Amol Avasare: belief

Transcript context

…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 is 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, Vercel, Replit, Sierra, Clay, and hundreds of other winning companies all have in common? They are all powered by WorkOS. If you're building a product for the enterprise, you've felt the pain of integrating single sign-on, skim, R-back, audit logs, and other features required by large companies. WorkOS turns those deal blockers into drop-in APIs with a modern developer platform built specifically for B2B SaaS. Literally every startup that I'm an investor in that starts to expand upmarket ends up working with WorkOS, and that's because they are the best. Whether you are a seat stage startup trying to land your first enterprise customer or unicorn expanding globally, WorkOS is the fastest path to becoming enterprise ready and unblocking growth. It's essentially Stripe for enterprise features. Visit workos.com to get started or just hit up their Slack where they have actual engineers waiting to answer your questions. 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 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'd say it's very much a company-wide effort. So 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 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 Claude Code, go to-market, et cetera, 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's 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, week two of when I joined, we're going into 2025 revenue planning and we have these base case and aggressive case scenarios and Dario's pushing the aggressive case scenario and people are freaking out being like, "How the hell are we going to hit that?" And Dario's like, "I think we can actually go much higher than that." And I'm coming in, this place is crazy, there's absolutely no way. And that happened. 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 those numbers are public. The 19 billion number you quoted is from the end of Feb, so that is also out of date. And look, it's absolutely insane. The funniest thing is something that I've noticed internally is linear charts are just not cool. No one cares about linear charts. Everything is log linear. You have to show me at log linear scale, and that's a scale we think. And I think overall, we're just really hanging on by the seat of our pants. So 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 things are magical and amazing and Claude 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, Amol, with a magical microgod 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 a couple of the wins that your team has shipped that has helped accelerate growth.…

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