Silicon Valley Girl: AI, Tech and Career Growth - $2.1B AI CEO: From "The Worst Idea" to a $2.1B Company | Grant Lee, Co-Founder and CEO Gamma

Episode Date: June 12, 2026

Grant Lee is the co-founder and CEO of Gamma — the $2.1B AI tool that turns one prompt into a finished presentation, now used by 100 million people.We covered:How Gamma hit $100M in revenue with a team of just 50 — profitably, on only $23M of fundingThe two signs you have product-market fit before the money shows up, and why "your friends will lie to you" about your productHow to run a full fundraise in two weeks — Grant did 100+ pitches and how he turned a wall of no's into yes'sHow to tell if an idea is worth a year of your life (he picks by energy, not spreadsheets)Why a top investor called Gamma "the worst idea I've ever heard" — and what that investor actually got rightThe exact first-30-days plan he gives any founder starting today Links: Subscribe to my newsletter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://siliconvalleygirl.beehiiv.com/subscribe?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=futureproof-sub&utm_content=GrantLee Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠X: ⁠⁠⁠https://x.com/siliconvalleymm⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/marinamogilko⁠⁠⁠My Companies & Products: ⁠⁠https://partnerships.marinamogilko.co

The 2026 Chevrolet Tracks is the stylish SUV for those on the move. And with the standard Chevy safety assist package, you have the backup to handle every turn with confidence. The 26 tracks. Start your build at Chevrolet.ca. The investor told me this is the worst idea he had ever heard. There is no way we would ever succeed. This is Grant Lee, co-founder and CEO of Gamma, the AI tool that turns one prompt into a finished presentation. He started at the end of 2020 before the AI boom. Today, Gamma has 100 million users and a $2.1 billion valuation.

A lot of people are trying to build an AI startup these days. What is the one thing they should copy from your playbook? You can build anything, whether you're vibe coding or just agented coding. All the capabilities feel like they're there. You can build anything. The question is, should you? So how do you know? One thing you'll learn is friends will lie to you.

They don't want to hurt your feelings. They'll tell you the product is amazing. If your product is valuable, they'll put their credit card down to pay their product. Then you'll know you have product. market fit. In this episode, Grant breaks down the three things that decided. How to make people fall in love with your product, how to know if an idea is worth a year of your life, and how to pitch it so investors say yes. Can you give me their first 30 days plan, step by step? First 30 days plan is a lot of people are trying to build an AI startup these days. What is the

one thing they should copy from your playbook when building in 2026? Honestly, the number one thing is to figure out who you're going to build with. You know, there's obviously a lot of speculation around the single person, billion-dollar startup. I still think, you know, even if that were possible, why do it alone? It's so much more fun building with a team. If you're going to build a team, make sure you choose the right team. So a team needs to look like a set of individuals that maybe share the same ambition,

share the same values and principles, but should be very complementary in skill sets. So for us, I chose two co-founders that, again, we work together. at a company called Optimize, became friends, but we're also so different. We bring a lot of different skills to the table. And so if you're starting to tinker today, find people that are very complimentary. You don't all need to be developers.

You don't all need to be product people. Come up with something where each of you bring something and then start tinkering on a bunch of different ideas. Find a problem space that feels uniquely sort of positioned where you as a team have the best chance of actually going out there and create something that's compelling for the market. Yeah, now that you're saying it makes total sense, but back then, you had to go through so many difficulties.

I read the story where an investor hung up on you saying it's the dumbest idea. Then you were fundraising in your small apartment. Your wife just had a second baby. Talk to me about that time. How did you know you should keep pushing? And by the way, was that investor right about anything at all? So the investor, yeah, basically, you know, this was early on in pitching, told me this is the worst idea he had ever heard. said that not only were we going up against massive incumbents,

but they had ultimate distribution. So there is no way we would ever succeed. And I think, you know, he was absolutely right. You know, in this market, especially what we're trying to build, there's going to be, you know, incumbents. They do have distribution. So as a product, you really have to think about growth from day one. You have to think about ways that your product itself can distribute itself

just by use of the product. So leaning heavily into things like product-led growth and how do you use? you build organic virality, these are things you can't afford to wait until many years later. Like, as you're building the foundation of the product, you're trying to integrate that into the philosophy of building the product. So he was right. And I think for better or worse, we took that sort of painful feedback early on and sort of internalized it and used that as motivation to keep building. For me, you know, I think trying to start the company when peak pandemic, you know, my daughter was just born. There was all the reasons not.

to start the company. Sounds like the worst time. It sounds like the worst time. But then in many ways it was the best time because you also start feeling the sense of what if we didn't do something, like the regret you'd have, you know? The sort of life is short mentality of, hey, you know, like why not just try something? And the hardest of times, you know, if we come out through the other end, we're going to feel all the more sort of like we have, you know, sense of accomplishment.

And so I sort of avoided the sort of, you know, the trap of saying, hey, you know, you know, the trap of saying, hey, too much going on. I'm just going to wait till later, wait for perfect timing. I think the reality is anybody that's starting a business realizes there's no such thing as perfect timing. There's you with an idea that you just cannot help but like think about night and day. And hopefully if you have a team that's also equally excited and energized by idea, sort of like you're just hungry to go after it. We were ready at the end of 2020 to commit to this full time. And so for us, it was a no brainer. We were going to go after it no matter what. What about your wife? How did she take that decision? Because you quit your job, right?

So I was in between jobs. The last startup I was that was acquired, so I was exploring what was next. I think this is another part about anybody that's building company is like, obviously you have your partners internally at the startup, your founders, your founding team. And then you have your life partner. And you have to be equally transparent with both. And so we had a conversation around, hey, if I'm going to do this, obviously I need the full support of you and being able to actually, you know, take a big swing at this. And it means like, you know, probably not taking a meaningful paycheck for a period of time. It means many late nights. It means, you know, sacrificing some weekends to get work done. And so we all, you know, we sat down. We felt like, yes, this was right. It felt like the right thing to do. And obviously, you know, the benefit of building something special as a

founder means like you share that with her family. If you build a meaningful business, you bring that to your family as well. Okay. Let's actually test your product. A lot of people who are building today are going to be fundraising. So I want you to help me create a perfect deck with Gamma for a C-stage company and you've been investing. You've launched this $10 million for 10-10 ideas.

Yeah. So you know what a good deck is, right? Let's imagine, because I have a business where we help people learn languages, specifically English for universities. Let's make a deck for

an app that helps people master their English. I want to hear your prompt. All right. And this would be for a services business or? It's an app that I'm trying to raise for. Okay. So I'm actually going to use this new agent feature down here that we have. So let's just say build a presentation. You want to do a pitch presentation, right? Yeah. Well, let's just start there. And so it's going to do some thinking in terms of, okay, what are the things that would be important if you were actually pitch,

switching this sort of app. And this will start with a question here, which is, what's your app's name and maybe a key differentiator? Would you like to describe it? Yeah, let's say it's a, let's look in general English language learning app. Content is generated on the go for you based on students' current level and interests.

All right, very specific. What would you like to cover? problem market so there's some options here um well i guess for fundraising you know you know let's do all the above yeah we can ask it to come up and then we're we're pitching vc's in this case or angels yeah angels at 10 slacks that's perfect right all right so we got our basic scaffolding in place and then we'll hit continue in this case right now we were leveraging more of like web search or kind of parsed together okay what are some interesting things that would be relevant to an investor.

If we were doing this for real, we'd also probably include, maybe if you already have a one-pageer or like a notion doc with a lot of things that describe the actual product requirements or the specific features you intend to launch with, all of that could be sort of included. In this case, we'll keep it to basically what Gamma can search out in the wild with a more generic prompt here and see what sort of can be created.

So we'll choose right now it's kind of looking through, It's adding some of the sort of content, things that are relevant. It created an outline. We'll choose a theme. And then basically from here, we can basically generate the first draft of the deck. How many pitches did you have to do to get your first check? I probably did over 100 pitches in that. In how many days?

It was over two weeks. So I was living in London at the time. And so my version of this was after the kids, you know, put the kids to bed around 8 p.m. I would pitch between 8 p.m. and 2 a.m. basically for almost two weeks straight. And this was, you know, the ability to kind of, you know, do this really quickly. Fortunately, during the pandemic, you actually, the benefit was you could all do it over Zoom. Today, if you had to drive from, you know, messer and master, actually, you probably couldn't squeeze in that many. Zoom, you can do back to back. And so I had, I just crammed it in. I would say even in there's 100 pitches, less than 50% success rate. So, of course, you know, you have to figure out. how do you pick yourself up after hearing no many, many times. But I think one thing you do also learn is that in hearing yeses, you can always ask an investor, okay, what made you want to invest in Gamble? Like, what are the things that actually caught your attention? You fold that into much earlier on in the pitch. You kind of adapt your pitch. And then you can also ask, you know,

if you're pitching to angels, angels, you can ask, okay, the ones that said yes, you know, who else should I talk to because many of these angels co-invest with other investors. So tapping into their network, getting a warm intro, these are things that just made it easier, even though it ended up being 100 plus. I got to the point where near the end, you're starting hearing many more yeses. So you start off with like many yoes, a few yeses, and you start shifting it to like snowball into people that give you warm intros and you can build towards actually getting many more yeses by the end of it. Visit BetMGM Casino and check out the newest exclusive.

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Is there a mistake that you're seeing a lot of AI founders in making on fundraising? I'd say part of it is just they, you know, you need to get into the mindset of this is, this is a game. There's a two-week period or like, again, going back to time boxing, time boxing matters a ton. You don't want to get in a position where fundraising drags on indefinitely. Many times people say, oh, I'll just give myself, you know, a couple months to figure it out. Then there's no urgency for investors and there's no sort of, process that you're running. You're just letting it drift. So one, define the timeline. Two,

out of the founders, you should have one person running point. It's very distracting to have multiple founders all kind of being dragged into hearing all the nose, for instance. It could be demoralizing. You need to have one person that has the right mindset going into it. And then, yeah, number three, is like when you design the process in the way that can allow you to snowball in the end, that just allows you to close, you know, stick to your timeline, be able to actually, you know, wrap things up in a really an efficient manner and go into, you should always go into a fundraise with as much momentum as possible. So if you're early, that means like maybe having a prototype you've really thought through and it really feels complete. If you're later

stage, obviously it means like you're building towards, hey, we're going into this fundraise with a ton of revenue momentum or a ton of sign up momentum, go into it with momentum, set that sort of time boundary for yourself two or three weeks, get it done in that process, have a real urgency. And I think that's where, you know, the best founders treat this as like a short-term sprint, get it done with, move on to what's important, which is building the business, and not be overly distracting to the rest of the team. What happens if in two weeks you haven't raised what you wanted? Do you just stop and go back to it in six months? It depends on what you're hearing from the market, right? Like if it's like a definitive no across the board, everybody you've talked to,

then it probably means your product's not ready. Or there's something about the market that is out of your control. Or your team? Or it could be your team. Yeah. So it's like you need to almost then be the most, you have to be your own worst critic in that sense. You have to self-diagnose, like, okay, what is the root cause? And for every company, it's going to be probably slightly different. You know, it could be that the team's not, you know, the right team to go after this market.

It could be the market has too many of these, they've heard too many of these pitches. So there's not an appetite. Or it could just be you spoke to the wrong investors. Maybe you pitched a bunch of like FinTech investors where, in fact, your business is a completely different type of business. So each sort of, you know, you know, know, areas, like one area to like to put it as you diagnose. And if you can find the root cause and go back to the drawing board and probably reset the clock and say, okay, I'm going to give myself another month to prep for this new process and then again go into that two-week sprint.

I would say more often than not, it's because you're going into the process without enough momentum. If you're going into it with momentum, in most cases, you should be able to find a clear path to be on the raise. Let's look at the deck. Let's see what Gamma build. Can you, as an investor, can you rate it? Yeah, so this is talking about the language app that learns you. It's talking about a billion English learners, zero personalization. So it's saying that a lot of people go into actually trying to learn, but in no way has this opportunity been personalized.

And so, I mean, obviously this is generic. So the question is, are you building a product that actually addresses this? Is there true personalization in the way you're dealing with this? Of course, this is intended to be a placeholder. So, you know, you'd have to go back and say, is this, you know, or any of these things relevant to how I'm thinking about building, you know, my app and be able to flesh that out quite a bit more. So I think what we've found is that, you know, oftentimes when you're starting off with something

that is a little bit more generic in this case, you're using it as more of like a thought partner. Yeah. You're saying, okay, these are the potential questions or things that could come up. And then you, as the builder, should say, is any of this? actually relevant. Do I believe in any of this? And if not, then I'm going to go ahead and replace it. And of course, this is where you start iterating. Because I remember when I was building a deck, it was just me and like looking at some like Airbnb decks. Yeah. Like it was good. And, you know,

I think one big thing, so traction of obviously is important and to plug in your real number, real thing here. I think one big thing that's actually missing here and where I would have probably changed the order is to talk about your team way earlier on. especially if you're an early stage company, I always think about as like when you're just pitching your product and you're just getting going, an investor is really just looking at the team and the dream. It's really just those two things. And you're answering, you're trying to answer for them, why you and why now, right? There's probably been many different startups that have attempted building, you know, in this category. So what makes your team unique and

special? What sort of insights do you come that actually offers something that feels differentiated? And then why now? Is there something else that has happened such that there is an opening in this market for your team to go after? These would be things I would actually, you know, looking at this deck, I would actually push all the way to the front. It's like start off of that. Before you start talking about like Tam or like the market opportunity, just talk a little bit about like what is it about you, your team that feels truly differentiated. Yeah, I feel like so many people have so many ideas. Ideas change so much.

You can ship a new product every week, like an MVP. Yeah. New MVP every week. It all comes down to the team. You were picking ideas based on energy. Is that right? Yeah. Early on, I think for us, the true sort of North Star was energy.

Was this an idea where, again, you wake up in the middle of night sometimes, thinking about, oh, my God, like tomorrow I'm going to work on these things because it's going to be so impactful. And I think that energy gets you to the point where you can create the early versions of the roadmap. You can start talking to early users, but you really need that energy to be the fuel. and we actually had, when we first kind of raised money, we actually, the ambition was to sort of help people change the way they communicate. So we actually had two different ideas. One was, well, you know, presentations are one form of communication. People spend so much time formatting, trying to design it rather than the idea themselves.

That could be one category of an idea. The other was, this is, again, peak pandemic. And so much work was shifting to like more hybrid and virtual work. We thought, what if we created a virtual office environment where, you know, instead of, all being in the same room, like we can collaborate on a canvas and like really share the work that's going on and be able to communicate in a way that almost emulates being in an office. We sort of parallel path like building both for about six months. Oh, wow.

Yeah. A good amount of work. A good amount of work. And we were dogfooding both products at the same time. So we would, you know, create presentations, present internally to each other. We would sometimes present in the virtual office. Like there's some sort of like cross-pollination of the ideas there. And after six months, we realized that the presentation idea, each one of us could like have like this roadmap of all the things we wish we could build.

It felt like even after six months, we're barely scratching the surface on like the possibilities of what would the future of presentations look like if we could just invest fully in it. Whereas like the virtual office, we almost hit this sort of ceiling. And part of the ceiling was part just due to our own ability to imagine it in this space. It was like, well, we really felt like we, you know, the virtual office, no matter how good it got. it could never really replace the sort of magic that you get within real life work and being able to work shoulder to shoulder with a colleague. And so that was almost a limitation of our own imagination. And so we were like, okay, well, if we're having trouble,

even like imagining the next few months worth of roadmap for this idea, let's go back to the one where we can't stop thinking about it. Let's go back to the presentations because this is the one where every one of us lights up when thinking about the problem. Do you use the same metric? Because I also read this amazing story, how you rebuild the whole onboarding process. especially when you were getting good traction, but you decided to rebuild it, and you started

getting an enormous amount of users. And in general, when you rebuild a product, when do you know when to stop iterating on features? Yeah, I mean, probably never need to stop innovating today, especially given how fast things are moving. But when you're early on, the sort of, you know, one question every founder will ask is, how do I know if I have product market fit? And I think the answer for many types of businesses, maybe not like infrastructure or B2B, but most like consumer or prosumer businesses, there's basically two things you're looking for. One is, does your product have organic growth? Is it so good people are telling all their friends, family, colleagues about?

Because if it is, then you don't even need to spend any money in sales and marketing. You'll just have more and more users come to your door to actually try to use your product. So that's step one. If people are using your product, telling all their friends about it, you have organic growth. Step two is, is their willingness to pay. You know, if you're a consumer product, maybe you can monetize via ads or different formats, but if you're a true sort of productivity or creative tool, people need to pay for your tool if it's really valuable. And payment is always an exchange of value, right?

If your product is valuable, they'll put their credit card down to pay their product. So if you have those two ingredients, I think then you'll know you have product market fit and you'll know you have something where you can put more fuel on the fire by obviously, you know, investing in marketing and sales in different ways. But without that, any sort of sales and marketing is premature because the product itself isn't good enough for it to actually spread on its own. And you're always going to be fighting an uphill battle to kind of retain customers. Quick pause.

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Talk to me about getting those first 1,000 users. How did you get them? And is there any advice on getting them in 2026? Yeah. So when we first launched, you know, maybe like many founders, we try to recruit all of our friends to, you know, use the product. anybody that had created a presentation. And, you know, we were able to get, you know, several thousand people just to sign up through our network, extended network. And of course, you ask your friends, like, how do you like the product?

And one thing you'll learn is, like, friends will lie to you. They don't want to hurt your feelings. They'll tell you the product is amazing. The real truth is then going back and looking at the usage, right? Like, are people actually using the product? And so then we'd go in and, you know, many of the friends that said they love the product weren't even coming back to the product, not using it. So then you start honing in, okay, where is their real usage? of the product, what kind of use cases are people actually, you know, leaning into. And we saw early on

on a lot of, you know, freelancers, solopreneurs, small business owners that had to create a lot of content using Gamma as the way that they were presenting and sharing with their clients and customers. So that's where we understood, okay, there's a pocket of users here. We should be spending much more time with them, talking to them. And then, of course, over time, then you can find out ways to, like, message to them specifically, whether it's on social media or, you know, if you're working with creators and influencers, like, really tap into the personas where your products the most useful and start getting that flywheel going of they're finding the product, they're finding real value, they're sharing the product with their network, with their friends,

and that's where you can really start building kind of the initial core of your kind of core users in the beginning. But you haven't done a lot of paid marketing at the beginning. So was it just word of mouth? It's just word of mouth. Yeah, word of mouth. Even today, word of mouth is by far, you know, the number one sort of acquisition channel for us is like people telling other people to use gamma. That's fascinating. And but you also do, influencers, right? And you do a lot of micro-influencers. So going after big ones. What did you learn in that process? Was there an influencer campaign that didn't work? So the very beginning, it was actually all organic influencers. People basically learning about, you know, gamma and just just sharing, you know, their audience. That was me. When I first learned, I did like a video about, yeah, really appreciate that. It's amazing. It's an amazing tool. Yeah. And so like, you know, that's where we started seeing just in the very beginning, like some organic spikes of. people coming and learning about gamma and starting to use the gamma. And so we realized, okay,

well, if this has already had it happening organically, what could we do to reach an even broader set of creators and influencers out there? And we started just testing a bunch. So I also in this process started to try to figure out, how could I be a creator myself? Because I felt like to really empathize with other creators, I kind of needed to go through on the journey myself and just understand how hard it is, right, to even build an audience, come up with content, and share information in a way that feels like authentic and really genuine. And like you need to like build that muscle, right? And so for me, it was like, okay, I'm going to start by learning how to do this.

And then when we do work with influencers and creators, I'm going to onboard all of them myself. Because now you know how to do that, right? I know how to do it, but I'm also still learning, right? Like it's helpful for me to like go down and say, okay, rather than just saying, hey, go, you know, go and showcase Gamma. It's like, okay, let's actually sit down and think about your audience specifically. And what I actually learned was that many of these creators struggled with presentations because they never learned it in school.

They never learned it on the job. And so I got to actually unveil kind of the magic for them. And then specifically for their use case, like, you know, if they're targeting, you know, real estate professionals, we would think through, okay, how do we actually package this up in a way where the use cases were showing are relevant, makes sense, the way we talk about the product, like resonate with their audience. And we can brainstorm a ton. And that for me was also a learning opportunity because then I could really really. say, okay, what do the best creators do? How did they, like, write a good hook? How did they come up with, like, a structured story in a short amount of time? How do they capture people's attention? And, you know, it was also sort of like, now I could teach them about the product. They learn

how to use gamma. They could talk about gamma in a very authentic way. And then in the process, I can become a better creator myself and translate that into, you know, many founders today have a chance to be their company's sort of megaphone or amplifier, right? Like, anytime they want to share information, if you have your own audience, you should be able to package up that narrative in the right way too. And I did so by just learning from, you know, the best creators out there, like how can I actually build this muscle myself? And it definitely felt like there's some good synergy there. And you're active on X and LinkedIn, right? Try to be on active on X and LinkedIn. Yeah. And I think this is where, yeah, many, you know, customers will

reach out, many partnership opportunities come to fruition because of those, you know, because of the audiences that I've built there. And again, barely scratching the surface, but more I want to do. And I think it just feels very rewarding to build to start building an audience. Yeah, just wanted to highlight it for everyone, like 10 years ago when I was talking to entrepreneurs. The sentiment was you're not taken too seriously if you're actively posting on social media. Now, I think it's such an inevitable part of being a founder because this is how you hire. This is how you learn the marketing channel and this is how you just meet the peers. Totally. And I think there is a negative stigma because, you know, sometimes, this is more like five, 10 years ago, where people almost felt like they were tooting

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

because there's just too much to like try to do in anyone given day? So I think as a founder, you have a chance to figure out what are the, you know, with your experience and your background and what you're building, what can you instill on your audience to like inform them and keep them educated. That value in itself should be where like all the, you know, the ability to build an audience comes from, it's not about tooting your own horn, like really just talking about your product all day. Have you looked at users who are coming from LLMs when chat GPT recommends Gamma? Because we're seeing, we're tracking on a newsletter.

We're just seeing crazy open rates when people find us through LLLLAM. Yeah, that's actually been one that's also trending very positively, both in terms of people, you know, landing on, you know, Gamma's website, but also converting long term. So I think we're early days. It's still a relatively smaller portion of overall traffic, but it's definitely growing. And it's exciting to think about what this could look like. obviously in a couple of years. And every business wants obviously to diversify like how customers hear about this,

so that obviously you want to build to activate multiple different channels at once. And it does feel like LOMs, you know, chats like chatDB, Clotter are going to be meaningful channels for us in the future. Talk to me about pricing in general. So you start with free, then it's $8 and it goes up to $90, right? How do you come up with pricing for an AI product? And also it's dependent on how the models price themselves. Totally. So yeah, there's a lot of different moving parts. I think every startup today needs to be thinking about pricing as something that they're probably constantly experimenting with. It used to be,

you know, five, ten years ago, you kind of set it and forget it. You come up with pricing once and maybe revisit it every several years. I don't think companies today have the luxury of doing that. You constantly need to be thinking about, okay, the tension between like seat base versus usage based, how your product evolves, the different segments of users. So we have users that are individuals versus, you know, B2B customers that may want to buy in a completely different way. So, I mean, the honest answer for us is this is something we're still constantly experimenting with. You also want to do so in a way where pricing, you know, pricing, you're trying to align the value you provide to your user.

And then the other side of the equation is you need to build a, build a durable business. So, like, are you actually, you know, building a business that's able to operate profitably or efficiently, the worst thing you could be doing is to be essentially selling dollars at a discount, right? Like if you're selling dollars at a discount feels good, you're making money, but you're doing it so very unprofitably. So these are all things where constantly moving target, I think the best you can do is being willing to adapt and then user base to kind of figure out what's the right way to balance both the value they're seeing and the cost you incur as a business. Do you have any strategies on converting customers from free into paying? Because you had this

competitor, the Toma, that shut down, and they had Tom, 25 million users, 3.5 million ARR. You had 40 million users at 20 million ARR. So you're doing something there, converting customers. Can you give advice to AI founders on how to do that? I think it will sound generic, but it just comes back to like what is the quality of the product, right? Every single category, if it's a meaningful category, there's going to be multiple competitors. And so your ability to kind of ignore the competition and focus on your users is all that really matters. Are you delivering something to them that competitors aren't, you know, either delivering on or aren't focused on, right? Like, even within our own category, you know, there's many people that focus on kind

of the design portion of, like, creating a presentation. We want to focus on the communication, the storytelling. So, like, how do we abstract design, the need for design completely away? And so you're going to approach it differently depending on your sort of vision for this category. And then you're specifically, like your customers you're serving, what are their needs? Many different types of customers might have different needs for a presentation tool. Like, you need to figure out where in that space do you actually want to play. And your strategy has been product first from what I'm hearing, from what I'm experiencing. And you only have 50 people.

Is it still the same? We're a little bit bigger than that. But like when we were crossing 100 million in AR, we're 50 people. Yeah, so there's a relatively small team. Grant just said he crossed a hundred million in revenue with only 50 people. This is exactly the kind of thing I love to explore in my future proof newsletter with a community of 18,000 builders and creators. Twice a week, I share the best practices from my conversations with CEOs and founders,

the AI tools I'm actually using, and the skills worth learning right now. It's free, the link is in the description. Question that's very, I think, is on point for 2026. Do you think you can triple your revenue with a amount of people. Is there technology there? Yeah. I think the answer is yes. And then the nuance is how do you triple it, right? Because we're trying to build a global business. And so this means, you know, we have a lot of users in Europe, a lot of users in Asia. We still feel like we need to build a physical presence there. And so ignoring that for too long, just assuming, hey, we'll just

grow from San Francisco and not, you know, grow headcount, I think would be the wrong long term decision. And so we are trying to grow now our footprint in these different offices, which means growing the team much bigger than it was, you know, obviously a year ago. So I think, you know, every business should think about what is their ambition as a business. If it is to be a company that has global presence, if it is to serve many different segments of users, so like we have the prosumer end and the B2B, you know, set of users that are much different in profile and then also serving developers through our platform, our API, MCP part of our business, those all require different teams and like different places of like emphasis in terms of building out the complete

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

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

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

We wanted to focus there. So rather than open the aperture in terms of hiring across the board, when we were super early, it was all about reinvesting in the core, hiring the right, obviously, engineers, product designers. We actually probably overinvested relative to what people would say, like in product design. It was almost a third of the company was product designers early on. And most people are like, why would you invest so much into product design? We're like, well, that matters a ton to us. So even though we were small in, you know, like the relative overall headcount, we were probably over indexed on

product designers because we felt like that was super important. And to get true organic virality, we needed to be exceptional in that one area of, you know, that one function. And so every stage you're going to have to look at, now that we're much bigger, we can't afford not to hire sales and marketing because we have a massive audience to go after. And we have a B2B business that still requires a ton more relationship building, a much more consultative approach to, like, actually, you know, expanding within these larger companies. And so we can't just, you know, hiring payfully slow at this stage doesn't mean we never hire sales and marketing. It means now that we're at the stage, we feel like we've earned the right and we can gradually open up

the aperture a bit more. If we had done that two or three years ago, I think that would have been premature. How many of your employees are generalists versus specialists? I feel like nearly all employees are what I would still define as generalists today, even though they spike in different areas. So, you know, for instance, our head of design, exceptionally talented designer, very visual, but he also knows how to code. And he was coding even before, like, you know, vibe coding was more accessible to most designers. But the fact that he can now ship something like end-to-end, test it, like get early versions into hands of users, that's a superpower, right? And so he can cross domains where, you know, traditionally it'd be a designer or a UX researcher that does a little bit,

some of this early, you know, sort of investigation or like early research, he can do that himself, develop the early prototype, ship the early prototype, get something into the hands of users to actually give feedback on, and oftentimes then ship something into production, like almost, like completely end-to-end. That just wasn't really possible before. But for us, like, we try to look for that the spirit of like a generalist across every function, whether it's, you know, sales, marketing, engineering, product design. And I think that allows you to have a relatively lean team that can, again, like, play across multiple domains at any given point in time. And I think in general, that just means a team that can be pretty collaborative to

because you have deeper empathy for what each function can bring to the table. And like when you're bringing something to an engineer, for instance, you've already done so much work to think through like, okay, how do I make this right? So the handoff is as seamless as possible. These things, I think, are hard to quantify. But when you have a team of generalists, there is some magic and, like, working together. But does this model ever break or start breaking with scale? Do you feel like there will be a point in time when you will need to start hiring more specialists?

I definitely think so. But there's also the sort of competing sort of race of like as you get bigger, you want more specialization. LLMs and AI is also getting better at being specialized in certain domains. And so there's almost like this race now of like at what point does AI also kind of fill in the remaining gap and the generals can go deep when they need to? So TBD, I think certain functions, like I think we're noticing, you know, like within like finance and legal, still pretty hard. Like you still want specialization and specific types of questions that come up. Like you don't want to just trust like an LM obviously to give you the right answer. But for a lot of like sales and marketing where, you know, your goal isn't to replace the human.

It's to augment or like to really automate as much so that the human can focus on what they're good at, which is the relationship building. Again, the consultative approach. You're trying to carve out, you know, if they only have a certain number of hours in a day, You don't want them to be wasting any time, like, fiddling with business systems or any of that. They should be spending time with customers. And so our goal is, like, those generalists can help automate as much of the work that is not customer-facing as possible. And the rest of the time, their specialty is to work with customers. We're trying to carve out as much time as possible for them to do that.

Yeah, that makes total sense. With all the companies deploying agents, what was the last process that you completely delegated to an agent? I think one thing we've learned is that even with agents, you're not completely delegating things away. Like a human still needs to supervise. And, you know, agents can still be fragile. They can go off course. And so I think the best cases are still where the human and agent are working hand in hand. And of course, maybe over time you have multiple agents all, you know, working with the same human and they can then be subdivided in different tasks.

But we're still so early. You know, we're not at the stage yet where I think any of our teammates feels like, okay, 100% agent work now, now I can go do something else. It's more like, okay, agent can actually help me provide a ton more leverage, can obviously reduce the time to complete a task, and then can help me do the things that I just wouldn't never have gotten to because my time in the day is too precious. And so there's certain aspects of that. You know, fast forward several years from now, then I think we're talking about maybe agents doing way more, being much more self-directed. and truly being like a partner where you can leverage the agent sort of workforce in a way that today still seems like we're a little bit out of reach. What's your favorite agent?

I mean, we build a lot of things internally to help with, you know, things like customer research or even just understanding, you know, what should we be building next? Like, what are pockets of things that are going to be useful? So, like, you know, taking all the input we get, you know, we look at obviously things like churn analysis, like what are people saying? We look at when new users sign up, you know, what are they using? How are they leveraging the product? These are all inputs. And so we want to be able to take those inputs to say, okay, now stress tests, like some of the other things we're thinking about building. Like how useful is this to an end user? Where might we kind of add value

in ways that we aren't even, you know, considering today? Like, you know, really being a sparring partner there. I think those are things where you can now with much more, like every company now is so much more data they can actually work with, taking advantage of that is really, I think, where the magic really happens. So your analyst is basically data analyst meets product and they make decisions together. Totally. Somebody who watched this video has a startup idea, built a deck with Gamma. Can you give me their first 30 days plan, step by step? First 30 days plan is spend all 30 days talking to your customers. Really, I think it feels like, you know, if you're assembling the team, you need to be laser-focused customer-obsessed from the very beginning, and nothing else really matters

in the long run. You wouldn't start with a co-founder? Well, I mean, I'm assuming if you've raised money, you have your co-founders. I mean, like, you just had an idea and you're like, okay, I'm going to start. Is it the co-founder or you start talking to clients first to figure out who you need as a co-founder? I personally think you shouldn't jump into the idea before the team because the team should help inform what the idea actually is. You might have like, hey, I'm again going back to our specific thing, which is we think like, you know, visual communication can be improved. But we weren't

going to be prescriptive into how we actually solve that. Let's as a team start tinkering. Like, what can our team deliver in this space that feels differentiated? And once we had that, that's when we said, okay, we feel like there is something here. We don't know exactly what the product might look like in three or four years, but there's something here. Let's go raise money. So we have a chance. to actually build this for, you know, over the next several quarters. Once you have that, then it's about, you have the early team, you flip all of your energy into spending time with customers and early users and, like, testing. Like, does my thing even deliver on, you know, anything that's valuable to you? And if not, let's, that's course correct. Let's make sure we're

not heading down a path of, like, delivering something that has zero value to you as a customer. Let's make sure we're listening to your problems, fine-tuning our own sort of understanding of the problem space and then building the right thing over the long haul. So for someone who came up with the idea, found the team, which is kind of hard if you are not in the ecosystem, like finding right team. But would you say this deck will help that company raise money? I would say yes, but it will help you sort of have the right conversations. But ultimately, the investor is going to judge you based on your level of conviction and their level of conviction in your team. to go after this market.

So use this as a tool. And every great tool can help you, you know, open the right doors and obviously have some of the right conversations. Can we wrap up with one final question? So if you could send one message to the founder version of yourself in 2023, when your growth was stagnating 6K users just start there, what would you say? It would be some version of just hang on, you know,

like every founder will go through many ups and downs. If you're surrounded by a team that, again, shares like the same level of ambition and values and principles, then you got to just lean, you know, lean on them as much as you can and then still have belief that you can make it through. The earliest days are the hardest because it very much as they describe it as like the idea maze, you're like bumping into wall after wall and not knowing if you've made any sort of meaningful traction. And so, you know, for us, it was like, hang on for as long as possible. make sure we don't lose belief in the longer term mission of trying to help people communicate their ideas. We feel like that should be something we could commit to for a very, very long time. And so hanging on to that belief that we can make a difference, like that's what, you know, for us actually did change the overall trajectory of the business. And it comes from the energy,

I guess, that the product is giving you, right? That was the source of that belief. It comes from, it's the energy in knowing that what you're working on should help improve people's lives and like the energy you're putting into it will hopefully result in amazing outcomes for for your customers and users. That energy obviously, it needs to be built up. It's like the conviction that needs to, you're constantly trying to fill up as much as possible. And if you're building the right things, I think you'll wake up every morning being excited about the things you're working on. Thank you so much, Grant. Thank you for having me. Thank you. Grand Bill Gamma to a $2 billion valuation. If you want another founder's story from the

AI era, watch my conversation with Young Zhao, the CEO of of Opus clip. He gave me one of the best frameworks I've ever heard for picking a niche when there are already 50 AI tools in every category. Click right here or here somewhere and also in the description.