Amol Avasare, Anthropogenichead of growth, took his job via a cold email in 2024 for Mike Krieger, Chief Product Officer of Anthropicbest known for co-founding Instagram. When Avasare first joined the company, sales were in the hundreds of millions. Annual revenues reached approximately $1 billion by the end of the year, increased to $9 billion in 2025and now stands at about $19 billion. Avasare currently leads a team of around 40 people
Avasare, who currently leads a team of about 40, credits Anthropic’s meteoric growth to its strength in research, early focus areas and a unique open company culture. “I have not met a single person who has been checked. Everyone’s putting everything they’ve got on the table,” he said on an episode of the tech show Lenny’s Podcast, organized by Lenny Rachitskypublished yesterday (April 5).
Originally from Australia, Avasare joined Anthropic after leading growth at fintech company Mercury and education platform MasterClass. He also co-founded Ensue, an AI-powered mental health tool.
His career path has not been without difficulties. In 2022, Avasare suffered a traumatic brain injury during a Muay Thai sparring session, forcing him out of work for nine months. The injury has not fully healed, he said, and symptoms such as dizziness and headaches persist. He manages them with regular retreats at Anthropic’s San Francisco office, which has a meditation room for employees.
Such balance is essential to the demanding work that Avasare oversees, which ranges from acquisitions, user activation, product launches, monetization and more. Roughly 30 percent of his team’s efforts are “more standard bread-and-butter growing work,” Avasare said. The remaining 70 percent addresses what Anthropic internally calls “the misfortunes of success,” referring to the challenges that accompany rapid scale.
The “late mover” advantage.
Anthropic has excelled at enterprise AI tools and coding, points that helped set it apart from more consumer-focused rivals like OpenAI. That focus was partly circumstantial, Avasare explained, given Anthropic’s smaller size and later arrival on the AI scene.
“We didn’t have the free cash flow or the distribution of one Meta OR Googlewe didn’t have the first-mover advantage of an OpenAI,” he said. “You just have to choose a very narrow focus—even for a very generalizable technology—to maximize your chances of escaping speed.”
Another growth driver is Anthropic’s company culture, which Avasare calls its “secret sauce” that “no one else will be able to replicate.” The startup’s mission-driven philosophy of building safe AI systems that benefit humanity has been a priority since co-founders and siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei launched the company in 2021 with a group of former OpenAI employees.
Anthropic’s culture is not only pushy, but radically open. Transparency is built into daily workflows, such as through Slack’s internal feeds called “notebooks,” where employees publicly jot down ideas and updates related to AI and company operations. This openness extends to the leadership level. Avasare recalled a moment when an employee challenged the CEO Dario Amodei live on Slack after disagreeing with a comment he made during an all-in-one meeting.
“That kind of thing, where you’re encouraged to go to leadership and disagree with them, challenge them publicly — I think it just leads to a level of trust,” Avasare said. “We have this very, very deep sense of togetherness.”
