Grant Lee: Gamma, Building an AI Startup, Company Culture, The Rise of The Generalist, Entrepreneurship, & More | FRLP 91

Welcome to the Fit Rich Life podcast, the show where we talk about money, entrepreneurship, fitness and building a life you absolutely love. In today's special guest episode, I get to interview Grant Lee, CEO and co founder of Gamma, an innovative AI powered presentation tool. We discuss Grant's entrepreneurial journey, the importance of co founders, the challenges of building a startup, and the significance of company culture. Grant shares insights on navigating the startup landscape, the pivot from Spectre to Gamma, and the role of AI for enhancing business communication. The discussion also touches on the rise of the generalist in the workforce and offers valuable advice for entrepreneurs. Friendly heads up that during this conversation I accidentally refer to Gamma as Gamma AI, when in actuality, Grant's company can be found@gamma AI. That's gamma app online. It's an incredible tool that has been a total game changer in my work, so I highly recommend checking it out. Now let's dive into the show. Please enjoy a wide ranging conversation with Grant Lee from Gamma. What's up Grant? So good to have you on the show, brother.

Hey, yeah, thanks for having me. It's great to be here.

Awesome. So for the listeners, today's guest is my Stanford classmate. He was a year ahead of me. Class of 2005. Grant Lee, CEO and co founder of Gamma AI, which is truly a revolutionary AI powered presentation tool that's currently generating 50 million in annual recurring revenue with just about 40 employees and they've only raised $23 million. And before I have you tell us more about this journey to building this company, I just want to tell the audience kind of what the product is. So Gamma is like if you spend any time in the corporate world and had to build a presentation using PowerPoint or Keynote or Google Slides, we've all been there when we're like, Jesus, I know the things I want to talk about, but I don't want to spend all this time like designing and finding pictures and like, you know, resizing things and formatting things. And Gamma is this just incredible tool that uses AI where you can just like literally feed it an outline of what you want to talk about and it will jam out a presentation in under like a minute. And it is stunningly beautiful. And I discovered this in the middle of 2024 when I was building my first digital course, Investing Mastery and I literally just googled AI presentation builder. And I stumbled upon Gamma AI at the time, had no idea that my friend and Stanford classmate had started this company. And I literally tried it and immediately fell in love with it because it was so Fast, so quick and so visually beautiful that it allowed me to focus on what I do best, which is really like teaching and, and speaking and not having to spend hours building a presentation. And instead I could get the presentation built and then be ready to share that presentation. So I was telling Grant, before we hit record, I also used to lead two one hour group coaching calls a week to my fitness money and life coaching clients. And I would spend two to three hours prepping for each one of those. So four to five, six hours a week prepping slide decks. And then when I discovered Gamma, it literally turned that two to three hour process into, no joke, a 15 to 30 minute process for me. And that was just like complete game changer to the point where anytime I talk to somebody who I know has to build slides, I'm like, have you tried Gamma yet? Let me do a screen share and show you how this works. So it's an incredible tool. And I think my first question for you, Grant, is to kind of take us back a bit because you and I have an interesting connection in the fact that you actually have tried to start companies in the past, one of them being an eyewear company called Spectre. And for those who are watching the YouTube version, these are the glasses that his company actually created. So if you're just listening, I'm wearing a pair of the Spectre glasses because at one time I was kind of like a pseudo model for his company back in the day. So really what I'm interested in, Grant, is like kind of take us back to like, whether it was at Stanford or a prior company, Optimizely, like, when did the entrepreneurial spirit or bug kind of like enter your world?

Yeah, I would say very, very early. So, you know, my family, my parents had owned, you know, Chinese restaurants on my mom's side. Still have a lot of family that is, you know, started. They have their own businesses too, making sauces in Taiwan and running restaurants out there. And then my dad's side, similar. They own a dumpling company in San Francisco for many years. And so I feel like it's just been in our DNA and, you know, as I think about kind of just some of these themes that have been kind of consistent through my life, this notion of wanting to build something, truly zero to one, trying to create something and deliver it to the world has, has kind of been with me for forever. When I went to school, I studied mechanical engineering because, yeah, I wanted to build things. And the field I ended up pursuing was more in sort of medical device design and and so, you know, a lot of it was like, how can we deliver something to patients that could, you know, improve their lives or change their lives in some way? And so it's been with me for, for a while and you know, through a very windy path, eventually, you know, started Gamma. But I would say it's just been one of those themes that as far back as I can remember, it's something I've wanted to do.

I love that. So it's really cool how you studied mechanical engineering at Stanford and then you literally designed eyewear that was really kind of like a direct application of your major, I think, which was really cool. And if my memory serves me right, you were working at Optimizely when you launched Spectre, correct?

Yeah, that's right. I was working full time at a software company called Optimizely, running finance. And you know, the, the irony is like the time like, you know, had had this idea of like wanting to start something, you know, fun mostly as like a passion project and the time I actually was able to spend enough of my own brain power to think about what that could be was when I first went on parental leave. So, you know, it was our first kid. I was taking a few months off from, from work and you know, when you're late at night, you know, you're holding your little one for me. It's like all of a sudden this idea is like, okay, you know, what could I, what else could we, what could I do here? And sunglasses for whatever reason just popped into my head. It may have been that it was we're approaching summertime and so, you know, there's just a lot more of people, you know, wearing some wear in general. And so yeah, started just nights and weekends kind of, you know, prototyping and drawing the sort of initial versions of Gamma of Specter and taking those designs and, and then bringing manufacturer in Japan to get the mid.

Yeah. And what age were you when you started Spectre?

I was 34.

34.

Okay, 33.

You're okay sharing your current age of.

Yeah, yeah, 42.

Okay. Yeah. So yeah. And one of the things I want to point out, the reason I bring that up on the interview is, you know, two part one Grant has tried to, you know, build companies. Gamma wasn't his first rodeo and you know, the first attempt was at 34. And then you started Gamma in 2020 at the age of 37. Correct.

Yep. And in between I actually joined a five person startup called Clearbrain, which I wasn't a co founder but you Know, I was, I started off in as advisor to that company and when they finished yc, I joined full time and still really got to see kind of, you know, going from what we were at the time, which is we were just starting to monetize the product so zero in revenue to when we were eventually acquired by Amplitude, you know, million in revenue and yeah, seeing what that journey was. So although I wasn't a co founder, really felt the, the sort of, you know, the hard work that goes into making something useful enough so that people, you know, want to pay for it.

Yeah. I'm curious, you know, in your mind, what were the most transfer transferable skills from your time at Optimizely in Clearbrain and even Spectre that kind of led to the massive success that you've already achieved at Gamma?

I mean it starts with like the, the fundamentals which is, you know, think really deeply about the market you want to go after. When I worked on Spectre, I realized that, you know, even though the product was super fun to build, it's a really tough market. You know, people buy sunglasses and ironically if you do a good job, they might buy a pair and not buy another pair for many, many years. And so you don't have a repeat customer if ever. And so there is no sort of repeatability. They buy it once and they're gone. And so yeah, obviously a product like that is both hard to design, hard to build and then you don't even have that repeatability. So think about the market and how big can that market truly be? It doesn't mean you'll tackle the entire market on day one, but it means like if you're successful, there's a path to turn this into a viable business. And I think most people maybe just don't think about that in the beginning and assume like it'll all work out. You know, I think we've all heard the saying around like, you know, a lot of what you need to do as a second time founders think about like distribution first. Like you're thinking about not only how do you build the product but like what is the market, who's going to buy it, how are you going to get into the hands of users? And those are questions you should be asking from day one. And if you, if you don't have a viable market, nothing else matters. It doesn't matter if you have a strong team, it doesn't matter if you have a genius idea for the product. It just means you're, you're at some point going to run into this massive wall. And I think it's always best to kind of go through the thought exercise, really think through, like, how is my product or business going to grow? And even if you can't see, you know, infinitely into the future, at least you can see the next couple years. And if you're, you know, find some level of success, like, you'll, you'll be able to anticipate what the next few steps after that might look like.

Yeah. So my next question is give us the genesis of Gamma. Like, like, how did this idea, like in company form, I know you're one of three co founders, but like kind of walk us through the founding story of Gamma.

Yeah, the, the problem space, I would say, is one that's been in my head for the past two decades. It goes all the way back to, you know, when I eventually graduated, I didn't go into mechanical engineering. I actually went into consulting in investment banking. So I've been living in slide decks my entire career. You know, throughout that, you know, first few years, I eventually, you know, found my way to optimize and, you know, as a head of finance and someone that's running operations, the sort of PowerPoint is, is what you consider like the language of business. It's how important information gets spread, it's how important decisions get made. And so, you know, as a leader, even at that company, you're living in slide decks. And so as a tool, it's been one I've used my entire career. And, and you know, at the last company I was at, when we were acquired, I decided not to join. So we were acquired by a company called Amplitude. I decided not to join full time. I stayed on it as an advisor and I went back into consulting. I was doing startup consulting, so I would have to then, you know, dust off Google Slides, create proposals and decks. And like, it was how I communicated all of my findings or suggestions. And I just, you know, felt like there, there was like one night where I was just up really late trying to format the slide and I just realized, like, even after hours it looked terrible. And that work was going to be a reflection of me. Right. Like, I have to go and like, present this to a client. And if the work looks terrible, it doesn't matter how much thought went into it, they're going to completely dismiss it or just think, you know, I'm an amateur, like, this is not, this is not polished work. And, and so, you know, that was the initial idea of like, okay, you know, slides as a format. Been around for almost 40 years at this point. Like, can we reimagine this from the ground up? Can we introduce new building blocks so that the average person who isn't a designer doesn't have, you know, technical skills, can still create something that they're proud of that, like, represents their work and then, you know, can go on with their life without having to waste all that time formatting, aligning boxes. So that that initial inspiration led me to reach out to two of my former colleagues. They were actually still at Optimize Z. And we started just prototyping nights and weekends, like, saying, hey, what could we do with this thing? Like, what if we really tried to introduce new building blocks that gave us, like, after four or five months, like, enough conviction that, hey, there is actually real opportunity here, you know, like, we can actually do something. So we took our prototype, like, this initial prototype and turned it into our initial pitch deck. Like, it was just. It was literally a sort of interactive, you know, hybrid doc deck sort of tool that we, you know, essentially laid out our plans for building Gamma use as our pitch deck and then raised a little bit of money.

I love it. So one thing I like to kind of do when I talk to some, you know, a founder or someone who's built a business or a company is kind of like, unpack the timeline. Because it seems like you had this idea, talk to your friends and, you know, work some nights and weekends, and bam, you have this, you know, company that's doing 50 million a year. But I know the timeline was in and the struggle was probably a lot longer, so help me kind of understand. So you had this pain point that's been with you for, you know, two decades, having to build presentations. By the way, I deeply know this because when I used to, I literally, at my last company, went to the CEO and founder, and I was like, I don't want to build presentations anymore. Can you make marketing do this? Because the thing I'm best at is pitching and closing and negotiating. And he was like, okay, cool, we'll make the marketing team do this. But I remember when I did have to do it, how painful it was. But going back to my original question is, like, help me kind of understand. Cause what I want, you know, the aspiring entrepreneurs that are listening to this is like, you know, you had this idea, this concept, and then you started, like, hacking things together on the weekend, you know, prototyping with your co founders. Like, what was the timeline of that from? Like, idea. Then kind of experimenting and then finally, you know, forming a team and kind of Raising some money.

Yeah, well, so, you know, the. Right after we kind of created the initial prototype, we were able to raise a little bit of money. So we instantly went into, let's form like the initial team. And for us, you know, there's three of us already as co founders and we thought about what are going to be the roles we would need to like, have enough to actually build a full product. And so we hired our head of design, a front end engineer and two backend engineers, all from Optimiz. So we were fortunate. Like at the time, Optimiz was going through an acquisition. So we were able to basically reach out to the folks that we wanted to work with again and convince them to kind of join us on this crazy journey. And so we had kind of the core team in place to start building. The interesting thing is we didn't actually immediately start building the presentation product or this category that we're in today. We. We ended up trying to do two things at once. We parallel path, like two opportunities. One was the presentation tool, so we were developing that. But the other was this other idea around. We were going to build a virtual office. This virtual office could be, this is peak pandemic. So like many more distributed teams. And so we wanted this sort of space where you could hang out with coworkers, you could collaborate as if you were in the office. And the reason we wanted to do that was like, okay, we're going to parallel path these two ideas to make sure that we really have conviction for one or the other. Both on paper sound good because like, oh, both, you know, are opportunities here. And given the timing, it felt like, oh, there's maybe something we can do. And so we actually built both for the next, like four to six months. Like, both trying to make them like incrementally better dog fooding the early versions of both products. And at some point we got to the point where we said, okay, we have to make a decision, like, which one are we going to make the main product and push forward? And that's our deciding moment was like looking at both and just trying to figure out of each category which one did we feel like had a better chance of being a product which could like, compound in value over time. Like, if we invested it like every single day, we could imagine it becoming more and more valuable to the end user. And the virtual office felt like we were at some point going to run into like diminishing returns because nobody even wants to be in the physical office 100% of the time, let alone a virtual Office. And so how good could we even make it? We felt like there was going to get to a point where, yeah, okay, we can keep adding features, but none of that's in service of a better experience. And so we ended up double downing on the actual presentation category and going deep there.

I'm so glad you shared that story because that's something I try to tell people all the time, is that the entrepreneurs who make it are the ones who pivot, pivot, pivot until they find the thing that, like, gets the, the traction. And I love that you kind of parallel track. You had these two different, you know, you know, business ideas and you, you were kind of going down both to see which one, A, you're most excited about, and B, like, you could see it really actually being something that PE people, the marketplace, et cetera, really wanted because that's, you know, we were kind of talking about this off air is like, all the successful entrepreneurs I know, they've just, like, tried and failed so much more than everybody else.

Totally. You got to, it's the only way. You have to be willing to experiment a ton, try and then have, like, low ego because, like, you know, things are not going to work out. You just got to pick yourself up and, and keep going. Knowing that failure is part of the equation here.

Yeah. So kind of connecting back to Spectre, like, when did you kind of decide, like, oh, this isn't like the one. Like, yeah, walk me through, like, kind of the emotional landscape. Was it hard for you to admit, like, ah, this is too hard to, like, win in this industry or, like, you know, if you can kind of take us there? Because, yeah, I want to understand that for myself and I think it'll be valuable for the audience as well.

Yeah. I mean, I think the honest answer is it actually started. It was. I probably set myself up for failure in the sense because I treated it as a passion project from day one. I wasn't treating it like something that would be a business. I, I did it because I did want to see what it would take to take something from 0 to 1 to understand all the nuances of like, you know, a business model and, you know, can I actually monetize in a way that could be profitable someday? And I did it to answer some of those questions. But I think deep down I knew this wasn't going to be the business. Like, this isn't, quote, unquote, my life's work, but it was something I, I found interesting. And so, yeah, I did it mostly out of, like, this was you know, enjoyable. It was fun. I could work on it with a few friends, but it was never anything I really considered. Hey, you know, if this fails, you know, it would, you know, it would, like, be a huge impact on me. I never felt that I never had that weight. And I think you do need to have some of that weight if you're going into, like, actually starting a business. You need to treat it like you're going to make it work no matter what happens. And for me, that wasn't how. How Spectre was, you know, sort of started.

Yeah. And one of the things I've realized in my own kind of career and entrepreneurial journey is like, everything we do in the past, eventually we're able to utilize some experience or skill set or strength that we built through that. And, you know, when I, when I kind of discovered that you were one of the co founders and CEO of, of Gamma, because I, I'd been, you know, off of LinkedIn for a while, went back on, saw you, and then I saw your ad where you're wearing the Spectre sunglasses and kind of doing the Mission Impossible Tom Cruise thing. And I was like, yeah, this is so cool that he literally, like, is wearing the sunglasses from the company he started that, like, didn't pan out, but he's still kind of paying homage to that, like, first endeavor.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, I think it's the Steve Jobs quote that you can only connect the dots going backwards. And I, I think that's totally right. It's like you kind of got to put yourself out there in many different ways. And, yeah, sometimes things line up. You can have a little fun along the way. And, you know, certain things, when they do line up, it makes everything else much easier.

Yeah. How important was it to have your two co founders? Because one of the insights that I've had really in the last six months is the times that I've found the most business success is when I had the right partners in my life, whether they were an incredible, you know, CEO, founder who was kind of, you know, acting as a mentor or, you know, a boss who really believed in me, or even a business partner who kind of had a skill set I didn't have. I'm just kind of curious, you know, your own reflections on, you know, because I know the, the, the. Your co founders have different career tracks than you and different experiences. So if you could speak to that, I think it'd be helpful.

Yeah. I owe almost, I'd say, all of our success to the decision of picking the right co founders, because everything else comes after that. And for us, we're just such a very complimentary team. Like, to your point, very different paths. John, who was the VP of product at Optimizely, has been on the product path his entire career. And then James was a senior engineer at Optimizely and actually started his career more in the sort of customer success or customer facing sort of capacity. And so has deep empathy for our customers. And like, together, I think just we make this team that again, has super sort of complementary skill sets. And I really do think that's required. Like, this is. You're doing this. When you're building a company, it's incredibly hard. You're going to run into so many different obstacles. And having a balanced team just means that no part of the system becomes like overburdened because you have someone that knows what to do and has good intuition there and you can lean on that person when needed. And, you know, the analogy is just like having a sports team, like, you can't have three quarterbacks. Like, that's not going to work. You can't have three kickers. You need to have complementary skill sets because every phase of the game is different. And I think we have been that for each other. And, you know, we, we. It doesn't mean it's just all easy. We try to do things to make sure that we have a good system in place. So, you know, ever since the very beginning, we've had two weekly standing founder meetings. Like all three of us get together. And I think over four and a half years, I think we've only missed two ever. And so these are. Things are very, very regular, very, very consistent. And it allows us to make sure that there is a sort of pressure valve where if any time there is this built up, like frustration or concern or doubt, we have a chance to talk about it. And I think that's really important. We have this mantra of don't let things fester. If it's in your mind, you need to talk it out. It cannot be something that stays in your head only and nobody else knows about. We've tried to stay true to that. I think it helped a ton that we had worked together for five plus years at Optimiz, so there was the foundation of trust. We knew that we were each other's number one cheerleader and we want to see each other succeed and thrive. And so that sort of relationship has helped kind of set the foundation for just how we build the team, how we build the company and everything that's Sort of come after the moment of, hey, let's start something together.

Yeah, that's amazing. So there's a couple things I want to dig into. One is kind of like the fact that you've kept your company so lean in terms of like head count. The fact that you have a negative net burn which will explain to the audience what that actually means for those who are unfamiliar. But before I do that, I want to. And then also company culture, because I think that's really important if you're building a company to build a culture where like, you know, I was listening to an interview of you on another podcast and I don't know if this still holds true, but like you've had no employee turnover, which is like insane. Like you've been in business for five years and no one's left. That's like, means you have an awesome company culture. That or you're paying people ridiculous amount of money. But before we do that, I wanna, I wanna showcase this tool because this, whether you work at a corporate job. And so I'm gonna do a screen share. So if you're listening on Apple or Spotify or whatever, like, this may be a good time to like just jump over to YouTube and just see this app. A P it's gamma app. We'll put the link in the description. I'm gonna do a screen share. I'm gonna show you. This is really good too because if you want to know how like a creator coach, like runs part of his business, this is a really good thing to see. So I'm just gonna share my screen here.

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So I've built I don't even know how many presentations in in Gamma but like you can already see there's a ton in here. And so you know, I use this to, to build a 17 hour money and investing course and this saved me, I don't know, probably 100 hours of work because there's, I don't know, there's six modules in each or six chapters in each chapter has multiple modules in it anywhere between 15 minutes and 50 minutes. And so I'm just gonna one show you an example from my investing mastery course of just how beautiful this is. So I'm going to go into present mode. But literally the beautiful thing about Gamma app is there's themes and they're beautiful, visually appealing themes. All different color themes and color codes. Now my Fit Rich Life brand is black and gold and they have this incredible black and gold theme that I've been using. Grant, you probably know the name of the theme or. Yeah, yeah, Orem, my favorite. It's so good but like literally like this is what it looks like and it's just so incredibly beautiful. And so I wanted to show you a kind of like what it looks like and then B real quick, bear with me. I want to just quickly show how fast it is to build something so the people who are like still spending hours building in Google Slides or PowerPoint or whatever can actually see just how incredible this is. So we're just going to go create new and one of the cool things as a creator that I've done is I started building coaching modules for my clients based on social media posts that have performed well that I'm like, oh wow, this is actually really good. So this is I'm going to paste in a Threads post I did about rewiring your dopamine system for wealth. So literally I'm just going to control V here, paste it in there and this is like I wrote this out on threads, but then literally I'm going to generate from notes or outline and then we are going to continue to prompt editor. Then I'm going to choose, we'll say concise but you can choose like how, how much text there is, et cetera. And then you can do card by card or freeform. I'm going to do freeform and you can choose how many slides there are. So I'm just going to choose 10, but you can choose 8, you can choose 25 and then hit continue. And again, highly recommend you go see this, but here's all the themes and here's aym. And then I'm gonna click this and literally I'm gonna hit generate and this is where the magic truly happens. And I love watching this every time because it just like you literally watch it start to bang out a presentation literally in like maybe a minute, probably less. But as you can see, if you're watching this, I'll kind of. Or if you're not watching this, I'll kind of walk you through it. It's literally building everything, the titles, the images, you know, different modular blocks, you know, that just look so freaking beautiful. And so again, I'll stop doing a screen share and go back to talking with Grant about other things. But for those who jumped over to YouTube or watching on YouTube, you can just see like literally in less than a minute. This has developed a stunningly beautiful presentation that now I could turn this into a 15 to 30 minute coaching module for my clients. So just had to share.

Amazing.

Any feedback or anything you want to say. You don't need to, but we can go into the conversation. But I mean, no, I love.

Yeah, we, we. You've highlighted just how quick we want to make things, make it easy so that people are not wasting their time. So yeah, awesome.

Cool. So let's go jump back to kind of company building, company culture. Why did you choose to raise so little money? Like, you know, in this day and age, people are raising like hundreds of millions of dollars and you've been in business for five years, a little over five years, I believe, and you've only raised 23 million, yet you're doing 50 million in a ARR, which for those who are unfamiliar with kind of the world of like technology, startup companies, like usually a company that's doing that much ARR has raised hundreds of millions of dollars, not 23 million.

Yeah, I mean, that's been our mindset from, from the very beginning. We, you know, think about constraints and how constraints, you know, beget creativity. You know, the more money you have it becomes just so easy to say, hey, let's go try to solve that problem with money, throwing more money at it, hiring more people. And that almost is never the case when it comes to early startup building. Like, money is not going to solve most of your problems. Most of your problems are around deeply understanding your customer, building a product that they love, and trying to do so in a way that, you know that. That is efficient. Like, if you, the moment you start kind of not focusing on efficiency to a certain extent, then you're building these habits that are going to stay with you for the rest of, you know, your life as a company. So we knew that from day one. Hey, we're going to have this sort of scrappy, you know, cockroach mentality that we can survive anything that happens. And I think that served us well. You know, every team member we have wears many different hats, can roll up their sleeves to do so many different things, can do, you know, this sort of whole mindset of do a lot with a little has been something I feel like has served us well and hopefully can serve us well throughout the next several chapters of building Gamma.

Yeah.

So.

Listening to an interview with, you know, on another podcast, you talked about, you know, the fact that Gamma is a horizontal product. Can you explain what a horizontal product is?

Yeah. So horizontal products typically mean, you know, you can serve many different industries and job functions all with the same product. You know, the classic horizontal products are, you know, like the Microsoft Office suite where spreadsheets, presentations, documents, they're used by almost every industry, whether you're a lawyer, a teacher, you know, investment banker. Like, you're using almost the exact same product. And, and the product can be sort of, you know, molded maybe to your needs, but it's all underlying the same, same tool. So, you know, Gamma is entering a pro, a category where we think, you know, again, any sort of user, whether. Whether your job function is in education or you're in corporate, you should be able to pick up Gamma and get a ton of value out of it. So that's what we've been building from day one.

Yeah. Why do you think you've had so much success? Because, like, I'm at this point in kind of my, you know, online education business. Like, I would never even, like, touch Google Slides or like, PowerPoint at this point, because it's just like, it would take me five to 10 times longer to create something that looks one tenth as good.

Yeah, I, I think, you know, when we think back to, like, some of the core decisions we had to make. Early on, there's been a lot of presentation tools that have come, you know, and tried to enter this category and many of them are not around anymore. And I think the trap that often happens is, you know, you try to enter this category and you think trying to be sort of, you know, incrementally better in some way, like, oh, we're going to be better at collaboration and, you know, the, you know, the, the 10x better sort of a mindset, I think, ends up not being enough because PowerPoint again has been around for 40 years. They've added every single bell and whistle you can possibly imagine. And so you need to enter a category saying, you know what, we're going to break all the rules, are going to be fundamentally different, and we're going to try to serve maybe a super underserved part of the market. And for us, that was like the person that again, doesn't have design skills, like, like just dreads the idea of having to format and choose a layout and all those things, but they still need to create. And so we've been trying to build a product that really serves that market as well as we possibly can. And I think that's how we've been able to build an early sort of community of users that love the product because for them it was a huge pain point and there was no alternative on the market. There was nobody else trying to do what we were doing. And that allowed us to get this initial set of people that just fall in love with the product. Can't imagine going back to the old way of doing things. And once you have some of that momentum, then you can start building on it. So those decisions were ones that I think we're benefiting from, but were made many, many years ago.

Yeah. Tell me the kind of reason that you like. I want to understand kind of like more the mission and culture of the company. You know, I mentioned before I did the presentation demo for those people that you've pretty much had no employees leave.

Yeah.

So I think for anyone who ever wants to build a company that, you know is more than just like being a solopreneur but have an actual team, you know, what does it take to build? Like, what did you, what have you done at Gamma that has made it so people have stuck around the entire time and no one has left, it.

Starts by just prioritizing these sort of culture conversations from the very beginning and let it sort of evolve a little bit over time. So, you know, we have this culture deck that we've maintained and it's been something we update regularly because the culture isn't something that should be fixed or static. It's something that needs to feel organic and most importantly, authentic to what you're building. And so my first version of writing our culture deck was just looking at our teammates and kind of describing the behaviors they already exuded. Like, what do they do? If I were to describe their actions, what is that? And try to articulate that in some way. And over time, that's sort of been a way to start clustering some of these behaviors into things that are, just represent who we are. And then, you know, as you grow, then it's starting to use that as a foundation for all new employees. You know, you're, you're, you're showing them like, hey, this is our culture deck. This is our culture deck. Talking through it, getting their input. When you're interviewing for candidates, you are seeing if they share those values and you set a super high bar. Like if they don't, if you don't feel like, you know, even if they're smartest person in the world, but they don't share your values, it's not someone you're going to hire. And so you have to have the patience to only hire people that, you know, actually have the DNA of what you want to bring into the company. And I think all of that has been helped by, for us, we've been hiring pretty slowly along the way. So, you know, the moment you start being in a floodgates are open, you're hiring as much as you possibly can. It's hard to maintain that bar for two reasons. One, the culture isn't solidified in any way, way, so nobody even knows what culture you're even trying to build. And then two, like, you're inevitably just lowering the bar because you're trying to hit some sort of hiring quota. And, and so then anybody can just come in and join even if they don't meet your sort of culture bar. So we had the saying from the very beginning. It goes back to the sort of scrappiness mentality, which is hire painfully slowly. And, and with that means yes, you're gonna have to say no to a lot of things in the beginning, but you get to, you earn the right to start building the culture you want, and then you then have to do the hard work of being consistent over and over and over again for, for many years.

Can you give us an example of the like, either the behaviors or the values that like, are really mission critical to the culture that you're Building at Gamma.

Yeah. So you know, our values conveniently spell echo and the E stands for empathy first. So empathy is not only internal, but it's also external. So internal, it's, you know, shit happens, life is complicated. Internal empathy just means like as you're working with other teammates, you understand like they may be going through things you don't, you know, you're not aware of. And it's helpful to just have that communication expectation like you're gonna work through it, things will be fine. And, and it's, it's at the end of the day like you're a team working together. You know. Empathy is also something when you are in a customer facing role to be able to understand. Like sometimes, yeah, customers are frustrated, maybe you didn't deliver what they needed in the product. But you need to hear them out because our goal as a product is to solve their problems and we need to deeply empathize with what are those problems that they're trying to solve. And so for us like the reason E is at the very beginning is empathy is always first. Like that is how we think about things. And when you start interviewing people, you can just tell when that isn't necessarily something they care about. Right. Like if it's all about I and it's never about the team and you know, they, they talk about hard problems in a very specific lens, it becomes clear that they're probably not going to be a good fit even if they're a rock star at their job. And so we wouldn't let someone like that into the company because they wouldn't do well.

Yeah, I love it. I appreciate you sharing an example. So one other thing I want to touch on briefly before we talk a little bit about like AI creativity and the future of work is. And I think this is so valuable because I know a lot of my listeners are kind of like in the, you know, Silicon Valley tech scene is how to value options and equity.

Yeah.

And, and there's kind of two frames I want you to talk through. One is like, how should founders like be, you know, when they're offering this to, you know, employees? Because I think one of the, the things that is unfortunate in this industry is a lot of times there's a lot of ambiguity about like the cap table and like what are these options actually ever worth? So there's that side of it. Like okay, if you were coaching a founder, what should they do? And then if you were kind of giving advice to an employee who's evaluating working at a startup that has you Know, an, like a equity component to the compensation package. Like, what would you tell them?

Yeah, I think the first thing I would say is, you know, as a founder, it's, it's your responsibility to be able to educate, you know, your team about how to think about options. So the, the most important thing is, like, if you're going to be the one educating, you need to learn it yourself and you need to learn all the different scenarios. When things are good, what happens. When things are bad, what happens. Have a perspective on where you want to be in terms of how generous you want to be with those options. Because there's, you know, the fine print can be written in many different ways. And, you know, I would start off like, for, for me, you know, many of us came from other startups, so I know what it's like when things don't work out. You know, my. When, you know, when I was at Optimiz, I did get a lot of equity and unfortunately, the company didn't work out. And the irony is, like, by, by when it was all said and done, I actually lost money from my options because I had exercise, I was on the hook for taxes and my options were underwater. And so at the end of the day, I didn't even make money. I lost money in my equity, which is a tough pill to swallow, right, because you join a startup believing it'll be worth something. But it wasn't because of malice or like, you know, people, you know, founders or like the leadership team not wanting to take care of me. It was just the circumstances and how things worked out. And I think you need to know those risks. So for a founder that hasn't gone through, you know, tougher times, they should go out and interview, you know, startups that where things didn't work out and so they can understand what the downside is and truly empathize with that case looks like. And then of course, like, we all want to believe that there's always going to be upside. And so it is helpful to, you know, map out a few different scenarios, like, what is a good outcome, what is a great outcome, what does that mean for the employee? And being able to share that with the candidate, I think makes a ton of sense. You know, candidates won't know what to ask oftentimes, so it's on the founder to kind of pave like a very clear picture such that if they're an employee that has multiple offers, you should provide a pretty objective view on what, you know, what are they getting with your company versus another company. And Try to, like, again, educate them. The downside is, yeah, maybe they end up realizing, you know, the math is more attractive somewhere else. And that may suck, but I think you're better off doing that, knowing that you're doing the right thing and playing a role in helping them make a really, really important decision that may impact them for, for many years to come. And so I'm always in the mindset of do your best to kind of play the role of educator. That only starts by knowing it inside and out yourself. And then once you understand how it all works, you as a founding team need to decide what is your philosophy on equity, how generous are you going to be with the terms, you know, written in, how your options are structured, and, and, and you know, try to do the right thing in your mind for, for the employees.

I love it. And so let's say you're, you know, somebody who is considering working at, you know, two or three different startups that you've gotten offers from. Is there any mental frameworks or online tools that people could use to kind of like value the equity portion of their offers?

Yeah, I mean, you need to start off by having, you know, apples, apples comparison. So asking the startup for the information you need. You need to understand your percent ownership on a fully diluted basis. Oftentimes someone will just give you, you know, X number of shares. That doesn't really mean anything. And so you need to understand like, okay, what does that ownership percentage mean? Can I compare X thousand of shares of company one and make that comparison to another company? You need to ask that. You should ask for things like strike price. So like, how is it, how much is it going to cost to exercise your options? If it's super early, you would want to ask like, you know, things like, can I early exercise my options? Because these have tax implications too. So I think there's, it ends up becoming a little bit trickier to always be able to do apples to apples. And you know, you, you try your best to understand at some level just generally what you think your percent ownership of this company is and then, you know, kind of do some basic scenario analysis for yourself of, you know, if I look at other sort of technology companies in a similar category, what does an amazing outcome look like, you know, when they go public, what is, what is that market cap? Or if they got acquired, what was the acquisition price? Then you might have some sort of bookends for like, what the total value of the company could be upon a great exit. And then of course you can then factor in your piece of the pie by looking at your percent ownership. Those are kind of like the, you know, the strawman to get you to at least an estimate.

Yeah, I appreciate that.

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Awesome. Let's transition to AI creativity in the future work, because, you know, I think you're building a really powerful AI tool that is really unlocking, you know, a lot of people's ability to, you know, communicate within, you know, the world of business, you know, no matter what type of business they're running. Like, it has totally unlocked me as a coach and an educator. And you've talked about the rise of the generalist. And can you tell me why you think that is the future and kind of what you mean by that turn of phrase, rise of the generalist?

Yeah. So for me, we're entering this era where AI can just be this powerful tool across many different dimensions, whether it's researching topics really deeply, helping you structure your thinking, really being your partner, your thought partner in many ways. And I think it will allow us to kind of pull in many different diverse skill sets into how we apply things at work. When I think about, you know, obviously something like a calculator or, you know, a spreadsheet, eventually, that just basically gave the average person the tools not to do less math, but to actually, you know, do interesting calculations and to actually then do much more than they would have with just, you know, a pen and paper when trying to calculate things.

Right.

So, like, that unlocked a ton of capabilities and made things way more accessible. I think the same thing is going to happen with, with AI, you know, the average person is going to be able to do way more. It doesn't mean you don't need to be spiky maybe in certain skills, like if you're a designer, for instance, like, yeah, still being super strong and like, visuals or like UI UX is going to serve you well, but all of a sudden AI allows you to code. So now you can actually prototype way faster than you could have in the past and not have to wait on an engineer to help you get the first, you know, version of your idea out there. And that's a, like a superpower, you know, and like the, the, the sort of kind of capabilities go on and on. Like as a designer, you know, you used to kind of rely on maybe having like a UX researcher to do certain things. Well now you can, you know, take maybe for us like one example is like we look into our Slack and we have a Slack group with a lot of our power users. We can copy and paste all of those chats into one place, synthesize all the things they've ever asked us for. And all of a sudden we have this treasure trove of information that would have historically been multi person job to actually go through and make sense of. And now it can be done with one person, with a little bit of time and the right tools. And I think that's just a powerful thing. So this idea like there can be a generalist that can truly span the entire sort of customer experience or the entire business and do things that they weren't able to do in the past is, is something that I really believe in and it will allow people just to have a ton more agency and ownership of all of their work.

Yeah, yeah, I think it's, I'm so fascinated by this, you know, partially because like I've kind of entered the world of like the Solopreneur where I just have like some, you know, contractors that help me with some things. But more and more I'm needing less of their help and using, you know, AI tech enabled tools to do the work. And I think we're in the next few years like we're gonna have like a solopreneur who's literally like built a billion dollar business as a one person business. And I think that's, that's just so fascinating to me. I'm not saying that's going to be me, but I, I think that is right around the corner, which is really cool in the fact that like anyone who's ever wanted to start a business, it's never been easier with the amount of like technology that we have right now. So I'm kind of curious. As a visionary founder and CEO, where do you see AI kind of taking storytelling and business communication and content in the next couple years? What do you see coming down the pipeline?

Yeah, we're building a tool where it isn't replacing the human.

Right.

We are a tool that's supposed to help make the human's life, life way easier. And so we see ourselves as building something that can truly be, you know, your sort of design partner, as if you had like an expert designer sitting right next to you. And any sort of idea you need to visualize or communicate, we can help you do that. And so the ideas are still yours. The sort of content and the story you want to tell, it's all in your head. And we want to help free that. And so, yeah, we're excited. I think there's just so many different ways that people, when you think about how communication itself will transform, you know, today you can lean on, you know, a slide deck as like a visual aid, but in the future there'll be, you know, many different formats. Multimedia, like websites, video, audio, like different ways that you can package up content, make it super shareable and consumable by any, anybody on any device. And yeah, we want to play a part of that. You know, slides for us has been sort of this initial wedge, but, but we think there's going to be many, many different forums and, you know, we're going to, we're going to kind of ride that as long as we possibly can.

I love it. So as we start to wind this down, a couple, you know, questions around, you know, wisdom for, for those who may want to start their own company or, you know, people who want to delve into the world of being a creator. Like, what advice would you give to someone who's, you know, wanted to start a company, but they haven't actually either started their own solo entrepreneur business or, you know, tried to build something like Spectre and failed. Like that person who's been dreaming about it but hasn't taken the action. What would you like, two to three nuggets of wisdom or encouragement for that person?

Yeah, I mean, it starts by, you know, who are you surrounding yourself with? You know, if there's others that have a similar ambition, can you, can you surround yourself with those folks? You know, if you're someone that cares about working out and you go to the gym, it's, it's easy when you're surrounded by people that also care a ton about fitness. And the same goes with, like, you know, if your ambition is to build a business, then surround yourself by people at various stages. Like, I think you kind of need people that are a few steps ahead of you and maybe people that are almost only like one step ahead of you. So you can almost imagine what it can be like to, to be what you want to be someday, but you got to just get started. You know, I feel like today, to Your point, like AIs made it simpler than ever to at least take those first initial steps. And it's still on you to take that first step. But I think if you have the confidence to do that and you have the confidence to take the next step after that and the next step after that and just keep going. So I'm really excited because I think there will be many more entrepreneurs that are born in this era just because there is more tooling and there is more sort of a community around this. And I can't see, you know, I'm personally just, I can't wait to see what people build.

Yeah. And I'll say one note, just because, you know, I work with so many coaching clients is you say confidence to, to, you know, take the action or do this. And the thing I've realized in my own entrepreneurial journey is like, I'm totally unconfident and scared all the time, but I just do it anyways. Because the way you build confidence is through experience. Even if you fail, you get more confident because it's like, cool, that didn't work. Okay, now I know like, what to do next. And so like, even like, you know, and I know what Grant's getting at, he's saying more so than confident. Just have the courage to try and try and try again and fail and you will build the confidence through that process of trying and failing. And then you will also, like, you'll become very confident over time in a specific area. So I think that's really powerful is, you know, and it like, honestly, like we said were talking about earlier in the podcast, every successful entrepreneur I know, they've just tried and failed more than the average person or the person who hasn't actually started a successful business. So get your failure reps in if you want to have your own business. Whether it's, you know, a 30, 40 person company doing, you know, 50 million a year in the AI space or if it's, you know, just a, you know, a solo entrepreneur business that's like, within the creator economy. There's just so many opportunities now, I think for people to build a career or a business around their interests and AI and technology is completely unlocking that. And we're so lucky to live in this time 100%. So, last question. I know you gotta wrap up and prep for your next meeting, but I always like to ask the guest to share a Tip tool or strategy for fitness health. One for money slash wealth and one for life slash fitness. Now they can be. It could be one thing that applies to all three, or it could be three different things for each area. So what do you got for us, Grant?

Yeah, I'll give you one. One for each. So, you know, when it comes to health for me, I like to think of, you know, a body in motion, states in motion. So I, I start every morning with just like actually getting the body in motion, having this little stretching routine to just get in like a better flow state. We're sitting in a chair for much of the day and so, you know, how can I get myself into like being prepared? And so yeah, I found like a really nice, like five minute stretching routine that's just been really nice. And I really feel like when I eventually am ready to like, you know, look at the first email or like, you know, start starting work, I feel good and I feel that that's been, you know, a great starting point on the wealth side. You know, I have two little ones, two little kids. And so for me it's been helpful just to start thinking about how do I teach them about money and what are the most important lessons and am I modeling that behavior? I think it's both a chance to kind of actually learn what's these concepts and remind yourself of them, but then also be the one that's modeling the behavior in a way that hopefully leads you down the path you actually want to go down. So it's a constant reminder for myself and something I think hopefully my kids will be able to gain some value from over time too. And then the last one, I guess, what was the category again?

It was life slash happiness.

Life happiness? Yeah. For me, I mean, it's just like in business and in life in general, it's all about the people. What I found to be the number one most important thing is surround yourself with people that give you energy. You know, you have to do your own sort of energy audit. But like the people that give you energy, like, that's, that's like a gift. And if you could surround yourself by people with different, you know, you know, ambitions, but still give you energy, that, that's awesome. And if you find that you're surrounded by vampires or people that drain your energy, then you got to kind of shift things a little bit because you know, that energy is what fuels you across all different parts of, of your life. And for me, it's the only way I've been able to like, have the energy to actually build Gamma is like surrounding myself with people that I genuinely want to spend time with and I love being around.

Awesome. Great tips, tools and strategies for people to live their fit, rich life. So thank you for sharing. If people want to know more about Gamma, they can go to Gamma App if they want to connect directly with you. Where? Where should they go?

LinkedIn and Twitter X are the two places. So yeah, hit me up. Would love to connect and I was here.

Great. Yeah. And it's Grant Lee. I'll put his Twitter slash X link hyperlink in the show notes as well as his LinkedIn profile in the show notes so you don't have to go searching for him. But it is Grant Lee, CEO and co founder of Gamma App. So Grant, thank you so much for coming on the show, brother.

Thanks for having me, man. It's great.

Hey everybody, thanks for tuning in. And remember, literally everything can be used as an opportunity to learn, heal, grow, transform and transcend. So whatever is going on in your life, choose to consciously and proactively harness that energy and use it to alchemize your life to the next level. Take one nugget from this episode and take action on it this week. Nothing changes unless you take new, inspired action. If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend or on your favorite social media and leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. You can find me @justindavid, Carl on Instagram and all the socials as well as at fitrichlife. Com on the web. Until the next time, sending you lots of energy and plenty of dragon magic.