Navneet Chauhan

I turn 50 today. This is a message to my kids but I offer it to you in case any of it rings useful. I was born in Sri Lanka in 1976 in a country that, at the time, was about to enter a decades long civil war. My father was able to get stationed at the Sri Lankan High Commission in Canada for four years in the early 80s - when some of the fighting was most severe - and which from our vantage point in Canada gave us some respite from an otherwise omnipresent conflict. He came as a diplomat but then my father filed for refugee status after four years when his life was threatened by militants. We stayed in Canada as refugees. My dad never really landed on his feet and we grew up on welfare. My mom stepped up. She did an incredible thing and put our family on her back and kept marching forward. Sometimes the steps were very small but she always tried to keep moving forward. I worked at Burger King starting at 14, giving my paycheck to my mom and dad to support our family in the role that I was assigned - earn enough to pay for our bus passes because we couldn’t afford a car. I was a loser growing up. Some friends, some good memories but mostly forgettable and lonely. I wasn’t very studious but did get my act together in my final year and got into a great university. I immigrated to the US soon after graduating and found an opportunity. Things clicked and I have been traveling a path to find myself ever since. Only in America is this possible… I worked hard, followed the rules, paid my taxes and stayed in California out of loyalty for the opportunities it has given me despite its dysfunction. I found my wife here. Had my kids here. Found my tribe here. There have been some very hard times as well - deaths, divorce, financial pain, mistakes of omission and mistakes of commission. You can’t dwell on these things - they are weights that will pull you down if you’re not careful. Learn from them. Respect them. BUT MOVE ON. To think 50 years ago I could have ever gotten a chance to meet the people I’ve met and have had the experiences I’ve had would have been mind boggling to my parents. It’s mind boggling to me now. We forget often and try to convince others it’s not true but America truly is the best country in the world. Everything and anything is possible here. I can testify. Be grateful to be here. This is the only place that gives EVERYONE a chance to live a great adventure. The first 50 years have been that for me - an incredible adventure. Notice there is nothing here about accomplishments or money. Because it doesn’t matter and it won’t matter. You will be dust in less than 100 years from now and the decision to be remembered won’t be yours so stop sweating it. It’s not in your control. So what is in your control? Be kind. Have fun. Work on something meaningful to you. Find your tribe. Try to find perspective. Find an incredible partner. Have a bunch of kids. Live an adventure. Forgive your parents - they were doing the best they could even if that wasn’t what you deserved. I will do what I can to make my next 50 years a wild ride. You should too. I love you and thank you. ❤️ 🙏🏽🙏🏽

LIQUIDITY: Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora @nikesharora joins The Besties: -- The Claude Mythos hype is real (found 5 years worth of bugs in 6 weeks) -- Analytical SaaS is DEAD, infra software is undervalued -- M&A playbook -- Armchair CEO: Google first to $10T? (0:00) Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora joins the Besties! (0:47) Claude Mythos found 5-6 years worth of vulnerabilities in 6 weeks (5:15) Are cyber defenders losing the race against AI attackers? (6:50) Analytical SaaS is dead, so what survives the AI wave? (14:06) If models become a utility, where will the money be made? (20:35) Armchair CEO: Nikesh rates Waymo, Google, and OpenAI (28:22) Palo Alto's M&A playbook and the path to $1 trillion Thanks to our partners for making this possible! EY (@EYnews) - AI ambition isn’t enough. EY.ai Value Blueprints move organizations beyond pilots embedding measurable business value by design. ey.com/en_us/services/ai/val… NYSE (@NYSE) - Thank you to our partner, the New York Stock Exchange - a modern marketplace and exchange for building the future. It all happens at the NYSE. nyse.com Plaud (@PLAUDAI) - Never miss a moment. Plaud, our official wearable AI note-taking partner at All-In Liquidity Summit, captured every insight. plaud.ai

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.”