Grant Lee (Gamma) - Finding Early-Stage Energy [Entire Talk]

Welcome everybody to the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders seminar at Stanford University. ETL is the Stanford seminar for aspiring entrepreneurs. And it is brought to you by BASES, the Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students, and STVP, the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. I'm Ravi Balani, a lecturer in the Management Science and Engineering Department at Stanford and the director of Alchemist, an accelerator for enterprise startups. Today we have the pleasure of continuing the Stanford Engineering Centennial. It's the 100-year anniversary of the Stanford School of Engineering, and we have one of our own Stanford engineer alums this week. Grant Lee, who is part of the centennial celebration and is the CEO and co-founder of Gamma, which is an AI-powered presentation and website design platform. How many people have used Gamma? OK. It will make your life better, and especially if you're a student. It's a little bit of a hack. And for all those who have, you guys are not alone. There's over 50 million users. And probably more that have used Gamma. And Gamma's also scaled to $50 million in annual recurring revenue, or ARR, with a relatively lean team, with fewer than 50 employees, and also with frugal and thoughtful fundraising. Without taking in excess venture capital, Gamma's raised over $20 million from funds like Accel and marquee investors like Eric Yuan, the CEO of Zoom, who is also here at ETL. And despite— not despite that, maybe because of being so lean and smart, Forbes has also recently named Gamma a next billion-dollar startup. Grant is a Stanford-trained engineer. He is really returning home here with this talk. Grant got his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering and co-termed in biomechanical engineering. Any mechanical engineers in the audience? OK, so Grant was in your seat just 20 years ago, and now he's back coming to the farm. Even though he studied biomechanical engineering, his entrepreneurial path has taken him into domains outside of that. Before Gamma, he served as the COO of Clearbrain, which was acquired by Amplitude, and the CFO of Optimizely. Anybody know of Optimizely? OK, so Optimizely is a leading A/B testing and digital experimentation platform. And so with such an eclectic career spanning data, product, and design-driven storytelling, Grant is really at the forefront of a new wave of AI tools empowering creators and teams to work faster and communicate more effectively. He's also very passionate about paying it forward, and he blogs about his advice to future founders on starting companies. So you should go follow and check out Grant Lee. Please welcome Grant to the Entrepreneur Thought Leader Summit. [FOREIGN LANGUAGE] The format for this ETL is that we're gonna do a fireside chat fire side chat for about 30 minutes and then we're gonna invite the students to come forward to really ask questions. So we wanna save time for all the questions that you have for Grant. So start preparing those now and we'll start lining up at this mic when I give the cue in about 25 minutes. We'll start lining up, okay gang? So just start thinking about your questions in advance. Grant, welcome back to Stanford.

Thank you so much, yeah, so great to be here. Thank you for having me.

So Grant, you know, one of the things— there's so much to unpack and there's lots to cover. One of the things that we oftentimes discover at ETL is that these meteoric successes are oftentimes, even though they seem like they're just happening in the moment, they're really years if not decades in the making. And so I want to start really with this fireside chat with understanding the foundation story of Gamma and then inflection moments. But even before Gamma, I want to start with what you learned at Optimizely. You were 5 years at Optimizely. How did that inform, if it all did, what you've done at Gamma?

Yeah, maybe I'll actually start with a quick Gamma story, then we'll go back to Optimizely. So Gamma, we're 5 years in and it does feel like we're making progress. But, you know, hopefully just kind of rewind a little bit. So we started the company back in the end of 2020. This is peak pandemic. You know, the world was in a different place and trying to fundraise at that time was also just kind of chaotic. We were trying to line up all these investor calls, and you do these Zoom calls back to back. I was actually living in London at the time, so even for me, kind of trying to figure out how to line up these calls was extra hard because it was all in the evening. I also have two little kids, and so trying to figure out actually how to put them to bed and then actually line up these pitches is also another piece of trying to figure that out as well. And so basically peak pandemic, we had this sort of modest flat in London, I would basically, after the kids go to sleep, set up this little spot that was between the kitchenette and the laundry room and sit there, kind of put up a Zoom background so that it looked nice. Nobody knew where I was. And I would start doing these calls. And the first day, I basically had lined up back-to-back calls. On my third call, I was with an investor, met him for the first time. And I felt like it was going pretty well. 20 minutes in, got through my pitch. And I kind of pause and wait for the investor to start asking questions. And he basically says, "This has got to be the worst idea I've ever heard. Not only are you going up against massive incumbents, they have ultimate distribution. There is no way you're going to succeed." And so in my mind I was like, "OK, I got to think about a smart rebuttal here or something. Like, what am I going to say?" Before I had a chance to, he hung up on the call. And so then I'm sitting there in the dark thinking about, well, that's not how I wanted this to go. And I think even worse, you start having this thought in your head, what if he's right? Like, what if this is a dumb idea? And fortunately, I didn't have too much time to get down on myself because I was having to prepare for the next pitch right after. And so instead, I sort of took that moment to think about there is truth to what he said, which is going into this market is incredibly hard. For us to actually have a chance of breaking through, we have to think about growth from the very beginning. Building a good product is necessary but not sufficient. And so what can you do to really set yourself for success long term? And if we're lucky enough to get funding, make sure that we don't take that for granted. So that was a sort of inception moment for just Gamma. And fortunately, we did raise a little bit of money and were able to assemble a team. But for me, that was kind of this moment of realizing that There's a lot to figure out along the way, and it's not gonna be easy.

And so how did you, so I know one of the criticisms that come up sometimes if people hear about Gamma is that you're gonna prove out a market and then OpenAI is just gonna eat your lunch. So, you know, all these platform players can just easily, you're a feature on an LLM platform. And I don't know if that's what the VC was also trying, and I'm sure people have told you that all the time.

So this was even pre-AI, so it wasn't even, you know, ChatGPT, it was PowerPoint's gonna eat your lunch. Whatever you do, they're just going to add to their product. Or Google Slides is going to eat your lunch. Whatever you do, they're going to make it 10x better. So those are all the things that crept into those investors' minds. And you have to think about, OK, again, how do you actually navigate that? And what truth are they actually conveying to you that you can incorporate into your roadmap?

And how do you answer that question?

For us, a lot of what you think about when you enter a market, it's about trying to think about how can you serve an underserved part of the market? So with presentations, you know, we're probably all been in PowerPoint presentation trying to use it where you're faced with this blank canvas. You as the user need to figure out how do I line the boxes, figure out the right layers, and, you know, choose the right layout. All of us are probably visual learners. Very few of us are visual designers. And so for us, we felt like there's an underserved part of the market where people need to communicate visually, but not all of us are great at getting what's in our head into this canvas. And so how can we actually do something there? How can we change the way PowerPoint is built fundamentally so that we can empower new people to actually have a tool that they can use? And so for us, it was think about, OK, what are the building blocks? Instead of static 16:9 slides, we're going to introduce different building blocks that empower the average user to do more. And so that was kind of the foundation. When you enter in a new market, you're thinking about— is like the analogy is almost like it's a balloon. And you're trying to penetrate this market in a new way. The best way to do that is be like laser-focused on just like one value prop. Don't try to spread yourself thin across like 10 different things that you offer. Just really nail it for that one like user, that one user persona super well, and that's what we've tried to be, you know, really focused on over the many years.

Okay. I hope everybody takes that to heart. So even if every company that you start, you're going to get the question of is there value, and then once you prove out the value, why won't an incumbent just replace you? And so having the conviction of doing— going after a targeted user in a different way, and then scaling from there is— it can be hugely valuable. So thank you for that share. But I'm curious to go back to the inception moment of Gamma. Was the inception moment when you were pitching these funds, where you said, you know, if somebody funds me, then I will commit? Or had you committed before that? And if you committed before that, can you literally walk us through the inflection moment? So in my mind, those are going to be, when did the idea come into your head? And then when did you have conviction to actually dedicate all of your time to that idea? What had to happen for you to get to that point?

So I'd say that the idea itself was something that's been brewing for many, many years. I started my career in consulting and investment banking. Not surprisingly, you live in slide decks. And so as a tool, it's something I use every day for many, many years. The idea itself in terms of like this being the thing I would work on didn't really happen until much later. The last startup I was at, a company called ClearBrain, we ended up getting acquired by Amplitude. And I decided to stay on it as advisor, but didn't join the company full-time. And so as advisor, I went back to my roots. I was consulting early-stage startups. And I was using Google Slides as the medium of how I'd communicate to all my clients. And one late night, I was trying to frantically prepare for the meeting for the next day. And I was spending all this time trying to format the deck to just look decent so that it didn't look like when I went into the meeting next day that I spent zero time on it, right? And so I ended up realizing that the sort of amount of time spent on the formatting and the design ended up being like 90% of the effort, whereas it felt like— and then 10% on the content— whereas it felt like it should be flipped, right? I should be spending most of my time thinking about the content and only 10% on the formatting. And so I ended up calling up two of my buddies that were still at a company called Optimizely. We had worked together for several years.

And we said—

I pitched them just a crazy idea. Of like, what if we kind of prototype something? Let's just like work on something. And so over the next 4 or 5 months, we were basically prototyping nights and weekends about what could this be if we reimagined this format from the ground up. We eventually took that prototype and used that as our pitch deck. So when I pitched to investors, instead of using Google Slides, we used our prototype. And that was what we used to raise a little bit of money at the end of 2020.

And were you all in at that point with your co-founders before you talked to the investors? And what had to happen to get to that?

Yeah. I mean, one of the things I think about as a founder, you're always trying to build conviction, right? Like at every single point in the game, like at the very, very beginning, you kind of have an idea. We spent the next 4 or 5 months building conviction by building the prototype. And through that, you start learning as a team, like do we actually make a good team? Many people will go on and maybe try to start startups with their friends. That could be fine. But you should also make sure that you're going to be a strong team. A strong team is complementary in nature, has like skill sets that can be really— basically be able to actually bring an idea to life, and that's not always easy. And do you actually have fun doing it? Is it enjoyable? Are you energized by your co-founders? And so that 4 or 5-month process was not only building conviction about the product, it was about building conviction for us as a team. Are we a good team, a good unit? And I think we got there. We basically at the end of that period was like, this feels good. It feels like something we would even potentially use as an end user. And so let's actually give this an honest chance. And let's go out there and actually pitch this to investors. We had the mindset that we were going to raise money. It was like almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. We wanted to get this done as quickly as possible so that we can actually come together. They were actually still both working on Optimizely at the time. So it allowed us to like, once we closed, they were able to put in their notice and we were able to jump in and do Gamma full time.

—so I just want to underscore a couple— there's a couple of really important nuggets here. Before you even raised a dollar, there was a couple of key steps. One is that you were focused on a pain point, a problem. You weren't enamored by the tech. You weren't like saying, how can I use AI to make PowerPoint AI-enabled? You had a pain point. That was the kernel. And then before you raised money, you wanted to confirm that you would actually get energized by working with your co-founders full time. Yep. And then did you also get any try to validation from the market before you went out to raise money? Or was it more just the energy that you were feeling?

The validation came from just our own intuition. So one of my co-founders, John, he was VP of Product at Optimizely. He had spent his entire career as a product manager, not surprisingly, also using decks all the time. My other CTO co-founder, he started his career actually in customer success, so he was interfacing with clients. And again, with all of his customers, you have to prepare quarterly business reviews, all in PowerPoint, all in Google Slides. And so we also We all came with some basic intuition for— this is a problem we have. We think it's kind of a universal problem. And so that was enough for at least us to start going down this path of, hey, we care about changing how people communicate. This is going to be the first sort of set of things we're going to go after. And we'll see what happens over the long haul. So you were both your focus—

you were the focus group and the founders.

Totally, yeah. Which is great. And I think that allows you to kind of have the initial feedback loop of, does this work? Is it helpful? Let's go back and rebuild it, try again.

So good. OK. So Grant, last week our keynote was Tina Seelig who talked— who authored this book, What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20. I understand that you've put together this reflection piece on 12 things I wish I knew before I started my company. Yeah. And I've gotten some nuggets out of those. I loved them. Should I call some out? Yeah. So one of the things that you say, one of the principles is that the Jeevons paradox applies to all nascent markets. Can you unpack that? I don't know if I'm saying Jeevans paradox. Jeevans paradox.

Jeevans paradox. Yeah, for those that may have heard of it, it's basically any time technology increases the efficiency of something, what ends up happening is demand surges. And so the classic example here is with steel production in the 1800s. At some point, the Bessemer process made it super efficient to create high-quality steel. And you might have been like, OK, well, then maybe the steel industry as a whole will kind of just— plateau because you don't need to spend as much on steel anymore, what ended up happening is all these new things were able to be invented or created. Skyscrapers were able to be built and invented, right? And so rather than sort of steel production, you know, plateauing, it skyrocketed, right? And so oftentimes you're trying to find like what are markets where you can build the skyscrapers of the future, where something about the technology has changed, something super efficient. AI is obviously a clear example of something's fundamentally shifted. And now can you go into a market where the skyscraper, in this case, doesn't even exist yet? Nobody's even imagined it yet. Can you go in there and leverage the efficiency gains and bring something to the market that's now possible? So oftentimes, that's the best kind of starting point, is kind of brainstorm within that set of things that you care about deeply, and can you find an opportunity to unlock?

That's so good. Last week we talked about engineering luck. That was the title. On that topic, one of your principles is also that your luck surface area has two dimensions, time and people.

Yeah. This is one I think about a lot just because going back there, so the two dimensions, right? People. I honestly believe you need to be able to surround yourself with people that give you energy. But it's also people that you share the same values. You share the same principles. You share the same ambition, maybe the same vision. And if you can combine that with giving that team enough time to do something, I think you can create your own luck. And when I go back to just thinking about my founding team, my two co-founders, I have the two— I have two amazing co-founders. There is like 0% chance we could have built Gamma without them. And I think we give ourselves a shot by just like, again, like building together, spending enough time. 5 years in startup land can feel like an eternity. But I think over that period of time, because we've allowed ourselves to kind of be invested in this, we're able to do something special.

How do you know when somebody is actually a true co-founder versus just a founding employee or—

Yeah. A lot— for us, I think the only way you can really do that is by just trying to build something together. It doesn't have to be— again, maybe it doesn't have to be your life's work or like a future startup, like just try something. The funny thing is actually— so I mentioned I have two co-founders. One of the co-founders, James, James and I, we worked together at Optimizely. We actually did a passion project on the side together. We built a sunglasses business. And so this was like completely just random. We weren't trying to make money. This was actually tapping into my mechanical engineering roots, where I was like, I'd love to build— design a pair of sunglasses. We ended up getting them handcrafted in Japan. He built the entire web presence, our e-commerce store, all of our sort of lifecycle marketing. And we had a blast doing it. We ended up having to wind down the company when I moved to London. And I had all these sort of sunglasses still sitting in my garage, because that was the fulfillment center. But the entire time we did it, absolutely enjoyed it, and I, in my— in the back of my head, was like, one day when we actually do something for real, James is gonna be the first person I call. Like, no doubt, he'll be the first person I call.

So important, gang, just to start working with people on different small tinkering projects, and those could be your future co-founders for changing the world. Another principle: Parkinson's Law applies to both time and money. What is Parkinson's Law, and can you unpack that?

Yeah. So I mean, you might have heard of this where basically if you— like the classic thing is like if there's a project and there's a deadline and you end up saying, oh, we're not going to be able to meet the deadline, so let's push the deadline. You end up just filling that time with doing the exact same amount of work, but actually not accomplishing any more. And what I've learned is that I think that also applies to basically how people end up spending money. I spent a lot of time in sort of the finance function, you know, CFO at Optimizely, where, you know, I was responsible for the entire company budget and every department budget. And what I found was that when you give a team or company a budget, they somehow magically always spend the entire budget. It doesn't almost— it almost doesn't matter what line— you can get super, you know, granular by line item by line item, just gets spent. And that's fine, but I think it's when you're building a startup, you shouldn't be overly prescriptive. You almost need to go in with a mindset of you're going to try to spend like as efficiently as possible. There are some things that are going to raise in terms of you think it's going to be high impact. And even if it doesn't fit, you know, quote unquote a budget, you might just want to do it because it's the right thing to do. And those are things you kind of have to learn along the way. It becomes a sort of like intuition that you'll have to build so that you can actually hopefully still spend efficiently and spend wisely, but not have to track every single dollar.

And there's also— so that's money. You also say it applies to time.

Can you talk about that? Yeah. I mean, one of the things with— especially early-stage startup building, is you have to be your own time cop. You have to be the one sort of setting the sort of pace, right? It's very easy to say, I'm going to do a million things, and we're going to kind of just get through them as quickly as possible, but not having like a fixed deadline. And then guess what? Like all of a sudden, like you think you're moving fast, but you have no general sense of like what true pace looks like. And so by setting a deadline, you give yourself a chance to actually see like within that window of time, like how much can we actually accomplish, and hold yourself accountable to it. And also by compressing the timeline, you learn significantly faster. Learning is like the key to growth, especially early stage, because you're going to make a ton of mistakes. You just don't know which one of the decisions you're making are the mistake. And so your ability to actually set like this sort of deadline forces yourself to like do your best work in that timeline, and then measure yourself against whether or not you're actually making progress.

And you guys are famous for how much you've accomplished with a relatively lean team and lean capital. I'm amazed also that you as a former CFO are such a phenomenal tech CEO, just because the CFOs I've met in my life tend to be, you know, downside risk mitigators but not upside risk potential expanders. Can you share any unintuitive hacks on how you get the best out of people from a management perspective?

Yeah, I mean, I do believe in general constraints beget creativity. So you create some set of constraints. Your team will be forced to get creative in general. That could be not enough resources, so they'll get creative in terms of creating new tools for themselves. And for us, one of the easiest hacks is you just don't hire super fast. We had this mantra early on, which is maybe counter to a lot of fast-growing startups, which is we're going to hire painfully slowly. Even as we started seeing explosive growth, The temptation is to just start doubling, tripling the size of your team. We resisted that. We kept the headcount super small. That means every team member needs to take on much more responsibility, but also has a ton more ownership. And that just means, again, going back to the creativity piece, you start getting— you force yourself into maybe really dreaming bigger just because you have limited resources.

Do you use MBRs or OKRs? Not yet.

I mean, we do set goals, but not to that level.

OK. Performing phenomenally well, so I'm just— okay. So you set higher level, more abstract directions.

Higher level, more abstract, and it's more about, I guess, the principles about how we operate, and then trying to just keep that velocity as high as possible.

That's so good. Okay, I'm going to ask 2 or 3 more questions, gang, and then we're going to open it up. So just start to think about or get ready to come up if you have questions. So Grant, you talk about in a recent blog post about how most founders optimize for features, headcount, and fundraising. But the outliers that you say will win in the next decade optimize for narrative, unit economics, and repeatable distribution. And then you detail out 7 questions that separate those that will win from those that will lose. You can choose if you want to go through all 7 questions now, but can you just unpack that for the students?

Yeah, so one of the pieces is just around You're going to have to learn how to tell your story. I think there's also just generally like this negative stigma when it comes to things like maybe sales or marketing. But those are skills that founders absolutely need to have. Being a salesperson basically means— the context is you're going to first have to pitch investors, sell them on your idea to get money. You're then going to have to pitch candidates about joining your company that has very— that has no traction or nothing to really be able to point to and kind of convince people to join you on this journey. And then you're going to have to pitch and win over customers to buy your product. And so it's all this amount of like sales and marketing, they're just like poured to every single part of your job that I do think getting over the stigma of like sales isn't for me or I don't want to touch sales because I'm a technical co-founder. I mean, I think that's going to kind of sell yourself short because I think the bigger opportunity is actually to get good at those skills, get good at them really early, practice them, and then so much more opportunity is unlocked for you. I want to ask about your—

thank you, that's great. I want to ask about your development because you have such an eclectic path. You studied biomechanical engineering, then you end up— it sounds like you go into banking and consulting, you become a CFO and a COO. First of all, can you walk us through what the students should think about studying now? Like in hindsight, are you glad you studied biomechanical engineering even though now you're running a major AI software company? How should the students think about what they should study now at Stanford?

Yeah, I definitely do not regret studying mechanical engineering. But I mean, I'll share my own personal story, which is I got to senior year and I was working late night in the lab one night. The lights were turning off, and I just had this moment of— I felt pretty lonely. I didn't know if this is what I want to do for the rest of my career. And I actually had a friend go through basically something similar where they were trying to take a bunch of courses, figure out what actually resonated with them. They ended up taking some business courses. And he was like, oh, maybe you'd like that. So I ended up spending the summer between my senior year and my co-term year taking some MBA courses. And I don't know. Something there just kind of unlocked for me where it was like I gained a lot of energy by doing those projects. And I thought about what was it about it. And I think for me, part of it was just being surrounded by people. I get energized by people. And a lot of the things we were doing were group setting, group projects, versus a lot of the work I was doing in engineering was a little bit more isolated. And of course, every field's a little bit different. And every industry or company you join might be different. But something about that just led me down a path where I was going to go towards where I got energy. I ended up doing consulting where— in my mind, it kind of got to combine the two things I loved, which is with engineering, you're kind of deconstructing problems, coming up with solutions. I love that. And then I also got to spend a lot of time with colleagues, clients, interfacing with them, trying to help solve their problems. And that allowed me to kind of bring this level of energy that I didn't have, that I didn't see in the alternative. And so that kind of led me down one path. And then over time in consulting, I think the major downside for me was you never get to see something to completion. You kind of deliver a proposal or a recommendation, and then you kind of never see what happens after that. And so I really felt like if I could join a company internally full-time, it would be a chance to actually see what would it be to have full ownership, to really be able to drive something forward over a long time horizon. And that's eventually how I found a role at Optimizely. It was basically the first finance hire there.

And then you ended up becoming the CFO over time. Yeah, in over 5 years. One of the through lines as I'm hearing you talk is about energy and people. I feel like people and energy are creating these moments of reflection that make it clear how to follow sort of the rabbit into Alice's Wonderland. Did you have key mentors along the way that helped shape you? And if so— and maybe you didn't, maybe you self-learned— but if you did have key mentors, can you share some of the seminal ones and what you learned from them?

Yeah. I mean, there's been— even at Optimizely, so Dan, he was the co-founder CEO there. He was also a Stanford student. We actually met at Stanford and were dormmates. And for him, I think that was just an opportunity to just understand what it means to build a company that has strong culture. You talk about a company where throughout there's just good people, people that are aligned, again, on the vision. for me, people that I was super energized working with. Like, we would work super hard, but it never felt exhausting, never felt draining. And so I really appreciated the difference between that versus some of my banking roles where we're also working hard, but it was very draining. And I think there was just a different characteristic there. When I was at Stanford, actually, I had a mentor here—

What was the difference there, just to unlock that? Because I think that's a really key insight. You had two scenarios. You're working really hard. One's draining, one's— energizing. Can you get down to tactics? What tactically made it energizing?

Yeah, I don't— there's a tactics and also I think there's just the value system. So in banking versus startups, it's probably as polarizing as it gets where it's missionary versus mercenary, right? Where missionary is caring about this like long-term vision of changing the world, making an impact, and you're like if you're bought into that, that feels great, like every day feels like you're marching towards like this long-term climbing the mountain together. If you're working for a company that's a mercenary, or it's just for the next paycheck, the paycheck comes and goes, and then you're resetting the clock, and then going back and trying to figure out, OK, how am I going to make even more money? And for some people, that's super motivating, because maybe money for them is that scorecard. But if it isn't, then it's pretty depressing, because everybody else is measuring the scorecard. You don't really care about it. And so you're working long hours, and then you're asked ask yourself like what's the point, like do I even care about this? And I think for me it was just a different scorecard that I cared about. And so startup land for me was just much more kind of aligned to where I wanted to be.

Okay. Okay, that's great. We crowdsourced some questions from the students. Yeah. And some of these are generic, some of these are specific to you. I'm going to ask— this is my final question, then I'm going to open it up. But I love this question from one of the students which was, if you had a clone of yourself who could go off and pursue anything right now, where would you direct them and why?

Oh, wow. That's a great question. I mean, I think the obvious answer is just to spend more time in AI. There's just too much going on. The amount of advancement happening on so many different dimensions is just insane. So no matter what, I almost don't think you could go wrong by just spending more time experimenting, exploring, dabbling. The more personal answer is if I could just double my own personal time spending time with my family and kids, that's also the no-brainer. That would be an easy one to check off if I could.

Okay, awesome. So we're going to now open it up for student questions.

Gamma exploded in popularity in 2023, I think, after generative AI became more popular and you integrated into the app. And I was wondering, Where did you see Gamma going before generative AI became part of it? And what do you think Gamma would be like if generative AI wasn't here? Yeah, great questions.

So the sort of the spirit of what we were building all along was a way to make content creation much faster and more flexible. This notion of being effortless. So the way we were attempting to do this before any of AI was instead of having static 16:9 slides where you have to move every single pixel, what if we had much more flexible formatting? What if we allowed you to almost write as the starting point versus designing as a starting point? And I think we would have just made a lot more progress where the ability to turn your words into different layouts and diagrams and visuals would be still pretty fast, but it may not be powered by generative AI. And it's hard to say where we would be. I think in general, it would have taken us longer because I think to be able to deliver on the same time to value that we can today, candidly, I think many, many more years of building. And so we were given a gift in that it aligned very much with the principles of what we were trying to do. Technology advanced so fast that we were able to incorporate it right away.

Thank you. Thank you for the question.

Hi, my name is Rachel, and my question is that I saw that ChatGPT has plans to integrate with Canva. What are Gamma's plans on?

Yeah, we are also working on a connector. And so very soon you'll be able to do exactly the same thing, but for presentations and all the other content you want to do in Gamma. Okay.

Yeah, I had the exact same question, but, uh, just something else is that with the new update, I wanted to know if like, how was the company's reaction to begin with? Were you guys worried or scared? And the second part of the question is that, do you feel like users are going to discontinue using Gamma, or like you won't get new users on Gamma because it's kind of easier to just use ChatGPT to make all of the slides for you?

Yeah, I just want to— was Yeah, totally. I think there's going to be—

And guys, if you can quiet the side conversations, because we can hear them up here. It gets picked up. It'll help. Sorry.

Sorry, go for it, Grant Lee. Oh, no, totally. Yeah. I think there'll be increasingly more and more ways people create content. I think, again, going back to us, we want to be able to eventually have this sort of end-to-end experience. So the moment you have an idea to the moment you need to create your first draft to when you need to actually edit and refine that, we want all that to be in gamma. And so our ability to do that is possible only because we have a pretty robust editor. We have a set of charting libraries and visualizations that can all happen within Gamma. And so we're not too worried about different applications or use cases where people are creating content elsewhere. I think that's inevitably going to happen. But when it comes to being a great visual communication tool or a visual storytelling tool, we want to be the very best. If we can be the very best, I think we'll earn the right for whatever consumer or prosumer needs that product, like we're gonna be the tool of choice for that.

[Speaker] Hi Grant, thank you for the talk. I'm Diana, second year computer science major. My question is more around when you talked about earlier when you talked to investors and one of the investors completely shot you down. You definitely could have just given up and just scrapped the whole idea and maybe started with something else. So my question is surrounding the pivot. So how do you know when to pivot or when to push forward as a founder?

Yeah, that's a great question. Going back to kind of, yeah, my— one of the core principles is you as a founder always need to be building conviction. Right? Conviction is your own state of mind. Like, do you believe in the idea, what you're building? And when we had gotten to the point where I was pitching that investor, I had already built up so much conviction. So no matter what he said, it didn't matter, because I still believed in what we were doing. And you have to really, really get comfortable hearing nos because anytime you fundraise, you're going to hear way more nos than you're hearing yeses, most likely. And so for us, it didn't faze us. But you're going to have different moments in time where maybe you're running low on cash flow, like runway, or like major thing didn't go as you expected and customers didn't love it. I think as long as you in your mind have built that level of conviction, you can overcome it. If at some point the conviction isn't there anymore because you've learned more, you've— surfaced new data, and you realize that no matter what you do, you're not going to be able to kind of break through, that's usually the time to actually look for the pivot. But it's also kind of your mental ability to think through, like, is this the right moment in time? And it's only you that can actually answer that question.

Is there an objective signal on conviction to know when you objectively have valid conviction versus self-delusion?

Well, I think it differs quite a bit. But I'd say once you are— kind of trying to go down the path of product market fit. Like, people always ask her, do I think I have product market fit? And of course, if you have product market fit, then you have high conviction. You can keep building. I'd say the strongest signal for product market fit is, do you have a product that has strong word of mouth? Do people tell all their friends about your product? Does it have organic growth? Can it grow on its own without any marketing or advertising? And you can trick yourself into thinking you have product market fit by having vanity metrics, like signups and all these other things. But if you don't have strong word of mouth, I'm pretty sure it's going to be really hard to do anything else. And so my advice to all founders is, especially for pre-product market fit, is just focus on that one thing. Get a product that is so good that people want to tell, again, all their friends, colleagues, family about. And I think the rest becomes so much easier after that point. That's great. OK. Thank you, Grant. Hi, I'm Chiyo from Japan.

I was wondering what the world looks like for you in 10 years. In terms of visualizing your ideas, is it like inserting chips?

Yeah, that's a great question. It's honestly hard to even imagine that far out. I think there's going to be a world where it'll be much more multimodal than it is today. I think the ability to even just— we think of Gamma as being like an expert design partner. So you can describe everything you need. You can have your design partner review your entire deck, offer suggestions. Questions, make the design changes for you. And we think it will be able to be even more capable, so maybe you literally are just talking and the changes are happening for you. But 10 years, I think that's a long time. It's hard for me even to kind of grasp what's possible by then.

Thank you.

Oh, hi, Grant. Hi. Thank you so much for sharing today. I feel like I benefit a lot from a lot of detailed advice you give for starting founders. But my question is, a lot of business actually kind of startup phase downfall when they achieve initial success. This is when new ideas become common and when other companies start taking the idea and making similar things. Yeah. So my question is, how do you envision for Jama in the future to survive in the market or even prosper, especially in the AI industry?

Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, yeah, for sure, any market worth going after is going to get competitive, right? Like you can name any massive market out there and there's multiple players. And so I think we have to anticipate that. But you ask yourself as a founder, why are you building this? Do you care enough about it to build for the next 10 years? And for us, the answer is yes. And so we just have to believe that you can compound the value you're building into the product that no matter if other competitors come across, like you're still going to be one of the best choices. If not the best choice, and that in itself should hopefully make sure that you actually have enough market to go after in general.

So like add on what you said previously, so if you want to start up something, why just like start something that everybody undoubtedly will love it, and also it can like continue for like 10 years and decades?

I think more importantly than everyone else loving it is you have to love it, because if you aren't able to stay committed to it for 5 to 10 years, it's not going to work, right? I always follow Phil Knight's advice, founder of Nike. He's like, go after your crazy ideas, but invest in ideas that are crazy but that you're passionate about, because that gives you the maximum chance of actually breaking through all the different obstacles you're going to have to overcome. And I think that you're the only one that can answer that question. OK.

Thank you so much.

Is there a tactical example of compounding that you see in Gamma that you can share? On the feature. So I think it's a really powerful principle that with compounding you can outperform any incumbent.

Well, I mean, for us, like, we combine that with, like, experimentation being pretty core to everything we do. So for instance, even today, you know, we're— in production we have over 20 models, you know, when it comes to, like, AI models. So you're constantly testing, like, what are models good at, which one— you're trying to choose the right model for the job. And if you have a large user base, you're constantly trying to get that feedback loop of, like, what's working, what's not. Those are things that are opaque to everybody else, but you internally can have the data, right? You can actually see what's working, and you're constantly sort of fine-tuning all that. And so over a long time horizon, the product gets better and better. It's hard to quantify necessarily like what percentage it's improving by, but you know it is, and you know it is because more users come back, more users use the product, and that's—

there's a flywheel, there's a positive— some sort of flywheel.

Perfect. Thank you for sharing. I'm really curious, um, about Who were your first 10 customers? And like, you know, who did you reach out to? You know, which people did you target? How did you find them? And then what did they like and didn't like about your product? Yeah. So our first 10 users, in the very beginning, we were just trying to recruit our friends. You know, anybody that's created a slide deck, we try to get them to use Gamma. And the downside of that is your friends will lie to you because they don't want to hurt your feelings. And they'll tell you it's great and then never come back to use the product. So it's helpful to a certain extent just to get some initial, like, okay, what's kind of working and what's definitely not working. And then our version of starting to get real users, we launched on Product Hunt. That was our public beta. And basically, you know, just put the product out there, no wait list, you can just sign up, start using the product. And that's how you start getting, like, okay, for the first time strangers, people you have no connection with are trying to use your product. That was how we got our first 10, maybe first 1,000 users. 1,000 users. And then for each one of those people, we would proactively reach out and say, hey, we'd love your feedback. Would you jump on a call with us? Of the 1,000, maybe 50 to 80 said yes. And so we got on calls and actually tried to hear where is the product still falling short? Where can we actually improve it? Thank you.

Thank you for presentation. Would love to chat more about GenAI, but my question is about— that we are all here building the future, right? And Gamma is one of the leading GenAI products right now on the market. And especially it's very, very cool that, you know, GenAI models are developing. But in the same time, they are becoming more as a commodity, right? What do you believe that, you know, your company lasting mode for, and how do you believe that Gamma will change the future with this mode? Yeah.

Are you asking Gamma specifically or just generally if you were building like an AI product?

Yeah, I'm more curious about the company. Yeah.

So for us, we want to over time just get even deeper and deeper into people's workflows, right? Like presentations live within a set of things that a user is trying to do. And so how do we really own as much of it end to end? So that we become the sort of source of truth or source of data, like basically the center of gravity for all that content. So over time they're just accumulating more and more. And I think that's only possible if we can actually, again, like actually earn our right into a lot of those workflows.

Thank you.

Hi, thank you so much for your time. I'm really curious about how you dealt with uncertainty and how you sharpened your decision-making skills? And also you talked about the sales part. Did you learn in practice or did you— like I'm very curious about how you get to where you are.

Yeah, yeah. So the uncertainty part, for me the honest answer is I leaned a lot on my co-founders. So we have a really close relationship. We have two standing co-founder meetings every week, beginning of the week, end of the week. In 5 years, I think we've only missed like maybe 2 of them. And it's a chance for us to just sort of acknowledge all the things that each one of us might be uncertain about or have doubts about or have concerns about. We have a saying around, don't let things fester. It's easy to just have these negative thoughts in your mind. And then if you have no other place to release them, then they just stay there. And so we try to talk through everything. I think that's happened since the very beginning and throughout the sort of growth of Gamma's. Having that team, which goes back to choosing your co-founders. People say it's important. It's insanely important. You have to do that right. And if you have that group that you trust with almost any decision or any uncertainty, then I think you're going to be better off. When it comes to things like sales, we do separate our responsibilities. I am the one that does most of the customer-facing things. And the only way is practice. I started practice by— at the last company, company I was at, I was the COO. And so I was the sort of all things on the business side. And I came from a finance background. I had never done a sales pitch in my life. And so just going through knowing that I'm going to mess up a lot, but I'm going to try my best not to mess it up too badly and to kind of learn along the way. That was kind of the only way to start getting a little bit better at it. And then over time, it feels a little bit more natural. I think the stigma of sales is like it's all about this sort of like being pushy or being super persuasive. I actually think like most good sales is actually just two things. It's being a very like active listener, like you're listening to the person's problem. And then you can try to help solve— and being a problem solver, like actually helping them solve the problem. Hopefully your solution, what you're offering, is actually what solves their problem. But honestly, it's those two things coming together. And if you can accomplish that, it's actually not that bad. Thank you so much.

And please speak into the mic so everybody can hear. Yeah, sure. Okay.

Uh, thank you for everything. I'm curious to know, have you adopted a forward deployed engineer model? Uh, if so, how do you think about pricing and what to work on and for whom? And if you haven't, then how do you think through roadmap acceleration and prioritizing requests from maybe some big clients that you have, especially when it's not so obvious? Like, of course, if it's like a Big Four and they have thousands of users, But if it's a little bit more in the gray area, how do you think about that roadmap acceleration?

Yeah. And explain what a forward deploy engineering model is.

Yeah, definitely. So there's a few different flavors of this. But sometimes you'll have a company where you'll send an engineer on site. And it's usually in the enterprise context. So some company has a really big budget. They like your software. But they might need some customization. It's not fully baked in terms of has everything we need. So you send an engineer there or someone super technical. That can basically build custom solutions on top of the core platform. And then you may actually choose to take some of the custom things that you're building and actually eventually integrate into the core platform as well. We are actually exploring a very similar role, but not exactly engineering. It's called a forward-deployed designer. In our case, like if you can imagine with presentations, oftentimes you need to work with the internal design team or the marketing team that has the brand guidelines or has the look and feel that they really want to abide by. And so our designer will go on site, really work really closely with them to say, hey, we're going to build you custom themes that are always on brand. We'll do the right templates so that anybody at your company that wants to use Gamma, it feels very personalized. And it feels like this was purposely built for us. And we do think that's going to be something that's going to be worthwhile. But we're just starting that experiment now. And maybe a year from now I can report back let you know how it goes.

How do you think about that pricing? And is it actually on-site? You literally send a designer there?

Yeah, I think TBD. I mean, I think it does need to be priced separately. And I think then the question is, how long do they need to be on-site? I do think there's a ton of value of doing some sort of in-person, like actually working together, even if it's sort of time-boxed. And then the question is, does it need to be forever? We're not sure yet. I do think it's probably, for us, much more of a, in the beginning, especially during the onboarding period, is important. And then maybe after that it's a little bit more periodic.

We have 30 seconds, so if you can make the question concise, and the answer has to be in one sentence.

Okay, it has to be a one-liner. Yes. Hi, so we are all studying in Stanford. We are surrounded by amazing ideas every single day, and I wonder, out of like the 5 startup ideas that I have in my mind, like how do you decide which one to pursue?

I mean, you might want to just test a few of them, right? If you have the capacity. I know we don't have time for this story, but When we first started Gamma, we tested two ideas at the same time. We parallel path building two different startups. At the end of the six months, we chose one. And so if you have the opportunity to work on a few at the same time, build your conviction, find the one that actually rings true to you and go with it.

And did you decide based on energy or metrics?

Oh, yeah, okay, that's good. Energy. We'll end with energy. That's the takeaway, is energy. Everybody join me in thanking Grant for a great ETL.