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 4 months. This is basically like a bet the company moment. 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. And that ended up becoming the most impactful launch we've ever had as a company. It was a 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, you know, just to paint the picture, peak pandemic. We cared a lot about, you know, the notion of trying to change how people communicate their ideas and communication. This is when, you know, work shifted from us all being in person to much more of it being asynchronous. You know, 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, you know, actually two ways we could potentially, you know, augment how people communicate during work. One is like presentations, you know, they called it sort of the language of business, slide decks. They're the, you know, 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 would that be a way to potentially change the way people were communicating? And so we felt like we owed it to ourselves, like we had raised a little bit of money, pre-seed round, to basically parallel path both of these ideas and just say it's like 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 dogfood both, so like in the virtual office we would be presenting, so we'd be taking that product and actually presenting there and still building the presentation communication tool all along and it gave us a chance like over 6 months to say, of these two products, which one when we wake up in the morning are we excited about, like which one lights us up, which one do we really think about having just so much unlimited potential and like 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 it, 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, like 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 sort of 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? And 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 to 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 faced 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, how you react to that. When that happened 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 like first time raising money for my own idea. And basically 2 pitches in, I feel good because the first 2 pitches went great. Third pitch, get into it, and I give my 20-minute sort of spiel. There's obviously 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 that moment I was sort of stunned, shocked, and I was trying to actually 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 a 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 4 or 5 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 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 had 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 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, you know, that next level of conviction to keep going.

Yeah, the conviction compounds.

Yeah, conviction compounds, and it's— you kind of need to ladder up, you know, 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 would just say, hey, we're building this thing, would you come check it out? And everyone was like, yeah, awesome, I'll definitely check it out. And then they— sometimes you screen share it, they go through it, and then you send them the link and you ask them, you follow up and They'd be like, "Oh, looks so good. This is super slick." I mean, I think that word— certain words you can just tell, like, okay, they probably didn't even really—

Heard those things.

Yeah, haven't even tried it. And then you'd be 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 5 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, you know, 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 their friends or their colleagues about, and signups 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 what oftentimes, you know, especially for a company— a lot of our early team came from Optimizely, which, you know, very grounded in sort of experimentation and analytics and data, it is very helpful to have qualitative data. And 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 like 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 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. Like, 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 like, I'm trying to get in front of a customer or like 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 popping up over and over again, and so we realized even just hearing that, we knew where to hone in, and like 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 signups sort of plateaued out. And so we knew that new users weren't bringing on more users. We would 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 a 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 4 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, OK, what can you— how can you really compress that time to value within the first 30 seconds, that was where all the brainpower went into. Gave ourselves that sort of time constraint of 4 months, and 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 non-obvious incentives, or maybe they were obvious, did you set to make this specific program so successful?

Totally, yeah. So, you know, at the time, this was 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, you know, short-form videos would perform pretty well. And we weren't paying them. And we just realized, you know, when it comes to your initial distribution channels, they'll oftentimes follow a power law. So like, you know, 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, you know, many of those platforms, they were incentivizing, you know, new micro creators even come on the platform, and it didn't— you didn't require a big following. And so we realized, okay, there's an opportunity for us to actually engage with, you know, micro influencers at a much deeper level. And obviously we have limited budgets, 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 were 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? What, you know, how hard is this? And like, 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 we— 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 like transactional, like a founder or CEO, they'd 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, how— what is your process for you to write a hook? And like, 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 would 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 you're spending time like 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.

Yeah.

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, you know, if you're going through explosive growth, you're just going to hire at all costs. Yeah. 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 overhire too quickly and you're creating work for people because they're actually— you haven't actually identified or articulated what you want that person to work on. And there is the syndrome of like 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 a clear sense of ownership. You don't need to go off and tell them exactly what to 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 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, 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 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 moments in time. Like, 12 was when we did our big AI launch. We were in a converted 2-bedroom apartment. We had this moment where SVB bank collapse happened, and so— it was like a moment of panic 2 weeks before a big launch. And so then when it was like, let's call an 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 lost messages, game of telephone, it was just everybody sitting in that one bedroom part of the 2-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. It's becoming a little bit harder to preserve because You have a candidate on-site, and like, you know, founders need to meet with a 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 overcommunication 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 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 were recruiting candidates, 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, we— 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 24/7 for us didn't feel like it left enough room for being— going back to energy, like coming in every day feeling energized and having sort of this creative energy flow into our work. So we wanted to balance it out. We basically internally have talked about We're not a 996 company, we're also not the standard 40-hour workweek company, we're probably something in between. Baseline expectation is probably 50+ hours a week, but how that takes shape is going to kind of differ from function to function, and it's much more about the outcomes and the output rather than— we're not 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 in life.

Ways of finding how to do that.

Totally.

In one of your most recent Twitter articles, you mentioned 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 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 Game Ambassadors. 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, like we are forcing ourselves to stay as close to the customer as possible. And if you can do those things well, then in our opinion, like the rest takes care of itself.

Game ambassadors.

Game ambassadors. 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, yeah, I guess one more of a personal story. 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 8, 9 months in. I just moved back from London. My daughter, she was just over 1 year— she just had turned 1, 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, like these are moments where nothing else matters. Yeah. And you're trying to just figure it out. And at the same time, we're still trying to build a company, right? And so, I'm very fortunate, I think about— 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. And fortunately, 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 know, 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, you know, going back to surrounding yourself with a team that can endure through these challenging moments, I remember having this all-hands where we're sitting in that room and deciding, should we push our launch back? We've been preparing 4 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 4 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 the true inflection point. It gave us sort of this moment in time where we came out of it at the other end being We're 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've 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 waitlist, 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, you know, we're creating the modern memo, and nobody understood what any of that was. But going through that, it helped us understand, okay, well, this is a muscle we need to exercise. Then the next time we launched, 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? 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 is 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, you know, going into 2026, let's say your Delphi is out there. Yeah, 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 like building Gamma and also just trying to reach more founders and other builders is just for them to realize like, 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. And 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.

Thank you.

Thanks, everyone.

Thank you. Thanks. Appreciate it.

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.