A Conversation With Grant Lee CO-Founder & CEO At Gamma

Unsupervised Learning is a podcast about trends and ideas in cybersecurity, national security, AI technology, and society, and how best to upgrade ourselves to be ready for what's coming. All right, Grant, welcome to Unsupervised Learning.

Hey, thanks for having me.

Cool. So I've heard a lot about your product. I've seen a couple glimpses of it in screenshots and people talking about it on social media. I think I might have messed around with it just slightly, a little bit, a couple of times. But I really want to kind of move my whole workflow to kind of using it. Can you just give some background on yourself and what the product and company is?

Yeah, definitely. So Gamma is. You can think of it as building the anti PowerPoint. So slides as a format I've been around for almost 40 years. We've all used it since we were kids, require a ton of formatting, designing, aligning of boxes, and we wanted to kind of reimagine how people share and present their ideas from the ground up. So we started Gamma a little bit over four years ago. The idea was really to kind of fundamentally rethink all the building blocks and then, of course, integrate AI deeply into the entire creation flow so that you, as someone that may not have design skills or resources, can work with Gamma as if you have like an expert design partner sitting right next to you, helping you guide the entire creation flow along the way.

Yeah, that makes sense. Are you seeing the whole AI thing kind of pushing a desire for this more, or is it just that it's enabling the product to be better? Like, what sort of trends are you seeing, like, pushing in this direction?

Yeah, definitely. I think for many people, it's rewiring how they, you know, their relationship with technology. So in the past, when you go into a tool like PowerPoint or Google Slides, you as the creator, need to do all the heavy lifting. You start with a blank slide, right? And you're going in and thinking about, you know, how do I create the right layout? How do I express my ideas the right way such that the person on the receiving end has the best chance of understanding, you know, what's in my head. And with Gamma, we try to really help pave a much more fun and interesting path so that you're not left to figure it out all on your own. We can present you a ton of different design options. We can help you craft a more compelling narrative story arc to your presentation. We can help find all the right assets to complement what you are trying to present. So whether that's text, images, diagrams, visuals, all of that should really help you put your best foot forward without you having to boil the ocean to find the perfect visual. So in that sense, you know, people can go in. It feels a lot more effortless to kind of create content. It feels a lot less daunting and in many cases much more fun to go into a tool like Yamma versus the incumbent tools.

Yeah, that makes sense. So I'm going to tell you what my workflow is and I want to see how, how close we can get there with the product. So the way I've been thinking about this, because I've done presentations for so long, just having been in the industry for so long, right. And I would say that I normally been kind of bad at it, I'm getting better more recently because I'm focusing more on like the arc of the story.

Right.

And I kind of use TED as one of my pinnacles because usually it's just like an image in the background and the person is talking through the story, right. And then the image is just like. And sometimes there's text on it, but mostly it's just like an image that's supporting it. So what I've taken to do now is essentially I just basically rant the whole thing describing the flow, start to finish, what is the story that I want to tell. And what I've found is that this works way better than starting with slides. If I start with slides, either if I think of it's a cool template or I had a couple of slides, what I found is it's really, it's almost impossible to break out of your current slides. And what you end up doing is you end up like trying to add a slide to work with the one that you already have. So you're like, well, what should go before it, what should come after it, right? When in fact we should be thinking nothing about slides whatsoever. Discard all of this, get the flow and the story and like, almost like the script, even though if you're not going to actually read it, which most people don't, but get the that working perfectly, then make the slides. So I think I saw in the product somewhere there was like a prompt area or something, right? Yeah. But is it possible to basically give either almost there or like a mostly there or even partially there arc and then say, you know, build this out and then I need this much supporting text and I need these types of graphics?

Yes, yes, definitely. So what you're describing, I think is a very sort of natural way People would love to be able to craft their presentations that they could. And we do see a lot of users now kind of changing their workflow from maybe what they have done in the past. And so one is maybe even going into a chatgpt like tool where you can riff on that a little bit. You start with it could be even just like you're recording and you take the transcript, the initial, more raw transcript. Then you use ChatGPT to refine it a bit more, maybe ask it questions around like, you know, what am I missing here? Or like, how could I make my story even more impactful or more engaging? Or how do I open with a stronger hook or a stronger opening. And then you get that to a good place. You might have like now, you know, pretty big wall of text. You can copy and paste that, the entire thing directly into Gamma and then say, hey, you know, I'm trying to take this and create, you know, a 10 slide deck that's much more visual, gives me complementary images and still allows me to hit my main points. And then Gamma can do that for you. You can also just take even the raw input. Like you had mentioned, it was like, maybe not. You can actually skip ChatGPT altogether. You actually just go directly into Gamma and say, hey, this is raw input. I need it to be made for keynote address. I'm presenting to some technical audience and how do I now take that? And so you can describe what you need. Gamma similarly can kind of walk you through it. That will get you kind of the first draft and then we also now have the ability, you can then continue to chat with AI to say, hey, ok, first draft is pretty good. But you know what, the theme we selected doesn't quite have the right look and feel, so why don't we go with something completely different? I actually want something a little bit more dark and minimalist and you know, can you kind of choose something, something else and Gamble can find you a different sort of vibe to go with. Then you might also say, hey, you know what, there's this one slide. I really like the layout of this. Let's just actually replace all the other supporting slides with the same layout because this one is like really effective and kind of, you know, top to bottom, just completely revamp the the deck based on some input. You can similarly kind of upload screenshots or images or like other supporting, you know, information and say, actually, I need an additional slide on this. Can you now create, you know, keep the rest of the content? I want to now build on this because Then now let's start riffing. And this is the analogy of like having like an expert design partner sitting next to you. It's as if your, your person sitting next to you is that expert presentation designer and you're like, okay, this first draft is okay, but I want to keep riffing. Tell me what you need and we're going to get you to the right place.

Yeah, yeah, that last piece, that's exactly what came to mind while you were finishing that. Yeah. So this is a big difference. This is a big difference. As opposed to like, okay, this is a website that you go to and it's a website that is basically a presentation tool and you could type stuff in. It's a completely different thing to be like, it's basically an agent. Gamma is a website agent that you talk to and maybe with the analogy of like started be doing product design and marketing with you. But, but it's like, okay, if you are a super high level CEO or CTO or whatever, you generally have a presentation person. Right. And this is a superpower that you have because they know things about you. They know the company. They're also design experts.

Totally.

So they're literally just looking at the screen as it gets updated and saying, no, more like this, less of this, more of that. Yeah, less text there. Actually, we want this image to be a little more edgy or whatever. And then he or she is like doing the magic and like, totally. That is, that's really where we want to be at.

Totally. Yeah. Most of us, to your point, do not have that person. Right. Like if you are an executive of a company, you might have one. You might actually have a team of people helping you with that. And like they are proactively both suggesting ideas, but can also just really quickly close the feedback loop. If you have something you want to change or something just doesn't feel right, they can give you five more ideas and then you just keep riffing. Right. And we. Yeah, dude. The average person, because they don't have that, they get stuck in this very, you know, rudimentary stage of like slide creation. And we want to help up level everybody so that they have access to the exact same, you know, expertise that, that anybody might have if they are an executive of a much longer, larger company.

So what do you feel like you guys are doing better than other people? Because I'm sure there's other people sort of moving in this direction. What do you feel like you guys get that they don't or the industry in general doesn't get about Presentations.

Yeah, there's a few things. I mean, for one, this is our sole focus. I think there's a lot of tools out there that are trying to do many things all at once. And we're trying to do this one thing really great and so deeply understanding customers, pain points where we can really help them and go deep on that. And obviously there's a ton of experimentation and working closely with those users to really kind of iterate a ton over time. So that's something we've been doing it for already, four plus years. We intended to be doing it for a very, very long time. And it's a space that we're very passionate about. The second thing is we are trying to acknowledge that presentations as a format probably needs a bit of rethinking and reimagining. I mentioned we started off in thinking about, okay, slides as a format have been around for almost 40 years, 16 by 9, sort of fix and aspect ratio, great for presenting when everyone's sitting in the same room staring at the same projector or projection screen or I need to print something on a piece of paper. But what that does and sort of acknowledges like a lot of what we are doing today is like either presenting over screen share or I want to send something to somebody and they are going to open on their own phone. And so how do you create something that acknowledges where kind of work is already shifting and acknowledge or embrace all the sort of goodness that modern web technology already offers the browser and everything else. And so we want to be able to enable people not only just to create presentations, but create presentations of the future, which is mobile friendly by default, interactive, multimedia, rich, easily shareable, all these things that we think modern tools should enable. And so Gamma enables not just the creation of presentations, but modern presentations. And with that we also have a medium that's much more malleable. So if you are starting off with something that is intended to be more presentational, what if you also want to create, you know, and highly engaging document that can also be passed around as a proposal? Or what if you want to take that exact same content and use it for social media and have social assets that are really made for, you know, social sharing? Or what if you want to take the exact same content and create micro sites, websites, things that are intended to be interactive. And so we want, you know, all that to be in the same place so that a user doesn't need to learn 10 different tools they can use. Gamma. Gamma can help shape and mold that content into whatever format it needs to Be and you're off to the races.

Okay, you're getting me excited here. Okay, so I'm pulling a layer back from presentations. It's about idea propagation.

Totally.

And then essentially the tool needs to figure out, okay, what is the core idea? Does that have, like a native presentation style that suits it best? Right. Then it's like, okay, who is the presenter? Then it's like, who are the receivers of the presentation? And then what, to your point, what medium are they on? Is it zoom? Are they in the room? Is it a giant screen? Is it a tiny screen? Is it a mobile? Are they only on mobile?

Right.

And then all of those context pieces actually would change that. That is super interesting. You know what I've been experimenting with and I think is really cool is sometimes I think I've seen Dwarkesh do this a couple of times. So he'll just be talking, kind of like what we're going to do in this video here, actually, you're already seeing in this video is you'll just be talking and over the top of it, like an image or especially a video plays. Right. And it's just like this little clip and it could just be like a weather pattern. We're talking about chaos. And you see like this weather pattern thing. Right, right. And it's like, oh, somehow that little weather pattern thing, when Grant said chaos, it just made it click that much more. Yeah. And it's like, I. I think that is really, really cool. Are there any features now or any things coming soon that are similar to that, where it could be like, maybe not necessarily a slide with text with an image, but more so, okay, this just calls for an image by itself and maybe it calls for an image with text, or maybe it calls for a short little video clip.

Yeah, yeah, there's going to be much more of that. I think, to your point around, we're all visual beings and the ability to tie concepts, ideas to something visual just makes it way easier to remember and also way easier to share and spread. And so, yeah, we want to lean into the ability to create all sorts of outputs. Video, audio will certainly be areas as we continue to explore. And then today, a lot of the content that comes out still is pretty, can be text heavy or has a text leaning aspect of it. We want to be able to also embrace just really visual, cinematic content. And so we have a lot of cool stuff coming here in the near term which will kind of unlock much more of that sort of creativity, where maybe it isn't a bunch of words, but it's actually just like this perfect visual that drives that point, your point home. We want to be able to support that as. As well.

Yeah, and what's cool about that is it all starts with the very first piece, which is in the product now, which is. What do you want to say? It starts with that hook and narrative and everything can build off of there. What are the current sort of graphical options that we have, like, in terms of, like doing, you know, animations or like picking a perfect graphic for a particular slide or whatever?

Yeah, definitely. So we offer, you know, variety. Like you can have Gamma go out and search the web for images for you. If you're looking at beautiful stock images, you can have AI generate images for you. So we offer a variety of, you know, the top models out there. So you can choose, you know, every model might have its signature sort of type of visual or aesthetic, and you can lean into the one that is most useful for the context of what you're presenting on. You can take that, you can, you know, continue to edit the AI, the image with AI, so removing backgrounds, replacing black backgrounds, adding text, animating the image. So if you wanted to take a still image and just bring it to life, you can do all that. In Gamma, we have a variety of ways you can create things like layouts, visuals, diagrams. So, you know, you need something much more sort of intended to be like, you know, whether it's like an infographic or something, just to help you kind of walk through something that could just be a, you know, set of bullet points. But how do you actually visualize that? We give you a variety of tools there. So yeah, there's many different, different ways. I think we want to let the user kind of mold and shape their content in whatever ways is most compelling, again for their audience. And a lot of that can be both a combination of non AI tools, like stock images, as well as obviously leaning into AI generation as an additional way to kind of supercharge your content.

Nice. And so what seems to be like the most popular feature or set of features and what are your favorites?

Yeah, I mean, a lot of it is bucketed into the AI generation workflow. Right. So it's like again, going back to changing the way people approach content creation, their relationship with technology broadly, I think that's where people go in. It's like, wow, this is just fundamentally different than how I might start a presentation in PowerPoint. And so people love that. It overcomes two big things. One is the cold star problem, like actually knowing even how to begin. And two, is like, people's inherent limitations when it comes to, like, their own creativity. They can imagine a lot of things, but to actually translate into something that can be on a canvas like a slide is, like, nearly impossible for most people. And so we can kind of knock those two down right out the gate and give them something that, you know, that actually keeps them around and gives them, you know, the tools that they need to kind of get the job done.

Nice. Anything coming out immediately, soon that you're willing to talk about or announce or anything?

Yeah. So we'll be doing, you know, today kind of the premise of Gamma still as an end user, you go in, you're still, you know, putting a lot of manual effort into creating the content. And of course, AI is there to assist you, but you're kind of nudging things along the way. And let's say, like, you get to a point where you just love the output. You love this slide deck. You want to make this your own. We're going to enable much more sort of automated creation such that you have that one slide deck now, you can crank out a hundred more just like it, but maybe personalize it for different audiences, different types of clients, different folks in different countries via our API. So we allow you to integrate with Zapier, make all of your favorite tools, keep a template that you love, generate many more like it, personalize that content, make that super easy and fast. And so I think a lot of people are going to be able to get even more value out of Gamma by plugging in and leveraging your API.

Okay, cool. That was my next question. What does this look like multiple releases from now, like two years from now or even further in the future? What ideally does propagating an idea look like with Gamma?

Yeah, I think there's a few different dimensions, certainly I mentioned just the different amounts of like, formats we want to be able to support. So presentations has been our wedge. I think over time we'll be able to go in and again, not having to learn 10 different tools. What if you can create all this content and it's all riffing off of your ideas? Right. It's your concepts and we're just helping you shape it in many more ways. And then, of course, automating content creation so that when needed, you can just have way more leverage. So I think you're just going to see even more of that and it's going to be across a lot of interesting formats that people can lean into where historically, if they don't have video skills like that feels Too intimidating. What if we can offer much more of that? So we'll see some of that. I think there's going to be, you know, today a lot. You know, the vast majority of our users are still individuals and small teams. And I think we're going to be able to see kind of Gamma as a format starts spreading internally into much larger organizations. So a viable, true alternative and replacement to like a PowerPoint in Google Slides, where, you know, if Slides is currently sort of the language of business and how kind of big ideas and decisions get made internally, we'll see a lot more shift to tools like Gamma, where all of a sudden, yeah, that's, that's the starting point and the ending point for how people kind of, you know, share information internally. So we're confident we're going to start seeing a lot more of that as well.

Very cool. And where can people find out about the company?

Yeah, the easiest way is just it's a, you know, freemium product. So come check it out. It's Gamma app. You know, you can jump on, start creating content. We give all new users free credits so they can play around with our AI. And then, yeah, if you're on LinkedIn or Twitter, come find me. I'm just Grant Lee. I would love to get your feedback, your input and hear what's working, what's not. We'd love to continue to iterate on the product.

Awesome. Well, thanks a lot, Grant. Talk to you soon.

Thanks so much. Great having me.

Bye.

Bye.

Unsupervised Learning is produced on Hindenburg Pro using an SM7B microphone. A video version of the podcast is available on the Unsupervised Learning YouTube channel. And the text version with full links and notes is available@DanielMeitzler.com Newsletter. We'll see you next time.