--:-- Host: I get into my third pitch, and it goes pretty well, I feel like. And I kind of pause and wait for the investor's reaction. He basically says, "This has got to be the worst idea I've ever heard. Not only are you going up against massive incumbents, they have ultimate distribution. There is no way you're going to compete against them." Before I could say anything, he hangs up. He just drops off the Zoom call. I kind of give myself just a chance to internalize what he was saying, try to pull out some of the truth in that, which is, yeah, going into this market is going to be incredibly hard. We need to think about growth from the very beginning. And if we have any chance of succeeding, product and growth are going to be intertwined in our strategy.
--:-- Host: Building a presentation shouldn't feel like wrestling with formatting. It should feel like thinking out loud. Today, you'll hear from Grant Lee, co-founder and CEO of Gamma, on building one of AI's breakout success stories. From a brutal pitch rejection to 100 million users and profitability in record time. We discuss why "better to be different than better" drove them to break the 16x9 prison that PowerPoint built 40 years ago, how they went from 60,000 signups in eight months to 50,000 per day after nailing the first 30 seconds of user experience, and why hiring painfully slowly while personally onboarding every influencer created their word of mouth flywheel. Plus, the strategic sequencing that let them build prosumer love before attacking enterprise, and how taste isn't just visual, it's the entire restaurant experience. Let's get into it.
--:-- Host: Thank you for coming, Grant.
--:-- Grant Lee: Thanks for having me.
--:-- Host: You co-founded and are leading one of the most successful AI applications right now. You've crossed 100 million of ARR. You're approaching 100 million users. We are so stoked to talk to you about all of your recent product launches, expanding the enterprise, and maybe taking a step back just the process of building Gamma itself as a company. Maybe to kick that off on that note, we'll rewind time and bring it back five years ago when you and your co-founders started Gamma in 2020. There's obviously been a ton of twists and turns since then. It feels like we've been in maybe three macro cycles, two technology cycles. A lot has changed.
--:-- Grant Lee: A lot has changed.
--:-- Host: Exactly. Can you share a little bit more about what that process has been like and what were some of the big unlocks along the way?
--:-- Grant Lee: Totally. It's always fun to tell the initial fundraising story because the world was such a different place. Peak pandemic, end of 2020, most fundraising was just done over Zoom. A lot of the investors I was trying to pitch early on, I never met in person. I was actually living in London at the time. So different part of the world, trying to line up these pitches. I'd have to do them in the middle of the night. I also have two little kids. So for me, it was after kids go to sleep. We had a pretty modest flat, so I would find a little corner tucked between the kitchenette and the laundry room. Little space. Put up a fake Zoom background so nobody could tell where I was. And try to talk somewhat softly so I didn't wake up the kids.
--:-- Grant Lee: Starting the pitch, first week, I was lining back-to-back pitches. The first day, I get into my third pitch, and it goes pretty well, I feel like. Going through 20 minutes in, feeling like, hey, this is not too bad. I pause and wait for the investor's reaction. He basically says, "This has got to be the worst idea I've ever heard." He said, "Not only are you going up against massive incumbents, they have ultimate distribution. There is no way you're going to compete against them." In my head, I was like, well, that wasn't what I was expecting. I got to think of a really good rebuttal. Before I could say anything, he hangs up. He just dropped off the Zoom call. I'm like, wow, okay. This feeling of really this moment, you're thinking in your head, what if he's right? What if he's right about all this? Maybe this is a dumb idea. Those doubts start creeping up into your head.
--:-- Grant Lee: I didn't really have much time to get down on myself because I had to prep for the next pitch. In that moment, I gave myself a chance to internalize what he was saying, try to pull out some of the truth in that. Which is, yeah, going into this market is going to be incredibly hard. We need to think about growth from the very beginning. If we have any chance of succeeding, product and growth are going to be intertwined in our strategy. I took that to heart, even though it was painful to hear. Certainly maybe there could have been a kinder way to say those words. I went back and eventually, fortunately, we were able to raise money. Five years in, we're making some good progress.
--:-- Host: Wow. I'll say. Good progress. That's amazing. And it was pre-AI when you started Gamma. Is that right?
--:-- Grant Lee: Pre-AI. I think the spirit of what we wanted to do all along was to make it easy, effortless for anybody to create content. The nature of being fast and the speed aspect was always there. AI happened to be a great gift a few years into the journey that really expedited the entire process.
--:-- Host: One of the things I've been curious about, because 100 million users is a lot of users, and some of them might know and love AI tools, and some of them might not. As AI has evolved, how do you think about how much AI you expose in the product? Even giving users the choice to pick their own image model? How easy or complex do you make that?
--:-- Grant Lee: Totally. It's a moving target. When I was at Stanford, I was lucky enough to have a mentor, David Kelly, who was the founder of IDEO. In his story, early on, they invented the first Apple mouse. At the time, Xerox already had a mouse. It was a three-button mouse, very expensive, wasn't built for mass consumption. For someone super technical, they knew how to navigate. Sounds silly now, even three buttons, kind of intimidating. David Kelly's approach was always, you need to be super empathetic for where users are. They actually invented the one-button mouse. Super easy. Anybody can click one button. I think it's going to change over time. I think we're right now maybe in the one-button era of AI where the vast majority of people are still trying to figure out how to even use this thing. It's powerful but intimidating. We need to recognize that. It's easy to throw shade at a chat prompt box and say it's not the ultimate form factor. That may or may not be true, but chat is also very accessible and familiar. We're trying to navigate that ourselves. What is the right entry point? A lot of that is spending time observing users, how they use Gamma, and then seeing where they run into a wall or fall short of expectations and try to fix things along the way.
--:-- Host: I think one thing that surprised us was just how, not only how hard it is to get AI presentations right, but also how different the products are on the market. Olivia and I have literally tried 20 plus players out there, and the results are night and day. Can you share more about what is so hard about it and what you guys got right?
--:-- Grant Lee: There have been multiple attempts throughout the past decade, even pre-AI. There's a graveyard of presentation tools out there. The ones that are pre-AI got stuck in a different trap. They tried to be incrementally better slideware. They still do the 16 by 9 thing, and you still have this canvas where you as the end user have to figure out the layouts, the layers, resizing things. For the average person, even if you're 10x better on one dimension, PowerPoint has had 40 years to add every single piece of functionality possible. How do you ultimately compete? They do have distribution. It becomes pretty hard. For us, early on, we knew that to compete in this category, the saying is it's better to be different than better. We wanted to be fundamentally different. What are the different set of primitives or building blocks that aren't 16 by nine slides that allows the average person without design skills, without design resources, to be able to create content super fast? That was the initial differentiation.
--:-- Grant Lee: Today there's almost a separate trap. Being an AI native startup, you can lean a lot on just the AI models and assume they're going to get better and better, which they will. But that becomes a crutch because you're trying to anticipate, I don't want to create something that the model is going to disrupt everything I've created. You're not really willing to understand how to create something in between that gives people a starting point that still has human in the loop. It's pretty challenging. For us, we were lucky in the timing in that we started pre-AI. We had a thesis around what building blocks would be important. Then we married that with AI along the way so we get the best of both worlds.
--:-- Host: That's fascinating. Maybe just to pull on that thread a little bit. Hey, we're coming up against Microsoft, Google, the biggest tech juggernauts in the world. On the flip side, you might hear from others that, hey, is this just going to be solved by the frontier models as the models get better? You can one-shot a great AI presentation. Talk more about why that reality is also maybe one that you're not afraid of and beyond a single model itself, what kind of value Gamma is adding on top.
--:-- Grant Lee: The way we see it is for certain tasks, maybe a generalist approach or a super app can probably do a lot of these things. For one-off presentations, that might be a viable solution. For any time where the job to be done is really core to what the end user is trying to do, in this case, visual communication, business communication, visual storytelling, there's a lot that happens to make that feel right. You as a creator need to feel like you have a lot of input. You want to be involved in that because it is your story you're telling. It's not the AI story. When you start going really deep into what it means to be a great visual storytelling tool, that job to be done has a lot of different workflows. For us, even orchestrating all the different models, whether it's on the text side, image side, video, audio, there's a lot going on there. How do you package that all up so that it feels good for the end user to be able to still play with this, edit, manipulate all those things? We think that requires a really specific tool to be able to do that.
--:-- Grant Lee: Even as you think about the evolution of that for us, you need to go from single player mode to multiplayer mode. The ability to collaborate, have a shared workspace, have a central repository of things that you're pulling into content. Those are also difficult problems to solve. Certainly you can do it. But for a super app to do that, you're starting to pull away from what maybe their long term aspiration is. They do want to be the all purpose app. That means they have to sacrifice a lot of these granular point solutions that may not fit with their long term vision.
--:-- Host: It's interesting because a lot of what's magical about Gamma comes from AI, like the new Agentic 3.0 launch is amazing and the editing capabilities there. And then some of it just seems to be new insights that your team had around how presentations and communications should work. What was the process that led you to doing that differently?
--:-- Grant Lee: Part of this was, we first started Gamma. The inception idea, how we came about the initial idea, was I was working at a different startup before we were acquired. I went back into my roots, which is consulting. I was advising early stage startups. What I was using to create presentations was Google Slides. I'd go in, late at night trying to prepare for a meeting the next day, and just feeling like I was spending all this time trying to format the deck to look decent so it didn't look like I didn't do any work. I had this moment feeling like, there's got to be a better way. This feels so backwards. Why am I spending 90% of the time on the formatting and 10% of the time on the content?
--:-- Grant Lee: When we took a step back to think about, PowerPoint invented almost 40 years ago, what has changed? What are some of the things we can anticipate continue to change? One is the way we share information obviously changed. Peak pandemic, so much work shifted to virtual, over Zoom. What if instead of having content that was static 16 by 9, it was much more malleable? It could be something that could be mobile responsive by default. If I shared something with you, you open on your phone, you could scroll through it just like you would a website. That same content can flow naturally there. We also thought, why instead of having most presentations just text and images, what if it could be more multimedia rich? You could literally embed an entire website into what you're presenting because that's a way for you to have much more richness in what you're actually trying to showcase.
--:-- Grant Lee: Rather than a standard slide deck where I'm saying, "Hey, next slide, please," and clicking on it, what if it could be interactive? What if it could be something where everything you click on actually opens up, just like the principles we've embraced with the web? The whole notion of progressive disclosure, that should apply to presentations as well. If you're reading async, you can choose your own adventure. If I'm presenting it to you, I can be the storyteller and actually guide you through this. We felt like those are all things that seem obvious, or maybe we've already taken for granted on the website side of creation. Why not be able to offer that same set of things for the average person that doesn't have design skills, doesn't have technical resources, doesn't know how to code, and just empower them to do way more than they could otherwise?
--:-- Host: What do you see? I love this evolution of what's been unlocked on Gamma. If you think about what's next, we're seeing interesting things being done with avatars, often in a sales context. It's still very early innings. How do you think about what's most interesting and what's coming up next for Gamma?
--:-- Grant Lee: One of the things we try to focus on are universal pain points. When it comes to the foundation for Gamma, a lot of the insight was, we're all visual learners, but very few of us are visual designers by background. How can we empower people to be good visual storytellers? Within this space, there's another skill set that a lot of people have fear about, which is presenting. They're not maybe super confident going up into a room and being able to articulate their thoughts. If people can't do that well, that just means their ideas never make it into the world. That's a really disappointing outcome. The whole notion of AI avatars or a presentation that can speak or articulate your thoughts on your behalf using your voice, those are all super exciting explorations because it goes back to some of these universal pain points. Things that people aren't inherently great at that we can help assist them along the way.
--:-- Host: The presentation is kind of a final unit of output that is downstream of a lot of work and also a lot of thinking, usually, if it's a good presentation.
--:-- Grant Lee: Totally.
--:-- Host: How do you think about how far Gamma goes in the pre-presentation space? How much do you do to help users get from the initial grain of an idea into a pretty clear articulation of a thesis?
--:-- Grant Lee: It's a great question. For us, we want to be end to end. The moment someone has some inkling of an idea that they want to share, we want to be there for them to help structure that, help maybe even create that initial narrative or story arc. The moment they want to create that first draft, we want to be there to help them create that outline and put some shape around it. When you do want a design partner to help you edit and really refine the thinking, we want our agent to review everything you've already created and offer suggestions, maybe even make the design changes for you. The moment you're actually sharing and presenting to others, we want you to have a feedback loop. What are people engaging with? What content actually resonates? What are people getting stuck on so you can go back and refine the entire process? Today I think we do decently well in the middle. You have the initial first draft done. You have some of the editing capabilities. I do think we have an opportunity to really close the loop entirely. Even the very first part of the journey, I think there's a ton more we could do there.
--:-- Host: Totally. I know Olivia touched on the Gamma 3.0 launch, which was a few weeks ago now. Very exciting launch, very successful. Within that, you had Agent, Teams, API. There's a lot coming out in one day.
--:-- Grant Lee: Big launch day.
--:-- Host: When we use Agent, it feels like having a design partner alongside you. I'm curious, I know it's early days, but how has it changed the way your users interact with Gamma for the ones that have tried it?
--:-- Grant Lee: I'll quickly share one perspective. We launched 3.0. It's helpful to think about the difference between a 1.0, 2.0, and a 3.0 launch. For me, the 1.0 launch is all about going after the true innovators. People that are really willing to try whatever's out there, they love the new things. You can call them AI tourists. They're going out there because they love playing around, testing all these tools. Many of them may not stick around. That's okay. You're trying to get some initial energy around what's interesting, what's not, what's actually useful. Then you have to go back and continue to improve the product.
--:-- Grant Lee: When you get to your 2.0 launch, you finally have a chance to win over the early adopters. People that are still willing to put up with a lot of gaps or deficiencies in your product. For the first time, they're starting to pull product out of you. They have a whole long list of feature requests. They see it working for certain use cases. That's great. You take that feedback back and start fleshing out your roadmap even further.
--:-- Grant Lee: Then you finally get to your 3.0 launch. If you were to map it to crossing the chasm, you're for the first time trying to hit the mass market. You have a chance to have a product that can actually be used and be relied on and people can trust it. I think that's where we're at today. For us, there's a few different things we're releasing. One is this notion that we can actually serve businesses of all sizes now. We're going from single player to multiplayer mode, from being a prosumer tool to being a business application. We've had to earn the right to be able to do so. For a business use case, everything from your terms of service to security, privacy, to can I actually collaborate in real time with my colleagues and coworkers, these are all pretty meaningful constraints for us to actually deliver on. We've worked a lot to fulfill on that.
--:-- Grant Lee: As part of that, we're expanding the aperture of what Gamma even represents. We're releasing an API business. For the first time, in addition to just serving end users, we can serve businesses and developers that want to build on top of Gamma. It's an exciting moment in time where for a business that has up until now been pretty straightforward, pretty easy to understand, we'll be able to add complexity in the sense that we're going to have many different ways we can serve many different types of users.
--:-- Host: Absolutely. I want to touch on the API piece. Whenever there's the word "agent" thrown in, that gets all the attention. But actually, this harkens back to a CRO dinner that we had where a lot of CROs talked about using Gamma for sales decks. If you think about the ability to connect your data stores, maybe it's a CRM, to communicating what's in them and getting that to action, that's a very powerful concept. What are some examples of loops like that that you've seen among your users and inspired the API product?
--:-- Grant Lee: A lot of the early requests were building on the foundation of our prosumer user base. Prosumers, many of them are already using tools like Zapier, Make. Now we can connect the tools they're already using. Let's say you're using Granola for all of your meeting notes. If you're someone that uses Gamma as a way to communicate to your clients and partners, and you're sitting with a client, the moment the meeting's over, you can feed everything from Granola into creating a beautiful presentation that recaps all of the discussion topics, all the action items, the deliverables, and all the next steps. As soon as the meeting is over, in their inbox, the client has that beautiful presentation, that beautiful PDF. They know exactly what happened during the meeting and what was agreed upon. They feel good because they feel like you listened and are able to fulfill being a good partner for them.
--:-- Grant Lee: On the go-to-market side, we see being able to integrate with CRM or sales intelligence tools like Endgame. A lot of that information is there that can be pulled into a presentation. If you want to personalize market research or a customer research deck for a specific client, you can also do that on a super automated basis. We think that's going to be super powerful.
--:-- Grant Lee: On the B2B side, there are two different use cases we're super excited about. One is being able to partner with someone like Glean, who sits on top of company knowledge, first-party data. Internally, we can be their visual storytelling layer. You have to prepare for a QBR or a strategy session, pull all the information you already have and create that deck so everybody can be on the same page. Who wants to spend time formatting the PowerPoint when you can just have that automatically created in Gamma?
--:-- Grant Lee: On the developer side, we're already starting to talk to folks like someone building a real estate app. They want their end users, when they go into their product and search a specific zip code or region, to be able to give their users a directory or listing of all the available homes in that market. They can have a beautiful branded PDF sent to that end user. They don't want to have to build that. We can be their content infrastructure in a way that's very complementary to their actual real estate app and provide them all this goodness. They can have this content engine running for them, all built on top of Gamma. As Gamma gets better, even on the prosumer side, that product gets better. Everything else gets better too. The API becomes more powerful, more effective, and it can then serve even more use cases.
--:-- Host: It's amazing. Hearing you walk through the 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 launch, your team has always been incredibly clear and intuitive product builders. But I'm sure with tens and now in the hundreds of millions of users, you get a lot of requests. How do you think about what do you build that people are clamoring for? What do you not build? How do you make those tradeoffs?
--:-- Grant Lee: It's definitely becoming increasingly hard. It's always balancing your own intuition for where you think there are big gaps or opportunities in the market. We also have many different sources where we try to have a good pulse and consolidate all that. One is we have a public Canny board where anybody can submit future ideas, requests. People can upvote. We have for our power users a separate Slack group. We call it the Gambassador program. We throw them all there. It's a great place for me to get real-time feedback because oftentimes we're showcasing early concepts, wireframes, whatever it may be, and saying, "Hey, is this completely missing the mark or is there something interesting here?" You get some really critical and honest feedback from there.
--:-- Grant Lee: We're extreme dogfooders for our own product. Every week we have something called Gamma-Rama where anybody at the company can create a fun presentation on any topic, educate us on something. It could be a hobby. It could be something you really believe in. At the end of every Gamma-Rama, you talk about all the pain points you have, all the shortcomings of the product. All to say, multiple different inputs into that. Then we try on a very regular basis to stack where we think is going to be most important and push that onto the roadmap.
--:-- Host: I actually want to switch gears a little bit to growth itself. The crazy thing about approaching 100 million users is not only the sheer number, but the fact that you've done so predominantly through organic channels. We'd love for the, I'm sure a lot of folks out there listening would be interested in how the heck did you guys do that?
--:-- Host: What channels have been the most effective for you? And I do have to throw in there, I don't know if you're going to say this channel, but I've been very impressed by your Instagram content. I'm a millennial and I'm on Instagram all the time and I engage with your content. Occasionally when I go to like it, I'll notice it has 80,000 likes already. So very curious how this ballooned, expanded, and how you guys bring the community into the effort.
--:-- Grant Lee: Totally. I'll start by just saying my piece of advice for most early stage founders as they're approaching or maybe getting product market fit: the number one thing I always advise them to focus on is word of mouth. You have to build a product that has strong word of mouth. Everything else becomes so much easier when that's the case. Don't fool yourself into thinking you have product market fit until you have strong word of mouth. We really did try to get that right in the very beginning.
--:-- We had a few different launch moments early on where we launched on Product Hunt. We ended up winning Product of the Day, Product of the Week, Product of the Month. It felt good. Then we looked at the signups. Initially you see this huge spike, and then they plateau out. We were still bringing in new users, but it was very clear we didn't have strong organic virality. Something wasn't working on a fundamental level.
--:-- We had to go back and say, okay, at that point we could have said, let's just throw much more money at the top of the funnel. Advertise a whole bunch. Run massive influencer campaigns. I think we would have fooled ourselves into thinking we could just continue to grow and spend our way out of the problem. But we gave ourselves an honest look. No, the core growth engine is broken. Before we do any of that, let's make sure we have strong word of mouth.
--:-- We ended up spending three to four months leading up to our first AI launch. The entire team just focused on one thing: nailing the first 30 seconds of the product experience. Making sure every new user coming in has a chance of seeing the aha moment so they will go on and tell their friends, colleagues, family about this product.
--:-- The moment we launched, all of a sudden, what took us basically eight months to get to 60,000 signups, within a few days we surpassed that. Then we had 25,000 signups a day, 45,000 signups a day, 50,000 signups a day. It just kept going up. We weren't doing any advertising, we weren't doing any marketing. It was all organic pull. People using the product, telling others about it, sharing it with others. That's where we felt like we're on a path where if we can just continue doing that, everything else is amplification on top of it.
--:-- As a founder, you can then say, okay, where might we augment and actually accelerate the growth? Doing so before that would have been premature. But doing that at the moment, you have this massive tailwind to support you and everything else. So that's fundamental.
--:-- There are many apps out there today that are very much more prosumer in nature. You have a growing base of users. It's often hard for a founder because you go from knowing every user to the user base being a faceless entity. Who is even my user? I don't know. A lot of your audience is probably familiar with founder-led sales as an important concept. If you're selling B2B, you probably need to do that. You need to be the first person to know how to tell the story of your product, then eventually train and onboard your AEs.
--:-- In this era, it's really important to have founder-led marketing. How do you tell your story broadly in a way that is compelling, that understands the product and why it matters in the world? Be so close to everything that is part of the brand building. You have to be laser focused on that in the beginning. Everything else becomes a little bit easier.
--:-- Host: For products that are as horizontal as Gamma is, monetization can get in the way of growth if you're not very careful about how you design pricing. A lot of your users are maybe students or other people who eventually might pay, but they might use Gamma for months or years without paying. How do you think about where you put the paywall and how you design the pricing?
--:-- Grant Lee: This is definitely more art than science at this point. The way we approached it: when we did our first big AI launch, signups were going through the roof. We hadn't built any monetization. All hands were on deck building the first 30 seconds. We had zero effort on the monetization piece. We actually couldn't even charge people for the product. Intercom was blowing up with people saying, "I ran out of credits. How do I purchase more?" It was a very fair question. We didn't have an answer. I said, okay, I guess we need to go figure out pricing.
--:-- We ended up spending all of April writing some initial pricing studies. We did classic Van Westendorp. We looked broadly at how other products were pricing. Among all these different data points, the conclusion ended up being that in this moment in time, everyone's familiar with ChatGPT's pricing. They're already anchored on that. You can get very sophisticated in how you want to price, but that adds a lot of friction into how people want to purchase a product.
--:-- We ultimately landed on something similar to how ChatGPT was pricing initially, just as a good starting point. Let's at least allow people to purchase Gamma. Then we wanted to see the data. Was this model actually economical for us? Could we make money with that price point? Fortunately for us, we were. We went from a point where our AI launch was really the bet-the-company moment because we had about 12 months of runway. As a startup, that's not a great place to be, especially with uncertainty ahead.
--:-- The moment we launched pricing and packaging, it took us about three months to get to one million ARR and become profitable. For us, it felt like we didn't need to change much because we knew the core unit economics worked at this stage. We continued to monitor it and focused more on the product. If we had launched and things were working but we were actually burning a lot of cash and that 12-month runway was going down even faster, we definitely would have had to revisit that decision. Fortunately, that wasn't one we had to do early on. We really haven't touched pricing in two plus years. More recently we introduced a few new plans, but fundamentally the initial design has remained the same.
--:-- Host: I love what you were saying about growth. It reminds me, I think you had this quote in an interview recently where you said, "Strategy is building a business on a product people love." The simplicity and clarity of that was very eye opening. You can really boil it down to that.
--:-- On this point of starting consumer prosumer, we talked about launching the Teams plan. I'm curious how you think about crossing the chasm to the enterprise and B2B users more generally. It feels like there's probably been a lot of pull already because some of your users use you for personal reasons and then they bring you to work. Talk more about that. How did you decide on the timing of when to launch this plan and when the time was right?
--:-- Grant Lee: Totally. We think a lot about sequencing. Set yourself up for success if you can. Prosumer First is where you want to start for a product like ours. You want to build a lot of bottoms-up love before you even attempt the B2B motion or the sales process. I see a lot of startups try to do both simultaneously. I do think that's tricky. Some categories maybe you can execute on that, but if you can start with the prosumer side and build that bottoms-up love, people recognize the brand, they learn to trust the brand. When you're finally actually selling into a company, there are already internal champions that want you to win. That's always way easier.
--:-- The moment we started feeling that was when we felt like we could actually start this process and go into the B2B motion with some tailwinds. We had momentum. We weren't a cold start. That was the early signal we were looking for. We didn't want to rush into it. We spent a lot of time talking to those users about their main points of friction.
--:-- This might be unique to this moment in time, but for many businesses, they're looking for ways to unlock AI productivity for their companies. What are tools that go beyond just ChatGPT that everybody at the company can use? Tools where employees can familiarize themselves with the power of AI, where other employees can train other employees. It just so happens that slides is one of the formats almost everybody at the company uses on a very regular basis. Now we're having the conversation where not only is there the bottoms-up love, there's top-down demand for something tomorrow to help educate a broad employee base. Those two together will hopefully make it easier for us to enter that market in a way that doesn't feel like pushing a massive boulder up a hill.
--:-- Host: I'm really interested in what you said about the kind of bottoms-up user love. I think that's something every company aspires to, but you can't manufacture it. It just happened.
--:-- Grant Lee: Right, you can't manufacture it.
--:-- Host: To what extent has that been a compounding advantage for you? Are there any flywheels that get going as you get users in the tens of millions?
--:-- Grant Lee: Totally. Startups often get asked what defensibility or durability means. There are many ways for a startup to build defensibility. There's some form of network effects. There's certainly brand as a moat. On the network effect side, we don't have true direct network effects like a social platform. But we do have this local network effect. When you have that bottoms-up love, what happens is you have users teaching other users how to use Gamma. Every incremental user brings a social proof aspect. What ends up happening is you become a standard. You become a language that everybody internally wants to learn. That becomes a very powerful thing.
--:-- Similar things happen with tools like Cursor, where you become the standard. It's like, okay, no brainer, we're just going to use Cursor. You only earn that by having some of that bottoms-up love. Going back to the brand piece, if you are top of mind for a category, when anybody says "AI presentations" and all they can think of is Gamma, that's a great place to be. For us, we want to be that. You can only earn that by building that brand awareness over and over again and being invested in doing so over a long time horizon.
--:-- Host: Absolutely. On the point of collaboration, you wouldn't necessarily call this a network effect, but the fact that you can share gammas so easily is a huge advantage. We share gammas internally all the time. It reminds me a bit of Figma and how they sort of replaced email over time in terms of sending that PDF format.
--:-- Grant Lee: When we were just getting started, we basically had two mantras: make it that simple to create, and make it that simple to share. If you do that, you complete the flywheel. We wanted to make sure that was the case from the very beginning. You build for that organic virality by design. You have to improve everything, but that needs to be fundamental to how you approach it.
--:-- Host: That's probably a good segue into company building overall. There's a lot of lore around Gamma in terms of how you built this company a bit differently, especially given that you started in 2020. A lot of companies in 2020 and 2021 were built very differently. They often got bloated pretty early on, which I think is pretty antithetical to how you and John and James built Gamma. Can you say more about the principles you had in the early days? You shared a little bit on the product side, but the culture of Gamma was also very important and distinct. I've heard you talk about having this live culture deck. Say more about how you guys came up with that and what's in that culture deck today, to the extent you can share.
--:-- Grant Lee: A couple of principles we've tried to stay true to. We had this internal mantra of "hire painfully slowly" from the very beginning. Even as we hit a lot of growth, we still have to stay true to that. It's allowed us to maintain relatively lean given our traction.
--:-- Most importantly, when we first started, we thought about the initial core team. There were seven or eight of us that all came from Optimizely. We had worked together for five plus years. There was already a foundation of trust. What we really thought about was that initial seven of us. We thought of that as our MVP crew. We needed that group to be everything we needed to ship a product end to end. We could create the product, market the product, and for me, even sell the product. That initial seven allowed us to move incredibly fast.
--:-- What did that look like in practice? Me as one of the co-founders, John as CPO and co-founder, James as CTO and co-founder. Our first hire was our head of product design. Our next hire was our first front-end engineer. Then we hired two back-end engineers. This was the MVP crew that could build end to end. We could test a lot of different ideas along the way and move incredibly fast in that first year. We didn't have to wait for the next hire to come aboard. We had everything we needed.
--:-- That foundation, getting that first seven right, allowed us to have this core DNA. I could easily imagine hiring the next seven or next ten and just trying to replicate that DNA. Brian Chesky talks about this: you really want to get that first ten right, or first hundred right. What you're trying to do is set the blueprint for the next set of folks that join so they all share the same values, same principles, hopefully the same level of ambition for what you want to build. Everything becomes easier. If you know that team is all in it together, a team full of missionaries, anything is possible.
--:-- Getting that first seven right was really critical. Even after that, having this notion of hiring painfully slowly allowed us to always focus on the quality of the people we're bringing in, not the quantity. Sometimes when you hit product market fit, there's this temptation to set really ambitious hiring targets. The hiring target becomes the goal. The goal is no longer to hire the best people. We've always wanted to know that we need to grow and continue to build a team, but we're never going to lower the bar for who we let in the door at Gamma. That's always been top of mind.
--:-- We've met many candidates that are maybe strong technically or maybe a good cultural fit, but weren't both. If they're not both, they're not someone we're going to work with at Gamma. It becomes hard because the temptation is always, "Hey, we have to keep growing on this growth flywheel." You can hit those targets without hitting the hiring target. If you can try your best to resist that temptation and be honest to your own core principles, that gives you a chance of actually replicating the DNA over and over.
--:-- Host: You said the head of product design is hire number one. We've heard, I don't know if this number is right, but 25% of your team is designers?
--:-- Grant Lee: In the beginning, yes. It's a little bit less now, but for a while, about a quarter of our team was product designers. I don't think that's common among startups. For us, we cared a lot about the fact that AI companies are trying to invent new surface areas, new user experiences. I don't think that's possible without a really strong product design team. Zach, our head of design, has been with us since the beginning. He's still with us today. Without him and being able to really deeply understand what the user is trying to accomplish, that matters so much. We're glad we invested so much in that team. It's translated into a better overall product experience.
--:-- Host: On the design topic, there's this concept of taste. It's overused now, but people talk about developer taste, researcher taste. You could think of design as the original arbiter of taste. Do you think there's a consistent sense of what good taste is at Gamma? I ask because there's an incredible diversity of what you can build on Gamma. Yet when I use it, there are clear design choices that have been made that are automated that make my presentation look really beautiful. What does taste look like at Gamma and how do you balance those two sometimes conflicting principles?
--:-- Grant Lee: It's a great question. When people say taste, they often think only about the visuals. What is the visual output? The analogy I have is a restaurant. You go into a restaurant. The moment you go in, you're greeted, you're seated at your table, you're handed the menu, you place your order, the food comes, it's good, you get your check. The end-to-end experience needs to be magical. If someone just came in and threw a plate down on your table and even if it looked good, you probably wouldn't go back and tell your friends.
--:-- Taste is really thinking about that entire experience. The moment you walk into the door for us, the moment you log into our product, to the moment you're actually sharing something with somebody else or your colleague, we want that to feel great. The accumulation of all those user experiences, we want that to feel like a no-brainer for you to tell your friends about. It's such a delightful experience.
--:-- That's really where product designers come into play. They deeply understand that entire journey a user is going on. Visuals are a big part of it. If the food doesn't look good or tastes horrible, no one's going to come back regardless. But that's only one part of this bigger journey. We think about a lot of that end to end.
--:-- We don't want Gamma to be like the incumbent tools. I'm going to kill this food analogy, but they're much more like a buffet. You go in, figure out what you want to grab, throw it on your plate, go back and eat it. That's the end of the day. We want to design the experience for you. We want that experience to feel well-crafted so that as a user, you choose what you want, but when you get what you order, it's going to be great. You're guaranteed it's going to be great. We're trying to move towards that vision where we can help curate a lot of it for you, make it feel effortless, and at the end of the day, hopefully it feels delightful and magical. That's the ultimate goal.
--:-- Host: Going back to this point on hiring, Ben has this great quote from 15 years ago that's aged really well: "If you haven't done the job yourself, how do you know what you're hiring for?" The reason it's aged well but there have been twists and turns is that there was probably a school of thought where it was like, "Hey, you have product market fit. Immediately go hire the expert to help you take that over," versus doing it yourself for a good bit of time. You've sort of gone on the record saying there are jobs you did in the early days for Gamma that maybe you didn't have experience doing. Some of them you're still doing today. Founder mode. Share a little more about your experience with this concept of do the job yourself before you hire for it.
--:-- Grant Lee: I'm fully aligned with what Ben said. Going back to "hire painfully slowly," the pain part is pretty important. Where are you actually feeling the pain as an organization? That's where you start looking for, okay, maybe we do need to hire somebody or build out that function.
--:-- For me, a lot of it early days was around marketing. I come from a finance and operations background. I had never done marketing. What does good marketing look like? I wanted to appreciate the job before we went out and hired and built out a team. In the beginning when we started doing things like influencer marketing, I was onboarding every single influencer myself. I wanted to make sure that influencers, who are an extension of your team, could tell our story well. I wasn't going to be prescriptive in how they tell the story, but they needed to understand Gamma. I wanted to make sure they got white-glove onboarding so they could fully appreciate the product and tell our story in their voice in the most impactful way.
--:-- I could have easily just hired somebody to build out the influencer marketing team because it was working already. But I don't think I would have appreciated all the nuances. Doing so allowed me to think about becoming a creator myself, posting more regularly on LinkedIn and Twitter. That gets you into the mindset of, what does it mean to be a creator? I need to learn how to be a better copywriter. What's the difference between a good hook and a bad hook? What's a way to engage an audience? Those are all things that become super important as you scale up a marketing function.
--:-- When you're finally interviewing people to join the marketing team, are they up-leveling you in some way? If they're not even as good as you and you basically just learned it yourself, that's probably not going to be a great fit. Now that I've at least dabbled in it, I can ask better questions and I have a better understanding of what great looks like. I also know how hard it is to overcome the bar of mediocrity. You can get sucked there and just be okay. Greatness takes a lot of work, many times, many years to get there. It raised my bar for who we even look for. When you're actually feeling the pain, you want to be able to put out that pain with the very best option out there. That's only possible when you start understanding it yourself.
--:-- Host: Totally. To tie that back to your point on founder-led marketing, which I really loved, you are the star of one of the recent launch videos. I was like, "Wait, is this a paid actor? Oh no, it's Grant. You're amazing." To your point on putting yourself out there, not just Gamma the company, but Grant as founder, co-founder, CEO. How did you think about the go-direct process? We think it's very powerful at a16z when a founder can go out, bring your company and product to the forefront, and connect it to the zeitgeist of what people actually care about and need and what their pain points are. How did you decide on this journey? For founders out there who are also thinking about going direct, it's not natural to them. Usually there are layers of comms in between. What was that decision-making process for you?
--:-- Grant Lee: There are a few different things driving this. One is that we talk about internally one of our values: don't be boring. A lot of the content we put out there is just to have a little bit of fun and be playful. I also think it's a responsibility for the founders to really be the steward of what the brand is. If you don't care about the brand, nobody else will. Nobody will ever care as much about the brand as you do because you created this from the ground up.
--:-- Even as we get bigger, we like to have a little bit of fun. Me being part of some of these videos ensures that what the brand represents is clear. We always think about brand and culture being two sides of the same coin. We care a lot about our culture and our team. Being able to infuse some of that into the brand as well, the external representation, has been energizing.
--:-- Personally for me, working with our creative team really does energize me. They're just so creative. They dream up things I could never do on my own. To be able to play even just a small role in that, I'm going to be a cameo or an actor, whatever they want me to do, I'll do it. Hopefully we can preserve that for a long time. That's part of what makes our team special.
--:-- Host: We thought we'd end on a fun question. It's sort of this theme of GammaRamas, which we didn't even know about. The first time we heard that, we thought we should call it that internally. This is actually going to be a question for all of us, so we all have to answer this. What was the last Gamma that you made? Or pick an interesting one. How do you personally use Gamma?
--:-- Grant Lee: That's a great one. For an upcoming GammaRama, one of the topics I was thinking about — there's a lot of talk around the longevity movement right now. I wanted to demystify some of that and look at the common themes around what people are saying that are important.
--:-- Grant Lee: I think definitely as I get older, I have two young kids. Just trying to keep up with them means I have to invest in things like being healthier and physical activity. All that stuff matters a ton. So I'm going to try to put something together there. I think it's a fun topic.
--:-- Host: Totally. I have a slightly more boring topic. I'm going to cheat a little — I have two use cases that I love Gamma for. One of them is, as VCs do, we'll go deep into a space for months and form a thesis around it. Voice agents is a space I spend a lot of time in, so I'll publish a very long Gamma — dozens of slides. What I really like about using Gamma for those is the analytics. First, the ease of publication. It's so easy to open and check out. I can put it in my Twitter bio. That's very easy. But then I can click in and see what part of this extremely long thesis people are engaging with. What should I write more about? What should I publish more about? That's a great signal. On the other end of the spectrum, much smaller audience — I use Gammas a lot when we're trying to talk to other startups and share why we're excited about them, what we've learned about them. Going back to the 16 by 9 insight, the flexible sizing slides and the fact that you can package and send something that feels more structured in a good way than a website, but feels as content-rich, is very, very special.
--:-- Grant Lee: Super cool.
--:-- Host: I use it for some of those same use cases, so I won't mention those. But maybe a personal one. I do an annual retreat with my best friends from college. We have an agenda for this retreat because we're total nerds. This year we put it in Gamma. It's become our ongoing tradition — here are the cards, here are the agenda topics for motherhood, career, etc. It's so interesting because when you use it for personal reasons, you see the tie to work and how this is just the ideal way of putting ideas into reality.
--:-- Grant Lee: We had a user create a graduation scrapbook as a gift for one of their family members. It was really cute — there were so many pictures. It was one that got shared across generations — grandparents, parents, kids. It feels pretty special to be part of some of those moments too, even if they're not core business use cases. The fact that they chose Gamma for a pretty special moment, something that's going to live on and be shared across the family — it was definitely a fun one to see.
--:-- Host: Well, thank you so much for being here with us, Grant. This was such a fun conversation and we're thrilled to have you here.
--:-- Grant Lee: Thank you so much. It was great.
--:-- Host: Thanks again for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode.
