Amol Avasare on How Anthropic Grew from $1B to $19B ARR in 14 Months

Cold Email Still Works When You Have a Secret Formula

Amol Avasare landed the head of growth role at Anthropic by cold emailing Mike Krieger. There were no growth PM roles listed. The company wasn't publicly hiring for a growth team. He sent one email to Krieger's personal inbox with a subject line he's been testing for years as a founder.

He refuses to share the exact copy. But the framework is simple: get them to open it first, then keep it short. Three elements: who you are, why you'd be a good fit, why you should chat. Then follow up relentlessly until they tell you to stop.

I sent Mike Krieger a cold email saying like, hey, love what you guys do. Love the product. I think you guys badly need a growth team. Want to chat.

— Amol Avasare

Krieger responded on the first try. The timing was perfect—Anthropic was just starting to think about building a growth function. Amol became the only PM Krieger ever hired from a cold email. Six months later, Anthropic's revenue would double, then double again.

70% of Growth Work Is Firefighting Success Disasters

Anthropic went from $1 billion to $19 billion ARR in 14 months. That's 10x year-over-year growth sustained across three consecutive years. No company in history has scaled this fast at this magnitude. By the time you read this, that $19 billion number is already outdated.

The growth team is roughly 40 people. They're structured like a traditional growth org—horizontals like growth platform and monetization, audience-focused pods for B2B, Claude Code, API. Engineers, designers, PMs, data analysts. The difference is how they spend their time.

Roughly 70% of what I spend my time on is what we internally refer to as success disasters. Things have gone so well that other things are breaking now.

— Amol Avasare

The charts are green. Everything is up and to the right. But scaling this fast means constant firefighting. Linear charts aren't cool internally anymore—everything is plotted on a log scale because exponential is the baseline expectation. The remaining 30% of time goes to standard growth work: pricing, packaging, deciding which products to prioritize, optimizing new launches like Cowork.

Add Friction If It Helps Users Understand Why the Product Is for Them

When Amol joined Mercury, the growth team spent an entire quarter ignoring metrics. They focused exclusively on making the onboarding flow better. Banking onboarding is brutal—regulated, complex, full of fields for registered agent addresses versus legal addresses versus physical addresses.

They fixed all of it. Just quality. No growth hacks. It became the single most impactful quarter Amol had as a growth PM until he joined Anthropic. Conversion from onboarding start to completion jumped significantly.

At Anthropic, the onboarding flow asks users questions about who they are and what their interests are. People look at it and say it's too long, too much friction. The data says otherwise. Masterclass does the same thing—a quiz before you can even buy. Calm added one after a growth PM from Anthropic joined them.

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 a product is for them and how to use it, don't shy away from it.

— Amol Avasare

The right friction converts better. It helps with activation, with lifecycle marketing, with lookalike targeting at the ad layer. Understanding who the user is upfront is juice that keeps giving down the funnel.

When Product Value Is Exponential, Bet Big Instead of Optimizing Small

At Anthropic's scale, a 1% lift is massive. Hundreds of millions in ARR. Most growth teams would milk those micro-optimizations. Anthropic flips the ratio. Traditional growth teams spend 60-70% of their time on small to medium bets, 20-30% on big swings. Anthropic does 50-50 or even 70-30 the other way.

The logic is simple. At a grocery delivery app or a trading platform, product value might increase 30-50% over two years if the team ships well. At Anthropic, product value will be 100 to 1,000x higher in two years because of the exponential curve in model capabilities. Agentic coding didn't exist 18 months ago. Now it's a bigger market than all previous AI coding use cases combined.

The growth team built the Chrome extension that now underpins Cowork and Claude Code use cases. That's a research-heavy, AI-pilled product bet—something most growth teams wouldn't touch. But no one else was doing it, so they shipped it.

Anthropic's growth platform team is now running an initiative called CASH—Claude Accelerates Sustainable Hypergrowth. Yes, the name is cringy. The idea is to use Claude to automate growth experimentation itself. It's early, but it's delivering results. When you're living in the future, you automate the work that used to define the role.