Library of Minds - Gamma: “The Worst Idea Ever” to $2B Startup

And this is where the investor said, this has got to be the worst idea I've ever heard. And so we gave ourselves four months. This is basically like BET the company moment. We're proud of what we had worked on. The world needed to see it. And if the company really did shut down afterwards, then so be it. And that ended up becoming the most impactful launch we've ever had as a company. It was the true inflection point and I'm proud that we actually stuck to our guns and made it through.

Grant Lee turned a boring category into one of the clearest AI breakouts, growing Gamma to over $100 million a year in revenue. Today, Grant shares how to out execute incumbents, stay brutally capital efficient and build something people can't stop sharing. All right, everyone, I'm super excited to have Grant Lee here, co founder and CEO of Gamma, one of the fastest growing AI productivity companies in the world right now. And you know, he set out to reinvent a category that was dominated by a couple key players, but he succeeded in doing that. Tens of millions of people use Gamma, and he also has a phenomenal social media presence. I would recommend everyone following him on LinkedIn and Twitter. Some really good insights that I've personally learned a lot from. So it's awesome to have you here.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Great to be here.

So I want to start off with before Gamma, you were actually testing two different ideas at the time. And you've talked about how you pursued Gamma not because metrics gave any reason to pursue Gamma, but because of energy. So I'm curious, why is energy a good indication of choosing what to work on? And have there been times where energy has led you in the wrong direction?

Yeah, it's a great question. So when we started Gamma, this was just to paint the picture peak pandemic. We cared a lot about the notion of trying to change how people communicate their ideas and communication. This is when work shifted from us all being in person to much more of it being asynchronous over Slack or virtual over Zoom. And we're no longer sitting together. So even the notion of hybrid work was becoming more prevalent. And so we thought actually two ways we could potentially augment how people communicate during work. One is presentations. They called it the language of business. Slide decks. Every sort of size organization, people are using slides to communicate their ideas. Information spread. So what if we took a look at a format that was invented now almost 40 years ago, and tried to reimagine that from the ground up? The Other idea was actually what we called the lobby and it was this notion of like a virtual office. And I was actually living in London at the time when we started Gamma, my two other co founders were in San Francisco. So we thought what if it was a way for us to have a virtual space for us to collaborate, to work on things together. To me be able to log in in the morning and actually see what are some of the things that they had accomplished overnight. And, and would that be a way to potentially change the way people were communicating? And so we felt like we owed it to ourselves. We had raised a little bit of money pre seed round to basically parallel path both of these ideas and just say it's not going to be an A B test where there's any sort of statistical significance, but just to actually see what it would be like to work on both simultaneously. And we would dog food both. So in the virtual office we would be presenting, so we'd be taking that product and actually presenting there and still building the presentation tool all along. And it gave us a chance like over six months to say of these two products, which one, when we wake up in the morning are we excited about? Which one lights us up? Which one do we really think about having just so much unlimited potential and what we could do with more time and more resources. And it became clear that with the virtual office we almost inherently in our own minds kind of ran into this cap or the ceiling where we couldn't really imagine this office really being better than the in real life experience to being shoulder to shoulder with a colleague, like really ideating, iterating on stuff. And maybe that was just our own lack of imagination for this category, but we couldn't see ourselves working on this for a period of time and being energized or excited about versus the presentation idea. Every morning we came up with 10, 20, 30 more features we wanted to build next. And it was just so clear that even though in our off time, not trying to think about it, we would always get pulled back into this idea. When you start working on any startup, you want to know that you're going to have this energy or this tailwind that can carry you through. Inevitably all the obstacles are going to come along the way. Fundraising is going to be challenging, customers are going to say no. Employees may end up moving on to other things. What are going to be the things that get you through that? For me, that comes in the form of some sort of real gut check around what are the things, what are the products or the problems you want.

Go after that, give you energy, enjoying the conversation. Got a question you can ask Grant's digital mind? Just check the link in the comments or description. So after you decided to work on Gamma, you obviously face a lot of external doubt. I think someone even told you it was the dumbest idea they've ever heard. And I always love to hear how you react to that when that happens. Specifically, how did you feel and how did you turn that skeptic skepticism into conviction and growing stronger from it?

So much of the founder journey is just trying to build conviction, a little conviction every step of the way. And so this moment in time, this was end of 2020, I was a first time founder, so first time raising money for my own idea. And basically two pitches in, I feel good because the first two pitches went great. Third pitch, get into it and I give my 20 minute spiel. There's always some back and forth and I wait and wait for some questions. And this is where the investor said, this has got to be the worst idea I've ever heard. Not only are you going up against major incumbents, they have ultimate distribution. There's no way you're ever going to succeed. And in my moment, I was sort of stunned, shocked, and I was trying not to think of something smart to say back, but the investor just dropped the Zoom call. They left altogether. So they didn't even give me a chance to respond. And for better or worse, it was sort of reality check. Hey, this market, this category we're trying to enter is going to be very, very difficult. Don't expect it to be easy. Fundraising is going to be hard. And so at least that helped me level set expectations. And I think what helped me overcome just even that moment was that we had been building conviction four or five months well in advance of that conversation. So basically before Gamma was officially a company, my co founders and I, we were just tinkering nights and weekends. We had this notion of, hey, what if we could reimagine PowerPoint from the ground up? And so, you know, nobody was paying us or telling us to do this, but we would get together, they were still full time at the company they were at, and we would just tinker nights and weekends on a prototype. The prototype, the process of building the prototype helped us build conviction. We were thinking, hey, as a team, we actually come together with some unique insights about how we could probably solve this space or at least come up with something differentiated. And we enjoy the space. And hey, by the way, this final check will be, can we take this prototype and use it to pitch our idea. So rather than use Google Slides or PowerPoint, which I've used my entire career, let's not use either of those. We're going to use our prototype to fundraise. And if we can actually raise money on this, then, you know, then it's worth going all in on it. So, fortunately, first two conversations went well, third one was not great. We ended up doing okay the rest of the fundraise, and that gave us that next level of conviction to keep going.

Yeah, the conviction compounds.

Yeah, conviction compounds. And you kind of need a ladder up over time.

And another layer of external doubt. You talked about how some of your earlier users were your friends and they would lie to you about how much they liked the product. And I think in general, when you talk to users, a lot of the time people just want to make you feel good. So I'm curious if there are any questions that would reveal the truth, even though they may not be saying what they mean?

Truth comes usually in the usage. So we would try to, in the beginning, basically any of our friends that ever made a slide deck, we'd just say, hey, we're building this thing. Would you come check it out? And everyone's like, yeah, awesome, definitely check it out. Then sometimes you screen share it. They go through it and then you send them the link and you ask them to follow up and they'd be like, oh, looks so good. This is super slick. I mean, I think that word, certain words you could just tell like, okay, they probably heard these things. Yeah, haven't even tried it. And like, okay. And then you go and look, and none of those users were coming back to the product. They maybe used it once for five minutes and they completely abandoned it. They gave you the sort of benefit of the doubt of giving it a try, but by no means was it ready for real work. And so as much as it feels great to have someone say your product looks beautiful or the design looks great, it's not going to get real usage. So we'd always go back and say, okay, are people using it actually using the product and what are they using it for? We realized at some point we had to go beyond just our own friend network. So the best way was just to launch our public beta, put it in a place. In this case, we launched on product hunt, get the word out and just see, does actual usage grow? Do you have people that like your product so much that they tell your friends, their friends or their colleagues about and sign ups just organically grow? And for Us, that has always been the ultimate test. Like, can you go beyond people, you know, using the product to actually want to come back over and over again?

Was anecdotal evidence even worth paying attention to then?

To a certain degree, yes. So one thing that was helpful, I think, oftentimes, you know, especially for a company. A lot of our early team came from Optimizy, which, you know, very grounded in sort of experimentation and analytics and data. It is very helpful to have qualitative data. Qualitative data. One thing we've done early on is to be able to run these sort of market research or user studies where we ask the user to describe what they're seeing in the product and actually articulate walking through the product so you can understand what's actually going on in their head. Where do they get confused? And do they start using the same type of language that other users might use? And so for. For us, even though the early prototypes weren't solving the problem, the problem became clear because people were saying the same things they were saying. This is kind of interesting, but what I really struggle with is formatting and design. I suck at Power. People would say things like, I suck at PowerPoint. It takes way too much to design, and I can never get my designer to help. So I'm stuck with something that looks ugly. When it looks ugly, I look bad. Because basically it looks like I put zero work into this. And so I'm trying to get in front of a customer or present to a client, and my PowerPoint looks garbage. And so it means that I must have spent zero time into it, even though that may not be the case. And so those sort of themes kept on popping up over and over again. And so we realized, even just hearing that, we knew where to hone in and what are the things we're going to focus on first?

Yeah, and it seemed like a big kind of inflection point for you guys was realizing the importance of onboarding. And the first 30 seconds of onboarding. And two part question. What led you to that realization that this was an area worth investing in? And two, how did you measure the effectiveness of onboarding? Because obviously there's completion rate, but then there is, you know, if you educated them enough, then maybe they're sharing it.

Right.

So what vectors did you optimize for? For onboarding?

Yeah, in the beginning, our sort of test was, is this product sort of remarkable enough such that people would tell their friends about? Right. Like, you know, product could be interesting, but maybe just not. Like, it doesn't really wow, you. So they'll go on. And even if they use the product or they don't use the product is they're never going to mention it to somebody else. And that inherently just means you're not going to have any sort of organic virality. So we really want to optimize for that. And with a lean team. At the time we were 12 people, we were starting to run out of money, candidly. We were getting to this point where we had this decent product hunt launch. We had a spike in signups and then sign ups sort of plateaued out. And so we knew that new users weren't bringing on more users. We'd have to either sort of really jam top of the funnel with more paid advertising or marketing or we would just not be able to grow. And so given that we had limited Runway, we said, okay, this is basically like bet the company moment. We have a few months to sort of figure out something to unlock some level of growth so that we have even our own going back to conviction, like conviction that we can continue building this product. And so we gave ourselves four months. We knew that we couldn't focus on everything. So let's just focus on if the job is to really while the new user, let's focus on the first 30 seconds. What can we do? All hands on deck to change the first 30 seconds of a user experience such that there's a chance we earn the next 30 seconds and there's a chance that when they leave the product they go on and tell their friend about it. And so obviously around brainstorming of like okay, how can you really compress that time to value within the first 30 seconds? That was where all the brain power went into. Gave ourselves that sort of time constraint of four months. Ended up launching basically end of March 2023.

One of your growth strategies was working with micro influencers. And I'm curious what gave you conviction that this was a growth strategy compared to all the other things you could do on growth and what, what non obvious incentives or maybe they were obvious that did you set to make this specific program so successful?

Totally, yeah. So you know, at the time, this is obviously still early in just the overall AI wave that we're still going through. And what we noticed is that there were a lot of influencers at the time that would organically post about Gamma because it would be one of the new AI tools. They wanted to share it with their network, with their audience. And a lot of these posts or short form videos would perform pretty well. And we weren't paying them. And we just realized when it comes to your initial distribution channels will oftentimes follow a power law. So certain channels will just greatly outperform others. And for us it seemed like short form and social content was just organically performing well. And so when we looked at even how platforms like TikTok were working at the time, many of those platforms, they were incentivizing new micro creators even come on the platform and you didn't require a big following. And so we realized, okay, there's an opportunity for us to actually engage with micro influencers at a much deeper level. And obviously we have limited budget, so we can't even pay the big influencers the money that they would want. And so how can we use this opportunity to kind of lean into it? Because we're already starting to see the organic piece of it working. Yeah, so that was the initial inkling and then part of going on that journey was like, well, if we're going to start building deeper relationships with our creators, I probably need to become a creator myself. So I just have deeper empathy. Like, what are they going through? How hard is this? And what does it take to create compelling copy, write a good hook, have good copywriting? And so that was also at the same time my own sort of journey into trying to become a creator myself.

And becoming the creator allowed you to connect with them more and understand their.

Needs, connect with them more. And also just, you know, when I could, I took it upon myself to try to build one to one relationships with a lot of these creators. And for them it was kind of different. It was almost awkward because in many cases brands at the time almost treated it as transactional. A founder or CEO, they never spend time with a creator. And for them it was like, okay, this is actually different. And then we could riff, like I can understand, okay, what is your process for you to write a hook? And what does your audience care about? And we can think about okay, within the context of Gamma, I'd obviously onboard them to using Gamma. They'd oftentimes even themselves start using the product and then together we could figure out, okay, let's make this something that feels authentic to how you want to articulate to your audience so it doesn't just read like an ad. Like so many of these creator campaigns, if the team or the marketing team is just giving you a script, then we all know what that looks like. And that's never going to feel authentic. But if the creator actually likes your product or uses your product and, and you're spending time Helping them refine the copy and the pitch, it ended up performing way better. And so to be able to even ask the creator the right questions, I felt like I needed to actually go through it myself, to know what are the sort of obstacles along the way and kind of just appreciate the craft. At a slightly deeper level, I want.

To switch to about your culture because you've been super intentional about building a team of your 60 people, which is I think, very small for the scale at which you're going after. And I think that's probably going to be more and more common. You've talked about how hiring slow is more important than if you're going through explosive growth, you're just going to hire at all costs. Did that lead to anything really breaking where you refused to hire? You refused to hire people because they just weren't a culture fit and you couldn't find the right culture fit and you just didn't have enough people.

It constantly feels like we're behind in many ways. So that is the feeling you have to get used to. I think it's choosing between two potential risks or downsides here. One, you over hire too quickly and you're creating work for people because you haven't actually identified or articulated what you want that person to work on. And there is the syndrome of shiny objects. We're just going to chase a million different things and hope that a few of them are going to work out. The risk of underhiring or hiring painfully slow is what we call it, is that obviously you feel like you're behind, but the upside is that, you know, you're always ruthlessly prioritizing the things that you think are going to be the most impactful. And any person that joins has a lot of work to do. There is clear sense of ownership. You don't need to go off and tell them exactly what you do. You're like, hey, these are the bucket of things that we need to work on. And they can also have some sort of agency around. Okay, how can I help you help move things along and who else in the company can I collaborate with? There's almost an inherent sort of collaboration that gets baked in because the team is so small and you have this mindset of being scrappy and in it together. No one else is coming here to save you. Like, you have to come in and be prepared to kind of do it on your own. So we understood the two potential trade offs or like the risks here and we felt like it was better to choose the latter, which is we're Going to hire painfully slow. Understand that means we're going to likely build fewer things and feeling behind at times. But we felt like that was the right trade off.

And as you scaled from 40, 50, 60, what have been the hardest cultural norms to preserve, if any?

Yeah, the biggest thing is just the when you're 12 people, which is, you know, I have like these snapshot moment in time. Like 12 was when we did our big AI launch. We were in a converted two bedroom apartment. We had this moment where SVB bank collapse happened. And so it was like a moment of panic two weeks before a big launch. And so then when it was like, let's call on all hands, it was all of us getting into one bedroom and me just telling like, okay, this is what's going on, this is what we're going to do. And that was pretty easy. There was no loss messages, game of telephone. It was just everybody sitting in that one bedroom part of the two bedroom apartment. And we can just really quickly go through that, answer questions and immediately go back and do work. Now we're mostly in San Francisco, but we have a few remote team members. We're all on one floor, but now the floor is getting pretty big. And so there's so many different things even happening in our own office. What we do every week is show and tell where anybody at the company can go up and present some update and share something with the team. Even that used to be like sacred time is becoming a little bit harder to preserve because you have a candidate on site and like, you know, founders need to meet with that candidate. Like sometimes we can't meet, make the show and tell, a big update's presented there. You also want to share it in Slack. And so communication just given the fragmented nature of a bigger team becomes way harder. Yeah. And so the muscle that we're trying to exercise now is over communication plus across multiple different channels so that you are optimizing your chance that most people have the context they need to do their job. Yeah.

And you've talked about the importance of having a culture of people who work hard but don't burn out. And I'm curious, is that a function of who you decide to hire or rituals and traditions in the company that foster that kind of environment?

Yeah, it's probably a little bit of both. I think part of this we've gone through the exercise of. There was a point in time when we're recruiting candidates and they would say, hey, we're applying for a company, I'm applying for a company. And it's 996 culture and what are your hours? And we didn't have a good answer for that. And so it was almost a forcing function for us to say, okay, well when we were 12 people again going back to that, we never had to articulate it. We could see when people were in the office and as we got bigger figuring out where that line was and philosophically where is that line? And for us we felt like building a tool like ours, which requires a lot of creative imagination. We're trying to invent a new category. In many ways, working more hours wasn't going to be the way to necessarily fix that. Just having people work 247 for us didn't feel like it left enough room for going back to energy, coming in every day, feeling energized and having this creative energy flow into our work. And so we wanted to balance it out. We basically internally have talked about, you know, we're not a 996 company. We're also not the standard 40 hour work week company. We're probably something in between. You know, baseline Expectation is probably 50 plus hours a week. But how, how that takes shape is going to kind of differ from function to function. And it's much more about the outcomes and like the output rather than we're not clocking, you know, we're not checking, you know, clocking in every minute and checking people there. It's mostly around the output and can we hold ourselves accountable to that? For us, that felt more authentic. And of course every company has to go through its own journey and ways.

Of finding how to do that. In one of your most recent Twitter articles, you mention James Clear and systems over goals. I'm curious, is there a system that you guys have invested in that has led to this culture of velocity?

The point really is oftentimes early stage startups, especially like pre product market fit startups will oftentimes like set these ambitious goals like we're going to reach X million by X quarter. And those sometimes feel good because you feel like you're in control when in reality if you're still figuring things out, you have no control over any of that. And so rather than focus on that, what are the things you can control? Well, you can control things like how do you interface with your customers and what are systems you build in so that you have this regular customer feedback loop. For us it's been in different forms. One is, I mentioned this sort of idea to research, to shipping a prototype and refining, tightening that feedback loop over and over again. Others Is like we started pretty early on when we had power users. We created a separate Slack workspace for them and we called them the Gambassadors. And within that space, we have now a system to share new things. We're shipping with them, get feedback, make sure that we're engaging with that community regularly. And these are things that have helped us every step of the way to make sure that when we do ship something, we haven't completely just left the user out of the process. We are forcing ourselves to stay as close to the customer as possible. If you can do those things, well, then in our opinion, the rest takes care of itself.

Gambassadors.

Gambassador. I like that.

What has been the most challenging moment of your journey and what did it teach you?

Yeah, there's been two challenging moments. One I'll share, I guess one more of a personal story. And. And I think the overarching theme around this, we have an internal cultural value around creating your own luck. And sometimes life throws crazy things at you. Things that are outside of your own control, that maybe are somewhat unlucky. For me, one moment of time was actually pretty early on in our journey. We were probably eight, nine months in. I just moved back from London. My daughter, she was just over one year, she just had turned one. She got really sick. She got encephalitis, which is basically a disease where your immune system starts attacking your nervous system. Very, very scary. I woke up one morning to see her and she was basically completely paralyzed. We had to rush her to the icu. And you can only imagine as a parent, these are moments where nothing else matters and you're trying to just figure it out. And at the same time, we're still trying to build a company. And so I'm very fortunate. I think about, you know, when I think about creating your own luck, part of that is surrounding yourself with good people. I'm very lucky to have two amazing co founders and like a founding team that I could just leave everything with them to know that they would continue making progress. And I had to step out. I couldn't be in the room, I couldn't be at meetings. I had to help take care of my daughter. Unfortunately, she ended up having a full recovery. But in that moment in time, you're just faced with so much uncertainty. Without the right team, you will just. The company will buckle under the pressure of just not having the right leadership or the right guidance. And I think months before, obviously that particular moment we had been preparing for. How do we assemble a team that can make it through hard times. The second hard time was this Silicon Valley bank collapse, where all of our money was in a bank where we had no idea what was going to happen. And going back to surrounding yourself with a team that can endure through these challenging moments, I remember having this all hands where we were sitting in that room and deciding, should we push our launch back? We've been preparing four months for this bet the company moment. And while this is happening, Silicon Valley bank decides they want to go under and so do we just pause things because there's a good chance that we won't even be around as a company. So does any of this matter? And part of creating our own luck was saying that we had worked way too hard for that moment to pass. We were going to ship something. We were proud of what we had worked on. The world needed to see it. And if the company really did shut down afterwards, then so be it. But we were going to still stick to the original. We had four months in advance set that date, we're going to stick to that date, we're going to ship, we're going to release the product. And we did. And fortunately, in the background, Silicon Valley bank situation worked out. And that ended up becoming the most impactful launch we've ever had as a company. It was a true inflection point. It gave us sort of this moment in time where we came out of it at the other end, being we are a team that is resilient, we can make it through anything. We can make it through, like a literally life or death moment for a company. And I feel like that has actually kind of been infused into the DNA of the company. And I'm proud that we actually stuck to our guns and made it through.

Launches are so big these days. Everyone has a launch video. What attributes of a launch have made your most successful launches go well?

Yeah, this is another thing with compounding. Launches are something you practice and you got to iterate and do over and over. It comes back to positioning, copywriting. We forced ourselves, when we were just doing our initial private beta, to launch, put up a wait list, put up a landing page, and just go through the exercise of how do we articulate our vision to the broader public. The first versions of this were terrible because we had no idea what we were doing. We came up with all these fancy and creative terms like, we're creating the modern memo. And nobody understood what any of that was. But going through that, it helped us just understand, okay, well, this is a muscle we need to exercise the next time we launch, we did our public beta launch on product time, we could refine a little bit. Like, okay, how do we write copy that could be a little bit clearer. We came up with present, basically write like a doc, present like a deck. So it was a little bit more punchier, maybe still a little bit too cute, but people could get what we were trying to do. And so every step of the way is like being honest with yourself. What can we do better? And launching often just gives you the forcing function to like bring it all together. It's not just about a product, great product on its own, it's not going to do enough. You have to be able to convey that message to someone else. And so like forcing yourself to go through it has been really helpful.

Lastly, going into 2026, let's say your Delphi is out there. People are asking for advice. What kinds of people and opportunities do you want in your life this year? Whether it's new hires, journalists, partners, what do you want to attract this year? Who do you want to attract?

Yeah, I mean, for me, part of building Gamma and also just trying to reach more founders and other builders is just for them to realize one, it's never too late to get started. Maybe it's never too early to get started. And if you believe in something, you should just go for it. With Gamma, really what we really want to try to do is empower people that may not have the design skills, technical skills, but have a great idea. How do they get their ideas out into the world? I hope I can connect with many more prospective founders, entrepreneurs, builders in any regard. And if I can do that on a global scale, I'll be very happy.

Thank you so much. This is awesome.

Thanks everyone.

Thank you. Thanks for tuning in. If you enjoyed today's episode and want personalized advice from Grant Lee, head to the link in the comments or description to ask his digital mind on Delphi.