Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol Avasare

Episode Date: April 5, 2026

Amol Avasare is Head of Growth at Anthropic, which is going through the most unprecedented growth trajectory in history—scaling from $1 billion to over $19 billion in ARR in just 14 months. Previously, Amol worked on the growth teams at Mercury and MasterClass. Before that he was a founder, and he cold emailed his way into the Anthropic role when no job listing existed. Most remarkably, he overcame a traumatic brain injury from a Muay Thai match that meant he couldn't work for nearly a year.In our in-depth discussion, Amol shares:1. How Amol landed his role by cold emailing Anthropic’s CPO Mike Krieger2. How Anthropic is automating growth experiments with Claude (their internal tool called “CASH”)3. Why the ratio of PMs to engineers might need to flip (more PMs than engineers) as AI makes engineers exponentially more productive4. Why activation is the single highest-leverage growth problem in AI5. Why Anthropic indexes 70/30 toward big bets (the opposite of most growth teams)6. How he uses Cowork to detect team misalignment in Slack7. How the company’s focus on AI coding created a research flywheel that accelerated their models—Brought to you by:WorkOS—Modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, free up to 1 million MAUsVanta—Automate compliance, manage risk, and accelerate trust with AI—Episode transcript: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/anthropics-1b-to-19b-growth-run—Archive of all Lenny's Podcast transcripts: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/yxi4s2w998p1gvtpu4193/AMdNPR8AOw0lMklwtnC0TrQ?rlkey=j06x0nipoti519e0xgm23zsn9&st=ahz0fj11&dl=0—Where to find Amol Avasare:• X: https://x.com/TheAmolAvasare• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amolavasare—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Introduction to Amol and Anthropic’s growth(03:15) The story of cold emailing Mike Krieger to get the job(08:28) What it’s like leading growth at the fastest-growing company ever(10:46) What the growth team actually does at Anthropic(12:16) The concept of “success disasters”(13:55) Why activation is the biggest challenge in AI products(18:05) Improving Mercury’s onboarding experience(20:57) The importance of adding the right kind of friction(25:10) Anthropic’s org structure(27:06) Why Anthropic focuses on big bets over micro-optimizations(33:34) Automating growth experiments with Claude (CASH)(38:20) How AI is starting to identify what experiments to run(41:07) The future of PM, engineering, and design roles(47:19) Why you might need more PMs as engineers get more productive(51:13) How Amol uses AI to prototype ideas and skip PRDs(58:10) Amol’s morning routine: AI analyzes 20 to 25 charts automatically(1:03:31) Getting coaching from an AI version of your manager(1:06:27) How Anthropic’s focus on coding and B2B drove their success(1:12:10) Balancing growth with AI safety as a core mission(1:18:09) Advice for thriving in an AI-first future(1:22:53) Anthropic’s culture and the “notebook channels” on Slack(1:35:12) Failure corner: Shutting down his startup after raising money(1:38:25) The traumatic brain injury that changed everything(1:46:49) Lightning round—References: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/anthropics-1b-to-19b-growth-run—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [e-mail].—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. To hear more, visit www.lennysnewsletter.com

A lot of companies claim to be the fastest growing companies of all time. Anthropic actually is. You guys were at a billion ARR at the start of 2025. The last number I've seen is 19 billion ARR. That's one 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 open AI.

It's a complete miracle that we've gotten to the stage that we have. Give us just a glimpse of what is like to be leading growth inside of Anthropics. This is the hardest job I've had in my life to come into Anthropics. You need to understand that 50, 60, 70% of how you operate in the past just throw it out the door. One of the cleverest growth moves you all made was this idea of importing memory from chat GPT. Activation is a really big challenge in AI. We are starting to look at how do we automate growth. Our growth platform team is driving this effort called Cash, which is Claude Accelerates.

sustainable hypergrowth, how can we use Claude to automate growth experimentation? And it's delivering results. You're basically living in the future. We always talk about the exponential. The product value that we will deliver in two years time is probably like a thousand X, what it is today. The funniest thing is, I've noticed internally linear charts are just not cool. Everything is log linear. It's just showing me at log linear scale. Today my guest is Amol Avasari. Amal is head of growth at Anthropic, which is on the most unprecedented dented growth run in history. In the past 14 months, they grew from $1 billion to over $19 billion in annual recurring revenue. Just in the past few months, their revenue doubled. They've been

growing 10x year over year. This is unheard of at the scale. By the time this episode comes out, their revenue will be even higher. To put this scale in perspective, companies like Atlassian and 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. And if that isn't interesting enough to you, a mole who leads growth at Anthropic is an incredible human. He previously led growth at Mercury and Master Class, before that he was a founder and an investment banker. And most interestingly, something that most people don't know about him, is that a mole suffered a severe brain injury. He had to spend nine months relearning how to walk and work and just not

be nauseous all the time. He shared this story in a guest post in my newsletter a number of years ago. We actually chat about this during the conversation. These are my favorite kind of conversations because 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. And 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 Mole 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 Lenny's ProductPass.com for an incredible set of deals available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers. With that, I bring you Amol Evasari. Amol, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Pleasure to be here. Head of growth at Anthropic. No big deal. I've had a lot of people come on this podcast from companies that claim to be the fastest growing companies of all time.

And Anthropic actually is, if you look at the trajectory, I just have some of the numbers here, just so people understand how absurd this is. So you guys were at a billion ARR at the start of 2025, then hit something like $4 billion mid-20205, then $9 billion ARR at the end of 2025. and the last number I've seen is you guys are at 19 billion ARR, which, just to put a couple pieces of context here, one is that's from $1 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.

So it was funny. When I did my onboarding, they walk through what percentage of the cover? what came through referrals, what percentage came through applying on the website, what percentage came through sourcing. And 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 a lot.

I was like, man, these guys, like, great product, great company. But they really, like, obviously don't have a growth team. And what I did was I just sent Mike Krieger a cold email. He was a chief product officer. I sent him a cold email saying like, hey, love what you guys do, love the product. I think you guys badly need a growth team. Wanted chat. And I didn't expect he would respond.

And he responds and says, hey, yeah, I'm interested. Let's talk. And it's funny, I didn't know. I mean, I wouldn't have known. They were not hiring for a growth team. There were no growth PM roles listed. But they were just at that time starting to think about hiring a growth team. So it was very good timing.

but yeah, one spoke to Mike and one thing led to another. He said, I'm the only PM that he's hired from cold email. And I feel very lucky that he decided to respond to my email. I did not know the 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 like I've basically perfected cold email over the years.

So when I was a founder, I had to get really, really good. bit this. So I sent a lot of cold emails out and just honed the subject line, the message, and the tone. And so basically, I have in the subject line, the first thing is like from a conversion standpoint, someone sees the email they need to click on it. And so I have a copy that I've tested that is like very, very high open rate. And so, wait, what is this copy? Or is this a secret? It's a secret. Okay. We'll keep it. We'll kind of keep some secret. So that's one, getting them to open. I think the second is then the tactics of you need to understand like where are people getting outreach. And if you if everyone's getting outreach in one area and then

you reach out to them there, then then you're not going to get as high a response rate. So you can think about like LinkedIn. You can think about like work email. These are things that everyone is emailing. So there's there's ways to get people's personal emails out there. And so like that's one thing that I did. And so, okay, I've got his personal email. I know the copy that works. And then it's just keeping it very short on here's who I am. Here's why I'd be a good fit. and we should chat. And these things typically don't work. And then you should always follow up a few times.

I think my rule of thumb is like if I really care about it, I should just keep reaching out to them until they tell me like, please stop. And so 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. So that's almost like an interview step as just did I want to read this email? This episode is brought to you by our season's presenting sponsor WorkOS. What do OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Versel, Replet, Sierra, Clay, and hundreds of other winning companies all have in common?

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WorkOS allows you to build faster with delightful APIs, comprehensive docs, and a smooth developer experience. Go to workOS.com to make your app enterprise ready today. Okay, so give us just like a glimpse of what is like to be leading growth inside of Anthropic right now, the most by far fastest growing company in history. Just what is it like? Yeah, I take it's very much a company-wide effort, right? So, like, yes, we are the growth team. We have done great.

I think we've driven a lot of impact. But honestly, man, we can't claim too much credit for the success of the company. We, as Anthropic, are really a model company and an intelligence company first and foremost. And so the lion's share of, like, what has driven our success is our research team. We have, I think, the best research team in the world. We have great teams on inference and compute. And then there's many other teams like ClaudeCode, go to market, who I think deserve much more credit than us.

I think just zooming out, going to some of what you said earlier, that 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 mil. 2024 was 100 to 1. Last year was 1 to roughly 10. And I look back to when I joined in 2024. Revenue was in the hundreds of millions.

And just that trajectory through the end of 2024 and 2025, like week two of when I joined, we're going into 2025 revenue planning. And we have these like base case and aggressive case scenarios. And Darya is pushing the aggressive case scenario. And people are freaking out being like, how the hell are we going to hit that? And Darius, like, I think we can actually go much higher than that. And I'm coming in like, this place is crazy. Like there's absolutely no way.

And that happened, right? And 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? And it just has not slowed down. And there's numbers of public, the 19 billion number you quoted is from the end of Feb. So that is also out of date.

And it's, look, it's absolutely insane. The funniest thing is something that I've noticed internally is like linear charts are just like not cool. Like no one cares about linear charts. Everything is log linear. I have to show me at log linear scale. And that's kind of a scale we think. And I think overall we're just 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. So you talked about just like things are magical and amazing. And they like clawed and all the tools you all built are amazing innately. And that's a big part of the reason they grow. I think many people listening to this will be like,

what do you even do a mole with like a magical micro god that just can do anything for you? Why do we need a growth person? What do you even do? Talk about just the stuff that you focus on and maybe like a couple of the wins that your team has shipped that has helped accelerate growth. I would say like they're not fully wrong, right? Like we're very, very lucky to have the best models in the world. We're very lucky to have products like Claude Code and co-work. It certainly makes life a lot easier. Having said that, I would say this is like the hardest job.

I've had in my life and that's, you know, having been a founder, having being an investment banker and other things like that. It's tough. And if I look at what do we do as a growth team here, I think it's ultimately the same categories of things that you would think about at a normal company. So we care about acquisition, how we're getting more people in the door, the intent of the people coming through the door. We care about activation, the sign-up flow, funneling people to the right products, making them successful. You know, we care about things like monetization, free of paid conversion, pricing and packaging, all of that stuff.

The categories of work is the same. I think then probably the big differences is, I would say that roughly 70% of what I spend my time on is what we internally refer to as success disasters. And that is where things have gone so well that other things are breaking now. And I think anyone has worked at companies that have gone through rapid growth. You think like Facebook or Uber or DoorDash early on, like they understand this viscerally where scaling this much just brings a lot of challenges. So if you think about each of those

categories on acquisition, on activation, on monetization, there's just a ton of firefighting jumping from like one urgent thing to another. And it's often like extremely painful. And like it's funny because you look at all the charts. All the charts are like green like fully up into the right and everyone's just like it can be quite tough emotionally still. And so you need to sort of step back and just realize like we're very lucky to have these problems. But that's sort of 70% of my time, I'd say, is just these like firefighting of success disasters. And I think the 30% remaining is just much more standard bread and butter growth work where it's like more proactive. So you think about, okay, if we have limited resources, which, which are the products? We have many different

products. Which are the products? Do you want to put some juice behind? What is our long term pricing? and packaging look like, especially given that the technology is changing a lot and behavior and engagement trends are shifting. And then, you know, things like we have a lot of new products coming up. Like, okay, you ship co-work. Now what? Like, when is the right time that we should lean in as a growth team to start optimizing the core adoption funnel for co-work? So it's probably 70% just crazy firefighting 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 all made recently was this idea. of importing memory from chat GPT, where he just made it really easy and kind of jumped down

this trend of people getting really excited by Anthropic. Is there anything you could share about the behind-the-scenes story of that feature? What was thinking about what can we do to improve the cold start problem and improve the new user experience? I think that activation is a really big challenge in AI. And so, you know, that's like one example of something that we ship that was very specific to a moment in time. But ultimately, you zoom out, it's like, okay, how do you really, how do you really make it easier for people who are signing up to have Claude, understand who they are, and understand how Claude can help them and get them to

the right place? I want to follow that thread, activation. There's something that comes up a ton when I talk to people leading driving growth on AI products. It's just like, like, there are so much stuff trying to get your attention these days for people to get to a place where they, okay, wow, this is really going to be something I want to keep using. It proves to be really hard. And it's also just unreliable. Sometimes it's not going to be magical. It's AI. It's a non-deterministic. I guess one is just like how important

is focusing on activation, getting people to that aha moment with AI products. And two, what are some things you've learned about how to do that well with Cloud or AI in general? Yeah, it's a good question. I think that activation, it's critical, right? And defining that as like early activation, call it day zero, day one product experience. I think that historically anyone who's been in growth or being in product understands that that's usually one of the highest levers that you have to actually even increase like longer term retention. And I think that the importance of that has just gotten exponentially higher. Now, 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 and the real challenge is on the product side of how do we start to diffuse those benefits to people where even internally like there's new models coming internally and you're sitting there you're so busy and when it when you when a new model's available you you need to like really carve out time to be like what what can this do how do I need to update my priors and if you think about more broadly for most people you may have a model that is like yeah you may have a GI or some you know model that can do all sorts of crazy things, but if people's instinct is to come there and be like, hey, what's the weather in SF, then, you know, they're not going to get the most out of the product. And so I think that

it's, it's tough because the model capabilities are rising so much. So like if I, if I think about, okay, back when we had, I don't know, say like Opus 4, there's a series of things the model can do at that point and Opus 4.5 unlocked a whole bunch of new things. You think about, okay, we sit there, we've got this new model Opus 4, the time to then go and run a bunch of tests, figure out, okay, there's the capabilities from this new model, what are the right on-ramps to guide people to those features? You know, you run tests, you get the learnings, you then ship a new flow. By then you may already have the next model, which unlocks newer capabilities that makes

all these learnings irrelevant, right? So, like, it's actually just like a really difficult problem to stay on top of. I think that many of the same things, same old trends in growth and activation remain, I think, accurate. To me, it's like ultimately some of the highest leverage is from finding the right product or the right feature for the right user. And I think that one learning, you've seen this time and time again across companies, actually like the right friction helps. And adding more friction usually works if you do it the right way. I think that's something I've consistently seen that we've seen here as well. So to me, I think it's really being able to identify what are the characteristics of the user

that allows you to then recommend them to the right feature or product and not being shy about adding friction to do that, I think is probably like the single biggest thing that's important here. When I asked Ben Mann, one of the co-founder's former podcast, guess what's asking you about? And this is what he highlighted is your experience, especially at Mercury redoing onboarding and making it man. magical. And basically he's in the same place as you of just how important it is for people

to understand what the AI tools 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, great question. And I like that he brings up in Mercury. I talk about their product a lot. So I've 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 the better banking experience than this. Yeah, I'm a very happy customer just with that out there. I love it.

Great product. I'm highly recommended. They have personal banking. Everyone's to go and use it. Right. They just launched that. And so I think the interesting thing about Mercury is like the core value is that it's a better experience, right? That's the reason you use it.

You're not getting like better other things. It's a better product experience. And so that ethos is very, very deeply held within the company. It comes from a number of the founders. And I think that we had a big push one quarter when I was there on the onboarding flow. So onboarding flows for banking institutions and regulated entities are extremely complex. Like the amount of time I have spent on the difference between like a registered agent address and a legal address and a physical address. Like these things are very, very complex.

And we basically looked at the onboarding flow and we were like, okay, we've invested so much in quality and the rest of the product. but we haven't really done it here, and this is the first experience that people have. And so we said forget metrics, forget growth, forget everything else. As the growth team on conversion, we're going to spend a whole quarter fixing quality in this flow. And so that's all we do, like forget the metrics. We're just going to make this as good of an experience as we can and fix all these, like you go back from one field to the other field and adding in your beneficial ownership details. And it actually ended out being like, probably until I joined.

in here, like the single most impactful quarter that I've ever had as a growth team in terms of the impact that it had. And so we saw a significant uplift from basically our like onboarding started to completion from just focusing on quality. And so that to me is like a broader learning around quality drives growth that I think I've tried to bring to Anthropic. I think for us at Anthropic, you know, some of the things that we've done in the onboarding flow is basically like we ask users, questions around who they are, what their interest areas are. And we then use that to recommend different products and features. And like 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, we have the data. We're kind of happy with how that's performing. What is your kind of a philosophy on friction, good friction versus bad friction? I've just seen time and time again at every job I've been in in growth that adding friction and adding the right steps leads to higher conversion and higher funnel completion. you want to get rid of an, especially if you have high volume, you should test the majority of this and just learn and see, like, does this apply to your business as well? But you want to,

you want to get rid of annoying friction that doesn't add value. But the, like, I think the most simple understanding people have is like, just get just, just just solve time to value. Cut all the steps and just get him into the product. And, and like, that doesn't work most times. Like, I think if you've really thoroughly tested your flows, I look at the companies I've been at Masterclass. If you go through Basterclass's purchase flow right now, you will go through all these steps in this quiz when you land on, when you're trying to buy,

and it's like, I came here to buy, and it's taking me through all these questions, what are you here for, etc? I think it's easy to look at that and be like, why do they have this? This is like a terrible thing, just cut it all. And it's like, no, like, that's being thoroughly tested. And actually, that was like a significant revenue driver because it helps users feel that the product is for them by understanding what their interests are and recommending the content and classes there.

One of the, they're both PMs on our team left to join Calm.com, the meditation app. If you go to Calm's, you know, their landing page and you go through their purchase flow, their login flow, you'll see a quiz. It's like not a, not a coincidence. At Mercury, we also tested, I think, I think you might post it. on Twitter, like we broke out some steps in onboarding and just having one screen, if you have like five or six different form inputs and you often break that into two screens and reduce the cognitive load to people, that that is something that that performs well. We added steps into the flow there, that that actually performed well. Same at Anthropics. So I think that the takeaway to me is like

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 a product, why product is for them, and how to use it and what's most relevant to them, and it's going to add friction, don't shy away from it. Test it. Confirm that it works for you, but I think this is something that most growth practitioners deeply understand. And 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. And like that like done right, that just it just flows through right. So it helps you with activation, but then it helps you with life cycle. You know more about those users and why they're here. And like, you know, most sophisticated businesses, you can then even if someone drops off, you can do like lookalike targeting and you can get you can get them at the ad layer as well. So that that initial piece of how you understand who the user is is just like it's a juice that just keeps on giving if you if you then use it right for the down funnel. everyone's about to go do a bunch of tear downs of

clods onboarding, Masterclass onboarding, Mercury onboarding. Kind of as a tangent, I was at this PM dinner recently and I was asking all the PMs, how is your role as a PM changed most with AI? Like, where is AI most impacted what you do?

And one of the PM's answer that is actually doing competitive analysis, doing a bunch of tear downs of what other people are doing for pricing pages and onboarding. So it's easy to do now. Just, hey, hey, co-work. I don't know. Would you co-work for this or cloud?

What would you use for that? Okay, this is good. How people pick which tool to use. If you want to go do a bunch of tear downs of other competitors onboarding flows, what would you use? You can use cowork for this, right? So be a co-work with the Chrome extension. So if you task co-work with the Chrome extension, go and look for these flows and show me, give me a view of what's working, what's not. That's definitely something that cowork can do. Cool. I imagine that's one of the challenges is like you have all these tools now, just which ones for me. By the way, the Chrome extension, I use it all the time. That's amazing.

I want to drill a little bit further into the growth org. There's this whole meme on Twitter the other day of just like, you have one growth market or driving all growth at Anthropic. And it's like, okay, that's crazy. What's like how many growth people are there? What's kind of the rough org structure of the growth team? We're roughly maybe 40 people now. And so we are, I think, structured very much like a traditional growth team in that we have sort of of horizontals of growth platform and monetization who think about the sphere of growth across

the entirety of our products. And then we have more sort of audience-focused growth pods. You can think about like B2P growth. You can think about code growth, knowledge worker grows, API growth. So really like these audiences to keep a narrow focus, which is the thing you have to do when you have so many different products. And then these these horizontals that sort of think, about things across the board. And is it across a team of engineers, designers, PMs? What's kind of like this functions within the SCROT org? Yeah, it's engineers, designers, PM's data.

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 maybe different is that we, I think that we index a lot more towards larger swings as opposed to smaller optimizations. Like if I think about a traditional growth team, I would have probably done maybe 60, 70% of my time on small to medium bets, 20 to 30% on larger swings. And I think that for us, we flip it a lot.

Like 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 like one of the biggest changes, I think. Just to highlight that, what's interesting there is at the scale you guys are at, like 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.

Like 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 gym type you made. And like, you could do that. Another billion. No big time. Yeah. Yeah, but the thing is like we're we've been tracking a 10x year on year. And we, you know, that's like the thing that we sort of keep in mind.

And I think it like ultimately comes down to our fixation of this company about the exponential. I think if you look at anyone who's talking about talking from Anthropic about basically anything we always talk about the exponential, like it's effectively as model capabilities continue to grow on an exponential. and the tools around them enable a better job of diffusing that into useful use cases. You basically just keep unlocking new markets that with the value of those markets significantly dwarfs what the value of the previous markets were. And like, agentic coding is a great example. Like it didn't exist, you know, a year and a half ago. And then now just the value of agentic coding is bigger than the like previous market AI coding use.

And so I think that is like the core thing here, which is that the future product value is in order of magnitude higher than it is today. And I think about, I don't know, like a normal business, like a number of companies that have maybe mentioned or like a trading app or like a grocery delivery product. Like there are many of the like the leading companies are great businesses. But if I think about what is the product value that a company like a standard like a grocery delivery app, like, what is the product value you get as an end user today versus two years from now? I look at it as like, again, two years from now, even if you're shipping all these new products, as an end user, the value you get from that product maybe goes up like 30 to 50% if the company's done a really good job of shipping new features.

It's not exponential, though. And so if I think about, okay, you're here today in two years, you're going to have 30% to 50% more product value. then as a growth team, the relative differential of the product value two years from now relative to today, I can actually capture like a decent percentage of that

with the small to medium optimizations that typically have higher conviction as opposed to like larger bets. But for Anthropic, it's not really that way where because of the exponential and our products being like very, very, very, the product value coming from AI,

the product value that we will deliver in two years time is probably like a thousand X, 100 to a thousand X, what it is today. And so if I think about that and it's like 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 sort of miss the forest for the trees. And so that's why we do, we still do all the small optimizations. It really matters. And like no one else is going to do some of these things.

And so we need to do it. The compounding value is not immaterial, but we do take on much larger core product-y type of swings as well. So you mentioned at the Chrome extension. Like that is now the thing that underpins a number of use cases on co-work and and called code as well. And that's something that the growth team built. That's like a very like AI-pilled product that is like a very research heavy product.

But we were just bullish on it. 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. And so that's the sort of thing that I wouldn't have done at another company. Oh, wow. That's, I did not know that. So the takeaway, one takeaway here is like, you know, there's like stuff to extract from your advice that is like only true at anthropic.

And then there's what can other companies learn from this experience that you've had. So one is, is your sense that if you're working in AI, shift more of the pie chart towards bigger. bets because in the future, the opportunity is so large. You want to get, find those as soon as possible versus micro-optimized. To be more specific there, it's, I'd say that it's, if the primary value that your product delivers is underpinned by AI as, as a central element of it, then I think you should operate this way. So, I don't know, companies like, yeah, lovable cursor, you know, all these like great businesses that are like, it's as the exponential rises, their, their value are also going to continue to rise significantly.

Like, if you're building a product or it's like 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 need to do. It would depend on how is the rest of the product old staffed

and how is the growth old staff in relation to that. Okay. Awesome. And then in terms of the way you're a share, structured. I thought that was really interesting. It's like a combination of different sorts of things. So there's like the API growth, there's cloud code growth, but then there's also like personas, like a vertical of like knowledge workers and B2B. Is that intentional? Like some specific bets and one just kind of like broad market opportunity. When you have like one product, it's easier to have a growth team that's more like purely on the funnel. It's like you have the conversion, you have

activation, you have monetization. But as you start to get into having multiple products, I think that's harder because if you do that, then, you know, if you just have like one activation team, for example, but then you have code code, you have co-work, you have all the other things. They're very different audiences and they're very different sets of cross-functional stakeholders internally. So we're kind of looking at what is the thing and all structures are like not perfect and they're like right for a point in time. But we're looking for what is the structure that allows us to have as much focus. like focus is a really big thing and on audience and and and and and and and also the tie-ins to cross-functional partners is really, really important. Like the folks on our ClaudeCodeCode

growth team like they worked extremely closely with Kat and Boris and the others on that team. And so that that tie-in is is really important as well. So you've done growth at a lot of different companies, a lot of basically, let's call it traditional growth beforehand. How else is growth as a function and as a skill set changing with the rise of AI, AI products, 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 medium experiments. I think in other things, it may be a big thing related to this that I think will accelerate this, which I am really interested to see how it will play out, is we are starting to

look at how do we automate growth, which I think is like a really interesting area. So our growth platform team, we're very lucky we have like Alexei commissoroka teaches growth engineering at Reforge and he's just like the guy on the team. And so he is driving this effort. The name is a little cringy. I didn't come up with it. And it's like it's called Cash, which is Claude Accelerates Sustainable Hiker Growth. I did not come up with that.

But really, it's an effort to look at how can we use Claude to automate growth experimentation. And it is still very, very small. It's still very, very early. We kicked it off only, I think, a couple of months ago. I think before Opus 4.5, it wasn't really possible. We were just not seeing the results. And more recently, with Opus 4.6, we're like, okay, this is like headed in the right direction. And so this, I think, it will happen more and more across the industry where basically, if you think about, okay, I think this can happen all across product, but growth teams in particular, because there's this whole body of work that is very small optimizations, I think are just more inherently suited to, to like tackle this earlier. I think if you think about like the life cycle of shipping, there's this sort of fall past two. One is identifying opportunities, like how good is clawed actually identifying opportunities based on different trends, based on previous trends that Claude has seen in the past. Second is then 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. And then fourth is then once you've actually shipped the thing, analyzing the data, gathering the learnings. If you think about that as like the loop of, okay, these are four things that you can eval and he'll clamber in each of these areas and understand how good is a model doing for you there. And we basically think about it in that like the four four ways. And we are scoring how good is Claude doing in each of those areas. And so we've been testing this with pretty small scale right now. It's been a lot of copy changes and some like very minor UI tweaks.

it's delivering results, right? And it's like you can push it, press play with it. And it's like it ultimately prints money where I'd say that the win rate is like, I would expect a senior PM to do better. Like I would say like this is like a junior PM like two, three years in. I would say this is like the win rate that I would expect from like a junior PM. But it's not quite at the senior PM level. Although I think like you look at the exponential, this wasn't available at all a couple of months ago.

So it's getting better rapidly. And I think that it's going to change where you'll be able to do this for larger and larger types of experiments. But then you think about the largest types of experiments, I mentioned the four 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 it is. And like, I think that that one is going to mean that like, in my eyes, the work of PMs is like not going away actually and anytime soon. And that piece, especially for larger projects, you don't need to do as much of it for smaller stuff, right? You can, you can skip it. But for larger stuff, that that piece is not 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 of change. It's funny. We had a, we had like a difficult meeting a couple of weeks ago and me and my, our head of design, Joel, we were debriefing afterwards. And he pings me, he's just like, Amol, we will have AGI and it will still be impossible to get six people in a room to, to get to align. And I'm like, yeah, I think that's, I can see that. That's a, like, what's the harder alignment problem? Oh, okay. This is so interesting. And this is exactly where I feel like things are going.

So just to be clear what you shared here, there's basically this tool that comes up with experiments to run to help grow Claude and all the tools. So it comes up with idea. Somebody looks at them, proves cool, let's do these things, builds it, ships it, tests the results, see how it's doing. And then comes back of like, here's things that are working. Is that roughly right? It's roughly right. And like we right now we have human in the loop of proving. But like the amount of time, I kind of think.

about scaling this way of just like 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 into the areas and as long as like week on week that's getting better than you're like okay this whole initiative is like scaling and and so that 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 so we care a lot about brand right so that is something that we do look at right now we don't want to be shipping something that goes against the brand. But then, you know, you can have a skill that, a skill that contains your brand guidelines and very clear yet do's and don'ts on brand. And so all of these types of

like accompaniments, I think, are going to get better. The model is going to get better at understanding how to use them. And so over time, I think that the need to like human review this really, really decreases significantly. Yeah. And you could always unship it if it's like, oh, yeah, that was actually not a great idea. And that's, That's such a good point that we think we need people to do these things forever. And it turns out, okay, a skill could do this really well. Here's our brand guidelines. Here's our vision.

Here's our mission. Here's our goals. Here's what matters to us. Okay. Let's not ship that thing. So the reason I think this is so interesting, this is like I've just been watching the expansion of AI doing more of the product development process. In this case, the growth process of just, okay, it went from helping you write code

to like writing all your code, to reviewing your code. Now it feels like what are the, at other end of the two ends around this. It's kind of going from the middle out. The top of that is coming up with what to do. And then there's like the alignment stuff still very hard. And then on the other end, it's reviewing the code and then shipping it. And then get distribution is that's like a whole other thing I want to talk to you about.

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

Okay. So something that I'm constantly thinking about along these lines is just the future of product, PM 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 most going to change, do you think, across these three roles? This is like something that we talk about and think about frequently, and the picture changes rapidly.

So sometimes when things break and execution, like the bottlenecks break, historically in the past, it's like, okay, now you need to hire more engineers, you need to hire more designers, et cetera. And it's more just like a life cycle thing of like, where is the life cycle of your team and that specific pod to identify where the bottleneck is. But now when things break, you need to still look at it of like, okay, is it like the actual ratio? Or is there also underlying technological shifts that are also causing this to break?

And so that's like an interesting thing, I think that smaller companies, like if I'm at like a 15 or 20 person company, I'm like the only PM there working with some designers and engineers. I think in the smaller companies, you'll see probably like the biggest blend where like the PM will be doing all sorts of, you know, designing, shipping, etc. I think you just have extreme bifurcation. You know, larger organizations, more scaled organizations, I think the jury is still very much out. Like, you speak to people even internally here. And different people in different teams who have different views of like, okay,

how much are these roles coming together versus how much are these roles going to be separate? I think that it's not to say, like, even the PMs, like number of PMs are shipping and themselves shipping and pushing PRs, etc. that I if I look at okay across what I'm seeing I think that it's 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 quad code and like they the amount of leverage engineers are getting from

them is higher than I think the amount of engineer the leverage that designers and PMs are getting from them today now that this is like rapidly also changing but that that to me is like my view today And so if you think about, okay, a default team, which is, say, five engineers, one designer, one PM, with code code that five engineers is like two to three X, right? And the PMs and designers have also increased that now they're managing what is effectively a much larger group of engineers. And so even though like the head count and the org structure hasn't changed, you're now just dealing with a situation of maybe 15 to 20 engineers in the old world, one and a half to two

PMs and like me, one and a half to two designers. And so we're seeing that that's putting like a lot of strain on PM and design. And it's not everywhere. Like I look at teams like Claude code and I think that or because that product is so technical, like it's probably like just the right thing where you, the PMs are like all basically engineers themselves anyway. But, you know, we had a product, like a PM lead on site the other week. And we were all just like talking about this way across the board we're feeling where PM and design is just squeezed. It's just absolutely squeezed.

And we're like, is the right thing here? We just need to actually hire like a ton more more PMs. And that could actually be where we land. You know, on growth, how I think about it is like one, we are hiring a number of growth PMs. We desperately need people who are very, very good. and we are hiring. So if you are excited by what we're doing and you know growth,

please feel free to apply. I would love to chat. And maybe craft an amazing cold email to you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Feel free to craft that email. So that's one is I think we are going to be hiring a number of PMs. But then the second thing that we do is we very much hire product-minded engine. I think this has always been the best thing to do in growth.

Like you always want to have the engineers coming up with ideas, etc. And so we especially people who can really like step in as mini PMs if people are, if the PM is absent. And so we're like basically more formally leveraging that right now because we are so stretched. So the frame that we have is that if a project is less than is two weeks of engineering time or less, then the, the, the, uh, engineering. is on the hook to effectively be the PM for that. And so that means things like talking to security, talking to legal, talking to cross-functional stakeholders, and the engineer is very much driving that.

The PM will get looped in and they'll advise if needed. And if something is like 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 two engineering weeks, then the default is that the PM should continue to be on the hook for making. that go well. They're still delegate more to Eng, but they're like squarely accountable. It's not like fully clean cut. It's like use your head. Like if this is a one week thing, but it's extremely controversial, like the PM should probably still drive it. But that,

that I think is like the approach that I expect more companies will start to do, which is just deputize the engineers to be mini PMs. Now, not everyone can do it, right? So the PMs, the engineers who are more product minded, suddenly their value goes up significant. like an order of magnitude. And then I think we will probably still be hiring a lot of PMS. There are so much interesting stuff. I want to follow up on here. Okay, so one is this idea of two weeks just briefly.

I always joke as a PM. You can go on vacation and be away for like a couple weeks from your team and things are going to be all right. Like, well, you know, there's like a momentum. There's a plan. People keep operating. And it feels like that's kind of this rule of thumb you use of just, okay, if it's a two week project, you'll be all right with that.

PM, you can handle it. I love that those two connect. Okay, the other here is so interesting. So you're saying here that because engineers are so accelerated, in the salt makes sense. PMs in design are kind of just like, holy, it's hard to keep up with the pace of engineering. And what you're saying is you need more and more PMs to keep up. That's one route. Or it's engineers that can PM essentially, which is so funny. It's just like, okay, great news for product managers until more of the PME stuff can be done by AI. But at that's the, It's a really interesting trend. I don't know.

Is there anything else there just like, oh wow, we actually may need more PMs. The ratio of more PMs to your engineers might be the future. Yeah, I think this is like, it just like really depends on the industry, the size of company, like any company where you're building something that's like much more developer focus, like you're going to rely on the engineers a lot more. Earlier companies, you don't have as much of this like cross-functional coordination, stakeholder, alignment nonsense that you need all these PMs for. so you can like get by with less.

But then as a company scales, and like if I think about, okay, now you have this ratio where maybe the 1 PM became 2 PMs from like productivity, that like five engineers became like 20 engineers, the one designer maybe became like three designers. If you think about like what is the best use of time for that PM, I think this is like a really interesting thing

of like how much should PMs be actually shipping things themselves versus everything else. I think like in the world where you're like limited on engineering, the PM should definitely be shipping things. I think in today's world, it's a good way to like get an understanding of the tools, which is really important. So the PM should be shipping for that reason.

But if I'm if I'm one PM or two PMs and there's 20 engineers, I think about what is the incremental value I can add with my time? And is it actually shipping like the 21st PM? feature or is it saying how am I getting a little bit better at guiding the team on what the right opportunities are? And so that's where I think like in this world, you may have all these engineers who are like mini PMs and the better that happens. That's like where I would love to be doing more of. But still like that if you then get a really good PM who can come in and can like improve that the like why and the what and why and the what particularly by like 5%. That is like such a high

leverage high. This is such an interesting insight you're making. It's like so counter to how a lot of people are thinking PM is evolving. Like what I'm hearing here is because PMs are so behind, because engineers are just getting so much done. There's like many people here, okay, you need to be prototyping, you'd be shipping PRs as a PM. What you're saying, which I completely agree with, is your time is much better spent helping PM, basically, and helping the engineers become better PMs themselves. and the leverage there is a lot higher than you spending time coding, shipping PRs in most cases. I think that's true in certain circumstances. I think that 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. I think 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's going to have, right? So there's going to be a number of cases where, like, as a PM, the right thing to do is to be like, screw it, I am shipping, and like, I am going it the whole way. But I'm talking here more about the larger companies,

more scaled businesses. Yeah, if you have 20 engineers, is it the highest use leverage of your time to ship an extra feature or figure out how do I, up-level everything that we're doing, 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. Like a lot of people talk about just like just going to try three things, see how it'll help inform the roadmap.

This is now the PRD is 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. So like even for me now where we've got number of PMs, we've got many engineers, there are a certain times and 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 is really important. And then, you know, we are very scrappy. So like we're like a big, big company by name, valuation, but we're like extremely scrappy and just the focus internally just like minimize bureaucracy and just like just go. And so probably 70, 70%, maybe 60, 70, 80% of what we what we ship does not have a PRD. I am like averse to PRDs. I just like, I just like hate documentation. I'm just like, go, go, go.

Just like cut, cut the blockers. 20, 30% of stuff where it's like, it's important. It's really important to get right. Like, the documentation should be really good and like that people should spend a lot of time on it. But by and large, I think PIDs are just outdated at this point. And you can just 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?

because people can build so fast or spend a lot of time going in the wrong direction, 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 like the two-week thing. So why we have that two-week thing, it's more like how do we 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. So for very small changes, you know, like, there's a thing coming. We need to have an upsell for it. What is the thing we're doing? Like, this is just on Slack, right? This is just purely on Slack. It's just messages back and forth.

And I think it also depends on having a good caliber of engineer in there. But engineers can understand like, hey, I know you said this, but like, what about that for the audience? And so like we're lucky we have good product-minded engineers in that sense. But all these smaller things are very much just on slack back and forth. And that's what you do. For the largest things, I think I very firmly believe in like a proper kickoff. So we still do just there's so much going on at this place. No one's got time.

No one knows what's going on. And so doing it cross-functional kickoff, get legal, get safeguards, get everyone in the room and just be like, This is all the plan to do. What do you care about? What do you care about? What do you care about? Like that 30 minute meeting for larger things is just, I think, still so important to just 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 like ramble into clod? Is it, do you have a template? Even in those cases, there are times I don't craft the PID. Because everything's moving so quickly, right? So there's still some of those cases where I just set up the meeting. And then like five minutes before, I'll put it into codework, like, you know, some of my thoughts, what credit, like, here are the things that I need to think about, spin up like a basic doc and we use it to talk. Other times I won't even have a doc.

But if I am creating a PRD, I have basically skill, like a skill that I view, they've created. And then there's projects with all the previous PRDs in there. And then I will, it's pretty simple. 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, flesh out the cross-functional stakeholders, those types of things. But again, my default is like if I can avoid the dock and if we can just jump to action, then that's what we should do. And increasingly 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, just like ironing out all these little, you know, what's important to you? It's important to the. Yes, and it's coming. And I think the legal team has done like good enablement around this. Like we work in versions of like how do you, you can think about like how can you mimic what someone might say

and like set up, you know, like a court. Right. So there's things like that that I think that we have now. And then as port gets more and more context and gets better at passing long context. these are things that Claude will just get better at knowing. One of the things, Lenny, is like a slight tangent, but one of the, I think, most effective ways I use Quote or the most interesting ways I use Quod is, it's just saying a number of people doing internally is to help you identify misalignment.

This is like, I think, something that's found really, really helpful. So with Co-Work, you have the Slack MCP, and you can tell Clowork, you can tell Co-Work to say, 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. And it does a really, really good job. So this is something that I have scheduled runs every week. Claude's like looking at things and coming back to me and saying like, hey, I think these things you should be aware of. And so you can think about in that shipping context, it's a similar thing where Claude can basically be looking at what's happening across the company and say, you're thinking about shipping this thing,

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Learn more at vanta.com slash lenny. And as a listener of this podcast, you get $1,000 off Vanta.com slash Lenny. I feel like there's this like, what are the jobs of a product manager and then how are they slowly going to be supported slash done by AI? So there's this misalignment, just like fine misalignment and then maybe one day it'll be like aligned people initially. you talked about this cash automation for growing. Like, how do I grow this product? That's starting to happen. Another 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 in asking the AI? Just give me a bunch of ideas and they're actually really good. So it's interesting how these little pieces are starting to be put into place to do more and more of this role. I'm curious what other automations you have and your team have that are effective. What I love about these conversations is you're basically living in the future. You're working in like the most bleeding edge company with the most talented people,

with the most cutting edge tools. And you can like see where things are going and start to actually live in the future, build things that nobody else has even thought about or can do. I'm curious just what else is working, what else your team has done to help save you time, be more productive. We use it pretty extensively across the board, right? So there's a standard PM stuff like writing docs, brainstorming, looking at data.

For data, I personally have like a co-worker runs on a schedule and looks at so 20, 25 different charts every morning. And then so when I come in the morning, there's just so many charts, so many products to track. Co-work will tell me, okay, here are the things that you should pay attention to. Here's like what is concerning. And here are just some like interesting insights. And it sends you the update in Slack or how does, what's kind of the workflow?

I, for me, it just shows, it comes up in co-webler. So co-work has a skill. In a desktop app. Yeah, in the desktop app, you can have a scheduled task that you create. And so I have a bunch of hex links that it will go and look at. It uses the Chrome extension for some things and he uses MCP for other things. And then it'll just give me a summary. And then I know, like, there's a few charts that I just like to look at because I'm

a number of guys, I just like charts. All up into the right too. Yeah, I'm just like to see the chart. But then there's like the long tail of things, and even the medium tail where it's like you don't have time to look at it every day, that if Claude is proactively looking at it and you start to feel good over time of, okay, it's like the false positive rate is going down. The false negative rate is going down of the things that Claude brings to you. Then you just get a little bit more confidence and peace of mind there. There touches on an idea I've always had that teams will have is a strategy. which just imagine an agent that's just constantly watching metrics, the market, the roadmap,

what's working on snout, and just like, Hamel, here's what I think we should do now. Here's the pivot we should take. Here's where we're going to win. Like, it feels like we're very close to that. I think we're close. I think we'll get there later this year to like the point where that's very, very effective. That's my gut. I think that level of like proactivity and getting, looking across a bunch of context and

and distilling insights, I think is, it's like, you know, the thing I mentioned earlier, learning about the alignment piece, like, that's like a version of it, right? Now you're just looking at across more data sources. This is something that I use. So I talked about, like, some of the standard PM stuff, you know, brainstorming data, UxR. There's a lot of, like, admin stuff. I just hate, like, life admin and, like, paperwork.

I just hate it. And so I get called to book my meeting rooms. I got in book meeting rooms, Claude archives sort of my email first pass at clearing out my inbox. I don't do any of my reimbursements and expenses. Claude will go to Benapass and file the reimbursements. He'll go to Brex and file the expenses. So all of that side of things, I'm just like just hand it, hand it to co-work, just get rid of it. And then the stuff that's quite interesting, I think, is like the manager lens where I talked about alignment is one thing.

So I look also across my direct reports. Like, Claude can look into what have they done, week. You look at sort of our team goals and OKRs, look at the transcripts from our discussions and understand, I can basically ask, what are the key takeaways and observations I should keep in mind and, like, what feedback do you think I should give them? And that's something that is, like, again, you can just set that up weekly. The quality is like hit or miss right now. It's like, it's decent on something. Sometimes you're like, holy shit, like, I am so glad that I caught this. And that's very, very helpful. And then I do that for my off as well. So I basically, my manager, Army, Vora, was, I think, a podcast guest of yours,

right? So I say, hey, based on what you know of Army, both publicly, she's written extensively about product and then internally, and then our discussions, what is, based on everything that I've done or not done this week, what feedback do you have for me as Army? And I get that every week, right? So, like, a lot of these things can already be done today. I think that the, as As the models improve, I think it's just like the accuracy and the signal of these things is going to continue to improve rapidly. I don't think you realize just how much awesomeness you're sharing here. This is just like every one of these is like, what? Okay.

Okay, so this, umy example. So you have one-on-ones with her. You ask, is this, so do you ask Claude co-work to go through all of her writing? They basically built like a model of her and you ask what should I be doing differently based on what you know about. I mean, is that their pretty? Yeah, effectively, there's a number of ways you can do this. I think 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. But increasingly, Claude is better at just understanding because you can tell Claude, like, look on co-work, you can say using the Slack MCB, look at everything that this person has said in the last, you know, week, etc. And based on that, like, what are their top priorities? What are priorities my manager has based on how they're spending the time that I don't know? And so all of this layer of stuff, which is like that I think about it as like soft coaching.

I think that that is like unlocked, in my opinion already. I think it's just that you're like working with a coach who's like kind of like drunk at times, I'm not drunk, but like, you know, like, sometimes, like, says something you're like, why, like, why would you bring that off? Like, that's clearly wrong. But other times you're like, wow, like that has, there's like one of, one of the, the guys Scott who leads our enterprise team. I think he, there's a few cases that he found like major areas of misalignment that would have caused teams to sort of spin their will significantly or do overlapping work. And you think about that the impact of that, like, you're, you're,

your shipping in this world is a bigger company is going to be constrained often by all the cross-functional coordination, right? And I think we're now starting to see at this cross-functional coordination layer, some of that work AI is really being able to be used to reduce that toil. And I think that six months ago that wasn't possible. And I'm like, shit, like six months from now, what is going to be possible there? And I think the fact that all this data is there is there's granola or whatever people use. Like all these notes from conversations and discussions are really key to this working. Yes.

So for someone that wants to do something like this, how do you set this up? What's kind of the steps? Yeah, you go on to CoWork, download the desktop app on CoWork. Connect the Slack MCP. That's where you need to, depending on how big the organization is, you may need to get sort of team or enterprise admin permissions to, you know, someone with permissions to enable that. But once you have the Slack MCP connected and on COVID, you just ask, Claude. That's it. Amazing. Okay. I'm going to go in kind of a different direction. I want to talk

about the focus that Anthropic has had over the years. So 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 that has worked out so well. There's a certain competitor in the market that is realizing they should have done this and are 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. So B2B, for example, just going deep on B2B, and then going really deep on coding use cases, cloud code being an example.

And it's worked out really well. Who's been driving that focus? Who has helped keep that focus from the beginning? Yeah, I mean, I think it's a foundation. part of the company. I think it's been there from the very, very early days and it really comes from leadership. And I think they've just done a phenomenal job of distilling that. I think that, you know, I saw this doc come up recently. I don't know where it was shared. It was something that Ben Mann is one of our founders that on the podcast had written, it's dated in 2021, I think,

a few months after they started the company. And it was like, here's why. why we should just focus on AI coding. And this is like, you know, this is like five years ago. This is long before anyone knew what the actual market opportunities were around this. And I think this is just like a deep focus that we have had internally from the start on the importance of coding and B2B. You know, it's a, I think there's like two lenses to write. It's like maybe a view of, okay, that this is going to be commercially beneficial to tackle. and then also the side of it around accelerating research.

So I'd say it's a pretty mainstream view now. I've now heard people from various labs talking about this, the importance of coding to accelerate research. But that has just being like a very firm view that we have been laser focused on internally of, okay, if you have the best models, that's going to accelerate your researchers and that's going to accelerate the research loop.

And I think that's something that like Dario has seen very clearly for a number of years. So I would say that that's probably one of a lot. I think a lot comes from Dario. I think a lot comes from leadership and just our DNA. I think the second, though, is probably just like necessity where if you're, you know, it's now changed. We're a more well-known company, raise lots of money, blah, blah, blah. But historically, we were very much like the smallest, least well-funded player in this space. Like, in many ways, it's a complete miracle that I think we've like gone to the stage that we have like we we didn't have the free cash flow or the distribution of the meta or google we didn't have the first mover advantage of an open ai and so

like what do you do right i think there's um i think there's like his broader principle i have just around life of like the freedom through constraints that when you when you have a bunch of constraints applied on you whether that's in personal life or or or at work i think that that can just it can bring a lot of freedom because it just frees up all this excess choice. You're like, okay, like this is this is clearly the path. And I think for us, it's like, okay, 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. And even for a very generalizable technology to maximize your chances of getting to escape velocity. And I think that that's also just related to like how history played out. Right. So, you know, it was well before my time. but Anthropic had a version of Claude. We had a chat bot 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 like an AI global arms race and, you know, chat ChpT launched and like they got like insane traction, right? And that just naturally sort of pulled them towards consumer. You know, there's another world where if Anthropic had launched Claude first, like maybe it'd be the other way around even with all that focus stuff. So who knows, it's always hard to say looking back at some of these things. Wow. I didn't know that.

I think also people just don't realize how far behind Anthropic was. Like right now it's like, of course, they're amazing. But like, I just remember when people are talking about Anthropic, we were raising money, I was like, there's no way they're going to compete with Open AI at this point. It's like so over. Just like they're so far ahead. And it shows the power of focus and just, I guess, I don't know, all the things you all did. Like, it is absurd how far you all have come and how successful and how things have changed so quickly.

Yeah. And I would say I very much agree. I think a lot of that, like we, I think a lot of that comes down to our leadership team. We have a number of people who've worked at, I call it like the best companies you know in the world, big very senior people. And I think almost uniformly everyone's like this is the strongest leadership team out of any of those companies. And so I think a lot comes from them. And then we're just very lucky to have incredible people. I think that that helps a lot as well. On the coding piece, just to make sure that part is clear, I never thought about this, that the reason that the bet was so deep on coding is not just,

that's a huge tam, but it's 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, it'll help us build better models, and it'll accelerate faster and faster. Yeah, that's correct. And this is something I checked.

Dario has talked about this publicly, so I am fine to. like okay it makes sense um the safety piece is really interesting so i want to spend a little time here so famously anthropic i think the official name of anthropic is anthropic and ai safety research company as a growth person there's this balance i imagine you strike between growing and just and not and the mission being don't grow at all cost or goal is ai safety and alignment how do you balance those two 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. And if you think about it's all the way from,

it's why they left to start the company. It's deep in our corporate structure itself. So historically, everyone raising money is like go create a Delaware C corp and that's like the structure you do. And with a corporation, you have a fiduciary duty to maximize returns for shareholders, maximize shareholder value. And from the beginning, they went a different way. We went to, we created a public benefit corporation, PBC, which allows you to legally say that maximizing shareholder value is not the overarching umbrella goal of this company. And you can optimize for 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. We, I think internally, we are very excited. And I think honestly, we're very, very optimistic about where this can go. But we also understand what the risks are. And so for us, that top line objective of this just like 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? So like we have it, you know, like it back then, okay, you had Claude, but you don't want to release it because you're like, there's these safety risk. And so there's time and time again that I've seen we've been happy to take that hit.

And it's actually worked out well for us in other ways. From like a growth lens, You know, I look at it as like growth teams can often push the boundaries of what is like good user X, UX, etc. Because they're trying to very, very much like eke out metrics at times. When I think about if a controversial test is bought to me, I sort of look at it as like this, there's two types of tests that are controversial. One is when that test is so controversial that you just should not run the thing because the results don't matter because you would not ship it for a combination. of, you know, brand and sort of customer friendliness and values.

And then the second is where it's like, it's controversial. Like, I don't like it. I certainly don't love it. But it's like, it's not like a red line. And so you're like, you know, if someone comes to you with conviction and is like, I have a really good hypothesis around this and you're like, I don't love it. But like, you can run the test and see what impact it has. And if it's like, if it's like a high level of like cringe,

or ick, then I want to see a high level of return for the result for that. I kind of think about everything, like, is it in one or is it in two? And for every company that one and two is different, I think for us, the AI safety is like very much in one. I think that it's like, yeah, that's why we exist. Like, yeah, it's fine. We're just not going to not going to do this thing. I think then there's other things that fall into two where you're like heightened sensitivity,

but we can we can we can we can try it and see what happens i think zooming out though lennie one of the biggest mistakes i feel like i see growth teams make and particularly just like hardcore growth practitioners is is just trying to squeeze every last dollar this is like i think this is like a general principle also in life like if you're a founder raising money you're just trying to squeeze that like the last dollar like you don't you don't want to do that because you want people to come back next time as well is my view and i think in in growth like it's it's it's i think really important that you usually need to be okay leaving money on the table. And that's a core principle for us as a growth team where we are very comfortable foregoing

metric impact in order to prioritize safety, in order to protect our brand, in order to hold a high quality bar and to maintain a great user experience. And if you look beyond the short term and like, okay, what are the numbers for this quarter and you zoom out and you think about what are the very best products out there, you realize this is how they all operate. And that's actually the thing that's going to drive more gross long term as well. And so I think that that actually ties back to safety where as the risks get higher and the stakes get higher, I think the fact that we are taking a stance and safety is like critical to what we do is actually going to become a significant, it's going to be a significant competitive advantage for us that I think is going to help us in the long run. Yeah.

As you as you share all this like clearly it's working, Anthropica is killing it. So I love when those examples, when someone doing something, someone approaching a problem that way, it actually works out. It's the same way I think about with my newsletter. There's so much more I can do to grow it. I just, my philosophy is just like, just focused on creating good content. Nothing else.

Like all these micro-optimizations are not going to matter in the end. It'll grow through people sharing it if it's useful to them. So in a very small scale, I have similar philosophy. One of the things that people are probably thinking about as we talk. So, you know, we joke about like AI replacing parts of jobs here and there. Like, you know, it is pretty scary to a lot of people. Just like, what is the future of my job? Will I have a job?

How do I stay relevant in this future? So for, there's a couple questions here. One is just like for folks that want to be to thrive in this approaching AI future, as a PM, as a growth person, do you have any advice, things that they should be doing right now? To me, a couple of things come up. Like one thing that everyone says is, like, use the tools. You need to be on top of the tools. I think you need to be using code.

You need to be using code, and understanding just each model release, what is the new things you can do with this? How can you apply this to your job? It'll work well in some things. It'll work terribly in other things. 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 would not have known.

And now many months have passed, so you didn't know that that was possible. And so I think that being on top of the tools is really, important both for improving your own productivity but also for getting product sense around AI products which I think is just going to become increasingly important. I think then zooming out beyond that I kind of look at it as like just leaning into where you have a competitive advantage and an unfair unfair advantage and so to me it's like if you know there are some people some PMs who are really good at like craft for example and there's others who you throw them into a situation

with all these stakeholders who have all these strong opinions. And there's no way they're going to mediate this. And they come out and it's like everyone's kind of swimming in the right direction. And so if you think about like what is the major skill set that you have where you spike in that can be tied to delivering dragging impact for a company in a product role, I would just double down on that and like almost like forget the weaknesses. Just what can you do to become like the best person at that thing? Because that's like 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 on where it's like, okay, in this world of engineers are mini-PMs, that the engineer who is like highly product-minded is a unicorn, is an absolute unicorn. I think the same thing is true for PMs where it's like, okay, now, you know, in this ratio, if the designer's really stressed and you're a PM who can design, you are also at Unicorn now. Like, the chances of a company letting you go has gone down dramatically because you are now just so much more useful. And so I think that is just like really, really important.

I think if I look at what's benefited me, it's probably a version of this. Like I think that for me it came from a founder background. So like the mix of the founder background, the like finance, I was in the innocent bankers. So like the finance background and numbers. and then sales, like I was, I almost became an account exec instead of going into product. I was right on the edge of should I go into sales or product. And I think like a combination of those along with growth is probably what's led to like, there are certain areas and situations where I can just have outsized impact to other people.

And so understanding what that is for you is is really important. I look at our financial services product. You know, we've launched like cord for sheets, quad for Excel. They got to like tank the market, by the way, everyone went to encourage. I know. But like the guy who's running that Nick Lynn, like he came from investment banking, he came from private equity. And it's has such a competitive advantage where he's building that product. And he's like, I know this.

I know this. Like he's like built for this. And so I think just understanding what are those interdisciplinary areas you can lean into to make yourself more just like higher higher impact is really important. And then the last one is just being adaptable. Anyone who is trying to just keep applying old playbooks, I think you're going to make life a lot harder for yourself. So one of the biggest things you come into Anthropic is you need to understand that probably, yeah, 50, 60, 70% of how you operate in the past,

just throw it 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. So just being adaptable and understanding, okay, the job's changed this way. I'm going to go that way, is I think like it's 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 Clow Work and all these things. I would just like the idea of going deep, becoming the best or one of the best at a very specific thing and that not every company will need and you don't need all the time, but just going deep on something. I forget how she described it. Or again, Dresen said the same thing.

Just like, I think we call it a, or a sideways E instead of just like T-shaped of one thing. If you could have a couple of things you're really, really good at. There's a lot of power to that. Oh, man. Okay. 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 maybe comes to mind is just like our culture and the people that we have here. I really think it's our secret source. 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. Like leadership has really invested in this a lot.

And Daniel and Dario, they really believe in this a lot. And I think you've just created a very special culture. So I would say that, you know, this is like truly a mission-driven company. And I was not 100% sure of that when I joined. Like I was like, I think that this is an exciting company. I like very much agree with their principles, but I didn't know anyone at the company. I didn't have any references on what it was like inside. I was a little skeptical when I joined.

I'm like, at least they're talking about it. But like, I don't know. Are they serious about this? And then I came in very early. I was like, oh, oh shit, okay. Like they are, maybe they even more serious about this internally. They talk externally. And so it's just like it's a mission-driven company

where people viscerally, viscerally understand both the upsides and the downsides of the technology and therefore understand the divergent ranges of how this may go for humanity and how different of the future that could be. And I think like when you understand, that of how different this could be as a future for all of us and like our children and our grandchildren, et cetera, I think it leads to a lot of passion for what we do and it just leads to

a lot of belief in what we're doing. And so I kind of look at every other job I've had in the past. There's some degree of people at the company who are just checked out where it's like, you know, 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, etc. That is just like not the case here. I have not met a single person. I'm saying a single person who is checked out. Everyone is putting everything they have on the table. Everyone is pouring it out and like leaving nothing behind and is just fully fully in it. And so I think that leads to like this

releases energy that is just like very, very hard to describe. I think you have that energy, you have that mission driven nature. And then it's it's such an open culture. So, leadership is very, very transparent with us on things. Slack is like a, it's a whole maze. There's so many things that play out on Slack. We're very open. Everyone has these notebook channels where you kind of have like your own like Twitter feed in a way where you're just talking about your thoughts about things.

And so you can go and like join the Slack channel, the notebook channels of people on research and all these other areas. And like you'll, you can learn whatever you want and you can spend so much time like getting lost in that as well. But that openness where we even encouraged, like, people can just argue with Dario. There was an all-hand. He said something where someone didn't agree and the person goes onto Dario's notebook channel and just says, like, hey, I didn't appreciate how you said this and this and that.

And then it sparked a whole big debate. But, like, that sort of thing where, like, it's encouraged, like, go to leadership and disagree with them, challenge them publicly. And, like, that, I think that just leads to a level of trust. And all of that together, I think it just means that we have this. very, very deep sense of togetherness that, man, I have just like never, I've never experienced anything like it. And then you get to the talent, right? I think that that is the thing where the talent density is like, I feel like I'm playing for like Real Madrid at times. I look

around and like, man, I'm playing for Madrid. It's like, you just like have the best people in the world. I think it's most the case on research. We have like the very, very best researchers in the world, but even you look on product. We have Ami Vora. She is phenomenal. We have Mike Krieger. You're like, okay, casually started Instagram. He's here. You know, on growth, we have John Egan, who is my engineering counterpart. He's like the OG in growth engineering.

He's great. We have Alexei. He's a guy who teaches growth engineering at Reforge. He's just like another dude on the team. And all of that, I think, is just very special. My favorite here is like in the linear couple of months ago, we had our on site, company-wide on-site, and in October, and I'm walking around, I see this guy, he's 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 US ambassador to my country,

Australia. And you're just an employee here. I'm like, this is insane. I'm like talking to our prime ministers of our country and all these things. And it's just the talent combined with that culture, I think, is just this secret source that is the reason that I think we are as successful as we are. This notebook channel is so interesting, just like as a tactical thing. So the idea there is Darya just shares, it's like a little Twitter, like internal Twitter feed where folks just share what they're thinking about and what their priorities are and things like that.

Yeah, that's basically it where it's an internal feed where it's not just Dario, everyone has one. and you basically, you 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. I think from like a leadership level. And we also think about that as it's a way to scale your beliefs and views across an org as it grows quickly. Right. So like if you're not adding a lot of people in the organization, you need to think about, okay,

what are the like behaviors that we want to model? What are the principles that are top of mind to? us. And if you think about, like, yeah, you can have a bunch of these meetings where you talk about it. You can model that behavior. But if you have a channel, which is like, here's my top of mind. And you say these things, right? Like if I have a post, which I did the other week of like, 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, this is like different to what we've had, we've known before. Right. So I think it's like good for the openness, but it's also good as a leader of how

you can scale your views as an organization to get people more up to speed on the way that things are done, which is, I think, really important to, like, avoid that drift, which when you have so many new people signing up, that drift can lead to a lot of drift in strategy and sort of perception. So it just helps run a tight of 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, very correct. Like it is something that goes to Claude, you know, that there are certain documents in onboarding where it's like 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 like a key thing, right?

And so more and more these types of things of, okay, how does the growth team think about this? How does safeguards think about this? You're armed in Claude with that context to get better and better at helping in the future. That's interesting. It feels like that's something that every company is going to have to start doing is just 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 just Slack. Okay, so there's all this talk of SaaS tools being replaced by AI, and you guys use Slack. I think there's this famous tweet of you guys still use Workday and all these tools,

all these SaaS tools. Everyone's like, 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 our right in the future. I don't know if you have anything there to share. Yeah, it's a really, I think it's a really complicated picture, right? Like, there's a number of things that we just build internally ourselves. As time goes on, then, you know, the ability

for Claude to do that better increases. And at the same time, like, 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 like there's, there's probably some truth to some of this. I think the other parts are like it's overblown and many of these products that like the customers of ours, we value them a lot as customers and we use their products very, very heavily and I don't see that changing. And you have better things to do? Like I don't who's going to spend time building a slack at that threat? Like that is not where value is going to accrue. And I think it also helps you see how much, how sophisticated these things are. They're not

just like, you know, like there's 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 just 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, just like creating all this fear. But like, and people think it's, oh, we're trying to raise money, or we got to get people's attention, or we just, yeah, we're just trying to like create headlines. But everything I've ever seen internally is always just this is what we're, what we're going to, we're what we believe and we want people to know what it 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. And you might say, why is Anthropic even building AI if it's so dangerous? And, you know, the understanding Ben shared is just like, 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 just hope that nothing that happens. Yeah, I think, I think three things that come to mind there. First is, I go back to something I said earlier, which is that we very much think about things from an exponential lens. And if you are thinking about things from a linear lens, you'll see the world very, very differently, right? Because you look at where we are today and you're like, okay, but like how much better can it be in two, three years? I think if you're looking at it

from an exponential lens and you understand how exponentials work, then you just realize that, like, a lot of this stuff is actually going to be happening. No, then people think if you're looking at it from a linear lens. And then if you understand that there could be upsides and downsides and the range of outcomes here, you need to, like, I think we very much need to be talking about the downsides so we can avoid them and push towards the upsides. I think most people of the company are optimists. We're very optimistic about the future.

I think it's just we understand the risk is like it is not a guarantee that we end up in a good place. And not enough people are talking about the risks. I think in productive ways and who have the know-how of the risks. I think there's people who may talk about the risks but are not in the game

and so they don't actually know fully. They're not like 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 like, I think we actually believe in this stuff

more strongly than we say externally. So like it is just such a key part of how we think internally that sometimes like we just like to reword your statements because it's like people might just think we're being like two over the top. But internally, that's how we think. And what we're putting out is a softer version of that at times. And then I think the third piece is going to what Ben said,

where we think a lot about driving the race to the top. And so it's like 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. Like 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. And so that is like the core of it. Like if we just pack up and go home, you have no influence on this thing. And if you stay in the game and you're like commercially, you're doing great. And then you have ways to influence that, okay, these are the principles

and put that into the conversation and make more people sort of believe in those things. I could talk to you forever, Amal, but two more questions. 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 a corner because someone listening to this may be like, all right, look at this guy, just worked at all these amazing companies, cold email, the CPO at Anthropi, 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 where did you learn from that experience? I have a couple. I think 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 just 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're going to do and that it's not going to happen. And so that I think is probably the biggest one. You know, we spent three years on it. It was not like, oh, we tried something part-time. It was like, no, we went for it. We had spent three years, raised a couple of mill.

We had maybe seven, ten employees at our biggest. And 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, major depression. So it's stuff that we really believed in. But ultimately, you know, we like, you know, early 20s. We had no idea what we're doing at the time. And many things I'd do differently. But that was just a very, very, very painful process. I think the good thing was like we kept

our investors in the loop the whole time. So 20 founders who are struggling out there. Like send those monthly investor updates. It's really easy to send those when you, when things are great. It's really hard to send those. Like when things are bad, you just battered down and you 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 it avoids surprises. But it's still so tough for you. Then calling up the investors to be like, hey, like we're shutting down or making that decision. Everyone believed in you. And it becomes such a big part of the identity. It's very, very tough. So, man, that was just brutal. Like, it's brutal.

And it took me, I think, like a number of years to truly get over. I think that it's a tough thing. but you get so much from that experience that is hard to see in the moment. And I think 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. I didn't know how to cold email really. And so 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 like draw the line looking back. But I think that would be my like takeaway is just keep in mind that it's a long game. And some of those things, like 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. And so it's just a, it's a tough thing, but the positives can come from it. What I love about this is a lot of people have these times in their career where they're like, it's all over.

Like I'm such a, I failed in such a big way. And my reputation's screwed and people were counting on me. And now they've seen, I'm going to. posture. I never knew what I was doing after all. Now they finally see. And just seeing that, and this was three years, I'm looking at your LinkedIn, you had seven employees, some like that. And then it's like 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 is not the end. Okay, so at 2023, I was, I was going to go on Pat leave because, uh,

my wife's pregnant and I was just like, wait, what do I do with the newsletter? I need to take some time off. That would be really nice to take a month or two off. And so my plan was, okay, I'm going to do a bunch of guest posts where people line up. I put out a call for guest posts. People apply. I pick a few and then I kind of slot them in ahead of time so I could take time off. So 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 me a better product manager. And I still remember reading the first draft you sent me and I was just like, holy shit. This story is incredible. It's just like, like you feel such feelings. And it was just so

tactically interesting and useful. 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 just the journey that you went on there because this is going to blow people's minds. It was the toughest time in my life. It made shutting down a company being like, oh, that was nothing actually. Just funny how perspective works that way. Back in early 2022, I had a traumatic brain injury. So I'd done MMA for many years. I'd done Muay, which is a type of martial arts for many years, never had a problem. And just, it's just like one of the things that happens, like the wrong session, the wrong, it's just a normal day of sparring, nothing crazy. You get the wrong hit to the head in the wrong way.

And my whole life changed. And basically, I spent nine months. I was off work for nine months. The first couple of months were brutal. It took me roughly half a year until I was comfortable walking again. It was very, very difficult. The first two, three months, beyond just showering and going to the bathroom, my wife did everything for me, like, including, like, texting my friends. I would listen to music for maybe like 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. It was not clear to me that I would ever work again for a while, actually.

And it was like, we didn't discuss my wife, like, what would we do in that case, etc. And we had to think even on those levels. And through a lot of pushing and really working through myself and you have to just slowly increase your tolerance. to things. It's a brutal process, but you need to slowly expose yourself to different things and just get better and better at each little thing, actively work on that. Don't push it too far. Otherwise, you have a big setback. It basically got to the point then where over nine months and then it returned to work and then slowly got better. And the part Lenny, you don't know, is, you know, in mid-2020, we posted that newsletter and a month later, I got re-injured, actually.

How well. And because 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, and like, you're like 95% healed. You're not 100% healed. And it was just an innocuous sort of in everyday life getting off a plane, a bag, sort of hit me on the head type thing.

And I was off work for two months when I like one month into joining Mercury. Like one month in, I'm like, sorry, guys, I need a peace out for three months. And then it was a very, very long recovery from that. And I'm actually still not 100% healed. So I'm like, I'm like mostly good, but I have times when I have like dizziness and headaches and other things that I need to work around. Overall, I feel like it's one of the best things that could have happened to me. And I think that keeping that mindset helps. And there's a point when you can like take that too far when that view is detached from reality.

but I think it's just made me so much better and effective, more effective as a person. A lot of the same habits. Like, 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.

This is like a really big one. You might think even in a place like anthropic, like how do you survive in this way? It's like 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 like model launches, et cetera. I'm lucky we have like a meditation area in the office that I'll go to. And then the whole 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 and 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. And just I think all of that has helped with better managing the physical. physical side of it because this job is very taxing and then emotionally having a little bit of space to what happens like you have you have sort of awareness on one side you have the reality on the other side and reality is crazy here man like reality is insane like there's so much happening every day there's so much noise it's mind-blowing and so that relationship between awareness and reality that's where you have choice that you sort of learn from from deep meditation on how to

shift that and apply your choice there. I think that that is the thing that has helped me significantly with just keeping a more level head. I think a lot of staying in this game at this level of intensity is just keep your head, just don't lose your head in like the crazy times. And I think all of that that I've gone through has helped me do this without resorting to like unhealthy coping mechanisms. Wow.

Amal, you're such an inspiration in so many ways. Just like there's so many reasons. you would not have been successful and things would not have worked out. And there's so many lessons to learn from just the stories you've shared in the journey you've been on to help people overcome challenges they're having. Like if you can like come back from an insane, was it like a kick to the head? Is that what happened? Is that it?

It was a kick to the head. That's correct. Yes. Just like feeling like you may not be able to like not want, like not want and be able to listen to music to just like leading growth at the fastest growing company in history. there's also just like a lesson here of constraints again you mentioned this idea of just like the power of constraints like you're forced to take breaks you're forced to go meditate like in a way that's really helpful and it's like a lesson for us all this is actually really good for us all yeah i think

that freedom through constraints is is like one of the big takeaways i've had during that time and it because if you have these constraints you're forced to adapt and it creates you makes you in a business setting you have to focus more in a personal setting and like if the constraint is I can't do anything and I'm injured. I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know I'm going to get better. You have two choices. You're like, one, are you going to let that,

are you just going to resist and, like, fight with reality and let and really suffer from that? Or are you going to accept the situation and, like, not let that affect you emotionally? It's not to say, like, I need everything, man. I was like, every single thing I could do, diet, exile. I was like, I'm on it. Every action I can take, I'm on it.

But then you have a choice of, are you going to let the impact of that, define your happiness or not. And I think that that's the thing when you, when the impacts maybe are not coming, you have to then adapt to what I want my happiness to be. And one of the meditation teachers said, like 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 that takeaway of just can you be content and like not have your happiness rely on getting something? I think it's a challenge and 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 a 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 five questions for you. First question, what are two or three books you recommend most to other people? Probably ties to a lot of what I just talked about. I think a lot about meditation and my emotional state. I want to spend most of my time thinking and reading and researching and working on outside of work. So my recommendation is very related to that.

The first is a book called Joy of Living by a Buddhist monk. His name is Yonghi Mingya Rinpoche. It's just really about how you can start to think about your life experience in a different way and have tactics of what to do to kind of change just how you think about things. This is one where, like, I've recommended people. It's not like, yeah, it recommends a lot of people and they've really, really enjoyed it. I think another one is awareness by Anthony DeMello, which is a kind of similar thing, but from a different angle. Those two, I consistently recommend to people.

And then the third one is more relevant to product in many ways. It's thinking in bets by Annie Duke. I think just being able to break down a situation and someone's like, I don't know it'll get done in time. Okay, like, can you put a number to that? Like what percentage likelihood is it? Those types of things I think are just so tactically helpful in product. Favorite recent movie or TV show? I think movie is probably Marty Supreme.

It's one of the only ones I watched recently. I thought it's great. I thought it was just insane. Absolutely insane movie. It was a ridiculous bit that I loved it. TV show, I have not watched TV in a while. I think it's probably the Olympics would be the one if that counts. Is there a product that you love just like,

I don't know, when you discovered recently or just when you have in your life, that's like, oh, this is very cool. People might want to know about it. Yeah. So this is a funny one. I was in Japan last week and I was on this, sleeping in this hotel. And I actually really love the pillow that I had in this hotel. It was very random. I've just had, at times, had like neck and upper trap pain. And sometimes I've been frustrated with my pillow because I sometimes sleep facing up, sometimes sideways and like the height's not quite right. And I was just like, this pillow is just great. And basically this pillow is like, it kind of is full of beads.

And so you can naturally shift the height of the pillow while you're sleeping, like even like unconsciously without thinking. And so I looked at the tag. I was like, what is this? I ordered it to invite Amazon Japan and I bought it back with me on the plane. And so I have the name here. It's called the Maru-Hachi Shinsui Maru-Hachi Pro Pillo. And you can only get it in Japan, but they shipped to the US.

No affiliation. And I think that has changed my life. in like the last week. That is an awesome pick. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to in worker in life? 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 like a tough or difficult situation. You're kind of like dismissing the severity of it in a way by saying like, eh, it'll be fine. And I think that that's just like such a good metaphor. It's such a good like tactic in many, many cases. And then I think the other one is just like sometimes in life, you just have to go for it. And that is something that this guy, Eros Resmini, who is the CMO of Discord, who is a very close advisor to me as a founder. He would push me on this. And that was something that he would often say is just like, just go for it.

And I think that that's, it's a very helpful thing of you can sit there thinking, should I do this, should I not. And sometimes in life, you just have to go for it. I love the combo of those two. Just sometimes just go for it and she'll be right. So good. Okay, final question. Okay, so I'm curious, 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 just like quite tight on time for hobbies. I would say I think it's largely just like work and have my body function and then like, you know, take care of the most important relationships around me. I think maybe the one hobby I'd say is just I'm really into sports and I've gotten more into sports at football in particular. 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 Wolverine fan and big Wolverine fan, big 49ers fan. I just love football. So that's probably the one that comes to mind. Mall, this was incredible on so many levels.

I am so thankful that you made time for this, considering how much you got going on. Where can folks find your line, say they want to apply for a job maybe on your team or can they find that and how can listeners be useful to you? You can find me in my LinkedIn. It's just a moa over sorry. I'm boring. That's that's it. You can look online to apply on our jobs pages. It rolls across growth engineering, growth product, growth design. We are looking for great people on the growth team. So please come and join us. And I think being being helpful to me is just two things, trying our products, giving us feedback, giving us harsh feedback in particular on welcome you better. And then please send 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 of as well who could be for one of our roles. Dream job for so many people. Amol, thank you so much for being here. Thanks, Fleming. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lenniespodcast.com. See you in the next episode.