We had to resist the temptation of just serving one ICP. Well, we needed to have a pretty broad swap of users. And the way we sort of acknowledged that was like rather than focus on personas, we focus on pain points. And for us, those universal pain points are like it's super hard to get what's in your head into a format that others can visualize. And that's a universal pain point. How do we do that? Well, that's what we're focused on doing. Welcome to the peel. I'm your host, Turner Novak, founder of Banana Capital. Today's guest is Grant Lee, co-founder and CEO of Gamma, the AI powered presentation platform building the anti-P PowerPoint. There's got to be a better way. Lies is a format created almost 40 years ago. As someone who's made a lot of decks, it's refreshing how Gamma thinks about slides as words and narrative. Becomes challenging when the medium you're working in forces you to instantly have to design at the same time. The storytelling, the structure are competing against how do I visually format and and put this in a layout. Gamma has extremely impressive metrics under the hood, growing from 0 to 50 million users and $50 million in ARR with only 30 employees. They've had zero employee attrition and have a negative lifetime burn rate, meaning they have more cash in the bank than they've raised. Constraints begets creativity. Forcing yourself to raise a bunch of money almost inherently means you're going to take a more lax approach. We talk about Gamma's generous approach to hiring. Why a quarter of the team is designers. If someone rushes immediately into the solution, it's usually a flag. How they rebuilt their entire product to be AI native after chatbt launched. We gave ourselves this 4 month sprint idea of we're going to do our first AI launch and how Gamma uses AI internally. Every corner of the company tries to deploy AI. A quick thank you to Automatra and Garab at a four, Shiana Hustle Fund, Evan at South Park Commons, and Voss at Excel for helping brainstorm great topics for Grant. A reminder, I publish episodes of The Peel every week with a back catalog of 100 episodes exploring the world's greatest startup stories just like this one. Tune in over the next few weeks for conversations with founders of WordPress, Handshake, and Intercom. Before we talk to Grant, I'm excited for the new presenting sponsor of the Peele, RAMP. Time is our most valuable resource, and it's impossible to get more of unless you're one of over 40,000 companies using RAMP. It's the easy to use corporate card, bill payments, accounting, and expense management platform. The product is simple enough for startups, powerful enough for large enterprises, and the Ramp team is known for being one of the fastest shipping in tech. Issue cards, get spend visibility and control policies, manage approvals, vendors, travel, and close your books eight times faster, all in one place. Stop chasing receipts. Make your expenses submit themselves. Go to ramp.com/theel and get 250 bucks just for signing up. That's ramp.com/theel. Time is money. Save both with RAMP. This episode is brought to you by Numemeral. Numeral is the endtoend platform for sales tax and compliance. They handle registration ongoing filings and their API provides sales tax rates wherever you need them with all the integrations you need. Numero sports over a thousand customers in both the US and globally and they pride themselves on white glove hightouch customer service. Plus, they guarantee their work and they'll cover the difference if they mess anything up. To fresh off a fund raise an $18 million series A from my friend Chathan Pudaga at Benchmark. If you want to put your sales tax on autopilot, check out Numeral at numeralhq.com. That's numelhq.com for the end-to-end platform for sales tax and compliance. Thank you, Numeral and Ramp. And now, let's talk to Grant. Grant, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me. Yeah, I'm excited to do this. I kind of wanted to start off just really quick for people who don't know, what is Gamma? Yeah, so we're I guess the easiest way to describe it is we're trying to build the anti- PowerPoint. You know, PowerPoint's been the sort of language of business. people use it to present share their ideas and we're trying to build a tool that kind of fundamentally changes how you might approach sharing your ideas. So this is maybe a rhetorical question for somebody who knows what GAM is for for somebody who doesn't know and is not familiar. Why is that a big deal? Because you think PowerPoint it's just some slides and pretty straightforward. Yeah. So, you know, I think with PowerPoint and, you know, many of the sort of traditional tools, you get dropped into this canvas and you as a person, you know, you're you're forced to be a designer. You're you're kind of moving pixels around, resizing boxes, aligning, formatting, and I think the vast majority of us aren't, you know, visual designers. And so, we want to take a fundamentally different approach, which is rather than being design first, what if it could be, you know, design later or design last? And much much more lean into content first. You start with your ideas, we help you shape them. And so we want to just change that approach because we think it actually aligns better with how most people actually want to create content. And it sound it sounds like people are liking it and using it. I I I know there's like some public stuff that you've been kind of talked about about how well the company is doing, but what's sort of like current state of of the business? Yeah, so we you know, we passed 50 million users, 50 million AR, been profitable. You know, I think a lot of what we pride ourselves is in trying to scale the company really efficiently, too. And so that inherently means you need to have, you know, some pocket of users that love your product that are pulling you into the market or pulling the market towards you. And we're all lucky that, you know, we're still early, but I've been able to achieve some some great early traction. Yeah, I think I saw that you're profitable. You I think this was in an article that you have more in the bank than you've raised. That's always a good kind of like a humble brag like in like VC backed startup world. Yeah, it's it's a stat that doesn't get maybe shared very often which is lifetime lifetime negative net burn more more money in the bank than you've ever raised which yeah feels good. Yeah, I know we're going to talk a little bit more about that but I think the thing I thought was most interesting is you have about 30 employees and like I just how do you be so efficient with such a small team? Because I feel like everyone that's kind of come back in vogue like I feel like 21 like the the metrics that KPIs people would lead with is like we have X employees and you have pretty pretty small team for kind of how far you've gotten it. What do you think is kind of the secret to doing that? You know, I attribute it a lot back to just how the company was was formed. So we started off with three co-founders but then we had like kind of a founding team of of seven and we all came from a company called Optimize the We had worked together for five plus years then and now it's been you know basically almost a decade working together and you know really just having that foundation of trust but also very complimentary skill sets. So three co-founders, you know, my two co-founders, John and James, one was the VP of product at Optimiz, the other was a senior engineer, and then myself coming more from an operating background was basically leading finance and strategy there. And so, you know, I think each of us kind of brings different skill sets to the table and then we look at the broader team. you know, we had, you know, amongst our first seven, we had our head of design, we had a front-end engineer, we had two backend engineers, and so we had everything we needed to kind of, you know, get the early versions of the product moving in the right direction. And then since then, we've kind of continued to layer on. And I think that just means that, you know, when you think about having the sort of leanest team possible, you need all the sort of positions filled. You need to have good, you know, each one of those need to be filled with someone that's that's obviously highly capable and can move fast. And then the more that you can bring together that trust factor, people that work together, that have that muscle memory, that allows you to also just navigate much quickly than than you could otherwise. So I saw specifically the first hire you made. I don't know if this was a part of the seven person founding team or just the fourth after the co-founders was you hired a designer, which I guess is kind of maybe you'd say that's ironic with you're like an AIdriven design company. there should be no designers, maybe there should be a bunch of designers. So, why hire a designer as the first first person? Yeah, I feel like we've, you know, others when they've looked at kind of the makeup of our company have always said that we've, you know, it seems like we've overinvested in, you know, design because, you know, almost a quarter of our team is is our product designers. Oh, wow. And, you know, when you compare that to many other organizations, like that's just not the same makeup. And we always believed like that was the right investment especially early on. Zach who was to to your point who you're mentioning here our first sort of design hire. He's our head of design. He is so gifted in many different ways but what he brings to the table is this ability to really explore many different ideas and help us kind of understand the the different directions we might pursue. Um, and I think only through kind of prototyping and like iterating with customer feedback and doing that like relentlessly over a long time horizon can you finally get to a point where like the product can be useful, can be valuable. And we knew that we need needed that on day one. Like we couldn't make progress without that sort of core component as kind of a strength of the team. And so yeah, it's been awesome having on board since almost basically day one from the company foundation formation and and then since then having him be able to build out a team around him. I think there's this concept of kind of a full stack designer where they can not only design but also code and build stuff and is that has that been a big piece of it too? Yeah, 100%. I think you know and this is becoming maybe more obvious now just in this era of you know AI and all the advancements here but I do think in many ways this is the the sort of the rise of the generalist and whether it's you know full stack designers or a PM that knows how to code or you know a marketer that can do both the research as well as like going in and actually synthesizing that coming up with a strategy and actually then deploying that through different campaigns like all that's becoming more and more important for like the average person to be able play a variety of roles and not to be necessarily siloed as a specialist. And so, yeah, absolutely. That sort of full stack design has been a designer like someone like Zach who can code, who is also visual and can also sit down with a customer and like deeply empathize with that feedback. That's the that's a superpower and bring that all together just gives you as a company a huge advantage. Is there a trick for just hiring people like that? Like how do you just kind of screen and make sure when you're adding to the team that like oh this person is good at understanding the customer can also build the stuff for them can make it look good is a good boss and manager and like help us recruit more like just like how do you find these just full stack generalist people? Yeah there's there's like this intangible that you you sort of look for which is someone that's just continuously learning like they're hungry to learn. You know, oftentimes what you'll find is like someone as they progress in their career, their desire to learn new things like quickly diminishes. Oh yeah, I definitely get caught in that rut sometimes. I'm like constantly Yeah, that's part of doing this podcast is like, okay, what can who can I meet just like a new industry like the episode by the time this comes out it'll be a couple weeks ago, but I had Sanjip Biswas at Samsara and they do kind of like internet of things physical sensors and devices for transportation and it's kind of interesting topic. know nothing about it. Feel like I learned a lot from it. So just like you get you just got to expose yourself to it. Yeah, you gota expose yourself and some people just are constantly trying to stretch their own sort of thinking and imagination and that comes with learning new tools, new tech techniques, new frameworks and when you talk to someone like they're the energy they express them, you know, like the way they talk about things. that they're expressing these new things with like a level of excitement and you can even ask them to teach you about some of these concepts like how deep can they they go. I think that those are all signs of someone that is just continuously learning no matter where they are in their career, whether they're fresh out of college or they're someone that's, you know, 10 plus years. You want to feel that energy and someone that really just enjoys kind of teaching. Like if they if they know if they know the concept well enough to teach it means that they're probably armed with the right tools to to be able to, you know, take a ton of ownership, high agency, move fast, and so those are absolutely the things you're trying to trying to sus out during the interview process. How would you structure that? I know we're getting way off script here already, but um how how would you sus that out in an interview? Like figuring out like what kind of things would you ask and kind of figure out where to like dig deeper on? Yeah. I mean, there's maybe a few common techniques like one is just asking them to to literally teach you something. You know, some some something that they're passionate about could be completely not even workrelated. Just have them teach you about something they're passionate about and see kind of how they articulate those things. Is it well structured? Have they been thinking about this for a long time? do do they do a good job of getting you excited and like understanding and appreciating the topic? And then the other is like to ask them to talk about, you know, a challenge that they've experienced and kind of overcome. And so oftentimes you'll you'll have somebody that can describe the situation with some level of humility and be able to actually go deep into understanding the problem. If someone rushes immediately into the solution, it's usually a flag. It's it's like okay they were able to really quickly jump to something and like you know kind of highlight the how great they were but a lot of what greatness looks like actually is you encounter a problem you realize that's actually like the the surface level problem and you dig like 10 levels deeper and someone that can actually articulate how they understood like what the true problem was and then went about trying to fix the problem and then realizing hey actually the initial solution maybe wasn't the right solution I went back and iterated like those are the things you really want to hear about Especially if it's something that's super challenging in that person's career. Like they should be able to go into depth. If they are if they aren't able to, it just means that again they probably aren't like a surface level thinker. They haven't gone to the extent of like really learning and trying to go deep on anything. How do you as a candidate? I don't know if you've ever been through that in your process, but like how do you do that without I don't know making yourself like setting yourself up in the wrong way or setting yourself in the right way if that makes sense. Yeah. I mean the the tricky thing with like interviews in general like you know some people get end up becoming really polished because they're just you know they practice a ton they become good interviewers I think in general like the more you know I've done interviews myself it's just like when you talk to people you want it to feel authentic and you can kind of start getting a glimpse of like you know how much are they trying to have the the sort of you know the PC version of the story or like you know trying to make themselves look good and we all know the truth is somewhere going to be somewhere in the in the middle And you want to be able to hear some texture to the story. It's not just all always great. There's some areas where there's, you know, there's wrinkles and you got to go in and be a have someone that's willing to appreciate that and and go into detail. Otherwise, you know, they're just holding back a bunch. And if that's the case, it's like hard to trust while they're not, you know, how much of it is is being honest and authentic. Yeah. I feel like a lot of people kind of forget. Maybe if you're just like a younger like a student maybe and you're interviewing for your first job or something, you kind of forget like this whole interview thing. uh we we kind of make a big deal about it at certain maybe phases of your career, but at the end of the day like 99% of the time is just sitting there working talking with people like and no one knows the answer. Like I'm sure you don't sit there with the team like oh here's my polished like researched response to this thing. You're like I don't know let's just figure it out or something. So totally. Yeah. Yeah. I mean a lot of it is yeah passing the the elevator test like could you stand standing with them you know and like you know is this someone you gain energy from? And so if it's if it's a person that all they say is like about, you know, how great they are, it's it's hard to imagine you wanting to spend a lot of time with. But if it's someone that is genuinely curious about the world, that's like that's great because that means you can there will be an infinite number of things you can work on with this person and you're never going to, you know, end up being in a place where there's actually not enough work for this person to work on. Yeah. And I I kind of want to talk a little bit more about the Gamma product, AI, some of the stuff you're kind of thinking about and using. So what what's been maybe the most interesting use case that you've seen for the Gamma product? Just I'm assume you have some stuff off the top of your head, but yeah, I mean the you know the initial wedge for the product was just a way for people to create presentations very simply and quickly. And so, you know, what you'll end up, you know, seeing is a lot of people creating a lot of external facing content. So, if they need to share something with a customer, a client, a partner, and that could be in the form of like a pitch deck, a proposal, you know, some sort of onboarding or training, those are all things that, you know, traditionally are kind of a pain in the butt to try to create in in in uh, you know, traditional tools like PowerPoint and not only just create, but also then edit and refine and like then actually share and get feedback on. So, we're just trying to make it dead simple for people to create those, you know, forms of content where all that can be done very fluidly. It could be shared, you can iterate on it. Editing isn't a pain in the butt and, you know, get your get your stuff out there quickly. Yeah. I think going back to kind of the beginning, I know your kind of initial insight was basically it's not design, it's like writing. Like it's like plan like that's how most people like when I when I was kind of like I was listening to some other podcasts you'd done and I was reflecting I was like, "Yeah, you're right. Whenever I make a PowerPoint, like I just kind of write it out first. Even if it's in like the first slide, I'll just like make some bullet points that are like the title of each slide and then maybe you'll, you know, expand on the bullet point and go a little bit deeper. But that's historically I've always done it. Totally. Yeah, I think that's, you know, most of us we want to have some general structure or like outline that we have in mind. you know, maybe the story that you're trying to tell so that there is some cohesion between like, you know, what is the main message and like how do you then build upon that and and so yeah, it becomes challenging when the medium you're working in forces you to instantly have to design at the same time because then those two things are at odds. the storytelling, the structure are competing against like how do I visually format and and put this in a layout that you know puts it in a in a way that's consumable by the by the you know the the actual reader or the person you're presenting to. And so those are things we're trying to remove that sort of friction or that tension and making it much more fluid in the process. Yeah. Yeah, cuz I think about when I do the deck for my fund when I'm fundraising like I I made my designer made it in Figma like a year or two ago and so I just kind of use which what she gave me and I'll like try to add a new slide that's like sort of in between some things and I'm like kind of redesigning it and like kind of swapping what's on what slide but I'm like kind of trying to fit it into the structure that's already there. So yeah, I can definitely see how that and so the way I'm just thinking about like how this might play out with gamma. Like do I basically type in like a chat box and I can just say like, hey, can you split this from two slides into three or like can you change the color? Can you add a chart? Like how does that usually play out when I'm interacting with it? Yeah, totally. I mean, I think there's we want eventually to be just so many different entry points because sometimes it's like you have, you know, just a topic and you just want like give me something so I have a rough template I can start with a really good first draft. That's fine. Other times you have maybe you've done some research uh maybe it's in chatbt or a different tool and you've actually crafted like the the sort of the endtoend sort of narrative you want and then like how do you visualize that? you can drop that entire thing into gamma and then there may be an instance where like there's maybe existing documents like a word doc a PDF that you're working off of something that was long form that you want to make more visual and you know we want you to be able to upload those documents and say hey you know take this 100page document and help me turn this into a five-pager because I I need to you know get in front of you know an audience and like communicate this more effectively and I know a lot of the information but I don't know the best way to turn that 100page document into something that's a little bit more visual and consume consumable and so you know obviously many different entry points we want all those to feel you know effortless like you should be able to do that no matter what the occasion is and gamma can help you then you know shape those the the rough ideas into something that's more refined and this is just a question I had thinking about you said you generating about 50 million in revenue a couple I think it said like a 100 thousand or a couple hundred thousand customers what is is that right yeah few hundred thousand customers so what are people paying for like when you're building this you're like this is free, this is paid. Um, how did you figure how did you kind of decide maybe it was a process of doing that? But how did that kind of all evolve over time? Yeah, so our we basically have a premium model. It's based on today AI usage. So all new users get a bucket of, you know, AI credits. And then when they use that all, they can either stay on the free plan, which allows you to still use Gamma, but you have to basically manually update, you know, the content and do, you know, quote unquote the oldfashioned way by as a human still entering and playing around with the building blocks. And even that has been, you know, useful for a lot of users because those core primitives still allow you to to manually create stuff much faster than you would in in other tools. And then if you need more AI kind of guidance or assistance, then you can upgrade to one of our paid plans. Uh we think of AI as being like the sort of expert design partner for you as if you know you're sitting right next to a great designer and you can actually have them help you craft and shape your your content quickly. And so we want that to again feel effortless and anytime you need that you can just tap your design partner in this case Gamma and they'll help you kind of really you know refine your content faster than you could do it on your own. So, it's like instead of just emailing my designer back or texting them back and saying, "Hey, can you change this thing, change the colors, I want to go this different direction, the product just kind of does it for you." Exactly. Yeah. I mean I think today a lot of the bottleneck is like either you know you don't have a design designer on staff at all or or maybe you know sometimes you outsource it to an agency or you just don't have much you have your own design skills and so the capabilities are limited and so what you have to do is try to you know outsource it. Um, we want to, you know, replace the need for that for the vast majority of use cases where, you know, you could just get by by leaning on gamma a bit more. And, you know, so many people we talk to, especially kind of in the more corporate environment, their bottleneck is like, yeah, even if they have a design team, they oftent times don't have enough of their time to be able to do a lot of the iteration back and forth. And so they, you know, that time is reserved for like the most important like super high polished, you know, outputs, but the day-to-day presentations or decks or things that need to be created there, there's nobody there to help with that. And uh we want to be, you know, be able to step in and and and serve those users right away. And this is um something that's maybe you did unconventionally. So you talked about like a pretty horizontal approach. I feel like generally in startups and like the VC kind of conventional wisdom is like go super niche, super vertical on a specific thing and you didn't do that. Like I'm just curious why because most people the advice would say like oh pick like you know management consultants specifically or like founders raising their preede rounds specifically. So why did you go so horizontal instead of super niche? Yeah, I mean I think there's two parts to this answer. The first is really just trying to think about our own founder ambition. Like we we set out to create a new standard. We want this tool to be ubiquitous. We know that's super challenging. Like it's not going to be easy to create something that even has a chance at you know replacing a daily active tool like like PowerPoint that's you know everywhere around the world. But that was our ambition like we believe we can create a better way. We want to create a new standard. The only way to do that is to create something that can be horizontal in nature. So to that such that if you're an educator, you can use it. If you're, you know, in the corporate world, you're a marketer, you can use it. If you're a consultant, freelancer, solarpreneur, small business owner, all of these types of users should be able to benefit from what we're creating. And and so that was our ambition like from day one, we knew that's what we wanted. And so horizontal was only sort of mechanism of of trying to fulfill that longer term vision and dream. And the second thing is like even if that were the long-term vision oftentimes people will say okay we'll just start with one ICP like just try to serve like you know salespeople for instance I think that ends up becoming much more challenging than than sort of like it's easier said than done right because what ends up happening is like you try to serve that one ICP pretty well and inevitably they have very like specific things that end up needing to like be tailored to their use case. And so what you end up doing is like creating a hyper specialized tool that maybe the sales people do get a ton of benefit out of. But when you start zooming out like none of what you've built over the past couple years are then beneficial to like the consultant or beneficial to the educator. And so inevitably you've already created like this you know verticalized tool or vertical tool even though your long-term ambition might have been to build build horizontally. So when we thought thought about just the sequencing, we knew that both to address number one, which is our own founder ambition, and to actually have a shot at that like we we couldn't we had to resist the temptation of just serving one ICP well, we needed to have a pretty broad swath of users. And the way we sort of acknowledged that was like rather than focus on personas, we focus on pain points. So, not ICPS, not personas, but really the pain point that uh uh a user might have. And what are those universal pain points? And for us, those universal pain points are like it's super hard to get what's in your head into a format that others can visualize. Like getting what's in your head into other people's head requires this sort of visualization piece that is really, really hard. And that's a universal pain point. How do we do that? Well, that's what we're focused on doing. So, do you think this is applicable for everyone? like any kind of category of company creation or do you think it only works if there's an opportunity to build like a super horizontal tool that specifically has kind of like pain points like this? No. Yeah, I definitely think it, you know, this is definitely not the only approach. You know, there's some markets out there where the the TAM is probably big enough just to go after that vertical alone. And maybe it's just so underserved too by incumbent tools that it's almost a flip of this which is like maybe incumbent tools are more horizontal in nature. that vertical is actually a very very large juicy TAM and to have a verticalized tool is actually the right approach especially if the founders like that that aligns with their ambition like hey we want to serve like you know the legal market for instance and that we believe is a big enough market and incumbent tools you know are going to be too generalized to not serve that market well and we believe it's a massive TAM let's actually build specifically for that I think there's definitely merit in doing that and there's that that makes sense for certain markets founders they should always ask you know is that market itself big enough? Is it growing? Is it expanding? Is a horizontal approach fundamentally limited in serving that market? And it's a good sort of thought exercise before just assuming you should go through the exercise of just asking like you know what what do you believe to be true years from now. Yeah. And actually you super crazy on that point of like legal market tam. So I think I saw I saw a tweet from Patrick Hollson at stripe. I believe the stat was something like though, you know, when you see those billboards on the side of the road for personal injury lawyers where it's like, "Oh, did you get in an accident? Call this number." It's like 1% of GDP or something in the US just like that market of like suing people after getting in an accident or something. Yeah. And it's growing, right? And it's like that that's like that's what you want to look for. It's like it's already like a meaningful amount and it's growing like Yeah. Then it's like, okay, well, there's probably something there. You want to move where you the markets are experiencing some sort of organic tailwinds and then and then try to capture that in that moment too. What is the uh the tamper just slides and presentations? I actually I didn't even look this up. Do like do you know what it is? I mean yeah Microsoft like office doesn't really share too much in terms of like just their their revenue but it's in the billions. When you look at the user base of of slides it's in the billions and you know the majority of that is PowerPoint but you have Google Slides and the other incumbent tools. And so even just the user base alone is in the billions. And I think for us to be successful longer term, like yes, we're going to carve out a good chunk of people that are maybe using incumbent tools, but also then create just new market opportunity. There's a lot of people that even slides aren't something they're super wellversed in. So they don't create them. Uh but you know, in the future when digital content is going to be even more important in terms of connecting with others, your customers or partners, like we they need simpler tooling, we can be that tooling for them. And for those that had never even adopted really ingrained sort of PowerPoint into their workflows, Gamma can be that solution for them. And so it's almost like creating a brand new market that just has latent demand but hasn't yet been fulfilled by an existing product. Yeah. How do you think about just generally sort of this whole office tool workplace? Like when you just think about like meeting summaries, presentations, docs, calls, like when there's a lot of people kind of playing in the space and I think if you just kind of fast forward, you think five years forward, 10 years forward, like they're all kind of converging. I don't know if there's a strategic reason of starting with slides or if it was just curiosity and interest and then how you just think about it over the long term, how everything's going to play out. Yeah, I mean that's the challenging thing is you know things are evolving so quickly hard to know how things will all pan out. We we started with slides because one was actually just trying to solve my own pain point. So the last startup I was at was acquired. I went back into more of an advisory and consulting role where I actually started my career and you know I was staying up late at night trying to actually put together synthesize kind of like information back to a client back to a customer and you know just thinking about like just dreading that moment of actually going into Google Slides having to like spend so much time formatting and like like getting like even just staring at that blank page gave me the the the first moment of realization which is like there's got to be a better way. You know, flies as a format created almost 40 years ago and we we we know it's such an important medium for communication like is there a different way we can approach this? So that was kind of like the initial okay something interesting and then what we actually ended up doing was like just building for several months kind of prototyping the initial versions of gamma just to give our ourselves our own sort of level of convictions like we started realizing yeah slides for most people isn't probably a super high MPS sort of product. It's one that people have just gotten used to the way things have always been done but never questioned like okay what if the primitives or building blocks were fundamentally different and when we thought about just the growing need for like digital communication we wanted something that kind of acknowledged where things were already moving. So you know slides as a format fixed in sort of aspect ratio or dimensions and made for an era where we're all sort of staring at the same projector or we needed things to be printed on pieces of paper. And when we think about where things were already heading, like much more of the communication can be async and viewed on different devices like your phone or a tablet or you know a monitor and so why not have something that was more mobile friendly or mobile responsive by default. Why not have something that was more interactive and multimedia rich and all the things that you know PowerPoint you might be able to hack together but it's not it wasn't built for that. like what if we lean more into like where we think things were already going going to be going and we just saw such a massive opportunity that it just felt like yeah even if we didn't know necessarily all the answers on day one it was going to be a fun journey to go on and it'd be plenty to build off of and we'd learn and kind of iterate along the way. Yeah, I think to your point of like how the the format has kind of evolved, right? just it's always been this kind of like landscape view rectangle thing, but if you think like probably like half of emails are open on phones. I don't know what the stat is, but like you kind of you know somebody's looking at a vertical screen on their phone and then you basically limit the size to be like a third of the screen in this little rectangle in the middle. I remember the first time I saw a vertical deck. I was like, "Oh this that was actually pretty smart." Like that's a good idea. And this was probably like 2019ish. And so this is probably you were doing this around 2020ish. End of 2020 is when we first formed the company. Yep. Okay. And then I think with this whole kind of horizontal vision, I think that kind of impacted how you kind of raised a little bit of money in the beginning in the in the early days. Um how did that kind of play out? Yeah, we knew we needed to raise enough to assemble the early teams. I imagine you even just the initial seven and then you know we got to a team of about 12 before we did our first like bigger AI launch. We we knew we needed enough to build kind of the the scaffolding for the initial product then to be able to get that in the hands of users and iterate. And so we raised you know a decent size preede round. It was a little bit under three million and that gave us the chance to kind of form the initial team and then we ended up raising another four million as part of our seed round. This is when we had basically just launched our private beta and and again I think you know part of the founder journey you know for anybody that's just getting started is you know try to look at other companies that are kind of in your category or might need to follow a similar path. So for us that's like other horizontal platforms that you know been created before us and so the notions the air tables even like the Figmas of the world which all took many many years to kind of get to a point where what they were building didn't feel like just a toy it was something that could be used for real work and I think we always acknowledge that upfront it was like even something as simple as presentations there's a ton of surface area to cover and so to like earn the right to be a tool that's actually used and depended on by by you know somebody outside of your your organization like it takes takes a ton of effort and we knew it would take us some time and with time means you need enough runway with enough runway means you need enough cash in the bank. So we ended up raising in a way that just try to factor all that in. How did you get people to buy into it? Because it's like a horizontal tool. Like most people like, "Ah, this won't work. Like it's impossible. Go to market won't work. I don't I don't like this idea." How'd you get around that? Yeah. I mean, we definitely got a bunch of rejections. It wasn't every everybody, but I think what you know, the ones that believed in us, there was probably two things that maybe caught their attention. One is when we when we created our very first sort of pitch deck, we actually built it as a prototype of gamma. So like it was basically showing what you know the possibilities were even if it was super rudimentary and so it had those elements. It was hybrid sort of writing like a doc document deck like medium. It was interactive. It was multimedia rich and so it had all the principles we were s sort of trying to lean into and so people could kind of you know squint their eyes and maybe see a little bit into what you know the feature we're trying to describe. And then the other half was people that kind of were the prototypical user. So Amy who led our seed round, she basically was, you know, product marketing manager, was at Stripe, was at Twitter early on. And so, you know, face the bottlenecks we were describing, which is like they had to create a lot of content. They don't always have design resources. And so you're just limited by what you can do on your own and then just constantly waiting. What if with a tool like gamma you could self-s serve much more of that and for like the average you know professional knowledge worker you know they can go into a tool and actually craft and shape their ideas like that was exciting to her and so I think it was like a combination of those two where do a little bit of showing not just telling but then also you know resonating with somebody that just understands your vision and why your product deserves to be in the market. So, how do you find the right investors then in that kind of situation? Like was it did you did you do a lot of outbound? Did you spend a lot of time getting to know people like in the years before? Like is it a volume game just getting in front of the right people? It's definitely a volume game, but you it to your point it is a game. And so the way I think founders just structure the game the early on like you you want to you know just try to build relationships. So, you know, the best way to to go into any fund raise is like not obviously already have some warm relationships. The other best way is also to go in with momentum. And so, if you're super super early, the way to show momentum is, you know, maybe going with a prototype, something that already shows that you've been thinking about this problem, that you've built enough conviction yourself. And then when you start, you know, pitching early early investors, you're going to get a ton of nos. The folks that say yes, you can ask them two questions. one, like what is it about your pitch that you know resonated with them? Like was there something that really stood out? Why why are they why are they choosing to invest? And two, you can ask them who else should I be talking to? Who else do you think might you know this this message or this pitch might resonate with? And you're just doing that over and over again. The the you know the the funny part about like our own founding during our preede round, you know, this is end of 2020, peak pandemic. I was actually living in London at the time and so I was doing all of my pitches late into the night, you know, to the 1:00 a.m. Pacific time. Yeah. And so I was locked in and we didn't have a a very big place in London, renting out like kind of small apartment. So I was stuck in the sort of laundry room because I was only place that was like soundproof enough all the rest of the family could sleep. And I would just do five, six hours of pitches back to back like just straight Zoom. And I was fortunate because peak pandemic that was acceptable practices just like do you backtoback zooms and I would just rinse and repeat the strategy of like meet somebody they said no move on meet somebody they say yes ask them those two questions and then line up backtoback basically two weeks straight worth of meetings to a point where we had enough you know to to fill the the initial round. Amazing. Yeah, it's it's definitely not glamorous. Like a lot of people think of fundraising as this like, you know, wine and dining and it's like it's basically just like eating until you get enough of the way there. Like that's it's it's usually that's how it goes. Totally. I would say I don't know. Today it feels maybe a light slightly different, but uh yeah, back then that was absolutely the mindset I went into, which is two weeks are going to be brutal. I've just accepted that and I'm going to stay in this laundry room until things are done. Yeah. Well, and then to the point, I think you you guys are doing really good today, but you've like you you've never really raised like big sexy hyped up rounds. Like VCs don't really talk about you. That's usually a signal that there's like a lot of VCs invested is when they're always talking about something like hyping it up. Why why did you never like raise a ton of money and you know and go down that path? Part of this is just like I think the mentality of the founding team that we've always had this notion that um raising too much money has a potential a ton of potential downsides especially if you do it too early because I think what you want early on as a founder is one to build good habits amongst your organization like things that are the foundation for how you want the rest of the company to operate in the future and like the mindset like what is that sort of scrainess mindset I think you know PG talks about like the cockroach mode that you can go into and like yeah like cockroaches don't need much to survive and what can you do to make yourself like super resilient as a team and you don't build resilience out of just luck it's a lot of like day-to-day like this is the grind and part of that scrappiness needs to come through with just how you operate and I think that naturally then bleeds into the culture you have right like you want your culture to be one where the early on you're you're you're building the early parts of the the team and then later on you want that culture to be solidified such that you hire you know the next 10 hundred people they all have the same DNA it's all the same like we know what we look for this is what gamma represents these are the type of people that fit in well here and then the people that don't that's fine we're going to move on and so we wanted to really invest in that when you're also early on you know constraints in my mind you know begets creativity you're building a tool that's horizontal you need a ton of creativity forcing yourself to raise a bunch of money almost in in inherently means you're going to kind of take a more lax approach and you're going to say, "Okay, you know, money is going to help solve most of these problems. I'm going to hire the person to do the job versus do the job yourself and like recognize that most of it is in your own control and you have probably enough of the the ingredients within your core team to do a lot of the work. And so those are all things that we we kind of talked a lot about early on. And anytime there was an opportunity to to raise more, we'd ask ourselves like, do we really need it? Like is it preventing us from achieving our long-term ambition? And if not, we're going to keep heads down and keep building and and we really want haven't wanted to like, you know, divert from that that core sort of mantra. How has that impacted being able to recruit? Because I feel like part of the reason people raise money is so that there's like a halo around it from a recruiting perspective, but also just, oh, you Facebook give you a million bucks, we'll give you more or you know what, whatever the strategy is there. I would say it's it's made recruiting harder in some ways, but it has, I think, a ton of upside and value in other ways. when you are forced to play the sort of, you know, dollar for-dollar game and you're competing against the giants of the world that can give, you know, insane packages, you end up inevitably, you know, finding people that are much more mercenaries than they are missionaries. And so for us, you know, we always look for people that where the core product like what we're doing, you know, resonates with them on some level. And you know, for instance, if you're coming in and doing an interview and you've already spent time in the tool and you're like, "Wow, this just this I I actually like even if I don't get this job, I'm going to go on and use this tool." Something about it has has kind of resonated. And those are the type of people that, you know, we've we found that once we bring them in house, it's like there's so much love and energy that they pour into the product. And of course we want to have like super competitive offers and we want to pay you know top of market and give good equity and those things all come packaged but you know at the same time like only kind of trying to satisfy the the the you know competing offer of of like a massive you know AI company I think in many ways you know sets you up for long-term you know obstacles that you may not even can even foresee. So what we're trying to balance now is like how do we you know one of the biggest benefits of raising is you set the market rate and so people can say hey what is the value of this business how do I even think about equity because equity for most people is still super opaque hard to understand and we we try to spend a lot of time providing education um even this comes kind of from my finance days but like even at optimizing I spent a lot of time just trying to educate people around like how do you how should you even value your options what are the different considerations there's a lot of you know you know the fine print that if you don't really understand the differences then what's on paper may not actually translate into true value for you and so we do the same with all of our candidates anybody that has like competing offers I try to provide a super objective like hey this is how you might think about things I'm not trying to overly sell them I just want them to know like how how they should actually value certain things such that they can go in and make an educated and informed decision and I I hope that many more founders will do that which is like take the ownus of actually trying to educate your candidates as much as possible so that whether they decide to join you or not like many years down the road they you you feel like you can sleep at night because they made the right decision with all the right information. Yeah. I think too there's there's the the value of like the just like the the tangible or the tangibility or like the the realistic chances of the equity like being worth anything just like at the end of the day like if if it's a public company it's like a liquid. If it's a startup, it's private, the there's a little bit of uncertainty around like what is this thing actually worth really at the end of the day? Like can I get anything for it if I needed to sell? You might have to take a discount, but just generally like if you I I think did you guys have raised a total of $23 million? I think that's right. So, I don't know if just generally speaking, there's usually like a 1x liquidation preference on the the equity that investors put in. So, if I'm somebody who's like considering working at Gamma, it's like, okay, if the company sells, the investors get their 23 million and then like we we all get our pool, that's a pretty low bar. You're doing 50 million in revenue. I don't think people are going to be valuing you at half of half of ARR. Like, you know, maybe you're a little bit higher, but like 10x I usually think 10x ARR is just like fairly reasonable number for just like a healthy growing software company. So yeah, it's like 500 million is like like that's pretty reasonable. Like you guys are in a great spot from that perspective, too. So I feel like not a lot of people think about that. Like if the company gets acquired, like if you had raised a billion and we'll just use that same number and say you're really only worth 500 million, everyone gets nothing. The investors don't even get their money back. So that's there's a lot more that goes into it than that. But that's generally like a high like a first look is like you know you just think how much is the company raised and like am I even is it even worth that much? I mean the math you just just described less than 10% less than 5% of candidates ever even get into that you know that math and to your point yes it's it's like when you you know break it down there's there are things that seem to be you can you know present that in a logical way and then that decision ends up becoming easier. But yeah, the the the tough thing is you know what when you are competing against um the the the large you know someone that's raised a ton of money they do have that external sort of credibility or validation that somebody believes they're worth you know x billion x00 million and oftentimes candidas will give that much more sort of rely on that much more than anything else because it's just easier to understand and that it's a you know quote unquote a trusted professional investor that has done their homework and has put that money in. I think when you've you know for us like we we as founders have gone through a few different kind of eras of like you know startups and we've seen both the good outcomes the mediocre outcomes and the terrible outcomes and oftentimes like the mediocre and terrible outcomes the founders and investors may be still defined to your point you know 1x they'll get their money back founders might still get a little bit something in those cases the employees almost get nothing and I've been both the employee and now a founder and a lot of what I fear is like I want you know in the future if gamma has a great outcome like every employee should be there to celebrate like it should be something we are celebrating together we are all owners of the business and that can only happen if kind of you're being thoughtful about that and trying to structure things the right way from day one not waiting until you know you've already made it and have huge success. It's like you need to be thinking about day one such that in all outcomes if the company has some meaningful outcome like everybody can celebrate. Yeah. And this is maybe like a little bit of a sidebar, but Optimizely, what was that company again? I' I've heard of them before. I've actually never heard. So, I'm just curious like what do they do and like how did that go for for you guys as a as a team? It sounds like it kind of all came from there, the early team. Yeah. So optimizing was started it was actually one of the fastest growing YC companies back in the day and they started off sort of in this space of AB AB testing and eventually kind of broaden that scope to be much more around just experimentation broadly. So you know we are serving companies like Nike, Best Buys, these large companies that had to do a lot of digital experimentation and supporting them through our own platform. And so any team that needed to run experimentation at scale could lean on on optimizing to do that. And I'd say you know the company when I joined you know was series A by time and you know a little bit over 10 million in AR by the time I left you know 100 million in AR. So, you know, by all means, like it was it was a business that definitely showed that there was a market for this and had grown and had global footprint. Um, and I think at the the outcome maybe wasn't as great as what we would have all hoped. You know, we, you know, being one of the fastest growing YC companies at the time. I think the aspirations were to be, you know, something that like super impactful and again a great outcome for employees. But we ended up being acquired and you know the I think one thing that a lot of you know now the gamma early employees is like we hope that one day you know if we do have a great outcome it's something we're all celebrating. It doesn't feel like we had left something on the table. Yeah. And that's I feel like that's kind of like a little bit of a superpower is like you guys have all I'm assuming you all work together at Optimizely like in some capacity. So it's like all right it's like round two it's like we already kind of know how to do this how to work together. Yeah, there's definitely a bit of, you know, that muscle memory working together, knowing how each other's styles, things that, you know, you almost don't need to say because it's just so obvious of how we work and that obviously just improves, you know, kind of how frictionless things can be. So it's been it's been extremely valuable and and all the you know first seven I mentioned also at Gamma actually you know all all of our employees we haven't had an employee leave and so it's like this continuity piece that's been that's been really helpful and something that we want to continue to sustain. That's an insane stat. 30 people no one's left yet over five years. I feel like that's got to be a record. I mean, I don't think I've ever met anyone like that scale over that period of time that hasn't had anyone leave. Yeah. I think it it keeps the the, you know, core team super obviously like the the collaboration really tight and it goes back to like being able to move as fast as possible. Yeah. Well, and speaking of kind of like the team you so you were in London in the beginning, like were you guys all sort of all over the place or was it just you that was remote? And I know now you're all in San Francisco, right? like how how did that play out and what did you learn about that evolution of how a how a team functions remotely versus in person? Yeah, so I was in London actually for my wife's work. We were there for a couple years and first started Gamma, you know, fundraised. I was out there. The rest of the team was all in San Francisco. So again, this is like peak pandemic. So we did have the question of should we build a fully distributed team or should we try to you know work together in person or some sort of hybrid environment. And when we actually asked our first you know I mentioned like the first seven eventually like several more than that kind of where where should we be based or like what is what is your you know optimal setup. Every one of them said we want to work in person in San Francisco. no desire to leave and I was moving back eventually anyways and so the decision was sort of made for us and and and then basically we went into okay we know we're gonna work together but in San Francisco we're still sheltered in place so we're going to find a place that allows us to do this which is we found a two-bedroom apartment converted two-bedroom apartment we stuffed ourselves there and and like worked in different corners of the office with like huge air filters and that was kind of like the first year I was like just doing that in person because it felt right it was like the right way for us to to build and we were just energized by being together. That was pretty bold because I remember back that first year I mean especially like the first month or two when COVID kind of hit. I mean it was literally like you look at someone with co like you're going to get it like we we didn't fully understand. So was it like was it pretty easy to convince people and like you guys were all like were you guys kind of all trying to like bubble and you know keep you know protect from the outside world or We definitely tried to do it in a safe way. So again like you know different quarters with air filters and whatnot but um but it just I think part of this is yeah because we we had worked together for so long it was easy just to like be candid like hey are is this something you're comfortable doing and if not totally fine work from home but you know it was something that at at that stage way easier to have those conversations and because everybody was fully aligned it just made sense it was the it was the right call. Yeah. And then so I know the first you kind of you've mentioned you did like a private beta, you did a public beta, you did a launch. What were kind of all those different iterations of the product over time? Yeah. So we started off early on doing basically a private beta. I was just putting up a landing page with a you know and then creating this weight list and it allowed us just to see who's even interested in what we're building. And, you know, we're collecting, I think early on is like four or 5,000 signups, and we could see kind of like the personas and like what they were looking for. Uh, we had a few different like open-ended questions just to gauge like, okay, you know, what is the pain point we're solving for this particular person? So, this is you you're still kind of sort of building it or was there kind of like building it? Yeah, it was it was very very rudimentary. It had like the the very basic ingredients of like you could use it, you could present it. Was it super reliable? Was it, you know, super versatile? Questable. Yeah. Yeah, maybe. Uh, but you kind of use the weight list signups as like almost like getting some data on like who was interested in potentially trying something. Totally. Yeah. And and it kind of gives you then the ability to, you know, start we didn't drop everybody from the weight list directly into the product. We basically had batch them up and so like every batch we let in a few hundred and we see what happens. And and for the people that were more engaged, we would follow up and start talking to them and, you know, ask them like, you know, what is it about the product that they were finding most valuable? What were the biggest things that were missing? How were they trying to use the product? And we kept doing that through the, you know, the initial set of weight list until we started seeing a pocket of users that was just organically coming back on their own. And they weren't our friends. They weren't people in our family that were just being nice, but there were people that, you know, just heard about the product and found some value in it. And that build built up enough conviction to say, "Okay, we're ready to do our public beta launch, which is we're going to remove the weight list. Anybody that comes in can sign up gets dropped directly into the product." So, what did you how did you qualify that and know that it was time? Like, was there like, okay, we have like 5,000 retained daily or weekly users? Like, how did you know it was it was the right moment? Yeah, we didn't set super aggressive sort of usage metrics. we had basically enough people coming back where you know it wasn't even I'd say it was like the low thousands where people were just using the product and and the feedback there was enough pockets of users were like oh this is this is great like and then like they're trying to pull sort of features out of you and so it was more of that sort of feelings like okay there's something here and then we we decided like we gave ourselves four months to essentially prepare for like a public beta which is you know add a little bit more polish extend the functionality we launched on public product hunt which gave us also a chance to kind of exercise the muscle of like launching and getting word out there and just seeing what it takes to even announce a product and you know flexing that muscle a little bit and so yeah and ended up the product launch ended up doing great. You know those are again our public beta launch. We ended up winning product of the day week and month and so gave us that little little bit of extra validation like hey people you know people are digging kind of the early version of the product. So when was this? Like beginning of 2022, middle of 2022? End of 2022. Fall of 2022. Yeah. Okay. Fall of 22. This was like around the time Chat GBT came out. Maybe like a little bit before. A little bit before. So the launch was preai. None of the, you know, the product was still you manually creating things. And then what we started realizing was yeah, obviously AI was moving incredibly fast both on the image side as well as the text side. And you know, most presentations are a combination of text and visuals. And so we knew we needed to basically revamp our entire creation flow so that we could integrate AI into it because yeah, I'm sure that like a lot of people listening to this have gone through this or thinking like there's probably a lot of people thinking about this like I need we need to rearchitect our product for AI. I I do want to kind of spend a couple minutes just talking about like how do you do that? Like so was the so the moment that you realized you needed to do it was when it was right like within the months after chat GPT launched and you realized the different text and image capabilities. Yeah, it was basically that is when we recogn well we were we started by just playing around a bunch more ourselves internally and very beginning of 2023 we gave ourselves again kind of like this four month sprint idea of like we're going to do our first AI launch. We in the meantime are going to completely rebuild the onboarding experience and like the first user experience. Why was that important? We knew that we needed to get people to understand the value of the product like immediately. Like we didn't have time to like get them to slowly understand or like adopt the product. They needed to see that in the moment. And that would kind of benefit us in in two ways. Like one, if they see the value and they activate, then you know they're more likely to obviously then retain themselves. And two, if that experience is so magical, they're going to tell other people about it and there'll be an ability to generate this sort of word of mouth immediately, this organic word of mouth, which is obviously a powerful sort of lever. So it's just like get that right in the beginning, like the first minute or however fast you got it to. Exactly. Yeah. Because you know most of us are you know the the the Scott Bulski you know selfish painter and lazy like most of us are that in the moment of like trying a new product and so unless it resonates and like that first mile is something that could be magical most people are never going to come back and so we wanted to we knew our current like at the time our our current onboarding was a little bit just to like required the the per the end user to do so much work to just even grock like what we were doing like understand any amount of value and and you know the the the learning curve was so steep that we were going to lose you know too many people right out the gate and so how could we flatten that learning curve dramatically and make that experience feel a little bit more magical that was the whole goal of that four months so it sounds like you simplified the onboarding like made it like there's like a quicker I don't know time to value or time to magic moment whatever whatever people want to use to describe that what advice would you give like if I'm if I'm like hey grant I'm trying to our onboarding sucks like it's too long. Like what should I do to get a better onboarding or faster, quicker onboarding experience? Yeah, I mean it's going to vary a ton for for different products. Like sometimes you actually want to infuse maybe slightly more friction because it allows you to Yeah. allows you to like better qualify the type of users that you can serve and then maybe through like either personalization or like a um a unique onboarding like based on how they're maybe responding to different questions, you set them up for success. So like you're taking some of those inputs for others like you just want to get them like right out the gate like understand enough about the product so that they come back and I think we fell more into the latter which is like we removed much more friction. We gave them a starting point which is like just enter some general idea of what you need to create and we'll show you what like a first draft could look like get them to understand like hey Gamma is actually a different way of creating content but the building blocks don't need to feel intimidating like we can get you there and you can start playing around with it within like the first you know 30 seconds of of of onboarding. So that was more of our goal and I think most founders need to go in and understand like what you know balancing that out in some cases like maybe adding a little bit more friction or getting people to integrate or getting people to like really get plugged in so that their first experience is feels like they're set up for success versus like a little bit too halfhazard like oh this is a toy not not a real product sort of situation. So it sounds like did you did you sort of personalize the onboarding a little bit like based on an answer you'd like kind of tweak what path they went down? We haven't yet done much of that, but this is something that we're starting to explore more is around personalization segmentation. RV1 of this, we didn't try to do that. The the the way you kind of got went and chose your own adventure is just by nature of the prompt you would, you know, put in. So like if you're creating something for like a a sales template like we would give you, you know, we'd give you a first draft that felt very relevant. Um, and it didn't need to be overly engineered based on like, oh, are you, you know, a certain type of user in a certain type of geography. we just let it be more prompt driven. We're now at the stage where I think there's other layers of like adding that friction where it may make sense and with that comes the ability to to personalize and give people you know even more unique starting point that you know puts them in a place where they can actually see themselves using the tool um you know after the first first run. And I know there's this whole uh saying of like you want to if you're building like an AI native product you with every new model release you want it to make your product better. Did did you benefit from that over time? Oh yeah, of course. I mean, yeah, we we are still benefiting from that, you know, the advancements. It's it's cool to work on a product where the surface area obviously covers a ton. You know, we have text, images, we'll have video, we'll have audio, we'll have many different, you know, formats that we'll be able to support. And because there's been advancements on underlying technology across the board, like, yeah, anytime there's, you know, advances, we can say, hey, what are we going to pull in? How does this, you know, get passed to our end user in terms of value delivered? And it's just a constant sort of iteration, learning, putting that back in. And yeah, just the the basic equation of every business is like pass as much value to your user as possible or your customer as possible at the lowest price and like you can build something pretty sustainable. Yeah. Because I could imagine even if I'm thinking about using Gamma for like this podcast and I think about like maybe your road mapaps and things you just indicated like I could send you a link to something that's kind of like I don't know onboarding you to the the peel or giving you like the TLDDR like here read this for two minutes and like we'll get you going like it could literally be like a custom AI generated avatar of me saying like hey Grant it's Turner um s like super excited about gamma I'm excited to like jump into the podcast here's things like you could probably even incorporate like a prompt where I'm like I want to talk to Grant about like building building the product and advice for people on building a native software and I can you can like tailor that into what comes in through the the actual link or presentation that you're get that you're getting from me it probably change dynamically too I'm assuming like yeah all of that I mean I think that's where it's going to be you know we're just like barely scratching the surface I think you know at the end of the day tools like ours you know they're communication tools and we obviously infuse a bunch of creativity into that as well, but allows you to express yourselves in ways that just weren't possible, you know, in the past. Like the sort of onetoone versus like one to many, the sort of automated, the personalized, all that becomes easier over time. And yeah, we're we're just getting started. It's kind of interesting that the core insight was that slides are sort of like a writing exercise, not a design exercise. that that even that got even like more pronounced as you built it to be more AI native because like you're not really designing like you're just saying you're texting it and saying like this is what I want you to make. Um and I there's probably like a luck element to that I'm assuming like you didn't know chat GBT was coming. You didn't know the LMS were going to get this good. No. Yeah, we did not. I think it was it was great that we had a writing first approach because that as naturally extended sort of kind of the fluidity that you can work in gamma because you you are already in that flow state of writing describing and then in some cases you're leaning on you know AI to be more generative and can help you kind of extend your ideas and shape it in different ways and so yeah definitely I think you know what where sort of luck meets sort of the preparation piece of it is that our vision has always has always been around like really simplifying and making it super easy and fast for the end user to shake your ideas and just so happens like our approach married with AI has been one where you know we're actually able to like really fulfill on that promise much earlier on was there anything that you wish you did differently when you redesigned it like when you kind of went back from scratch like we're going to build this completely AI native rearchitect everything I don't know how much the design changed but anything specifically that like if you go back and tell yourself two two two and a half, three years ago and just say like just don't do this one part or like skip this or or something. It's it's like it's so hard to you know go back and say because I think for us and maybe this is because we came from optimiz so much of how we approach things are like you know iteration, experimentation, testing things out and so we get a lot of things wrong but that's built into the system and how we how we build things. And so yeah, for sure we probably, you know, could have navigated differently, but our approach probably would have been the same. And so we would have still tested, you know, get things into the hands of users, test our assumptions, our hypotheses, and then go back and and like refine that and just be relentless about doing that over and over. And so yeah, I don't think it would have changed much. I think it was just baked into how we operate. Yeah. Okay. And I know you have about 50 million people that use the product today. You kind of talked about there's a weight list. you did the the public launch maybe it's like a couple thousand maybe tens of thousand people that's pretty big gap so how did you go from you know couple thousand people using it to like a pretty pretty significantly large product today anything specifically that kind of happened over the past couple years on that side on the growth side yeah all of it was I I'd say the main inflection point through through it all was that four month sprint leading to our first AI launch and so this was you know 2023 spring 2023 getting ready We completely revamped the onboarding flow and you know at that time we had about 60,000 users and we we launched and then you know all of a sudden we're we're adding like you know 5,000 users a day, 10,000 users a day, 20,000 users a day. Was increasing. Yeah. kept on increasing and and so that's where you know the flywheel started spinning and that that was really kind of the the initial sort of inflection point and and you know we've been lucky that since then you know growth has has remained you know steady and and we want to continue to build on that momentum. Is it like somebody shares it like you send me a presentation or a link and there's like you know made with gamma like try it out type thing like do a lot of people come from that or is it like they go to Google and they just search gamma like what is this make a slide like AI generated slides like is there certain channels that seem to work better kind of in those as you kind of really scaled up. Yeah, there is a good chunk of like when you share like a free gamma, you'll see the made with gamma badge and people come through that. The vast majority of it is more through like word of mouth. So someone might say you know yeah I'm using gamma for this or like if if you're presenting for instance like you'll see that it's you know being used in gamma being served by gamma and so people will then just inherently ask like oh what is you know what are you using and then people that really love the product are telling all their friends and so then their friends will go and search for it or come direct so that still ends up becoming the most for us the most meaningful you know channel just just strong word of mouth and then how do you think you stand out today as an AI company like what's what's the most important thing because there's a lot of people doing a lot of different things all growing pretty fast or some some of them are growing pretty fast what becomes most important when everything's kind of AI native you know what becomes most important is still you know the question of how much is the human in the loop and are you creating something that completely replaces the human or can can the human have the ability to actually still be part of the experience and edit in shape. We're actually, you know, approaching that from, I think, a few different ways. Like for our core proumer product where, you know, the end user, it needs to be a delightful experience. Um, you go in and you can get, you know, a great first draft and then the human can continue to like nudge and push things in the right direction. Like we want that to feel again like effortless. It should feel like something you go in, it feels nice. It's not the PowerPoint moment I described which is like I'm really dreading going into this and like I worry about touching anything because it's so fragile and it's just going to mess up the entire layout. We want that to not be the case. And so our I think unique advantage is like human and AI working well together and like as the AI gets better and more capable it can just really guide that experience too. But the human is just the driver still the person you know navigating. Um, I think where we're going to be exploring much more automation is, you know, via our API where being able to allow others to build on top of gamma and where maybe things can actually be almost fully or or almost entirely automated and where a human doesn't necessarily need to go in as much and it's more about like how can you create content at scale reliably, reliably, predictably and and you know then what what does that what does that really give to you and so I think that might have a different set of constraints overall. all and maybe overarching different approach but that can also be equally powerful and we want to be able to you know serve both audiences well so what's the API maybe have an idea of it but that's sounds kind of interesting what is what is that going to be yeah it's going to be there'll be a different few different flavors of it but essentially it's being able to allow people to combine their first party data and you know feed that into something like gamma where we are now the content engine so no matter what you might need to do in terms of like combining that information and like shaping it for different outputs. So, you know, it's a report, a PDF, a slide deck, whatever it may be as your output like we'll help you automate all of that and just run in the background. We're the sort of content infrastructure for you and you are just piping us basically what you need to be shaped and and distributed. So, what all that could that connect to like Salesforce, your data warehouse, like all sorts of things. Yeah, you can imagine obviously for a sales use case, you know, any of the customer wherever customer data might live or customer information might live. If you're, you know, a consultant and you need to tap into a body of research that you've done and, you know, pull that in anytime you want to personalize or like be able to like, you know, do specific types of market research or, you know, pull from, you know, different geos, zip codes, like all of that can be piped in and and and so it really depends on, you know, what data you have access to and, you know, what you want Gamma to be able to take advantage of. Interesting. So, if I'm like a teacher, maybe like the report card for a kid could be hooked up to this and like I'm sending you your kids report card and it's just hooked up into whatever my grading software is. I don't I don't know what teachers use, but it sounds like that might be a use case. There could be definitely something there. And I think even like simpler than that is just, you know, maybe personalizing some of the content that goes out. So like for certain types of students you include certain types of you know information or maybe for certain types of learners you might give them more visual content versus stuff that is more long form information dense right like all those things are knobs that can be controlled and so rather than having a one-sizefits-all sort of content production like you might actually fine-tune a lot of in the background and just allow that engine to run and then and spit out what needs to be spit out. And then this is a little bit of a different topic, but I'm curious. You're kind of one of the, you know, you're kind of sitting at the forefront of AI. How are you guys using it internally? Are there any interesting things you've done to kind of leverage? I'm assuming you're smiling. So there's there's got to be some stuff you've done like maybe the the secrets that you're willing to share. Um, what are some of the cooler ways you guys use AI internally? Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's anything crazy. is basically the way we use AI is that every corner of you know the company tries to deploy AI or leverage AI and it's a constant sort of learning sharing and this willingness to try certain things out some things are still in uncanny you know valley territory and that's fine but we're able to like test it and so yeah whether or not like you know I'm sure you know other AI startups are doing similar things where like engineers are exploring you know the cursors of the world designers are exploring lovables, bolts to help with prototyping. Marketing team is constantly leveraging different, you know, deep research tools or tools like notebook LM to like synthesize vast amounts of like customer data to create personas, create, you know, archetypes of like different customers we're we're going after. And then customer support, leaning on infrastructure built by like Finn and Intercom and then like using that to create like better support content and like really you know creating that flywheel of like where are there gaps in our own sort of you know help center content and like streamlining automating that. We use a ton of AI to to localize our product and so get like sort of m machine you know translated content out in different forms of our our web app as well as our marketing site and then going in and also having humans like review that and you know improve upon it. So honestly it's like every single function is deploying some version of you know AI and AI tooling and you know the question is just like how much can we kind of use that as you know great leverage as we continue to build every single person should be thinking about like actually building in a way that and and sort of incorporates AI as part of the plan not just like a a nice to have as a mustave and it might look different at different stages and it might look different for different functions but everybody's thinking about it I'm assuming You use gamma too internally. Oh yeah, of course. I was like I hope you're using it every every team meeting presentation and we even have fun use cases around Fridays we have this thing called gamarama which team member can present on just a fun topic something silly it could be something related to just pop culture and like just educating the rest of the team but using gamma to to create that presentation. So, we're trying to have fun with it, but also use it as the actual tool we communicate information with. Do you have a favorite? While we're talking about AI tools, do you have like a favorite kind of like under the radar new one you've discovered, or you still just like chat GBT is kind of the king? I mean, it really still feels like chat GPT is the king. I mean, there's there's been a few out there that I want to spend more time playing with like granas of the world seem seem interesting. obviously optimizing founder Dan creating limitless which seems like a really cool application. So there's so many out there and and more and more of them I'm you know trying to figure out how to fold them in and give them a try. One thing I kind of want to talk about anything that you guys specifically do differently from other companies in San Francisco. I mean we kind of hit on a little bit but maybe some of those constraints that's kind of molded how you guys think or operate that's maybe a little different than kind of your down the fairway venturebacked hyperrowth startup. I I would say there's you know some some big differences in just the culture and how we operate. So one is I think you know there's there's this tendency right now to believe that all the hyperrowth AI startups are operating their their 996 shops which I don't know if you're familiar with but you know 9:00 am to 900 pm six days a week in the office in person and that's everybody and we we do not do that. We have, you know, very flexible sort of more hybrid work culture where we're primarily based in San Francisco. Most people come into the office most days of the week, but it's not mandatory. Like we we don't force that. We have basically anchor days, Monday, Wednesday, Fridays where most of the team is in because we have our team meetings. Um but when you need to be you know like you want some some f focus time and working from home is like the opt optimal way to do that like that's that's totally fine by us and we are also not of the culture of like being a boiler room where you know the pressure is just constantly there. We're building this, we're trying to build for the long haul, which means, you know, we're constantly trying to balance like how much sort of creative like creative energy you can bring into, you know, building a product like ours requires like the level of energy where you can't just like force that through brute force energy, you know, just working endless hours. It needs to be that you have space to think, space to be energized and like recharge your batteries and we really much encourage that. But then but like you know for us in person obviously still has its benefits. So we haven't moved completely remote like we still want to be able to be in the same room jam on things together very very frequently. It just doesn't need to be 247. Yeah it sounds like it's working because your point earlier you haven't had any turnover yet. So sounds sounds like for and it's been pretty successful for everything I can see from from the outside at least. So seems like it's working. Yeah it's working so far and I guess you know what everyone will want to see just you know what do the next four or five years look like? We're four years into our journey now and a lot of these hyper growth startups are you know maybe even earlier into a journey so they're one two three years into it and so yeah you know I think there's many different ways to win and you know as as a founding team you got to find the way that feels authentic to you and one that you believe you can sustain for a long long time because regardless of you know what type of startup you're building if you want to be successful it's not a one twoyear journey for most it's a multi- multi-year if not multi-deade journey and so give yourself a chance to kind of be on that journey for long enough. I think that's the sort of mindset we've tried to have. So on that note, how do you balance trying to grow fast and meet the moment but also, you know, not burning too much cash, remaining profitable, not spending on dumb stuff that you don't need or like has there been anything you've kind of like been able to center around of just like the right balance of that? Uh because I feel like that's a struggle everyone kind of deals with. Yeah, the way we balance it is to inherently infuse some natural tension into this. So we create tension by you know our internal mantra is like higher painfully slow which means like we don't open up a bunch of headcount. We know that the the team is going to remain lean. What that means is like each team member needs to you know take on a ton of ownership and has high agency can do things. Um we try to have a very complimentary set of you know teammates and we you know optimize for the type of people we're hiring like generalists over specialists and we even at the sort of manager level try to invest more in in developing player coaches. So rather than the traditional management layer where you might bring on the VP with the rolodex and they fill out the entire org chart by hiring, we do that by, you know, having these player coaches that are people that have managed in the past but really still love the IC work and can be great mentors and coaches to those around them and can play a role in strategy but are still plugged in to the day-to-day and and so all that means that you know we can move fast. We feel the sort of scrappiness inherently. We bacon, we try to time box things a lot. So we're setting our own deadlines so that we aren't just kind of letting ourselves drift infinitely into like exploration, but there's some sort of semblance of like progress and we can measure ourselves against that. So all those are things like you kind of have to naturally kind of one in instilled the tension and then be comfortable with it and be open when things maybe aren't working well. And so being in a culture of high feedback like culture of feedback like all those are important ways to sort of craft your own sort of engineer your own sort of urgency into into the whole setup. Yeah. And you mentioned a couple times this four month window like do you guys do product sprints in four months? like is there some significance of that or it's kind of organically how it's happened and I think what I found is that you know obviously hard to sprint indefinitely right like if you just don't have a timeline and people are just sprinting forever it it's really hard almost anybody can say I can crank really hard for a quarter and that four month is just like you need a quarter and a little bit like you know you need you need a last not just a quarter you're going to have to go beyond that and it's like that mentality I think for whatever and just has felt like enough time to like, you know, get our ducks in a row, enough time to build what we need to build and then feel like it's still an appropriate deadline where we we do that and it's not forever. It's like, okay, we we have a few months here. Let's let's make sure we got ourselves together. Do you give yourself like a windown period after that? like after a four month spring you're like all right we're like taking it easy for a month or two or something like is there do you like kind of balance those like sine waves almost or yeah we don't I guess we don't really talk about it in terms of like oh we're just going to let our you know foot off the gas take a break it's mostly because after that there's a whole bunch of like bugs that need to be fixed or things that we didn't get right and we need to kind of iterate. So I think it just allows us like we we were building building building and now it's like okay let's learn a little bit see what's going on make sure in some cases where there's immediate fires that need to be put out we can put those out and then we don't go immediately back into four month sprint there's always like some sort of period where we're we're actually learning you know from what's been valuable to the end users and that sort of period ends up being a little bit more organ organic like it may be you know one month it may be a few months and then we'll start thinking about the next sort of four month milestone. Maybe it's like a calibration period or something where you know you're still like foot on the gas but you're just like sensing of like are we still going somewhere still driving but what do we need to like you know level set or you know adjust course correct 100%. Yeah. Yeah. And there's oftentimes quite a bit because like you can go in assuming you you know all the answers but oftent times um things that will be you know surprising that you have gone wrong. Yeah. So I have two two more questions. They're both kind of maybe more selfish questions. But I have two kids. Like we both have two kids are the same age. Any just like I don't know parenting tricks or like especially with like running a hyperrowth startup. Like anything you found that just works for like being a good parent plus you know operator like what's what have you learned that's kind of worked the best? For me what's worked the best is like being very diligent about being on like a routine. And so I think part of this is like you're going to be your best self when you feel healthy and well-rested. And the only way he do that is by being healthy and well-rested. And so like being really like I think what is it? Brian Johnson has the saying of like you you basically have to be a professional sleeper. Like sleep should be your extra job. And if when you show up late to your job, you feel bad about yourself. Like if you if you show up late to sleep, like yeah, that you shouldn't feel great. And so getting that in is like the foundation. sleep then trickles into like being able to have energy to exercise and like fitting in that into your schedule like being super diligent about making sure you carve out enough time and then like from that like comes nutrition. It's like it ends up becoming pretty obvious like you have those three in a good place. I think the rest can can follow and then you can feel like when you show up to being a parent like you actually have the energy. You can you can you know actually have fun and play and so easier said than done but I feel like it all starts with like being on that routine and being as sort of rigorous about like making sure nothing gets in the way of that. And if you can do that I feel like everything else is like hopefully the the dominoes can fall in a in a in the right place. Yeah. I feel like my two kids are both like an awesome age now where they want to like play board games, play card games. We've been playing Minecraft the past like month or two and I'm like how am I so lucky that just like my my kids just like I if I had nothing else to do I would just like play video games or like play board games. So this is kind of awesome. I get to do it and it's like you know it's you don't want to play video games all the time with your kids. You try to limit the screen time but it's like this this is fun. Like this is actually enjoyable. No, I think you're you're winning. You got it right. Yeah. So do you have Last question. Do you have like a favorite like founder, CEO or business that you kind of like learned from just like throughout history? I mean this can be like the Rockefeller or it can be like you know maybe more like modern recent example but any any like stories or founders or companies that you've gotten a lot of inspiration from? I mean I am definitely a you know Nike fanboy and you know an Apple. I think with with you know some of these brands that have just bu built enduring businesses so much of it is about recognizing early on that there's also this community element and and you as a founder play a specific role like particularly special role in sort of nurturing that early on. So for us is like what that translates into like you know we have our own slack workspace for our power users we call it ambassadors where you know ambassadors that's an amazing name yeah and I'm still you know daily checking that and trying to interface and like whether or not it's like helping them use gamma or just helping them out in any other way like they're all many of them are you know building their own businesses and are looking for advice or need help in a certain way and I don't always have the answers but I do try to seek and give them some guidance or introduce them to someone that might be able to and you know that part of it feels feels good. It feels like, you know, we're building not just a product. We're building the sort of community and yeah, that sort of thing needs to be done brick by brick. And I think obviously the Nikes of the world have shown that it's not like, you know, you should kind of just set it forget. It's like, oh, those relationships are humans and those humans require, you know, a lot of sort of input from you and like bu nurturing that just takes a lot of time and an investment and if you believe it's worth it, you should do it. And so for us, like that's been from day one, we really believe that's something worth doing. And hopefully someday I can just continue to carve out time that you know it's it's something that we really believe is is is important and and so what what does ex exactly mean like building a community or having a community like does that mean that the people that use the product talk to each other? They have their own identity does it mean you as the founder or as the company or the brand are interacting with them? I maybe it's all those things but what does that mean exactly? Yeah. In the very beginning of community building, it it much very much is a kind of you and then finding like individuals out there that see something about your product and trying to just build some of that relationship and in many cases they need a little bit help like getting the most out of your product. In other cases, they're eager to give you feedback on how to improve the product. And so just being giving them a channel to like talk to you, I think is important and like deeply empathizing with, you know, what you could be doing better. And then the the long-term goal is like you build a community that's then self- sustaining. You have other community members helping each other and you are no longer part of the conversation. You have left the chat, right? Like you are you're out of it. And and you can then just observe like them like being so excited to help another person like get to a good place because they're, you know, they know what it feels like to like have a product that, you know, can serve them in some way and like unlock some some incredible thing for them, whether it's like extending their business or like, you know, getting, you know, helping them build all the content they've always wanted to build. And so that's like a magical moment and we're kind of on that part of the journey. And obviously that community can start small and then eventually you want that to be something that's that's global where you know people have this affiliation with your brand and your product and a deep love for it and that's the dream state right like that if that happens then you know you're just kind of out there trying to just push the boundaries on the product and the rest kind of happens more organically and we're really trying to build towards that like where we can be one where the product you know gets shipped and we have you know the millions of people out there just championing the product and just excited to share with the next person. Yeah. Because in a way they're almost like a extension of the team in the sense of like they're kind of doing your marketing for you. They're kind of doing your customer support. They're kind of like R&D%. Yeah. So it's like it's like shift those off off balance sheet or off income statement and like just makes a stronger business, more profitable. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it that gets like it's so underrated because it's not quantifiable, right? It's like like accounting is very quantifiable. I can go say, "Hey, what was my payroll last last month?" But yeah, like that value that you just described, like that's hard to quantify. But if you get it, man, that's like a secret sauce and it could be, you know, lightning in a bottle that you can just keep and kind of fuel, you know, future future growth for your company. Yeah. Is there a moment that you know that you have it? Like was there a moment when you kind of knew like we have a community quote unquote? Like is it the word of mouth thing usually or there's definitely an element of that? But I think it's the same thing as like when people talk about like product market fit. It's like, you know, when you think about like product market fit, it's it's sort of this thing that's almost like fleeting or like, you know, the game gets harder. So like you might have product market fit in a small TAM, but like if you want to go after a ma massive TAM, the product needs to change. You're going after a bigger market. And so for us, the same thing is like, yeah, we we have, you know, a small community of users today that love the product. To become a global community, that's, you know, the product needs to evolve. The way we interact with the community needs to evolve, what they get out of being in that community needs to evolve. And so yeah, we're we're at the small stages of like growing what we think to be, you know, enduring and and special community, but it's like yeah, ton more investment needs to be required and and hopefully we can actually, you know, fulfill that over the many many years ahead. Well, Grant, this is a lot of fun. Thanks for doing this. Thanks so much, J. Yeah, this is great. Really appreciate it. Yeah. And just real quick, where can people find you? Like we want to look you up. Twitter, LinkedIn, both of those. I'm trying to be active both on Twitter and LinkedIn. So, just Grant Lee and yeah, love a follow. If there's anything I can do to help, please reach out. Love to connect as well. Yeah, I feel like your Twitter you've you've been you tweet tweet like what you're seeing. Yeah, I appreciate it. Trying to. I think there's so much fun stuff going on in the world. Cool. Well, thanks again for doing this. All right, thanks. Take care. And thank you for listening and thank you to RAM for saving us all time and money and to numeral for putting our sales tax on autopilot. If you missed it, make sure to check out last week's episode with Ryan Sockin at 3Flow on AI opportunities in the $2 trillion employee benefits market. Tune in over the next few weeks for conversations with Matt Mullenwag, the founder of WordPress, which powers over 43% of all websites on the internet, Garrett Lord, the founder of Handshake, college recruiting platform that's emerged as a leader filling the massive opportunity in AI data labeling, and Owen McCabe on Intercom's impressive turnaround from traditional SAS to AI native customer service platform. If you don't want to miss any of these future episodes, subscribe to my newsletter, The Split, in the description to get each episode plus a transcript emailed directly to your inbox every week. And finally, if you like this, please leave a quick review or comment wherever you're listening or watching. And let me know if you have any feedback or thoughts on this or any other episode. Thanks again for listening. See you next time. [Music]