Gamma's Journey to $50M ARR with 30 Employees | Co-founder and CEO Grant Lee

11:53Grant Lee:If they know the concept well enough to teach it, it means that they're probably armed with the right tools to be able to take a ton of ownership, high agency, move fast. And so those are absolutely the things you're trying to suss out during the interview process.

12:08Turner Novak:How would you structure that? I know we're getting way off script here already, but how would you suss that out in an interview? Like figuring out what kind of things would you ask and kind of figure out where to dig deeper on?

12:19Grant Lee:Yeah, I mean, there's maybe a few common techniques. One is just asking them to literally teach you something. Something that they're passionate about could be completely not even work-related. 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 they do a good job of getting you excited and understanding and appreciating the topic? And then the other is to ask them to talk about you know, a challenge that they've experienced and kind of overcome. And so oftentimes 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.

13:00Grant Lee:If someone rushes immediately into the solution, it's usually a flag. It's like, okay, they're able to really quickly jump to something and like, you know, kind of highlight 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 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.

13:33Grant Lee:And 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 aren't able to, it just means that again, they probably are like a surface level thinker, they haven't gone to the extent of like really learning and trying to go deep on anything.

13:47Turner Novak: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?

14:00Grant Lee:Yeah. I mean, 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 time to 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 how much are they trying to have the PC version of the story or trying to make themselves look good. And we all know the truth is somewhere in the middle. And you want to be able to hear some texture to the story.

14:33Grant Lee:It's not just all always great. There's some areas where there's wrinkles. And you got to go in and have someone that's willing to appreciate that. 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 whether or not, you know, how much of it is being honest and authentic.

14:49Turner Novak: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. 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. 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

15:19Grant Lee:mean a lot of it is yeah passing the the elevator test like could you stand stand who 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 wanted 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'll 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.

15:48Turner Novak:Yeah. And 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's been maybe the most interesting use case that you've seen for the Gamma product? Just, I assume you have some stuff off the top of your head, but.

16:05Grant Lee:Yeah, I mean, the initial wedge for the product was just a way for people to create presentations very simply and quickly. And so what you'll end up 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, some sort of onboarding or training. Those are all things that traditionally are kind of a pain in the butt to try to create in traditional tools like PowerPoint. And not only just create, but also then edit and refine and then actually share and get feedback on.

16:41Grant Lee:And so we're just trying to make it dead simple for people to create those forms of content where all that could be done very fluidly, could be shared. You can iterate on it. Editing is an opinion that, but, and, you know, get your, get your stuff out there quickly. Yeah.

16:53Turner Novak: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 playing, 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 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.

17:23Grant Lee:Totally. Yeah. I think that's, yeah, 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 put this in a layout that puts it in a way that's consumable by the actual reader or the person you're presenting to.

18:00Grant Lee: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.

18:07Turner Novak:Yeah, because I think about when I do the deck for my fund, when I'm fundraising, my designer made it in Figma like a year or two ago. And so I just kind of use 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's live. And 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?

18:43Turner Novak: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?

18:48Grant Lee: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, maybe it's in chat, CPT or a different tool. And you've actually crafted like the end-to-end narrative you want. Then how do you visualize that? You can drop that entire thing into Gamma. Then there may be an instance where 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.

19:27Grant Lee:We want you to be able to upload those documents and say, hey, take this 100-page document and help me turn this into a five-pager because I need to get in front of 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 a hundred page document into something that's a little bit more visual and 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 Gama can help you then, you know, shape those, the rough ideas into something that's more refined.

19:59And this is just a question I had thinking about.

20:02Turner Novak:You said you're generating about 50 million in revenue, I think it said like 100 ,000 or a couple hundred thousand customers. Is that right?

20:10Grant Lee:Yeah, a few hundred thousand customers.

20:12Turner Novak:So what are people paying for? Like when you're building this, you're like, this is free, this is paid. How did you kind of decide maybe those processes doing that? But how did that kind of all evolve over time?

20:23Grant Lee:Yeah, so we basically have a freemium model. It's based on today AI usage. So all new users get a bucket of 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 the content and do, quote unquote, the old-fashioned way by as a human still entering and playing around the building blocks. And even that has been useful for a lot of users because those core primitives still allow you to manually create stuff much faster than you would 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.

21:01Grant Lee:we think of our 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 on your own so it's like instead of

21:25Turner Novak: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.

21:35Grant Lee: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 maybe, you know, sometimes you outsource it to an agency, or you just don't have much of your own design skills. And so the capabilities are limited. And so what you have to do is try to, you know, outsource it. We want to, you know, replace the need for that for the vast majority of use cases where you could just get by by leaning on gamma a bit more. And so many people we talk to, especially in a little more corporate environment, their bottleneck is like, yeah, even if they have a design team, they oftentimes don't have enough of their time to be able to do a lot of the iteration back and forth.

22:15Grant Lee:And so that time is reserved for the most important super high-polished outputs, but the day-to-day presentations or decks or things that need to be created, There's nobody there to help with that. And we want to be able to step in and serve those users right away.

22:31Turner Novak:And this is something that maybe you did unconventionally. So you talked about a pretty horizontal approach. I feel like generally in startups and the VC kind of conventional wisdom is like, go super niche, super vertical on a specific thing. And you didn't do that. 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 pre-seed rounds specifically. So why did you go so horizontal instead of super niche?

23:04Grant Lee: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 set out to create a new standard. We want this tool to be ubiquitous. We know that's super challenging. It's not going to be easy to create something that even has a chance at replacing a daily active tool like PowerPoint that's everywhere around the world. But that was our ambition. 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, such that if you're an educator, you can use it.

23:40Grant Lee:If you're in the corporate world, you're a marketer, you can use it. If you're a consultant, freelancer, solopreneur, small business owner, all of these types of users should be able to benefit from what we're creating. That was our ambition. From day one, we knew that's what we wanted. So horizontal was only mechanism of trying to fulfill that longer-term vision and dream. The second thing is even if that were the long-term vision, oftentimes people will say, okay, we'll just start with one ICP. Just try to serve salespeople, for instance. I think that ends up becoming much more challenging. It's easier said than done.

24:17Grant Lee:because what ends up happening is you try to serve that one ICP pretty well, and inevitably they have very specific things that end up needing to be tailored to their use case. What you end up doing is creating a hyper-specialized tool that maybe the salespeople do get a ton of benefit out of. But when you start zooming out, none of what you've built over the past couple of years are then beneficial to the consultant or beneficial to the educator. And so inevitably, you've already created this verticalized tool or vertical tool, even though your long-term ambition might have been to build horizontally.

24:51Grant Lee:So when we 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, we had to resist the temptation of just serving one ICP well. we needed to have a pretty broad swat of users. The way we acknowledge that was rather than focus on personas, we focus on pain points. So not ICPs, not personas, but really the pain point that a user might have, and what are those universal pain points. 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.

25:29Grant Lee:Getting what's in your head into other people's head requires is 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.

25:40Turner Novak: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?

25:57Grant Lee:No, yeah, I definitely think, you know, this is definitely not the only approach. You know, there's some markets out there where the TAM is probably big enough just to go after that vertical loan. 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 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.

26:29Grant Lee:and incumbent tools 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 that makes sense for certain markets. Founders, they should always ask, 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 do you believe to be true years from now?

27:02Turner Novak:Yeah, and actually you were crazy on that point of like legal market, Tam. So I think I saw a tweet from Patrick Halston 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 an accident? They 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.

27:26Grant Lee:Yeah, and it's growing, right? And that's what you want to look for. It's already a meaningful amount and it's growing. Then it's like, okay, well, there's probably something there. You want to move where the markets are experiencing some sort of organic tailwinds and then try to capture that in that moment too.

27:43Turner Novak:What is the tamper just slides and presentations? Actually, I didn't even look this up. Do you know what it is?

27:50Grant Lee:I mean, Microsoft Office doesn't really share too much in terms of just the revenue, but it's in the billions. When you look at the user base of slides, it's in the billions. And 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 are in something they're super well versed in, so they don't create them.

28:23Grant Lee:But in the future, when digital content is going to be even more important in terms of connecting with others or customers or partners, 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?

28:54Turner Novak:Like when you just think about like meeting summaries, presentations, docs, calls, like there's a lot of people kind of playing in this 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 just curiosity and interest and then how you just think about it over the long term how everything's going to play out

29:20Grant Lee: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 started with slides because one this 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 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 just thinking about like just dreading that moment of actually going into Google Slides, having to like spend so much time formatting and like getting like even just staring at that blank page gave me the first moment of realization, which is like, there's got to be a better way.

30:08Grant Lee:Slides is a format created almost 40 years ago. And it's such an important medium for communication. 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 just building for several months, kind of prototyping the initial versions of Gamma just to give ourselves our own sort of level of convictions. We started realizing that 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 are fundamentally different?

30:45Grant Lee: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 aspects 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, much more of the communication can be async and viewed on different devices, like your phone or tablet or a monitor. And so why not have something that was more mobile-friendly or mobile-responsive by default?

31:18Grant Lee:Why not have something that was more interactive and multimedia-rich? And all the things that, PowerPoint, you might be able to hack together, but it wasn't built for that. What if we lean more into where we think things were already 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.

31:43Turner Novak:Yeah, I think to your point of like how the format has kind of evolved, right? It's just it's always been this kind of like landscape view rectangle thing. But if you think 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, shit, that was actually pretty smart. Like, that's a good idea. And this was probably like 2019-ish.

32:13Turner Novak:And so this is probably you were doing this around 2020-ish?

32:17Grant Lee:End of 2020 is when we first formed the company, yeah.

32:20Turner Novak: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 and in the early days. How did that kind of play out?

32:30Grant Lee:Yeah, we knew we needed to raise enough to assemble the early teams. I mentioned even just the initial seven. And then we got to a team of about 12 before we did our first bigger AI launch. We knew we needed enough to build kind of the scaffolding for the initial product, then to be able to get that into the hands of users and iterate. And so we raised a decent-sized pre-seed round. It was a little bit under$3 million. And that gave us the chance to kind of form the initial team. And then we ended up raising another$4 million as part of our seed round. This is when we had basically just launched our private data.

33:02Grant Lee:And again, I think part of the founder journey for anybody that's just getting started is 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 have 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 acknowledged that up front. It was like even something as simple as presentations, there's a ton of surface area to cover.

33:41Grant Lee:And so to like earn the right to be a tool that's actually used and depended on by somebody outside of your organization, it 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.

34:00Turner Novak:How did you get people to buy into it? Because it's like a horizontal tool, like most people are like, this won't work. Like, it's impossible, go to market, won't work. I don't like this idea. How'd you get around that?

34:11Grant Lee:Yeah, I mean, we definitely got a bunch of rejections. It wasn't 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 created our very first pitch deck, we actually built it as a prototype of Gamma. It was basically showing what the possibilities were, even if it was super rudimentary. So it had those elements. It was hybrid writing, like a document slash deck-like medium. It was interactive, it was multimedia-rich, and so it had all the principles we were trying to lean into. People could squint their eyes and maybe see a little bit into the feature we're trying to describe.

34:53And then the other half was people that kind of were the prototypical user.

34:58Grant Lee:So Amy, who led our seed round, she basically was product marketing manager, was at Stripe, was at Twitter early on. And so 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-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

35:45Turner Novak:the right investors and 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?

35:57Grant Lee:It's definitely a volume game, but to your point, it is a game. And so the way I think founders just structure the game, the early on, like you want to, just try to build relationships. So the best way to go into any fundraise is like that 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 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 pitching early investors, you're going to get a ton of no's.

36:36Grant Lee:The folks that say yes, you can ask them two questions. One, what is it about your pitch that resonated with them? Was there something that really stood out? Why are they choosing to invest? And two, you can ask them, who else should I be talking to? Who else do you think this message or this pitch might resonate with? And you're just doing that over and over again. The funny part about our own founding during our pre-seed round, 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, 2 to 1 a.m., 2 a.m.

37:12Turner Novak:Like Pacific time, yeah.

37:14Grant Lee:And so I was locked in and we didn't have a very big place in London, renting out like kind of small apartments. So I was stuck in the sort of laundry room because I was only placed, I 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, is just like you back to back 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 back to back basically two weeks straight worth of meetings to a point where we had enough, you know, to fill the initial round.

37:53Turner Novak:Amazing. Yeah, it's definitely not glamorous. Like a lot of people think a fundraising is this like, you know, wine and dining. And it's like, it's basically just like eating shit until you get enough of the way there. Like that's, it's usually that's how it goes.

38:08Grant Lee:Totally. I would say, I don't know. Today it feels maybe slightly different, but 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.

38:24Turner Novak:Yeah, well, and then to the point, I think you guys are doing really good today, but 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 did you never like raise a ton of money and go down that path?

38:45Grant Lee:Part of this is just like, I think the mentality of the founding team that we've always had this notion that raising too much money has 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 scrappiness 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.

39:21Grant Lee: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 early on, you're building the early parts of the team. And then later on, you want that culture to be solidified such that you hire the next 10, 100 people. They all have the same DNA. It's all the same. Like we know what we look for.

39:56Grant Lee: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 inherently means you're going to kind of take a more lax approach and you're going to say, okay, you know, money's 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 ingredients within your core team to do a lot of the work.

40:36Grant Lee:And so those are all things that we kind of talked a lot about early on. And anytime there was an opportunity 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 we really haven't wanted to like, you know, divert from that core sort of mantra.

40:57Turner Novak:How has that impacted being able to recruit? Because I feel like part of the reason and people raise money so that there's like a halo around it from a recruiting perspective, but also just, oh, Facebook will give you a million bucks, we'll give you more or whatever the strategy is there.

41:11Grant Lee:I would say 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 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 actually like, even if I don't get this job, I mean, go on and use this tool, something about it has resonated.

41:57Grant Lee:Those are the type of people that we found that once we bring them in-house, there's so much love and energy that they pour into the product. Of course, we want to have super competitive offers, and we want to pay top of market and give good equity, and those things all come packaged. But at the same time, only trying to satisfy the competing offer of a massive AI company, I think in many ways, It sets you up for long-term obstacles that you may not 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.

42:34Grant Lee: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 try to spend a lot of time providing education. Even this comes kind of from my finance days, but like even at Optimize, 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.

43:23Grant Lee:And I hope that many more founders will do that, which is like take the onus 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, 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 the value of like the, just like the tangible or the tangibility

43:46Turner Novak:or the realistic chances of the equity being worth anything just at the end of the day. If it's a public company, it's a liquid. If it's a startup, it's private. There's a little bit of uncertainty around what is this thing actually worth really at the end of the day. Can I get anything for it if I needed to sell? You might have to take a discount. But just generally, I think you guys have raised a total of$23 million, I think.

44:10Grant Lee:That's right. So I don't know.

44:12Turner Novak:Just generally speaking, there's usually a 1x liquidation preference on the equity that investors put in. So if I'm somebody who's considering working at Gamma, I'm just like, okay, if the company sells, the investors get their 23 million, and then 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 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, that's pretty reasonable.

44:49Turner Novak: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, is it even worth that much?

45:16Grant Lee:I mean, the math you just described, less than 10%, less than 5 % of candidates ever even get into that math. And to your point, yes, it's like when you break it down, there are things that seem to be, you can present that in a logical way and then that decision ends up becoming easier. But yeah, the tough thing is, when you are competing against someone that's raised a ton of money, they do have that external credibility or validation that somebody believes they're worth X billion, X hundred million dollars. And oftentimes, Candace will rely on that much more than anything else because it's just easier to understand.

46:03Grant Lee:And it's a, quote unquote, a trusted professional investor that has done their homework and has put that money in. I think when you, you know, for us, like we as founders have come 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, one X, 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.

46:36Grant Lee:and a lot of what I fear is like, I want, you know, in the future, if Dama 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.

47:05Turner Novak:And this is, Maybe a little bit of a sidebar, but Optimizely, what was that company? I've heard of them before. I've actually never heard. What did they do? How did that go for you guys as a team? It sounds like it all came from the early team.

47:19Grant Lee:Yeah, so Optimize.it was actually one of the fastest growing YC companies back in the day. And they started off sort of in this space of A-B testing and eventually kind of brought in that scope to be much more around just experimentation broadly. So we were 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 Optimizer to do that. And I'd say the company when I joined was Series A, by the time, a little bit over 10 million in ARR.

47:59Grant Lee:By the time I left, 100 million in ARR. So by all means, it was a business that definitely showed that there was a market for this and had grown and had a global footprint. And I think the outcome maybe wasn't as great as what we would have all hoped. You know, being one of the fastest growing YC companies at the time, I think the aspirations were to be something that like super impactful and, again, a great outcome for employees. But we ended up being acquired. And, you know, 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.

48:37Grant Lee:It doesn't feel like we had left something on the table. Yeah. And that's, I feel like it's kind of like a little bit of a superpower.

48:45Turner Novak:I'm assuming you all work together at Optimizely 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.

48:54Grant Lee:Yeah, there's definitely a bit of that muscle memory, working together, knowing each other's styles, things that you almost don't need to say because it's just so obvious of how we work. And that obviously just improves kind of how frictionless things can be. So it's been extremely valuable. and all the first seven I mentioned all still at Gamma. Actually, all of our employees, we haven't had employees leave. And so it's like this continuity piece that's been really helpful and something that we want to continue to sustain.

49:29Turner Novak:That's an insane stat. 30 people, no one's left yet over five years. I feel like that's gotta be a record. I mean, I don't think I've ever met anyone on that scale over that period of time that hasn't anyone leave.

49:41Grant Lee:Yeah, I think it keeps the core team super, obviously, the collaboration really tight when it goes back to being able to move as fast as possible.

49:51Turner Novak:Yeah. Well, and speaking of the team, you were in London in the beginning. 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? How did that play out and what did you learn about that evolution of how a team functions remotely versus in person?

50:11Grant Lee:Yeah. So I was in London actually for my wife's work. We were there for a couple of years and first started Gamma, fundraised. I was out there. The rest of the team was all in San Francisco. So again, this was like peak pandemic. So we did have the question of, should we build a fully distributed team or should we try to work together in person or some sort of hybrid environment. And when we actually asked our first, I mentioned the first seven, eventually several more than that, kind of where should we be based or what is your optimal setup? Every one of them said, we want to work in person in San Francisco, no desire to leave.

50:49Grant Lee:And I was moving back eventually anyways. And so the decision was sort of made for us. And then basically we went into, okay, we know we're going to work together, but in San Francisco, we're still sheltered in place. So we're going to find a place that allows us to be 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 a huge air filters. And that was kind of like the first year of like just doing that in person because it felt right. It was like the right way for us to build. And we were just energized by being together.

51:22Turner Novak: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 COVID, like you're going to get it. We didn't fully understand. So was it pretty easy to convince people? And were you guys kind of all trying to bubble and protect from the outside world?

51:45Grant Lee:We definitely tried to do it in a safe way. So again, like different quarters with air filters and whatnot. But I think part of this is because we had worked together for so long, it was easy just to like be candid like hey or is this something you're comfortable doing and if not totally fine work from home but you know it was something that at that stage way easier to have those conversations and because everybody was fully aligned it just made sense

52:11Turner Novak:it was the it was the right call yeah and then so i know the first you kind of you 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?

52:23Grant Lee:Yeah, so we started off early on doing basically a private beta. I was just putting up a landing page and then creating this wait list. And it allowed us just to see who's even interested in what we're building. And we're collecting I think early on it was like 4 ,000 or 5 ,000 signups. And we could see kind of like the personas and what they were looking for. We had a few different open-ended questions just to gauge like, okay, what is the pain point we're solving for this particular person?

52:49Turner Novak:So you're still kind of sort of building it? Or was there kind of like... Still building it.

52:53Grant Lee:Yeah. It was very, very rudimentary. It had like the very basic ingredients of like, you could use it, you could present it. Was it super reliable? Was it super versatile? Yeah, maybe.

53:06Turner Novak:But you kind of used the waitlist signups as like almost like getting some data on like who was interested in potentially trying something.

53:14Grant Lee:Totally, yeah. And it kind of gives you then the ability to start, we didn't drop everybody from the waitlist directly into the product. We basically had batched them up. And so every batch, we let in a few hundred and we see what happens. And for the people that were more engaged, we would follow up and start talking to them and ask them, 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 initial set of waitlist until we started seeing a pocket users that was just organically coming back on their own.

53:48Grant Lee:And they weren't our friends. There weren't people in our family that were just being nice, but there were people that just heard about the product and found some value in it. And that built up enough conviction to say, okay, we're ready to do our public beta launch, which is we're going to remove the wait list. Anybody that comes in can sign up, gets dropped directly into the product.

54:06Turner Novak:So how did you qualify that and know that it was time? Was there like, okay, we have like 5 ,000 retained daily or weekly users? How did you know it was the right moment?

54:15Grant Lee:Yeah, we didn't set super aggressive usage metrics. We had basically enough people coming back where it wasn't even, I'd say it was like below thousands where people were just using the product. In the feedback, there was enough pockets of users were like, oh, this is great. Then they're trying to pull features out of you. It was more of that sort of feeling like, okay, there's something here. Then we decided, we gave ourselves four months to essentially prepare for a public beta, which is add a little bit more polish, extend the functionality. We launched on public product hunt, which gave us also a chance to exercise the muscle of launching and getting word out there and just seeing what it takes to even announce a product and flexing that muscle a little bit.

54:59Grant Lee:And so, yeah, the product launch ended up doing great. Those are, again, our public beta launch. We ended up winning product of the day, week, and month. And so it gave us that little bit of extra validation like, hey, people are digging the early version of the product.

55:16Turner Novak:So when was this? Beginning of 2022? Middle of 2022?

55:20Grant Lee:End of 2022. Fall of 2022. Okay.

55:23Turner Novak:Fall of 2022. This was around the time ChatGPT came out. Maybe a little bit before?

55:27Grant Lee:A little bit before. So the launch was pre-AI. The product was still 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 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.

55:54Turner Novak:Because I'm sure that a lot of people listening to this have gone through this or thinking, there's probably a lot of people thinking about this, like we need to re-architect our product for AI. I do want to kind of spend a couple of minutes just talking about how do you do that? So the moment that you realized you needed to do it was when it was right within the months after ChatGPT launched and you realized the different text and image capabilities?

56:18Grant Lee:Yeah, it was basically that is when 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.

56:38Turner Novak:Why was that important?

56:40Grant Lee:We knew that we needed to get people to understand the value of the product immediately. We didn't have time to get them to slowly understand or adopt the product. They needed to see that in the moment. And that would benefit us in two ways. One, if they see the value and they activate, then 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.

57:17Turner Novak:So it's just like, get that right in the beginning, like the first minute or however fast you got it to.

57:22Grant Lee:Exactly. Yeah. Because most of us are the Scott Balski, selfish, fainter, and lazy. Most of us are that in the moment of trying a new product. And so unless it resonates and that first mile is something that could be magical, most people are never going to come back. And so we knew at the time our current onboarding was a little bit just to require the end user to do so much work to just even grok what we were doing, understand any amount of value. And the learning curve was so steep that we were going to lose 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?

58:06Grant Lee:That was the whole goal of that four months.

58:08Turner Novak:So it sounds like you simplified the onboarding, like made it like there's a quicker, I don't know, time to value or time to magic moment, whatever people want to use to describe that. What advice would you give? Like if I'm like, hey, Graham, our onboarding sucks, like it's too long. Like what should I do to get a better onboarding or faster, quicker onboarding experience?

58:28Grant Lee:Yeah, I mean, it's going to vary a ton for different products. Sometimes you actually want to infuse maybe slightly more friction because it allows you to better qualify the type of users that you can serve. And then maybe through either personalization or a unique onboarding, based on how they're maybe responding to different questions, you set them up for success. So you're taking some of those inputs. For others, you just want to get them right out the gate, understand enough about the product so that they come back. And I think we fell more into the latter, which is we removed much more friction.

59:03Grant Lee:We gave them a starting point, which is just enter some general idea of what you need to create, and we'll show you what a first draft could look like. Get them to understand, 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 30 seconds 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 experiences feels like they're set up for success versus like a little bit too haphazard, like, oh, this is a toy, not a real product sort of situation.

59:48Turner Novak:So it sounds like, 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?

59:56Grant Lee:We haven't yet done much of that. But this is something that we're starting to explore more is around personalization, segmentation, RV one of this, we didn't try to do that. The way you kind of got went and chose your own adventure is just by nature of the prompt you would put in. So like if you're creating something for like a sales template, like we'd give you, you know, we'd give you a first draft that felt very relevant. and it didn't need to be overly engineered based on like, oh, are you 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.

1:00:30Grant Lee:And with that comes the ability to personalize and give people even more unique starting point that puts them in a place where they can actually see themselves using the tool after the first run. And I know there's this whole saying of like,

1:00:46Turner Novak:If you're building an AI-native product, with every new model release, you want it to make your product better. Did you benefit from that over time?

1:00:55Grant Lee:Oh, yeah, of course. I mean, yeah, we are still benefiting from that. The advancements, it's cool to work on a product where the surface area obviously covers a ton. We have text, images, we'll have video, we'll have audio, we'll have many different 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 advances, we can say, hey, what are we going to pull in? How does this 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 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 you can build something pretty sustainable.

1:01:40Turner Novak:Yeah, because I could imagine even if I'm thinking about using Gamma for this podcast, and I think about maybe your roadmaps and things you just indicated, I could send you a link to something that's kind of like, I don't know, onboarding you to the PL or giving you the TLDR. Here, read this for two minutes and we'll get you going. It could literally be a custom AI-generated avatar of me saying, Hey, Grant, it's Turner. Super excited about Gamma. I'm excited to jump into the podcast. Here's things. You could probably even incorporate a prompt where I'm like, I want to talk to Grant about building the product and advice for people on building AI and native software.

1:02:19Turner Novak:And you can tailor that into what comes in through the actual link or presentation that you're getting from me. it probably changed dynamically too, I'm assuming.

1:02:29Grant Lee:Yeah, all of that. I mean, I think that's where it's going to be. We're just like barely scratching the surface. I think at the end of the day, tools like ours, 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 in the past, like the sort of one-to-one versus like one-to-many, the sort of automated, the personalized, all that becomes easier over time. and yeah, we're just getting started. It's kind of interesting that the core insight

1:02:58Turner Novak:was that slides are sort of like a writing exercise, not a design exercise, that that even got even more pronounced as you built it to be more AI native because you're not really designing, you're just saying, you're texting it and saying, this is what I want you to make. And there's probably a luck element to that, I'm assuming. You didn't know ChatGPT was coming. You didn't know the LLMs were going to get this good.

1:03:21Grant Lee:No, yeah, we did not. I think it was great that we had a writing first approach because that has naturally extended the fluidity that you can work in Gamma because you are already in that flow state of writing, describing, and then in some cases, you're leaning on AI to be more generative and can help you extend your ideas and shape it in different ways. Definitely, I think where luck meets sort of the preparation piece of it is that our vision has always been around really simplifying and making it super easy and fast for the end user to shape their ideas. And just so happens, our approach married with AI has been one where we're actually able to really fulfill on that promise much earlier on.

1:04:06Turner Novak: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, re-architect everything. I don't know how much the design changed. but anything specifically that like if you go back and tell yourself 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

1:04:28Grant Lee:it's like it's so hard you know go back and say because i think for us and maybe this is because we came from optimizity so much of how we approach things are like Iteration, experimentation, testing things out. We get a lot of things wrong, but that's built into the system and how we build things. Yeah, for sure, we probably could have navigated differently, but our approach probably would have been the same. We would have still tested, get things into the hands of users, test our assumptions, our hypotheses, and then go back and refine that and just be relentless about doing that over and over.

1:05:04Grant Lee:I don't think it would have changed much. I think it was just baked into how we operate.

1:05:09Turner Novak:Yeah, okay. And I know you have about 50 million people that use the product today. You kind of talked about there's a wait list. You did the public launch, maybe like a couple thousand, maybe tens of thousand people. That's a pretty big gap. So how did you go from, you know, a couple thousand people using it to like a pretty significantly large product today? Anything specifically that kind of happened over the past couple of years on that side, on the growth side?

1:05:33Grant Lee:Yeah, all of it was, I'd say the main inflection point through it all was that four-month sprint leading to our first AI launch. And so this was 2023, spring 2023, getting ready. We completely revamped the onboarding flow. And at that time, we had about 60 ,000 users and we launched. And then all of a sudden, we're adding 5 ,000 users a day, 10 ,000 users a day, 20 ,000 users a day. Oh, so it's increasing. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, it kept on increasing. and so that's where the flywheel started spinning and that was really kind of the initial sort of inflection point. And we've been lucky that since then growth has remained steady and we need to build on that momentum.

1:06:20Turner Novak:Is it like somebody shares it? Like you send me a presentation or a link and there's like made with gamma, try it out type thing. 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?

1:06:41Grant Lee: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 you're presenting, for instance, like you'll see that it's being used in gamma, being served by gamma. And so people will then just inherently ask like, oh, 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 channel, just strong word of mouth.

1:07:19Turner Novak:And then how do you think you stand out today as an AI company? Like what's the most important thing? Because there's a lot of people doing a lot of different things are all growing pretty fast or some of them are growing pretty fast. What becomes most important when everything's kind of AI native?

1:07:35Grant Lee: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 the human have the ability to actually still be part of the experience and edit and shape? We're actually, you know, approaching that from, I think, a few different ways. For our core prosumer product where the end user, it needs to be a delightful experience. You go in and you can get a great first draft and then the human can continue to nudge and push things in the right direction. We want that to feel, again, effortless.

1:08:10Grant Lee: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 I worry about touching anything because it's so fragile and it's going to mess up the entire layout. We want that to not be the case. And so our, I think, unique advantage is human and AI working well together. And as the AI gets better and more capable, it can just really guide that experience too. But the human is the driver. It's still the person navigating. I think where we're going to be exploring much more automation is 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 almost entirely automated and where a human doesn't necessarily need to go in as much.

1:08:55Grant Lee:And it's more about like, how can you create content at scale reliably, reliably, predictably? And then what does that really give to you? And so I think that might have a different set of constraints overall and maybe an overarching different approach, but that can also be equally powerful. And we want to be able to serve both audiences as well.

1:09:14Turner Novak:So what's the API? Maybe you have an idea of it, but that sounds kind of interesting. What is that going to be?

1:09:21Grant Lee:Yeah, it's going to be, there'll be a few different flavors of it, but essentially it's being able to allow people to combine their first party data and 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 combining that information and shaping it for different outputs. So it's a report, a PDF, a slide deck, whatever it may be as your output, 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 distributed.

1:09:56Turner Novak:So what all could that connect to? Like Salesforce, your data warehouse?

1:10:02Grant Lee:All sorts of things. Yeah, you can imagine obviously for a sales use case, any of the customer, wherever customer data might live or customer information might live. If you're a consultant and you need to tap into a body of research that you've done and pull that in. Anytime you want to personalize or be able to do specific types of market research or pull from different geos, zip codes, all of that can be piped in. And so it really depends on what data you have access to and what you want Gamma to be able to take advantage of. Interesting.

1:10:40Turner Novak: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 kid's report card and it's just hooked up into whatever my grading software is. I don't know what teachers use, but it sounds like that might be a use case.

1:10:53Grant Lee: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 size fits 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 spit out what needs to be spit out.

1:11:27Turner Novak: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 just got to use some stuff you've done. Like maybe the secrets that you're willing to share. What are some of the cooler ways you guys use AI internally?

1:11:49Grant Lee:Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's anything crazy. It is basically the way we use AI is that every corner of the company tries to deploy AI or leverage AI. And it's a constant sort of learning, sharing. and I was willingness to try certain things out. Some things are still in uncanny valley territory and that's fine, but we're able to test it. And so, yeah, whether or not, I'm sure other AI startups are doing similar things where engineers are exploring the cursors of the world, designers are exploring lovables, bolts to help with prototyping. Marketing team is constantly leveraging different deep research tools or tools like Notebook LM to synthesize vast amounts of customer data to create personas, create archetypes of different customers we're going after.

1:12:40Grant Lee:Then customer support, leaning on infrastructure built by Fin and Intercom, and then using that to create better support content and really creating that flywheel of where there are gaps in our own help center content and streamlining, automating that. We use a ton of AI to localize our product and so get machine-translated content out in different forms of our web app, as well as our marketing site, and then going in and also having humans review that and prove upon it. Honestly, it's like every single function is deploying some version of AI and AI tooling. The question is just how much can we use that as great leverage as we continue to build?

1:13:25Grant Lee:every single person should be thinking about actually building in a way that incorporates AI as part of the plan, not just a nice-to-have, it's a must-have. And it might look different at different stages, and it might look different for different functions, but everybody's thinking about it.

1:13:41Turner Novak:I'm assuming you use Gamma, too, internally?

1:13:43Grant Lee:Oh, yeah, of course. Okay. You didn't mention it, so I was like,

1:13:46Turner Novak:I hope you're using it.

1:13:48Grant Lee:Every team meeting presentation, and we even have fun use cases around. Fridays, we have this thing called GammaRama, which a team member can present on just a fun topic, something silly. It could be something related to just pop culture and just educating the rest of the team, but using Gamma to create that presentation. So we try to have fun with it, but also use it as the actual tool we communicate information with.

1:14:15Turner Novak:Do you have a favorite, while we're talking about AI tools, do you have a favorite under the radar, a new one you've discovered? Are you still just like ChatGBT is kind of the king?

1:14:23Grant Lee:I mean, it really still feels like ChatGPT is the king. I mean, there's been a few out there that I want to spend more time playing with, like Granolas of the World seem interesting. Obviously, Optimize the Founder, Dan, creating Limitless, which seems like a really cool application. So there's so many out there and more and more of them, I'm trying to figure out how to fold them in and give them a try.

1:14:46Turner Novak: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 has kind of molded how you guys think or operate. That's maybe a little different than kind of your down the fairway, venture backed hyper growth startup.

1:15:03Grant Lee:I would say there's some big differences in just the culture and how we operate. So one is, I think, you know, there's this tendency right now to believe that all the hyper growth AI startups are operating their 996 shops, which I don't know if you're familiar with, but, you know, 9am to 9pm, six days a week in the office in person, and that's everybody. And we do not do that. We have a 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 don't force that. We have, they say, anchor days, Monday, Wednesday, Fridays, where most of the team is in because we have our team meetings.

1:15:51Grant Lee:but when you need to be you know like you want some so for focused time and working from home is like the optimal way 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.

1:16:46Grant Lee:It just doesn't need to be 24-7.

1:16:49Turner Novak:Yeah, it sounds like it's working because your point earlier, you haven't had any turnover yet. So it sounds like for, and it's been pretty successful for everything I can see from the outside, at least. So it seems like it's working.

1:17:01Grant Lee:Yeah, it's working so far. And I guess, you know, everyone will want to see just, yeah, 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, I think there's many different ways to win. And 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 what type of startup you're building, if you want to be successful, it's not a one, two-year journey for most.

1:17:32Grant Lee:It's a multi-year, if not multi-decade 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 it on dumb stuff that you don't need?

1:17:54Turner Novak:Or like, has there been anything you've kind of like been able to center around of just like the right balance of that? 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.

1:18:12Grant Lee:So we create tension by our internal mantra is like higher, painfully slow, which means we don't open up a bunch of headcount. We know that the team is going to remain lean. What that means is each team member needs to take on a ton of ownership and has high agency, can do things. We try to have a very complementary set of teammates. And we 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 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 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.

1:19:09Grant Lee:And so all that means that we can move fast. We feel the sort of scrappiness inherently. 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 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 instilled attention 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, engineer your own sort of urgency into, into the whole setup.

1:19:53Yeah.

1:19:54Turner Novak:And you mentioned a couple of times this four month window, like you guys do product sprints in four months. Like, is there some significance of that or?

1:20:00Grant Lee:It's kind of organically how it's happened. And I think what I've 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'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, extra months yeah you need to last not just a quarter you're gonna have to go beyond that and it's like that mentality i think for whatever reason it 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 do that and it's not forever it's like okay we have a few months here let's let's make sure we got our stuff together do you give yourself like a

1:20:47Turner Novak:wind down period after that like after a four month spring like all right we're like taking it easy for a month or two or something? Do you kind of balance those sine waves almost?

1:20:57Grant Lee:Yeah, I guess we don't really talk about it in terms of like, oh, we're just going to let our foot off the gas and take a break. It's mostly because after that, there's a whole bunch of 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 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 a four-month sprint there's always like some sort of period where 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 organic like it may be you know one month maybe a few months and then we'll start thinking about the next sort of four-month milestone

1:21:38Turner Novak:maybe it's like a calibration period or something where yeah 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 level set or adjust course correct?

1:21:51Grant Lee:100%. Yeah. And there's oftentimes quite a bit because you can go in assuming you know all the answers, but oftentimes things that will be surprising that you have gotten wrong.

1:22:02Turner Novak:Yeah. So I have two more questions. They're both kind of maybe more selfish questions, but I have two kids. We both have two kids of the same age. Any just like, I don't know, parenting tricks or like, especially with like running a hypergrowth 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

1:22:28Grant Lee: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'd 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 basically have to be a professional sleeper like sleep could 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 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 interior schedule, like being super diligent about making sure you carve out enough time.

1:23:11Grant Lee:And then like from that, like comes nutrition. It was like, it ends up becoming pretty obvious. Like you have those three in a good place. I think the rest 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 dominoes can fall in the right place.

1:23:41Turner Novak: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 kids just like, 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, 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 is fun. Like, this is actually enjoyable.

1:24:08Grant Lee:No, I think you're winning. You got it right.

1:24:10Turner Novak:Yeah. So do you have, last question, do you have like a favorite like founder, CEO, or business that you kind of like learn from? So 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 like stories or founders or companies that you've gotten a lot of inspiration from?

1:24:30Grant Lee:I mean, I am definitely a Nike fanboy and an Apple. I think with some of these brands that have just built enduring businesses, so much of it is about recognizing early on that there's also this community element. And you as a founder play a specific role, like particularly special role in sort of nurturing that early on. So for us, it's like, well, that translates into like, We have our own Slack workspace for our power users. We call it Ambassadors.

1:25:02Turner Novak:Ambassadors, that's an amazing name.

1:25:04Grant Lee:And I'm still daily checking that and trying to interface. And whether or not it's helping them use Gamma or just helping them out in any other way. Many of them are 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 that part of it feels good. It feels like 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 should kind of just set it, forget it.

1:25:40Grant Lee:It's like, oh, those relationships are humans and those humans require a lot of sort of input from you and nurturing that just takes a lot of time and investment. And if you believe it's worth it, you should do it. And so for us, that's been from day one, and we really believe that it's something worth doing. And hopefully something I can just continue to carve out time that it's something that we really believe is important.

1:26:02Turner Novak:And so what does it exactly mean, like building a community or having a community? Does that mean that the people that use the product talk to each other? Do they have their own identity? Does it mean you as the founder or as the company or the brand are interacting with them? I mean, maybe it's all those things, but what does that mean exactly?

1:26:20Grant Lee:Yeah, in the very beginning of community building, It very much is a kind of you and then finding individuals out there that see something about your product and starting to just build some of that relationship. And in many cases, they need a little bit of help 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 giving them a channel to talk to you, I think is important and deeply empathizing with 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 yeah 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 helping them build all the content they've always wanted to build.

1:27:22Grant Lee:And so that's a magical moment. And we're on that part of the journey. And obviously, that community can start small. And then eventually, you want that to be something that's global, where people have this affiliation with your brand and your product and a deep love for it. And that's the dream state. If that happens, then you're just out there trying to just push the boundaries on a product, and the rest 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.

1:27:57Turner Novak:Yeah, because in a way, they're almost like an 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. 100%.

1:28:05Grant Lee:Yeah.

1:28:06Turner Novak:So it's like shift those off balance sheet or off income statement and like just makes a stronger business more profitable.

1:28:12Grant Lee:Totally. Yeah. Yeah. And I think 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 feel, you know, future, future grocery company.

1:28:34Turner Novak: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

1:28:42Grant Lee: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 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.

1:29:11Grant Lee: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 at the small stages of like growing what we think to be, you know, enduring and special community. But it's like, yeah, a ton more investment needs to be required. And hopefully we can actually, you know, fulfill that over the many, many years ahead.

1:29:31Turner Novak:Well, Grant, this is a lot of fun. Thanks for doing this.

1:29:33Grant Lee:Thanks so much, General. Yeah, this is great. Really appreciate it.

1:29:36Turner Novak:Yeah, and just real quick, where can people find you? Like we want to look you up. Twitter, LinkedIn, both of those.

1:29:40Grant Lee: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.

1:29:50Turner Novak:Yeah, I feel like your Twitter, you've been, you tweet, tweet like what you're seeing.

1:29:54Grant Lee:Yeah, I appreciate it. Trying to. I think there's so much fun stuff going on in the world.

1:29:57Turner Novak:Cool. Well, thanks, Sam, 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's auction at three flow on AI opportunities in the$2 trillion employee benefits market. Tune in over the next few weeks for conversations with Matt Mullenweg, 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 SaaS to AI native customer service platform.

1:30:38Turner Novak: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.

1:31:08I pray for you. I pray for you.