361: Can AI Be a True Creative Partner? Grant Lee, CEO of Gamma, on AI Design Philosophy and Building the Anti-PowerPoint

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7d ago 35:58

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Grant Lee is the CEO and co-founder of Gamma, the company reimagining presentations by building what some call the “anti-PowerPoint.” Since its launch in 2022, Gamma has grown to over 70 million users, with 30 million gammas created each month, and has reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR). These milestones were achieved profitably, with a team of just 50 people (that’s about $2 million in ARR per employee) and a Series B round at a $2.1 billion valuation, led by Sarah Wang at Andreessen Horowitz.

Before founding Gamma in 2020, Grant led finance at Optimizely, where he developed a passion for A/B testing. He began his career in investment banking and holds a BS in Biomechanical Engineering and an MS in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University.
In this conversation, we discuss:

How Gamma went from an idea to one of the fastest-growing presentation tools in the world with $100M ARR and a 50-person team
Why Grant and his co-founders set out to reinvent slides from scratch instead of improving on PowerPoint
Lessons from Optimizely that shaped Gamma’s culture of experimentation and rapid iteration
How Grant thinks about product-market fit and why every feature must solve real user pain instead of mimicking the competition
How AI serves as a design partner, not a replacement for human creativity, and why “human in the loop” is central to Gamma’s philosophy
The importance of building user trust in generative AI through transparency, feedback loops, and community programs like the “Gambassador” initiative
How resilience, early failures, and conviction helped Gamma survive investor rejection and a near-collapse during the SVB crisis

Resources:

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