Grant Lee : From "The Worst Idea" to a $2.1B Company | Gamma

23:31That was me. When I first saw it, I did a video about... I really appreciate that. Because it's amazing. It's an amazing tool. Yeah. And so that's where we started seeing just in the very beginning, like some organic spikes of people coming and learning about Gamma and starting to use Gamma. And so we realized, okay, well, if this is already happening organically, what can we do to reach an even broader set of creators and influencers out there? And we started just testing a bunch. So I also, in this process, started to try to figure out how could I be a creator myself? Because I felt like to really empathize with other creators, I kind of needed to go through on the journey myself and like just understand how hard it is right to even build an audience come up with content share information in a way that feels like authentic and really genuine and like you you need to like build that muscle right and so for me it was like okay I'm gonna start by learning how to do this and then when we do work with influencers and creators I'm gonna onboard all of them myself because now you know how to do that right I know how to do it but I'm also still learning right like it's helpful for me to like go down and say okay rather than just saying hey go and showcase Gamma.

24:38I was like, okay, let's actually sit down and think about your audience specifically. And what I actually learned was that many of these creators struggled with presentations because they never learned it in school. They never learned it on the job. And so I got to actually unveil kind of the magic for them. And then specifically for their use case, like if they were targeting real estate professionals, we would think through, okay, how do we actually package this up in a way where the use cases we're showing are relevant, make sense, the way we talk about the product, like resonate with your audience and we can brainstorm a ton.

25:07And that for me was also a learning opportunity because then I could really say, okay, what do the best creators do? How did they like write a good hook? How did they come up with like a structured story in a short amount of time? How do they capture people's attention? And, you know, it was also sort of like, now I could teach them about the product. They learn how to use Gamma. They could talk about Gamma in a very authentic way. And then in the process, I can become a better creator myself and translate that into, you You know, many founders today have a chance to be their company's sort of megaphone or amplifier, right?

25:36Like anytime they want to share information, if you have your own audience, you should be able to package up that narrative in the right way too. And I did so by just learning from, you know, the best creators out there. Like how can I actually build this muscle myself? You know, it definitely felt like there was some good synergy there. And you're active on X and LinkedIn, right? Try to be active on X and LinkedIn, yeah. And I think this is where, yeah, many, you know, customers will reach out. many partnership opportunities come to fruition because of those, you know, because of the audiences that I've built there.

26:06And again, barely scratching the surface, but more I want to do. And I think it just feels very rewarding to be able to start building an audience. Yeah, I just wanted to highlight it for everyone. Like 10 years ago, when I was talking to entrepreneurs, the sentiment was, you're not taken too seriously if you're actively posting on social media. Now, I think it's such an inevitable part of being a founder, because this is how you hire. This is how you learn the marketing channel. And this is how you just meet the peers. Totally. And I think there is a negative stigma because sometimes, this is more like five, 10 years ago, where people almost felt like they were tooting their own horn.

26:41They want to like, oh, hey, look at me, look at me. I think you need to reframe it. Like if you have an audience and hopefully your audience overlaps with your core user base, you're trying to provide as much value to them as possible. Like you're not talking about your product all the time. In fact, you should be talking about your product very little. You should be talking about things that your audience cares about, has questions about. Obviously, in this day and age, everyone's curious about how to apply AI to their work lives. How do they sift through all the noise? How do they maintain a sense of productivity without just becoming insane because there's just too much to try to do in any one given day?

27:16So I think as a founder, you have a chance to figure out what are the... With your experience and your background and what you're building, what can you instill on your audience to like inform them and keep them educated. That value in itself should be where like all the, you know, the ability to build an audience comes from. It's not about tooting your own horn or like really just talking about your product all day. When you finally find your thing, you want the whole world to know about that thing. So you use a thing called Canva to make it an even bigger and better thing. Whether you want to create flyers for that thing, make presentations for that thing, or design merch for that thing, you can do anything.

27:54so people can see your thing, feel your thing, love your thing. The next thing you know, it's a thing. Canva, the thing that makes anything a thing. Have you looked at users who are coming from LLMs when ChatGPT recommends Gamma? Yeah, yeah. Because we're tracking on a newsletter. We're just seeing crazy open rates when people find us through LLMs. Totally, yeah. That's actually been one that's also trending very positively, both in terms of people landing on Gamma's website, but also converting long term. So I think we're early days. It's still a relatively smaller portion of overall traffic, but it's definitely growing.

28:30And it's exciting to think about what this could look like, obviously, in a couple of years. And every business wants, obviously, to diversify how customers hear about this so that, obviously, you want to be able to activate multiple different channels at once. And it does feel like LLMs, chats, like ChatGBT, Claude are going to be meaningful channels for us in the future. Talk to me about pricing in general. So you start with free, then it's$8 and it goes up to$90, right? Yeah. How do you come up with pricing for an AI product? And also it's dependent on how the models price themselves, right?

29:03Totally. So, yeah, there's a lot of different moving parts. I think every startup today needs to be thinking about pricing as something that they're probably constantly experimenting with. It used to be five, 10 years ago, you kind of set it and forget it. You come up with pricing once and maybe revisit it every several years. I don't think companies today have the luxury of doing that. You constantly need to be thinking about, okay, the tension between seat-based versus usage-based, how your product evolves, the different segments of users. So we have users that are individuals versus B2B customers that may want to buy in a completely different way.

29:37So, I mean, the honest answer for us is this is something we're still constantly experimenting with. You also want to do so in a way where pricing, you know, pricing, you're trying to align the value you provide to your user. And then the other side of the equation is you need to be able to build a durable business. So, like, are you actually, you know, building a business that's able to operate profitably or efficiently? The worst thing you could be doing is to be essentially selling dollars at a discount, right? If you're selling dollars at a discount, it feels good. You're making money, but you're doing it so very unprofitably.

30:07So these are all things where constantly moving target. I think the best you can do is being willing to adapt and then user base to kind of figure out what's the right way to balance both the value they're seeing and the cost you incur as a business. Do you have any strategies on converting customers from free into paying? Because you had this competitor, it's a Toma that shut down. Yeah. And they had Toma, 25 million users, 3.5 million ARR. You had 40 million users at 20 million ARR. So you're doing something there, converting customers. Can you give advice to AI founders on how to do that? I think it will sound generic, but it just comes back to like, what is the quality of the product, right?

30:47Every single category, if it's a meaningful category, there's going to be multiple competitors. And so your ability to kind of ignore the competition and focus on your users is all that really matters. Are you delivering something to them that competitors aren't either delivering on or unfocused on? Right? Like even within our own category, there's many people that focus on kind of the design portion of like creating a presentation. We want to focus on the communication, the storytelling. So how do we abstract design, the need for design completely away? And so you're going to approach it differently depending on your sort of vision for this category.

31:26and then you're specifically like your customers you're serving, what are their needs? Many different types of customers might have different needs for a presentation tool. Like you need to figure out where in that space do you actually want to play. And your strategy has been product first from what I'm hearing, from what I'm experiencing. And you only have 50 people. Is it still the same? We're a little bit bigger than that. But like when we were crossing 100 million in ARR, we're 50 people. Yeah, so it's a relatively small team. Grant just said he crossed 100 million in revenue with only 50 people.

31:54This is exactly the kind of thing I love to explore in my future-proof newsletter with a community of 18 ,000 builders and creators. Twice a week, I share the best practices from my conversations with CEOs and founders, the AI tools I'm actually using, and the skills worth learning right now. It's free. The link is in the description. Question that's very, I think, is on point for 2026. Do you think you can triple your revenue with the same amount of people? Is there technology there? Yeah, I think the answer is yes. And then the nuance is, how do you triple it? Because we're trying to build a global business.

32:30And so this means we have a lot of users in Europe, a lot of users in Asia. We still feel like we need to build a physical presence there. And so ignoring that for too long, just assuming, hey, we'll just grow from San Francisco and not grow headcount, I think would be the wrong long-term decision. And so we are trying to grow now our footprint in these different offices, which means growing the team much bigger than it was obviously a year ago. So I think every business should think about what is their ambition as a business. if it is to be a company that has global presence, if it is to serve many different segments of users, so like we have the prosumer end and the B2B set of users that are much different in profile, and then also serving developers through our platform or API MCP part of our business, those all require different teams and like different places of like emphasis in terms of building out the complete product and platform, those require headcount.

33:24And so if we were just focused purely on prosumer, growing that as fast as possible, I think we could stay pretty lean. But if our ambition is to build a global business that can operate across segments, I think we're going to need a much bigger team. And also the question is, is there longevity in just growing the consumer business, like trying to do everything by yourself? Trying to do everything. Yeah, that is another tension. I think every startup is feeling today, especially today, because when it feels like you can build anything, whether you're vibe coding or just agentic coding, all the capabilities feel like they're there.

33:55When it feels like you can build anything, the question is, should you? Yeah. And if not build everything, where are you going to focus? You know, and so this is this is both like the challenge and I think the opportunity of building today. Like you have the feeling of being limitless in terms of going out there, but you also need to provide your team the right level of focus and to be kind of committed to some path of this is what we really care about. And these are the things we don't. And being committed to that for as long, you know, long of a time horizon as possible. Your principal is hire painfully slow.

34:29Is there a role that you wanted to have in your company, but you're not hiring because you think it's, you know, you're still like debating whether you need it or not? I think it goes back to like every, you know, stage of company, you need to ask yourself sort of where you're at and what are the limiting factors for you to continue to grow. Oftentimes, the moment a startup raises a little bit of money, they think like, okay, I need to immediately open the floodgates on, you know, sales and marketing and just like hiring as many people there to build top of the funnel, build demand. But going back to like, is that the best way to grow an early product?

35:07Probably not. It actually means going back to focusing on the core, like making sure the core product is so good. Going back to organic virality is like so good. People tell all their friends about. We wanted to focus there. So rather than like open the aperture in terms of hiring across the board, when we were super early, it was all about reinvesting in the core, hiring the right, obviously, engineers, product designers. We actually probably over invested relative to what people would say, like in product design. We had, it was almost a third of the company was product designers early on. And most people are like, why would you invest so much in the product design?

35:38We're like, well, that matters a ton to us. So even though we were small in the relative overall headcount, we were probably over-indexed on product designers because we felt like that was super important. And to get true organic virality, we needed to be exceptional in that one area of that one function. And so every stage you're going to have to look at, now that we're much bigger, we can't afford not to hire sales and marketing because we have a massive audience to go after. And we have a B2B business that still requires a ton more relationship building, a much more consultative approach to actually expanding within these larger companies.

36:13And so we can't just, hiring payfully slow at this stage doesn't mean we never hire sales and marketing. It means now that we're at the stage, we feel like we've earned the right and we can gradually open up the aperture a bit more. If we had done that two or three years ago, I think that would have been premature. How many of your employees are generalists versus specialists? I feel like nearly all employees are what I would still define as generalists today, even though they spike in different areas. So, you know, for instance, our head of design, exceptionally talented designer, very visual, but he also knows how to code.

36:47And he was coding even before like, you know, vibe coding was more accessible to most designers. But the fact that he can now ship something like end to end, test it, like get early versions into hands of users, that's a superpower, right? And so he can cross domains where, you know, traditionally it'd be a designer or UX researcher that does a little bit, some of this like early, you know, sort of investigation or like early research. He can do that himself, develop the early prototype, ship the early prototype, get something into the hands of users to actually give feedback on, and oftentimes then ship something into production, like almost like completely end to end.

37:21That just wasn't really possible before. But for us, like we try to look for that, the spirit of like a generalist across every function, whether it's, you know, sales, marketing, engineering, product design. And I think that allows you to have a relatively lean team that can, again, like play across multiple domains at any given point in time. And I think in general, that just means a team that can be pretty collaborative too, because you have deeper empathy for what each function can bring to the table. And, and like when you're bringing something to an engineer, for instance, you've already done so much work to think through like, okay, how do I make this right?

37:54So the handoff is as seamless as possible. These things I think are hard to quantify, but when you have a team of generalists, there is some magic in working together. But does this model ever break or start breaking with scale? Do you feel like there will be a point in time when you will need to start hiring more specialists? I definitely think so. But there's also the sort of competing race of as you get bigger, you want more specialization. LLMs and AI is also getting better at being specialized in certain domains. And so there's almost like this race now of like, at what point does AI also kind of fill in the remaining gap and the generals can go deep when they need to.

38:31TBD, I think certain functions, like I think we're noticing, you know, like within like finance and legal, still pretty hard. Like you still want specialization and specific types of questions that come up. Like you don't want to just trust like an LM obviously to give you the right answer. But for a lot of like sales and marketing where, you know, your goal isn't to replace the human, minutes to augment or like to really automate as much so that the human can focus on what they're good at, which is the relationship building. Again, the consultative approach you're trying to carve out, you know, if they only have a certain number of hours in a day, you don't want them to be wasting any time, like fiddling with, you know, business systems or any of that.

39:05They should be spending time with customers. And so our goal is like those generalists can help automate as much of the work that is not customer facing as possible. And the rest of the time, their special, specialty is to work with customers. We're trying to carve out as much time as possible for them to do that. Yeah, that makes total sense. With all the companies deploying agents, what was the last process that you completely delegated to an agent? I think one thing we've learned is that even with agents, you're not completely delegating things away. A human still needs to supervise. Yeah. And agents can still be fragile.

39:42They can go off course. And so I think the best cases are still where the human and agent are working hand in hand. And of course, maybe over time you have multiple agents all working with the same human and they can then be subdivided into different tasks. But we're still so early. We're not at the stage yet where I think any of our teammates feels like, okay, 100 % agent work. Now I can go do something else. It's more like, okay, agent can actually help me provide a ton more leverage, can obviously reduce the time to complete a task, and then can help me do the things that I just would never have gotten to because my time in the day is too precious.

40:18And so there's certain aspects of that. Fast forward several years from now, then I think we're talking about maybe agents doing way more, being much more self-directed and truly being like a partner where you can leverage the agent sort of workforce in a way that today still seems like we're a little bit out of reach. What's your favorite agent? I mean, we build a lot of things internally to help with, things like customer research or even just understanding what should we be building next? What are pockets of things that are going to be useful? So taking all the input we get, we look at obviously things like churn analysis, like what are people saying?

41:00We look at when new users sign up, what are they using? How are they leveraging the product? These are all inputs. And so we want to be able to take those inputs and say, okay, now stress test like some of the other things we're thinking about building, like how useful is this to an end user? Where might we kind of add value in ways that we aren't even considering today, like really being a sparring partner there? I think those are things where you can now with much more, like every company now has so much more data they can actually work with. Taking advantage of that is really, I think, where the magic really happens.

41:33So your analyst is basically a data analyst meets product and They make decisions together. Somebody who watches this video has a startup idea, built a deck with Gamma. Can you give me their first 30 days plan, step by step?

41:47Grant Lee:First 30 days plan is spend all 30 days talking to your customers. Really, I think it feels like if you're assembling the team, you need to be laser focused, customer obsessed from the very beginning and nothing else really matters in the long run. You wouldn't start with a co-founder? Well, I mean, I'm assuming if you've raised money, you have your co-founders. Oh, no, I mean like you just had an idea and you're like, okay, I'm going to start. Is it the co-founder or you start talking to clients first to figure out who you need as a co-founder? I personally think you shouldn't jump into the idea before the team because the team should help inform what the idea actually is.

42:26Grant Lee:You might have like, hey, I'm again going back to our specific thing, which is we think like, you know, visual communication can be improved. but we weren't going to be prescriptive into how we actually solve that. Let's as a team start tinkering. What can our team deliver in this space that feels differentiated? Once we had that, that's when we said, okay, we feel like there is something here. We don't know exactly what the product might look like in three or four years, but there's something here. Let's go raise money so we have a chance to actually build this over the next several quarters.

42:57Grant Lee:Once you have that, Then it's about you have the early team, you flip all of your energy into spending time with customers and early users and testing. Does my thing even deliver on anything that's valuable to you? And if not, let's course correct. Let's make sure we're not heading down a path of delivering something that has zero value to you as a customer. Let's make sure we're listening to your problems, fine-tuning our own sort of understanding of the problem space, and then building the right thing over the long haul. So for someone who came up with the idea, found the team, which is kind of hard if you are not in the ecosystem, like finding the right team.

43:33But would you say this deck will help that company raise money?

43:38Grant Lee:I would say yes, but it will help you sort of have the right conversations. But ultimately, the investor is going to judge you based on your level of conviction and their level of conviction in your team to go after this market. So use this as a tool and every great tool can help you open the right doors and obviously have some of the right conversations. Can we wrap up with one final question? So if you could send one message to the founder version of yourself in 2023, when your growth was stagnating, 6K users just start there, what would you say? It'd be some version of just hang on. You know, like every founder will go through many ups and downs.

44:22Grant Lee:If you're surrounded by a team that, again, shares the same level of ambition and values and principles, then you got to just lean on them as much as you can and then still have belief that you can make it through. The earliest days are the hardest because it very much is they describe it as like the idea maze. You're like bumping into wall after wall and not knowing if you've made any sort of meaningful traction. And so, you know, for us, it was like, hang on for as long as possible. make sure we don't lose belief in the longer term mission of trying to help people communicate their ideas. We feel like that should be something we could commit to for a very, very long time.

44:59Grant Lee:And so hanging on to that belief that we can make a difference, that's what for us actually did change the overall trajectory of the business. And it comes from the energy, I guess, that the product is giving you, right? Is that what's the source of that belief? It comes from, it's the energy in knowing that what you're working on should help improve people's lives and the energy you're putting into it will hopefully result in amazing outcomes for your customers and users. That energy, obviously, it needs to be built up. It's like the conviction that you're constantly trying to fill up as much as possible.

45:34Grant Lee:And if you're building the right things, I think you'll wake up every morning being excited about the things you're working on. Thank you so much, Grant. Thank you for having me. Thank you. Grant built Gamma to a$2 billion valuation. If you want another founder story from the AI era, watch my conversation with Yang Zhao, the CEO of OpusClip. He gave me one of the best frameworks I've ever heard for picking a niche when there are already 50 AI tools in every category. Click right here or here. Somewhere. And also in the... You can't reason with the sun. Trust us. We've tried. This summer, it's time to put that angry ball of fire on mute.

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