Gamma's Journey to $50M ARR with 30 Employees | Co-founder and CEO Grant Lee
Show notes
Grant Lee is the Co-founder & CEO of Gamma, building instant PowerPoints, presentations, and websites with AI. As someone who’s made a lot of decks, its refreshing how Gamma thinks about slides starting with the words and narrative, using AI to build the design around the story. Gamma has put up impressive metrics, growing from zero to $50 million in ARR and 50 million users with only 30 employees. They’ve also had zero employee attrition, and a negative lifetime burn rate, with more cash in the bank than they’ve raised. We talk about building a horizontal product instead of for a specific vertical, why Grant likes hiring generalist’s, how a quarter of the team is designers, why they’ve never raised large funding rounds, and how they run the company with an efficient team while not subscribing to 996 working hours. Grant also shares how Gamma rebuilt their entire product to be AI-native in the months after ChatGPT launched, and how every department at Gamma uses AI internally. Thanks to Anamitra and Gaurav at Afore, Shiyan @ Hustle Fund, Evan @ South Park Commons, and Vas @ Accel for helping brainstorm topics for Grant. Special thanks to presenting sponsor of The Peel, Ramp. Ramp: Time is money. Save both with Ramp. Join 40,000+ companies, go to https://ramp.com/ThePeel Numeral: The end-to-end platform for sales tax and compliance. Try it here: https://bit.ly/NumeralThePeel Timestamps: (3:46) Gamma: The anti-Powerpoint (5:56) How to be efficient with a small team (7:58) Importance of full-stack generalists (12:15) How to hire problem solvers (15:57) Changing slides from designs to narratives (20:13) Gamma’s freemium AI business model (22:36) Ignoring conventional wisdom with a horizontal product (28:47) Why Gamma started with Slides (32:21) Raising a Pre-Seed for a horizontal product (38:25) Why Gamma avoided hyped funding rounds (40:57) How fundraising impacts recruiting (43:40) Liquidation preferences and employee equity (47:08) Gamma’s zero employee attrition (49:54) Working in-person during COVID (52:15) Using waitlists to batch new user cohorts (56:08) Re-building the product to be AI-native (58:17) How to improve your onboarding (1:00:46) Benefitting from AI models getting better (1:05:10) Growing from 60k to 50 million users (1:07:30) How to stand out as an AI company (1:09:23) Creating a Gamma API (1:11:37) How Gamma uses AI internally (1:15:06) Why Gamma doesn’t do 996 working hours (1:19:54) 4-month product sprints (1:22:16) Parenting hacks: sleep, exercise, nutrition (1:24:26) Brand and community lessons from Nike and Apple Referenced Gamma Careers at Gamma Optimizely NotebookLM Fin / Intercom: Afore Capital Follow Grant Twitter LinkedIn Follow Turner Twitter LinkedIn Subscribe to my newsletter here to get every episode + the transcript in your inbox every week.
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