Scaling the ‘Cursor for Slides’ to $50M ARR: Gamma founder Jon Noronha
Before ChatGPT made AI mainstream, John Noronha was building Gamma with a simple insight: everyone hates making slides but needs visual communication for high-stakes ideas. His background at Optimizely proved crucial as Gamma became a testing laboratory for AI models, running hundreds of experiments to discover that Claude excels at creative taste, Gemini wins on cost efficiency, and reasoning models actually hurt creativity. John explains how solving their own blank page problem inadvertently solved it for millions of users, turning a near-failing startup into a cash flow positive platform with 250 million presentations created. He discusses competing with PowerPoint's 500 million users while expanding beyond slides into documents, websites and visual storytelling.
Hosted by Sonya Huang, Sequoia Capital
E54: The Presentation Revolution with Jon Noronha, Co-Founder of Gamma
In this episode, Nathan sits down with Jon Noronha, co-founder of Gamma. Gamma is a new medium for presenting ideas, allowing you to focus on your ideas and receive beautiful, engaging content without the formatting work. In this episode, Jon and Nathan discuss the journey of building Gamma, how to coax AI to do things well, and the opportunity for AI A/B testing. If you're looking for an ERP platform, check out our sponsor, NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive
We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on other projects he's incubating. He's hiring a Chief of Staff, EA, Head of Special Projects, Investment Associate, and more. For a list of JDs, check out: eriktorenberg.com.
TIMESTAMPS:
(00:00:00) - Preview
(00:01:23) - Nathan introduces Jon Noronha
(00:06:36) - Intro - Jon Noronha introduces himself and Gamma
(00:09:36) - Gamma's origin story: building the "anti-PowerPoint" pre-GPT-3
(00:13:15) - From using AI for onboarding to generating near-complete presentations.
(00:15:11) - Sponsors: Netsuite | Omneky
(00:18:01) - If Notion and Canva had a baby
(00:23:35) - Searching for the right structure for AI, landing on HTML
(00:28:16) - Degrees of freedom - developing a constrained vocabulary of semantic blocks
(00:29:30) - Choice of model(s) – weighing cost, speed, and quality tradeoffs
(00:35:18) - Editing UI - getting AI to edit slides per user command
(00:38:04) - UI for gathering training data - following Midjourney's example
(00:40:00) AI A/B Testing: a big opportunity space
(00:43:22) - Image generation models - Baseten and Gamma's deployment of it
(00:45:37) - Pacing feature development - Trying to stay ahead of innovations like 3D, video, voice etc.
(00:47:45) Image generation for slidedecks and AI involvement
(00:50:29) Gamma's main building priorities and AI generated websites
(00:52:34) - Competing with giants like Microsoft and Google
(00:55:04) - Enterprise AI shipping challenges - Startups pioneer new patterns; giants will eventually follow.
(00:57:45) - Simplifying complexity - will models smooth over the complexity of bloated product suites?
(00:59:22) - Conclusion and final thoughts
X/TWITTER:
@thatsjonsense (Jon)
@labenz (Nathan)
@eriktorenberg
@CogRev_Podcast
LINKS:
Gamma: https://gamma.app/
SPONSORS: Shopify |NetSuite | Omneky
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