From Idea To Impact: How Gamma Is Redefining Presentations | Grant Lee

If you don't have strong word of mouth in your product, don't move on to the next stage of scaling. If you don't have that first piece and you've tricked yourself into thinking of that first piece, everything else is just a waste of time. It's a waste of money. And once you have that, then you can think about all the things that matter. Like, okay, what type of team do I need to build to go after this opportunity? The best players want a lot of playing time. They love that ownership. They don't want to delegate that to somebody else. They want to be in it. We're building this team where every single one of the A players wants to play the game.

Sam Altman and others have talked about how they think you can build a billion trillion dollar company with one person.

I think it's a great headline. I don't believe that that's going to happen anytime soon. And I also don't believe you want it to happen. I think part of building something special in enduring business is doing it with.

Welcome to grit. I'm Juban, partner at Kleiner Perkins A show where we go beyond the highlight reel and explore the personal and professional challenges of building history making companies today. On the show we have Grant Lee, co founder and CEO of Gamma, the AI presentation tool that's aiming to kill PowerPoint. Grant thinks about everything differently and one of the reasons I was so excited to have him on the show is because he thinks about company building in a very unique AI native way. I'm fascinated to see how it'll play out. Enjoy the episode. By the way, I just roll. Just so you know, like I just roll.

Okay, cool.

The hard work has gone crazy in Silicon Valley Right now, 100%. And I think the spirit of it is right. Which is like in 2021, 2022, we like kind of lost our minds and tricked ourselves into thinking that like companies are not willed into existence, right? And we should be flexible about everything. People should live everywhere. You know, it's like whatever, right? Like this crazy amount of flexibility.

Totally.

Now I feel like we've whipped the other direction.

Pendulum swung all over.

And it's not even that I'm against the like raw hours of whatever that is, 72 hours of a 9, 9 6. But the way that it's framed is so rigid in nature that I find it very annoying. Does that make sense? Like it's just rigid. Like, I don't know. I don't wake up at nine. I wake up way earlier. I'm also in Bed by nine. Do you know what I mean?

It's the opposite of flexibility.

It's just the opposite of. It's like, I don't know, I just.

I think anybody that's doing creative work is that, that becomes extra frustrating. Right. Like if you're trying to time box like a creative project, that just seems like the wrong approach.

Yeah.

And you need a little bit of the. Okay, you know, this hour I'm gonna let myself go a little bit deeper on this thing because it's the right thing to do. It's not because I have to do it.

Yeah.

But I'm enjoying doing. I'm in the flow state. I feel like more work should be like that, but I get the spirit of it. It's like you got to work hard. Especially in this era, things are moving so fast. So if you're not gonna do it, someone else is gonna do it. And so as a startup, how do you keep up? Right. That's the mentality. I think it needs to be there in some form. I think we'll have to figure out the right packaging of it.

If you told your team, how many employees do you have now?

Yeah. 50.

50.

Yeah.

And you're doing like 50 million of revenue with 50 employees or something?

Yeah, more than that.

More than that. Okay. Have you crossed a hundred? Can you say?

We can't say. We can't say.

But like, you're on your way. Yeah, you're doing great.

We're doing great.

And like, you've actually recently sparked, I don't know if controversy is the right word, but like, you've done the small team, big revenue thing quite effectively. But if you went to your 50 employees tonight and you were like, all right, here's our policy, nine to nine, six days a week, wouldn't they be like, dude, what are you talking about?

Yeah, yeah, there's no way. Well, I mean, we have had the conversation, but our conversation has been. We know there's been, you know, AI startups are kind of in a few different camps today. Right. You do have the 996, and that's maybe one extreme. And even, you know, the996, many of those companies are saying, it's actually not996, it's way more than that. And we're using the construct of996 because it's a familiar labor. And then, you know, then there's opposite end of the spectrum, which is a, we're a 40 hour workweek, which is a standard. You know, what's known. We've we've kind of said that we're, we're somewhere in between. We know we need to work hard. We're also in a space where creativity is incredibly important. Like, we're trying to reimagine how people visually storytell, and that doesn't for us, that means the level of creativity does require much more flexibility in our mind. And so we say, hey, there's a baseline expectation around 50 hours a week. That's like a baseline. And we're not there to monitor how many hours you're working. But if you're working and you feel like any given week you have had that amount of output, you should feel good about it. And, and as a team, we do try to overlap as much as possible. So I think this is also the question of like, how much should be in person work. Because to your point before is like everybody had gone to remote distributed work, hybrid work, and we are trying to do much more of overlap, like in person. So. So that you have that little bit of that magic, that serendipity.

But like when you were five people, do you think that the reins started to loosen for you? I have no idea. But like from the 50 hours in flexibility kind of mindset, when you were five people, in order to get the incremental 15th employee, did you feel like, all right, we cannot be how we were when we were this tiny little startup.

It's a hard thing to. So it's like for us, when we were, you know, 12 people, we were working in a two bedroom, converted two bedroom apartment. You know, we were all sitting shoulder to shoulder in this tiny little room and everybody was working all the time. And so there was the unspoken. I didn't have to measure how many hours people were working. We're working a ton. And then gradually we started, like, we've never grown that fast. So it's always been for us, like sort of this incrementally adding the next person. So I don't even know if there was ever a point where it felt like we were a different company. It just felt like a natural progression. And so I think we've just kind of kept that spirit. But then at some point it got to the point where, like, we are big enough where we're not all crammed in a two bedroom apartment. And so some of the unspoken things it was helpful just to talk through, okay, you hear all the headlines of 996 are we a 996? And so we started having those conversations. We're a very transparent culture. So for us it's like every week we're meeting as a team, we still have that open dialogue. And so that's where the conversation comes. Like it really became a forcing function. When you start recruiting folks and they're asking you, are you a996? And so what is your answer? So if I have to give an answer to a cand, I need to have an answer for the internal team too. And so that's actually how things progress for us.

Yeah, that makes sense. And when you say you didn't grow that fast.

Yeah.

Okay, so like you started the company four or five years ago.

Five years ago.

Five years ago. Sorry, do you want to just say like maybe 30 seconds? What does the company do?

Yeah. So Gamma's building the anti PowerPoint for anybody that spent, you know, late night trying to design a slide, find the right layout, you know, trying to tell their story visually. Like we're, we're trying to replace that with an experience that doesn't require all that manual tedious work so that you can actually, you know, tell an impactful story in a fraction of the time.

Yeah. And so you started pre LLMs.

Pre LLMs. Pre all the recent AI.

That's right. Yes, that's right. Five years ago.

Yes.

And then when you say you grew slowly.

Yeah.

What do you mean by that?

Yeah. So there's three founders, so three of us, that's end of 2020 raised a little bit of money and then over the course of the next year we added four more teammates. So we got to about seven and then the year after that we got to about 15 or so. And then the year after that we got to around 20 and then we, you know, this year we started the year just a little bit over 20 and we're approaching around 50 now. So that's been over that past five years.

And when LLMs happened, did you have to redo the product?

Yes and no. So the first couple of years we were building the core building blocks for Gamma. So you can think of, you know, in present typical presentations, you have slides as like the primitive. Right. Slides 16 by 9. We all know it. You get this blank canvas. For us, we came up with a new notion of we're actually going to create this notion of a card. A card can be much more malleable. It can be any size, it's mobile, responsive. It can also be something you can drop in interactive elements into so it's not static and it can be multimedia rich. So you can embed entire websites directly into your Gamma. And so those Core primitives are what we worked on for the first couple years. And then come 2023, we recognized that we had to rebuild entire onboarding flow, new user experience by leveraging AI. So that instead of. If you're a new user, you imagine going into a product like ours, you're faced with all these building blocks, you're like, what the heck is this? Well, what if instead we preassembled those building blocks for you? That was a starting point. So now you can kind of play with a preassembled set of, you know, Legos. And. And that makes it much easier. That's what we used AI for in the beginning. And then over time, it's become deeply integrated into entire product.

Yeah. And so when you say slow growth, what you're saying is slow headcount growth.

Slow headcount growth, yes.

Not slow revenue growth.

Not. It's not slow revenue. So when we. So we did our first AI launch in March of 2023, end of March 2023, this was pre revenue. We launched the product, it had AI, Entire workflow is. Onboarding flow is different within a month. So our free version at the time was like, every new user gets a free amount of AI credits. Once they burned through it, that was it. Right. And so right after we launched, basically our support started blowing up with how do I buy more credits? And we didn't have yet a way to monetize yet. So with. We had to basically scramble three or four weeks figuring out pricing and packaging. Then we started monetizing. This is like end of May 2023. Yeah. From there on out, revenue growth has been. Yeah. Fast.

And one of the things that I was excited to talk to you about is there's a lot of talk, like Sam Altman and others have talked about how they think you can build a. Whatever. Billion. Trillion dollar company with one person. What is it? Billion or trillion? Billion.

Okay, maybe trillion.

As soon it's going to be trillion. Yeah, Y. Yeah, we're going to have AGI with three people or whatever.

Okay, great.

But in your case and in practice, like, from everything that I have observed within every portfolio company, I have not actually seen that.

Right.

Like, I have not actually seen that when push comes to shove and you have more customer demand than you know what to do with that you're not hiring more CSMS account executives. If you have a bigger roadmap than you can handle that you're not pulling ahead. Headcount for engineering and product. Like, it's just very natural. Why has that not been the case for You?

Yeah, I mean I don't believe in that. I think it's a great headline, right? Yeah. Billion dollar one person startup or whatever, it's a great sound bite. I don't believe that that's going to happen anytime soon. And I also don't believe you want it to happen. I think part of building something special in enduring business is doing it with a team. It's fun if you're doing something you actually enjoy, you don't want to do it alone, you want to do it with other people that enjoy building with you. And I think everybody will bring a unique set of skills. And so I do think you can build a much leaner team, but it still requires a team. It's not a one man show by any means. And so to your point, like yeah, you start building out the go to market team, sales, marketing, those are different skill sets. Maybe one day a lot of that will be replaced by AI automation, but I guarantee it'll still be somebody running and orchestrating kind of the AI play, the, the sales playbook or the, you know, how, how do we actually go and reach customers? And, and so that's where what you're seeing is I think there is a chance to be much leaner than, than you could have in the past, but it's not going to be, you know, single person massive startups anytime soon. At least from my.

And from your lived experience, like how much leaner? Maybe I'll, I'll be very specific about the question. Let's imagine, I assume you want to take this company public or I don't know, maybe, yeah, you maybe secretly you want to have it be acquired by Microsoft but you can't say that. So out loud you want to say you want to, you want to go.

Public this as big as possible. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. So like let's just assume public.

Yeah.

Do you have like a headcount in mind that you think you could go public with? Let's just imagine that the number that you need to go public with, let's just make up a number, is 4 or 500 million of arrow. Let's just say, yeah, at that number, what do you think your headcount could be?

Yeah, I'll give you a couple things that we think about. So one is just like we do have a frame of reference. Right. Many of us came from a company called Optimizely many years ago where that was at the time when I joined fastest growing YC company. And by the time we were at the same level of traction as we are today at Gamma we were 500 employees. So we're 10 times bigger in terms of headcount. Same level of traction in some, some, you know, some using that point of reference we're one tenth the size. I think the other point of reference is we've taken that mindset. So being scrappy from the very beginning, this is pre our AI launch we talked about as a company we're going to hire painfully slowly. Like that was what we said. And then even after we started growing really quickly, still the same mindset. We're not going to just add headcount because you know the easy thing to do back in the day would be you want to start hiring sales, you hire the VP of sales, VP of sales comes in and builds out, they bring the role decks. They built that entire sales function and that's how things are done. We've always been actually we're going to go bottoms up where any role we have, we're going to start with somebody that can be a player coach. They start off as a player, they really know how to execute well in that function before they start hiring anybody. And that allows you to kind of invert like just how that process goes in general. You don't assume you get headcount, you actually assume something needs to be done and we're going to figure out how to do it. We're going to try our best to reimagine what the entire org can look like. I always tell other founders, most startups think about when they think about innovation, it's like okay, we can innovate on product or innovate on technology. Well, you also have an opportunity to innovate on org design. You can go in and say, hey, we're not going to build teams the exact same way. We're not going to have people managers the same way we had 10 years ago. What is it going to mean for you? And I think it's up to every startup if they want to do that, to innovate in a way that feels authentic, that they can execute on. And we've tried to run that from the very beginning.

Yeah, but does it worry you that you're wrong? Meaning like you have competitors and let's imagine your competitors are subscale relative to where you are. Let's just say they're half your size, but let's just say now they just took on way more funding than you and they've hired twice the amount of engineers that you have. They've hired people on the go to market side. Let's just imagine they start winning, they can pull roadmap ahead faster, they can get to distribution faster than you can. And maybe you got too cute with it, right? Would be the thought, could you get too cute with it? In the spirit of this principled lean mindset?

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's something that we think about, but we don't actually even have to imagine that we are in a space that have had startups that have raised way more money than us, that have teams way bigger than us, that started before us, that have now shifted, pivoted to different, different opportunities, they no longer work in the space. And we could have feared the same things. We were like, okay, they raised a ton of, ton of money with big round, we should go raise a big round. They hired their 80 employees, 100 employees. We should grow to be that big. And so that fear has been around for forever. But the question always is like, do I believe fundamentally, if I double the size of the team, I double the speed? And the answer's always been no. We are super agile, super. We are lean, but we can move and adapt really quickly. If we want to change strategy tomorrow, I call a team meeting. We would change directions tomorrow. And that's always been the ability with a 50 person company, you can do that. I think if I was 10 times bigger, much harder to move the ship.

That's true. But what if you double the team and you increased velocity by not 100% but, but like 30%, would you do that? Because isn't that where the truth is, usually somewhere in the middle?

I think what you're getting to is like velocity is the question, right? Like velocity is speed and direction. If it's just speed, I think that's not the right thing because you want to make sure you're headed in the right direction. In this age when everything is moving so fast, underlying AI technology, how customers are adopting your tooling, it's moving fast. And so you might be if you move too fast in the wrong direction, well, guess what, then you're going to have to rewind all of that in a few years. And so you're better off being really sure about the strategy and direction you're headed in before you double down on the speed notion.

But are you not convinced right now that you are definitely going in the right direction?

We are, we do feel that. But when you think about a startup going after a space. Right. So it oftentimes feels like if you imagine this market that you're trying to penetrate as being like this balloon to Penetrate that market, you need this really sharp laser focus. You need to be that needle that can pierce through that balloon. The moment you start spreading that across a wider surface area, you can no longer penetrate that market. You're hitting this balloon with a blunt object. That's not the right way to do it. And so we do feel like we're heading in the right direction. But again, the speed thing isn't going to help us do that any faster. It's going to actually. It would actually force us to kind of allocate those resources across a broader set of things that may be not important yet today, but they may be important in the future. So we're going to sequence it the right way. We're going to focus on the things that matter most today, worry about the other stuff later.

Yeah, I think what I'm really scratching at, which I'm really fascinated by, is like, we are re underwriting all of the startup axioms that have been true forever.

Right?

Forever. And so you're on the bleeding edge of that. And there is a fundamental question of, you know, like, for example, a lot of founders will come to me and want to redo how sales compensation works. And in my mind I'm like, do not do that. Like, that is tried and true. And I think you're getting too cute.

Yes.

Like, this is how these people are wired. This is what works. Now, almost always founders will try, and almost always all roads inevitably lead back to the thing that has been true since the dawn of company building. Does that make sense? So, like, small example, but like, if you take that to the company level. Right. Like, it's just an interesting question that I also ask myself all the time, which is, is every business fundamental down to headcount completely actually being rewritten for the first time? Is this technology so transformative that it is actually going to rewrite how companies are fully built? And if so, you're one of the first to actually be doing it. Now you haven't hit real scale yet, so we'll see how as time goes on. But you're doing it, so I don't know. It's like a. It's a question.

Yeah, I totally agree. I think founders do have this desire to want to get creative on many things. And I agree. Yeah, like sales comp. I've seen this play out too. And so I think you have to figure out in which things the existing playbook is going to work and you should just not reinvent the wheel. And in which things. Do you at your core feel like there's an opportunity to do something different. And I think you should be constantly listening for signals, right? So like you're reinventing the sales comp and let's just say all your keep quitting. You can't. None of them hit quota. Whatever it is, like everybody, like another startup's hiring all your top AES, then, yeah, you got to, you got to go back to the drawing board. Right. For us, I think there's, you know, when it comes to, at the company level, I look at, okay, do we feel like we're losing the competition? Do we feel like we're losing employees? We have high employee attrition because we're, you know, we're, we're so, we're so thin that everybody has to do so many things. Like they're, they're burnt out. Do I, do I see that? None of the fundamental signals to me have said that we need to change something. We can keep doing what we're doing, but if they ever do, then I got to go back and be like, hey, you know, this is not working. I try something different.

Yeah, but you know, the question that I asked myself is, how do you measure the signal of. What if we were double our revenue count today, but we aren't reaching that velocity because of that? You don't know. You don't know that answer. Does that make sense?

It makes sense.

What if we're not going fast enough because we're artificially constraining headcount and we could actually be a bigger company because the market is there? I don't know.

I don't know either. I think for us, the risk is not worth the reward because we're already growing fast. If we were stalled, then I think it's a viable question to be like, hey, you know, we're stuck. Like, we gotta do something different. But if you're growing fast organically, vast majority of our users are word of mouth people are using the product. Love the product. Like, is moving faster the right thing right now? Or actually, should we just make sure that our customers today are super happy with it? Continue to use the product we build Bottoms up Love. We build a brand people love and trust. Not just like a flash in the pan sort of thing. That's more important to me. That's existential to me. Like, I want to make sure the foundation's right. That's where, like, again, because organic growth is strong, we have, I think, the luxury to kind of take our time on other stuff.

Does your team, the 50 people that are managing whatever going on 100 million of revenue. That is a huge responsibility for people.

Right.

Are they screaming at you to hire or do they like it this way?

I wouldn't say they're screaming. There's definitely going back to painfully hire painfully slowly. There is some pain in certain parts of the function, you know, certain functions. And in that case we are opening headcount. It's not that we're not hiring, we're just hiring much slower than I think maybe some of our peers are. And you know, you think about like sometimes I think about like sports analogies, right? Like you, you have like the best teams in the world. If you have the best teams and you have the best players, guess what? The best players want a lot of playing time. Right. They don't want to have a huge team where like there's a million priorities and they get a little scrap of like what's going on. They want to own a ton. And if you're hiring eight players, they want to be on the playing field. We feel like we hire, we've hired eight players and they love it. They love that ownership. They don't want to delegate that to somebody else. They want to be in it. And so I think just a different mentality like, yeah, certainly you can succeed by not doing that. And that's just a different way of building a team. We're building this team where every single single one of the eight players wants to play the game.

And as a result of that, are you making money like actually profitable?

Yeah, we've been hyper efficient, so we raised our series a back in 2024. We were cash flow positive even before then. We have more money in the bank than we've ever raised. We are lifetime negative net burn. And so when we think about efficiency, yeah, we have a lean team. We're also not spending a lot elsewhere and allows us to have a ton of optionality kind of really be focused on what we think is going to be core to our strategy and invest in that way. We believe in growing by investing your profits, not having to raise a ton of money. It doesn't mean you never raise. It just means when you do, you're being selective about the right partners and you do it in a way that you know how to deploy that capital. We need to be good stewards of capital if we're going to build an enduring business.

Yeah, but like if you're not investing the millions of dollars that you're making into headcount, where does it go?

Yeah, well, it doesn't mean we won't Invest in headcount. I think at a certain stage things like acquisitions, acqui hires become interest. Interesting. I think having cash on the balance sheet is going to help with that. And we are starting to explore that more than we were in the past. So those are areas where we can now have this pool of capital to say, hey, maybe we can deploy it in different ways. It can be more asymmetric than just shoving it into operating expenses. Maybe different things. And so I think that's where just having the optionality helps. We can deploy it when we need to. And again, we will grow the team. I think once we really start building out the go to market team, especially on like the sales side, those are instances where the cost will come ahead of maybe the revenue because you have to lay the foundation for AES and oftentimes those customers will come later, you're paying later. And so I think those will change some of the economics. And we're going to do that at some point. That will change the dynamic.

Yeah. It's interesting. During the COVID zirp days there was many companies that were plg.

Yep.

Which in so many words meant they didn't think they needed sales. And the reason for that is because like, you know, demand was pulled forward and the spigot was just on and everybody convinced themselves that it was never going to turn off. And then it turned off or it started to taper off and then they had no sales team. Right. And they couldn't control their own destiny as a byproduct of that.

Right. I mean we are building out the sales team. So I totally. These are things that I think that's where you can maybe get too cute is like. Yeah. Assuming that there is no role for that. If you're going after a big enough market and especially if you're doing B2B sales is inevitable.

Right.

You need to have that team. And we are starting to. We have been more prosumer up until now, like up until this year. And so as we think about the next chapter, you know, for us prosumer will be the core growth engine. We'll add sales, we'll add the ability to go after that B2B opportunity. And that requires headcount.

How many engineers are there? Ish.

Yes. It's, you know, more than half of the companies.

Okay. So like call it 25ish. That's a lot. Yeah. And when you look down the barrel of your two year roadmap, is there not a temptation to say we could make a. Okay. Let's just say we could make a three year roadmap, a year and a half roadmap, if we added 10 more headcount.

Yeah, yeah.

This is like the constant tension that I imagine there is like, it's like always in your head.

This is a constant tension. Yeah. And when you think about what keeps founders up at night, like for me that this is one of the questions, right. It's like how quickly do we build a team and we are going to grow the team. I think next year will be a critical year to build out more of the R and D, the engineering team. And I think that's been a big investment. But the question, yeah, what is the number? And I think that's for us to sort of figure out.

Yeah. When you were at Optimizely, what were you doing?

I always had to finance there, so I was interim cfo, eventually was also chief of staff. I was playing a few different operating roles.

And did you come through the finance ranks?

Yeah, investment banking. And then started as the first finance hire. And then. Yeah.

Okay. Like not the typical. It's interesting like hearing the way that you think.

Yeah.

Like it doesn't surprise me to hear like how judicious you are about resource allocation is a very like finance orientation towards company building.

Yeah.

And I actually think in some ways it's really refreshing, but it's not the archetype of so many founders that I work with.

Yeah, yeah, I, I mean, I feel so the thing is, I think, you know, we have, there's three, three of us co founders, very complimentary in skill sets. And for me, yeah, I come from a very different background. Right. Like I, I, I studied engineering. I was a mechanical engineering in school. I did mechanical engineering in school. But you know, I'm not working with our, our engineers today. Right. And, and for me, I think what I bring is like a different way of thinking about company building, product building. And you know, you might assume like, oh, hey, you know, someone from finance, like the first thing you would do is like apply budgets to everything. And that's the exact opposite of what we do. I don't apply budgets to a lot of things because I don't think that that's the right way of kind of framing things because guess what? When I was in finance, anytime you had a budget, people spent the budget. Right. You give someone a budget, they're going to spend up to that budget and then next quarter they're going to ask you for 10% more than the budget they had last year for us, if you instead focus on, okay, what are the problems that need to be solved? Who's the best to go after? Which team needs to be working on it? And like, don't come with a budget. Let's just go do it. Let's actually just go spend the money on the thing. And if you have a strategy that sounds sound, we're going to do it. And then we'll worry about the cost later. Of course, over time you're making sure you're not just burning everything, but like you're approaching it with like, okay, we need to figure these different problems out. There is no amount of budget that I'm going to give to you that's ever going to feel right or perfect. So let's just not try to over index on that. Especially at the earliest stages. Everything is like you're doing for the first time and especially for a team of 50. Right. We're not only doing it for the first time, we're trying to do it differently than maybe other people have in the past. So that's been our mentality. And I think that's where I think having the finance background actually allows me to see the world with a unique perspective. But doesn't always mean that you're rigid in how you approach selling the process.

Yeah, for sure. Let me ask you a hypothetical.

Yeah.

Today I come to your office with 10 of the most cracked engineers in Silicon Valley that all want to work at Gamma. Like certified cracked, the best of the best. Do you hire them?

If they pass our interviews? Yeah.

You do. You would hire all 10?

Yeah, hire all 10.

Okay. So there is no like true constraint on headcount.

Not for where there's going to be room for them to actually impact what we're doing. Yeah. Would I hire 10 accountants? No. But yeah. If you were saying engineers, we have an infinite roadmap for things we're going to build. There will be if ten landed in our front door today and they passed our interviews. Yeah, for sure.

I mean, that's kind of what you're trying to do with an Aqua hire, isn't it?

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Get it in bulk. Like if we have 10 people that work together, love working together and they're all great. Yeah. Awesome. Let's do it.

This market for talent, let's just be specific. Engineering talent is like nothing I've ever seen.

It's insane.

And like, I'm not even talking like researchers.

Take that. Yeah.

Take that aside.

Yeah.

Like just great engineers is insane.

It's insane. It really is. Yeah. It's hard and I get it. I mean there's so many amazing teams working on cool things. Right. Like you're competing against that. Plus, you know, the faang, the mega companies also are hiring. It's from all directions. Right. So if you're great and you're talented, you can choose anything you want to do. And this becomes both challenging for the company as well as the candidate. Because you as a company, as a startup, you want to hire people that are missionaries, right? But you're competing against people that are missionaries, getting massive mercenary checks. And like, how do you, how do you compete when someone can actually have the best of both worlds potentially? You got to find people that are actually really mission oriented. Like, you're doing, love what you're doing, love how you're doing it. That's hard. It's really hard to find.

Yeah. Do you feel like there are things that you did in hindsight get too cute with where you regretted it, like, oh, I tried to rewrite this playbook, I shouldn't have done that.

Nothing we've massively regretted. I mean we are the type of company where we are constantly testing and iterating. Right. It very much is the strong opinions loosely held. I'm. I'm totally fine being proved wrong about things. So I don't think there's ever been a big decision where like, hey, this was just dumb because I don't think it's never gotten to that. And maybe I'll reflect back on this tiny team thing in five years and be like, actually this is dumb. We haven't yet, I think so up until this point it's been these decisions that are oftentimes micro decisions that you're trying to see if it's right, test it out a little bit. And when we think about even the tiny team approach, a lot of our early teammates, especially in the leadership role, come through a work trial. They're in the seat first for several months before we hire them. So yeah, I think there's a lot of, I guess what you'll see is not surprisingly, a company that came from Optimiz experimentation kind of allows you to kind of move fast without feeling like you're making these big units like one way door decisions where all of a sudden you can never go back. You regret it for the rest of the life of the company.

Yeah, that makes sense to me. When you think about the vibes of the people in the company, does the 10 engineer headcount cross your mind of if we did an aqua hire today and they were all amazing engineers because the company is so small, relatively speaking, if you increase headcount by 20% of people that you've never worked with. I bet you people inside the company are quite protective of the culture of Gamma.

Totally.

I imagine, yeah. Maybe there is an inverse world where they also start pushing back on you saying like, no, no, no, what we have is special. I don't want to change that.

It's a tough one I think to your point. Yeah, it's like what percentage of the company are you trying to absorb or change at the same time, I think, I think this goes back to a point of why for us hiring slowly, for us matter a lot. It is the culture piece. Because if you're going from 10 to 50 to 100 in a year, the culture doesn't even have time to really set. You don't even know what your identity is as a company and you're introducing all this new DNA. What you want to do is once you have this core team, that's your DNA, you're trying to replicate that DNA, you're trying to bring in people that have the exact same values and principles. But if you don't have that set yet, it's really hard to do that. And that's why I worry like these companies that maybe even pre product market fit or like hyperscaling, like they're all of a sudden they're doubling tripling size of team. Well, you know, a few years from now are you going to have a team that even feels cohesive? And I don't think that's possible when you're trying to grow that aggressively. 20% like at 50 now for adding 10, that's probably on the verge of like, okay, yeah, you're right. That's a decision we need to take very seriously. We probably need to spend a ton of time with that team. It's not just passing the interviews, it's like, okay, let's go grab dinners, let's make sure you can work in this office. And this day to day feels actually like a place you want to be. That's a big decision. And I don't, you know, 20% is big if it's like 5%, maybe less so. And so I do think there is some range where you can't hire 50 engineers and try to absorb it all at once. And if you're doing that, it must be for some really important strategic decision that you're merging at that level. Right?

Yeah. A lot of my questions, I'm incubating a company here at KP and we're going through a Lot of these core questions. And one of the things that I think I got wrong was I had multiple pages of values that were core to me, that I thought were very important in whatever I did next, if I ever wanted to operate again, whatever that would look like, what would that mean? And very quickly what I realized was me, two co founders, founding engineer, you sit in a room together for seven days a week. And I realized, like, oh, I don't actually think any of those things matter. And the reason for that is because it is just how you behave that defines what it is 100%. And to your point of defining what it is before you move on to the next thing, defining what it is is like. Like, how do you all behave together? Like, what is that core behavioral cohesiveness that then is like, okay, we want people that are whatever, high slope and low ego, for example, because that's how we feel like we are. And so it's so hard to like pre define any of these things 100% because so much of the company that you build is the people that you hire. And so much of the values that you try and imbue are through those people, like through how you actually act every day. And then you can decide what those things are.

This is what we did. I mean, so we didn't come in with pre defined values. What we did was the first seven of us and eventually 12, we're in Slack a lot. There's like a shout outs channel. And so anytime someone does something amazing, they can give someone else a shout out on the team. And then what I would do is I'd start just writing down what people were praising other people for. Like, one of the things of like, oh, this is. You did an awesome job. This is exactly what you did. And I observed people's behaviors in general. Like, what is something that, you know, Jess, as an engineer, like, what did she do that was special that I'd be like, oh, if I could have another Jess, this is. This would be great, right? I write that down. And then I had this sort of notebook of all the things that people did, all the behaviors that people did, and I started crafting our culture down deck. And I turned all those behaviors in a set of values. And then I shared that with a team and I said, which of these feel authentic? And we continue to iterate on that together. And that formed the first version of the culture deck. The culture deck is a living deck. Every time we have a new batch of new hires, I go through it. We ask questions about what are Things we appreciate about how we operate. And I edit it. And so once a year at least, if not more often, we're going in and we're revising it, we're adding to it. And that's the way we try to stay true to a living thing that to your point, is actually the people you hire. Hopefully the foundation is solid so that you're not constantly rewriting the whole thing. Right. But that first set is really observing the people around the room and trying to articulate what are the values they bring to the table.

I think it's really well said. And you waited to do that deck until 12 people.

Yeah, probably about two years in.

In.

Yeah, like one and a half, two years in. So we had already gone through some craziness as a company, as every early stage company probably does, like just trying to build, trying to find product market fit, being in the idea maze. So you go through some stuff and you feel like, okay, things are starting to click. Then you start writing some things down and you start sharing it. Start talking about as a company, I don't think you ever want to do it too prematurely because nothing else matters in the beginning until you hit product market first. It. Right. Like as a company, you're not a company until you've reached that point. You're just a group of people working on something. Maybe you have money in the bank, but once you feel like you're a company, then yeah, I think having a culture is great. And then once you start recruiting, you better have something you can point to or even if it's in your head where you're like, I can replicate the DNA now, I know what I'm looking for.

Yeah. How long were you in the idea maze for?

I mean, two plus years.

Come on.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

With how many you and your two co founders?

No, no. When we raised our pre seed round, this is end of 2020, over the next few months we added a few more people. So we were about seven people. And we really started kind of building the very beginning of Gamma. And what we actually did was instead of just build. So I mentioned Gamma as kind of like a modern alternative to PowerPoint. So we felt like, okay, one opportunity. This is peak pandemic too. It's like one opportunity is like, okay, we're going to change how people present and share their ideas. The other opportunity was like, we want to explore was actually, what if we created a virtual office? Because so much of our work now is hybrid. There's people distributed. Our ambition all along was like, we wanted to change how people communicate. But we actually thought saw both of these as interesting opportunities. Presentations as a space that needs to be reimagined. Virtual office as a replacement for the physical office. And so we actually worked on both ideas in parallel for six months. And we dog fooded both simultaneously for six months. At the end of the six months we're like, okay, which product are we going to dedicate 100% of our time to? It was kind of like an a B test, but it wasn't driven by any sort of hard numbers. It was okay. We saw on one hand this virtual office that was ultimately competing against in real life, working together, which we would never be able to surpass. There was an inherent wall. No matter how much we built a better virtual office, it couldn't be better than being next to your teammates, enjoying work together, collaborating in real life. So like, okay, there's an inherent cap there with the presentations idea. We had an infinite number of things that were like, we can make this better. PowerPoint is stuck in this rigid format. It is not the most expressive tool. Vast majority of the people know PowerPoint but suck at it. There's so much more we could do there. So we end up going all in. But this is after six months of parallel pathing both. It wasn't like we actually knew for sure. We're like, actually, we know our ambition, but let's give both a shot. So then we started working on this and that's like, okay, that's great. So we did that for a bit, but then you're like, you start building this thing and you get some early users. Many of them are your friends telling, hey, this is an interesting thing. And then you go look at the data, they don't come back to using the product. You're like, okay, well, not good at all. Let's keep iterating. We keep iterating all the way until August of 2022. So again, this is a couple of years in now. We were like, okay, we're going to do our first launch. We're going to launch on product time. We're going to launch our public beta. So no longer will it be like a wait list or private. We're going to launch our public beta and we launched our own product on and actually did really well. We got product of the day, product of the week, product of the month. See the surge in usage and signups and you feel kind of good about yourself. And then the new signups start plateauing or they start going down. It's like, okay, you're still getting new signups, but you have not earned word of mouth. People are not telling other people you do not have organic virality, so you can keep on getting new startups or you're never going to have sort of exponential growth. Right. And so at that point we knew, okay, there's some interesting building blocks here that we've done. But is this standalone? We are not going to succeed as a business if this is just continues to be the case. There is no amount of like incremental improvement, improvements we're going to do to turn us into a company that has product market fit. That's the moment where we went, let's go back to the drawing board. Three month sprint of engineering AI into the entire creation flow. Relaunching our AI launch in March of 2023. And that's where things. That was the inflection point. All of a sudden it took us like eight months to get to 60,000 signups. And then the day we launched, we got like 5,000 signups, then like 10,000 signups a day, then like 20,000 signups a day, Then like 50,000 signups a day. And none of that was marketing. It was all word of mouth, people using the product. And that's the moment, you know, okay, we have something here that can just continue to grow organically without us even touching anything else.

That's insane. When people go through the idea maze for a long time, there's a natural sense of skepticism that emerges because of course, like, you've been trying to find product market fit for a while.

Yeah.

When you saw the first day of signups, were you like, man, too good to be trained?

Totally. I mean, the first month you're just like, oh, come on, what is this? No way. And then you keep checking the dashboards. Of course, every like five seconds you're like, yeah, okay, well, maybe we're onto something. This is like, okay, you know, this is. But yeah. You're so paranoid. You're so paranoid.

Did the team stick with you? Did everybody on the team stick with you? All the way through?

Yeah, all the way through.

That's amazing.

I mean, it really feels like, you know, within the first couple years we so going back to that, even just that specific moment of time. Right. Like two weeks before our AI launch and this was sort of a bet the company moment. This had to succeed. SVB collapse happened. All of our money, most of our money was Silicon Valley bank. So it was like I had to call a team meeting. And this is going back to the fun part. Of being at the stage was we're in the two bedroom converted two bedroom apartment. So I had to call everybody into one of the bedrooms and we're like, okay, well, everyone's reading the news svb. Our money is totally at risk and we had to decide are we going to stay heads down. We had the launch date already set, like three months in advance. Or we're going to stick to this launch date or we're going to be like, oh, let's try to figure things out. We'll push this out a little bit. And basically we had the moment. It's like we're sticking to the launch date. I don't know how we're going to make payroll, but I will find a way. I don't know if we're going to talk to our investors. We're going to figure something out and we're not changing the launch date. I think those are the moments where everyone can see like, we are all in this together. The level of resilience and trust you build and moments like that, you can't really manufacture. It just happens. And through that I was just like, I'd never seen a team work harder. We got through the launch and it was just like massive feeling of this is super rewarding. We are doing something that is special. We were doing something together and it was literally all hands on deck to make it happen.

It's insane. I'm very happy for you. It's just awesome.

Appreciate it.

There is a I guess now viral tweet that you had about basically all the VC advice that sucks. Is it fair to characterize it like that?

I would say it's that a lot of people take maybe interpret certain VC advice the wrong way. And it's not that.

By the way, I also think a lot of VC advice sucks. So you don't have to play coy with me.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh. So let's just say there is a lot of bad advice and there's a.

List that you made. Can we go through it together? Do you remember your like, do you remember your top hits?

Oh, man, there is. There's so much. I mean a lot of it is predicated on, well, so I even just go with like the foundational stuff, right? Which is when you think, just go back to product market fit. Most people rush this thing of if you don't have strong word of mouth in your product, like don't, don't move on to the next stage of scaling. Like you need to be so patient in that part of it and be Honest with yourself. Is this a product that has a chance of growing organically? And that is the tailwind you need to do everything else. If you have that, everything else becomes easier. You cannot fool yourself into thinking like, hey, we have okay distribution and people are using it and it's super churny, but we'll incrementally figure it out. No, don't do that. Don't worry about anything else until you have strong word of mouth. And if I could just tell people one thing. That's the thing. Yeah. YC trope is absolutely accurate. Build something people want because that's the foundation. Then once you have that as a foundation, I always think about strategy as then you can actually build a great business around that. Strategy is building the business around a product people love. If you don't have that first piece and you've tricked yourself into thinking of that first piece, everything else is just a waste of time, in my opinion. It's a waste of time, it's a waste of money. So do that first. And once you have that, then you can think about all the things that matter. It's like, okay, what type of team do I need to build to go after this opportunity? And that is for you to answer like, I think you can be a much smaller team if you have strong word of mouth growth. And so that's where I do think we've benefited from things that are already organically working. Well, we can be super deliberate about which teams we hire for and how we hire for them. This is where you set the super high bar for. We only only have A plus players. Right? Or a players. Like, you cannot lower the bar in hiring. The mantra of hiring painfully slowly, even when we felt like we hit product market fit. I didn't open 50 headcount. We didn't open any headcount. We stuck with the roles that were already open and we incrementally added from there and we asked the team, where are we feeling the most pain? And then we started doing it. And like, oftentimes the pain was maybe stuff that wasn't even on the engineering side. It was stuff that I was trying to figure out on the marketing side. And before I hire a marketing team, I need to know how hard this thing is. Right? Like, I've never done growth marketing at any level of scale. So let me try doing the job. Let me see what it takes. Like, let me know what great looks like before I try to hire the first growth marketer. And so I did that for like six to 12 months before we even entertained opening that role. And was it easy? No. Was it painful? Absolutely. But did I learn a lot? Yes. I went from zero to one in terms of knowledge over that six to 12 months doing everything myself. All the talking to creators, all the working with agencies, all the thinking about like, what is the right way to tell Gamma's story. And I think that's what's it was, what was needed. I could have delegated that to somebody for sure. People told me like, okay, you should stop doing this thing. I could have done that. But I don't think that would have been the right way for us to have approached it. And I don't think anybody would have cared as much about building a brand and the way we interact with customers, the way that I could have cared about it.

Yeah, but if you're not doing, if you're, let's just say if you choose to do growth marketing, what are you not doing?

I'm delegating the rest of the product and the development side to my two co founders. So I'm leaning on them heavily. I'm not going to be in the weeds on every product. Roadmap, prioritization. That's my co founder John. I'm not going to be in the weeds on looking at our AWS bill or AI bills. That's going to be co founder James. I'm going to be spending a ton of time with our existing customers. So we have like a separate Slack workspace for what we call the Gambassadors or power users. I live in Gam or live in our Gambassador Slack. I'm talking to them on a daily basis. I'm spending a ton of time with creators, talking to them, jumping on zoom calls, meeting them in person. And I'm thinking a ton about our brand and like how do we want to tell our story?

What else, what else is on that list of shitty advice?

So I mean the rest of it all is all around like, like scaling and hiring. And so like who do you hire?

What is the advice that you get and what do you disagree with?

I think the advice you get is like as soon as you hit product market fit, you blitzscale this thing, right? It's hire as fast as you can, go after the market. Don't squander it. And I think there's definitely, yeah, you don't want to squander it. And you should be super paranoid. You should take hiring super seriously. And so I think that's important. But it doesn't mean you have to double Triple the size of your team in a year. So I think that's stuff that you just as a founder, you need to care deeply about. And then it goes back to if whatever your hiring strategy is, can you maintain that a level bar? I think if you're trying to hire 100 people, founders should be honest with themselves. They say they want to hire a players. Can you do that if you're hiring 100 people? Is that possible? We still interview every founder, still interview every single person coming through the door. So we keep that bar high. There's been tons of plenty of like talented people that we don't let through the door because maybe they don't pass the culture interview. And so like when we think about raising, keeping that bar high for us, it's only been possible because we haven't been trying to hire 100 people in a few months. You know, so those are things that I think it can be hard to quantify but can really dramatically change the nature of the company. When I think about the types of, you know, managers or like leadership we've hired, we've hired this, this what we call like the player coach, like going back to like sports analogy is like, you know, certain sports, like they move super fast and so, you know, it's hard for the coach to always get the players in the right position or call the right play. Right. So you have roles like the linebacker, that's essentially a player coach where if the coach can't actually see what's happening, linebacker can make some call adjustments on the field and that happens. The play happens so fast. You know, the best linebackers can do that really, really well. We have something in Gamma where most of our management is a player coach. They are able to do the job themselves oftentimes. For instance, if you're an engineering, you're still shipping code, but then you can also coach and mentor those around you. And especially within this AI era, you can also help define which AI tools the team might be using or should be using. So I think that allows you to be much closer to the work. But that's only really possible when again you have this sort of flat team, flat organization, and you don't have inherently a ton of layers that you're trying to fit into that structure.

In our top eight portfolio companies, across five key functions, whatever it is, sales, marketing, finance, engineering, product, let's just say.

Yeah.

38 out of 40, maybe 39 out of 40 of those executives that run that function are reporting to the CEO for the first time. This is in our Top companies. Oh, wow, that's a cool stuff. And if you listen to maybe the Ramp, the Ramp CEO or if you listen to what Pedro did at Brex where he basically removed three layers between him and the director and they made the director his CTO and they did that across the company or the ramp. Eric says at Ramp. Like basically he got so many executive hires wrong that he's like, I'm just not going to hire executives anymore. I'm just going to promote from within. My point is there seems to be this really horror opposite reaction to an experienced leader. I don't know how else to say that. We went so far in one direction of the John Doer days where Google hires a CEO and the founder should not be the leader. To now so many folks are actually doing the opposite where they're like, experience is overrated. I just care about their taste in the work and the function. I will promote them and hope that they become leaders. It's an interesting like hard opposite reaction to what it used to be.

Yeah, I mean, I think so just unpack some of that. I do think, I don't think experience is overrated, but I do think maybe management experience might be overrated. Like you don't need to be 10 years manager to be a great manager. You don't need to have 10 years of management experience to be a great manager, but you do need to know how to do the job. I think like anybody that's managing a team like they should be able to go deep on any variety of topics and be able to really serve that coach or mentorship ability to really step in and see that team. But some people are just, I think if you have a flat org and again more of a player coach style model where someone's still doing the work, then it's inherently much easier. They're still close to it. They don't need to guess what other teammates are doing. They're seeing it and then they can actually make. I guess that's where the management and the advice you're giving maybe doesn't fall on deaf ears because it's coming from somebody that you respect and you're seeing in the trenches. I think that model, at least for us fits well. And I think to your point, yeah, maybe we had swung the pendulum too far the other way, which is like you bring in someone that is just there to be the people manager and they happen to have the Rolodex where they can hire all their people they've worked with before and assuming that's just going to work by copy and pasting. I think that era probably is over.

Yeah, but isn't it tempting to hire some? I'm just making up an example, a CTO or VP of engineering that has all of these engineers that knows the top 10 cracked engineers that they can bring with them. Isn't that where the temptation really lies?

It is, it is. And I think that's still something worthy of exploring. If that person really still felt like they fit well, then, yeah, maybe that is the right hire. Yeah, but you know, it's obvious. Often, oftentimes, obviously it's not black and white. There's gonna be a set of things you're looking at and you're just trying to make the best decision, you know, on the spot there.

On the work trial question or the thing that you brought up about, like most people do a work trial for a couple months for a lot of people.

Yeah.

If you're a talented engineer working at Meta or something or, I don't know, OpenAI. I don't know, just pick your company making a lot of money. Why? I understand why you want a work trial.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You wanna see what does it feel like to spend a couple months with them. They also probably want to see what does it feel like to spend a couple months with you. But in order to do that, I'm pretty sure they have to leave their other job.

Totally. Yeah. It rarely works. I think for a lot of these sort of IC roles. And frankly, even with us, we got lucky with timing on certain things. People were maybe in between roles and so we could say, hey, why don't. We don't know exactly what role you'll play. Let's have you in this role and then over time we'll see what fits best. And so. So I would say it's something you should explore. By no means can it be every single hire. I think not enough people assume that's even an option. Most people just assume it's higher or nothing. And I think oftentimes, yeah, that may not be the case. And if you can, especially for management level roles or people that could be running a team, that's a pretty important. That's an important function. If you can, if you have the luxury of doing a work trial, do a work trial.

What percentage of your work trials do you think have converted it to full time? All of them.

Yeah. And I think part of it is obviously we set a high bar for the work trial. The other is if you're in the seat and assuming you set the high bar Then it's like you're helping define the role to a certain extent too. Right. If it is collaborative, then it should feel like, hey, this is something we can work out. And I think most of the people we even entertain the work trial with are people that are, are very open minded to doing things a different way. I'm very transparent with the player, coach model, the way we operate. Lean team, tiny team. And so I think people are opting into that knowing that there's a certain level of uncertainty. I think by nature of that, maybe it's almost like a self fulfilling prophecy. It's like, okay, they're going to make it work because they know what they're stepping into.

Do you not get caught up in. So you've raised what, an A, A seed? An A C?

Didn't an A. Yeah.

C'd in an A if it's not already happening, which I know it is. But if it's not already happening, after this you will have more Series B investors knocking down your door than you know what to do with. And it's very weird in Silicon Valley when you're a great company like Gamma is, what ends up happening is like it's very seductive to go into the venture ecosystem. You meet all the fancy partners, they take you on the dinners, on the boats, on the things. All the things.

All the things.

And it's nice, like they're nice things. And by the way, they're just gassing you up the whole time.

Yeah.

And they're telling you like, and by the way, not for nothing, but it feels good because like you're, you want every inch of validation that you can get because you've been too like tooth and nail clawing to get to this point.

Totally.

So like, of course, like it's human nature to like enjoy hearing that other people think that your baby is as beautiful as you do. They may or may not believe it for what it's worth, but at least they're gonna say it to you.

Totally.

And they're gonna do all the nice things. Like you have really resisted that game quite effectively.

Yeah.

But do you agree that that seduction is there?

Absolutely. I think this is the challenge, I think for a lot of maybe first time founders or earlier founders and just their career in general is like those all feel great. They build up your ego and they feel really, really good. And it's not like they're trying to necessarily be doing anything malicious. That's just the way things work. Right. And I think when you're early in your career or Just early and just figuring things out. You may not even know what you want. You may not even know what your definition of success is. And for us, it's different. Right? I'm doing this because this is what I want to be. My life's worth work. And this is what I want to be building for as long as I possibly can. And when I think about success and what's rewarding to me, I have two little ones at home. When I get to work on something and my son is sitting on my lap and he's playing with Gamma with me, and we're making like, a comic book or something, that in my mind is like winning. That's success. Because I am enjoying that moment. For me, when I first learned PowerPoint, like, my eyes lit up because, like, oh, man, I'm creating something out of nothing. And I'm seeing that same light in his eyes. Doing that with Gamma, that's amazing. That is winning. And so I want to do that for as long as possible. If I felt like raising a mega round or taking all this cash would help us get us faster there or help us guarantee that destination, yeah, maybe I would do it. But I don't think that's ever been the case. And I think founders need to ask themselves, is more money in the bank going to really help you build an enduring business?

Yeah. With the way that money is flying around in the Valley right now and how crazy valuations are, you could get a stupid valuation and take a lot less dilution. We're playing musical chairs and the music is going to stop at some point. I don't know when. Nobody knows. Could be in a year, it could be in five years, it could be in a day. It doesn't matter. We don't know. But when there's this much money and this much demand, is it not tempting to be like, like, all right, would I sleep better at night knowing that If I put 50 million in the bank with relatively little dilution, Relatively. Is there not a temptation there?

There definitely is. And that's the calculation you're trying to do. Right. But is it 50 or is it like 500 million? I think by default, a lot of founders will assume, let's just take the most money at the max valuation and I'll worry about the rest later. I think worrying about the rest later is just a recipe for disaster. So, yeah, taking the 50, that probably is a smart move, and that could be the smart move. And you should ask yourself, is that the right number? But if you're always maximizing if you're always going to this, like, I'm going to maximize everything, I think that's the slippery slope because you can to your point, you can always go for a higher valuation. If it's competitive, someone else is going to bid it up. If you want to run it like an auction, you can. And then you're going to be left with hundreds of millions in the bank and like, what are you going to do with it? I think the consequences for first time founders are, are ones that are hard to calculate. You have 500 million in the bank. What do you do building your business? What do your employees think? When you have that much money, what are you using it for? Oftentimes they use it to go hire the 500 people immediately. And so the temptation flips from taking the money to spending the money. And when you start spending the money, you can spend it on so many different things and you can instantly lose focus and you can instantly lose the desire to build. And you have to be honest with yourself. Is that going to be helpful or hurtful for where you are as a company? And I think more founders should just be patient and thinking about or just trying to answer that for themselves.

Were your kids born post Gamma being born?

Daughter was born right before Gamma was born and son is a little bit older. Yeah. So he's three years at the.

Going back to where the conversation started about how hard you and your team are working.

Yeah.

How do you. Do you feel guilt ever? Like, do you like, how do you balance the responsibility that you feel as a CEO, which, you know, it's like a pie eating contest. The reward for it is more pie versus, you know, like being dad.

Yeah, it's a tough one. I mean, I try to spend as much time as I can with them. Right. And I think with that just means there's sacrifices. You're not doing a whole lot of other things. You don't have fun, hobbies you have hang out with kids, which is great and is rewarding, but you give up a lot of other things and I think that's worth it for me going back to what you think success is, if you feel like you're on that path, then yeah, you shed everything else that's not allowing you to succeed in your own definition of success.

Do you have to do anything intentionally with your partner kids so that the pie eating contest doesn't go in perpetuity like that you can create some space?

To a certain extent I feel lucky. I mean, my wife works from home so she, you know, she has she has, she is able to work remotely. And that means like, way less pressure for me to have to do like pickups or like drop offs. So like, I think we're just trying our best to like, fit this, you know, infinitely complex puzzle into the right places where we live really close to my parents. So, like, you know, having grandparents around, you know, they're retired, they can help with the kids, is that also helps. Like, you gotta like, figure out what can you do, what's in your control to optimize for the things you matter that matter to you. And it changes. Like when, you know, my daughter was just born, like, it was actually pretty tough. She, when she was 1 years old, she, when she turned 1, she caught this super rare disease. And that throws you into a whole different spiral, right? Like, obviously your priorities as a parent change as a human change. And so you're trying to navigate that. And so, you know, what startups have taught me is like, you just gotta be adaptable. You know, like every year, every day is gonna be different. You shouldn't assume it's gonna be the same. And if you have that mindset, then at least you know you're gonna be anticipating change and just trying to go with it.

Do you ever feel guilty? Guilty? Guilty, yeah. Do you ever feel guilty?

No.

Guilty that you're not being enough of a husband, father or CEO?

I don't. I mean, I feel like I do give it my all. And I think, you know, for me it's been. And even before starting the company, you have to have conversation. Like sitting down with my wife is like, are we getting into this? This is not my decision. It's a decision we have together. Right? Like, I cannot do this without your support. And when I mentioned it, she's like, 100%, you should do it. Right? Like, there's no hesitation. And if she's giving me that support, then I can do everything I need to do to make sure Gamma's successful. If there was resistance there or hesitation, then there's a conversation, right? Then you have to be like, okay, am I giving up the right things here? Maybe I should just go get another job instead. But you start with open and honest conversations. And if you have a partner or whoever else is involved in those decisions, you got to have that well ahead of ever even thinking about fundraising. We had those conversations basically as soon as the last startup I was at was acquired. And that was eight or nine months before we even tried to raise money. You got to have those conversations first and then raise money later. If you're not having that first, then obviously it's the wrong sequencing.

Yeah, I did the same. That was the starting block before anything.

Starting block?

Yeah. Are we going to do this? And I think her reaction was, yes, we are. But even if I said no, would that change how you felt?

Like, okay, all right.

They kind of know what they.

Fortunately, you don't have to worry about that.

That all makes sense to me. Let's just say, when the kids have a recital and you have a deliverable, what do you do?

It's a good question. Well, oftentimes the deliverable is probably something I've set as the deadline. Right. And so what will typically happen is I'll go to the recital or right now, my kids. My son's in a lot of soccer, so I'll go watch a soccer game, and I'll just stay up late to make sure I hit the deliverable. Right. If it's due the next day, I stay up as late as possible or as needed to get it done. And that's.

That's.

You know, that is. That is literally the day to day, week to week. That. That is what I'm. What I'm going through.

Yeah. And when you go to the soccer game.

Yeah.

Like, honest, honestly, can you actually watch the soccer game, like, or is your mind going crazy?

It's literally like, anytime there's a timeout or something, I'm checking my phone. But when my son is playing 100% all in, I'm also, like, super competitive. So, like, when I'm watching them play, I almost, like, it's like my brain just switches to different gear. Like, I have to for better or wor. And just, like, locked in and probably screaming too loud and all those things. But, yeah, I think it is, like, switch on, like, okay, work and then switch off. Like, you're kind of doing. You're bouncing back and forth, but when.

He'S not on the field, you're like, forget about.

I'm usually. Yeah, unfortunately, yeah. His teammates probably aren't the biggest fans of me, but it's just like, okay, well, I got to check this slack. I got to respond to this thing. So.

I appreciate you doing this, man. I was really excited to do this with you. Yeah.

Appreciate it.

I find you unique and distinct in the Valley, and it's refreshing, and I'm excited to. I'm just excited to see, like, how these decisions play out. Yeah, I'm, like, fascinated.

Thanks, man. Yeah, I mean, I feel like, if anything, you know, this is one of the things where If I can give anything back to the next sort of wave of founders is like, you know, play your own game. You're doing something that's incredibly hard. Every step of the way. You'll be getting good advice and bad advice. You kind of got to learn to kind of figure out yourself. And then, yeah, when it comes back to I always think about your luck. Surface areas is really just two things. It has two dimensions. It has people and has time. Surround yourself with amazing people, people that give you energy, share the same values, hopefully the same ambition, and then give yourself enough time to win. That's the basics. If you can do that, well, I feel like a lot of people can succeed.

Oh, it's really well said. I close with the same question. The first Are you hiring?

We are hiring. Check out our careers page Gamma app. We definitely are hiring.

When you hear the word grit, what do you think of?

I think of my parents. Honestly. Determination, coming here with no money in the bank, starting trying to build a life where their family could have a better life than them. And honestly, I just picture my mom.

It's amazing. Thank you, man.

Thanks for having me.

That's it for now. If you like the episode, please leave us a review or go back into the archives where we've done more than 200 episodes with some fantastic folks. This podcast is a Kleiner Perkins production and I'm Juven. Thanks for listening.