just on Slack, back and forth, and that’s what you do.

For the larger things, I very firmly believe in a proper kickoff. We still do that. There’s just so much going on at this place. No one has time, and no one knows what’s going on, so doing a cross-functional kickoff—getting legal, getting safeguards, getting everyone in the room—and just being like, “This is what we plan to do. What do you care about? What do you care about? What do you care about?” That 30-minute meeting for larger things is still so important to streamline all the mess that may happen later if you don’t do that work early on.

What’s your approach to crafting that PRD in those cases? Is it rambling into Claude? Do you have a template?

Even in those cases, there are times I don’t craft a PRD because everything’s moving so quickly, right? There are still some cases where I just set up the meeting, and then, five minutes before, I’ll put some of my thoughts into Cowork: “Here are the things that I need to think about. Spin up a basic doc.” Then we use it to talk. Other times, I won’t even have a doc.

But if I am creating a PRD, I basically have a skill that I’ve created, and then there’s a project with all the previous PRDs in there. It’s pretty simple. It has the format down, so I’ll just say, “Here are the things I care about. Here’s the why. Here’s the problem,” and flesh out the key considerations and the cross-functional stakeholders, those types of things.

Again, my default is, if I can avoid the doc and we can just jump to action, then that’s what we should do. Increasingly, we should just jump to prototyping the thing.

Yeah, and that’s where I think it’ll get so interesting once we can automate more of that—just like your assistant talking to the legal assistant, ironing out all these little things, like what’s important to you and what’s important to the—

Yes, and it’s coming. I think the legal team has done good enablement around this. There are versions of how you can mimic what someone might say and set up a Claude format, right? I think we have things like that now. As Claude gets more and more context and gets better at parsing long context, I think these are things that Claude will just get better at knowing.

One of the most effective ways I use Claude—or one of the most interesting ways I see people using Claude internally—is to help identify misalignment. This is something that I’ve found really, really helpful. With Cowork, you have the Slack MCP, and you can tell Cowork, basically, “Look across Slack. You know the projects that I’m working on. These are the things that are top of mind. Go and find me areas of potential misalignment right now.”

It does a really, really good job. This is something I’ve scheduled to run every week. Claude looks at things and comes back to me, saying, “Hey, I think these are things you should be aware of.” In that shipping context, it’s a similar thing: Claude can look at what’s happening across the company and say, “You’re thinking about shipping this thing. Here’s who you need to talk to. Here’s what you need to keep in mind.”

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I feel like there are these jobs of a product manager, and then they’re slowly going to be supported or done by AI. There’s finding misalignment, and then maybe one day it’ll be aligning people initially. You talked about this Claude automation for growth, like, “How do I grow this product?” That’s starting to happen.

Another thing that I use myself when I’m building stuff is just asking, “How do I make this product better? How do I make this a better user experience?” I ask the AI to give me a bunch of ideas, and they’re actually really good. It’s interesting how these little pieces are starting to be put into place to do more and more of this role.

What I love about these conversations is that you’re basically living in the future. You’re working at the most bleeding-edge company with the most talented people and the most cutting-edge tools, and you can see where things are going and start to actually live in the future—to build things that nobody else has even thought about or can do. I’m curious what else is working and what else your team has done to help save you time and be more productive.

We use it pretty extensively across the board, right? There’s the standard PM stuff, like writing docs, brainstorming, and looking at data. For data, I personally have Cowork running on a schedule and looking at 20 or 25 different charts every morning.

When I come in in the morning, there are just so many charts and so many products to track. Cowork will tell me, “Okay, here are the things that you should pay attention to. Here’s what’s concerning, and here are some interesting insights.”

And it sends you the update in Slack? What’s the workflow?

For me, it just shows up in Cowork.

In the desktop app?

Yeah, in the desktop app, you can have a scheduled task that you create. I have a bunch of Hex links that it will go and look at. It uses the Chrome extension for some things and MCP for other things. Then it just gives me a summary.

I still like looking at a few charts because I’m a numbers guy. I just like charts.

They’re all up and to the right, too, so that must feel nice.

Yeah, I like to see the chart. But then there’s a long tail of things, and even a medium tail, where you don’t have time to look at them every day.

If Claude is proactively looking at them and you start to feel good over time—if the false-positive rate is going down and the false-negative rate is going down on the things that Claude brings to you—then you just get a little bit more confidence and peace of mind there.

This touches on an idea I’ve always had: teams will have a strategy bot. Just imagine an agent that’s constantly watching metrics, the market, the roadmap, what’s working and what’s not, and saying, “Amol, here’s what I think we should do now. Here’s the pivot we should take. Here’s where we’re going to win.” It feels like we’re very close to that.

I think we’re close. I think we’ll get there later this year, to the point where that’s very, very effective. That’s my gut.

That level of proactivity—looking across a bunch of context and distilling insights—is related to the thing I mentioned earlier, Lenny, about the alignment piece. That’s a version of it, right? Now you’re just looking across more data sources.

This is something that I use. I talked about some of the standard PM stuff, like brainstorming, data, and UXR. There’s also a lot of admin stuff. I hate life admin and paperwork, so I get Claude to book my meeting rooms. I don’t book meeting rooms. Claude archives my email as a first pass at clearing out my inbox.

I don't do any of my reimbursements or expenses. Claude will go to Benepass and file the reimbursements. It'll go to Brex and file the expenses. So all of that side of things, I'm just like, "Just hand it to Cowork. Just get rid of it."

The stuff that's quite interesting, I think, is the manager lens. I talked about alignment being one thing, but I also look across my direct reports. Claude can look into what they've done this week, look at our team goals and OKRs, look at the transcripts from our discussions, and understand. I can basically ask Claude, "What are the key takeaways and observations I should keep in mind, and what feedback do you think I should give them?"

Again, you can just set that up weekly. The quality is hit or miss right now. It's decent on some things. Sometimes you're like, "Holy shit. I am so glad that I caught this." That's very helpful.

I do that for myself as well. My manager, Ami Vora, was a podcast guest of yours, right?

Yeah. Yeah.

So I say, "Hey, based on what you know of Ami, both publicly—she's written extensively about product—and then internally, and then our discussions, based on everything that I've done or not done this week, what feedback do you have for me as Ami?" I get that every week.

A lot of these things can already be done today. As the models improve, I think the accuracy and the signal of these things are going to continue to improve rapidly.

I don't think you realize just how much awesomeness you're sharing here. Every one of these is like, "What?"

Okay, this Ami example: You have one-on-ones with her. You ask Claude Cowork to go through all of her writing, basically build a model of her, and ask, "What should I be doing differently based on what you know about Ami?" Is that the approach?

Yeah, effectively. There are a number of ways you can do this. If someone has a public profile where they've written extensively, it's helpful because Claude can just get all that information. Otherwise, you can have a project or you can have a skill.

Increasingly, Claude is better at just understanding because you can tell Claude, "Look, on Cowork, using the Slack MCP, look at everything that this person has said in the last week," and based on that ask, "What are their top priorities? What priorities does my manager have, based on how they're spending their time, that I don't know about?"

All of this layer of stuff, which I think about as soft coaching, is unlocked, in my opinion, already. It's just that you're working with a coach who's kind of drunk at times. Not drunk, but sometimes it says something and you're like, "Why? Why would you bring that up? That's clearly wrong." Other times you're like, "Wow, that has..."

One of the guys, Scott, who leads our enterprise team, found major areas of misalignment that would've caused teams to spin their wheels significantly or do overlapping work. Think about the impact of that. Your shipping in this world, at bigger companies, is often going to be constrained by all the cross-functional coordination, right?

I think we're now starting to see that at this cross-functional coordination layer, AI is really being used to reduce some of that toil. Six months ago, that wasn't possible, and I'm like, "Shit, six months from now, what is going to be possible there?"

Oh, man. I think the fact that all this data is there—Slack, Granola, or whatever people use, all these notes from conversations and discussions—is really key to this working.

So for someone who wants to do something like this, how do you set this up? What are the steps?

You go onto Cowork, download the desktop app, and connect the Slack MCP. Depending on how big the organization is, you may need to get team or enterprise admin permissions—someone with those permissions to enable that. But once you have the Slack MCP connected on Cowork, you just ask Claude. That's it.

Amazing. Okay, I want to go in a different direction. I want to talk about the focus that Anthropic has had over the years. If you look at the numbers that you're all putting up, what's really incredible about it is the focus that you all have had, and I think this is the reason it has worked out so well.

There's a certain competitor in the market that's realizing they should have done this and is starting to shift to a similar approach. As an external observer, it feels like Anthropic has been very good at doing very few things but going super deep. B2B, for example: just going deep on B2B and then going really deep on coding use cases, Claude Code being an example. It's worked out really well.

Who has been driving that focus? Who has helped keep that focus from the beginning?

5. Anthropic Mission Guides Growth

I think it's a foundational part of the company. It's been there from the very early days, and it really comes from leadership. They've done a phenomenal job of distilling that.

I saw this document come up recently. I don't know where it was shared. It was something that Dan Mann, one of our founders who you had on the podcast, had written. It's dated in 2021, a few months after they started the company, I think, and it was, "Here's why we should just focus on AI coding." This is five years ago, long before anyone knew what the actual market opportunities were around this.

I think this is just a deep focus that we've had internally from the start on the importance of coding and B2B. There are 2 lenses to it, right? There's maybe a view that this is going to be commercially beneficial to tackle, and then there's the side of it around accelerating research.

I'd say it's a pretty mainstream view now. I've heard people from various labs talking about the importance of coding to accelerate research. But that has just been a very firm view that we've been laser-focused on internally: if you have the best models, that's going to accelerate your researchers, and that's going to accelerate the research loop. I think that's something that Dario has seen very clearly for a number of years.

A lot comes from Dario. A lot comes from leadership and just our DNA. The second thing, though, is probably just necessity. It's now changed—we're the more well-known company, we've raised lots of money, and so on—but historically, we were very much the smallest, least well-funded player in this space.

In many ways, it's a complete miracle that we've gotten to the stage that we have. 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. So what do you do?

I have this broader principle around life of freedom through constraints. When you have a bunch of constraints applied to you, whether that's in your personal life or at work, I think that can bring a lot of freedom because it frees up all this excess choice. You're like, "Okay, this is clearly the path."

For us, it was, "You're not—you don't have a ton of funding. You're a small player. You don't have distribution. You just have to really pick a very narrow focus, even for a very generalizable technology, to maximize your chances of getting to escape velocity."

I think that's also related to how history played out. It was well before my time, but Anthropic had a version of Claude. We had a chatbot before ChatGPT was launched, and we had ultimately chosen not to launch it for safety reasons. I think the team didn't want to kick off, effectively, an AI global arms race.

ChatGPT launched, and they got insane traction. That naturally pulled them toward consumer. There's another world where, if Anthropic had launched Claude first, maybe it would be the other way around, even with all that focus stuff. So who knows? It's hard to say, looking back at some of these things.

Wow. I didn't know that. I think people also just don't realize how far behind Anthropic was. Right now, of course, they're amazing, but I just remember when people were talking about Anthropic raising money, and I was like, "There's no way they're going to compete with OpenAI at this point.

It's so over—they're just so far ahead. And it shows the power of focus and, I guess, all the things you did. It is absurd how far you've come, how successful you've become, and how quickly things have changed.

Yeah, and I would say I very much agree. I think a lot of that comes down to our leadership team. We have a number of people who've worked at what you might call the best companies in the world. They're very senior people, and I think almost uniformly everyone's like, “This is the strongest leadership team out of any of those companies.” A lot comes from them, and then we're just very lucky to have incredible people. I think that helps a lot as well.

On the coding piece, just to make sure that part is clear: I never thought about this—the reason the bet on coding was so deep is not just that it's a huge TAM, but that this is a feedback loop that will accelerate us further and further. So if we get the best at coding, coding will help us do research, help us build better models, and accelerate faster and faster.

Yeah, that's correct. Dario has talked about this publicly.

The safety piece is really interesting, so I want to spend a little time here. Famously, Anthropic—I think the official name of Anthropic is Anthropic, an AI safety research company. As a growth person, there's this balance I imagine you strike between growing and not growing at all costs, with the mission being AI safety and alignment. How do you balance those 2 things? How does that impact your job?

Look, I think it's something we take very, very seriously, and it is the whole reason the company exists. It's why they left to start the company. It's deep in our corporate structure itself. Historically, everyone raising money is like, “Go create a Delaware C Corp,” and that's the structure you use. With a corporation, you have a fiduciary duty to maximize returns for shareholders and maximize shareholder value.

From the beginning, they went a different way: we created a public benefit corporation, or PBC, which allows you to legally say that maximizing shareholder value is not the overarching goal of the company, and you can optimize for public benefits. So really, I think it starts from there, and it ladders down from there. For us, our purpose, our mission ultimately is to make sure that the transition to powerful AI goes well and is net beneficial for humanity. Internally, I think we are very excited and, honestly, very optimistic about where this can go, but we also understand what the risks are.

And so for us, that top-line objective is: this needs to go well for humanity. This just needs to go well for humanity. That is something that we are happy to take a significant commercial hit for. And we've done that time and time again, right? Back then, okay, you had Claude, but you didn't want to release it because you were like, “There are these safety risks.” Time and time again, I've seen that we've been happy to take that hit, and it's actually worked out well for us in other ways.

From a growth lens, I look at it as growth teams can often push the boundaries of what is good user experience, et cetera, because they're trying to eke out metrics at times. When I think about a controversial test being brought to me, I look at it as: there are 2 types of tests that are controversial. One is when the test is so controversial that you just should not run it because the results don't matter: you would not ship it because of some combination of brand, customer friendliness, and values.

The second is when it's controversial: I don't like it, and I certainly don't love it, but it's not a red line. So if someone comes to you with conviction and says, “I have a really good hypothesis around this,” and you're like, “I don't love it,” but you can run the test and see what impact it has, and there's a high level of cringe or ick, then I want to see a high level of return for that result. I think about everything in terms of: where is it—in 1 or 2? For every company, what's in 1 and 2 is different.

For us, AI safety is very much in 1. It's like, yeah, that's why we exist. We're just not going to do this thing. There are other things that fall into 2, where you're like, “Heightened sensitivity, but we can try it and see what happens.”

I think zooming out, though, Lenny, one of the biggest mistakes I see growth teams make, and particularly hardcore growth practitioners, is trying to squeeze every last dollar. I think this is a general principle in life. If you're a founder raising money, you're trying to squeeze that last dollar; you don't want to do that because you want people to come back next time as well, is my view.

In growth, it's really important that you just need to be okay leaving money on the table. That's a core principle for us as a growth team: we're very comfortable foregoing metric impact in order to prioritize safety, protect our brand, hold a high quality bar, and maintain a great user experience. If you look beyond the short term—what are the numbers for this quarter?—and zoom out and think about what the very best products out there are, you realize this is how they all operate, and that's actually the thing that's going to drive more growth in the long term as well.

And so I think that actually ties back to safety. As the risks get higher and the stakes get higher, the fact that we are taking a stance that safety is critical to what we do is actually going to become a significant competitive advantage for us that I think is going to help us in the long run.

Yeah. And as you share all this, clearly it's working. Anthropic is killing it. I love when someone approaches a problem that way and it actually works out.

It's the same way I think about my newsletter. There's so much more I can do to grow it. My philosophy is just: focus on creating good content. Nothing else. All these micro-optimizations aren't going to matter in the end. It'll grow through people sharing it if it's useful to them.

On a very small scale, I have a similar philosophy. One of the things people are probably thinking about as we talk is that we joke about AI replacing parts of jobs here and there, but it is pretty scary to a lot of people: “What is the future of my job? Will I have a job? How do I stay relevant in this future?”

So, for folks that want to thrive in this approaching AI future as a PM or as a growth person, do you have any advice—things they should be doing right now?

6. Thriving In The AI Future

To me, a couple of things come up. One thing everyone says is: use the tools. You need to be on top of the tools. I think you need to be using Claude Code. You need to be using Cowork and understanding, with each model release, what are the new things you can do with this? How can you apply this to your job?

It'll work well in some things and terribly in others, and then one model launch later, it's like, “Oh shit, that other thing worked.” But if you didn't go back to try it, you wouldn't have known, and now many months have passed and you didn't know that was possible. And so I think being on top of the tools is really important, both for improving your own productivity and for getting product sense around AI products, which I think is just going to become increasingly important.

Zooming out beyond that, I look at it as leaning into where you have a competitive advantage and an unfair advantage. To me, there are some PMs who are really good at craft, for example, and there are others who, if you throw them into a situation with all these stakeholders who have all these strong opinions, there's no way they're going to mediate this, and they come out with everyone kind of swimming in the right direction.

If you think about what the major skill set is that you have, where you spike and that can be tied to delivering and driving impact for a company in a product role, I would just double down on that and almost forget the weaknesses. What can you do to become the best person at that thing? Because that's very, very valuable. And I think that ties to the notion of just leaning into being interdisciplinary.

So, going back to some of what we mentioned earlier, in this world where engineers are mini-PMs, the engineer who is highly product-minded is a unicorn—an absolute unicorn. I think the same thing is true for PMs: if the designer is really stretched and you're a PM who can design, you are also a unicorn now. The chances of a company letting you go have gone down dramatically because you are now so much more useful. I think that is really important.

I think if I look at what's benefited me, it's probably a version of this. For me, it came from a founder background, the mix of the founder background, finance—I was an investment banker, so the finance background and numbers—and then sales. I almost became an account executive instead of going into product. I was right on the edge of whether I should go into sales or product, and I think a combination of those, along with growth, is probably what's led to there being certain areas and situations where I can have an outsized impact compared to other people. Understanding what that is for you is really important.

I look at our financial services product. We've launched Claude for Sheets and Claude for Excel.

Which will take the market, by the way. Everyone wants Claude.

I know. But the guy running that, Nick Lin, came from investment banking and private equity, and he has such a competitive advantage building that product. He's like, “I know this. I know this.” He's built for this. I think understanding which interdisciplinary areas you can lean into to make yourself higher-impact is really important.

The last one is just being adaptable. Anyone who's trying to keep applying old playbooks is going to make life a lot harder for themselves. One of the biggest things when you come into Anthropic is that you need to understand that probably 50%, 60%, 70% of how you operated in the past, you should just throw out the door. It's not going to be relevant, and if you try to stick to that, you're going to have a lot of friction and it's not going to be helpful. Just being adaptable and understanding, okay, the job's changed this way, I'm going to go that way, is so important.

That is awesome advice. It matches a lot of what Jenny shared when she came on the podcast, the design leader on Claude and Claude for Work, and all these things—the idea of going deep, becoming the best or one of the best at a very specific thing. Not every company will need all 10, and you don't need all 10, but just going deep on something. I forget how she described it. Or, again, Driessen said the same thing: I think we called it a sideways E instead of just being T-shaped. If you could have a couple of things you're really, really good at, there's a lot of power to that.

Before I get into something that I think will blow a lot of people's minds about how we actually met and kind of a big part of your journey, let me just ask you this: Is there anything else about Anthropic that might be worth sharing, might be worth talking about?

The thing that comes to mind is our culture and the people we have here. I really think it's our secret sauce. I think it's the thing that is the most defensible, the thing that no one else is going to be able to replicate, and I don't think it's an accident. Leadership has really invested in this a lot, and Daniela and Dario really believe in this. I think they've created a very special culture.

This is truly a mission-driven company, and I was not 100% sure of that when I joined. I thought this was an exciting company, and I very much agreed with their principles, but I didn't know anyone at the company and I didn't have any references for what it was like inside, so I was a little skeptical when I joined. I was thinking, “At least they're talking about it, but I don't know—are they serious about this?” Then I came in very early and I was like, “Oh. Oh shit. Okay.” They are—maybe they're even more serious about this internally than they talk about externally.

It's a mission-driven company where people viscerally understand both the upsides and downsides of the technology, and therefore understand the divergent ranges of how this may go for humanity and how different of a future that could be. When you understand how different this could be as a future for all of us—our children and our grandchildren, et cetera—I think it leads to a lot of passion for what we do. It leads to a lot of belief in what we're doing.

I kind of look at every other job I've had in the past, and there's some degree of people at the company who are just checked out, where it's, “I'm here. I'm sick of this, but I don't have a better option,” or, “I'm getting paid too much to leave,” et cetera. That is just not the case here. I have not met a single person who's checked out. Everyone is putting everything they have on the table, pouring it out, leaving nothing behind, and is fully in it.

I think that releases an energy that's very hard to describe. You have that energy, you have that mission-driven nature, and then it's such an open culture. Leadership is very transparent with us about things. Slack is a whole maze. Everything plays out on Slack.

Everyone has these notebook channels where you have your own Twitter feed, in a way, where you're just talking about your thoughts about things. You can join the notebook channels of people in research and all these other areas, and you can learn whatever you want. You can spend so much time getting lost in that as well.

But that openness—we even encourage people to argue with Dario. There was an all-hands where he said something someone didn't agree with, and the person went onto Dario's notebook channel and said, “Hey, I didn't appreciate how you said this and this and that.” Then it sparked a whole big debate. That sort of thing is encouraged: go to leadership, disagree with them, challenge them publicly.

I think that leads to a level of trust, and all of that together means we have this very deep sense of togetherness that I have never experienced anything like. And then you get to the talent, right? I feel like the talent density is like I'm playing for Real Madrid at times. I look around and I'm like, “Oh man, I'm playing for Madrid,” where you just have the best people in the world.

I think it's mostly the case in research. We have the very best researchers in the world. But even if you look at product, we have Ami Vora—she's phenomenal. We have Mike Krieger. You're like, “Okay, he casually started Instagram. He's here.”

On growth, we have John Egan, who's my engineering counterpart. He's the OG in growth engineering, and he's great. We have Alexei, who's someone who teaches growth engineering at Reforge. He's just another person on the team. All of that is very special.

My favorite here is from a couple of months ago. We had our company-wide onsite in October, and I'm walking around and I see this guy just walking around, eating popcorn by himself. I go up to him and I'm like, “You're Jeff, right?” And he's like, “I am.” And I'm like, “You are literally the U.S. ambassador to my country, Australia, and you're just an employee here.” I'm like, “This is insane.”

I'm talking to him about prime ministers of our country and all these things, and it's just the talent combined with that culture. I think that is the secret sauce, and it's the reason that we are as successful as we are.

This notebook channel is so interesting as a tactical thing. The idea there is that Dario just shares—it's like a little Twitter, an internal Twitter feed, where folks share what they're thinking about, what their priorities are, and things like that.

Yeah. That's basically it: it's an internal feed where everyone—not just Dario—has one, and you basically share your internal thoughts. It's a way to keep people updated on things, on what's working. It's a way where people share provocative things.

From a leadership level, we also think about that as a way to scale your beliefs and views across an organization as it grows quickly. If you're adding a lot of people to the organization, you need to think about what behaviors you want to model and what principles are top of mind for you. You can have a bunch of meetings where you talk about it, and you can model that behavior, but if you have a channel that's like, “Here's what's top of mind,” and you say these things, right? Like, if I have a post, which I did the other week, of “This is the importance of being comfortable leaving money on the table,” now all the new engineers on growth who've joined have seen that and they're like, “Oh, okay.”

Well, this is different from what we’ve known before, right? So I think it’s good for the openness, but it’s also good for a leader: it’s how you can scale your views as an organization to get people more up to speed on the way things are done, which I think is really important to avoid that drift. When you have so many new people signing up, that drift can lead to a lot of drift in strategy and perception. So it just helps run a tighter ship in that way.

And more importantly, the data for the agents everyone’s got running to help them work with all these humans.

Yes, that is very correct. It is something that goes to Claude. There are certain documents in onboarding where the HR team has written, “Before editing anything on this document, please check with this person because this is a document that Claude references,” as a key thing, right? More and more, these types of things—how does the growth team think about this? How does Safeguards think about this?—are arming Claude with that context to get better and better at helping in the future.

That’s interesting. It feels like that’s something every company is going to have to start doing: sharing their thoughts in a structured way so that all these agents that we’ve all got running have what they need to know. Another interesting side note here is Slack.

There’s all this talk of SaaS tools being replaced by AI, and you guys use Slack. I think there was this famous tweet about you guys still using Workday and all these tools, all these SaaS tools. Everyone’s like, “What?” They’re all going to be vibe-coded out of existence. The fact that you all, at the cutting edge of what could be built with code, still use Slack and all these other tools, to me, that’s a good sign that maybe SaaS companies will be all right in the future. I don’t know if you have anything there to share.

Yeah, it’s a really complicated picture, right? There are a number of things that we just build internally ourselves. As time goes on, your ability for Claude to do that better increases. At the same time, we use Figma a ton, we use Slack a ton, we use Workday. We use a lot of these products, and I don’t see that changing in the immediate future.

And so, yeah, I think there’s probably some truth to some of this. I think the other parts are overblown, and many of these products are customers of ours. We value them a lot as customers, and we use their products very, very heavily. I don’t see that changing.

And you have better things to do. Who’s going to spend time building a Slack at Anthropic? That’s not where value is going to accrue. I think it also helps you see how sophisticated these things are. There have been teams thinking about these problems for a long time. Anyway, that’s a whole other tangent.

Just coming back to the values thing, I want to highlight something here that’s really important. A lot of people criticize Anthropic for talking about the dangers to humanity, throwing out all these numbers about jobs going away, and creating all this fear. People think it’s, “Oh, we’re trying to raise money,” or, “We have to get people’s attention,” or, “We’re just trying to create headlines.” But everything I’ve ever seen internally is always just, “This is what we believe in. We want people to know what might be coming. Even if it isn’t bad, we want people to understand: here’s what might happen, and we are trying to avoid it.”

You might say, “Why is Anthropic even building AI, though, if it’s so dangerous?” The understanding Ben shared was just that we think it’s better that we go at this and try to build it the right way versus just stay out of it and hope that nothing bad happens.

I think three things come to mind there. First, I go back to something I said earlier, which is that we very much think about things from an exponential lens. If you’re thinking about things from a linear lens, you’ll see the world very, very differently, right? You look at where we are today and you’re like, “Okay, but how much better can it be in 2 or 3 years?” I think if you’re looking at it from an exponential lens and you understand how exponentials work, then you realize that a lot of this stuff is actually going to be happening sooner than people think if you’re looking at it from a linear lens.

And if you understand that there could be upsides and downsides and the range of outcomes here, you need to be talking about the downsides so we can avoid them and push toward the upsides. I think most people at the company are optimists. We’re very optimistic about the future. I think it’s just that we understand the risk: it is not a guarantee that we end up in a good place. Not enough people are talking about the risks, I think, in productive ways and with the know-how of the risks.

I think there are people who may talk about the risks but are not in the game, and so they don’t actually fully know. They’re not surgical on what the specific risks are. But we’re in the game, we understand what’s happening, and so that’s one piece. I think the second is that we actually believe in this stuff more strongly than we say externally. It is just such a key part of how we think internally that sometimes we need to reword our statements because people might think we’re being too over the top. But internally, that’s how we think, and what we’re putting out is a softer version of that at times.

Then I think the third piece is what Ben said, where we think a lot about driving the race to the top. If you’re not in the game and you’re shouting from the sidelines, no one cares. It’s just the reality of how the world works. No one really cares. If you’re in the game and you’re a leading player, and what you’re doing is working, you can influence people who are also in the game to take the right actions.

So that is the core of it. If we just pack up and go home, you have no influence on this thing. And if you stay in the game, you’re doing great commercially, and then you have ways to influence that—these are the principles—put those into the conversation and make more people believe in those things.

I could talk to you forever, Amol, but two more questions just to round out the conversation and touch on some stuff that I’ve hinted at a number of times. One is, I want to take us actually to failure corner because someone listening to this may be like, “All right, look at this guy: just worked at all these amazing companies, cold-emailed the CPO at Anthropic, got a job, joined this rocket ship. It’s all been up and to the right, just killing it constantly.” What’s a story from your career where things didn’t work out, when you failed, and what did you learn from that experience?

I have a couple. It’s very much not that way. I feel like it was a lot of squiggly lines to get here. The biggest, I’d say, is founding a company, raising a bunch of money, having employees, and then having to shut it down and tell your investors that you’ve lost the money and that you had a vision of what you were going to do and that it’s not going to happen. I think that’s probably the biggest one.

We spent 3 years on it. It was not like, “Oh, we tried something part-time.” It was like, no, we went for it. We spent 3 years, raised a couple of million, and had maybe 7–10 employees at our biggest. It was something that we really believed in. It was around mental health and how you can quantify mental health to help understand or get early predictors of things like generalized anxiety and major depression.

It was stuff that we really, really believed in, but ultimately, we were in our early 20s. We had no idea what we were doing at the time, and there are many things I’d do differently. But that was just a very, very painful process. I think the good thing was that we kept our investors in the loop the whole time.

So to any founders who are struggling out there, send those monthly investor updates. It’s really easy to send those when things are great. It’s really hard to send those when things are bad. You’re just battered down, and you need to sit down and send an update to your investors about why everything you talked about last month did not go to plan. But it’s just the right thing to do, and it keeps people in the loop and avoids surprises.

But it’s still so tough when you’re then calling up the investors to say, “Hey, we’re shutting down,” and disappointing everyone who believed in you. It becomes such a big part of your identity. It’s very, very tough. Man, that was just brutal. It was brutal. And it took me, I think, a number of years to truly get over it.

I think that it’s a tough thing, but you get so much from that experience that’s hard to see in the moment. Without doing that, I would not have gone into this. I was not a PM before. I didn’t have any of these skills. I’d never worked on products, and I didn’t know how to cold email, really.

It was through that job that I learned a ton of the skills that made this career path viable for me, and it’s just really hard to see that in the moment when you’re looking at a point in time. It’s much easier to draw the line looking back. But I think that would be my takeaway: just keep in mind that it’s a long game, and some of those things—I'm so grateful for that experience now.

I’m so grateful that it failed and went that way, actually. It’s very painful because it wouldn’t have led to what I’m doing now. It’s a tough thing, but positives can come from it.

What I love about this is that a lot of people have these times in their career where they’re like, “It’s all over. I failed in such a big way, my reputation’s screwed, and people were counting on me. Now they see I’m an imposter. I never knew what I was doing after all. Now they finally see.”

Just seeing that—and this was 3 years; you had, I’m looking at your LinkedIn, 7 employees, something like that—and then it’s MasterClass, Mercury, Anthropic. I think it’s inspiring to hear a story like that, to know that you can have a big failure like that and things can work out, that it’s not the end.

In 2023, I was going to go on parental leave because my wife was pregnant, and I was just like, “Wait, what do I do with the newsletter? I need to take some time off. It would be really nice to take a month or 2 off.” My plan was to do a bunch of guest posts where people lined up. I put out a call for guest posts, people applied, I picked a few, and then I slotted them in ahead of time so I could take time off.

I put out this call: “Hey, who wants to write a guest post for my newsletter?” I got 500-plus applications. One of those applications was from you, and the pitch was essentially how a traumatic brain injury made you a better product manager.

I still remember reading the first draft you sent me, and I was just like, “Holy shit, this story is incredible.” You feel such strong feelings, and it was so tactically interesting and useful. It was like, “Oh, wow, this is actually going to make me a better product manager.”

Share the story of the brain injury that you went through and the journey that you went on there, because this is going to blow people’s minds.

7. Recovering From Brain Injury

It was the toughest time in my life. It made shutting down a company feel like, “Oh, that was nothing.” It’s funny how perspective works that way.

Back in early 2022, I had a traumatic brain injury. I’d done MMA for many years. I’d done Muay Thai, which is a type of martial art, for many years. I’d never had a problem, and it was just one of those things that happens. It was a normal day of sparring, nothing crazy. You get the wrong hit to the head in the wrong way, and my whole life changed.

I spent 9 months off work. The first couple of months were brutal. It took me roughly half a year before I was comfortable walking again. It was very, very difficult. For the first 2 or 3 months, beyond just showering and going to the bathroom, my wife did everything for me, including texting my friends.

I would listen to music for maybe 20 seconds and feel like I needed to vomit. I couldn’t look at screens at all, and it was a very, very long recovery. For a while, it was not clear to me that I would ever work again. My wife and I even discussed what we would do in that case. We had to think on those levels.

Through a lot of pushing and really working through it myself, you have to slowly increase your tolerance to things. It’s a brutal process, but you need to slowly expose yourself to different things and get better and better at each little thing. You have to actively work on that. Don’t push it too far; otherwise, you have a big setback.

Over 9 months, it got to the point where I returned to work, and then it slowly got better. The part, Lenny, that you don’t know is that in mid-2023, we posted that newsletter, and a month later I got re-injured.

Oh, wow.

When you have a brain injury, until you’re 100% healed, your risk of another concussion or brain injury is elevated. When you’re 100% healed, your risk falls down to that of a non-concussed population. But until that time—even if you’re 95% healed—you’re not 100% healed.

It was just an innocuous, everyday-life incident. I was getting off a plane, and a bag hit me on the head. I was off work for 2 months, 1 month into joining Mercury. I was 1 month in, and I was like, “Sorry, guys, I need to peace out for 2 months.”

That was a very, very long recovery. I’m actually still not 100% healed. I’m mostly good, but I have times when I have dizziness and headaches and other things I need to work around.

Overall, I feel like it’s one of the best things that could have happened to me. I think that keeping that mindset helps. There is a point when you can take that too far, when that view is detached from reality. But I think it’s made me so much better and more effective as a person.

A lot of the same habits—I don’t drink alcohol, I don’t drink caffeine. I have to do a bunch of these things for my physical health. I just have to do them, so I keep doing them. I take breaks. That’s a really big one.

You might think, even in a place like Anthropic, “How do you survive in this way?” Even on the craziest days, Lenny, between the start of the day and lunch, and between lunch and the end of the day, I take a short break. Even on the craziest days with model launches and everything else, I take that break. I’m lucky we have a meditation area in the office that I’ll go to.

The whole side of things around meditation that I talked about in that post—I think both you and I have done a retreat at Spirit Rock. Doing a meditation retreat changed my life, and it’s something that I do at least once a year now. I have one coming up relatively soon as well.

All of that has helped with better managing the physical side of it, because this job is very taxing. Emotionally, it’s helped me have a little bit of space from what happens. You have awareness on one side, and you have reality on the other side. Reality’s crazy here, man. Reality’s insane. There’s so much happening every day. There’s so much noise. It’s mind-blowing.

That relationship between awareness and reality is where you have choice. You learn from deep meditation how to shift that and apply your choice there. I think that has helped me significantly with keeping a more level head.

A lot of staying in this game at this level of intensity is just keeping your head. Don’t lose your head in the crazy times. All that I’ve gone through has helped me do this without resorting to unhealthy coping mechanisms.

Wow. Amol, you’re such an inspiration in so many ways. There are so many reasons that you might not have been successful and things might not have worked out, and there are so many lessons to learn from the stories you’ve shared and the journey you’ve been on to help people overcome the challenges they’re having.

If you can come back from something insane—was it a kick to the head? Is that what happened?

It was a kick to the head, that’s correct. Yes.

From feeling like you might not be able to listen to music to leading growth at the fastest-growing company in history, there’s also a lesson here about constraints. You mentioned this idea of the power of constraints. You’re forced to take breaks. You’re forced to go meditate in a way that’s really helpful, and it’s a lesson for us all. This is actually really good for us all.

Yeah. I think freedom through constraints is one of the big takeaways I’ve had during that time. When you have these constraints, you’re forced to adapt, and they create focus. In a business setting, you have to focus more; in a personal setting, you have to adapt.

If the constraint is that I can’t do anything and I’m injured, I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know if I’m going to get better. You have 2 choices. Are you going to resist, fight with reality, and really suffer from that? Or are you going to accept the situation and not let it affect you emotionally?

It’s not to say I did nothing. I did everything, man. Every single thing I could do—diet, exercise—I was on it. Every action I could take, I was on it. But then you have a choice: are you going to let the impact of that define your happiness or not?

When the results maybe aren’t coming, you have to adapt to, “Okay, what do I want my happiness to be?” One of the meditation teachers said, “The true freedom in life is learning how to be content when you don’t get what you want.”

And it's not to say you shouldn't do something when you don't get what you want. But I think that takeaway of just, can you be content and not have your happiness rely on getting something, I think is a challenge. I'm not perfect at it, but I think it's probably one of the biggest takeaways from that whole thing.

Incredible. And we'll link to the post if folks want to read this. Before we get to our very exciting lightning round, is there anything else you wanted to share, or should we just jump right in?

I think we can jump into it.

We covered a lot of ground. Okay, here we go. I've got 5 questions for you. First question: What are 2 or 3 books you recommend most to other people?

It probably ties to a lot of what I just talked about. I think a lot about meditation and my emotional state. That's what I spend most of my time thinking and reading and researching and working on outside of work, so my recommendations are very related to that.

The first is a book called The Joy of Living by a Buddhist monk. His name is Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche. It's really about how you can start to think about your life experience in a different way and have tactics for how to change the way you think about things. I've recommended it to a lot of people, and they've really enjoyed it.

I think another one is Awareness by Anthony de Mello, which is a similar thing, but from a different angle. Those 2 I consistently recommend to people. And then the third one is more relevant to product in many ways: Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke. I think just being able to break down a situation when someone's like, “I don't know if it'll get done in time.” Okay, can you put a number to that? What percentage likelihood is it? Those types of things are just so tactically helpful in product.

Favorite recent movie or TV show?

I think the movie is probably Maadi Supreme. It's one of the only ones I watched recently. I thought it was great. I thought it was just insane. Absolutely insane movie. It was ridiculous, but I loved it.

TV show, I have not watched TV in a while. I think it would probably be the Olympics, if that counts.

Is there a product that you love? One you discovered recently, or just one you have in your life that's like, “Oh, this is very cool. People might want to know about it”?

Yeah, this is a funny one. I was in Japan last week, and I was sleeping in this hotel. I actually really loved the pillow that I had in this hotel. I've had neck and upper-trap pain at times, and sometimes I've been frustrated with my pillow because I sometimes sleep facing up and sometimes sideways, and the height isn't quite right.

I was just like, “This pillow is just great.” Basically, this pillow is full of beads, and you can naturally shift the height of the pillow while you're sleeping, even unconsciously, without thinking. So I looked at the tag. I was like, “What is this?” I ordered it through Amazon Japan and brought it back with me on the plane.

I have the name here. It's called the Maruhachi Shinsui Maruhachi Pro pillow, and you can only get it in Japan, but they ship to the US. No affiliation, and I think that has changed my life in the last week.

That is an awesome pick. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to in work or in life?

The main one I'd say is just, “She'll be right.” This is a very common Aussie saying. It's like, “She will be right. She'll be right.” It's a common Aussie saying when we're faced with a tough or difficult situation. You're kind of dismissing the severity of it in a way by saying, “Eh, it'll be fine.”

I think that's such a good metaphor. It's such a good tactic in many, many cases. And then I think the other one is just, sometimes in life you have to go for it. That is something that Eros Rezvani, who was the CMO of Discord and a very close advisor to me as a founder, would push me on. Something he would often say is just, “Just go for it.”

I think that's a very helpful thing. You can sit there thinking, “Should I do this? Should I not?” Sometimes in life you just have to go for it.

I love the combo of those 2: Sometimes just go for it, and she'll be right. So good. Okay, final question. I'm curious: You used to be into martial arts. That didn't go great. Do you have a new hobby that you find yourself loving? Do you make time for hobbies?

I think I'm quite tight on time for hobbies, I would say. I think it's largely just work, having my body function, and taking care of the most important relationships around me.

I think maybe the one hobby I'd say is that I'm really into sports, and I've gotten more into sports—football in particular.

Like watching?

Watching. Certainly not playing. My wife's from Michigan, and she took me to a game at the Big House, and it just changed my life. From then on, I was like, “I'm a Wolverines fan.” I'm a big Wolverines fan, a big 49ers fan. I just love football. So that's probably the one that comes to mind.

Amol, this was incredible on so many levels. I am so thankful that you made time for this, considering how much you have going on. Where can folks find you online? Say they want to apply for a job, maybe on your team. Where can they find that, and how can listeners be useful to you?

You can find me on my LinkedIn. It's just Amol Avasare. I'm boring. That's it. You can look online to apply on our jobs page. There are roles across growth engineering, growth product, and growth design. We are looking for great people on the growth team, so please come and join us.

I think being helpful to me is just 2 things: trying our products, giving us feedback—giving us harsh feedback in particular on what can be better—and then sending great people our way. We are looking for the best of the best to join the team, and we would love to hear from anyone you know who could be a fit for one of our roles.

Dream job for so many people. Amol, thank you so much for being here.

Thanks, Lenny.