Head of Growth (Anthropic): Anthropic is automating its own growth
Description
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 Krieger 2. 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 productive 4. Why activation is the single highest-leverage growth problem in AI 5. Why Anthropic indexes 70/30 toward big bets (the opposite of most growth teams) 6. How he uses Cowork to detect team misalignment in Slack 7. 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 MAUs: https://workos.com/lenny Vanta—Automate compliance, manage risk, and accelerate trust with AI: https://vanta.com/lenny *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)
Summary
Generated by gpt-5.6-terraAt-a-Glance
- Verdict: Watch fully
- Core thesis: Anthropic's hypergrowth is driven primarily by rapidly improving model capabilities and focused product bets, while its growth team increasingly acts as an AI-enabled operating system for activation, experimentation, coordination, and scale management rather than a conventional optimization function.
- Why it matters: This is a high-signal view of how a frontier AI company is using agents, MCP-connected context, automated experimentation, and lightweight operating mechanisms to turn model progress into adoption and revenue.
- Best use: Use it as a practical architecture and operating-model reference for agent-enabled growth/product teams: automate repeatable loops, preserve humans for high-stakes coordination, and focus product work on capability diffusion rather than marginal funnel tuning.
Executive Summary
Amol Evasari, Anthropic's head of growth, argues that the company’s extraordinary revenue trajectory is not principally a growth-team achievement: it is the consequence of frontier research, strong models, products such as Claude Code and Cowork, inference/compute execution, and deliberate focus on coding and B2B. He characterizes the growth team's day-to-day reality as managing "success disasters"—breakages and constraints caused by demand outpacing systems—alongside conventional work on acquisition, activation, monetization, and product launches.
His central growth argument is that AI activation is unusually important and unusually difficult because models improve faster than products can teach users what they can do. Anthropic therefore uses onboarding questions and other intentional friction to identify a user’s role and intent, then routes them toward relevant features and lifecycle communications. The goal is not minimum time-to-product; it is faster realization that the product is specifically useful to that person. He cites similar tested patterns from Mercury, MasterClass, and Calm.
The most operationally important section is Anthropic’s early effort to automate growth experimentation, internally called CASH: Claude identifies opportunities, helps build changes, evaluates quality and brand fit, analyzes results, and learns from the loop. The system is currently aimed at copy and minor UI changes, requires human approval, and performs more like a junior PM than a senior PM—but it is already generating positive results. Evasari expects this class of automation to expand as models improve, while stakeholder alignment remains the durable human bottleneck.
Anthropic is also using Claude as an internal management and control layer: scheduled agents review dashboards, surface anomalies, scan Slack for misalignment, prepare manager feedback, handle administrative work, and synthesize a leader’s priorities. The enabling infrastructure is shared organizational context—Slack MCP, internal notebook channels, established documents, and explicit principles—which makes people’s decisions and values legible to agents. The interview is therefore less a generic growth playbook than a concrete preview of an AI-native company’s control plane.
Key Takeaways
- Claim: At Anthropic’s scale, growth is mostly about managing the operational consequences of success rather than manufacturing demand through conventional tactics. | Evidence: Evasari says roughly 70% of his time goes to "success disasters" across acquisition, activation, and monetization—urgent scaling failures caused by demand growth—while only about 30% is proactive work such as prioritization, pricing/packaging, and launch adoption. He describes Anthropic’s historical revenue pattern as roughly 0 to $100M in 2023, $100M to $1B in 2024, and about $1B to $10B in 2025; the interview cites $19B ARR at the end of February. | Implication: For fast-scaling AI products, build growth, reliability, capacity, support, pricing, and cross-functional response systems together; an up-and-right dashboard can conceal severe operating strain. | Caveat: The revenue figures are presented conversationally and include forward-looking/contextual claims; Evasari explicitly says the cited $19B figure was already out of date.
- Claim: AI-product activation should optimize for personalized capability discovery, not simply the shortest possible signup path. | Evidence: Anthropic asks new users who they are and what interests them, then recommends relevant products/features; it also shipped ChatGPT-memory import partly to address the cold-start problem. Evasari says adding the right friction has repeatedly improved conversion at Mercury, MasterClass, Calm, and Anthropic. At Mercury, a quarter focused solely on onboarding quality—not metrics—produced his most impactful growth-team result through a significant start-to-completion uplift. | Implication: Instrument onboarding around the information needed to route users to their highest-probability use case, then reuse that intent data for lifecycle messaging and lookalike acquisition instead of treating onboarding questions as pure conversion drag. | Caveat: Friction that does not reduce uncertainty, cognitive load, or improve relevance should be removed; Evasari stresses that this principle should be tested in each business rather than accepted as dogma.
- Claim: AI-first products should allocate substantially more effort to large product bets than traditional growth organizations because model progress creates discontinuous market opportunities. | Evidence: Anthropic’s growth organization is roughly 40 people, with platform/monetization horizontals and audience pods for areas including B2B, coding, knowledge workers, and API. Evasari says the team has shifted from a traditional mix weighted toward small and medium experiments to roughly 50/50 or 70/30 in favor of larger swings. He frames agentic coding as an example: a market that barely existed roughly 1–1.5 years earlier now exceeds prior AI-coding value. | Implication: Ken should evaluate roadmap and experimentation portfolios based on exposure to capability unlocks: when underlying model gains radically expand the addressable job-to-be-done, missing a platform-level bet is costlier than failing to capture another 1% funnel improvement. | Caveat: He limits this advice to businesses whose central value proposition is directly driven by AI capability growth, such as AI-native products; it may not apply to a conventional product with a few AI features.
- Claim: Growth experimentation is becoming an agentic closed loop: find opportunities, build, test for quality, ship, analyze, and iterate. | Evidence: Anthropic’s growth platform team is piloting CASH, short for "Claude Accelerates Sustainable Hypergrowth," led by Alexei Komisaroka. It evaluates Claude across four stages: identifying opportunities from trends and past tests, building the feature/change, testing it against quality and brand standards, and analyzing post-launch results. The pilot began only months earlier, focuses mainly on copy changes and small UI tweaks, and Evasari says it already "prints money" with a win rate roughly comparable to a junior PM with two to three years of experience. | Implication: Build an experimentation agent as a measurable system rather than a generic copilot: create stage-specific evals, monitor quality and time spent by humans at each stage, encode brand rules as reusable skills, and expand autonomy only as error rates decline. | Caveat: The work remains small-scale, human-reviewed, and below senior-PM performance; brand-sensitive changes and larger bets still need meaningful oversight.
- Claim: The near-term PM bottleneck is increasingly coordination and judgment, not feature production; AI-accelerated engineering can make PM and design capacity relatively scarce. | Evidence: Evasari estimates that Claude Code can make a five-engineer team behave more like 10–15 engineers, while PM and design leverage has risen less. Anthropic’s operating rule is that engineers act as the effective PM for projects estimated at two engineering weeks or less—including stakeholder conversations with security and legal—while PMs are accountable by default for larger work. He says the company is also hiring growth PMs and relies heavily on product-minded engineers. | Implication: For Ken’s agent systems, define clear delegation thresholds by risk, scope, and reversibility: let capable builders own small execution loops, while product leadership focuses on opportunity quality, systems design, stakeholder alignment, and high-consequence decisions. | Caveat: He distinguishes scaled organizations from early-stage, cash- and engineering-constrained companies, where PMs may still need to prototype and ship directly to create velocity.
- Claim: A connected internal context layer can turn Claude into a proactive management and organizational-sensing agent. | Evidence: Evasari uses scheduled Cowork tasks to review 20–25 charts each morning and flag concerns, insights, and anomalies. Via Slack MCP, he asks Claude to scan projects for potential misalignment, identify a manager’s implicit priorities from their activity, review direct reports’ work against OKRs and meeting transcripts, and suggest feedback. He also uses it for email triage, meeting-room booking, reimbursements, and expenses. | Implication: Prioritize a read-only organizational intelligence layer before attempting autonomous management: connect metrics, communications, goals, and decision records; schedule recurring scans; require human review; and track whether surfaced issues actually prevented misalignment or missed commitments. | Caveat: He calls the management/coaching output "hit or miss": sometimes it surfaces critical issues, while other times it is clearly wrong. Its usefulness depends on improving false-positive and false-negative rates over time.
- Claim: Anthropic treats safety, quality, and long-term trust as explicit constraints on growth rather than costs to be optimized away. | Evidence: Evasari says Anthropic is a public benefit corporation, allowing goals beyond shareholder-value maximization, and describes a two-bucket test framework: some proposals are disallowed outright because results would never justify shipping them; others may be tested only if the expected upside clears a higher bar for "cringe" or user-unfriendly behavior. He says the team is deliberately willing to leave money on the table to protect safety, brand, product quality, and user experience. | Implication: Encode non-negotiables into agent permissions and experiment-review policy before optimizing growth loops. A system that can autonomously generate and launch experiments needs hard safety/brand constraints, not only revenue objectives. | Caveat: This is Anthropic’s stated internal philosophy, not independent evidence that every tradeoff has improved outcomes; the specific boundary between unacceptable and merely testable varies by company.
Detailed Brief
Operating cadence: lightweight artifacts for small work, formal alignment for consequential work
- Claims: Evasari considers many conventional PRDs outdated for small, reversible work; Anthropic reportedly ships 60–80% of work without a PRD.; The operating distinction is not documentation versus no documentation, but proportional process based on investment, risk, and coordination complexity.; For large initiatives, a short cross-functional kickoff is more valuable than extensive prose because it exposes legal, safeguards, security, and stakeholder concerns before implementation.
- Evidence: Small changes such as an upsell can be initiated through Slack exchanges with product-minded engineers.; For larger work, he calls a roughly 30-minute kickoff with relevant functions and explicitly asks each group what it cares about.; When a document is needed, he uses a Claude skill plus prior PRDs to draft the why, problem, key considerations, and stakeholder map; in other cases he uses Cowork to turn rough thoughts into a basic discussion document minutes before a meeting.; He increasingly prefers a prototype as the PRD when a visual artifact can clarify an idea faster than written specification.
- Caveats: The low-documentation model relies on unusually capable, product-minded engineers and a culture that minimizes bureaucracy.; Even a nominally small task may need PM ownership if it is politically sensitive, safety-relevant, or controversial.
- Implications: Adopt an explicit project-classification policy for agent and human work: reversible/local changes can use a short intent record; multi-team or irreversible changes require a structured kickoff, owners, constraints, and decision log.; Use prototypes and machine-generated briefs to accelerate alignment, but do not confuse faster artifact production with eliminated coordination risk.
Focus, coding, and organizational context as Anthropic’s strategic flywheel
- Claims: Anthropic’s focus on coding and B2B was both a commercial strategy and a research-acceleration strategy: better coding systems help researchers build and improve AI faster.; Evasari attributes the company’s narrow focus partly to leadership conviction and partly to historical constraints: Anthropic lacked the distribution of Google/Meta, OpenAI’s first-mover position, and comparable free cash flow.; Internal notebook channels function as a scalable leadership and cultural mechanism: every employee can share thinking publicly, debate leaders, and create durable context for other people and for Claude.
- Evidence: Evasari references a 2021 Ben Mann document arguing for focus on AI coding, years before current market validation.; He summarizes the constraint principle as "freedom through constraints": fewer resources and distribution advantages force a clearer path to escape velocity.; Leadership and employees maintain internal Slack notebook channels resembling individual internal feeds; leaders use them to communicate principles, such as being willing to leave money on the table.; The organization has begun treating certain documents as high-value agent context, including instructions to consult named owners before editing material Claude relies on.
- Caveats: The causal role of coding focus versus timing, research quality, market shifts, and competitor actions cannot be isolated from the interview.; Broad internal transparency increases available context but can also create discovery overload and requires access controls, ownership, and document hygiene.
- Implications: For a company-scale agent layer, create structured, attributable decision and principle streams—not merely chat exhaust—so agents can identify current priorities, escalation paths, and policy boundaries.; Treat domain wedges that improve the core production loop as strategically different from merely large markets; a wedge can compound capability, customer value, and internal productivity simultaneously.
Notable Concepts & Terms
- Success disasters: Anthropic’s label for the operational breakages caused by growth going better than expected; it reframes hypergrowth as a scaling and coordination problem, not simply a demand-generation win.
- Capability overhang: The gap between rapidly advancing model capabilities and users’/products’ ability to understand, discover, and apply them; Evasari considers this a core AI-product activation challenge.
- Right friction: Intentional onboarding effort that collects useful user context, reduces cognitive burden, and improves personalized routing; it is contrasted with arbitrary or annoying friction.
- CASH: Claude Accelerates Sustainable Hypergrowth, Anthropic’s internal pilot to automate the experiment lifecycle from opportunity discovery through post-launch analysis.
- Slack MCP: The Slack Model Context Protocol connection used with Cowork to inspect organizational conversations, detect potential misalignment, infer priorities, and produce management summaries.
- Two-engineering-week rule: A delegation heuristic under which a product-minded engineer owns the effective PM role for small projects, while PMs retain default accountability for larger work.
- Notebook channels: Internal Slack feeds where employees, including leaders, publish current thinking and debate; they disseminate culture and create reusable agent-readable organizational context.
- Race to the top: Anthropic’s rationale for participating in advanced AI despite risks: commercial and technical leadership gives it influence to push safety norms rather than merely criticize from outside.
Operator Notes / Why Ken Should Care
- Pilot a closed-loop experimentation agent on low-risk, reversible surfaces such as copy, targeting, or small UI changes. Score it separately on opportunity selection, implementation, QA/brand compliance, and analysis rather than evaluating it as one opaque system.
- Create a read-only executive/operations agent that reviews core metrics, Slack/project activity, goals, and decision records on a schedule; require it to flag anomalies, unresolved dependencies, and potential cross-team misalignment with links to evidence.
- Define a delegation matrix for agents and humans using scope, reversibility, financial impact, security exposure, and stakeholder count. Use a threshold comparable to Anthropic’s two-engineering-week rule, but elevate controversial work regardless of estimated effort.
- Make operating principles machine-readable: brand restrictions, security rules, customer promises, escalation owners, and decision rights should exist as versioned context rather than be implicit in people’s heads or buried in chat.
- Audit onboarding for questions that materially improve user-to-use-case routing. Preserve or add friction only where it demonstrably improves activation, lifecycle personalization, or downstream conversion.
- Separate hard experiment prohibitions from testable-but-sensitive ideas, and require a higher expected return for any test that risks trust, manipulation, brand damage, or poor user experience.
- Favor domain wedges where product adoption also improves the company’s internal capability loop—for example, tools that make builders, analysts, or operators faster—rather than selecting markets on TAM alone.
Source/Metadata
- Title: Head of Growth (Anthropic): Anthropic is automating its own growth
- Transcript words: 30327
- Duration seconds: 6769
- Timestamp note: No usable timestamps or chapter markers were present in the supplied transcript. The transcript contains substantial repeated passages and sponsor material.
Transcript
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 OpenAI. It's a complete miracle that we've gotten to the stage that we have. Give us just a glimpse of what it's like to be leading growth inside of Anthropic. It's the hardest job I've had in my life to come into Anthropic. You need to understand that 50, 60, 70% of how you operated in the past, just throw it out the door. One of the cleverest growth moves you all made was this idea of importing memory from ChatGPT. Activation is a really big challenge in AI. We are starting to look at how do we automate growth. Our growth platform team is driving this effort called CASH, which is Claude Accelerate 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 1,000x what it is today. The funniest thing is I've noticed internally, linear charts are just not cool. Everything is log-linear. Just show me a log-linear scale. Today my guest is Amol Evasari. Amol is head of growth at Anthropic, which is on the most unprecedented growth run in history. In the past 14 months, they grew from 1 billion to over 19 billion in annual recurring revenue. Just in the past few months, their revenue doubled. They've been growing 10x year over year. This is unheard of at this scale. By the time this episode comes out, their revenue will be even higher. To put this scale in perspective, companies like Atlassian 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, Amol, who leads growth at Anthropic, is an incredible human. He previously led growth at Mercury and MasterClass. Before that, he was a founder and an investment banker. And most interestingly, something that most people don't know about him is that Amol 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 chatted 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 Amol got the job in the first place by cold-emailing Mike Krieger, and so much more. Amol is wonderful, and just try to count the number of times that he blew my mind during this conversation. Before we get into it, don't forget to check out LennysProductPass.com for an incredible set of deals available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers. With that, I bring you Amol Abbasari. 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 so people understand how absurd this is. So you guys were at a billion ARR at the start of 2025, then hit something like four billion mid-2025, then nine 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, is from one 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. It's funny, when I did my onboarding, they walked through what percentage of the cohort came through referrals, what percentage came through applying on the website, what percentage came through sourcing. And I was none of those. And I was like, okay, this is interesting. Basically, the way that I got to Anthropic was that I was actually a user of Claude, and I was using it a lot. I was like, man, these guys, great product, great company, but they really obviously don't have a growth team. What I did was I just sent Mike Krieger a cold email. He was the chief product officer. I sent him a cold email saying, hey, love what you guys do, love the product. I think you guys badly need a growth team. Want to chat? And I didn't expect he would respond. He responds and says, hey, yeah, I'm interested. Let's talk. 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, I spoke to Mike, and one thing led to another. He said I'm the only PM that is hired from a 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 I've basically perfected cold email over the years. When I was a founder, I had to get really, really good at this. So I sent a lot of cold emails out and honed the subject line, the message, and the tone. Basically, in the subject line, the first thing is, from a conversion standpoint, someone sees the email, they need to click on it. So I have copy that I've tested that is a very, very high open rate. Wait, what is this copy? Or is this a secret? It's a secret. I think we'll keep it. We'll keep some secrets. It's a secret. So that's one, getting them to open. I think the second is the tactics of you need to understand where people are getting outreach. And if everyone's getting outreach in one area and then you reach out to them there, then you're not going to get as high of a response rate. So you can think about LinkedIn, you can think about work email. These are things that everyone is emailing. So there are ways to get people's personal emails out there. And that's one thing that I did. So, okay, I've got this 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, if I really care about it, I should just keep reaching out to them until they tell me, 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, 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. 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If you're building a product for the enterprise, you've felt the pain of integrating single sign-on, skim, RBAC, 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 seed stage startup trying to land your first enterprise customer or a 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 it's like to be leading growth inside of Anthropic right now, the most by far fastest-growing company in history. What is it like? Yeah, I'd say it's very much a company-wide effort, right? 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 are many other teams like Claude Code, GoToMarket, et cetera, who I think deserve much more credit than us. I think, just zooming out, going to some of what you said earlier, the growth trajectory has just been insane. That 10x year-on-year revenue growth trend has been there since the beginning. I think 2023 was 0 to 100 mil. 2024 was 100 to 1. Last year was 1 to roughly 10. And then I look back to when I joined in 2024. Revenue was in the hundreds of millions. And just that trajectory to 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 Daria is pushing the aggressive case scenario. And people are freaking out, being like, how the hell are we going to hit that? And Daria is like, I think we can actually go much higher than that. And I'm coming in like, this place is crazy. There is 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 any of those numbers are 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 linear charts are just not cool. No one cares about linear charts. Everything is log linear. So show me a log linear scale. And that's the scale we think in. 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 anytime they want something to grow, they ask you to help. And it works. So you talked about things being 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 with 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 the stuff that you focus on and maybe a couple of the wins that your team has shipped that have helped accelerate growth. I would say they're not fully wrong, right? We're very, very lucky to have the best models in the world. We're very lucky to have products like Claude Code and Cowork. It certainly makes life a lot easier. Having said that, I would say this is the hardest job I've had in my life. And that's having been a founder, having been an investment banker, and other things like that. It's tough. And if I look at what we do as a growth team here, I think ultimately it's the same categories of things that you would think about at a normal company. So we care about acquisition, how are we getting more people in the door, the intent of the people coming through the door. We care about activation, the signup flow, funneling people to the right products, making them successful. We care about things like monetization, free-to-paid conversion, pricing and packaging, all of that stuff. The categories of work are the same. I think then probably the big difference 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 who's worked at companies that have gone through rapid growth, think Facebook or Uber or DoorDash early on, 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 one urgent thing to another. And it's often extremely painful. And it's funny because you look at all the charts, all the charts are green, fully up and to the right, and it can be quite tough emotionally still. And so you need to step back and realize we're very lucky to have these problems. But that's 70% of my time. I'd say it's just this firefighting of success disasters. And I think the 30% remaining is much more standard bread-and-butter growth work, where it's more proactive. So you think about, okay, if we have limited resources, which are the products, we have many different products, which are the products we want to put some juice behind? What does our long-term pricing and packaging look like, especially given that the technology is changing a lot and behavior and engagement trends are shifting? And then things like we have a lot of new products coming up, like, okay, you ship co-work, now what? 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 y'all made recently was this idea of importing memory from ChatGPT, where you just made it really easy and jumped on this trend of people getting really excited about Anthropik. Is there anything you could share about the behind-the-scenes story of that feature? I 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 that's one example of something that we shipped that was very specific to a moment in time, but ultimately, you zoom out, it's like, okay, 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 growth on AI products. There is so much stuff trying to get your attention these days. For people to get to a place where they think, okay, wow, this is really going to be something I want to keep using, it proves to be really hard. And it's also unreliable. Sometimes it's not going to be magical. It's AI. It's non-deterministic. I guess one is, 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 Claude or AI in general? Yeah, it's a good question. I think that activation, it's critical, right? And defining that as early activation, call it day zero, day one product experience. I think that historically anyone who's been in growth or been in product understands products, it's just, there is 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 non-deterministic. I guess one is just 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 Claude or AI in general? Yeah, it's a good question. I think that activation, it's critical, right? And defining that as early activation, call it day zero, day one product experience. I think that historically anyone who's been in growth or been in product understands that that's usually one of the highest levers that you have to actually even increase 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, there's new models coming internally and you're sitting there, you're so busy. And when a new model's available, you need to really carve out time to be like, 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, yeah, you may have AGI or some model that can do all sorts of crazy things. But if people's instinct is to come there and be like, hey, what's the weather in SF, then they're not going to get the most out of the product. And so I think that it's tough because the model capabilities are rising so much. So if I think about, okay, back when we had, I don't know, say Opus 4, there's a series of things that 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, here's the capabilities from this new model. What are the right on-ramps to guide people to those features? You're running tests, you get the learnings, you then ship a new flow. So by then you may already have the next model, which unlocks newer capabilities that make all these learnings irrelevant. Right. So it's actually just a really difficult problem to stay on top of. I think that many of the same old trends in growth and activation remain accurate. Where 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, is 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 allow 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 the single biggest thing that's important here. When I asked Ben Mann, one of the co-founders, former podcast guest, what to ask you about, this is what he highlighted, your experience, especially at Mercury, redoing onboarding and making it magical. And he's in the same place as you of just how important it is for people to understand what the AI tool is capable of to help people decide to use it and stick with it. Is there an example of something you changed in onboarding that helped significantly improve activation? Yeah, it's a great question. And I like that he brings up Mercury. I talk about their product a lot. So I worked on the growth team at Mercury. I think it's a fantastic product. It's something many people use, and the reason they use it is because it's a better banking experience than this. I'm a very happy customer, just to put that out there. I love it. Great product. I highly recommend it. They have personal banking. Everyone should go and use it. Right. They just launched that. And so I think that the interesting thing about Mercury is the core value is that it's a better experience, right? That's the reason you use it. You're not getting better other things. It's just 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. But that doesn't have that be that that doesn't have that be that that doesn't have that be that that doesn't have that be that that doesn't have that be that that doesn't have that that doesn't have that be that that doesn't have that be that that doesn't have that that 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. Forget the metrics. We're just going to make this as good of an experience as we can and fix all these. You go back from one field to the other field and adding in your beneficial ownership details. And it actually ended out being, probably until I joined here, 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 onboarding start to completion from just focusing on quality. And so that to me is a broader learning around quality drives growth that I think I've tried to bring to Anthropic. I think for us at Anthropic, some of the things that we've done in the onboarding flow is basically 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 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 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. So you want to get rid of, especially if you have high volume, you should test the majority of this and just learn and see, does this apply to your business as well? But you want to get rid of annoying friction that doesn't add value. But I think the most simple understanding people have is just solve time to value. Cut all the steps and just get them into the product. And that doesn't work most times. I think if you've really thoroughly tested your flows, I look at the companies I've been at, Masterclass. If you go through Masterclass's purchase flow right now, you will go through all these steps in this quiz 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, et cetera? I think it's easy to look at that and be like, why do they have this? This is a terrible thing. Just cut it all. And it's like, no, that's been thoroughly tested. And actually that was a significant revenue driver because it helps users feel that the product is for them by understanding what their interests are and then recommending the content and classes there. One of the growth PMs on our team left to join Calm, calm.com, the meditation app. If you go to Calm's landing page and you go through their purchase flow, their login flow, you'll see a quiz. It's not a coincidence. At Mercury, we also tested, I think you might post it on Twitter, like we broke out some steps in onboarding. And just having one screen, if you have five or six different form inputs, and you often break that into two screens and reduce the cognitive load to people, that is something that performs well. This is a terrible thing. Just cut it all. And it's, no, that's been thoroughly tested. And actually that was a significant revenue driver because it helps users feel that the product is for them by understanding what their interests are and then recommending the content and classes there. One of the growth PMs on our team left to join Calm, calm.com, the meditation app. If you go to Calm's landing page and you go through their purchase flow, their login flow, you'll see a quiz. It's not a coincidence. At Mercury, we also tested, I think you might post it on Twitter. We broke out some steps in onboarding, and just having one screen, if you have five or six different form inputs, you often break that into two screens and reduce the cognitive load to people. That is something that performs well. We added steps into the flow there that actually performed well. Same at Anthropix. So I think that the takeaway to me is cut friction when it doesn't add to the experience of helping a user understand why the product is for them. But if you can help users understand a product, why the 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 that, done right, 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 most sophisticated businesses, you can then, even if someone drops off, you can do lookalike targeting and you can get them at the ad layer as well. So that initial piece of how you understand who the user is is a juice that just keeps on giving if you then use it right for the down funnel. So everyone's about to go do a bunch of teardowns of clods onboarding, masterclass onboarding, mercury onboarding. As a tangent, I was at this PM dinner recently and I was asking all the PMs, how has your role as a PM changed most with AI? Where has AI most impacted what you do? And one of the PMs' answer to that is actually doing competitive analysis, doing a bunch of teardowns of what other people are doing for pricing pages and onboarding. So it's easy to do now. Just, hey, 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. Help people pick which tool to use. If you want to go do a bunch of teardowns of other competitors' onboarding flows, what would you use? You can use co-work for this, right? So 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 co-work can do. Cool. I imagine that's one of the challenges, is you have all these tools now and just which one's for me? By the way, the Chrome extension, I use it all the time. It'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, you have one growth marketer driving all growth at Anthropic. And it's like, okay, that's crazy. What's, how many growth people are there? What's 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 horizontals of growth platform and monetization. We think about the sphere of growth across the entirety of our products. And then we have more audience-focused growth pods. You can think about B2B growth. You can think about code growth, knowledge worker growth, API growth. So really these audiences keep a narrow focus, which is the thing you have to do when you have so many different products. And then these horizontals that think about things across the board. And is it across a team of engineers, designers, PMs, what's the functions within the growth org? Yeah, it's engineers, designers, PMs, 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 index a lot more toward larger swings as opposed to smaller optimizations. 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, we do much more the other way, where it's 70, 30 or more like 50, 50, rather than indexing toward smaller bets. That's probably one of the biggest changes, I think. Just to highlight that, what's interesting there is at the scale you guys are at, a 1% win is massive in the scheme of things. So it's interesting that even at the scale you're at, you're not focusing on these micro optimizations. It is easy, you could easily focus on these small optimizations and then you tally them up at the end of the quarter and you're like, look how much impact we made. And you could do that. Another billion. Yeah, but the thing is, we've been tracking at 10x year on year and that's the thing that we keep in mind. And I think it ultimately comes down to our fixation at this company about the exponential. I think if you look at anyone who's talking from Anthropic about anything, we always talk about the exponential. 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 just keep unlocking new markets where the value of those markets significantly dwarfs what the value of the previous markets were. And agentic coding is a great example. It didn't exist a year, a year and a half ago. And now just the value of agentic coding is bigger than the previous market AI coding use. And so I think that is the core thing here, which is that the future product value is an order of magnitude higher than it is today. And I think about a normal business, a number of companies that I've maybe mentioned, or you could think about a trading app or a grocery delivery product. There are many of these, the leading companies are great businesses. But if I think about what is the product value that a company, a standard grocery delivery app, what is the product value you get as an end user today versus two years from now? I look at it as, 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 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 a decent percentage of that with the small to medium optimizations that typically have higher conviction as opposed to larger bets. But for Anthropik, it's not really that way, where because of the exponential and our products being very, very, very, the product value coming from AI, the product value that we will deliver in two years' time is probably a hundred 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 toward, okay, we need to take larger bets and we need to not miss the forest for the trees. And so that's why we still do all the small optimizations. It really matters, and 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 types of swings as well. So you mentioned that the Chrome extension, that is now the thing that underpins a number of use cases on cowork and code as well. And so if I think about that, there's so much value on offer. You need to shift more towards, okay, we need to take larger bets and we need to not miss the forest for the trees. And so that's why we still do all the small optimizations. It really matters. And 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 type of swings as well. So you mentioned that the Chrome extension, that is now the thing that underpins a number of use cases on cowork and code code as well. And that's something that the growth team built. That's a very AI-filled product that is 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. I did not know that. So one takeaway here is there's stuff to extract from your advice that is only true at Anthropic. And then there's what can other companies learn from this experience that you've had? So one 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 find those as soon as possible versus micro optimize. To be more specific there, I would say that if the primary value that your product delivers is underpinned by AI as a central element of it, then I think you should operate this way. So companies like Lovable, Cursor, all these great businesses, as the exponential rises, their value props are also going to continue to rise significantly. If you're building a product where it's an AI-first product, then I would definitely operate in this way. I think if you're building a product where it's not necessarily an AI-first product and you have some AI features that are on the side, but it's not the core of your value, I don't know that I would operate this way. It would depend on how is the rest of the product all staffed and how is the growth all staffed in relation to that. Okay. Awesome. And then in terms of the way you're structured, I thought that was really interesting. It's a combination of different sorts of things. So there's the API growth, there's cloud code growth, but then there's also personas, like a vertical of knowledge workers and B2B. Is that intentional? Some specific bets and one broad market opportunity. When you have one product, it's easier to have a growth team that's more purely on the funnel, right? It's like, okay, 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, if you just have one activation team, for example, but then you have code code, you have coworker, 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 not perfect. And they're right for a point in time, but we're looking for what is the structure that allows us to have as much focus. Focus is a really big thing on audience and problems, and also the ties to cross-functional partners is really, really important. The folks in our code growth team work extremely closely with Kat and Boris and the others on that team. And so that tie-in is really important as well. So you've done growth at a lot of different companies. A lot of traditional growth before Anthropic. How else is growth as a function and as a skill set changing with the rise of 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, 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 a really interesting area. So our growth platform team, we are very lucky. We have Alexei Komisaroka, who teaches growth engineering at Reforge. And he's just 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. It's called cash, which is Claude accelerates sustainable hypergrowth. 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 small. It's still 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 headed in the right direction. And so this, I think, 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 tackle this earlier. I think if you think about the life cycle of shipping, there's sort of four parts to it. One is identifying opportunities. How good is Claude at 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 once you've actually shipped the thing, analyzing the data, gathering the learnings. If you think about that as the loop of, okay, these are four things that you can eval and hill climb on in each of these areas and understand how good is a model doing for you there. And we basically think about it in that 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 very minor UI tweaks. It's delivering results, right? You can press play with it, and it ultimately prints money. Where I'd say that the win rate is, I would expect a senior PM to do better. I would say this is like a junior PM, two, three years in. I would say this is the win rate that I would expect from a junior PM. But it's not quite at the senior PM level. Although I think 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 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 I think that one is going to mean that, in my eyes, the work of PMs is not going away any time soon. Although I think 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 I think that one is going to mean that, in my eyes, the work of PMs is not going away any time soon. And that piece, especially for larger projects, you don't need to do as much of it for smaller stuff, right? You can skip it, but for larger stuff, that piece is not going away. Until the other stakeholders are their own little agents running around. I think that's right. I think that would be the point where I've changed it. It's funny. We had a difficult meeting a couple of weeks ago, and me and our head of design, Joel, were debriefing afterwards, and he pings me just like, Amal, we will have AGI and it will still be impossible to get six people in a room to align. And I'm like, yeah, I think I can see that. What's the harder alignment problem? Oh, okay. Okay. This is so interesting, and this is exactly where I feel 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 ideas. Somebody looks at them, approves, cool, let's do these things, builds it, ships it, tests the results, sees how it's doing. And then it comes back with, here's things that are working. Is that roughly right? It's roughly right. And we, right now, have human in the loop approving, but the amount of time I think about scale in this way of just week on week, are things getting better in each of the areas? Are people spending less time on each of the areas? Are the results getting better in the areas? And as long as week on week that's getting better, then you're like, okay, this whole initiative is scaling. And so 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 can have a skill that contains your brand guidelines and very clear do's and don'ts on brand. And so all of these types of 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 human review this 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 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. So 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 writing all your code, reviewing your code. Now it feels like, what are the other ends of this, the two ends around this? It's going from the middle out. The top of that is coming up with what to do, and then there's the alignment stuff, still very hard. And then on the other end, it's reviewing the code and then shipping it and then getting distribution. That's 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 so much simpler. Not that growth is easy, but it's data-driven. There's this loop that you talked about. So I think this is such an interesting sign of things to come across product generally. 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 something that we talk about and think about frequently, and the picture changes rapidly. So sometimes when things break and execution, 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 a life cycle thing of 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 like, okay, is it the actual ratio, or are there also underlying technological shifts that are also causing this to break? And so that's an interesting thing. I think that smaller companies, if I'm at a 15- or 20-person company, I'm the only PM there working with some designers and engineers. I think in the smaller companies, you will see probably the biggest blend, where the PM will be doing all sorts of, they'll be designing, shipping, et cetera. And I think you just have extreme bifurcation. In larger organizations, more scaled organizations, I think the jury is still very much out. You speak to people even internally here, and different people in different teams have different views of, okay, how much are these roles coming together versus how much are these roles going to be separate? It's not to say, and even the PMs, a number of PMs are shipping and themselves shipping and pushing PRs, et cetera. But if I look at, okay, across what I'm seeing, I think that it's clear that while PMs and designers are getting more leverage from AI, engineering is getting the most leverage right now. I look at tools like Claude Code, and the amount of leverage engineers are getting from them is higher than, I think, the amount of leverage that designers and PMs are getting from them today. Now, this is rapidly also changing, but that to me is my view today. And so if you think about, okay, a default team, which is say five engineers, one designer, one PM, with Claude Code, that five engineers is like 2 to 3x, 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 the head count and the org structure haven'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 maybe one and a half to two designers. And so we're seeing that that's putting a lot of strain on PM and design. And it's not everywhere. I look at teams like Claude Code, and I think that because that product is so technical, it's probably just the right thing where the PMs are all basically engineers themselves anyway. But we had a PM lead onsite the other week, and we were all just talking about this, that across the world we're feeling this, where PM and design are just squeezed. It's just absolutely squeezed. And we're like, is the right thing here, we just need to actually hire a ton more PMs. And so we're seeing that that's putting a lot of strain on PM and design. And it's not everywhere. I look at teams like Claude Code, and I think that because that product is so technical, it's probably just the right thing where the PMs are all basically engineers themselves anyway. But we had a product PM lead onsite the other week, and we were all just talking about this way across the world. We're feeling this where PM and design is just squeezed. It's just absolutely squeezed. And we're like, is the right thing here that we just need to actually hire a ton more PMs? And that could actually be where we land on growth. How I think about it is, 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. We'd love to chat. And maybe craft an amazing cold email to you. Yeah. Yeah. Feel free to craft that email. So that's one, is I think we are going to be hiring. We're hiring a number of PMs. But then the second thing that we do is we very much hire product-minded engineers. I think this has always been the best thing to do in growth. You always want to have the engineers coming up with ideas, et cetera. And so, especially people who can really step in as mini PMs if the PM is absent. And so we're basically more formally leveraging that right now because we are so stretched. So the frame that we have is that if a project is two weeks of engineering time or less, then the engineer 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 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. And they'll still delegate more to Eng, but they're squarely accountable. It's not fully clean-cut. It's like, use your head. If this is a one-week thing but it's extremely controversial, the PM should probably still drive it. But that, I think, is 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 engineers who are more product-minded, suddenly their value goes up significantly, like an order of magnitude. And then I think we will probably still be hiring a lot of PMs. There is so much interesting stuff I want to follow up on here. 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 a couple of weeks from your team, and things are going to be all right. They'll, there's 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 without a 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, this all makes sense. PMs and design are kind of just like, holy shit, that'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 use for product managers until more of the PM stuff can be done by AI. But that'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, fewer engineers might be the future. Yeah. I think this just really depends on the industry, the size of company. Any company where you're building something that's much more developer-focused, you're going to rely on the engineers a lot more. Earlier companies don't have as much of this cross-functional coordination, stakeholder alignment nonsense that you need all these PMs for. So you can get by with less. But then as a company scales, and if I think about, okay, now you have this ratio where maybe the 1 PM became 2 PMs from productivity, that the 5 engineers became 20 engineers, that one designer maybe became 3 designers. If you think about what is the best use of time for that PM, I think this is a really interesting thing of how much should PMs be actually shipping things themselves versus everything else. I think in the world where you're limited on engineering, the PM should definitely be shipping things. I think in today's world, it's a good way to get an understanding of the tools, which is very, very, very important. So the PM should be shipping for that reason. But if I'm 1 PM or 2 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 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? Yeah. And so that's where I think in this world, you may have all these engineers who are like mini PMs, and the better that happens, that's where I would love to be doing more of. But still, if you then get a really good PM, you can come in and improve the why and the what, and the why and the what particularly by 5%, that is such a high-leverage high. Wow. This is such an interesting insight you're making. It's so counter to how a lot of people are thinking PM is evolving. What I'm hearing here is because PMs are so behind because engineers are just getting so much done, and there are many people here saying, okay, you need to be prototyping, you need to be shipping PRs as a PM. What you're saying, which I completely agree with, is 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 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, as a PM, the right thing to do is to be like, screw it, I am shipping, and I am going it the whole way. But I'm talking here more about larger companies, more scaled businesses. Yeah. If you have 20 engineers, is it the highest-leverage use of your time to ship an extra feature or figure out how do I uplevel 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. A lot of people talk about just going to try three things, see how it goes, and that'll help inform the roadmap. This is now the PRD: look at it instead of talking about it. So there's a lot of value there still. That's very true. I think that's a great point. I am shipping, and I am going 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 leverage use 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. A lot of people talk about just going to try three things, see how it goes. And that'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 even for me now, where we've got a number of PMs, we've got many engineers, there are certain times when I'm like, I want to articulate the idea I have in my head. It's just better for me to prototype it and show it. Right. So I think that is really important. And then we are very scrappy. So we're a big company by name valuation, but we're extremely scrappy, and the focus internally is just minimize bureaucracy and just go. And so probably 70%, maybe 60, 70, 80% of what we ship does not have a PRD. I am averse to PRDs. I think I just hate documentation. I'm just like, go, go, go. Just cut, cut, cut the blockers. 20, 30% of stuff where it's important, it's really important to get right, the documentation should be really good, and people should spend a lot of time on it. But by and large, I think PRDs are just outdated at this point, and you can 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 goes back to the two-week thing. So why we have that two-week thing, it's more like, how do I have some filter to say if we're investing heavily into something, we should apply more thinking behind it, versus if it's a smaller set of investments, just go for it. And as a growth team, again, you do have a decent amount of these smaller things that you do. So for very small changes, like, oh, there's a thing coming, we need to have an upsell for it. What is the thing we're doing? This is just on Slack, right? This is 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, hey, I know you said this, but what about that for the audience? And so 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 very firmly believe in a proper kickoff. So we still do, there's so much going on at this place. No one's got time. No one knows what's going on. And so doing a cross-functional kickoff, get legal, get safeguards, get everyone in the room, and just be like, this is all we plan to do. What do you care about? What do you care about? What do you care about? That 30-minute meeting for larger things is still so important to 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 ramble into Claude? Do you have a template? Even in those cases, there are times I don't craft the PRD, because everything's moving so quickly, right? So there's still some of those cases where I just set up the meeting, and then five minutes before I'll put it into Codework, like, here are some of my thoughts, what criteria, here are the things that I need to think about. Spin up 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 it is pretty simple. It has the format down, so I'll just say, here are the things I care about. Here's the why, here's the problem, and flesh out the key considerations, flesh out the cross-functional stakeholders, those types of things. But again, my default is if I can avoid the doc, 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, and your assistant talking to the legal assistant, just ironing out all these little, what's important to you, what's important to them. Yes. And it's coming. And I think the legal team has done good enablement around this. We work in versions of, how can you think about, how can you mimic what someone might say and set up a court? Right. So there are things like that that I think that we have now. And then as Claude gets more and more context and gets better at passing long context, I think these are things that Claude will just get better at knowing. One of the things, Lenny, is a slight tangent, but one of the most effective ways I use Claude, or the most interesting ways I use Claude, which I see a number of people doing internally, is to help you identify misalignment. This is something that I found really, really helpful. So with CoWork, you have the Slack MCP, and you can tell CoWork 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've scheduled runs every week. Claude's looking at things and coming back to me and saying, 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. Here's who you need to talk to. Here's what you need to keep in mind. That is so cool. I am so excited to tell you about this season's supporting sponsor, Vanta. Vanta helps over 15,000 companies like Cursor, Ramp, Duolingo, Snowflake, and Atlassian earn and prove trust with their customers. 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And then how are they slowly going to be supported slash done by AI? Every security leader that I talk to is feeling the increasing weight of protecting their organization, their business, and not to mention their customer data. Because things are moving so fast, they are constantly reacting, having to guess at priorities, and having to make do with outdated solutions. Vanta automates compliance and risk management with over 35 security and privacy frameworks, including SOC 2, ISO 27001, and HIPAA. This helps companies get compliant fast and stay compliant. More than ever before, trust has the power to make or break your business. Learn more at Vanta.com slash Lenny. And as a listener of this podcast, you get $1,000 off Vanta. That's Vanta.com slash Lenny. I feel like there's this, 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 fine misalignment. And then maybe one day it'll be align people initially. You talked about this cash automation for growing. How do I grow this product? That's starting to happen. Another that I might 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? And 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 living in the future. You're working in the most bleeding-edge company with the most talented people, with the most cutting-edge tools. And you can 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 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 the standard PM stuff like writing docs, brainstorming, looking at data. For data, I personally have a coworker that runs on a schedule and looks at 20, 25 different charts every morning. So when I come in the morning, there are just so many charts, so many products to track. Coworker will tell me, okay, here are the things that you should pay attention to. Here's what is concerning. And here are some interesting insights. And it sends you the update in Slack, or how does, what's the workflow? For me, it just shows, it comes up in coworker. So coworker has a schedule. 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 it uses MCP for other things. And then it'll just give me a summary. And I know there are still a few charts that I just like to look at, because I'm this guy, I just like charts. So I'll open those too. That was, I like to see the chart. But then there's a long tail of things, and even the medium tail, where it's like, you don't have time to look at it every day. If Claude is proactively looking at it and you start to feel good over time of, okay, the false positive rate is going down there, 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. This touches on an idea I've always had that teams will have is a strategy bot, which just imagine an agent that's constantly watching metrics, the market, the roadmap, what's working. It's not in just like, Hamill. Here's what I think we should do now. Here's the pivot we should take. Here's where we're going to win. It feels like we're very close to that. I think we're close. I think we'll get there later this year, to the point where that's very, very effective. That's my gut. I think that level of proactivity and looking across a bunch of context and distilling insights, I think it's like the thing I mentioned earlier, Lenny, about the alignment piece. That's a version of it, right? Now you're just looking across more data sources. This is something that I use. So I talked about some of the standard PM stuff, brainstorming, data, UXR. There's a lot of admin stuff I just hate, like life admin and paperwork. I just hate it. And so I get Claude to book my meeting rooms. I get it to book meeting rooms. Claude archives my email, first pass at clearing out my inbox. I don't do any of my reimbursements and expenses. Claude will go to Benapas and file the reimbursements. It'll go to Brex and file the expenses. So all of that side of things, I'm just like, just hand it to coworker, just get rid of it. And then the stuff that's quite interesting, I think, is the manager lens, where I talked about alignment as one thing. So I look also across my direct reports, like Claude can look into what they have done this week. You look at our team goals and OKRs, look at the transcripts from our discussions and understand. I can basically ask Claude, what are the key takeaways and observations I should keep in mind? And what feedback do you think I should give them? Yeah. And that's something that, again, you can just set up weekly. The quality is hit or miss right now. It's decent. Sometimes you're like, holy shit, I am so glad that I caught this. And that's very, very helpful. And then I do that for myself as well. So I basically, one of my manager, Ami Vora, was, I think, a podcast guest of yours, right? So I say, hey, based on what you know of Ami, both publicly, she's written extensively about product and then internally, and then our discussions, based on everything that I've done or not done this week, what feedback do you have for me as Ami? And I get that every week. A lot of these things can already be done today. I think that as the models improve, 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. Every one of these is like, what? Okay, so this Ami example. So you have one-on-ones with her. You ask, so you do ask Claude coworker to go through all of her writing, basically build a model of her. And you ask, what should I be doing differently based on what you know about Ami? Is that the approach? 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, on coworker, using the Slack MCP, look at everything that this person has said in the last week, et cetera. And based on that, what are their top priorities? What are priorities my manager has based on how they're spending their time that I don't know? And so all of this layer of stuff, which is, I think about it as soft coaching, I think that that is unlocked in my opinion already. I think it's just that you're working with a coach who is kind of drunk at times, not drunk, but sometimes says something and you're like, why would you bring that up? That's clearly wrong. But other times you're like, wow. There's one of the guys, Scott, who leads our enterprise team. a week, et cetera. And based on that, what are their top priorities? What are priorities my manager has based on how they're spending their time that I don't know? And so all of this layer of stuff, which is the, I think about it as soft coaching. I think that that is unlocked, in my opinion, already. I think it's just that you're working with a coach. She's kind of drunk at times, not drunk, but sometimes says something, you're like, why would you bring that up? That's clearly wrong. But other times you're like, wow. There's one of the guys, Scott, who leads our enterprise team. I think there were a few cases where he found major areas of misalignment that would have caused teams to spin their wheels significantly or do overlapping work. And you think about that, the impact of that, your shipping in this world at bigger companies 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, six months from now, what is going to be possible there? Oh man. And I think the fact that all this data is there, Slack, granola or whatever people use, 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 the steps? Yeah. You go onto co-work, download the desktop app on co-work, connect the Slack MCP. That's where you need to, depending on how big the organization is, you may need to get team or enterprise admin permissions, someone with those permissions, to enable that. But once you have the Slack MCP connected and on co-work, you just ask Claude. That's it. Amazing. Okay. I'm going to go in 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 they are 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 think it's a foundational 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 then man is one of our founders that on the vodcast had written. It's dated in 2021, I think, a few months after they started the company. And it was like, here's why we should just focus on AI coding. And this is five years ago. This is long before anyone knew what the actual market opportunities were around this. And I think this is just a deep focus that we have had internally from the start on the importance of coding and B2B. It's a, I think there's two lenses to it. It's maybe a view of, okay, 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. I have now heard people from various labs talking about the importance of coding to accelerate research. But that has just been a very firm view that we 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 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 necessity, where if you're, you know, it's now changed. We have a more well-known company, raised lots of money, blah, blah, blah. But historically we were very much the smallest, least well-funded player in this space. In many ways, it's a complete miracle that I think we've gotten to the stage that we have. We didn't have the free cash flow or the distribution of a Meta or Google. We didn't have the first-mover advantage of an open AI. And so what do you do? Right. I think there's, I think there's this broader principle I have just around life of freedom through constraints, that when you have a bunch of constraints applied on you, whether that's in personal life or at work, I think that can help. It can bring a lot of freedom because it just frees up all this excess choice. So you're like, okay, 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, even for a very generalizable technology, to maximize your chances of getting to escape velocity. And I think that's also just related to how history played out. Right. So, you know, it was well before my time, but Anthropic had a version of Claude. We had a chatbot before ChatGPT was launched. And we had ultimately chosen not to launch it for safety reasons. I think the team didn't want to kick off effectively an AI, a global arms race. And, you know, ChatGPT launched, and they got insane traction. Right. And that just naturally pulled them towards consumer. You know, there's another world where if Anthropic had launched Claude first, maybe it'd be the other way around, even with all that focus stuff. So who knows? It's hard. It's always hard to say, looking back at some of these things. Wow. I didn't know that. But I think also people just don't realize how far behind Anthropic was right now. It's like, of course they're amazing. But I just remember when people were 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. And it's so over. They're so far ahead. And it shows the power of focus and just, I guess, I don't know all the things y'all did. It is absurd how far y'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, I think a lot of that comes down to our leadership team. We have a number of people who've worked at, call it the best companies in the world, 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 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 will excel. This is a feedback loop that will accelerate us further and further. Yeah. And I would say I very much agree. I think a lot of that comes down to our leadership team. We have a number of people who've worked at the best companies in the world, 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 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 will excel. 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 and help us build better models and 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, okay, it makes sense. 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, an AI safety research company. As a growth person, there's this balance. I imagine you strike between growing and the mission being don't grow at all costs. Our 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, it's all the way from 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 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 and 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 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 are very excited and I think honestly 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 we have, back then, okay, you had Claude, but you don't want to release it because you're like, there are these safety risks. And so there are times 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 a growth lens, I look at it as growth teams can often push the boundaries of what is good UX, et cetera, because they're trying very much to eke out metrics at times. When I think about if a controversial test is brought to me, I look at it as there are 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 brand and customer friendliness and values. And then the second is where it's controversial. You're like, I don't like it. I certainly don't love it, but it's not a red line. And so you're like, 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 you can run the test and see what impact it has. And if it's a high level of cringe or ick, then I want to see a high level of return for the result for that. I think about everything in, is it in one or is it in two? And for every company, one and two are different. I think for us, AI safety is 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 do this thing. I think then there's other things that fall into two where you're like, heightened sensitivity, but we can try it and see what happens. I think zooming out though, Lenny, one of the biggest mistakes I feel like I see growth teams make, and particularly hardcore growth practitioners, is just trying to squeeze every last dollar. I think this is a general principle also in life. If you're a founder raising money, you're just trying to squeeze the last dollar. 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 growth, it's really important that you just 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 forgoing 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 that this is how they all operate. And that's actually the thing that's going to drive more growth long term as well. And so I think 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 critical to what we do is actually going to become a significant competitive advantage for us that I think is going to help us in the long run. Yeah. And as you share all this, clearly it's working and the author is killing it. So I love those examples, when someone approaching the problem that way, it actually works out. That's the same way I think about my newsletter. There's so much more I can do to grow it. My philosophy is just focus on creating good content and nothing else. 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 on a very small scale, I have a similar philosophy. One of the things that people are probably thinking about as we talk: We joke about AI replacing parts of jobs here and there. It is pretty scary to a lot of people. What is the future of my job? Will I have a job? How do I stay relevant in this future? So there are a couple of questions here. One is just for folks that want 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. One thing that everyone says is use the tools. You need to be on top of the tools. I think you need to be using cloud code. You need to be using co-work and understanding, with each model release, what are the new things you can do with this? How can you apply this to your job? It'll work well in some things. It'll work terribly in other things. And then one model launch later, it's like, oh, 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 and you didn't know that that was possible. So, there's a couple of questions here. One is just for folks that want 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. One thing that everyone says is, use the tools. You need to be on top of the tools. I think you need to be using cloud code. You need to be using co-work and understanding just each model release. What are the new things you can do with this? How can you apply this to your job? It'll work well in some things. It'll work terribly in other things. And then one model launch later, it's like, oh, 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 and 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 look at it as just leaning into where you have a competitive advantage and an unfair advantage. And so, to me, it's like if there are some people, some PMs, who are really good at craft, for example, and there are others who you throw 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 swimming in the right direction. And so if you think about what is the major skill set that you have where you spike, that can be tied to delivering driving impact for a company and product role, I would just double down on that and almost forget the weaknesses. Just what can you do to become the best person at that thing? Because that's very, very valuable. And I think that ties to the notion of just leaning into being interdisciplinary. So, going back to some of what we mentioned earlier on, where it's like, okay, in this world of engineers are mini PMs, the engineer who is 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, in this ratio, if the designer's really stressed and you're a PM who can design, you are also a unicorn now. The chances of a company letting you go have gone down dramatically because you are now just so much more useful. And so I think that is really, really important. I think if I look at what's benefited me, it's probably a version of this. I think that for me, it came from a founder background. So the mix of the founder background, the finance, I was an investment banker, so the finance background and numbers, and then sales, 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 a combination of those, along with growth, is probably what's led to there being certain areas and situations where I can just have outsized impact relative to other people. And so understanding what that is for you is really important. I look at our financial services product. We've launched cord for sheets, cord for Excel. They're going to tank the market, by the way. Everyone went. I know. But the guy running that, Nick Lynn, came from investment banking, he came from private equity, and it's such a competitive advantage where he's building that product. And he's like, I know this, I know this, he's built for this. And so I think just understanding what are those interdisciplinary areas you can lean into to make yourself more, just, higher, 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 when you come into anthropic is you need to understand that probably, yeah, 50, 60, 70% of how you operated 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, 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 Clowork and all these things. I would just say 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 10, but just going deep on something, I forget how she described it. Mark Andreessen said the same thing. I think we called it a sideways E instead of just T-shaped. 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 a big part of your journey, let me just ask you this. Is there anything else about Anthropik that might be worth sharing, might be worth talking about? The thing that maybe comes to mind is 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. Leadership has really invested in this a lot. And Daniel and Dario, they really believe in this a lot, and I think just created a very special culture. So I would say that this is truly a mission-driven company. And I was not 100% sure of that when I joined. I was like, I think that this is an exciting company. I 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. So I was a little skeptical when I joined. I'm like, at least they're talking about it, but I don't know, are they serious about this? And then I came in very early. I was like, oh, oh shit. Okay. They are maybe even more serious about this in terms of what they talk externally. And so it's a mission-driven company where people 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 the future could be. And I think when you understand that, how different this could be as a future for all of us and 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 look at every other job I've had in the past, and there's some degree of people at the company who are just checked out, where it's like, I'm here, I'm sick of this, but I don't have a better option, or I'm getting paid too much to leave, et cetera. That is just not the case here. I have not met a single person, I'm saying not a single person, who's checked out. Everyone is putting everything they have on the table. Everyone is pouring it out and leaving nothing behind and is just fully, fully in it. And so I think that releases energy that is just very, very hard to describe. I think you have that energy, you have that mission-driven nature, and then it's such an open culture. So leadership is very, very transparent with us on things. Slack is a whole maze. There's so many things that play out on Slack. We're very open. Everyone has these notebook channels where you have your own Twitter feed, in a way, where you're just talking about your thoughts about things. And so you can go and join the Slack channel, the notebook channels of people on research and all these other areas, and you can learn whatever you everything they have on the table. Everyone is pouring it out and leaving nothing behind, and is just fully, fully in it. And so I think that leads to this, releases energy that is just very, very hard to describe. I think you have that energy, you have that mission-driven nature, and then it's such an open culture. So leadership is very, very transparent with us on things. Slack is a whole maze. There's so many things that play out on Slack. We're very open. Everyone has these notebook channels where you have your own Twitter feed, in a way, where you're just talking about your thoughts about things. And so you can go and join the Slack channel, the notebook channels of people in research and all these other areas, and you can learn whatever you want, and you can spend so much time getting lost in that as well. But that openness, where we've been encouraged, people can just argue with Dario. There was an all-hands, you said something where someone didn't agree, and then the person goes onto Dario's notebook channel and just says, hey, I didn't appreciate how you said this and this and that. And then it sparked a whole big debate. But that thing where it's encouraged, go to leadership and disagree with them, challenge them publicly. And that, I think, 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 never experienced anything like it. And then you get to the talent, right? I think that is the thing where the talent density is, I feel like I'm playing for Real Madrid at times. I look around, I'm like, oh man, I'm playing for Madrid. It's like you just have the best people in the world. I think it's most the case in research. We have the very, very best researchers in the world. But even if you look at product, we have Anivora, she is phenomenal. We have Mike Krieger. You're like, okay, casually started Instagram, he's here. On growth, we have John Egan, who is my engineering counterpart. He's the OG in growth engineering. He's great. We have Alexei. So, the guy who teaches growth engineering at Reforge, he's just another dude on the team. And all of that, I think, is just very special. My favorite here is in the linear, a couple of months ago, we had our onsite, company-wide onsite, 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 talking to you about 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 sauce that is the reason that I think we are as successful as we are. This notebook channel is so interesting, just as a tactical thing. So the idea there is Dario just shares, it's like a little Twitter, internal Twitter feed where folks just share what they're thinking about and what their priorities are and things like that. Yeah. That's it. It's an internal feed where everyone, it's not just Dario, everyone has one, and 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 a leadership level. And we also think about that as a way to scale your beliefs and views across an org as it grows quickly, right? So if you're adding a lot of people in the organization, you need to think about, okay, what are the behaviors that we want to model? What are the principles that are top of mind to us? And if you think about, 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? If I have a post, which I did the other week, of this is the importance of being comfortable leaving money on the table, now all the new engineers on growth who've joined have seen that, and they're like, oh, okay, well, this is different to what we've known before, right? So I think it's good for the openness, but it's also good as a leader, 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 avoid that drift. We have so many new people signing up that drift can lead to a lot of drift in strategy and perception. So it just helps run a tighter ship in that way. And more importantly, it's data for the agents everyone's got running to help them work with all these humans. Yes, that is very, very correct. It is something that goes to Claude, that there are certain documents in onboarding where the HR team has written, before editing anything on this document, please check with this person, because this is a document that Claude references as a key thing, right? 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 aiming 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, 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 was this famous tweet of you guys still use Workday and all these tools, all these SaaS tools. Everyone's like, why? They're all going to be vibe-coded out of existence. The fact that you all, at the cutting edge of what could be built with code, still use Slack and all these other tools, to me, that's a good sign that maybe SaaS companies will be all right in the future. I don't know if you have anything there to share. Yeah. It's a really complicated picture, right? There's a number of things that we just build internally ourselves. As time goes on, the ability for Claude to do that better increases. And at the same time, we use Figma a ton, we use Slack a ton, we use Workday. We use a lot of these products, and I don't see that changing in the immediate future. And so, yeah, I think there's probably some truth to some of this. I think the other parts are overblown. And many of these products, 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. I don't know who's going to spend time building a Slack at Anthropic. That is not where value is going to accrue. And I think it also helps you see how sophisticated these things are. They're not just, 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, creating all this fear. And people think it's, oh, we're trying to raise money, or we got to get people's attention, or we're just trying to create headlines. But everything I've ever seen internally is always just, this is what we believe in. We want people to know what might be coming. Even if it isn't bad, we want people to understand, here's what might happen, and we are trying to avoid it. And you might say, why is Anthropic even building AI if it's so dangerous? And, you know, 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, creating all this fear. But people think it's, oh, we're trying to raise money or we got to get people's attention. Or we're just trying to create headlines. But everything I've ever seen internally is always just this is what we believe in. We want people to know what might be coming. Even if it isn't bad, we want people to understand here's what might happen. And we are trying to avoid it. And you might say, why is Anthropic even building AI if it's so dangerous? And the understanding Ben shared is just, we think it's better that we go at this and try to build it the right way, versus just stay out of it and hope that nothing happens. Yeah, I think three things 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 will see the world very, very differently, right? Because you look at where we are today, and you're like, okay, but 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 a lot of this stuff is actually going to be happening sooner than people think if you're looking at it from a linear lens. And then if you understand that there could be upsides and downsides and the range of outcomes here, I think we very much need to be talking about the downsides so we can avoid them and push toward the upsides. I think most people at the company are optimists. We're very optimistic about the future. I think it's just, we understand the risk 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 are people who may talk about the risks, but are not in the game. And so they don't actually know fully. They're not surgical on what the specific risks are. But we're in the game, we understand what's happening. And so that's one piece. I think the second is, I think we actually believe in this stuff more strongly than we say externally. So it is just such a key part of how we think internally that sometimes we reword our statements because people might think we're being too over the top, but internally that's how we think. And what we're putting out is a softer version of that at times. 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. 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 the core of it. If we just pack up and go home, you have no influence on this thing. And if you stay in the game, and 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 believe in those things. I could talk to you forever, Amal. But two more questions just to round out the conversation and touch on some stuff that I've hinted at a number of times. One is I want to take us actually to failure corner. Because someone listening to this may be like, all right, look at this guy. Just worked at all these amazing companies, cold emailed the CPO at Anthropic, got a job, joined this rocket ship. It's all been up and to the right, just killing it constantly. What's a story from your career where things didn't work out, when you failed? And what did you learn from that experience? I have a couple. 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 were going to do and that it's not going to happen. And so that, I think, is probably the biggest one. 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 mil. We had maybe seven to 10 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, stuff that we really, really believed in. But ultimately, in our early 20s, we had no idea what we were doing at the time, and there are many things I'd do differently. But I think the good thing was we kept our investors in the loop the whole time. So to founders who are struggling out there, send those monthly investor updates. It's really easy to send those when things are great. It's really hard to send those when things are bad. You just batten it down and 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 when you're then calling up the investors to be like, hey, 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. It's brutal. And it took me, I think, a number of years to truly get over. I think 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 draw the line looking back. But I think that'd be my takeaway, just keep in mind that it's a long game. And some of those things, I'm so grateful for that experience now. I'm so grateful that it failed and went that way, actually, as painful as it was, because it wouldn't have led to what I'm doing now. And so 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. I failed in such a big way, and my reputation's screwed, and people were counting on me. And now they see I'm an imposter. I never knew what I was doing after all. Now they finally see. And just seeing that, and this was three years, you had, I'm looking at your LinkedIn, you had seven employees, something 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 in 2023, I was going to go on pat leave because 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 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. I was going to go on Pat leave because 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 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, 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 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 be like, oh, that was nothing, actually. It's 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 Thai, which is a type of martial arts, for many years, never had a problem. And it's just one of the things that happens. The wrong session, 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 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 till 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, including texting my friends. I would listen to music for maybe 20 seconds and feel like I needed to vomit. I couldn't look at screens at all. And it was a very, very long recovery. It was not clear to me that I would ever work again for a while, actually. We even discussed, my wife and I, what would we do in that case, et cetera. 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. I got to the point where, over nine months, and then after that, returned to work, and then it slowly got better. And the part, Lenny, you don't know is, in mid-2023, we posted that newsletter, and a month later, I got re-injured, actually. Oh wow. And 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 you need to be 95% healed, you're not 100% healed. And it was just an innocuous, everyday life, getting off a plane, a bag hit me on the head type thing. And I was off work for two months, one month into joining Mercury. One month in, I'm like, sorry guys, I need to 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 mostly good, but I have times when I have 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 take that too far, when that view is detached from reality. But I think it's just made me so much better and 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 a really big one. You might think, even in a place like Anthropoc, 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 model launches, et cetera. Lucky we have a meditation area in the office that I'll go to. And then 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 I think all of that has helped with better managing the physical side of it, because this job is very taxing, and then emotionally having a little bit of space to what happens. You have awareness on one side, you have the reality on the other side, and reality is crazy here, man. Reality is insane. 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 learn 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. A lot of staying in this game at this level of intensity is just, you just keep your head. Just don't lose your head in the crazy times. And I think all of that that I've gone through has helped me do this without resorting to unhealthy coping mechanisms. Wow. Amal, you're such an inspiration in so many ways. There's so many reasons that you would not have been successful and things would not have worked out. And there's so many lessons to learn from the stories you've shared and the journey you've been on to help people overcome challenges they're having. If you can come back from an insane, was it a kick to the head? Is that what happened? It was a kick to the head. That's correct, yes. Just feeling like you may not be able to walk, may not be able to listen to music, to leading growth at the fastest-growing company in history. There's also a lesson here of constraints. Again, you mentioned this idea of the power of constraints. You're forced to take breaks, you're forced to go meditate. In a way, that's really helpful, and it's a lesson for us all. This is actually really good for us all. Yeah. I think that freedom through constraints is one of the big takeaways I've had during that time. Because if you have these constraints, you're forced to adapt, and it gives you, in a business setting, you have to focus more. In a personal setting, 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 if I'm going to get better, you have two choices. One, are you going to let that, are you just going to resist and fight with reality and really suffer from that? Or are you going to accept the situation and not let that affect you emotionally? And it's not to say, I did everything, man. I was like, every single thing I could do, diet, excise. 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 It creates, you emit, gives you in a business setting, you have to focus more in a personal setting. And 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. One, are you going to let that, are you just going to resist and fight with reality and really suffer from that? Or are you going to accept the situation and not let that affect you emotionally? And it's not to say, I did everything, man. I was every single thing I could do, diet, exercise. 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 the impacts maybe are not coming, you have to then adapt to, okay, what do I want my happiness to be? And one of the meditation teachers said, the true freedom in life is learning how to be content when you don't get what you want. And it's not to say you shouldn't do something when you don't get what you want. But I think that takeaway of just, can you be content and not have your happiness rely on getting something? I think it's a challenge. I'm not perfect at it, but I think it's probably one of the biggest takeaways from that whole thing. Incredible. And we'll link to the post if folks want to read this. Before we get to our very exciting lightning round, is there anything else you wanted to share, or should we just jump right in? I think we can jump in. 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? It probably ties to a lot of what I just talked about. I think a lot about meditation and my emotional state as what I spend most of my time thinking, reading, researching, and working on outside of work. So my recommendations are very related to that. The first is a book called Joy of Living by a Buddhist monk. His name is Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche. It's really about how you can start to think about your life experience in a different way and have tactics of what to do to change how you think about things. This is one where I've recommended it to a lot of people, and they've really, really enjoyed it. I think another one is Awareness by Anthony DeMello, which is a 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, is 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, can you put a number to that? 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 was great. I thought it was just insane. Absolutely insane movie. It was ridiculous, but I loved it. TV show, I have not watched TV in a while. I think it's probably the Olympics would be the one, if that counts. Is there a product that you love, one you discovered recently or just one you have in your life that's like, oh, this is very cool, people might want to know about it? Yeah. So this is a funny one. I was in Japan last week, and I was sitting in this hotel, and I just really loved the pillow that I had in this hotel. It was very random. I've at times had neck and upper trap pain, and sometimes I've been frustrated with my pillow because I sometimes sleep facing up, sometimes sideways, and the height's not quite right. And I was just like, this pillow is just great. Basically, this pillow is full of beads, and so you can naturally shift the height of the pillow while you're sleeping, even unconsciously without thinking. And so I looked at the tag, like, what is this? I ordered it on Amazon Japan, and I bought it back with me on the plane. And so I have the name here. It's called the Maruhachi Shinsui Maruhachi Pro Pillow. And you can only get it in Japan, but they ship to the U.S., no affiliation. And I think that has changed my life in the last week. That is an awesome pick. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to in work or in life? Main one I'd say is just, she'll be right. This is a very common Aussie saying. It's like, she will be right. She'll be right. It's a common Aussie saying when we're faced with a tough or difficult situation. You're kind of dismissing the severity of it in a way by saying, eh, it'll be fine. And I think that that's just such a good metaphor. It's such a good tactic in many, many cases. And then I think the other one is just, sometimes in life, you 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, would push me on this. And that was something that he would often say, just go for it. And I think that that'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 go for it, and she'll be right. So good. Okay. Final question. Okay, so I'm curious. You used to be into martial arts. That didn't go great. Do you have a new hobby that you find yourself loving? Do you make time for hobbies? I think I'm just quite tight on time for hobbies. I would say, I think it's largely just work and have my body function and then 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 and football in particular. I'm watching. Watching, but certainly not playing. My wife's from Michigan, and she took me to a game at the Big House, and it just changed my life. From then on, I was like, I'm a Wolverines fan, and big Wolverines fan, big 49ers fan. I just love football. So that's probably the one that comes to mind. Amal, 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 you online? Say they want to apply for a job maybe on your team. Where can they find that? And how can listeners be useful to you? You can find me on my LinkedIn. It's just Amal Ivasare. I'm boring. That's it. You can look online to apply on our jobs page as it relates 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 helpful to me is just two things, trying our products, giving us feedback, giving us harsh feedback in particular on what can be 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 as well who could be a fit for one of our roles. A dream job for so many people. Amal, thank you so much for being here. Thanks, Lenny. 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 LennysPodcast.com. See you in the next episode. 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, 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 and 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 advantage. And so to me, it's like if 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 that can be tied to delivering driving impact for a company and 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, this in this ratio, if the designers really stressed and you're a PM who can design, you are also a unicorn now. Like the chances of a company letting you go has gone down dramatically because you are now just so much more, 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 an investment banker. 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, 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, and so understanding what that is for you is, is really important. I look at our financial services product, um, you know, we've launched like cord for sheets, cord for Excel. They're going to like tank the market, by the way, everyone went. I know. Um, but like the guy running that Nick Lynn, like he came from investment banking, he came from private equity and it says 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, what are those interdisciplinary areas you can lean into to, to make yourself more, um, just like higher, higher, higher impact is, is really important. And then the last one is just being adaptable. Anyone who you, who is trying to just keep applying old playbooks, I think you're, 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, 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 jobs changed this way. I'm going to go that way is, is I think like it's, it's so, it's so important. That is awesome advice. It matches a lot of what Jenny shared when she came on the podcast, the design, design leader on Claude and Clowork and all these things. I would just like, 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 10, but just going deep and on something, I forget how she described it. Mark Andreessen said the same thing, just like, I think we called it or, or, uh, 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, uh, 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. Um, let me just ask you this. Is there anything else about Anthropik that might be worth sharing might be worth talking about? The thing that maybe comes to mind is it's just like our, 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, um, I don't think it's an accident. Like leadership has, has really invested in this a lot. And Daniel and Dario, they, they really believe in this, in this a lot. And I think 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 a hundred percent sure of that when I joined, like, I was like, I think that this is an exciting company. I, I, 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. So 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, are they, are they serious about this? And then I came in very early. I was like, oh, oh shit. Okay. Like they, they are maybe even more serious about this in terms of, they talk externally. And so it's just like the it's, it's a mission driven company where people viscerally, viscerally understand both the upsides and the downsides of the technology technology and therefore understand the, the, the divergent ranges of how this may go for humanity and, 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, it, it leads to a lot of passion for what we do. And, um, it just leads to a, a lot of belief in, in what we're, what we're doing. And so I kind of look at every other job I've had in the past. And there's some degree of people at the company who are just checked out, where it's like, you know, I'm, I'm here, I I'm sick of this, but I, I don't have a better option, or I'm getting paid too much to leave, et cetera. That is just like, not the case here. I have not met a single person. I'm, I'm saying like, not a single person who's checked out. Everyone is putting everything they have on the table. Everyone is, is pouring it out and like leaving nothing behind and, 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, 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. We, uh, Slack is like a, it's 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, 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, and you can spend so much time like getting lost in that as well. But that, that openness where we've been encouraged, like people can just argue with Dario. There was an all hands, you said something where someone didn't agree. And then, 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. Um, 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, um, man, I have just like never, I've never experienced anything like it. And, and then you get to the talent, right? That I think 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, I'm like, oh man, I'm playing for Madrid. Or it's like, you just like have the best people in the world. I think it's most, 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, on like product, we have Anivora, like she is phenomenal. We have Mike Krieger. You're like, okay, casually started Instagram. He's here. Um, you know, on growth, we have John Egan, who is my engineering counterpart. He's like the OG in growth engineering. He's, he's, he's, he's great. We have Alexei. So like guy who teaches growth engineering at Reforge. He's just like another dude on the team. Um, and all of that, I think is just very special. They met my favorite here is like in the linear, a couple of months ago, we had our onsite company wide onsite 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 you about prime ministers of our country and all these things. And it's just the, the talent combined with that culture, I think is just this secret sauce that, uh, is, is, 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 Dario just shares, it's like a little Twitter, like internal Twitter feed where folks just share what they're thinking about and what their, what their priorities are and things like that. Yeah. That's basically it where it's, it's an internal feed where every, it's not just Dario, everyone has one and you basically, you share your internal thoughts. It's a way to like 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, you can model that behavior. But if you have a channel, which is like, here's my top of mind. And you, 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, well, this is like different to what we 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 like, 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 we 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, run a tighter ship in that way. And more importantly, it's data for the agents everyone's got running to help them work with all these humans. Yes, that is, that is very, very correct. Like it is, 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 aiming Claude with that context to get better and better at, at, at, and 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 like there's all this talk of SaaS tools being replaced by AI. And you guys use Slack. I think there was this famous tweet of you guys still use Workday and all these tools, all these SaaS tools, everyone's like, why? 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 all 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, your, your, 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, and so, yeah, I think like this, there's probably some truth to some of this. I think the other parts are like, it's overblown. And many of these products, like the customers of ours, we, 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 the throat? 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 believe in. 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 doesn't, why is Anthropic even building AI? That's 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, three things that come to mind there. First is, I go back to something I said earlier, which is that we, we very much think about things from an exponential lens. And if you are thinking about things from a linear lens, you will 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 sooner than 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 at 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, like 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 we just like reword your statements because it's like, people might just think we're being like too over the top, but internally that's how we think. And what we're putting out is a softer version of that at times. And then I think the third piece is that 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, 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 in 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 the 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 just to round out the conversation and touch on some stuff that I've hinted at a number of times. One is I want to take us actually to failure corner. Because someone listening to this may be like, all right, look at this guy. Just worked at all these amazing companies, cold email, the CPO at Anthropik, got a job, joined this rocket ship. It's all been up into the right just killing it constantly. What's a story from your career where things didn't work out when you failed? And what did you learn from that experience? I have a couple 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, is just, you know, 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. 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 mil. We had maybe seven to 10 employees that are 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 stuff that we really, really believed in. But ultimately, in our early 20s, we had no idea what we're doing at the time and many things I did differently. But 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 things are great. It's really hard to send those. Like when things are bad, you just bat it down and you sit down and send an update to your investors about why everything you talked about last month, like 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 when you're 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 draw the line looking back. But I think that'd be my 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 screwed and people were counting on me. And now they see, I'm an imposter. I never knew what I was doing after all. Now they finally see. And just seeing that, and this was three years, you had, I'm looking at your LinkedIn, you had seven employees, something like that. And, 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 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. Uh, 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 this, 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 be like, oh, that was nothing actually. Just funny how perspective works that way. Uh, back in, uh, early 2022, I had a traumatic brain injury. So I'd done MMA for many years. I'd done Muay Thai, which is a type of martial arts for many years, never had a problem. And just, it's just like the, 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, uh, my whole life changed. And, 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 till 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 even discussed my wife, like, what would we do in that case, et cetera. And we had, we had to think even on, on, on those, those levels and through a lot of pushing and, and, and really working through myself and, 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. I basically got to the point then where, where over nine months, and then after that, returned to work and, and then it slowly got better. And the part Lenny, you don't know is, you know, we, we, in mid 2023, we posted that newsletter and a month later, I got re-injured actually. Oh wow. And because, and, and when you have a brain injury, until you're 100% healed, your, your risk of another concussion or brain injury is elevated. When you're 100% healed, your, your risk falls down to that of a non-concussed population. But until that time, and like, you need to be like 95% healed, you're not 100% healed. And it was just an innocuous sort of in, in, in everyday life, getting off a plane, a bag sort of hit me on the head type thing. And, 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 to peace out for three months. And, and that, 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. I, and, and I think that keeping that mindset helps. And there's a point when you can like take that too far when you're, that view is devoid, 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, 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 Anthropoc, 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. Um, even on the craziest days with like model launches, et cetera, lucky we have like a meditation area in the office that I'll go to. And, uh, and then the whole, the whole side of things around meditation that I talked about in, in, in, um, that, that post, I think both you and I have done a retreat at Spirit Rock and doing a, you know, meditation retreat changed my life. And it's something that I do, uh, at least once a year. Now I have one coming up, uh, relatively soon as well. And, and just, I think all of that has helped with better managing the physical side of it, because this job is very taxing and then emotionally having a little bit of space to what happens. Like you, 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, it's, it's mind-blowing. And so that relationship between awareness and reality, that's where you have choice that you, you sort of learn from, from deep meditation on, on how to, 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. Um, being a lot of staying in this game at this, at this level of intensity is just, you 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 like helped me do this, um, without resorting to like unhealthy coping mechanisms. Wow. Uh, Amal, you're such an inspiration in so many ways, just like, there's so many reasons that you would not have been successful and things have, 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 was a, it was a kick to the head. That's correct. Yes. Just like feeling like you may not be able to walk, like not want, be able to listen to music, uh, 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, is like one of the big takeaways I've had during that time. And it, cause if you have these constraints, you're forced to adapt and it, it creates, you emit, gives 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, and let, and really suffer from that? Or are you going to accept the situation and, and like not let that affect you emotionally? And it's not to say like, I did everything, man. I was like every single thing I could do, diet excise. 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, and I think that that's the thing when you, when you, when the impacts maybe are not coming, you have to then adapt to the, okay, what do 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, that takeaway of just, can you be content and like not have your happiness rely on, on getting something? I think is, it's a challenge. I'm not perfect at it, but I think it's, it's probably one of the biggest takeaways from that whole thing. Incredible. And we'll link to the post if folks want to read this. Before we get to our very exciting lightning round, is there anything else you wanted to share or should we just jump right in? I think we can jump in. 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? It probably ties to a lot of what I just talked about. I think a lot about meditation and my emotional state as what I spend most of my time thinking and like reading and researching and working on outside of work. So my recommendations very related to that. The first is a book called Joy of Living by a Buddhist monk. His name is Yonggi Mingyeringpoche. It's just really about how you can start to think about your life experience in a different way and, and, and you 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 to people. It's not like, yeah, it recommends a lot of people and they, 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 is 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, what percentage likelihood is it? Those types of things I think are just so tactically helpful in, in, 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 was great. I thought it was just insane. Absolutely insane movie. It was ridiculous, but, but I loved it. Uh, TV show. I have not watched TV in a while. I think it's probably the, the Olympics would be the one if that, if that counts. Is there a product that you love just like, I don't know, one you discovered recently or just one you have in your life that's like, oh, this is very cool. People might want to know about it. Yeah. So I, this is a funny one. I was in Japan last week and, uh, I was on this sitting in this hotel and I, I just really loved the pillow that I had in this hotel. It was very random. I've, I just had, at times had like neck and upper trap pain. And, 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 it basically this pillow is like, it kind of, it's full of beads. And so you can like naturally shift the height of the pillow while you you're sleeping, like even like unconsciously without thinking. And, and so I like looked at the tag or 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, it's called the Maruhachi Shinsui Maruhachi Pro Pillow. And you can only get it in Japan, but they shipped to the U S uh, no affiliation. And I think that has changed my life in like the last week. That is an awesome pick. Uh, do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to in work or in life? Main one I'd say is just, she'll be right. This is a, 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. Um, 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, 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, um, 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, 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. Uh, just sometimes just go for it and she'll be right. So good. Okay. Final question. Okay. So I'm curious, uh, used to be into martial arts. That didn't go great. Uh, do you have a new hobby that you, uh, 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, the, the one hobby I'd say is just, I'm really into sports and I've gotten more into sports and football in particular. I'm watching. Watching, but certainly not playing. I, my wife's from Michigan and she took me to a game at the big house and it just changed my life. From then on, I was like, I'm a Wolverines fan and, uh, big Wolverines fan, big 49ers fan. I just love football. So that's, that's probably the, the one that comes to mind. Amal, this was incredible on, on so many levels. Uh, I am so thankful that you made time for this, considering how much you got going on. Where can folks find you online? Say they want to apply for a job maybe on your team. Where can they find that? And how can listeners be useful to you? You can find me on my LinkedIn. It's just Amal Ivasare. Um, I'm boring. That's, that's it. Uh, you can look online to apply on our jobs page as it rolls across growth engineering, growth product, growth design. We are looking for great people on, on the growth team. So please come and join us. And I think being, being helpful to, to me is just two things, trying our products, giving us feedback, giving us harsh feedback in particular on what can be better. And then please send, uh, great people our way. We are looking for the best of the best to join the team. And, uh, we would, we would love to, to hear from anyone, you know, uh, off as well, who could be a fit for one of our roles. A dream job for so many people. Amal, thank you so much for being here. Thanks Lenny. 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 Lenny's podcast.com. See you in the next episode.