Gamma's 50 Million User Playbook | Grant Lee, Co-founder and CEO

We had to resist the temptation of just serving one icp. Well, we needed to have a pretty broad swath of users and the way we sort of acknowledge that was like rather than focus on Personas, we focus on pain points. And for us those universal pain points are like it's super hard to get what's in your head into a format that others can visualize and that's a universal pain point. How do we do that? Well, that's what we're focused on.

Welcome to the Peel. I'm your host Turner Novak, founder of Banana Capital. Today's guest is Grant Lee, co founder and CEO of Gamma your the AI powered presentation platform. Building the anti PowerPoint there's gotta be.

A Better Way Slides is a format created almost 40 years ago.

As someone who's made a lot of decks, it's refreshing how Gamma thinks about slides as words and narrative.

It becomes challenging when the medium you're working in forces you to instantly have to design. At the same time, the storytelling, the structure are competing against how do I visually format and put this in a layout?

Gamma has extremely impressive metrics under the hood, growing from 0 to 50 million users and $50 million in ARR. With only 30 employees, they've had zero employee attrition and have a negative lifetime burn rate, meaning they have more cash in the bank than they've raised.

Constraints begets creativity. Forcing yourself to raise a bunch of money almost inherently means you're going to take a more lax approach.

We talk about Gamma's generous approach to hiring, why a quarter of the team is designers.

If someone rushes immediately into the solution.

It'S usually a flag how they rebuilt their entire product to be AI native. And after ChatGPT launched, we gave ourselves.

This four month sprint idea of we're going to do our first AI launch.

And how Gamma uses AI internally.

Every corner of the company tries to deploy AI.

A quick thank you to Animitra and Garav at Afore Shiona, Hustle Fund, Evan at South Park Commons and VAs at Excel for helping brainstorm great topics for Grant. A reminder. I publish episodes of the Peel every week with a back catalog of 100 episodes exploring the world's greatest startup stories just like this one. Tune in over the next few weeks for conversations with the founders of WordPress, Handshake and Intercom. Before we talk to Grant, I'm excited for the new presenting sponsor of appeal. Ramp time is our most valuable resource and it's impossible to get more of unless you're one of over 40,000 companies using Ramp, it's the easy to use corporate card bill payments, accounting and expense management platform. The product is simple enough for startups, powerful enough for large enterprises. And the Ramp team is known for being one of the fastest shipping in tech. Issue cards, get spend visibility and control policies, manage approvals, vendors, travel and close your books 8 times faster all in one place. Stop chasing receipts. Make your expenses submit themselves. Go to ramp.comthepeal and get $250 just for signing up. That's ramp.comthepealth Time is money. Save both with Ramp. This episode is brought to you by numerl. Numeral is the end to end platform for sales tax and compliance. They handle registration, ongoing filings, and their API provides sales tax rates wherever you need them with all the integrations you need. Numero sports over 1,000 customers in both the US and globally and they pride themselves on White glove High touch customer service. Plus they guarantee their work and they'll cover the difference if they mess anything up. The Fresh Apple Fundraise raising an $18 million Series A from my friend Chathan Puttagunta at Benchmark. If you want to put your sales tax on AutoPilot, check out numerl@numeralhq.com that's n u m e r a l h q.com for the end to end platform for sales tax and compliance. Thank you numerl and Ramp. And now let's talk to Grant. Grant, welcome to the show.

Hey, thanks for having me.

Yeah, I'm excited to do this. I kind of wanted to start off just really quick for people who don't know what is Gamma.

Yeah. So we're, I guess the easiest way to describe it is we're trying to build the anti PowerPoint. You know, PowerPoint's been the sort of language of business. People use it to present, share their ideas. And we're trying to build a tool that kind of fundamentally changes how you might approach sharing your ideas.

So this is maybe a rhetorical question for somebody who knows what Gamma is, for somebody who doesn't know and is not familiar or why is that a big deal? Because you think PowerPoint is just some slides and pretty straightforward.

Yeah. So I think with PowerPoint and many of the sort of traditional tools, you get dropped into this canvas and you as a person, you're forced to be a designer, you're kind of moving pixels around, resizing boxes, aligning, formatting. And I think the vast majority of us aren't visual designers. And so we want to take a fundamentally different approach, which is rather than being design first, what if it could be design later or design last and much, much more lean into content first. You start with your ideas, we help you shape them. And so we want to just change that approach because we think it actually aligns better with how most people actually want to create content.

And it sounds like people are liking it and using it. I know there's some public stuff that you've been kind of talked about about how well the company's doing, but what sort of like current state of the business?

Yeah, so we, you know, we passed 50 million users. 50 million ARR. Been profitable. You know, I think a lot of what we pride ourselves is in trying to scale the company really efficiently too. And so that inherently means you need to have, you know, some pocket of users that love your product that are pulling you into the market or pulling the market towards you. And we feel lucky that, you know, we're still early, but I've been able to achieve some, some great early traction.

Yeah, I think I saw that you're profitable. You, I think this was in an article that you have more in the bank than you've raised. That's always a good kind of like a humble brag in like VC backed startup world.

Yeah, it's like it's a stat that doesn't get maybe shared very often which is lifetime, lifetime negative net burn more money in the bank than you've ever raised. Which yeah, feels good.

Yeah, I know we're going to talk a little bit more about that, but I think the thing I thought was most interesting is you have about 30 employees and like how do you be so efficient with such a small team? Because I feel like everyone that's kind of come back in vogue. Like I feel like 21, like the metrics that KPISP would lead with is like we have X employees and you have pretty small team for kind of how far you've gotten it. What do you think is kind of the secret to doing that?

I attribute it a lot back to just how the company was formed. So we started off with three co founders, but then we had kind of a founding team of seven and we all came from a company called Optimizely. We had worked together for five plus years then and now it's been basically almost a decade working together and you know, really just having that foundation of trust but also very complimentary skill sets. So three co founders. You know, my two co founders, John and James. One was the VP of product at Optimize, the other was A senior engineer and then myself, coming more from an operating background, was basically leading finance and strategy there. And so, you know, I think each of us kind of brings different skill sets to the table and then we look at the broader team. You know, we had, you know, amongst our first seven, we had our head of design, we had a front end engineer, we had two back end engineers. And so we had everything we needed to kind of, you know, get the early versions of the product moving in the right direction. And then since then we've kind of continued to layer on and I think that just means that, you know, when you think about having the sort of leanest team possible, you need all the sort of positions filled and you have good, you know, each one of those need to be filled with someone that's, that's obviously highly capable, can move fast and, and then the more that you can bring together that trust factor, people that work together, that have that muscle memory that allows you to also just navigate much quickly than you could otherwise.

So I saw specifically the first hire you made. I don't know if this was a part of the seven person founding team or just the fourth after the co founders was you hired a designer, which I guess is kind of, maybe you'd say that's ironic with your like an AI driven design company, there should be no designers, maybe there should be a bunch of designers. So why hire a designer as the first person?

Yeah, I feel like we've, you know, others, when they've looked at kind of the makeup of our company, have always said that we've, you know, it seems like we've over invested in, you know, design because you know, almost a quarter of our team is, are product designers. Oh wow. And you know, when you compare that to many other organizations, like that's just not the same makeup. And we always believe like that was the right investment, especially early on. Zach, who is, to your point, who you're mentioning here, our first sort of design hire, he's our head of design. He is so gifted in many different ways, but what he brings to the table is this ability to really explore many different ideas and help us kind of understand the different directions we might pursue. And I think only through kind of prototyping and like iterating with customer feedback and doing that like relentlessly over a long time horizon, can you finally get to a point where like the product can be useful, can be valuable. And we knew that we needed that on day one. Like we couldn't make progress without that sort of core component as kind of A strength of the team. And so, yeah, it's been awesome having on board since almost basically day one from the company foundation formation and then since then having him be able to build out a team around him.

I think there's this concept of kind of a full stack designer where they can not only design, but also code and build stuff. And has that been a big piece of it too?

Yeah, 100%, I think. You know, and this is becoming maybe more obvious now just in this era of, you know, AI and all the advancements here. But I do think in many ways this is the sort of the rise of the generalist. And whether it's, you know, full stack designers or a PM that knows how to code, or, you know, a marketer that can do both the research as well as like going in and actually synthesizing that, coming up with a strategy and actually then deploying that through different campaigns. Like, all that's becoming more and more important for like the average person to be able to play a variety of roles and not to be necessarily siloed as a specialist. And so, yeah, absolutely. That sort of full stack design has been a designer like someone like Zach who can code, who is also visual and can also sit down with the customer and like deeply empathize with that feedback. That's a superpower. And bringing that all together just gives you as a company a huge advantage.

Is there a trick for just hiring people, people like that? Like, how do you just kind of screen and make sure when you're adding to the team that like, oh, this person is good at understanding the customer, can also build the stuff for them, can make it look good, is a good boss and manager and like, can help us recruitment. Like, just like, how do you find these just full stack generous people?

Yeah, there's, there's like this intangible that you. You sort of look for, which is someone that's just continuously learning, like they're hungry to learn. You know, oftentimes what you'll find is like someone, as they progress in their career, they. Their desire to learn new things, like, quickly diminishes.

Oh yeah, I definitely get caught in that rut sometimes. I'm like, constantly. Yeah, that's part of the doing this podcast is like, okay, what can. Who can I meet? Just like a new industry, like the episode. By the time this comes out, it'll be a couple weeks ago, but I had Sanjit Biswas at Samsara and they do kind of like Internet of things, physical sensors and devices for transportation. And it's Just kind of interesting topic, know nothing about it, feel like I learned a lot from it. So just like you get, you just got to expose yourself to it.

Yeah, you got to expose yourself. And some people just are constantly trying to stretch their own sort of thinking and imagination. And that comes with learning new tools, new technique, techniques, new frameworks. And when you talk to someone like they're the energy they express, the way they talk about things, that they're expressing these new things with like a level of excitement. And you can even ask them to teach you about some of these concepts, like how deep can they go? I think those are all signs of someone that is just continuously learning no matter where they are in their career, whether they're fresh out of college or there's someone that's, you know, 10 plus years, you want to feel that energy. And someone that really just enjoys kind of teaching, like if they, if they know, if they know the concept well enough to teach, it means that they're probably armed with the right tools to build a, you know, take a ton of ownership, high agency, move fast. And so those are absolutely the things you're trying to kind of suss out during the interview process.

How would you structure that? I know we're getting way off script here already, but how would you suss out in an interview like figuring out like what kind of things would you ask and kind of figure out where to like dig deeper on?

Yeah, I mean there's maybe a few common techniques. Like one is just asking them to literally teach you something. You know, some, some, something that they're passionate about could be completely, not even work related. Just have them teach you about something they're passionate about and, and see kind of how they articulate those things. Is it well structured? Have they even thinking about this for a long time? Do they do a good job of getting you excited and like understanding and appreciating the topic. And then the other is like to ask them to talk about, you know, a challenge that they've experienced and kind of overcome. And so oftentimes you'll, you'll have somebody that can describe the situation with some level of humility and be able to actually go deep into understanding the problem. If someone rushes immediately into the solution, it's usually a flag. It's like, okay, they're able to really quickly jump to something and kind of highlight how great they were. But a lot of what greatness looks like actually is you encounter a problem, you realize that's actually the surface level problem. When you dig 10 levels deeper and someone that can actually articulate how they understood what the true problem was and then went about trying to fix the problem and then realizing, hey, actually the initial solution maybe wasn't the right solution. I went back and iterated, like, those are the things you really want to hear about. And especially if it's something that's super challenging in that person's career, like, they should be able to go into depth. If they aren't able to, it just means that again, they probably are like a surface level thinker. They haven't gone to the extent of like really learning and trying to go deep on anything.

How do you, as a candidate, I don't know if you've ever been through that in your process, but like, how do you do that without, I don't know, making yourself, like, setting yourself up in the wrong way or setting yourself in the right way, if that makes sense.

Yeah, I mean that the tricky thing with like, interviews in general, like, you know, some people get. End up becoming really polished because they're just, you know, they practice a ton. They become good interviewers, I think, in general, like, the more, you know, I've done interviews myself, it's just like when you talk to people, you want it to feel authentic and you can kind of start getting a glimpse of like, you know, how much are they trying to have the sort of, you know, the PC version of the story or like, you know, trying to make themselves look good. And we all know the truth is somewhere going to be somewhere in the, in the middle and you want to be able to hear some texture to the story. It's not just all always great. There's some areas where there's, you know, there's wrinkles and you got to go in and be able to have someone that's willing to appreciate that and go into detail. Otherwise, you know, they're just holding back a bunch. And if that's the case, it's like hard to trust whether or not, you know, how much of it is being honest and authentic.

Yeah, I feel like a lot of people kind of forget. Maybe if you're just like a younger, like a student maybe, and you're interviewing for your first job or something, you kind of forget, like this whole interview thing. We kind of make a big deal about it at certain, maybe phases of your career, but at the end of the day, like 99% of the time is just sitting there working, talking with people like, and no one knows the answer. Like, I'm sure you don't sit there with the team like oh, here's my polished, like, researched response to this thing. You're like, I don't know, let's just figure it out or something. So totally.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, a lot of it is. Yeah. Passing the elevator test. Like, could you stand. Standing with them? You know, and like, you know, is this someone you gain energy from? And so if it's, if it's a person that all they say is, like, about, you know, how great they are, it's, it's hard to imagine you wanting to spend a lot of time with. But if it's someone that is genuinely curious about the world, that's like, that's great because that means you can, there'll be an infinite number of things you can work on with this person and you're never going to, you know, end up being in a place where there's actually not enough work for this person to work on.

Yeah. And I kind of want to talk a little bit more about the Gamma product AI, some of the stuff you're kind of thinking about and using. So what's been maybe the most interesting use case that you've seen for the Gamma product? Just, I'm assuming you have some stuff off the top of your head.

But yeah, I mean, the initial wedge for the product was just a way for people to create presentations very simply and quickly. And so what you'll end up, you know, seeing is a lot of people creating a lot of external facing content. So if they need to share something with a customer, a client, a partner, and that could be in the form of like a pitch deck, a proposal, you know, some sort of onboarding or training, those are all things that, you know, traditionally are kind of a pain in the butt to try to create in, in, you know, traditional tools like PowerPoint and not only just create, but also then edit and refine and like then actually share and get feedback on. And so we're just trying to make it that simple for people to create those forms of content where all that could be done very fluidly, could be shared. You can iterate on it. Editing isn't a pain in the butt. And you know, get your, get your stuff out there quickly.

Yeah, I think going back to kind of the beginning, I know your kind of initial insight was basically, it's not design, it's like writing like, it's like playing like that's how most people like, when I, when I was kind of like, I was listening to some other podcasts you'd done and I was reflecting, I was like, yeah, you're Right. Whenever I make a PowerPoint, like, I just kind of write it out first, even if it's in the first slide. I'll just make some bullet points that are the title of each slide, and then maybe you'll expand on the bullet point and go a little bit deeper. But that's. Historically, I've always done it.

Totally. Yeah. I think that's most of us. We want to have some general structure or outline that we have in mind, maybe the story that you're trying to tell so that there is some cohesion between what is the main message and how do you then build upon that. And so, yeah, it becomes challenging when the medium you're working in forces you to instantly have to design at the same time, because then those two things are at odds. The storytelling, the structure are competing against, like, how do I visually format and put this in a layout that puts it in a way that's consumable by the actual reader or the person you're presenting to? And so those are things we're trying to remove that sort of friction or that tension and making it much more fluid in the process. Yeah.

Cause I think about when I do the deck for my fund, when I'm fundraising, my designer made it in Figma like, a year or two ago. And so I just kind of use what she gave me and I'll try to add a new slide that's sort of in between some things. And I'm, like, kind of redesigning it and kind of swapping what's on what's live. And I'm, like, kind of trying to fit it into the structure that's already there. So I can definitely see how that. And so the way I'm just thinking about how this might play out with Gamma, do I basically type in, like, a chat box and I can just say, like, hey, can you split this from two slides into three? Or, like, can you change the color? Can you add a chart? Like, how does that usually play out when I'm interacting with it?

Yeah, totally. I mean, I think there's. We want eventually to be just so many different entry points. Because sometimes it's like you have, you know, just a topic and you just want, like, give me something. So I have a rough template. I can start with a really good first draft. That's fine. Other times you have maybe you've done some research, Maybe it's in ChatGPT or a different tool, and you've actually crafted, like, the sort of the end to end sort of narrative you want. And then, like, how do you visualize that you can drop that entire thing into Gamma and then there may be an instance where like there's maybe existing documents like a Word doc, a PDF that you're working off of, something that was long form that you want to make more visual. And you know, we want you to be able to upload those documents and say, hey, you know, take this 100 page document and help me turn this into a five pager. Because I, I need to get in front of an audience and communicate this more effectively. And I know a lot of the information, but I don't know the best way to turn that 100 page document into something that is a little bit more visual and consumable. And so obviously many different entry points. We want all those to feel effortless. You should be able to do that no matter what the occasion is. And Gamma can help you then shape the rough ideas into something that's more refined.

And this is just a question I had thinking about. You said you generate about 50 million in revenue. I think it said like 100,000 or a couple hundred thousand customers. What is that?

Right? Yeah, few hundred thousand customers.

So what are people paying for? When you're building this, you're like, this is free, this is paid. How did you figure? How did you kind of decide? Maybe there's a process of doing that, but how did that kind of all evolve over time?

Yeah, so we basically have a freemium model. It's based on today AI usage. So all new users get a bucket of AI credits. And then when they use that all, they can either stay on the free plan, which allows you to still use Gamma, but you have to basically manually update the content and do the old fashioned way by as a human, still entering and playing around the building blocks. And even that has been useful for a lot of users because those core primitives still allow you to manually create stuff much faster than you would in other tools. And then if you need more AI kind of guidance or assistance, then you can upgrade to one of our paid plans. We think of AI as being like the sort of expert design partner for you, as if you're sitting right next to a great designer and you can actually have them help you craft and shape your content quickly. And so we want that to again feel effortless. And anytime you need that, you can just tap your design partner, in this case Gamma, and they'll help you kind of really refine your content faster than you could do on your own.

So it's like instead of just emailing my designer back or Texting them back and saying, hey, can you change this thing, change the colors? I want to go this different direction. The product just kind of does it for you.

Exactly, yeah. I mean, I think today a lot of the bottleneck is like either, you know, you don't have a design designer on staff at all or maybe, you know, sometimes you outsource it to an agency or you just don't have much of your own design skills and so the capabilities are limited. And so what you have to do is try to, you know, outsour. We want to replace the need for that for the vast majority of use cases where you could just get by by leaning on gamma a bit more. And so many people we talk to, especially kind of in a more corporate environment, their bottleneck is like, yeah, even if they have a design team, they oftentimes don't have enough of their time to be able to do a lot of the iteration back and forth. And so that time is reserved for the most important super high polish, you know, outputs. But the day to day presentations or decks or things that need to be created, there's nobody there to help with that. And we want to be, you know, be able to step in and serve those users right away.

And this is something that's maybe you did unconventionally. So you talked about like a pretty horizontal approach. I feel like generally in startups and like the VC kind of conventional wisdom is like go super niche, super vertical on a specific thing and you didn't do that. Like I'm just curious why? Because most people, the advice would say like, oh, pick like, you know, management consultants specifically or like founders raising their pre seed rounds specifically. So why did you go so horizontal instead of super niche?

Yeah, I mean, I think there's two parts to this answer. The first is really just trying to think about our own founder ambition. Like we, we set out to create a new standard. We want this tool to be ubiquitous. We know that's super challenging. Like it's not going to be easy to create something that even has a chance at, you know, replacing a daily active tool like PowerPoint that's, you know, everywhere around the world. But that was our ambition. Like we believed we can create a better way. We want to create a new standard. The only way to do that is to create something that can be horizontal in nature. So such that if you're an educator, you can use it. If you are, you know, in the corporate world, you're a marketer, you can use it. If you're a consultant, freelancer, solopreneur, small business owner. All of these types of users should be able to benefit from what we're creating. And so that was our ambition. Like from day one we knew that's what we wanted. And so horizontal was only sort of mechanism of trying to fulfill that longer term vision and dream. And the second thing is like, even if that were the long term vision, oftentimes people say, okay, we'll just start with one icp. Like just try to serve like, you know, salespeople, for instance. I think that ends up becoming much more challenging than, than sort of like it's easier said than done, right? Because what ends up happening is like, you try to serve that one ICP pretty well and inevitably they have very like specific things that end up needing to like, be tailored to their use case. And so what you end up doing is like creating a hyper specialized tool that maybe the salespeople do get a ton of benefit out of. But when you start zooming out, like none of what you've built over the past couple of years are then beneficial to like the consultant or beneficial to the educator. And so inevitably you've already created like this, you know, verticalized tool or vertical tool, even though your long term ambition might have been to build horizontally. So when we thought about just the sequencing, we knew that both to address number one, which is our own founder ambition, and actually have a shot at that. Like, we couldn't, we had to resist the temptation of just serving one icp. Well, we needed to have a pretty broad swath of users. And the way we sort of acknowledged that was like, rather than focus on Personas, we focus on pain points. So not ICPs, not Personas, but really the pain point that a user might have. And what are those universal pain points? And for us, those universal pain points are like, it's super hard to get what's in your head into a format that others can visualize. Like getting what's in your head into other people's head requires a sort of visualization piece that is really, really. And that's a universal pain point. How do we do that? Well, that's what we're focused on doing.

So do you think this is applicable for everyone, like any kind of category of company creation? Or do you think it only works if there's an opportunity to build like a super horizontal tool that specifically has kind of like pain points like this?

No. Yeah, I definitely think, you know, this is definitely not the only approach. You know, there's some markets out there where the TAM is probably big enough just to Go after that vertical alone. And maybe it's just so underserved too by incumbent tools that it's almost a flip of this, which is like, maybe incumbent tools are more horizontal in nature. That vertical is actually a very, very large juicy tam. And to have a verticalized tool is actually the right approach. Especially if the founders, like that aligns with their ambition, like, hey, we want to serve the legal market, for instance, and that we believe is a big enough market and. And incumbent tools are going to be too generalized to not serve that market well. And we believe it's a massive tam. Let's actually build specifically for that. I think there's definitely merit in doing that, and that makes sense for certain markets. Founders, they should always ask, is that market itself big enough? Is it growing? Is it expanding? Is a horizontal approach fundamentally limited in serving that market? And it's a good sort of thought exercise before just assuming you should go through the exercise of just asking, like, you know what, what do you believe to be true years from now?

Yeah. And actually super crazy on that point of like, legal market tam. So I think I saw, I saw a tweet from Patrick Carlson at Stripe. I believe the stat was something like, though. You know when you see those billboards on the side of the road for personal injury lawyers where it's like, oh, did you get an accident call this number? It's like 1% of GDP or something in the US just like that market of like suing people after getting in.

An accident or something. Yeah. And it's growing, right? And it's like that. That's like, that's what you want to look for. It's like, it's already like a meaningful amount and it's growing, like, yeah. Then it's like, okay, well, there's probably something there. You want to move where the markets are experiencing some sort of organic tailwinds and then. And then try to capture that in that moment too.

What is the. The TAM for just slides and presentations? I actually, I didn't even look this up, dude. Like, do you know what it is?

I mean, you know, Microsoft, like, Office doesn't really share too much in terms of, like, just their revenue, but it's in the billions. And when you look at the user of slides, it's in the billions. And, you know, the majority of that is PowerPoint, but you have Google Slides and the other incumbent tools. And so even just the user base alone is in the billions. And I think for us to be successful longer term, like, yes, we're going to carve out a good chunk of people that are maybe using incumbent tools, but also then create just new market opportunity. There's a lot of people that even slides aren't something they're super well versed in, so they don't create them. But you know, in the future when digital content is going to be even more important in terms of connecting with others, your customers or partners, like we, they need simpler tooling. We can be that tooling for them. And for those that had never even adopted, really ingrained sort of PowerPoint into their workflows, Gamba can be that solution for them. And so it's almost like creating a brand new market that just has latent demand but hasn't yet been fulfilled by an existing product.

Yeah. How do you think about just generally sort of this whole office tool workplace? Like when you just think about like meeting, summaries, presentations, docs, calls, like when there's a lot of people kind of playing in this space and I think if you just kind of fast forward, you think five years forward, 10 years forward, like they're all kind of converging. I don't know if there's a strategic reason of starting with slides or if it was just curiosity and interest and then how you just think about it over the long term, how everything's going to play out.

Yeah, I mean that's the challenging thing is things are evolving so quickly. Hard to know how things will all pan out. We started with slides because one was actually just trying to solve my own pain points. So the last startup I was at was acquired. I went back into more of an advisory and consulting role where I actually started my career. And I was staying up late at night trying to actually put together, synthesize kind of like information back to a client, back to a customer and you know, just thinking about like just dreading that moment of actually going into Google Slides, having to like spend so much time formatting and like, like getting like even just staring at that blank page gave me the, the first moment of realization which is like, there's gotta be a better way. You know, slides is a format created almost 40 years ago and it's such an important medium for communication. Like is there a different way we can approach this? So that was kind of like the initial okay, something interesting. And then what we actually ended up doing was like just building for several months, kind of prototyping the initial versions of Gamma just to give ourselves our own sort of level of convictions. Like we started realizing that slides for most people isn't probably a super High NPS sort of product. It's one that people have just gotten used to the way things have always been done, but never question like, okay, what if the product primitives or building blocks are fundamentally different? And when we thought about just the growing need for like digital communication, we wanted something that kind of acknowledged where things were already moving. So, you know, slides as a format fixed in sort of aspects, ratio or dimensions, and made for an era where we're all sort of staring at the same projector or we needed things to be printed on pieces of paper. And when we think about where things were already heading, like much more of the communication can be async and viewed on different devices, like your phone or tablet or, you know, a monitor. And so why not have something that was more mobile friendly or mobile responsive by default? Why not have something that was more interactive and multimedia rich and all the things that, you know, PowerPoint, you might build a hack together, but it's not, it wasn't built for that. Like, what if we lean more into, like where we think things were already going to be going and we just saw such a massive opportunity that it just felt like, yeah, even if we didn't know necessarily all the answers on day one, it was going to be a fun journey to go on and it'd be plenty to build off of and we'd learn and kind of iterate along the way.

Yeah. I think to your point of how the format has kind of evolved. Right. It's always been this kind of like landscape view, rectangle thing. But if you think probably like half of emails are open on phones, I don't know what the stat is, but like you kind of, you know, somebody's looking at a vertical screen on their phone and then you basically limit the size to be like a third of the screen in this little rectangle in the middle. I remember the first time I saw a vertical deck, I was like, oh, shit. That was actually pretty smart. Like, that's a good idea. And this was probably like 2019ish. And so this is probably. You were doing this around 2020ish.

End of 2020is when we first formed the company. Yep.

Okay. And then I think with this whole kind of horizontal vision, I think that kind of impacted how you kind of raised a little bit of money in the beginning, in the early days. How did that kind of play out?

Yeah, we knew we needed to raise enough to assemble the early teams I mentioned here, even just the initial seven. And then, you know, we got to a team of about 12 before we did our first like bigger AI launch. We knew we needed enough to build kind of the scaffolding for the initial product then to be able to get that in the hands of users and iterate. And so we raised, you know, a decent sized pre seed round. It was a little bit under 3 million and that gave us the chance to kind of form the initial team. And then we ended up raising another 4 million as part of our seed round. This is when we had basically just launched our private data. And again, I think part of the founder journey for anybody that's just getting started is try to look at other companies that are kind of in your category or might need to follow a similar path. So for us that's other horizontal platforms that have been created before us. And so the notions, the airtables, even the figmas of the world, which all took many, many years to get to a point where what they were building didn't feel like just a toy. It was something that could be used for real work. And I think we always acknowledge that up front. It was like even something as simple as presentations, there's a ton of surface area to cover. And so to like earn the right to be a tool that's actually used and depended on by somebody outside of your organization, it takes a ton of effort. And we knew it'd take us some time. And with time means you need enough Runway, with enough Runway means you need enough cash in the bank. So we ended up raising in a way that just tried to factor all that in.

How did you get people to buy into it? Because it's like a horizontal tool. Most people like this won't work. It's impossible. Go to market, won't work. I don't like this idea. How'd you get around that?

Yeah, I mean we definitely got a bunch of rejections. It wasn't everybody, but I think the ones that believed in us. There was probably two things that maybe caught their attention. One is when we created our very first sort of pitch deck, we actually built it as a prototype of Gamma. So like it was basically showing what the possibilities were, even if it was super rudimentary. And so it had those elements. It was hybrid sort of writing, like a doc document slash deck, like medium. It was interactive, it was multimedia rich. And so it had all the principles we were sort of trying to lean into. And so people could kind of, you know, squint their eyes and maybe see a little bit into the future we're trying to describe. And then the other half was people that kind of were the prototypical user. So Amy who led our seed round, she basically was, you know, product marketing manager, was at Stripe, was at Twitter early on. And so, you know, face the bottlenecks we were describing, which is like they had to create a lot of content. They don't always have design resources. And so you're just limited by what you can do on your own and then just constantly waiting. What if with a tool like YAML, you could self serve much more of that. And for like the average, you know, professional knowledge worker, you know, they can go into a tool and actually craft and shape their ideas. Like that was exciting to her. And so I think it was like a combination of those two where do a little bit of showing, not just telling, but then also, you know, resonating with somebody that just understands your vision and why your product deserves to be in the market.

So how do you find the right investors then in that kind of situation? Did you do a lot of outbound? Did you spend a lot of time getting to know people in the years before? Is it a volume game, just getting in front of the right people?

It's definitely a volume game, but to your point, it is a game. And so the way I think founders just structure the game early on, you want to, you know, just try to build relationships. So you know, the best way to, to go into any fundraise is like obviously already have some warm relationships. The other best way is also to go in with momentum. And so if you're super, super early, the way to show momentum is, you know, maybe going with a prototype, something that already shows that you've been thinking about this problem, that you've built enough conviction yourself. And then when you start, you know, pitching early, early investors, you're going to get a ton of no's. The folks that say yes, you can ask them two questions. One, like what is it about your pitch that resonated with them? Like was there something that really stood out? Why, why are they, why are they choosing to invest? And then two, you can ask them, who else should I be talking to? Who else do you think might, you know, this, this message or this push might resonate with. And you're just doing that over and over again. The, you know the, the funny part about like our own founding during our pre seed round, you know, this is end of 2020 peak pandemic. I was actually living in London at the time and so I was doing all of my pitches late into the night, you know, 1:00am Pacific Time.

Yeah.

And so I was locked in and we didn't have a very big place in London renting out, like kind of small apartments. So I was stuck in the sort of laundry room because that was the only place that was like soundproof enough while the rest of the family could sleep. And I would just do five, six hours of pitches back to back, like just straight zoom. And I was fortunate because peak pandemic, that was acceptable. Practices just like do back to back zooms and I would just rinse and repeat the strategy of like, meet somebody, they said no, move on, meet somebody, they say yes, ask them those two questions and then line up back to back. Basically two weeks straight worth of meetings to a point where we had enough, you know, to fill the initial round.

Amazing. Yeah, it's definitely not glamorous. Like a lot of people think of fundraising is this like, you know, wine and dining and it's like, it's basically just like eating shit until you get enough of the way there. Like that's, it's, it's usually that's how it goes.

Totally. I would say, I don't know, today it feels maybe slightly different. But yeah, back then that was absolutely the mindset I went into, which is two weeks are going to be brutal. I've just accepted that and I'm going to stay in this laundry room until things are done.

Yeah, well, and then to the point, I think you guys are doing really good today. But you've like, you, you've never really raised like big, sexy, hyped up rounds. Like VCs don't really talk about you. That's usually a signal that there's like a lot of VCs invested is when they're always talking about something like hyping it up. Why, why did you never like raise a ton of money and you know, and go down that path?

Part of this is just like I think the mentality of the founding team that we've always had this notion that raising too much money has a potential, a ton of potential downsides, especially if you do it too early. Because I think what you want early on as a founder is one to build good habits amongst your organization. Like things that are the foundation for how you want the rest of the company to operate in the future. And like the mindset, like, what is that sort of scrappiness mindset? I think, you know, PG talks about like the cockroach mode that you can go into and like, yeah, like cockroaches don't need much to survive and what can you do to make yourself like super resilient as a team. And you don't build resilience out of just luck. It's a lot of like day to day, like, this is the grind. And part of that scrappiness needs to come through with just how you operate. And I think that naturally then bleeds into the culture you have, right? Like you want your culture to be one where the early on you're building the early parts of the team and then later on you want that culture to be solidified such that you hire the next 10, 100 people. They all have the same DNA. It's all the same. Like, we know what we look for. This is what Gamma represents. These are the type of people that fit in well here and then the people that don't, that's fine. We're going to move on. And so we wanted to really invest in that. When you're also, early on, you know, constraints, in my mind, you know, begets creativity. You're building a tool that's horizontal. You need a ton of creativity. Forcing yourself to raise a bunch of money almost inherently means you're going to kind of take a more lax approach and you're going to say, okay, money's going to help solve most of these problems. I'm going to hire the person to do the job versus do the job yourself and recognize that most of it is in your own control and you have probably enough of the ingredients within your core team to do a lot of the work. And so those are all things that we kind of talked a lot about early on. And anytime there was an opportunity to raise more, we'd ask ourselves, do we really need it? Is it preventing us from achieving our long term ambition? And if not, we're going to keep heads down and keep building. And we really haven't wanted to divert from that core sort of mantra.

How has that impacted being able to recruit? Because I feel like part of the reason people raise money is so that there's a halo around it from a recruiting perspective, but also just, oh, Facebook will give you a million bucks, we'll give you more, or whatever the strategy is there.

I would say it's made recruiting harder in some ways, but it has, I think, a ton of upside and value in other ways. When you are forced to play the sort of dollar for dollar game and you're competing against the giants of the world that can give insane packages, you end up inevitably finding people that are much more mercenaries than they are missionaries. And so for us, we always look for people that were the core product like, what we're doing, you know, resonates with them on some level. And you know, for instance, if you're coming in and doing an interview and you've already spent time in the tool and you're like, wow, this is this. I actually, like, even if I don't get this job, I mean, go on and use this tool. Something about it has kind of resonated. And those are the type of people that, you know, we've, we found that once we bring them in house, it's like there's so much love and energy that they pour into the product. And of course we want to have like super competitive offers and we want to pay, you know, top of market and give grid equity. And those things all come packaged, but, you know, at the same time, like only kind of trying to satisfy the, you know, competing offer of like a massive, you know, AI company. I think in many ways, you know, sets you up for long term, you know, obstacles that you may not even can even foresee. So what we're trying to balance now is like, how do we, you know, one of the biggest benefits of raising is you set the market rate. And so people can say, hey, what is the value of this business? How do I even think about equity? Because equity for most people is still super opaque, hard to understand. And we try to spend a lot of time providing education. This comes from my finance days, but even at optimizing, I spent a lot of time just trying to educate people around. How should you even value your options? What are the different considerations? There's a lot of the fine print that if you don't really understand the differences, then what's on paper may not actually translate into true value for you. And so we do the same with all of our candidates. Anybody that has like, competing offers, I try to provide a super objective, like, hey, this is how you might think about things. I'm not trying to overly sell them. I just want them to know, like, how, how they should actually value certain things such that they can go in and make an educated and informed decision. And I hope that many more founders will do that. Which is like, take the onus of actually trying to educate your candidates as much as possible so that whether they decide to join you or not, like many years down the road, you feel like you can sleep at night because they made the right decision with all the right information.

Yeah, I think too, there's, there's the value of like the just like the, the tangible or the tangibility or like the, the realistic chances of the Equity like being worth anything. Just like at the end of the day, like if it's a public company, it's like a liquid. If it's a startup, it's private. There's a little bit of uncertainty around like what is this thing actually worth really at the end of the day, like it. Can I get anything for it? If I needed to sell, you might have to take a discount. But just generally like if you. I, I think did you guys have raised a total of $23 million? I think that's right. So I don't know if just generally speaking, there's usually like a 1x liquidation preference on the equity that investors put in. So if I'm somebody who's like considering working at Gamma, I'm like, okay, if the company sells, the investors get their 23 million and then like we, we all get our pool. That's a pretty low bar. You're doing 50 million in revenue. I don't think people are going to be valuing you at half of half of ARR. Like, you know, maybe you're a little bit higher. Like 10x. I usually think 10x is just like fairly reasonable number for just like a healthy growing software company. So yeah, it's like 500 million is like, like that's pretty reasonable. Like you guys are in a great spot from that perspective too. So I feel like not a lot of people think about that. Like if the company gets acquired, like if you had raised a billion and we'll just use that same number and say you're really only worth 500 million, everyone gets nothing. The investors don't even get their money back. So that's, there's a lot more that goes into it than that. But that's generally like a high. Like a first look is like, you know, you just think how much does the company raised? And like, am I even, is it even worth that much?

I mean the Matthew just described less than 10%. Less than 5% of candidates ever even get into that. You know that math. And to your point, yes, it's like when you break it down, there are things that seem to be. You can present that in a logical way and then that decision ends up becoming easier. But yeah, the tough thing is when you are competing against the large someone that's raised a ton of money, they do have that external sort of credibility or validation that somebody believes are worth x billion x $100 million. And oftentimes Candace will give that much more, sort of rely on that much more than anything else because it's Just easier to understand. And it's quote unquote, a trusted professional investor that has done their homework and has put that money in. I think when you, you know, for us, like we as founders have come through a few different kind of eras of startups and we've seen both the good outcomes, the mediocre outcomes and the terrible outcomes. And oftentimes the mediocre and terrible outcomes the founders and investors maybe still define to your point 1x they'll get their money back. Founders might still get a little bit something. In those cases, the employees almost get nothing. And I've been both the employee and now a founder and a lot of what I fear is like, I want, you know, in the future, if DAM has a great outcome, like every employee should be there to celebrate. Like it should be something we are celebrating together. We are all owners of the business. And that can only happen if kind of you're being thoughtful about that and trying to structure things the right way from day one, not waiting until you know you've already made it and have huge success. It's like you need to be thinking about day one such that in all outcomes, if the company has some meaningful outcome, like, everybody can celebrate.

Yeah, and this is like a little bit of a sidebar, but Optimizely, what was that company again? I've heard of them before, I've actually never heard, so I'm just curious, like, what do they do? And like how did that go for you guys as a team? It sounds like you kind of all came from there, the early team.

Yeah. So Optimizely was started, it was actually one of the fastest growing YC companies back in the day. And they started off sort of in this space of ab, A, B testing and eventually kind of broaden that scope to be much more around just experimentation broadly. So, you know, we are serving companies like Nike, Best Buys, these large companies that had to do a lot of digital experimentation and supporting them through our own platform. And so any team that needed to run experimentation at scale could lean on, optimize it to do that. And I'd say, you know, the company when I joined, you know, was series A by time and you know, a little bit over 10 million in ARR by the time I left, you know, 100 million in ARR. So, you know, by all means, like it was, it was a business that definitely showed that there was a market for this and had grown and had global footprint. And I think the outcome maybe wasn't as great as we would have all hoped. You know, Being one of the fastest growing YC companies at the time, I think the aspirations were to be, you know, something that, like, super impactful and again, a great outcome for employees. But we ended up being acquired. And you know, the. I think one thing that a lot of you know now, the Gamma early employees is like, we hope that one day, you know, if we do have a great outcome, it's something we're all celebrating. It doesn't feel like we had left something on the table.

Yeah. And that's. I feel like that's kind of like a little bit of a superpowers. Like you guys have all. I'm assuming you all work together at Optimizely and like in some capacity. So it's like, all right, it's like round two. It's like we already kind of know how to do this, how to work together.

Yeah, there's definitely a bit of that muscle memory. Working together, knowing each other's styles. Things that you almost don't need to say because it's just so obvious of how we work. And that honestly just improves kind of how frictionless things can be. So it's been extremely valuable. And all the first seven I mentioned, all still at Gamma. Actually, you know, all of our employees, we haven't had an employee leave. And so it's like this continuity piece that's been. That's been really helpful and something that we want to continue to sustain.

That's an insane stat. 30 people, no one's left yet. Over five years. I feel like that's gotta be a record. I mean, I don't think I've ever met anyone that scale over that period of time that hasn't anyone leave.

Yeah, I think it keeps the core team super obviously like the. The collaboration really tight. And it goes back to like being able to move as fast as possible.

Yeah, well. And speaking of kind of like the team. So you were in London in the beginning. Like, were you guys all sort of all over the place or was it just you? That was remote. And I know now you're all in San Francisco, right? Like, how did that play out? And what did you learn about that evolution of how a team functions remotely versus in person?

Yeah, so I was in London actually for my wife's work. We were there for a couple years. And we first started Gamma, you know, fundraised. I was out there. The rest of the team was all in San Francisco. So again, this is like peak pandemic. So we did have the question of should we build a fully distributed team or should we try to work together in person or some sort of hybrid environment. And when we actually asked our first, you know, I mentioned like, the first seven eventually, like several more than that kind of where should we be based? Or like, what is your, you know, optimal set up? Every one of them said, we want to work in person in San Francisco. No desire to leave. And I was moving back eventually anyways. And so the decision was sort of made for us. And then basically we went into, okay, we know we're going to work together, but in San Francisco we're still sheltered in place. So we're going to find a place that allows us to do this, which is we found a two bedroom apartment, converted two bedroom apartment. We stuffed ourselves there and worked in different corners of the office with, like huge air filters. And that was kind of like the first year I was like, just doing that in person because it felt right. It was like the right way for us to build and we were just energized by being together.

That was pretty bold because I remember back that first year, I mean, especially like the first month or two when Covid kind of hit. I mean, it was literally like, you look at someone with COVID like, you're gonna get it. Like, we didn't fully understand. So was it like, was it pretty easy to convince people and, like, you guys were all like, were you guys kind of all trying to, like, bubble and, you know, keep, you know, protect from the outside world or.

We definitely tried to do it in a safe way. So again, like, you know, different quarters with air filters and whatnot. But. But it just. I think part of this is. Yeah, because we, we had worked together for so long, it was easy just to like, be candid, like, hey, is this something you're comfortable doing? And if not totally fine work from home? But, you know, it was something that at our, at that stage, way easier to have those conversations. And because everybody was fully aligned, it just made sense. It was the. It was the right call.

Yeah. And then, so I know the first you kind of. You mentioned you did like a private beta, you did a public beta, you did a launch. What were kind of all those different iterations of the product over time?

Yeah. So we started off early on doing basically a private beta. I was just putting up a landing page with a, you know, and then creating a wait list. And it allowed us just to see who's even interested in what we're building. And, you know, we're collecting. I think early on it was like four or five thousand signups and we could see kind of like the Personas and like what they were looking for. We had a few different, like open ended questions just to gauge like, okay, you know, what is the pain point we're solving for this particular person?

This is you. You're still kind of sort of building it, or was there kind of like building it?

Yeah, it was, it was very, very rudimentary. It had like the, the very basic ingredients of like, you could use it, you could present it. Was it super reliable? Was it super versatile? Questionable. Yeah, yeah, maybe.

But you kind of use the waitlist signups as like almost like getting some data on like who was interested in potentially trying something.

Totally. Yeah. And it kind of gives you then the ability to, you know, start. We didn't drop everybody from the wait list directly into the product. We basically had batched them up. And so like every batch we let in a few hundred and we see what happens. And, and, and for the people that were more engaged, we would follow up and start talking to them and you know, ask them like, you know, what is it about the product that they were finding most valuable? What were the biggest things that were missing? How were they trying to use the product? And we kept doing that through the, you know, the initial set of wait list until we started seeing a pocket of users that was just organically coming back on their own. And they weren't our friends. There weren't people in our family that were just being nice, but there are people that, you know, just heard about the product and found some value in it and that built up enough conviction to say, okay, we're ready to do our public beta launch, which is we're going to remove the wait list. Anybody that comes in can sign up, gets dropped directly into the product.

So what did you, how did you qualify that and know that it was time, like, was there? Like, okay, we have like 5,000 retained daily or weekly users. Like, how did you know it was the right moment?

Yeah, we didn't set super aggressive sort of usage metrics. We had basically enough people coming back where, you know, it wasn't even, I'd say it was like the low thousands where people were just using the product. And the feedback there was enough pockets of users were like, oh, this is great. And then they're trying to pull sort of features out of you. And so it was more of that sort of feeling like, okay, there's something here. And then we decided like, we gave ourselves four months to essentially prepare for like a public beta, which is, you know, add a little bit More polish, extend the functionality. We launched on public product hunt, which gave us also a chance to kind of exercise the muscle of like launching and getting word out there and just see what it takes to even announce a product and, you know, flexing that muscle a little bit. And so, yeah, and ended up, the product launch ended up doing great. You know, those are again, our public beta launch. We ended up winning product of the day, week and month. And so gave us that little, little bit of extra validation. Like, hey, people, you know, people are digging kind of the early version of the product.

So when was this? Like beginning of 2022, middle of 2022.

End of 2022? Fall of 2022? Yeah.

Okay. Fall 22, this was like around the time ChatGPT came out, maybe like a little bit before.

A little bit before. So the launch was pre AI, none of the, you know, the product was still manually creating things. And then what we started realizing was, yeah, obviously AI was moving incredibly fast, both on the image side as well as the tech side. And you know, most presentations are a combination of text and visuals. And so we knew we needed to basically revamp our entire creation flow so that we could integrate AI into it.

Because yeah, I'm sure that like a lot of people listening to this have gone through this or thinking like, there's probably a lot of people thinking about this, like, I need, we need to re architect our product for AI. I do want to kind of spend a couple minutes just talking about like, how do you do that? Like, so was the, so the moment that you realized you needed to do it was when it was right or like within the months after ChatGPT launched and you realized the different text and image capabilities.

Yeah, it was basically that is when we recognize, well, we were, we started by just playing around a bunch more ourselves internally. And very beginning of 2023, we gave ourselves again kind of like this four month sprint idea of like we're going to do our first AI launch. We in the meantime are going to completely rebuild the onboarding experience and like the first user experience.

Why was that important?

We knew that we needed to get people to understand the value of the product like immediately. Like we didn't have time to like get them to slowly understand or like adopt the product. They needed to see that in the moment and that would kind of benefit us in two ways. Like one, if they see the value and they activate, then they're more likely to obviously then retain themselves. And two, if that experience is so magical, they're going to tell other people about it. And there'll be an ability to generate this sort of word of mouth immediately, this organic word of mouth, which is obviously a powerful sort of lever.

So it's just like get that right in the beginning, like the first minute or however fast you got it to.

Exactly, yeah. Because most of us are the Scott Belsky selfish, fainter and lazy. Like, most of us are that in the moment of trying a new product. And so unless it resonates and like that first mile is something that could be magical, most people are never going to come back. And so we wanted to. We knew our current, like, at the time, our current onboarding was a little bit just to like, required the end user to do so much work, to just even grok, like, what we were doing, like, understand any amount of value. And, you know, the learning curve was so steep that we were going to lose too many people right out the gate. And so how could we flatten that learning curve dramatically and make that experience feel a little bit more magical? That was the whole goal of that four months.

So it sounds like you simplified the onboarding, like, made it like there's like a quicker, I don't know, time to value or time to magic moment, whatever, whatever people want to use to describe that. What advice would you give? Like, if I'm, if I'm like, hey, Graham, trying to. Our onboarding sucks. Like, it's too long. Like, what should I do to get a better onboarding or faster, quicker onboarding experience?

Yeah, I mean, it's going to vary a ton for different products. Like, sometimes you actually want to infuse maybe slightly more friction because it allows you to better qualify the type of users that you can serve. And then maybe through either personalization or a unique onboarding, based on how they're maybe responding to different questions, you set them up for success. So you're taking some of those inputs for others. You just want to get them right out the gate, understand enough about the product so that they come back. And I think we fell more into the latter, which is like, we removed much more friction. We gave them a starting point which is like, just enter some general idea of what you need to create and we'll show you what like a first draft could look like. Like, get them to understand, like, hey, Gamma's actually a different way of creating content, but the building blocks don't need to feel intimidating. Like, we can get you there and you can start playing around with it within, like the first, you know, 30 seconds of onboarding. So that was more of Our goal, and I think most founders need to go in and understand like what, you know, balancing that out in some cases, like maybe adding a little bit more friction or getting people to integrate or getting people to like really get plugged in so that their first experiences feels like they're set up for success versus like a little bit too haphazard, like, oh, this is a toy, not a real product sort of situation.

So it sounds like, did you sort of personalize the onboarding a little bit, like based on an answer you'd like kind of tweak what path they went down?

We haven't yet done much of that, but this is something that we're starting to explore more is around personalization, segmentation. RV1 of this we didn't try to do that. The way you kind of got went and chose your own adventure is just by nature of the prompt you would put in. So like, if you're creating something for like a sales template, like we would give you, you know, we'd give you a first draft that felt very relevant and it didn't need to be overly engineered based on like, oh, are you, you know, a certain type of user in a certain type of geography. We just let it be more prompt driven. We're now at the stage where I think there's other layers of like adding that friction where it may make sense. And with that comes the ability to personalize and give people, you know, even more unique starting point that, you know, puts them in a place where they can actually see themselves using the tool, you know, after the first, first run.

And I know there's this whole saying of like, you want to, if you're building like an AI native product, you with every new model release, you want it to make your product better. Did you benefit from that over time?

Oh, yeah, of course. I mean, yeah, we are still benefiting from that. You know, the advancements. It's cool to work on a product where the surface area obviously covers a ton. You know, we have text images, we'll have video, we'll have audio, we'll have many different formats that we'll be able to support. And because there's been advancements on underlying technology across the board. Yeah, anytime there's advances, we can say, hey, what are we going to pull in? How does this get passed to our end user in terms of value delivered? And it's just a constant sort of iteration learning, putting that back in. And yeah, just the basic equation of every business is like, pass as much value to your user as possible or your customer as possible at the lowest price. And like, you can build something pretty sustainable.

Yeah, because I could imagine even if I'm thinking about using Gamma for like this podcast and I think about like, maybe your roadmap, some things you just indicated, like I could send you a link to something that's kind of like, I don't know, onboarding you to the peel or giving you like the tldr. Like, here, read this for two minutes and like, we'll get you going. Like, it could literally be like a custom AI generated avatar. Me saying like, hey, Grant, it's Turner, like, super excited about Gamma. I'm excited to like jump into the podcast. Here's things like you could probably even incorporate like a prompt where I'm like, I want to talk to Grant about like building. Building the product and advice for people on building AI native software. And I can. You can like tailor that into what comes in through the. The actual link or presentation that you're get. That you're getting from me. It probably changed dynamically too. I'm assuming like a. Yeah, all of that.

I mean, I think that's where it's going to be. We're just like barely scratching the surface. I think at the end of the day, tools like ours, they're communication tools and we obviously infuse a bunch of creativity into that as well, but allows you to express yourselves in ways that just weren't possible in the past. Like the sort of one to one versus one to many, the sort of automated, the personalized. All that becomes easier over time. And yeah, we're just getting started.

It's kind of interesting that the core insight was that slides are sort of like a writing exercise, not a design exercise, that, that even that got even like more pronounced as you built it to be more AI native. Because, like, you're not really designing. Like, you're just saying, you're texting it and saying like, this is what I want you to make. And there's probably like a luck element to that. I'm assuming like you didn't know ChatGPT was coming. You didn't know the LLMs were going to get this good?

No, yeah, we did not. I think it was great that we had a writing first approach because that has naturally extended sort of kind of the fluidity that you can work in Gamma because you are already in that flow state of writing, describing, and then in some cases you're leaning on AI to be more generative and can help you kind of extend your ideas and shape it in different ways. And so, yeah, definitely. I think what, where sort of luck meets sort of the preparation piece of it is that our vision has always been around, like really simplifying and making it super easy and fast for the end user to shape their ideas. And just so happens, like our approach married with AI has been one where, you know, we're actually able to like really fulfill on that promise. Much earlier on.

Was there anything that you wish you did differently when you redesigned it? Like when you kind of went back from scratch? Like, we're going to build this completely AI native, rearchitect, everything. I don't know how much the design changed, but anything specifically that, like if you go back and tell yourself two, two and a half, three years ago and just say like, just don't do this one part or like skip this or, or something, it's, it's like it's.

So hard to, you know, go back and say, because I think for us, and maybe this is because we came from Optimizee. So much of how we approach things are like, you know, iteration, experimentation, testing things out. And so we get a lot of things wrong, but that's built into the system and how we build things. And so, yeah, for sure we probably could have navigated differently, but our approach probably would have been the same. And so we would have still tested, get things into the hands of users, test our assumptions, our hypotheses, and then go back and refine that and just be relentless about doing that over and over. And so, yeah, I don't think it would have changed much. I think it was just baked into how we operate.

Yeah. Okay. And I know you have about 50 million people that use the product today. You kind of talked about there's a wait list, you did the public launch maybe like a couple thousand, maybe tens of thousand people. That's a pretty big gap. So how did you go from, you know, couple thousand people using it to like a pretty, pretty significantly large product today? Anything specifically that kind of happened over the past couple of years on that side? On the growth side?

Yeah, all of it was, I'd say the main inflection point through it all was that four month sprint leading to our first AI launch. And so this was 2023, spring 2023, getting ready. We completely revamped the onboarding flow. And at that time we had about 60,000 users. And we launched and then all of a sudden we're adding like 5,000 users a day, 10,000 users a day, 20,000 users a day.

Oh, so it's increasing.

Yeah, that's cool kept on increasing. And so that's where the flywheel started spinning. And that was really kind of the initial sort of inflection point. And we've been lucky that since then growth has remained steady and we want to just continue to build on that momentum.

Is it like somebody shares it? Like, you send me a presentation or a link and there's like, made with Gamma, try it out type thing. Do a lot of people come from that? Or is it like they go to Google and they just search Gamma? Like, what is this? Make a slide. Like AI generated slides. Like, is there certain channels that seem to work better kind of in those as you kind of really scaled up?

Yeah, there is a good chunk of, like, when you share, like a free Gamma, you'll see them made with Gamma Badge and people come through that. The vast majority of it is more through, like, word of mouth. So someone might say, you know, yeah, I'm using Gamma for this. Or like, if you're presenting, for instance, like, you'll see that it's being used in Gamma, being served by Gamma. And so people will then just inherently ask, like, oh, what is, you know, what are you using? And then people that really love the product are telling all their friends, and so then their friends will go and search for it or come direct. So that still ends up becoming the most, for us, the most meaningful, you know, channel. Just, just strong word of mouth.

And then how do you think you stand out today as an AI company? Like, what's. What's the most important thing? Because there's a lot of people doing a lot of different things are all growing pretty fast, or some of them are growing pretty fast. What becomes most important? When everything's kind of AI native.

What becomes most important is still the question of how much is the human in the loop and are you creating something that completely replaces the human, or can the human have the ability to actually still be part of the experience and edit and shape? We're actually approaching that from, I think, a few different ways for our Core Prosumer product, where the end user, it needs to be a delightful experience. You go in and you can get a great first draft and then the human can continue to nudge and push things in the right direction. We want that to feel, again, effortless. It should feel something. You go and it feels nice. It's not the PowerPoint moment I described, which is, I'm really dreading going into this and I worry about touching anything because it's so fragile and it's just going to mess up the entire layout. We want that to not be the case. And so our I think unique advantage is like human and AI working well together. And like as the AI gets better and more capable, it can just really guide that experience too. But the human is the driver still, the person navigating. I think where we're going to be exploring much more automation is VR API, where being able to allow others to build on top of Gamma and where maybe things can actually be almost fully or almost entirely automated and where a human doesn't necessarily need to go in as much. And it's more about like, how can you create content at scale, reliably, reliably, predictably and then what does that really give to you? And so I think that might have a different set of constraints overall and maybe overarching, different approach, but that can also be equally powerful and we want to be able to serve both audience as well.

So what's the API? Maybe you have an idea of it, but that sounds kind of interesting. What is that going to be?

Yeah, it's going to be. There'll be a few different flavors of it, but essentially it's being able to allow people to combine their first party data and feed that into something like Gamma, where we are now the content engine. So no matter what you might need to do in terms of combining that information and shaping it for different outputs so you know, it's a report, a PDF, a slide deck, whatever it may be as your output, like we'll help you automate all of that and just run in the background. We're the sort of content infrastructure for you and you are just piping us basically what you need to be shaped and distributed.

So what all that could that connect to like Salesforce, your data warehouse, like.

All sorts of things. Yeah, you can imagine obviously for a sales use case, you know, any of the customer, wherever customer data might live or customer information might live, if you're, you know, a consultant and you need to tap into a body of research that you've done and you know, pull that in anytime you want to personalize or like being able to like, you know, do specific types of market research or you know, pull from, you know, different geo zip codes, like all of that can be piped in and, and so it really depends on what data you have access to and what you want Gamma to be able to take advantage of.

Interesting. So if I'm like a teacher, maybe the report cards for a kid could be hooked up to this and I'm sending you your kid's report card and it's just hooked up into whatever my grading software is. I don't know what teachers use, but it sounds like that might be a use case.

There could be definitely something there. And I think even simpler than that is just maybe personalizing some of the content that goes out. So for certain types of students you include certain types of, you know, information or maybe for certain types of learners you might give them more visual content versus stuff that is more long form information dense. Right. Like all those things are knobs that can be controlled. And so rather than having a one size fits all sort of content production like you might actually fine tune a lot of in the background and just allow that engine to run and then and spit out what needs to be spit out.

And then this is a little bit of a different topic. But I'm curious, you're kind of one of the, you know, you're kind of sitting at the forefront of AI. How are you guys using it internally? Are there any interesting things you've done to kind of leverage? I'm assuming you're smiling, so there's just got to be some stuff you've done, like maybe the secrets that you're willing to share. What are some of the cooler ways you guys use AI internally?

Yeah, I mean I don't think it's anything crazy. It is basically the way we use AI is that every corner of the company tries to deploy AI or leverage AI and it's a constant sort of learning, sharing and this willingness to try certain things out. Some things are still in uncanny valley territory and that's fine, but we're able to test it. And so yeah, whether or not I'm sure other AI startups are doing similar things where engineers are exploring the cursors of the world, designers are exploring lovables bolts to help with prototyping. Marketing team is constantly leveraging different deep research tools or tools like NotebookLM to synthesize vast amounts of customer data to create Personas, create archetypes of different customers we're going after and then customer support leaning on infrastructure built by fin and Intercom and then using that to create better support content and really you know, creating that flywheel of like where there are gaps in our own sort of, you know, help center content and like streamlining, automating that. We use a ton of AI to localize our product and so get like sort of machine translated content out in different forms of our web app as well as our marketing site and then going in and also having humans like review that and you know prove upon it. So honestly it's like every single function is deploying some version of you know, AI and AI tooling and the question is just like how much can we use that as great leverage as we continue to build. Every single person should be thinking about actually building in a way that and sort of incorporates AI as part of the plan. Not just like a nice to have. It's a must have and it might look different at different stages and it might look different for different functions but everybody's thinking about it.

I'm assuming you use Gamma too internally.

Oh yeah, of course you didn't know.

I hope you're using it every, every.

Team meeting presentation and we even have fun use cases around Fridays we have this thing called Gammarama which team member can present on just a fun topic something silly. It could be something related to just pop culture and like just educating the rest of the team but using Gamma to, to create that presentation. So we're trying to have fun with it but also use it as the actual tool we communicate information with.

Do you have a favorite while we're talking about AI tools, do you have like a favorite kind of like under the radar, a new one you've discovered? Are you still just like ChatGPT is kind of the king?

I mean it really still feels like ChatGPT is the king. I mean there's, there's been a few out there that I want to spend more time playing with like granolas of the world seem, seem interesting obviously optimizing founder Dan creating Limitless which seems like a really cool application. So there's so many out there and more and more of them. I'm you know, trying to figure out how to fold them in and give them a try.

One thing I kind of want to talk about anything that you guys specifically do differently from other companies in San Francisco. I mean we kind of hit on a little bit but maybe some of those constraints that's kind of molded how you guys think or operate that's maybe a little different than kind of your down the fairway venture backed hyper growth startup.

I, I would say there's you know some, some big differences in just the culture and how we operate. So one is, I think you know there's, there's this tendency right now to believe that all the hyper growth AI startups are operating their, their 996 shops which I don't know if you're familiar with but yeah, 9am to 9pm Six days a week in the office in person and that's everybody and we do not do that. We have very flexible sort of more hybrid work culture where we're primarily based in San Francisco. Most people come into the office most days of the week, but it's not mandatory. We don't force that. We have basically anchor days, Monday, Wednesday, Fridays where most of the team is in, because we have our team meetings. But when you need to be, you want some focus time and working from home is like the optimal way to do that. Like that's, that's totally fine by us. And we are also not of the culture of like being a boiler room where, you know, the pressure is just constantly there. We're building this, we're trying to build for the long haul, which means, you know, we're constantly trying to balance like how much sort of creative, like creative energy you can bring into, you know, building a product like ours requires like the level of energy where you can't just like force that through brute force energy, you know, just working endless hours. It needs to be that you have space to think, space to be energized and like recharge your batteries. And we really much encourage that. But then, but like, you know, for us in person obviously still has its benefits. So we haven't moved completely remote. Like we still want to be able to be in the same room, jam on things together very, very frequently. It just doesn't need to be 24,7.

Yeah, it sounds like it's working because your point earlier, you haven't had any turnover yet and it's been pretty successful for everything I can see from the outside at least. So it seems like it's working.

Yeah, it's working so far and I guess everyone will want to see just what do the next four or five years look like. We're four years into our journey now and a lot of these hyper growth startups are maybe even earlier into their journey. So they're one, two, three years into it. And so yeah, I think there's many different ways to win. And as a founding team you got to find the way that feels authentic to you and one that you believe you can sustain for a long, long time. Because regardless of what type of startup you're building, if you want to be successful, it's not a one, two year journey for most, it's a multi year, if not multi decade journey. And so give yourself a chance to kind of be on that journey for long enough. I think that's the sort of mindset we've tried to have.

So on that note, how do you balance trying to Grow fast and meet the moment, but also not burning too much cash, remaining profitable, not spending it on dumb stuff that you don't need. Or has there been anything you've been able to center around of just the right balance of that? Because I feel like that's a struggle everyone deals with.

Yeah. The way we balance it is to inherently infuse some natural tension into this. So we create tension by our internal mantras like hire painfully slow, which means we don't open up a bunch of headcount. We know that the team is going to remain lean. What that means is each team member needs to take on a ton of ownership and has high agency, can do things. We try to have a very complimentary set of teammates and we optimize for the type of people we're hiring, like generalists over specialists. And we even at the sort of manager level, try to invest more in developing player coaches. So rather than the traditional management layer where you might bring on the VP with their Rolodex and they fill out the entire org chart by hiring, we do that by having these player coaches that are people that have managed in the past but really still love the IC work and can be great mentors and coaches to those around them and can play a role in strategy, but are still plugged in to the day to day. And so all that means that we can move fast. We feel the sort of scrappiness inherently. We bake in, we try to time box things a lot. So we're setting our own deadlines so that we aren't just kind of letting ourselves drift infinitely into exploration. But there's some sort of semblance of like progress and we can measure ourselves against that. So all those are things like you kind of have to naturally kind of one instill the tension and then be comfortable with it and be open when things maybe aren't working well. And so being in a culture of high feedback, like, culture of feedback, like all those are important ways to sort of craft your own sort of engineer your own sort of urgency into. Into the whole setup. Yeah.

And you mentioned a couple times this four month window, like do you guys do product sprints in four months? Like is there some significance of that.

Or it's kind of organically how it's happened. And I think what I found is that obviously hard to sprint indefinitely. Right. Like if you just don't have a timeline and people are just sprinting forever, it's really hard. Almost anybody can say I can crank really hard for a quarter. And that four month is Just like you need a quarter and a little bit like, you know, yeah, you need a loss, not just a quarter. You're gonna have to go beyond that. And it's like that mentality, I think for whatever reason, just has felt like enough time to like, you know, get our ducks in a row, enough time to build what we need to build and then feel like it's still an appropriate deadline where we, we do that. And it's not forever. It's like, okay, we have a few months here. Let's, let's make sure we got our stuff together.

Do you give yourself like a wind down period after that? Like after a four month sprint, you're like, all right, we're like taking it easy for a month or two or something. Like, is there, do you like kind of balance those like sine waves almost or.

Yeah, we don't, I guess we don't really talk about it in terms of like, oh, we're just going to let our foot off the gas, take a break. It's mostly because after that there's a whole bunch of bugs that need to be fixed or things that we didn't get right and we need to kind of iterate. So I think it just allows us like we were building, building, building and now it's like, okay, let's learn a little bit so see what's going on. Make sure in some cases where there's immediate fires that need to be put out, we can put those out and then we don't go immediately back into four month sprint. There's always like some sort of period where we're actually learning from what's been valuable to the end users. And that sort of period ends up being a little bit more organic. Like it may be one month, it may be a few months and then we'll start thinking about the next sort of four month milestone.

Maybe it's like a calibration period or something where, yeah, you know, you're still like foot on the gas but you're just like sensing of like, are we still going somewhere, still driving. But what do we need to like, you know, level set or you know, adjust course correct 100.

Yeah, yeah. And there's oftentimes quite a bit because like you can go in assuming you, you know all the answers but oftentimes things that will be, you know, surprising that you have gotten wrong.

Yeah. So I have two, two more questions. They're both, I kind of made more selfish questions, but I have two kids. We both have two kids are the same age. Any just I don't know parenting tricks or especially with running a hyper growth startup, anything you found that just works. For being a good parent plus operator, what have you learned that's kind of worked the best?

For me, what's worked the best is being very diligent about being on a routine. And, and so I think part of this is like you're going to be your best self when you feel healthy and well rested. And the only way you do that is by being healthy and well rested. And so like being really like. I think Brian Johnson has the saying of like, you basically have to be a professional sleeper, like sleep your extra job. And if, when you show up late to your job, you feel bad about yourself, like if you, if you show up late to sleep, like, yeah, you shouldn't feel great. And so getting that in is like the foundation. Sleep then trickles into like being able to have energy to exercise and like fitting then that interior schedule. Like being super diligent about making sure you carve out enough time and then like from that like comes nutrition. It's like it ends up becoming pretty obvious. Like you have those three in a good place. I think the rest can, can follow. And then you can feel like when you show up to being a parent, like you actually have the energy. You can, you can, you know, actually have fun and play. And so easier said than done. But I feel like it all starts with like being on that routine and being as sort of rigorous about like making sure nothing gets in the way of that. And if you can do that, I feel like everything else is like, hopefully the, the dominoes can fall in the right place.

Yeah, I feel like my two kids are both like an awesome age now where they want to like play board games, play card games. We've been playing Minecraft the past like month or two and I'm like, how am I so lucky that just like my, my kids just like I, if I had nothing else to do, I would just like play video games or like play board games. So this is kind of awesome. I get to do it. And it's like, you know, it's. You don't want to play video games all the time with your kids. You try to limit the screen time, but it's like this, this is fun. Like this is actually enjoyable.

No, I think you're, you're winning. You got it right.

Yeah. So do you have. Last question. Do you have like a favorite like founder, CEO or business that you kind of like learn from? There's like throughout history, I mean this can be like the Rockefeller or it can be like, you know, maybe more like modern recent example. But any, any like stories or founders or companies that you've gotten a lot of inspiration from.

I mean, I am definitely a, you know, Nike fanboy and you know, an Apple, I think with, with, you know, some of these brands that have just built enduring businesses. So much of it is about recognizing early on that there is also this community element. And you as a founder play a specific role, like particularly special role in sort of nurturing that early on. So for us it's like, well, that translates into like we have our own Slack workspace for our power users. We call it Ambassadors, where, you know, Ambassadors.

That's an amazing name.

And I'm still daily checking that and trying to interface. And whether or not it's like helping them use Gamma or just helping them out any other way, like they're all, many of them are building their own businesses and are looking for advice or need help in a certain way. And I don't always have the answers, but I do try to seek and give them some guidance or introduce them to someone that might be able to. And you know, that part of it feels, feels good. It feels like, you know, we're building not just a product, we're building the sort of community. And yeah, that sort of thing needs to be done brick by brick. And I think obviously the Nikes of the world have shown that it's not like, you know, you should kind of just set it, forget it. It's like, oh, those relationships are humans and those humans require a lot of sort of input from you. And nurturing that just takes a lot of time and investment. And if you believe it's worth it, you should do it. And so for us, that's been from day one, we really believe that it's something worth doing and hopefully somebody I can just continue to carve out time that it's something that we really believe is important.

And so what does it exactly mean, like building a community or having a community? Like, does that mean that the people that use the product talk to each other, they have their own identity? Does it mean you as the founder or as the company or the brand are interacting with them? I mean, maybe it's all those things, but what does that mean exactly?

Yeah, in the very beginning of community building, it much, very much is a kind of you and then finding like individuals out there that see something about your product and starting to just build some of that relationship and in many cases they need a little bit help like getting the most out of your product. In other cases, they're eager to give you feedback on how to improve the product. And so just being, giving them a channel to like talk to you, I think is important and like deeply empathizing with, you know, what you could be doing better. And then the long term goal is like, you build a community that is then self sustaining. You have other community members helping each other and you are no longer part of the conversation. You have left the chat, right. Like you are, you're out of it and, and you can then just observe like them like being so excited to help another person, like get to a good place because they're, you know, they know what it feels like to like have a product that you know, can serve them in some way and like unlock some, some incredible thing for them. Whether it's like extending their business or like, you know, getting, you know, helping them build all the content they've always wanted to build. And so that's like a magical moment and we're kind of on that part of the journey. And obviously that community can start small. And then eventually you want that to be something that's, that's global where you know, people have this affiliation with your brand and your product and a deep love for it and that's the dream state. Like if that happens, then, you know, you're just kind of out there trying to just push the boundaries on the product and the rest kind of happens more organically. And we're really trying to build towards that like where we can be one where the product gets shipped and we have, you know, the millions of people out there just champion the product and just excited to share with the next person.

Yeah. Cause in a way they're almost like a extension of the team in the sense of like they're kind of doing your marketing for you, they're kind of doing your customer support. They're kind of like R and D. So it's like, it's like shift those off off balance sheet or off income statement and like, just makes a stronger business more profitable.

Totally. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it, that gets like, it's so underrated because it's not quantifiable. Right. It's like, like accounting is very quantifiable. I can go say, hey, what was my payroll last. Last month? But yeah, like that value that you just described, like that's hard to quantify. But if you get it, man, that's like a secret sauce and it could be, you know, lightning in a bottle that you can just Keep and kind of fuel, you know, future, future growth for your company?

Yeah. Is there a moment that, you know, that you have it? Like, was there a moment when you kind of knew, like, we have a community quote, unquote? Like, is it the word of mouth thing usually, or.

There's definitely an element of that, but I think it's the same thing as, like, when people talk about, like, product market fit is like, you know, when you think about, like, product market fit, it's. It's sort of this thing that's almost like, fleeting or like, you know, the game gets harder. So, like, you might have product market fit in a small tam, but, like, if you want to go after a massive tam, the product needs to change and you're going after a bigger market. And so for us, the same thing is, like, yeah, we have, you know, a small community of users today that love the product to become a global community that's, you know, the product needs to evolve. The way we interact with the community needs to evolve. What they get out of being in that community needs to evolve. And so, yeah, we're at the small stages of growing what we think to be enduring and special community, but it's like, yeah, ton more investment needs to be acquired, and hopefully we can actually fulfill that over the many, many years ahead.

Well, Grant, this is a lot of fun. Thanks for doing this.

Thanks so much, Turner. Yeah, this is great. Really appreciate it. Yeah.

And just real quick, where can people find you? Like, we want to look you up. Twitter, LinkedIn, both of those, trying to.

Be active, both on Twitter and LinkedIn. So just grant Lee and yeah, love a follow. If there's anything I could do to help, please reach out. Love to connect as well.

Yeah, I feel like your Twitter, you've been. You tweet, tweet like what you're seeing.

Yeah, I appreciate it. Trying to. I think there's so much fun stuff going on in the world.

Cool. Well, thanks, Sam, for doing this.

All right, thanks.

Take care and thank you for listening. And thank you to Ramp for saving us all time and money, and to Numeral for putting our sales tax on autopilot. If you missed it, make sure to check out last week's episode with Ryan Stockchain at 3 Flow on AI opportunities in the $2 trillion employee benefits market. Tune in over the next few weeks for conversations with Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, which powers over 43% of all websites on the Internet. Garrett Lord, the founder of Handshake college recruiting platform that's emerged as a leader filling the massive opportunity in AI data labeling and Owen McCabe on Intercom's impressive turnaround from traditional SaaS to AI native cloud customer service platform. If you don't want to miss any of these future episodes, subscribe to my newsletter the split in the description to get each episode plus a transcript emailed directly to your inbox every week. And finally, if you like this, please leave a quick review or comment wherever you're listening or watching and let me know if you have any feedback or thoughts on this or any other episode. Thanks again for listening. See you next time.