Philipp Seybold

founder @combyneapp (exited) | working on something new 🎉 | venture scout @EWOR_official

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

I think Muse is going to win tbh

[Philipp Seybold @philippsey]

👇

[Naval @naval]

The future is more likely AIs fighting AIs (on behalf of humans) than AI fighting humanity.

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

My biggest takeaways from @AnthropicAI's Head of Growth Amol Avasare:

1. Engineering is getting the most AI leverage—and it’s squeezing PMs and designers. With Claude Code, a five-engineer team now produces the output of 15 to 20 engineers. But PM and design productivity haven’t scaled proportionally. The result is a compressed ratio where one PM is effectively managing the output of a much larger engineering team. Anthropic's growth team is responding in two ways: hiring even more PMs (!), and formally deputizing product-minded engineers to act as mini-PMs for any project with less than two weeks of engineering time.

2. Anthropic is using Claude to automate its own growth. The internal initiative is called CASH (Claude Accelerates Sustainable Hypergrowth). It works across four stages: identifying opportunities, building features, testing quality, and analyzing results. Right now it handles copy changes and minor UI tweaks. The win rate is comparable to a junior PM with two to three years of experience, and improving rapidly.

3. The one part of PM work that AI can’t automate yet: getting six people in a room to agree. Amol and his head of design joke that even with AGI, it’ll still be impossible to align six stakeholders. Cross-functional coordination—managing opinions, navigating politics, mediating tradeoffs—remains the bottleneck that AI doesn’t touch for larger projects. This is why Amol believes PM roles aren’t going away, and may actually grow.

4. 60-80% of Anthropic’s growth team's projects have no PRD. For smaller work, kickoffs happen on Slack—messages back and forth with product-minded engineers who can push back and ask the right questions. For larger projects, Amol believes in a proper 30-minute cross-functional kickoff (legal, safeguards, stakeholders) to surface concerns early.

5. Adding friction to onboarding drives growth—if the friction helps users understand why the product is for them. His work Mercury, MasterClass, Calm, and now Anthropic, adding steps to onboarding flows consistently improved conversion. The key: cut annoying friction that doesn’t add value, but add friction that helps users understand why the product is for them.

6. AI companies need to focus on bigger bets, not better A/B tests. Amol’s argument: if your core product value is driven by AI, then the future value is orders of magnitude higher than today’s value, because model capabilities grow exponentially. In that world, micro-optimizations capture a shrinking share of a growing pie. Traditional growth teams do 60% to 70% small optimizations and 20% to 30% big swings. At Anthropic, they flip this ratio.

7. Amol built a weekly AI agent that scans Slack for cross-functional misalignment. Using Cowork with the Slack MCP, he has a scheduled task that looks across his projects and conversations and surfaces areas where teams are about to do overlapping work or pull in different directions. A colleague on the enterprise team already caught major misalignment that would have caused weeks of wasted effort.

8. A traumatic brain injury taught Amol the principle that now drives his work: freedom through constraints. In early 2022, a kick to the head during a Muay Thai sparring session caused a traumatic brain injury. Amol spent nine months off work and months relearning to walk, unable to look at screens or listen to music for more than 20 seconds. He was re-injured a month after joining Mercury and had to take two more months off. He’s still not fully healed. But the constraints—no alcohol, no caffeine, mandatory breaks, daily meditation—have become the habits that let him operate at the intensity Anthropic demands. “The true freedom in life is learning how to be content when you don’t get what you want.”

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

Every founder and CEO should read all they can about the drama triangle.

If you cannot face another person directly, you will drag a third person in and call it process. That is how companies rot from the inside.

[Philipp Seybold @philippsey]

Yes 💯 – if!

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

You can one-shot anything if you plan well before, and test well afterwards.

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

My information consumption is now 1/4 X, 1/4 podcast interviews of the smartest practitioners, 1/4 talking to the leading AI models, and 1/4 reading old books. The opportunity cost of anything else is far too high, and rising daily.

[Naval @naval]

It’s not about junior vs senior, it’s about “good with AI” vs “not good with AI.”

[Michael Truell @mntruell]

https://t.co/jZKOk8RAsV

[andrew chen @andrewchen]

the real AI divide isn't technical vs non-technical anymore

it's people who use AI agents daily vs people who don’t. And people building every day and people who don’t. the gap is getting enormous

[Philipp Seybold @philippsey]

"How to live: Create." Lovely excerpt from Derek Sivers' works. @naval just retweeted it by quoting "Die empty". Wonderful!

[Jay Alto @theJayAlto]

there are essays, and then there are "violently shift your entire perception of reality" essays

[Philipp Seybold @philippsey]

@prasenx Robots?

[Naval @naval]

Plan as if you were going to live forever, act as if you were going to die tomorrow.

[Philipp Seybold @philippsey]

@afinkek @semajeth GLOB 🔥

[Philipp Seybold @philippsey]

@dorloechter so 🔥 !

[Philipp Seybold @philippsey]

@peaq here at the right time with the right product 🔥

[Max @MaxThake]

robots have always been central to our vision for the Machine Economy

(or what we referred to as the Economy of Things back in the 2010s)

the only thing missing was the robots

that's changing at lightning speed

[Max @MaxThake]

robots have always been central to our vision for the Machine Economy

(or what we referred to as the Economy of Things back in the 2010s)

the only thing missing was the robots

that's changing at lightning speed

[Philipp Seybold @philippsey]

@Bouazizalex @DanWestgarth @MaxHager66

[Philipp Seybold @philippsey]

@DinBisevac Fantastic! Congrats 👏

[Philipp Seybold @philippsey]

@csteadone @vidushanmug @GVteam @HarryStebbings @20vcFund @fdestin @stride_vc Congrats Jan, very well deserved!

[Jon Lai @Tocelot]

a common trap I see start-ups fall into is getting stuck making small tweaks / optimizations to a product without core PMF, when what they really need is a big bold swing in a new direction

if your W1 retention is 10%, i'm sorry but you likely need to rethink the core product - are you solving the right problem? are you going after the right users? is your technical approach correct? etc

fine-tuning the onboarding flow or adding small incremental features usually won't get you to PMF if you don't already have some measure of it unfortunately

it's a bit counter-intuitive because culturally we love hearing successful founders tell stories about how they "grinded it out" one feature at a time. but hidden beneath those glossy Forbes interviews is often a tale of pivots and risky experimental bets that seemed crazy at the time

be bold, be free to do crazy! don't get stuck in optimization hell - you could have just worked at a FANG company for that 🙂