ET in the Valley: Grant Lee, Co-Founder & CEO of Gamma

Every professional has lived through some death by PPT moments, juggling between slides and spending countless hours fixing layouts. Grant Lee, a former consultant, was frustrated when he realized that he was spending 90% of his time designing the slides and only 10% focusing on the content. He and his co founders decided to flip this equation. They founded gam, the design platform, which is now being dubbed as the AI powered PowerPoint killer. The company now competes with Figma and Canva and has scaled to 100 million annual recurring revenue and 70 million global users. All of this in less than three years and with just 50 employees, its series B funding round values the company at 2.1 billion, putting it in the elite club of next gen productivity disruptors. I was at the Gama headquarters in San Francisco recently, away from the downtown rush. In a sunlit workspace, Grant and some 50 odd people sat in shared rows. New furniture was still being unboxed. As Gama had recently expanded its team from 25 to 52 people. Grant says that he never rushed to hire, even as Gama's revenues were growing fourfold. His belief is simple, small, lean and deeply collaborative teams. No hustle culture, no bloat, just high trust ownership. I spoke to Grant on the company's growth story, fundraising, work culture and the future of AI native productivity tools. This is the latest episode of our special series ET in the Valley, where over the coming weeks my colleagues and I will bring you conversations with founders and C Suite executives who are rewriting the global tech story with AI. Its Wednesday 26th November. I am your host Himanshi Loachab and this is the morning Brief. So Grant, let's begin from the beginning as they say. Tell us a little bit about the origin story of Gamma. How did you hit upon this idea of making presentation design simpler?

Yeah, so I was at another startup back in 2020, that startup was acquired and I had a chance to stay on as an advisor, but basically went back into my early roots as a consultant. So I was consulting, started consulting early stage startups and as a consultant you're oftentimes using slide decks as the way you communicate. And so I was using Google Slides as a to communicate to my clients and it was just this one night. Spent all this time formatting the deck, trying to design it and feeling like I was spending 90% of the time on the design and formatting and only 10% of the time on the content. And so basically reached out to two of my former colleagues at a company called Optimizely and kind of pitched them on this problem. What if we were to reimagine presentations from the ground up? What would we do differently? And so for the first four or five months, we started just prototyping nights and weekends on hey, instead of slides as the core primitive, what if we came up with new building blocks? What would it look like? And we got to the point where those four or five months really helped us build conviction that actually if we took a much more sort of writing first approach to content creation, it would alleviate the need for people to instantly have to think about design, layout, formatting, all at the same time as content creation. And it felt like we could then allow people to just move way faster. So we ended up using our early prototype to raise our pre seed around back in 2020. And that was the sort of inception or the very beginning of Gamma as a company.

So help us understand, you've been a company which has been in this space even before the ChatGPT moment happened and generative AI really became mainstream. So how did that change things for you and how did you use that shift to really revolutionize your product?

Yeah, so the core principles have always been the same, which is we want to make it really feel effortless, like speed needs to be part of our value prop to an end user. They don't want to waste time on the mundane, tedious tasks. In 2022, you started observing certain things happening, obviously, even before ChatGPT, what we saw with like stable diffusion on the image side, so many presentations are highly visual. And so we started seeing that, hey, you're able to do things that just weren't possible before, like generate visuals that match the content in a mean, meaningful way. And so we recognized that, okay, you know, AI is already progressing so fast here. There's got to be a way to integrate that much more deeply in Gamma. And then eventually, Obviously with the ChatGPT moment, it was like, oh, it's not only images, it's also text. And like, what if we could actually combine, you know, a lot of the advancements in the underlying models in a way that Gamma users could take advantage of all of it. Our big AI launch happened March 2023. Before that moment, it was like, you know, we feel like we have these really great building blocks that a human could figure out how to use, and they're faster than SL slides. But what if we used AI to pre assemble those building blocks so that when you come in as a new user, you don't necessarily need to learn how every single thing works In Gamma, we'll Give you a preassembled set of building blocks and a really great first draft. And then from there you can start learning how those building blocks work and really focus on the first 30 seconds of the new user experience so that they can get started right away. So same principles of speed and being effortless, but really taking advantage of AI and integrating that core to the user sort of creation experience to make those two kind of feel as seamless as possible.

Sure. Because, you know, initially there was a moment when Gamma was not able to grow organically and you were also losing subscribers. Tell us about how did you rebound from that moment?

So that was mostly sort of the pre AI moment where, you know, what we had in Gamma was everything had to be manually generated or created by a human, in this case the end user. And, you know, we felt like the product was actually pretty useful. And so what we did was we launched on Product Hunt. It was our way to go, basically announce our sort of public beta. And the Product Hunt launch actually went pretty well. So we won Product of the Day, Product of the Week, Product of the Month. And we were celebrating internally like, oh, this is a great sort of milestone. We saw a huge spike in signups, but then we saw that the new user signups kind of sort of dropped and sort of plateaued. So we were still acquiring new users, but it was clear we didn't have strong organic virality at that moment in time. You kind of have a decision point, like, do you try to maybe brute force your way into like marketing and like trying to just get more top of the funnel knowing that, you know, organic virality isn't yet there? Or do you go back to the drawing board and try to really, you know, re architect the entire product experience to change the kind of physics of the business. And so for us, we chose the latter. We spent, you know, basically four months, heads down, re architecting everything, really optimizing for the first 30 seconds of the user experience. And when we did our AI launch end of March 2023, that's where we just saw a very different dynamic. We saw, you know, very first day a few thousand users sign up, the next day like 5,000 users sign up, then like 10,000 users per day signing up. And it just kept on going up. Right. And this was with no advertising, no marketing, it was purely by people using the product being so sort of blown away or like actually, you know, using it that other people would learn about Gamma through the use of the product. And that's where we knew like we were, we felt like we were actually onto something where without us being evolve, the product could grow. And I think this is where the true power of word of mouth, organic virality. If you're a startup that is questioning whether or not you have product market fit, that's the biggest test. Do you have a product that grows on its own? And if you don't, you probably don't have product market fit. You should probably really focus on just that before you really distract yourself with anything else.

Tell me about the adoption roadmap, which are the most active global regions right now for Gamma. And what do you feel about the India market?

Yeah, yeah. So we launched Gamma, our sort of AI product, a little bit over two and a half years ago. And what we saw was that there was global adoption almost from the very beginning. We noticed that certain countries are much more AI forward. And these countries include countries like India, certainly in Asia. There's also countries like Korea that are also very AI forward. And you would just see sort of organic adoption kind of without us doing any sort of marketing or advertising, you know, just through word of mouth and use of the product, you know, it started spreading. And so I think part of our plans for 2026 is to really start expanding our global presence. And that means potentially localized local teams in regions like apac, potentially even specifically like countries like India, where we'll have much more presence boots on the ground in those countries.

So how do you think is Gamma really changing productivity for your customers? I'm asking this because, you know, our foundational models are not there yet. They hallucinate, they make mistakes. Especially in the case of image models. I mean, the output is really subpar. So tell us what your customers are telling you about. What kind of productivity gains is the tool really giving them?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, our users say there's dramatic amount of time saving. Like we're going from what used to take many multiple hours to maybe a single hour to get to like a really well defined sort of first draft or like even likely a final draft in that case. And because a lot of our users are individuals that maybe just never had proper design training or design skills or just don't have design resources at all, we're giving them a superpower in that, you know, all the things that were just simply out of reach in the past can now be done way quicker and they can still have the ability obviously to edit and change things so they feel like they're still part of the creation process. It's not just all one shot. I think that's where it's both the productivity gain and then the sort of unlocking of what they as an individual think is even possible.

So tell us, where do we go from here? You've already scaled 200 million ARR, you have 70 million global users. What does the future product roadmap look to you? What are the key markets you want to tap globally?

You know, we're just getting started. Like there's, there's so much more in terms of the type of capabilities that we think our agent should be able to handle in the future. So that if you're just starting off with like a seed of an idea, how do you crafting that into something that could be much more of a story arc. We started off with presentations as kind of the initial wedge where you know, everybody has to probably create a deck in one form or another. It's pretty much ubiquitous. But we think we have an opportunity to again like expand people's sort of aperture. Like what are the types of content that they can create? It shouldn't just be presentations. It can be things like social media assets, videos, different types of long form, short form content. Like all that should be possible in a tool like Yamma Gamma should be built in a way where the content is all super malleable so you can turn a beautiful document into a beautiful presentation into a very engaging video. Like all that should be possible in one place. And so we're going to invest a lot more in kind of expanding the different use cases. We can support the different formats and like the ability for you to really take any piece of content and transform it into another piece of content.

Okay, so can you break down your customer base right now for us in terms of how many are large enterprises, professionals and content creators?

The vast majority of our users today are, you know, what we call like the prosumer base of users. These are individuals, sometimes small teams that do a lot of, you know, external facing content creation, small business owners, freelancers, solopreneurs, content creators in this case, where they have to create content for their customers, partners, clients, and Gamma's kind of their tool that they're using regularly. Slightly bigger than that would be like agencies and consultancies kind of doing the same thing. And then even bigger than that would be like sales and marketing professionals within a much larger company. Internal teams that lean on Google Slides or PowerPoint. We're going to replace them as the kind of internal communication tool. And it's still early, but this is where that small pocket of users is starting to grow. So we expect that to be a much bigger kind of proportion of our overall user base in coming years.

And what about large consulting firms? I mean, the McKinseys and BCGs of the world?

Not yet, but you know, we're having many more conversations with them. I think in the past because they have built so much internal tooling, they can lean on that for quite a bit. And so much is orchestrated through PowerPoint or existing tools. And so I think we're now at an interesting inflection point where it seems like those conversations are sort of changing their tone a little bit. Where we can actually play well potentially with our leverage is a way of actually automating a lot of that content creation at scale. This is where it's becoming much more interesting. We no longer need to necessarily replace PowerPoint as the end solution or the point solution. We can actually be embedded in their actual workflows. I think large consultancies, large agencies, large corporations in general that have a lot of needs around automation. I think we'll be able to play a much bigger role in that in the future.

Do you also see larger players who are of course also competitors, but maybe trying to acquire Gamma in the near future? I mean, we saw that happening with OpenAI trying to acquire Windsurf, which was ultimately acquihired by Google. So do you see those opportunities for Gamma also?

Of course. I mean, I think if you're doing anything interesting enough, certainly at scale, either incumbents or other strategic partners will be interested as well. And I think for us it's about. We believe Gamma as a standalone business can be super massive. We want to essentially become a new standard. PowerPoint is a standard that has been around for now almost 40 years. We want to be a tool that is included amongst the most prominent or the most ubiquitous tools for the next 40 years. And if we do our job well, then of course there'll be interest in many different directions. But we want to stay heads down and build an independent business that can serve as many users as as possible.

Wonderful. I want to come to, you know, the work culture at Gama right now. You are a lean team company.

Yeah.

I observed that you sit outside with your team.

Yeah, yeah. So, you know, we, I guess there's a few things that kind of shape the way we operate. Even from the early days, we talked about, you know, one thing around this mantra around like hire painfully slow. Which means even after we started seeing like pretty meaningful growth and acceleration, we weren't in a rush to just hire a bunch of people. I think oftentimes temptation is you raise a big funding round, you feel like you have product market fit, you start doubling, tripling, quadrupling the size of the team within the year. And we've never sort of leaned too much into that. We felt like we had a better opportunity of making sure our foundation was super solid. We hire for people that in general are much more generalist versus specialists, so they can wear a lot of different hats and kind of play across multiple different domains. It just means like, we can actually put a lot on their plate and they can actually help drive things forward. So it also allows for a very sort of flat, flat team, a flat organization. And by nature of having a flat, lean team, you're also highly collaborative. Like that stuff that by nature of how we've constructed the team are all things that are almost like side effects, but like positive side effects of that organization.

So, Grant, is the culture changing in the Silicon Valley right now? I mean, we are hearing a lot more about lean team companies, solo founders, and even just founding engineers running large startups. Is it becoming more and more common?

I think it's becoming much more common. I think we'll have to see how much of this actually sticks around in coming years. And certainly even for us, there's often a chance to reinvent yourself every stage of the way. So it doesn't mean we're never going to grow big. It just means we'll grow as thoughtfully and deliberately as we can. And as you scale as a business, your ambition also grows. You want to be a global business, you have a global user base, you have so many different products you want to support. And so I think being adaptable is also highly important. But I do think in general, like, I see teams that are trying to be much more efficient thinking about things like, you know, distribution early on, how can we be, you know, super potentially profitable early on and use those profits to reinvest in the business rather than raising massive funding around? There is still a temptation for many founders to raise like the mega rounds because they think that that's going to give them a way to kind of use money to solve certain problems along the way. And so I wouldn't say it's fully replaced how people think in terms of like all being lean teams. But I am seeing a much more growing trend of that being kind of a common default.

Right, right. And do you also go by the 996 hustle culture, as they say here? You know, it's quite popular in the Valley right now?

Yeah, that's a great question. We don't specifically, you know, we've had very sort of transparent conversations around where do we even want to fall in that spectru? I think we really believe, like, you know, there's benefit in having some flexibility. We obviously want to have as much overlap as possible. We talk about having, you know, at the sort of a minimum baseline of like 50 hours a week. A lot of that is in person, but also leaving room where, you know, it doesn't have to be sort of all or nothing. In some cases, like, being at home. And having the flexibility to be at home unlocks other productivity gains. And also, like, not forcing yourself to meet some sort of, like, hour or, like, quota around, like, hours leaves a lot more room for creativity.

Okay, Grant, what do you feel about the crazy talent war brewing in the AI market right now? I mean, we have seen large companies like Meta and OpenAI hire AI researchers at crazy salaries. What do you think about this premium for talent right now?

Definitely in San Francisco. You know, it's not necessarily a bad thing because I think for a startup, what you really want to do is hire people that are either missionaries, so, like, they really believe in what you're building or really believe in, like, this. This notion of, like, a tour of duty where they don't want to just jump between company to company. They're in it to really help you grow through this next phase, and they want to be with you for four or five, six plus years. And I think this is where, when you start interviewing candidates that really have that mindset and aren't just chasing the big, shiny pay package, you actually get employees that are much more committed to what you're doing long term. And for us, we have probably one of the lowest employee attrition rates, you know, in San Francisco, and if not, you know, around the world here. And I think, you know, that that makes it more possible for us as a startup to be able to compete with, you know, all these other much bigger players, because we don't have this sort of revolving door, people that are just in it for a short sprint.

And what is your view on macroeconomic challenges? I mean, I'm talking about the immigration situation in the US Right now. We have seen some very hard policy stunts against immigration in the US has that impacted your hiring strategy? How are you dealing with it?

That's a great question. It has. I mean, we previously had been very open to working with people with all different visa situations and backgrounds and wanting to have flexibility and just hiring the best and trying to make everything else work. I think it has put us into a position where we've had to pause some of that just to see how much changes. Right. Like, I think the past few months there's been so much change. I think that change has led to a lot of uncertainty. And so even for us, and so we're kind of in a wait and see Mode for like H1BS, for instance. We're really trying to follow as closely like, what the administration is trying to think and will do and making sure that we can be adaptable and hopefully respond in a positive way in the future when there's more clarity.

Are you an immigrant yourself?

So my parents moved here from Taiwan when they were in their 20s, and then I was born here in New York.

So amid all this, what is your view on AI's impact on jobs? I mean, we are seeing a lot of layoffs right now, especially in the IT sector, where software development life cycle has really shrunk by multifactor and there's this higher than ever demand to be a 10x engineer, as they say. So what do you think are the required skill sets of tomorrow? And what would you advise someone who is, let's say, getting to college right now?

Yeah, I mean, my somewhat boring advice is like, still to follow what interests you most. If, like, being a developer is still what interests you, you should still absolutely pursue that and understand the foundations there and still take CS courses. And obviously the surrounding landscape will change. So the tools you use might change. But having a solid foundation there isn't going to hurt you. In my opinion, when there's uncertainty, people pause on their plans. But I think people are going to restart their hiring plans over the next couple years. And right now we're in a specific window of time because so much has changed. It's easy for companies to be like, okay, let's just not hire any new software engineers or new grads. Let's potentially shed parts of the organization because we just don't know how we're going to use them right now. But I think that's going to pick back up. So if we look three, four, five years down the road, I think the rate of software engineering hires is going to probably rebound quite a bit. And then like, if you're not a software developer, if that's never spoken to you, I think think about, like, the foundational skills that are going to be important. These are things like writing, communication, having structured thinking, because, you know, all of us are kind of going to be thrust into being a manager for, you know, even if we're not A people manager. We're going to be managing AI and the same skill sets of managing people are likely going to applied to managing AI, which is like, do you understand the context? Do you actually know what the sort of desired outcome looks like? And can you sort of give detailed instructions, feedback, guidance to AI to get you to that end result? And so those are only achieved by actually practicing a lot of those skills. I think we already know today, like, if you give AI not very detailed instructions, you're going to get very generic output. The more context you give it, the more instructions, the more structured your own approach is, the better the output. And I don't think that's going to change as well. Like, certainly people predict, like, maybe prompt engineering will go away. I think it's just going to evolve and the foundational skills are going to be critical no matter what.

Wonderful. Grant, any closing comments you want to make or any message that you want to send to India's largest businesses leaders, early founders who are starting out in AI or even the government?

You know, I would say broadly, it still feels like we're just so early in all this. I think there's going to be a divide between the companies that end up becoming, reframing their own narrative to be like, hey, we're actually a pretty technical organization and technical doesn't mean just we're all software developers. Technical means we understand how to use AI broadly. And I think there'll be a big divide between those companies that embrace that versus those that kind of just get stuck into the, you know, we'll kind of wait and see how things pan out and worry about that later. I think the wait and see ones are going to be left behind because so much changes every single month, every single quarter. By the time you try to play catch up, it's going to be too late. I think we're starting to see much more of a kind of a big pendulum sort of swing to the other direction, which is we don't want to be left behind. And so how do we actually have company level mandates for using AI, ideally in a very sort of, you know, deliberate way. So that's not just spray and pray, but it's like, okay, we need to look for ways where AI adoption makes sense today. This is what I'm hearing from companies of all sizes, like, we're now ready to embrace it. And actually the tone at the top, the leadership needs to actually impact how these things evolve. And there's much more active dialogue there.

That was Grant Lee, co founder and CEO of Gamma on how AI as a productivity tool is changing the future of work itself. The company's meteor rise has become a playbook for many young founders to nail the product market fit, spend the right marketing dollars and let the product speak. Stay tuned as we bring you more conversations from ET in the Valley. I'm Himanshi Lochab and you've been listening to the Morning Brief. This episode was produced by Anirban Chaudhary and Rajas Naik. Sound designed by Indranel Bhattacharji. A new episode of this series drops every Wednesday day wherever you get your podcast. Our other shows are the Morning Brief on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, and Corner Office Conversation every alternate Monday. Keep listening.