“Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (co-founder)

I'm in my third pitch in. I get to the

very end of the pitch feeling pretty

good about myself. The investor pauses a

little bit and then just says that is a

has to be the worst pitch worst idea I

have ever heard. Not only are you trying

to go against incumbents, you're going

against incumbents that have massive

distribution. You are never going to

succeed.

>> You guys are at over 100 million AR now

worth over $2 billion. One of the most

interesting ways you guys grew early on

was influencer marketing.

>> All the initial influencers I onboarded

manually myself. I would jump on a call

with each one of them so that they

understood what Gamma represented, how

to use the product. You want to be able

to have them tell your story, but in

their voice. I think a lot of people

think influencer marketing and they'll

think these big trendy creators, people

that have a million followers, this is

the wrong approach. You basically give

them a script to read immediately feels

like an ad. That product is not

connected really to them in any way.

You're much better doing the hard thing,

which is hard to scale. finding the

thousands of micro influencers that have

an audience where your product maybe is

actually useful. People really trust

what they say that ends up becoming this

wildfire that can spread really really

fast.

>> Something you talk about there is

actually a lot of ways to think

experimentally even in the early stages.

>> We would have an idea in the morning,

come up with some sort of functional

prototype. We recruit a bunch of people

that are legitimately good prospective

users that have zero skin in the game.

Ship that so people can start playing.

In the afternoon, we're already running

pretty full scale experiment. you start

actually hearing other people describe

their usage of the product when you can

also watch them struggle by the evening

or by the next day we can actually go

through all of it together and say okay

we're going back and we have to fix this

this is like not usable and we've done

that for everything

today my guest is Grant Lee CEO and

co-founder of Gamma this is a really

unique and inspiring and very tactically

useful conversation because Grant is

building something that is essentially

the dream for most founders a massive AI

startup that's profitable and has been

for a long time that didn't raise a lot

of money for a long time and is a small

team. It's just around 30 people all who

can fit in a small restaurant serving

over 50 million users globally. If

you're not familiar with Gamma, they're

an AI powered presentation and website

design tool. They just hit 100 million

ARR in just over 2 years. They're valued

at over $2 billion. And unlike a lot of

the fast growing AI startups that you

hear about, they're growing profitably

and sustainably and in a category that

most people did not believe had a huge

business opportunity. As you'll hear in

the conversation, one investor told

Grant this is the dumbest idea that he

has ever heard. In this conversation,

Grant shares the very counterintuitive

lessons that he's learned finding

product market fit, how he knew they had

product market fit, the specific tactics

that helped them grow, including a deep

dive into influencer marketing, which

blew my mind. Also, how they figured out

their price, his thoughts on building a

GPT rapper company that is durable, a

ton of hiring advice, and so much more.

This could honestly have been another

two hours of conversation. I suspect

we'll do another follow-up conversation

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>> Grant, thank you so much for being here

and welcome to the podcast.

>> Lonnie, so great to be here. Thank you

for having me.

>> I see your face all the time in my

LinkedIn feed. I don't know if you know

this a thing on on these JP Morgan Chase

ads. I'm so curious if other people see

this or if it's just me. Did you know

this was a thing? I

>> I think it's maybe once a day now I get

a text message and just there just no

message. which is just a screenshot or

you know an image of me you know doing

something in San Francisco on one of

these uh uh ad ads that we're seeing and

so yeah kind of embarrassing but also

you know we're happy customers of JP

Morgan Chase so trying to represent

>> oh my god I hope I hope you love them

because it's like it's always you

there's no one else it's like Grant

>> I know can I tag I swap somebody out I

mean that'd be great I I I'm totally

fine with that

>> okay so to get serious the reason I'm

really excited to have you here is

unlike a lot of super fast growing AI

startups. You are both growing like

crazy. You are growing very profitably.

We're going to talk about this. You did

not raise a ton of money when you

started. You waited a long time to raise

a bunch of money. You also built a

business in a category that I think most

people never imagined there was this big

of an opportunity. And you're basically

you've achieved the dream of a lot of

founders these days, especially people

building AI startups. So my goal with

this conversation is essentially do an

anthropological study of a really

successful AI startup. Talk about how

you found product market fit, how you

grew, all the all the lessons you've

learned along the journey. And I'm going

to break this conversation up kind of

along the different milestones of the

journey. Before we get into the first

piece, is there anything that you think

is important for people to hear kind of

broadly about the story of Gamma? Yeah,

maybe I'll just start with uh with a

quick story if that's okay. And um it's

really just a founding story. So, you

know, we started the company back in

2020. This is peak pandemic. And you

know, fundraising, even fundraising was

just so different. So, all of the

fundraising was done over Zoom. You were

kind of, you know, sitting in these Zoom

meetings trying to pitch. Many investors

you never met in person. So, just a

different era, right? And so, for us,

you know, we're first- time founders. I

was actually living in London at the

time and so, you know, different time

zone. I had to do all of my pitches at

night and you know I have two little

kids so wait for them to go to bed 8 PM

we had a pretty modest flat so nothing

big. I would basically find this little

corner uh between the kitchenet and the

laundry room kind of setup shot far

enough from the kids so they wouldn't

you know be woken up and between 8:00

p.m. like 2 a.m. I'm just pitching you

know trying my best like the fake Zoom

background so people didn't know where I

was and just pitching. And so, you know,

really the first day kind of I'm in my

third pitch in trying to tell the story

of Gamma. Obviously, just starting to

get the hang of the pitch and uh you

know, I get to the very end of the pitch

feeling pretty good about myself and the

investor pauses a little bit and then

just says that is have to be the worst

pitch, worst idea I have ever heard. Not

only are you trying to go against

incumbents, you're going against

incumbents that have massive

distribution. you are never going to

succeed. And so like in my head I'm

already kind of shell shocked and

thinking, you know, what am I gonna

what's my rebuttal? And before I could

even have, you know, respond, he hangs

up. And so I'm there sitting, you know,

there thinking about it. And, you know,

before I could really get down on myself

because I had to prepare for the next

pitch. I kind of just internalized this

feeling that, you know, maybe he's

right. You know, maybe something about

what he's saying is actually correct.

And so for me, I started thinking about

if we're going to succeed in this

category, we're going to really have to

think about growth from the very

beginning. This category is going to be

really, really hard to break into. And

so we really kind of made this sort of

kind of promise to ourselves that as we

continue to build, growth is going to be

critically important. And so my thing to

kind of, you know, your audience is

that, you know, I don't come from a

growth background. So if I can learn

growth, anybody can learn growth. And I

think especially in this sort of market,

hyper competitive, oftentimes very

crowded, it's going to be essential.

>> That is such a fun story. Oh my god, how

how bad must this investor feel at this

point? We won't name names. Uh just to

share some stats. I know this is going

to be by the time this launches, this

will be out, but you guys are at over

100 million AR now, worth over $2

billion. Uh a business that again most

people did not think was was going to

work in in this category.

>> Yeah, thank you. Yeah, we feel super

proud to have accomplished that and

again, yeah, I'm excited to share some

of the, you know, the growth tactics and

things that worked for us because I

think, you know, hopefully it will help

others kind of on their journey as well.

>> Okay, so let's dive into it. Let's talk

about product market fit. Tell us the

story of just how you found product

market fit and how you knew you found

product market fit.

>> Yeah, I'll start by telling kind of the

moment where we thought we maybe had

product market fit. And I think a lot of

founders, you know, ask themselves, do

we have it or do we not? And I think

there's a there's often a sort of

temptation to go almost fool yourself

into thinking you have it. And so we

sort of did our first public beta

launch. Um this is back in August of

2022. We launched on product hunt and

you know felt really good. We had you

know what we felt like was a great

launch. Ended up winning product of the

day, product of the week, product of the

month. And I was like wow we you know I

think we have something here. And then

we'd look at signups and you'd get that

initial spike in signups and then they

sort of like flatten out. we were still

getting new users every day, but it was

clear we didn't have strong word of

mouth. There wasn't strong organic

virality. And so if we just kind of

played things out, you know, we knew

that the the product wasn't going to

grow on its own. Like something was

missing there. We didn't have that

strong word of mouth so that the product

could just continue growing. And so we

really kind of asked ourselves like,

okay, what does what do we need to

change? And the answer is like we we

need to fundamentally change everything.

It for us almost became the sort of bet

the company sort of moment because at

that point we were running low on runway

you know we knew we needed to make

progress and we didn't really know you

know what could be done and so we got

everyone together at this point the team

was uh just over 12 people and we said

okay it's going to be all hands on deck

we are going to do everything we

possibly can to make the first 30

seconds of the product feel magical the

moment you land into the product it has

to be great and it has to be so great

that someone that goes through that

onboarding is going to tell all their

friends. And if we can get that right,

then maybe we have a chance at actually,

you know, doing something in the space.

And so we spent three, four months

actually, you know, after the product

hunt launch, we like felt great, but we

knew we had to go back to the drawing

board. We spent the next like three,

four months actually revamping the

entire onboarding experience. And of

course, this is also where, you know, AI

for us kind of played a big role. We

actually rebuilt it so that AI was part

of the the the actual onboarding. every

single new user would experience this

sort of magic in the first 30 seconds.

And so we re relaunched, this is end of

March 2023.

And all of a sudden, you know, we'd go

from a few hundred signups a day to now

first day it was like a couple thousand.

And then the next day would be like

5,000 signups and then 10,000 signups a

day and then 20,000 signups a day and

then it just kept going up. And we

weren't doing any sort of marketing, no

advertising. It was all sort of organic

word of mouth, virality of the product,

people using the product and sharing it

with others where we for the first time

really felt this pull like we didn't

have to do anything. Product was just

growing and uh it was just such a

distinct difference between that feeling

and like coming out of the product hub

launch where we could have fooled

ourselves into thinking we had product

market fit. I think the temptation would

have been hey let's just spend more on

ads or spend more on marketing because

like you know we'll just fuel you know

fuel the top of the funnel and

everything else will work itself out. I

think that would have been a trap. I

think that would have let led us down to

like this path of trying to brute force

our way into product market fit and it

would just always be sort of a fleeting

sort of destination. We never actually

arrive. And so I think we made the tough

call, the right call. It was a sort of

bet the company moment. And I think on

the other side it just felt so

different.

>> Grant, this is exactly what I wanted

this conversation to be. I'm so I'm so

excited. I have so many questions I have

to follow up on the stuff you shared

before we even get to the rest of the

journey. So one is essentially what

you're describing is product market fit

to you was when organic growth started

to really take off and it was just

growing through word of mouth. You

weren't doing much because it was so

awesome. People were telling their

friends about it. Is there anything more

there that might be helpful for people

to share just to hear about just like

okay here's what it actually looks like?

>> Yeah I mean I my one piece of advice is

when you're early on you your mindset

should almost be like you're trying to

create a word of mouth machine right?

Like if you can get that part right,

everything else becomes significantly

easier. And the if you have any and and

I think this applies to both like

proumer, B TOC as well as even B2B

products. Like if you have a B2B

product, even if you're not telling all

of your, you know, all of your friends,

you should be telling colleagues where

like that product is relevant. You

should probably be telling, you know,

you know, former co-workers where, hey,

you've discovered something like, oh, I

wish we had this, you know, my in our

prior lives. And like that should even

be magical. And then you should see that

in all the leads that are coming through

like or people coming through through

your prospects and your existing

customers. If you're not seeing a

healthy chunk of those leads come

through that way, I would go back. I'm

like why? Why is that not happening?

Because again, that's like the massive

tailwind you need where everything every

single thing you do on top of that, all

the marketing, all the sales, all the

advertising, you're just going to have

like it becomes way way easier.

>> How much of this was, you describe it as

a word of mouth machine. How much of

this was like word of mouth loops and

verality features versus just the

product itself? One was awesome and two

is kind of innately sharable because

it's you know presentations people share

with each other. Yeah totally. I think

for us we do benefit from being in a

category where you know by nature of it

if if you like gamma you're sharing it

presenting it to others. So I think it

for us it's a combination of both and

and ideally you have other ways where

you know word of mouth or organic

verality can can happen in your product.

So by nature of usage like it's being

shared you know we basically had an

internal mantra that we go back to like

the first 30 seconds we want it to be

dead simple for someone to create

content we want to be dead simple for

them to share it and everything we did

kind of for that first 30 seconds or you

know call it the first few minutes is

remove friction so that they can do both

of those things create and share and I

think other people you know when you

look at your own product you think about

okay what is it you know what is it

about my product and how it gets used

can you remove friction such that it can

actually spread And even if it's locally

within an organization or like you know

within a workspace like just be able to

enable that as much as you possibly can.

>> The other really profound point you're

making here is the story of you won

product of the day on product hunt which

alone is so hard. So many people try to

win and don't most people don't like

I've tried to help companies win and

it's it's like a really hard thing to

achieve and then you won product of the

week and product of the month and still

you're like no this isn't working. Those

people that achieve that are like no we

got this and they would not have to bet

the company there was no feeling there

wouldn't be a feeling if we have to

rethink everything. What is it just what

is it there that you're just like no we

need this isn't going to work as much as

as exciting as this is this isn't it?

Yeah, I mean part of, you know, being a

founder is being, you know, as

self-aware as you can and be your own

your own worst critic, right? And so,

you know, oftentimes you want to have

these vanity metrics that feel good to

celebrate and you should celebrate, but

you should know when it's a vanity

metric versus is this core to our growth

engine? Like if this number goes up,

does it mean the product is working? And

I think that's where we looked at like,

okay, you know, felt good to win those

things. We got we kind of put ourselves

at least on the map, but it wasn't good

enough to actually have this sort of

feeling that we had a core growth engine

we could just invest in and get better

and better. That wasn't there yet.

>> So essentially, it kind of started to

just plateau and and slow. It wasn't

like this rocket ship that took off from

that point.

>> Yeah. It was still like we were still

getting signups like they're coming

through, but you could just tell there

wasn't like there wasn't this like

building momentum, you know? And I think

that's that's where it's always hard to

tell like you you kind of have to you

know me and my co-founders we sat down

we're just we're trying to be honest

with ourselves like okay is this going

to be enough and it just really felt

like it wasn't going to be good.

>> The other point here is the power of

onboarding which comes up a bunch on

this podcast when you talk about driving

retention. So you so you launched

product hunt did great and then started

kind of petering out. How much did the

product change after it things started

to work versus onboarding just like how

important was onboarding and then just

tell us why the first 30 seconds where

did you come up with that number? Yeah.

I So for us, you know, the the

onboarding and the product experience,

for us that's intertwined, right? Um the

analogy I always think about is, you

know, you know, if you go into, you

know, a restaurant and you know, maybe

the food is good, but when you really

think about the user experience, it's

like the moment you walk in the door,

you get seated, the waitress, waiter

comes by, greets you, you order. Yeah.

And of course, the food has to taste

good. But if that entire like and then

you finally get the bill and you leave,

like is that entire experience something

that feels delightful? Is it good enough

for you to tell your friends about? if

someone just came by and dropped the

food on on your plate, you know, on the

table and like just left and never came

with a bill, we're like, "Okay, I'm not

going to recommend this to to somebody

else." And so for us, like we thought

about, okay, the first moment someone

walks through our door, you know,

dropping into the product, what is what

is something we can give them? Can we

shorten that time to value as much as

possible? A lot of this is inspired by,

you know, like Scott Bellski, he talks

about kind of that first smile, the

first 15 minutes. And I think that's

totally right. And I think one approach

is you think about new users as you

almost have like a cynical view of them.

You have to think about them being

selfish, vain, and lazy, right? Like

they're coming in, they have no desire

to learn a new tool. And so what can you

give them in that first 30 seconds that

earns you the next 30 seconds and then

the next 30 seconds? And so for us, we

knew that if we can't, you know,

people's attention span is even shorter

today than maybe 10 years ago. And so

what is it in that first 30 seconds? can

we actually show you something and uh

earn the right to kind of you know keep

kind of building that relationship with

you. We really thought a lot about that

and and certainly that's that's all we

could really afford at the time. We only

had 12 people building and so like we

couldn't make a entirely you know

revamped entire product. We knew that we

had to at least put all of our energy

into one spot and so we made that coming

into the door come through the door make

that feel that moment feel magical so

that we can do a little bit more over

time. I love your point about how, you

know, you could think of it as like,

okay, it's onboarding versus the

product. The lens of how do we make this

incredibly valuable and ahaish for the

first 30 seconds almost informs what the

product should be.

>> Yeah. It really helps you, you know,

pull forward what is the most magical

thing about your product, right?

Sometimes founders will think about like

the five 10 features. Well, maybe

there's only like one thing that kind of

differentiates you. you know, I I try to

learn a lot from, you know, you know, we

we'll get into some of the marketing

pieces of this, but even just having

this sort of founder marketing lens of

like what can I do to help a new user

just understand, you know, there's this

thing from like consumer advertising,

which is you throw a consumer one egg,

they can probably catch it. You throw

them four or five eggs, they're probably

going to drop all of them. And like

often times founders want to talk about

the four or five features they have,

maybe 10 features, and then the consumer

is totally confused like why why do I

need this thing? We try to just give

them that one egg, that one, you know,

like first experience. We're like,

"Okay, you know, create a slide in

seconds." That's that's the egg. I'm

going to throw you this egg. Is that

compelling to you? Some people are still

going to opt out, but for the people

that catch that, you're solving like a

real problem for them and then you can

continue again kind of building on that

over time. Like you've given them enough

so that they'll sit around and like keep

playing with your product.

>> That is a hilarious metaphor I've never

heard for for onboarding time to value.

Just focus on one egg at a time. Just

going even further back, what was the

original insight that you had that led

to Gamma and what Gamma is today?

>> After the last startup I was at was

acquired, I I went back into kind of my

roots which is consulting. I was

advising early stage startups and the

sort of medium I was using was Google

Slides. So I just remember this, you

know, late night trying to prepare for

next day's meeting, trying to format and

figure out the right layout and spending

hours just trying to get the sort of

look and feel right rather than the

content itself. And for me that just

felt completely backwards. You know, I

should be spending 90% all the time on

the content, 10% maybe on the design and

formatting. And so the question just

was, you know, what if there was a

better way? What if we could reimagine

this format from the ground up? Slides

have been around for almost 40 years as

the default, you know, medium of choice

for a lot of this. And so we thought

about, okay, if we had different

building blocks, different primitives,

so you're not locked into the fixed 16

by9, you know, slide, what could you,

you know, what could we offer to new

users? And so that was really the the

starting point of all this

>> like hearing this I could see why

investors would be like you know like I

guess so but slides has been around

PowerPoint has been around 40 years like

I get it you know I get why people be

and specifically AI was that a part of

the vision initially or did AI start to

come up and then wow great timing

>> great timing it wasn't part of the

original vision although the spirit was

there which is we wanted to make it

incredibly fast and effortless for

people to create content so it just so

happened that AI was a magical gift that

allowed us to do all those things along

the same sort of ambition or vision that

we had and um and so we integrated it

core to kind of all the building blocks

we were already building well before AI

was part of the picture.

>> It's such a cool other example just so

many examples of ideas that were not

possible before are now very possible

with AI and it's a great opportunity for

people to come after as you like places

categories people think is an impossible

place to build a big business AI now

allows it.

>> Awesome. Speaking of that, let's talk

about the growth journey and how you

actually grew from nothing to 100

million ARR in just over two years. I'm

thinking we break it up. I know these

milestones aren't that clear, but kind

of like zero to 100 million ARR, one to

10, 10 to 100, something like that. And

let's just kind of see how it goes.

How did you get your first set of users?

How did you get your say 100 first 100

users? How'd you get to 100 million

error from zero? Our first hundred looks

very different, I'd say. So, this was

even pre the sort of AI launch we had.

You know, the first hundred users for a

product like ours, you're you're trying

to convince all your friends to use the

product. Anybody that's ever made a

slide deck, you're trying to talk to.

And I think early on, you know, your

friends want to do you a favor, so

they're going to try the product.

They're also going to lie to you.

They're going to tell you how great it

is, and then you look at the usage and

nobody's coming back. And so I think our

first hundred was sort of like gradually

hard-earned post sort of the product

hunt launch people learning like okay

this is kind of becoming a little bit

more useful usage were still pretty

episodic so they weren't coming back

every week and then I think do think you

know the the moment post sort of the AI

launch is where all of a sudden you know

we saw that sort of organic growth

happening people coming back to the

product regularly and so that's where it

wasn't even the first hundreds like I

mean the first you know 10,000 users all

came within a pretty short time period

after that that initial launch. Awesome.

We're going to talk about monetization

pricing later, which is obviously an

important part of actual getting to a

millionaire and 10 million error.

>> Yeah.

>> So, what I'm hearing essentially is the

product HUD launch was a big part of

just the first 10,000ish users. I know

there was also a a tweet when you first

when you relaunched that helped in a big

way. Talk about that.

>> Yeah. So, when uh we you know we did our

AI launch, we we didn't do our AI launch

on Product Tongue. We just we we

basically said, "Hey, let's just put it

on out on Twitter. See if we can get

some virality." And honestly, we kind of

came up with kind of a clickbaity sort

of, you know, tweet. It was like, you

know, the the most valuable uh skill in

business is about to become obsolete.

And uh and so, you know, it was

intentional in that we wanted to create

a little bit of engagement. We knew that

having sort of a more provocative, you

know, tweet would allow people to engage

with it. And so, um after a couple days,

all of a sudden, it started getting a

little bit more viral. and uh a lot more

engagement. And we looked and it was

basically because Paul Graham had

commented and saying something like

surely the thing that uh the slide deck

is describing is more valuable than the

slide itself, right? And uh obviously

you know it was fun just to see that

comment. I think once that comment came

through like you know even more

engagement on the post and then that was

really the whole intent of that post was

just to be able to have you know that

level of engagement so that people you

know we have some level of reach and so

for me it was almost like uh the my

first sort of learning moment going back

to you know what does founderled

marketing even mean? It means like how

do you actually break through the noise?

How do you get a chance to have people

even engage with like a post like that?

Part of that is copywriting. Part of

that is like storytelling. Part of that

is just having like even like the right

visuals to share. And so it was uh for

me kind of a moment just understanding,

hey, to kind of do this, right? You kind

of uh you kind of have to do things that

maybe you're not super comfortable with,

but uh it makes a difference.

>> Such a fun story. So you intentionally

set that announcement up to be

controversial is what I'm hearing.

>> Totally. Yeah, I'd say provocative, a

little spicy.

>> That is so cool. So essentially, you got

to 10,000 users through Product Hunt and

then essentially one controversial tweet

that ended up baiting Paul Graham to

comment. Amazing. And was it a com? It

was just a comment. It wasn't even him

retweeting it.

>> No, just a comment. Yeah. And then

others would, you know, pile on.

>> Yeah. It's interesting how much a

comment can uh increase the distribution

of a tweet versus them retweeting it or

quote tweeting it.

>> Totally. And of course, the algorithms

change all the time. So part of it is

just luck based on when it happened, how

it happened, who who posted.

>> And I you use the term founder

marketing, which I love and I'm already

seeing it in action here. This is you

thinking about it's not like delegating

to someone in marketing. It's not hiring

an agency. It's like how do I tell a

story that I think will break through

the noise based on you building this

company having the insight to build this

product and I guess is there anything

more there you think is important for

people to hear about the importance of

the founder thinking through this stuff?

>> Yeah, I mean I think very you know most

people today are probably familiar with

founder sales which is still very very

important. I think before you hire your

first, you know, salesperson or sal, you

know, AE, it's great to for the founder

to understand like what it takes and,

you know, they're going to craft the

right narrative, the right story. At my

previous role, I was the COO at a

startup where I was doing a lot of I

wasn't founder, but I was early and so I

was helping the founders go through this

and and really helping going to meetings

with a client or a prospect and saying,

"Hey, this is why, you know, um, our

product is interesting." I think you

know today there's there's so many AI

startups that are much more either BTOC

or consumer and so you're not

necessarily talking to individual

prospects but the idea that you can be

you know really in control of the

narrative on the marketing side is

really really important and I think you

know I'll describe a few things where

over time I think that skill set just

really really helps you. One is like you

know you have a chance to kind of be a

creator yourself these days. I think a

lot of founders are trying to, you know,

be more active on social media. And I

think, you know, if you can kind of

overcome the initial cringe factor of

like seeing yourself and post things

like, oh, this doesn't, you know, feel

authentic. If you can overcome that

initial feeling, you you start investing

into like, okay, how do I become a

better copywriter? You know, how do I uh

articulate something that is um clear,

not just clever, you know? I think

there's that saying where obviously if

you can have that clarity, that's super

important. And most people will try to

get super like creative with their with

their copywriting, but that's not

usually the right way to break through

and communicate something. So, how do

you improve your own copywriting? And

then that allows you to actually have a

higher bar when you start working with

other marketers or in this case like for

us like working with influencers, right?

If you're working with influencers and

creators and you can totally empathize

with like how they approach that work

and you know what a good hook looks like

or you know how like a structure a good

post like you can only do that if you've

kind of gone through it a little bit

yourself and you know how hard it is and

I think too many founders will then just

say you know they'll write something um

that just feels so much like an ad and

and then they'll give it to a creator to

help amplify and then that just never

works right and so I do think part of

founder marketing is like going through

this yourself using your own platform In

the beginning, it's probably going to be

super small, but as you get bigger, like

you have you have a platform that you

have a voice and people listen and

you're going to get better and better at

your own storytelling. I think these are

all skills you should invest in as early

as possible because you know you're

going to have to get better and better.

It's like practice. You got to practice

over and over.

>> I I definitely want to pull on this

thread more because you tweeting the

lessons you learned building gamma is

what led to this conversation. I was

reading I'm like okay he's sharing a

bunch of stuff but there's so much more

I want to hear and we're going to talk

through this and go a lot in a lot more

depth than what you've shared on Twitter

but uh I love that that's example of

that working get having this

conversation so let me ask a couple

questions here one is just how do you

find time as a founder CEO of a very

fast growing hectic crazy startup we

have so much to do how do you just like

allocate the time to do this and then

any just key lessons you've learned

about doing this well beyond what you've

already shared for people that are that

want to try to start sharing things on

LinkedIn and Twitter.

>> My advice is definitely just to try to

start small. Don't let it become so

intimidating that you just don't get

started. For me, it was like just having

a notepad or uh you know Google doc

around in the beginning where I would

just constantly jot down, okay, this is

something I learned or something I

observed or something that worked well,

something that was unintuitive but but

worked and just start creating a log of

that. And then once I had enough of

those, then I'd spend basically every

week I'd block off a few hours to go a

little bit deeper. I'd take a lot of

those bullet points and try to say, is

there enough here to turn this into

maybe a post or you know, something that

can be shared broadly and in the

beginning I didn't have enough. It was

all sort of scattered thoughts. But over

time, you start accumulating some

interesting themes. And then I would

start stress testing that some of that.

So I would tell, you know, my teammates

like, "Hey, this is something

interesting. Like, do you find this

interesting?" And if if there were

enough like, oh yeah, that's that I

would not have expected that or that's

not something I've never heard before,

then I then I'd actually start crafting

the initial post. And then and then you

actually just put it out there. I think

what I've learned is, you know, even for

LinkedIn versus Twitter, the audiences

want different things. And so you almost

have to then have different tones of

voices or like, you know, even nuggets

are sharing. For me, I invested much

more in LinkedIn early on just because

it felt a little bit more natural for

me. And then over time I said, "Okay,

I'm going to start packaging certain

content for Twitter that's actually

different than what I would post on

LinkedIn." Sometimes on on Twitter, you

get even more tactical or even more into

the weeds. And so I found that that to

be helpful. But honestly, I'm still

learning. And so like every time you

post, you go back, you know, after a

couple weeks, you go and say, "Okay,

what things are actually being engaged

with?" Like, are things actually

creating? Like ideally you're creating

enough value where people are either

bookmarking it, sharing it, retweeting

it, you know, these these things that

are signals for there's something

valuable there and uh and then you just

go back and you start collecting your

own sort of you know these are my

all-star posts like these are the ones

that I've actually you know broken

through and then you go back and try to

understand okay what about that post do

I think was actually useful was it the

actual content was it the structure of

the content was it some sort of

contrarian advice and you start you know

thematically bunching that together such

that as you're brainstorming every you

just have a good sort of bo, you know,

body of work to to work off.

>> This is so interesting and valuable. So,

let me mirror back a few of the lessons

that I heard here that I think is easy

for people to miss. So, one is just what

to share. What I heard here, and I

completely agree with this, and this is

what I try to do, is pay attention to

things you've learned, things that you

find interesting, things that are

unintuitive to you. Just like have a

dock and just put these there. And every

time you learn something, find something

interesting, just add it to the dock.

uh or yeah haven't heard before is a

good one too. So it's essentially just

like if you find it interesting people

on social media will also find it

interesting and

>> one approach is just share it as it's

happening which is what I try to do just

like oh I just learn this thing with

clock with clock code and check it out

or save it up for a big long post.

>> The other interesting I've never heard

this before of like post different

things to LinkedIn and Twitter. I I I

just copy and paste the same thing. Uh I

love that you do something different for

the two platforms. I I think we all kind

of have intuition that there's there's

there different audiences, right? And so

if you know that kind of fundamentally,

then the question is, you know, how do

you package up the story the right way

so that there is um you know, the

audience is is ready to receive it. And

I think this can differ by, you know, by

the type of creator or the founder,

whoever is posting it. And and of

course, the actual content itself. And

so for me, I'm still tweaking, but I do

find that just copy and pasting, you

know, from one to the other doesn't

usually work. Um, it it it really like

you almost need to be in the right

mindset of like, okay, what do I think

will be more engaging on Twitter and

then what do I think will be more

engaging on LinkedIn and and then kind

of, you know, test test a bunch, see

what actually works, go back and and re

uh iterate a little bit.

>> So, if you had like one bullet point tip

for what works on Twitter versus

LinkedIn, you shared maybe more tactical

on on Twitter. Is there anything more

there you can share? Yeah, I that's what

I found is like tactical oftentimes more

contrarian on Twitter and also um I

would say technical too. People really

like to know, you know, again going into

getting going back to like getting into

the weeds like is this something I feel

like I could replicate and I'm not going

to give you like there's no credibility

if you just give like a blanket

statement or something that feels

generic. Like I I really need to know if

you could show me the metrics even

better. Uh, I feel like that versus like

LinkedIn, it's it's more oftentimes more

even just, you know, either more

aspirational or aspirational or like a

like a a topic or a theme that just

feels like relevant at that point in

time. And you can just kind of make more

of a, you know, broader statement. It

doesn't need to be as tactical. It's

more like inspirational. It's like, oh,

okay, now I need to go and learn a

little bit more about pricing and

packaging, for instance. And that could

be the sort of spark that somebody

needs. And, uh, you don't need to, you

know, spell it completely out. Part of

it is also that on on LinkedIn you can't

really do threads and so you know doing

like a super long form post isn't as

practical. Maybe that changes in the

future where maybe the the tactical

pieces, you know, that element might

might actually change.

>> And last piece is you said you just

block off time. Is there like a specific

time of the week you do this? How do you

actually because everyone's like, "Oh,

sure. I'll block off time and then oh

no, okay, but I actually got to do all

this other stuff, so I'm not going to

use it this time. Oh, maybe next week."

>> For me, it's usually two times of the

day. Uh very first thing in the morning

and uh last thing at night. And partly

is because of kids. It's almost like I

need time where there's just zero

distraction. Uh and there's no noise in

the house and so I can actually think

and uh and then you know I think in the

mornings it's about where are you

finding inspiration like where where are

you energ like what are what are topics

you're energized by and then I think at

night it's about reflection like what

are the things you actually went through

that day? You can almost pull up your

calendar and be like okay I talked to X

Y andZ people and was there anything

from those conversations that might be

relevant? That's where you know write

some of those things. It's more of a a

recap of of actually what happened.

>> And what I what helps me to not feel

like this is some cringy self-promoy

egotistical stuff is just it's useful

stuff that I've learned that ends up

being helpful to people and people in

the comments are always just like oh

that is really cool and useful. Thank

you. It's not like self-promotion. It's

not just like look how amazing I am.

Look at check out my amazing product.

It's like here's a thing I learned. You

might find it useful.

>> That's exactly right. I I think you know

one way of thinking about it you know

with like founder le sales it's it's

always about like exchange of value

right you want to be able to give you

know them the customer this feeling that

they're getting an amazing product in

exchange they're going to pay you money

for it I think with like founder

marketing it's almost this mindset of

you want to give people a ton of content

maybe it's like you know a value in the

content so you're sharing something

maybe some you know some secret tactic

or you know you're giving them something

where they you know there inherently

there's value in And in exchange, you

sort of get goodwill back. You're not

necessarily getting money back. You get

goodwill. They're going to follow you.

They're going to engage with her post.

They're going to tell others about it.

And then over time, you can exchange

maybe some of that goodwill for like

actually talking about my product and

like announcing it and and they're going

to help amplify the news. And I think

that's magical where you kind of kind of

bank the goodwill for a long period of

time by providing just a ton of value

with no expectation of anything

immediately in return. The book I always

point people to when they're want when

they're struggling with this sort of

thing and like, "Okay, I did this and no

one like no one cared. It didn't do any

good is there's a book by uh Scott

Presfield, I think is his name, uh

called Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit."

>> Yeah. Which is exactly what is right.

Nobody wants to read it. The bar for

people to care is very high. There's so

much stuff to read and process. And so

this book gives you a really good lens

of just like, okay, the bar is very high

and nobody wants to read your So

you have to try really hard to make it

really good.

>> Great reminder. Y

>> we'll link to that in the show notes.

Okay, let's get into let's come back to

the growth of Gamma. So we've talked

about how you got your first tens of

thousands of users essentially product

hunt rethinking onboarding making it

really magical and then this very

controversial tweet that Paul Graham

commented created some buzz. Let's talk

about the next phase and maybe I don't

know tell us kind of the ARR at that

point through 100 million just like

broadly what should we know?

>> So when we got to about 10 million in

ARR I think there's this feeling for me

which was we we knew we needed ways to

help just continue to amplify you and

spread the word about gamma. I think it

was already working in terms of the

organic virality virality was there and

so we do we did feel like it was time to

start amplifying some of this and I

think the main blocker in my mind that I

started feeling was that our initial

brand was sort of holding us back and I

think a lot of people will discount you

know whether or not a rebrand is

valuable and I think sometimes is

sometime sometimes it isn't for us you

know there's a few different things we

looked at so one our initial brand was

was almost more of a placeholder brand

because we created it the moment we

started incorporated the company which

was again like back late 2020, beginning

of 2021 where we needed something so

that as we built we could at least share

it with people. We could put up a

landing page and just feel like okay you

there's something here but we didn't

invest a whole lot into it and so it was

pretty limited in sort of what I call

kind of the DNA of the brand. There

wasn't that many like the art direction

was very limited in scope. there wasn't

much when it came to like voice and

tone. And so, you know, it was um it was

something that we we knew was good

enough to start, but it wasn't scalable.

And when I think about something that

could be scalable, it's almost like you

can take the ingredients of a brand and

replicate it a ton. Like you're kind of,

you know, this this DNA is something

where you can you can imagine creating

tons of content around it all feeling

pretty cohesive. And I don't I think

that needs to be done by design. Like

you're really thinkful about every

single element like what is the art

direction you want to go with? what is

the voice and tone such that as you're

creating you know thousands of pieces of

copy it all feels pretty cohesive and so

we kind of went back to the drawing

board and we spent many months kind of

rethinking what would be the you know

the brand what is what is this this

vision that we have longer term our

creative director internally partner

with Smith and Diction and amazing

agency that has helped you know you know

folks like Perplexity also do their

rebrand or their initial brand and we

work we spent many months just like

really trying to craft kind of what we

think is like the core DNA of the brand

and doing so in a way that we could

replicate it as much as possible.

Replication piece of it comes into play

because as you start scaling, you're

going to have to create a ton of

content, your own content on social

media, ads on, you know, for performance

marketing assets for influencers to be

able to use and showcase in their

content. And so you're going from like,

you know, tiny pieces of content to all

of a sudden every week we're testing

thousands of pieces of of creative. And

you cannot do that if you don't feel

confident that as you're replicating

like you you have that sort of cohesive

feel. So for us that we realized it was

going to be necessary and it's why we

invested so much and ended up being I

mean way more expensive way more

timeconuming than I would have imagined

but I think coming you know on the other

side of it being the right investment

feeling that that was the right time to

do it.

>> I love how many things you did that feel

like this wouldn't this would will not

work out. uh building a startup within

the presentation space, doing a whole

rebrand

in the middle of scaling. Uh also just

reworking the entire product after you

launched and just like rethinking the

whole thing. Like all these things

everyone's always like, "No, this is not

how we went." And interestingly worked

out for you guys. I want to come back to

the brand stuff, but one of the most

interesting ways you guys grew early on

was influencer marketing, which a lot of

people hear about and talk about. I

don't I haven't heard of much of like

how to actually do this and what

actually works. Talk about that as a

broad growth uh lever for you guys and

then I want to get into just like what

tools did you use, who actually was

really helpful there things like that.

So yeah, just give us the big picture.

>> Yeah, I think a lot of founders assume

that uh with influencer marketing, it's

it's almost like turnkey. You set aside

a budget, you find some creators, you

figure out the right campaign or the

right moment of time to do it, and it's

all it's all done. you're ready to go.

And I think the reality is like going

back to like this founder marketing

mindset is like well you're going to set

yourself up for success if you actually

are super involved in that entire

process. So for us what this meant was

like all the initial influencers I

onboarded manually myself. Um we would

find I would spend time I would jump on

a call with each one of them so that

they understood what Gamma represented

how to use the product. You want to be

able to have them tell your story but in

their voice, right? And they can't do

that if you're not willing to put in

that investment. And so we would spend a

lot of time like going through it wasn't

my job to tell them how to pitch Gamma,

but it was my job to make sure that they

understood what Gamma was as a product.

And so we would spend a lot of time like

me just walking through the product,

them asking questions, us like just kind

of brainstorming what could the hooks

be, and me just giving them some initial

feedback and like saying, "Oh yeah, this

one I love that. I figure it's going to

work great for your audience." but not

trying to be super prescriptive and

working with a ton of micro influencers,

people that don't have massive

followings, but are committed to giving,

going back to giving value to your

audience, like they're committed to

giving value to their audiences. They

want to be able to showcase tools that

actually they would use or they are

using. And how do you do that in an

authentic way? Like, you can't really

fake that. You really need to spend the

time doing that. And just like you would

onboard a customer, you onboard an

influencer the same way. You want them

to be an extension of your team and I

think they can feel whether or not

you're willing to put in the work and if

if you're not then they're just going to

treat it like uh you know any other

project, ship it and be done with it. If

you invest in that relationship, you

know, guess what? They'll they'll be

back to actually post about you again.

And like you're all of a sudden having

this sort of uh you know this

relationship that actually can build

over time. I think that's really where

the where the magic is. Like too many

people discount that initial piece.

>> This is awesome. To be clear, influencer

marketing essentially uh a person with a

following on say Tik Tok, Instagram,

Twitter, LinkedIn, whatever gets paid in

some way to promote your product. That's

how you describe that's the simple way

to understand influencer marketing.

Yeah.

>> Yes. That's definitely the simple way.

And I I'd say you know there's

definitely different um you know levels

you I think a lot of people think

influencer marketing and they'll think

you know these these big trendy

creators, people that have like a

million followers for instance and their

their idea is that okay we're going to

carve out a really big budget. we're

gonna, you know, choose like five or six

that we feel like are really like the

taste makers in the space and put all of

our money into like just help, you know,

having them talk about our product. And

I I think usually this is this is kind

of the wrong approach because many of

them, you know, they do have massive

audiences and for you, you're basically

like you basically give them a script to

read and it immediately feels like an

ad, right? Like they don't feel like

like that product is not connected

really to them in any way. It's just

something that they're, you know, for

this week they happen to be working with

you and then they move on with their

life and it never feels organic or

authentic and you wasted a ton of money

doing so. I think you're much better

doing the hard thing which is hard to

scale but it's like finding the

thousands of micro influencers that have

an audience where your product maybe is

actually useful and for instance you

know for us like early on it'd be you

know educators people that for them part

of their job is creating slides every

day because they need to engage their

students and so like for them you know

having a tool that actually saved them a

ton of time was something they love

talking about and if you can find some

of these pockets we call them echo

chambers where if you find a pocket like

educators, teachers love telling other

teachers about products they love using

during summer break. They all come

together and talk about, okay, what are

the things that are going to actually

improve, you know, my job next next

school season? And, you know, obviously

during this AI wave, a lot of those have

been, okay, what are the AI tools that

just save me a ton of time? And so, if

you can start actually tapping into

these pockets of like echo chambers,

that's even better. Like that it doesn't

have to be this flashy, you know, like

well-known influencer. It's actually

just this person that has an audience

that where people like really trust what

they say and uh and that's amazing that

that ends up becoming this sort of you

know uh wildfire that can spread really

really fast.

>> And what's like the dollar amount these

folks get? It's like a few hundred

bucks, few thousand bucks, something

like that.

>> Yeah. Few hundred to low thousands,

little single digit thousands.

>> What are how do you find these folks? Is

there tools they use? Is it just like a

bunch of manual searching and and

looking?

>> Yeah, in the very beginning it was all

manual. uh a lot of cold outreach and

then we ended up finding a couple

different things. One is a platform, a

YC company called First Collab. Um that

has been amazing. They basically do all

the automated outbound for you. Plus,

you can help them, you know, actually

create profiles or personas of of

different creators. So, like for

instance, educators being one and then

they'll go out and actually, you know,

based on that profile, find all the

right creators for you. So, they've been

amazing, really great to work with. Um,

and then we've also found um, small

agencies to also help kind of augment

that. Like I look for, you know,

agencies that are super young and

hungry. These are people that, you know,

are are uh, social, they're native to

social media. And so, you know, they

really understand it and they can really

be able to bring in uh, creators that,

you know, are great to work with. And I

think part of it is like if you find

creators that are great to work with,

every everything else becomes easy. So

we've had a few one is AKG media out in

actually out in the UK and they've been

fantastic to work with as well. So you

kind of find a few different things

either agencies or platforms that can

help you actually scale this thing up.

>> And these when they post they they're

generally transparent about this is a

paid promotion, right? They're not just

pretending I found this tool and I love

it.

>> Cool.

>> Yeah. Exactly right.

>> Okay. And so how about how much impact

did this lever of influencer marketing

have on your growth say from 10 to 100?

like is this the biggest lever of growth

other than just word of mouth people

continuing to share it?

>> Yeah, so uh word of mouth has definitely

been the biggest. So when we look at

kind of all kind of new subscriber

growth over 50% of this is is word of

mouth. It's either people searching you

direct coming direct entering gamma.app

app or going through search and and

typing in gamma like a branded keyword

search um where they're looking for

gamma they've heard about gamma but I

think for us social media and influencer

specifically has always been an

amplifier so every time we invest in

influencer marketing we actually see

word of mouth increase even more and

it's always like you can just you can

just see it like basically anytime you

spend you know a little bit of money you

start seeing people come through

influencer the word of mouth factor is

actually one point will get another 1.5

five additional users on top of that

which has been really interesting to see

and I think part of this is just

recognizing that and I think we kind of

uh understand it but like with

influencer marketing because why it's so

effective you know we we all know you

know Dumbar's number which is you know

have this number of like 150 people that

you call kind of your network and your

network you trust more than the average

stranger down the street like if they

tell you something you know recommend

something there there is a sort of halo

effect right you learn to trust them

there a lot of these influencers the

reason why they share care so much about

their lives is because they want to be

in your network. They want you to feel

super close. And once you feel super

close, you trust them to actually, you

know, share things that are going to be

useful. And so when they recommend a

tool, there is this sort of halo effect

where it doesn't feel like it's coming

from a stranger. It feels like it's

coming from a friend. And that's where

every time we've spent money there, you

actually see this amplification. It's

like, okay, that's kind of interesting.

You wouldn't necessarily expect that,

but um for us, it's been this sort of

amplifier from from yeah, the very

beginning. This is so fun to hear about.

I've not heard this level of detail on

how influencer marketing works and how

to make it work. A few more questions

here. So, you said there's maybe a few

thousand people you ended up working

with roughly influencers

>> over the course of yeah like a year. It

wasn't all in the same time. It was like

you know you find basically in the

beginning you do in the very very

beginning we had a small budget. it was

like, you know, 20 creators a month and

then you start increasing that to like

50 then 100 and then, you know, we're

we're still not I don't we're not

definitely not fully scaled at this

point, but I could easily see a point

where, you know, you're working with

many many creators every single month

and that gives you a chance to actually

test a variety of, you know, again,

content hooks, ways to talk about the

product, value props.

>> Amazing. And you said the key here is

you spend time with every one of these

creators, influencers early on to help

make sure they understand what you're

doing, get excited about it, isn't just

like a thing you outsource.

>> I think there's a lot of value there.

It's hard to again hard to quantify and

most creators feel like they're pro or

most founders probably feel like they're

too busy to allocate that time, but I

think it was a good investment because

going back to you want them to feel like

an extension of your team. They're not

going to feel like an extension of their

team if if one, they've never met you,

and two, you've never even told them

really how the product works. They just

they're forced to kind of go to your

website to figure it all out. Those are

going to be, you know, uh, not a whole

lot of, you know, love that they're

feeling from from from the outset.

>> So, what I'm hearing is, uh, quality

over quantity, especially when you're

getting started. And then there's this

other piece of niche, which I think is

very counterintuitive. Instead of going

to large large influencers with a huge

audience, it's good to folks that are

small. What's like a audience size

roughly that you think is ideal for this

sort of what niche just means?

>> Honestly, I don't think there's a

minimum because even with, you know,

platforms like Tik Tok, they often times

are giving you credit for a brand new

account. They want to help amplify that

new account because, you know,

obviously, you know, if they're thinking

from a creator perspective, you know, if

that new creator feels like, oh, coming

to Tik Tok is like a massive win for me,

they're going to be more invested in it.

And so there there really isn't a

minimum. A lot of these platforms are

trying to shift to to kind of the same

thing where they really reward new

creators on the platform. And so you

could have a small audience, it doesn't

really matter. You could have 10,000

followers, that's also good. I think as

long as the content feels, you know,

again, engaging, authentic to that to

the to the people you're talking to, I

think has a really good chance of

actually taking off.

>> That's such a good point with TikTok

where it's not follower related. It's

it's if it's useful and people find it

uh clickable or whatever, likable,

viewable, uh it'll it'll the algorithm

will spread it to a lot of people. Such

a good point.

>> Totally.

>> Okay. There's a couple more points you

made in the tweet that I want to make

sure we highlight. So, one is you made

this point that 90% of your reach in

influencer marketing comes from less

than 10% of people. Is there anything

there that you think is important for

people to hear?

>> Yeah, I mean this just goes back to it's

it's you hard to know where that 10% is

going to come from. So, you kind of just

have to cast a super wide net, right?

you can sort of I think uh try to again

trick yourself into thinking you're

you're great at picking creators or

you're great at telling them how to like

post about your stuff. But the reality

is like even for me I could never guess

like I kind of had some idea but I just

had to make sure that I was meeting

enough creators broadly such that when

you meet enough they're all posting

there's some pocket that end up just

taking off and I I was not a good

predictor of that. I was not smart

enough to actually know which ones would

take off. I just knew that we had to

play the sort of numbers game to make it

work.

>> So, one of your tips here is is people

fail often in this because they start

too small or their budget's a little too

small. You recommend 10 to 20,000 a

month over 6 months and just trying

this. It sounds like you were doing like

20 to 30 creators a month. Is that the

right framework for how to just start

this thing and explore?

>> Yeah, totally. And I'd say it's not just

that the budget's too small. It would be

that they put all their eggs in one

basket. So you can also easily blow that

20k on just one, you know, bigger

influencer and then be like, "Oh, that

didn't work, so I'm going to try it

again. That didn't work. Okay, I give

up." And and I think rather than doing

that, you should be like, "Okay, that

20k, I could actually probably work

with, you know, 40 different influencers

and see what actually works." and across

the 40. I'm going to try to find a a

variety of personas, a variety of use

cases, spend a lot of time with them,

and then actually see, you know, what's

working, what's not, and then next month

take those learnings and and, you know,

double down. Like, if educators are

working, go with educators. If

consultants are working, go with

consultant, find more consultants

because there going to be more there. I

think that's where the uh putting all

your eggs in one basket is just probably

the shest way to fail because like

you're going to miss a ton and it's

going to take you way too long to learn

and you're going to come to the

conclusion that it's a waste of time.

>> I feel like this whole podcast

conversation could be just about this

one lever. So much I want to keep

talking about, but there's more

questions here because this is so useful

and interesting. you had this line in

your tweet about how verality is not an

accident and that this approach is how

you figure out what actually works and

then once you do that then you start

leading into that messaging. Talk about

that.

>> This goes back to obviously if you're

you're testing a bunch you'll finally

find that sort of you know post or set

of posts actually go viral. Going back

to yeah just the fundamentals like make

it easy for your influencers to be able

to tell your story and their voice. One

thing we did, you know, we open sourced

our basically our entire brand. We have

brand.gamma.app which is everything

about our brand, our voice and tone, our

art direction, what we use in midjourney

to create the sort of art direction that

we have so that a creator can can do the

same, right? And they can actually just

copy all of that so that they don't have

to reinvent the wheel every time they're

trying to post about gamma that they

have all of that. And I think that going

back to like this notion of like just

make it dead simple for them, remove

friction. they already have enough to

like on their plate to have to figure

out. Don't make it any harder than it

is. And if you remove friction, then

it's like, okay, you get into this

rhythm of adding creators is easy.

Having them post is create easy,

reviewing what's working, what's not is

easy. And if you're able to do that

relentlessly over many, many months,

then all of a sudden, like hitting the

sort of viral post is is easy because

you're going to have enough at bats

there where some are going to, you know,

some are actually going to pop off. But

you kind of only can get there after

you've like done all the hard work

before that to make you know you know

kind of remove friction from the process

and feeling like it's almost like a you

know welloiled machine at that point.

>> Is there a platform you find most

helpful for the stuff you guys are

doing? Is it like Tik Tok, Instagram,

LinkedIn something else?

>> Yeah I mean this is one where you know

for us we we cast a pretty wide net too

but it's very clear you know LinkedIn

the conversion rates are just sub

substantially higher. they're 4x maybe

5x higher than other platforms and I I I

think a lot of people are probably still

sleeping on LinkedIn frankly and so it's

one where you know the some of the some

of the influencers there or creators

there can be a little bit more costly

but if you can be highly high you know

eventually be more targeted knowing that

hey this type of creator is is pretty

impactful for for you know our product

then working with them it's just like oh

that's that's great like the conversion

rates are just so strong and it really

feels like we're we're like just getting

started there. So, you know, if you're

in the beginning you're not sure, it's

always helpful to cast a pretty wide net

and then, you know, similar to sort of

just the influencer strategy like test

and iterate. You'll figure out many of

these things will follow the power a

power law. So, it's like, you know, one

or two channels are going to be the most

important for you. Uh, for instance,

Twitter for us hasn't been that

impactful. And I think for tools like

notion, they've been really really

impactful. You're not going to really

know. And so, just test and then double

down on the ones that really move the

needle for your product.

>> I think that many people listening now

are like, "Wait, LinkedIn posts are

sponsored sometimes? I didn't know that.

Uh what's like how do you know if it's a

sponsored post or like a

hashtagsponsored or something like that?

How do they communicate this?

>> Usually they'll say, you know, they're a

partner or yeah, basically it is

sponsored in some form or you know

they'll they'll hashtag, you know, ad or

you know something along those lines. So

um that's probably the the way you'll

you'll see it the most.

>> Cool. By the way, I don't do this sort

of stuff. If you ever see me on

LinkedIn, I'm not doing any paid stuff,

just so people know. And I don't plan to

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Let's come back to this brand point. So,

one of your big lessons is invest in

brand before you go heavy into paid ads

and performance marketing. I imagine you

do some ads at this point on Facebook

and Google and things like that. Yeah,

we run ads. Uh, you know, performance

marketing, you know, I think there's

this this like the stigma that, you

know, brand marketing and performance

marketing are sort of at odds with each

other. I very much follow kind of the

the sort of the thought that brand

marketing is performance marketing. Like

everything is some form of performance

marketing. It just not might have not be

as attributable. So like the ability to

actually map back to every single dollar

spent is a little bit harder, but it

doesn't mean that it's not impactful.

And I think um as a company scales, you

have to invest in both. And ideally,

they work really, really well together.

Like the more you invest in brand

marketing, it strengthens your

performance marketing. This goes back to

like having enough creative to even

test. If you're too limited in scope and

you don't have a brand, you feel like

you can actually amplify. You're

handicapping your ability to actually

have a good performance marketing

program. I love that heristic of how do

you know if you are underinvested in

brand is if you're limited in the number

of ideas you can try in performance

marketing like is are your totally

>> is your design system just like is

everyone having to redesign things from

scratch and come up with all these

frameworks every time they run an ad.

>> Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's like bas

b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b

basically you kind of have a feeling

for, you know, if I were to scale this

up to a thousand pieces of creative,

would it still feel cohesive or is it

kind of all over the place and it feels

like it's all over the place and you

kind of have to go back to the drawing

board?

>> You said when you talked about the

rebrand that it took a lot longer than

you expected, that it was more expensive

than you expected. That's like the fear

I think everyone has when they hear

this, like, oh, I don't have time for a

rebrand. Well,

>> yeah. I also imagine because your

product is so visual that it makes more

sense to invest there and to spend the

time and money for the typical founder.

Do you have any just I don't know

thoughts of just like here's when it

makes sense, here's a sign you really

need to invest here heavily versus like

it'll probably be all right. Yeah, I

mean I I do think it's probably more

geared toward anything that's a little

bit more uh proumer or consumer because

so much of your product you're trying to

create, you know, this feeling for a

user like what are they experiencing and

the experience is happens way before

they even drop into your product. It

might be they see an ad or they see a

billboard or they see something. I was

like, "Okay, that piqu my interest a

little bit." And then you need some sort

of like symmetric messaging and that

they see there's some symmetry in that

they see the ad, they then they drop

into the product, they land on your

website, they it feels cohesive and it

feels like, okay, this is this is

interesting. I'm going to go all the way

through to sign up and then maybe

actually start using the product. That's

a little bit different when it's like a

B2B product or, you know, where there's

a there there isn't as much reliance on,

you know, that that initial moment. They

might just hear about it through you

know colleague and and then sign up for

it and then go through huge procurement

process and then it's like okay may

maybe it matters but probably not so

much as as like for a product where the

brand can have so many different touch

points.

>> I want to talk about some uh kind of

broader things that have worked to help

you grow. But before we do that I just

want to visualize the pie chart of how

gamma grows say post 10 million ARR. If

I have it correctly in my head, it's

over 50% just word of mouth, organic

people sharing it, doing presentations

for each other. Oh, it's GMA. Go check

it out. Sign up. Then it feels like the

second biggest bucket is influencer

marketing kind of social stuff. And then

is the third performance/paid marketing?

>> Yep, that's right. Yeah.

>> Cool. So on that last piece, is there

anything else there for people that are

starting to explore performance

marketing essentially Facebook ads,

Google ads, all these other platforms,

is there anything else that you think

might be helpful for people to hear or

learn just to get started down this

road?

>> I I would just have two recommendations.

Like one, going back to my initial piece

of advice, which is don't invest until

you have word of mouth. Don't fool

yourself into thinking that you'll solve

other problems by just starting to ramp

up a performance marketing program. Like

just get the word of mouth piece first.

so that you have you're coming into this

program with some tailwinds and then

start ramping it up. The second piece is

like set some constraints. You don't

want your product to h to be at a point

where more than 50% of your your

acquisitions are coming through paid

acquisition. I think if that is

happening, your core growth engine is

broken. And it, you know, feeds right

back to point number one, which is like

if you if your core growth engine is

broken, you just have this leaky bucket.

you're trying to spend so much money

building top of the funnel, people are

not making it all the way through.

Something else should be fixed before

you really try to dial it up. And it

doesn't mean like you don't spend a

little bit of money, but just don't dial

it up until you feel like your c core

growth engine is actually working.

>> When you said the first point about uh

wait until you have word of mouth before

investing in performance marketing, is

that essentially like a large chunk of

your growth should be coming from word

of mouth, direct organic.

>> Yep. Yeah. And like for us even at scale

again going back to more than 50% of you

know new signups still come through word

of mouth like we that that for us is a

sign like okay if something is still

working people are using the product

telling other people and you want that

feeling before you really start dialing

anything else up.

>> Is there like a percentage that you

think is helpful for people to think

about just like is it like 25% or more

something like that of just word of

mouth be for you to feel like okay we

actually have organic growth as a major

growth engine. Yeah, I mean I think this

comes back to maybe just how maybe

aggressive you want to be. You know, I

think just rough, you know, heristic is

the more the better. If it's over 50%, I

think that's great. If it's like

approaching that, good. And just going

back to like don't fool yourself into

thinking just ads is going to be the way

you grow because you can do that. But

everything else becomes harder and

harder. If you re rely on paid

acquisition to be the main growth

engine, you should be prepared for

things like CAC, like customer

acquisition cost to keep going up and

the the more you're trying to reach like

a new audience. It gets more and more

expensive. So don't assume it's going to

be flat and then all of a sudden you're

running on this treadmill that's

actually running faster and faster. And

so that's where it's it's like easy to

get hooked on that early on when you're

just investing a small amount of money

and then it's almost impossible to get

off that treadmill when you're too far

into it. And so anticipate that and give

yourself a better chance at actually

being able to sustain that growth long

term.

>> Important advice. Okay. There's a couple

more elements you've shared that were

key to Gamma's growth. One is sharing

prototypes with users before you ship.

What does that look like? What does that

mean? Why is that so powerful?

>> Yeah, I mean this for us was a huge

unlock. You know, going back to like

early days when you're just trying to

get your product into anybody's hands.

you're getting to your, you know,

friends trying to use it and again

they're going to lie to you, tell you

how great it is and then never come back

to using the product. I think what you

want to be able to do, you know, the the

ideal situation is you recruit a bunch

of people that could, you know, that are

legitimately good prospective users or

customers of your product um but have

zero skin in the game. They do not care

at all whether or not your product

succeeds. They're just in it to test it.

And you you know for us it was like

people that have made slide decks or

make slide decks regularly. Let's drop

them into Gamma. Give them very little

context. We just tell you, hey, this is

an alternative to PowerPoint. Go ahead

and try it. And then as you're going

through the onboarding flow and testing

the product, just tell us everything

that's going on in your head. Like

describe what you're seeing. Tell us

what you're trying to do. We'll give you

maybe a few different tasks like oh

create, you know, create a piece of

content. And when you watch them do that

and also hear what they're saying, you

just immediately feel the pain. Like all

the places they're struggling and all

the places are so confused by like what

they're seeing. And you sort of then can

internalize that pain and say, "Okay,

we're going back and we have to fix

this. This is like not usable." Like we,

you know, we oftentimes are dog fooding

everything. And so you can get to the

point where you're so familiar with your

own product, everything kind of feels

kind of easy and you you know where

things are. But when you start actually

hearing other people describe their

usage of the product, that's like a

gift. Like you're all of a sudden you're

like, "Okay, now I know where to

actually spend the time." People aren't

even getting to the third screen.

They're stuck on the first screen

because they can't even find the button

that we think is like so dead obvious.

And so let's go back and actually

re-engineer, rearchitect that piece of

it. And we've done that for for

everything. Landing pages, onboarding

experience, new feature launches, you

know, export, sharing, every single

piece of that such that, you know, we

can actually see where things are

working, we're not. And then every time

we'll learn something that's kind of

painful, but obvious.

How do you scale this sort of thing? How

do you run every new big idea, new

feature change by people? Do you have

like a closed beta group? Uh do you use

some platform? How do you actually do

this? There's a couple great platforms.

So, um, voice panel, which is also YC

company, full disclosure, angel

investor, and then there's also, um, you

know, platforms like user testing that

really help you, um, source and, you

know, find find these people that fit

again that persona or profile you're

looking for. So, in our case, like

people that are in a specific job

function or, you know, create decks

regularly. And so, you can use those

platforms to really scale up these

programs pretty fast. And then once your

team knows how to use those platforms

like we would we would have an idea in

the morning and in the afternoon we're

already running you know a pretty full

scale experiment or like you know a

research study and and by the evening or

by the next day we can actually go

through all of it together. So it's

pretty fast once you have it set up.

It's more about like how do you get the

program uh you know onboarded the right

way. I think the other sort of mechanism

we did early on was once we had some

repeat users, we created a sort of a

program for our power users. We called

it the gambitor program which is uh we

put put them into a separate slack

workspace and that was a place for us to

kind of share very very early prototypes

like wire flame wireframes sometimes

they're functional prototypes and get

them to get some get some initial

feedback as well. This definitely helps

with more sort of you know later stage

or like you know features or things that

aren't going to be necessarily important

as part of onboarding but like once you

understand gamma like oh how do you

share it for instance like this was a

great way to start testing some of that

because they already understand gamma

but now you're adding net new

functionality and then we can also watch

them struggle and hear how they're

struggling with the product and so that

was been a great way just to have a

separate Slack workspace anytime we're

thinking about something they're the

first to hear about it give us some

early indication if we're on the right

track or not

>> I love this workflow that you shared of

you have an idea in the morning, you

build a prototype. Do you build it with

like like AI prototypy tools like cursor

lovable something like that?

>> Yeah. Yeah. That or it could be Yeah. I

mean uh we're lucky a lot of our you

know designers also know how to code. So

even before the recent tools like you

know kind of come up with some sort of

functional prototype and then and then

be able to ship that so people can start

playing with it.

>> Yeah. So you you have an idea in the

morning, you build a prototype using

various tools. You by the end of the day

you are getting feedback from real

people using one of these platforms,

voice panel or user testing and just

like that loop saves you I imagine

potentially months of just building the

thing nobody wants and shipping it,

launching it and then just failing.

>> Totally. Yeah. I mean I think this is

even more probably helpful for you know

certainly a lot of folks that are

starting to do much with vibe coded apps

like yeah that's great like you've

lowered the you know amount of time to

get something out there now prove that

it's useful to like some set of users

and this should be again like every day

every week you should be able to go

through a ton of these and and then

build on the things that seem to be

working. I I feel like that's like it's

almost like a a way to speedrun a lot of

that early sort of you're in the idea

maze. You think you have something that

could kind of work. How do you actually

break through so that you know people

are actually finding value in what

you're building?

>> Yeah, I love it because so many people

hear this idea of just like run your

stuff by users before you ship, you

know, do the user research. It sounds so

hard and heavy lifty and in the way

you're describing it is like very

automated, very very quick to do. You

don't have to go think about finding

random people to in a coffee shop. It's

just like these platforms exist where

you could go plug in your thing, get

feedback by the end of the day.

>> Totally. Yeah. And that Yeah. helps you

just move way faster.

>> Is there a feature that you were super

excited about that you built and ran

through this and just like, okay, that

was a huge failure.

>> I I don't think any of the ones where

we, you know, we always try to kind of

chunk it down. So like none of the

things we're testing earlier on are like

these massive features. They're always

like an inception or like a starting

point of like this could be something

interesting. And then we take that

initial learning and actually then build

the the product around it. It's never

like, oh, we spent like four months

working on this thing. Let's see if

anybody actually wants it. It's almost

like we always start super early and a

bunch of ideas die right away, but

they're still pretty small ideas. And

then the ones that kind of pass the

initial test, you start building towards

something that could be hopefully more

gamechanging or much more value ad. And

by the time you're actually shipping,

like you've gone through, you know, 10

different layers of actually testing and

iteration before it actually sees the

light of day. What's really interesting

about you and the way your company

operates, you guys are exoptimizely

people. So you're very uh versed in

experimentation. A lot of people talk

about AB testing experimentation as

something that doesn't make sense for a

startup because the scale is so low.

What I'm hearing here and I know this is

something you talk about is just the

there is actually a lot of way to a lot

of ways to think experimentally even in

the early stages. Is there something

more there you think is important for

people to hear? Yeah, I mean I really

think it's more of, you know, the

mindset you go into to almost any

problem or opportunity is, you know, the

the saying of, you know, strong opinions

weakly held. I think it's totally fine

to have like some of these assumptions

or like hypotheses going into a lot of

these things, but you should always know

that there's a way to start trying to

validate some of this. You know, as a

founder, you're always trying to build

conviction. And so you build conviction

by, you know, not, you know, having it

all live in your head, but getting it

out there and start testing this with

users, prospect, customers, and starting

to see like what are the things that

actually feel right. And sometimes you

have enough data to be statistically

significant. Sometimes it's more of a,

hey, we at least were able to gut check

this a little bit and get some

qualitative feedback. I think that's

still valuable. It shouldn't be this

sort of like all or nothing like it has

to be stat sig for it to be useful. I

don't think that's true. In fact, I'll

just share kind of the very early story

of, you know, when we first started

Gamma, we knew we wanted to help change

the way people communicate. And we

actually had two different ideas. We

were uh parallel pathing kind of at the

same time. So, of course, we had, you

know, presentations reimagining how

people were creating presentations and

we al actually had the separate idea

which we called uh the lobby which is a

virtual office. Uh this is a place where

you know this is again peak pandemic

much more hybrid work much more virtual

work and so this was a place where

everybody on the team whether you're in

the same office or not could gather

collaborate it would feel pretty magical

and we worked on both for six months we

worked on both the virtual office and

the presentation product for for six

months we would dog food both so like

oftentimes we'd be in the virtual office

presenting the the presentation tool and

kind of use both and after six months we

came to this conclusion usion that we

wanted to go all in on the presentation

tool. And the reason was when we looked

at the virtual office tool, we were sort

of always competing against what we

thought was something we'd never be able

to surpass, which is in real life

experience, like actually being able to

work shoulder-to-shoulder with our

colleagues and having this environment

where, you know, you really feel like

you're building together. Like virtual

office could get pretty good, but we

would never beat that. And so we were

almost like limited in our own

imagination about how good could this

product be versus the the the

presentation product. We ended that with

like a million more ideas we thought we

could actually introduce that could be

better than how you work in PowerPoint

today. And we were just so like so

energized by it. And so for us that was

like uh you know this sort of AP test of

like testing these two things that we

invested equally amount of equal amount

of time into and coming out at the other

end realizing that one was going to be

the product we would pour sort of you

know all of our blood sweat and tears

into making it great because we saw the

potential in it.

>> There's I didn't know that about you

guys that you explored that other idea

that there's so many startups that did

that during co times. I'm like okay this

is the future we're all going to be

remote and let's work remotely and

>> virtual offices. There's a startup in

I'm a tiny investor in Lindy that is now

a big AI agent company and they did the

same thing I imagine you know that was

their whole first concept.

>> It was just like these little avatars.

It was like a little game where you walk

around go to little virtual

>> we had some Yeah, it was it was a fun

product to work on. So uh but yeah

>> yeah it's interesting how we just

reverted to the base back to like the

mean of just like people are in offices

again. That was a fun fun experience

although things have changed. So just to

uh highlight this point you made that I

think is really powerful. I haven't

heard it described this way before just

the power of testing prototypes very

very very early using these platforms

that make it super easy. We always hear

okay you have you have a mock you have a

prototype yeah testable with users

always feels like this heavy thing you

got to have a user research team go do

interviews do one-on- ones like what

you're describing is something I don't

know why everyone's not doing this and

with AI tools it's so easy now have an

idea build the prototype test it with I

don't know is it like dozens of people

how many people actually run through a

prototype on average

>> uh 20

>> 20 people so 20 people look at this

thing give you a bunch of feedback you

realize this was very dumb or here's the

nugget that we want to lean into and

instead of building the thing, instead

of doing all these user research

sessions, things like that. Super cool.

Okay.

Is there any other big lesson or lever

that has helped you grow to today's

hundred million R2, $2 billion company?

We've talked about influencer marketing.

We talked about testing prototypes, uh,

investing in brand and a little bit of

paid growth. Anything else? Certainly

for us the ability to sort of adapt and

move fast in this environment. You know

I attribute a lot of you know what we've

been able to accomplish to a few things.

One is we do have a small team and a

lean team one that's able to move really

fast. I think that is that means by by

default like we have to look for a lot

of levers where a small team can do a

lot of different things. So we can talk

one you know obviously about like how do

you construct like a team like ours and

what I think has worked and then two

going back to experimentation being this

sort of thing where for us it's been a

huge unlock right because it allows you

to not only you know test things and

like you know iterate a ton allows you

to build much more efficiently and so

we've been a startup where we've had

great unit economics from the very

beginning we run profitably we have

really strong margins I don't think that

would be possible of experimentation was

in kind of core infrastructure to us

because the temptation would be you just

throw the most expensive model at, you

know, every job and assume that's going

to work. And the reality is that never

is the case. And so for us to be able to

actually test across, you know, 20

different models in production today,

always trying to align kind of value

we're delivering to our customers with,

you know, our ability to actually scale

this operation. that's been at the sort

of in the background and not always

things that are easily you know

quantifiable or things that you know

you're sharing broadly but it is kind of

core to our DNA and again going back to

a team that came from optimiz you know

probably not surprising but I do think

that's been part of our sort of ability

to actually execute at this level

>> I love that the product is so beautiful

and such a good experience it's such a

good example of experimentation and

being really obsessed with running

experiments AB tests like you data can

create really beautiful products and

experiences that aren't just feeling

like some kind of microoptimized flow.

>> Totally. Yeah. And just going back to

like one part of the team part of that

plays a huge role which is you know you

want to build a product you know where

people talk about taste and you know

brand and all these things are they

emote. I'm not going to kind of uh kind

of throw in whether or not yes or no but

I do think it makes a difference. And

for us at some point you know more than

a quarter of our team or about a quarter

of our team was product designers. And I

think that's like a un sort of uh

unintuitive level of investment or at

least that's not common like you don't

see many startups like on our stage or

early stage you know where where a

quarter of the team's product designers

and I think that was an important

investment for us because when you think

about you know with AI companies so many

companies are trying to invent new

surface areas or you know new user

experiences and that's not possible if

you're not really getting the foundation

right but really thinking deeply about

you know user problems and how can you

solve them in a novel way and u and so

for us like we made that investment in

the very beginning even if it was

counter to what other startups would do

because we actually felt like it was the

right thing.

>> Okay. I definitely want to spend more

time on hiring before we get to that.

>> You've touched on this kind of uh

concept that you guys are what many

describe uh a GPT rapper company. You

essentially sit on top of other models

do some cool stuff uh charge for that.

There's historically and there's been a

big shift here. Historically, there's a

sense that, okay, uh, you're just this

thin layer on top of the model. How is

there any sort of motor leverage or

long-term business model here when it's

just the model that is doing the thing

and uh, charging you guys to do all this

AI work? Uh, it feels like people have

started to realize maybe that is where

the all that is the only place money

will be made because the models are just

so hard to compete with and that's not a

a place you can build a business

anymore. talk about just what you've

learned about this concept of being a

GPT rapper and how maybe what people may

not be understanding about the business

opportunity there.

>> You know, when you think about maybe

just um literally only being a rapper on

like you know, one model or you know,

one provider, yeah, maybe there's only,

you know, limited amount of utility or

value ad, but then when you start

thinking about, okay, I'm going to go

really deep into this one workflow and

it's not just one model. It's maybe 20

plus models powering all different parts

of the product. And then you're thinking

about the orchestration that's required

and you're thinking about obviously if

you're experimenting like constantly

being able to test across the newest

models versus you know models that have

been around that are cheaper like you're

doing a lot to really you know your your

job is to again like align value you

know maximize the value you're

delivering to to the end user uh in a

way that's sustainable for you as a

business. And so there's a lot more to

that. And so for us, you know, we've

always been passionate about being very

close to our our customers, our users

who for them their job to be done is,

you know, visual communication, visual

storytelling. And the default tool today

is going into like a PowerPoint or

Google Slides where the amount of effort

to create something, you know, we've all

been there late at night trying to

format a deck, trying to find the right

layout, all this manual and tedious

work. Well, what if you could abstract

all that away and give them something

that feels a little bit more delightful,

a little bit easier, much more

effortless? Uh what would that earn you

in terms of a customer that wants to

come back to your product? And so that's

everything that we focus on is like you

need to go deep into the workflow, be

empathetic to the user and their job

that you're trying to solve, and of

course apply the best technology

possible so that you're you're

delivering on that promise of a product

experience that's way better than the

the status quo. And I think if you can

be laser focused on it doesn't matter if

you're a rapper or not. Like what is the

technology you're doing in applying that

um makes a real difference. So that's

the that's the ultimate goal.

>> This is a really cool framework for how

to think about what it takes to build a

successful rapper company that is I

don't know let's just I'll keep using

that term. I don't know if it's truck or

not

>> but just like you know some ideas don't

work because these model companies are

launching their own products here and

there. So what I love about what you're

describing here is kind of like the

almost like a heruristic that'll tell

you if there's if there's an opportunity

how to be successful as a GPT rapper

company. I'm putting in air quotes. It

sounded like maybe there's three here,

but talk about just like if you think

about the bullet points of what you need

to do to build a successful business on

top of existing models.

>> I mean I think the most important thing

is you know before you even talk about

the technology. So we're we're we're

skipping to the part where you're trying

to, you know, apply the most interesting

models or technology to solve some

problem. Start with solving the problem

you actually care about. You know, I

think it's very tempting right now to

chase shiny objects. Like a founder

might be able to gain some initial

traction by literally being that GPT

rapper and like solving any sort of

problem and like you starting to see

some traction and then you just go with

that. But before you do that, you should

think about is this a problem I can

invest 5 to 10 years into actually

solving? do I care deeply enough about

it? Uh because if you can't, you're

never going to go sort of actually think

about like overcoming the variety of

different hurdles, whether it's other

startups or other, you know, incumbent

tools that are trying to start doing the

same thing. And so for us, like we we go

back to like, you know, we've started

this company because we really care

about helping change the way people

communicate their ideas. Um we really

feel like this idea of like visual

communication, visual storytelling

matters. It helps elevate everybody and

it gives people much more opportunity to

do the things that you know in the past

if you weren't great at making slides

your ideas might have died and someone

else that was able to actually

articulate their ideas better ended up

winning you know the deal or winning the

you know uh the favor of their their

manager or their boss and so we felt

like that that was the wrong you know

that didn't feel right and and so could

we help democratize visual storytelling

visual communication that was sort of

our north star and then you go back into

thinking okay every step of the way.

What are the tools and technology I can

apply to help solve that and actually

move the average person closer to that

long-term vision of ours. And of course,

AI has been again like this gift where

yes, you can apply that to solving this

job. You can also apply that, you know,

AI to many different jobs. Figure out

what is the problem you care deeply

enough to go deep because going back to

this sort of idea like you need to own

the sort of endto-end workflow. A

customer needs to have you like you want

you to live you want your product to

live in their brain somewhere where when

they think about hey I have to create a

presentation they come to you as the

default tool and and the moment they

start creating it to the moment they

ship it and send it to you know their

boss that endto-end experience needs to

feel magical needs to feel great and I

don't think you can really do that

unless it's actually a workflow you

either know deeply yourself or you care

deeply to actually help solve for

somebody else. So some of the elements

I'm hearing here is one is just like uh

care actually really care about solving

this problem not come from oh wow this

cool thing happened and it worked wow

maybe I could sell this thing to people

because you may end up having to work on

this thing for 10 20 years

>> totally.

>> Um two is understand the problem really

really deeply and have real empathy for

the people trying to solve this problem.

you had this problem that you uh

creating presentations at your previous

job. So you understood it and I imagine

you genet understand even more deeply

now that you work on this. So

essentially like care really deeply uh

go really deep on the problem have real

empathy for the people facing this

problem and then there's this like

actually be able to solve this problem

using the technology out there and you

made this point about how you guys use

20 different models to do what you do.

talk a little bit more about that just

because you know people may think oh

okay like I could just go to open just

chat to btr cloud and it'll create an

awesome presentation for me why does it

take 20 different models why is that

such a big part of the success here

>> yeah so going back to the workflow you

know you're trying to go and break down

every step of you know the creation

process for for a user so the moment of

the initial idea to maybe creating an

outline of of what you want to you know

present or articulate to creating the

first draft like what do we you know

show you there to edit ing the content

like, okay, I have a first draft, but

it's only 60% of the way there. How do I

get it to 100% of the way there? Those

are all things that might require

different models. like the initial

outline might be better served by

something that's purpose-built for

actually creating, you know, the best

outline, the best narrative, the best

story arc versus one where you're

actually going back and saying, you

know, Gamma, our agent, can actually go

and review your entire deck and say,

actually, if I were to add suggestions,

I would say, you know, you may want want

to change the visual layout on these set

of cards, and you may want to actually

change the imagery or the visuals for

for these cards to match, you know,

everything else. These are things that

again like every model might be better

served for different things and so

knowing how that actually breaks down

into the end user sitting down working

on the product working on working on you

know their presentation how do you help

them I think you can only do that by

understanding that workflow and then

breaking that down into finding the

right tool for the right job that is

super interesting essentially there's

like here's the things that AI has to do

for us uh it's I don't know imagining

some kind of storyboard and then it's

figure out the model and level of model

and prompt for for that model to achieve

each of these steps uh as best as

possible.

>> Totally. Yeah. And it applies to you

know even on the visual side finding the

right image. I think certain models have

great at photorealistic output versus

others you know want more of the

artistic vibe or like a you know

something that feels more abstract. And

so again you can choose the right model

for the right job. It doesn't mean that

you'll never use other models. is just

like as you're going through that

workflow certain the the content might

dictate you know what's the best use

case in that particular you know

particular use case and so you're always

trying to map to that what is the end

user trying to accomplish in that

certain moment

>> which models are you finding most uh

useful uh in in the work like I don't

know is there anything surprising about

oh wow this model is actually really

good at this and this is really bad at

that

>> yeah I think surprising or not

surprising the leaderboard is constantly

changing and um and so this is where you

almost You have to have the mindset that

you can be adaptable. We're just getting

to the point where there's going to be

more personalization to is going back to

like, you know, a consultant's going to

have different needs than an educator.

If an educator is trying to engage their

students, they might want to have, you

know, language or visuals are more

animated and that that makes sense.

Consultant can't get away with that.

They might need something that, you

know, is much more structured or

information dense. And so, again, like

how do we actually be the same tool that

can serve both of those needs? I think

that's where it becomes interesting. And

it's almost like there is isn't

necessarily even a quote unquote best

model. It's like what's the right model

for that right for that particular user.

That's actually much harder problem to

solve and we're just starting to you

know trying to embrace some of that. Now

>> is there one that's just like oh this is

actually really cool for some that we

didn't expect

>> early on things like creating the

outline perplexity was actually great.

You know not one that people talk about

as often but creating the outline and

doing web search and you know actually

integrating some of those elements

together for for us was was pretty

powerful

>> there. Okay. There's two more things I

want to talk about. One is pricing. how

you guys figured out your approach to

pricing. You guys started monetizing

really early and that feels like such an

important piece to AI startups because

you're spending real money on an

inference and other things. And then I

want to talk about hiring. So in terms

of pricing, when did you decide it was

time to really start charging? And then

how did you pick your approach to

pricing, your actual price?

>> Yeah, so uh we kind of stumbled into

having to do pricing and packaging. Um,

I mentioned our big AI launch in in

March 2023. This was pre-revenue. So, we

wanted just to get the, you know, we

focused all of our effort on the first

30 seconds. Literally all hands on deck

just trying to get that right. And we

spent zero time on actually

monetization. So, we, you know, we had a

credit system. All new users get 400

credits. Once they burn through those

credits, there was actually nothing more

you could do with AI. It kind of just

got cut off. And so intercom for us was

just blowing up with people saying how

do I purchase more credits like I I want

to keep using this thing and a very fair

question. So basically all of April we

ended up having to do a quick you know

sort of pricing and packaging exercise.

Uh we did a couple different things. We

we did run a form of van westonorp which

is just understanding what is the

overall willingness to play

>> and willingness to pay and so we we did

use that. We did kind of integrate some

forms of like conjoint analysis which is

just like trying to understand you know

what are the features or things that

people actually value in your product

and so we survey a lot of our early

users and and kind of ended up coming to

a price point that was in the beginning

we only had one plan type it was roughly

like 20 bucks a month part of this was

also just realizing we we almost didn't

need to overthink it too much because

this is when the the initial wave of

like AI companies and startups are

coming out and products were coming out

and you're almost uh end up becoming

anchored buy what does chatbt charge

because everyone becomes familiar with

that price point and so we asked

ourselves like how complicated do we

want to make it we always default to

remove friction make it as easy as

possible for a user to understand and so

we end up coming up with like a similar

price point and kind of ship that as the

the v1 basically end of May 2023 and for

us we wanted to see a couple things like

okay we we have the initial price point

is it uh economical for us like at the

price point are we actually making money

and we monitor there for that for for

many many months realizing that yes,

like actually at that price point, we

could still generate pretty good margins

and that would allow us to reinvest that

profit back into growing the business,

continue to add, you know, obviously

headcount, but then also, you know,

investing even more into inference

costs, whatever we wanted to do to

experiment broadly with AI. And so we've

always had that like you know pricing

and packaging is is not only it does it

not only need to be easy to understand

for a user you know obviously you have

to have like strong conversion rates but

it should be something where you feel

like you could build an enduring durable

business off of and if it's not right

then you can always go back and try to

tweak things but it's something you

should be monitoring you know as early

as possible.

>> What's interesting we had the head of

Chad JBT on the podcast and he shared

the way they picked Chad JBT's prices

the Van Westonorp survey that they ran

in Google forms.

>> Totally. Yeah. Yeah, I listened to that

one. Yeah, it was a great one.

>> What a that survey, man. What a And not

only just that survey being the It's

like I'm imagining that XKCD comic with

like the open source little uh I don't

know block holding up the entire world

like this one little piece of code. Uh

that's like the survey just like behind

everything. Uh but it's interesting how

that one decision just created this

ripple effect on all AI startups. 20

bucks a month. Of course, that's what

everyone's doing.

>> Totally. Who knows what would happen if

they chose a different number, but here

we are.

>> Everyone would be so much more rich.

It's just like 25 bucks someone. Imagine

the

>> the GDP of growth.

>> Yeah.

>> From that. Oh man. Okay. And then the

way So is Ben Westonorp helped you pick

a price point and then you said this

conjoin analysis. I actually have a

guest post that I think describes how to

do this well and if not we'll find point

people to how to actually approach this.

>> And you started charging. So was post

product launch. You launched with no

paid features. People were just like, I

want to pay. I want to keep using this.

You're like, okay, I guess we got to

start charging.

>> That's right. Yep.

>> Is there anything looking back, I guess,

just like you'd wish you'd known uh when

you were approaching pricing for folks

that are doing this now, like, oh, we

should have done this differently or

should have thought about this?

>> Yeah, I mean, that's one that one's

hard. I think, you know, you you never

want to obviously just throw something

together without giving it much thought.

But for us, you know, we we with limited

resources, we focused on the only thing

we thought mattered, which was like

getting some initial users and having

that organic growth. And I think there's

there's maybe like two checkpoints of

thinking about whether or not you feel

like you have product market fit. I

think one checkpoint is organic growth.

The second is are people willing to pay

for the product. And I think if you pass

both those, you feel like you've you've

you've at least within some pocket of

the market, you have some PMF. Um so I I

think you know those are both important

questions to ask depending on your

resources. Ideally you can do kind of

both and experiment a little bit along

you know um at the same time and then by

the time you actually have paying users

you've you sort of check some of those

boxes for yourself.

>> By the way I love that you like you

launch pricing you're like okay let's

figure out if we're actually making

money or not. It's not obvious with AI

companies.

>> Well we also didn't have a choice

because at that point runway was also

low you know. So it's like if we weren't

making money well, you know, we would

actually be in a tough spot.

>> That's such a good point that you did

not have a huge amount of money sitting

around to spend on like the way a lot of

companies in AI do. Just we will deal

with it and we'll figure out how to make

money later.

>> Totally. Yeah. Within a couple months we

had hit uh a million in ARR and became

profitable. And so those were both two

exciting milestones for a company that

months prior were, you know, heads down

figuring out how we how we even survive.

>> What a story. I'm so excited to be

telling the story. Uh, okay. Final uh

topic I want to talk about is hiring.

You have some really hot takes on

hiring. Clearly, it's worked out for you

guys. What are some things you've

learned about hiring? Well, what is your

approach to hiring?

>> Yeah, so we had this mantra internally.

I mean, even before you know the the

sort of AI launch for us, which was hire

painfully slowly. And I think you know

the temptation is once start you know

things start working you to start let's

scaling this thing and start adding more

and more headcount and for us that

always I don't know they didn't feel

right we wanted to build the team very

thoughtfully be lean but also be a team

that every individual feels like they

have high you know amount of impact that

they can that they have on a daily basis

and and so for us yeah that was from

sort of the very beginning and so even

you know as we've scaled up I think

we've been super efficient by nature of

just being a very lean So I think a lot

of people hear this advice of stay lean,

be efficient. You have some even more

concrete pieces of advice here of just

like what that looks like. You have a

huge uh I don't know philosophy of just

like huge leverage per person. You focus

a lot on revenue per employee. Talk

about that. So we actually I mean we we

we obviously we look at things like

revenue per employee but we never let

that be the sort of northstar. It's not

something that dictates our strategy per

se. Same thing with like profitability.

I think by being efficient like that

ends up becoming like a side effect of

yeah we we are profitable and growing

but I think for us more is like we care

a ton about you know adding the right

team members. So you know it's it's easy

you can almost sort of shoot yourself in

the foot as a founder by just setting

the wrong goals. If your goal is to

double in headcount and like add 100

people to the company then that becomes

the goal, right? The goal is no longer

to add the best people. It's no longer

to maintain a high quality bar. the goal

is to hit 100 people and that's that's

everything everyone's focused on. So

then guess what? If that's the goal,

then the thing that ends up dropping is

okay, maybe we'll settle for employees

that are good enough and we're going to

make sure we get to that 100 because 100

is going to help us get to the next

phase of growth and the next phase of

growth. And I think we've tried to

resist that temptation, which is we want

everybody that comes through the door

and joins our team to to really be, you

know, this the type of person that

represents Gamma. our first 10 to 12

employees. We spent so much time like

really getting the DNA right. I think

Brian Chesky talks about this like your

goal is like you get that first 10 and

you want to be able to then replicate

the next 10 and then replicate the next

10. But that 10 needs to be all super

cohesive. You need to have the shared

same shared values, same principles,

same ambition, same vision. And if you

don't then like what are you even

replicating? Right? At that point you're

just adding headcount. And you know, you

can easily just be adding headcount

because they're chasing the next shiny

startup to join. And so for us, we

really focused on that first 10. That

allows us to really have this, you know,

this sort of community of of of like a

teammates that that basically, you know,

want to stick around.

A lot of founders think about, you know,

not wanting to have a leaky bucket on

the product side, but the same thing

applies on the the team size, right? If

you have a leaky bucket, people are just

constantly leaving revolving door.

That's a huge amount of cost. The

continuity cost is is massive and it's

really hard to quantify and that you I

mentioned our first 10 employees all 10

of them are still here today five years

later, right? And so that sort of

continuity means that you have this

tribal knowledge that sticks with you.

It means that people can continue

building and having that sort of

cohesive feeling. So I think that's one

piece is just like it's hard to quantify

but I do think you know startups I would

advise just to really be thoughtful

about that like get that to a point

where you really feel confident that as

you're adding the next 10 and next

hundred you're actually replicating the

same DNA and not actually just adding a

bunch of random people to the company.

>> One of your very specific piece of

advice is hire generalists versus

someone that's just like really deep in

one thing. Why why is that so important?

What does that look like? This very much

feels like the age of the generalist or

the rise of the generalist. Right now,

when we think about, you know, uh a team

that can be really flat, you want people

that can you you you still want people

that can be very spiky in certain areas.

So, for instance, obviously, you know, a

product designer that knows how to code.

That's great. It allows you to actually

span across many different domains. And

again, a organization that's super flat,

when you're wearing a lot of different

hats, that means every individual, if

you're a generalist, you can wear by by

default a lot of different hats. And

that's helped us like just maintain this

idea that the work, you know, the

opportunity in front of us, it continues

to expand. Each person plays a huge

role. They don't need to wait and ask

for permission. They can go after and

pick up a piece of work because it's

there and they can at least get it

started even if they're not the one that

always sees it through. And so for us, I

do think this rise of the generalist is

going to be important. You can always

augment that by working with contractors

or agencies that are hyper specialized

in certain areas. And this is where like

for instance going back to influencer

marketing, you might work with an agency

rather than kind of scale up your own

influencer, you know, marketing team,

you work with like a hyper specialized

team there, but my marketing team is all

generalists. You know, we our head of

marketing more recently launched this

cool drone show uh in San Francisco. We

had like 4,000 people in San Francisco

come. The mayor came by. she created

that entire project and managed that

entire project end to end or herself,

right? While also managing the entire uh

marketing team and so it's like this

idea that a generalist is able to play

all these different roles can still uh

you know be super high impact for us. It

also goes handinhand with I I mentioned

sort of this other um role which is the

player coach. Traditional management

layer is like a manager manages a ton of

people and that's kind of their c core

focus. All of our people leaders are

player coaches in that they still do the

end work themselves and they can like

mentor and coach those around them. Um,

this analogy came from or this mindset

came from something I borrow from just

the sports world in general because

there's a lot of sports that just move

incredibly fast like football for

instance. It moves really really fast.

And so you might have a coach that has

that's calling in a play but the

quarterback can actually make a last

minute adjustment based on what he's

seeing the defense do, right? And so you

want a player that is on the field that

can adapt as needed. And that way the

coach doesn't have to call every single

thing in. He's just kind of giving you

the general intent of what you want to

run as the play. And then the

quarterback quarterback can still make

the the adjustments. And so all of our

people leaders, our management layer is

all folks that actually can make those

adjustments. If they're seeing something

that doesn't feel right on a daily or

weekly basis, they're kind of adjusting

priorities for that team. And they're

still doing the work themselves, too.

they're so close to that they understand

like what is the relative prioritization

at all times. So though both of those I

think have been you know when I think

about founders they they oftentimes

think about innovation in the sense like

we're going to innovate on product or

innovate on technology I think every

founder today has a chance to innovate

on org design and that starts by just

thinking about what is the type of

company we want to build today what does

it mean and when it comes to like the

management later what what sort of

leaders do we hire what does it mean

when it comes to hiring specific roles

and specific functions all that is a

chance for you to be very thoughtful

and and build a company that you're

excited to be at for hopefully many many

years to come.

>> So what I'm hearing here is manager

there's no pure managers at Gamma and

your plan is to not have people that are

just managing. The idea is everyone even

a manager is doing their own IC work.

>> Yes.

>> And then the other piece of advice here

is just generalists. People that can do

a lot of stuff. And I hear this a lot on

this podcast just like everyone is

there's no more just like you're a

designer that's all you're going to do.

designers need to build stuff, market

stuff, write some BRDs probably

>> and I think I mean just one thing to add

is like you know that's for where we are

where where we are at today. I think

being adaptable means that you know

certain things may evolve and change and

like how the player coach model evolves

you know and maybe in certain functions

or as the team scales like that's not

going to be practical everywhere. I

think the reality is like you just have

to know and be willing to kind of adopt

like different frameworks over time and

like being honest with ourel with what's

working, what's not. I think we're

constantly trying to, you know, learn

and and evolve ourselves because I

think, you know, we're doing it in a way

that we don't believe it really has been

done before and so we have to kind of

pave our own path over time.

>> I love that giving yourself an out when

when the time comes when you need to

just hire managers.

>> A year later when you invite me back,

I'll say, "Yeah, this is what we

learned."

>> Yeah, that you know that makes sense.

That's probably going to happen. It's

like people are like, "We don't need

product managers." And then, "Okay, I

see. Maybe we do." Uh, yeah, it makes

sense. One last piece I want to talk

about is you have this really cool quote

that you shared on Twitter. When you

find someone exceptional, bet big on

them. This is a big part of your

philosophy is just like bed big on the

people that are doing super well. Just

talk about what that looks like and why

that's so important.

>> Yeah, I mean, this starts top of the

funnel, which is like you meet

candidates, you you decide who you know,

you actually hire. And so if you don't

start with a high bar there, you know,

going back to what is the goal? The goal

is to hit a hiring target versus like,

you know, maintaining a super high

quality, you know, hiring bar, you know,

those are different goals. And I don't

think we've ever kind of dropped our

bar. And so then you bring somebody in

that you think is exceptional, that

brings something unique to the table,

that can be a good teammate. When

they're when they're thriving, you just

give them more and more resources. I

think what you realize going, you know,

another sports analogy is like, you

know, when you're when you're on a, you

know, an A team, for instance, or a team

that you feel like is exceptional, you

know, a players want actually more

playing time. Like you never see a star

player that says, "Actually, I want less

playing time." They want more time on

the field. They want to actually go

after the hardest problems. They want to

be able to feel like they're making a

huge impact. And so if you have fewer,

you know, exceptional teammates, um,

where you can just throw almost anything

at them and they'll figure it out, that

feels that for, you know, you as a team

just feels great because then they they

get what they find rewarding, which is

the ability to go after hard, hairy

problems and to be able to come out

through the other end feeling like

they've accomplished something. And I

think that for us has always been

something that um, goes beyond just, you

know, almost everything else. Like we

give people a chance to really thrive in

this environment. and um and we try to

nurture that as as much as humanly

possible every step of the way.

>> Is there anything else around hiring

that you think is really important or a

big lesson you've learned or lesson you

share that you that we haven't talked

about yet? I mean there's some of these

intangibles which is you know for the

founding team does this feel like this

could be your life's work right like

when you're pitching a um when you're

pitching u a potential candidate like

does this feel like something where

you're actually committed the

unfortunate side of a lot of the you

know what's happening in the AI world

broadly is I think you're coming to

learn which founders are sort of

missionaries versus mercenaries and many

that were just chasing maybe just a big

outcome or like something shiny or like

something to feel good about themselves

they'll go off and then the company you

know I guess doesn't live on or maybe

has to find a different way a different

path and so you know something I admire

is like you look at some of the founders

obviously before this sort of AI era you

know folks like Dylan or Melanie Figma

Canva you know Ivan at notion they've

been doing this for over a decade now

they had many chances to just you know

leave and you know sunset off into doing

whatever they wanted to do but they care

so much about the mission they've stuck

it through and I think when you're

talking to candidates can kind of tell

like is this something like the founders

even care about? And um I think you're

going to have a better chance of

attracting, you know, true missionaries,

people that want to build with you for

the long haul if it's authentic and it's

something you actually care about.

>> Oh man, I feel like I keep saying this.

I feel like we could have at least five

more hours of stuff to talk about. Uh

that'll be good content for when you

come back and you're making a billion

dollars a year. Before we get to our

very exciting lightning round, Grant, is

there anything else that you think uh is

important for people to hear? Any last I

don't know lesson you want to double

down on? Anything you want to leave

listeners with?

>> Yeah, I mean just going back to the

original story of um that was probably

the ultimate low point. You know, having

an investor that spent 20 minutes

listening to my pitch, telling me that

it was the worst thing, worst idea in

the world. You know, I think throughout

the journey, there's going to be those

low moments. And when I think about, you

know, being a founder and uh working at

a startup, you're honestly just trying

to increase your luck surface area as

much as possible. And for me, luck

surface area has two dimensions. The

first dimension is people. Who are you

surrounding yourself with that share

your same ambition, share the same

values, same principles, and find those

people? and then give yourself enough

time to prove that you guys can, you

know, accomplish great things. I'm lucky

to have two amazing co-founders. We've

been working on this thing for five

years. There's 0% chance we'd be where

we are if I didn't have them. And we've

had to overcome a lot, but I guess for

us it's like creating that own luck over

a long time horizon has been the only

way that, you know, it's been possible.

>> Well, it's clearly showing in the

success you guys are having. Grant, with

that, we've reached our very exciting

lightning round. Are you ready?

>> Yep. Yes. All right, I've got five

questions for you. First question, what

are two or three books that you find

yourself recommending most to other

people?

>> Yeah. So, I'll give um one that's for

pre-product market fit folks and the one

post product fit. Pre-product market

fit, I would say, is Shoe Dog,

>> which is written by Phil Knight, founder

of Nike. And you know he talks about two

things like one you should tra chase

your sort of crazy ideas but these are

these should be ideas you're you're

you're passionate about like he was an

athlete and so not surprisingly he

focused a lot about you know creating

tools or you know shoes in this case for

for other athletes and was passionate

about that. And the the second thing he

taught me was going back to the team

thing. He surrounded himself with other

people that were super passionate about

athletics and shoes as well. And so the

folks that he had as his as his his

initial startup crew were all that. And

I think that gives gives you a chance of

like overcoming a ton where you're

focused on problems you actually care

about solving and you're doing with a

team that shares the same ambition as

you. Uh postp productduct market fit

there's a book called seven powers by

Hamilton Helmer where I think when you

think about how to build a durable

business there's so much in there. I

think there's a lot that you can kind of

read and reread as you kind of evolve

and kind of hit new milestones yourself.

And so much of that can be both tactical

but also like zooming out and thinking

about what are the big picture strategic

questions you as a founding team need to

be thinking about. So both are great.

>> Hamilton was on the podcast. We'll link

to that episode. Uh I also love that

book. Many people mention it. Next

question. Do you have a favorite recent

movie or TV show you've really enjoyed?

>> Yeah. Uh the Lazarus Project is one I'm

a I'm a huge sucker for uh time travel

and sci-fi. So, this is one I just

started watching and for me it has like

all the right ingredients for a fun

show.

>> Is there a product you recently

discovered that you really love?

>> Yeah, I mentioned this already um voice

panel. So again, a full disclosure,

angel investor, but we've been using it

and going back to kind of being a cheat

code for folks that are, you know,

starting to experiment a ton with

different ideas, vibe coding maybe some

of these like get this into the hands of

users, hear what they think about it, I

think, and honestly can help speed up a

lot of things and save you time from uh

wasting time on on kind of the wrong

ideas or ideas where there's no market.

>> Is there a life motto that you often

find yourself coming back to in work or

in life? Yeah. So there's this uh

Chinese idiom that my mom used to say.

It's a gin zwa which the translation is

a frog at the bottom of a well. And the

story is like there you know there's a

frog at the bottom of the well. He looks

up every night and he sees the world and

he imagines he you know he he knows

everything about the world. And then one

day a bird comes along and describes all

the things that he sees. the ocean, the

mountains, and the frog realizes that

what he sees is just such a limited part

of the world. And you know, the bird

asks like, "Do you want to come join me

and kind of see the rest of it?" And so

frog goes along. And so for me, you

know, I came from, you know, a pretty

modest childhood. You know, my parents,

we we didn't have a whole lot. And I

think it would have been very easy to

kind of have a very narrow kind of lens

on the world, be like, "Oh, this is this

is what it is." But my mom never allowed

me to do that. She always pulled me to

dream much bigger to say, "Hey, the

world is vast. It's your opportunity to

seize it." Like you have to go out

there. Don't have a narrow, you know,

view of of what's possible. Always dream

bigger. And so for me, that's always

carried through. And every time I feel

like I'm thinking too little or too

small, I try to zoom out and remind

myself that there's much more out there

to go after.

>> That is so good and so important and so

valuable in today's world where so much

more is possible. just like most of what

limits people it feels like now is just

I don't know what idea I have like I

don't know what to do now you could get

things done so much quicker and so much

more is possible so that's such valuable

thinking okay final question you help

people present better you know your

tools basically help people become

better presenters what's like one tip

you've learned or one tip you teach

people to become better presenters that

might be helpful to listeners

>> yeah I mean I'll go back to the uh

consumer advertising uh concept which is

you know one idea at a time. So, you

know, this this notion of you give them

one egg, someone can catch it. Give them

too many eggs, they're going to drop it.

So, don't try to uh uh throw too many

concepts all at once. Keep it simple.

People will appreciate it. And so, with

every sort of presentation, like break

it down into the core concepts. Try to

make sure you're covering one at a time.

And uh I think once you sort of see the

through line there, then it becomes easy

for it to package up in something that

feels more cohesive.

>> Less is more, as they say. Totally.

>> Grant, two final questions. Where can

folks find you online? Where can they

find Gamma? What should they know? Let's

just like plug anything you want. And

then how can listeners be useful to you?

>> Yeah, so you can find me on both Twitter

and LinkedIn DM's open. Uh I uh honestly

here just knowing how hard the the

journey is in general, whether you're

just thinking about a startup idea or

you're deep into startup land. Uh I want

to be hopefully helpful. Uh I'm going to

be your hopefully your biggest

cheerleader. So let me know how I can

help. And then for us, like you know,

we're always looking for feedback. So if

you're trying Gamma, it's falling short

of your expectations, let us know. We'd

love to help in terms of just trying to

make it better. And uh yeah, really

appreciate, you know, all the feedback

and support along the way.

>> Grant, this was awesome. I really

appreciate you making time. I know

you're trying to build a crazy fast

growing startup with a lot going on, so

I really appreciate you making time for

this.

>> Thanks, Lenny. It's been a blast.

>> It's been a blast for me, too. Bye,

everyone.

Thank you so much for listening. If you

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