Gamma founder Grant Lee on making slide-creation effortless

For many organizations, presentations are the language of persuasion. They lead to decisions, investments, and—when done badly—headaches. 

For those who hate PowerPoint or lack design skills, presentations just got a whole lot easier thanks to the AI-powered tool Gamma, which takes text or a document and spins it into a deck for you. In our TikTok world, some are using Gamma to make vertical presentations or even modular websites. That’s helped the San Francisco startup to attract 17 million customers, speeding to 16th place among AI apps—two spots behind Midjourney—as of January rankings from SimilarWeb. 

To fuel further growth Gamma just raised $12 million in a round led by Accel, which was an early investor in Dropbox, Facebook, and Slack. CEO Grant Lee says Gamma aims to push organizations past the PowerPoint era. Fast Company spoke with Lee about how it’s persuaded people to make 60 million decks with Gamma and how it aims to stand out in the crowded arena of online presentation tools. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Visuals on TikTok and Instagram are vertical. Will presentations follow suit? 

In traditional PowerPoint land, you’re stuck to 16 by 9. In Gamma, you can have fluid cards of any height. You can optimize for vertical layouts or horizontal landscape. The malleability piece is something we’re leaning into because incumbent tools aren’t made to be malleable. They’re for the print and project era where things had to fit on the screen.

The new $12 million brings your funding to $22.3 million. Why raise so much? 

We’re a lean team of 16 based in San Francisco. Because we’ve been growing so fast and profitably, we have zero cash burn. We raise the money not really for the funding itself, but to establish a strong relationship with Accel, a fantastic partner. And as we start to hire, it gives us a stamp of credibility that we’re in this for the long haul.

If you fail to meet expectations generated by $22 million in funding, what would be the most likely reason? 

We have big ambitions to go after a massive market. PowerPoint today is used by well over 500 million people around the world, probably closer to a billion. If we fail, it’s just  if we don’t live up to the promise of being able to take a good chunk of market away. 

That would be a situation where distribution is still king and massive enterprises just cannot see the progress in trying to leave incumbent tools because everyone’s used to them and they’re ubiquitous. And so slides still win at the end of the day. And then even if we’re able to carve out a smaller niche segment, it doesn’t end up being big enough. So, that’s the most likely scenario for failure, of not fulfilling the promise of what we want to go after.

Many people fear presenting. Do you expect AI to help with that?  

People hate having to present, and even if they do a Loom recording, they hate having to record themselves, because if they mess up, they have to do it all over again. So what if we can help them create a presentation that could present itself in your voice? We could use different versions of your voice avatar, or even your visual avatar, to present all that content for you. 

And this is where sharing that content asynchronously becomes pretty magical, because you can then personalize the material for different audiences, and even personalize it in different languages. Our thesis is that if we make content creation effortless, people are going to create more content.

What about interactivity? Presentations are often one-sided. 

You can insert interactive elements in Gamma. And we intend to build basic versions of polling or quizzes or other things that are embedded into a presentation. The idea is for you to not only engage the audience but also gauge their level of understanding or even get input live. Even if it’s not a live presentation, people could click on and vote on things. 

What parts of the world are you focused on?

We have a similar early trajectory to the Notions of the world. I read some crazy stuff like in the very beginning, 80% of Notion users were not in the U.S. We’re seeing something similar. The vast majority of our users are actually outside of the U.S. In Europe, the usual suspects—U.K., Spain, Italy, and Germany—are growing fast. In Latin America, Brazil is growing really fast. And then in Asia, Korea, Japan, and Taiwan are growing fast. Australia and New Zealand are also starting to emerge and grow. Many of those markets feel underserved. 

How does someone with a Stanford mechanical engineering degree end up CEO of this kind of company? 

I started my career in consulting investment banking. So for the first several years we were literally living in slide decks. I was the person putting together the slide decks and at the 11th hour trying to make edits. So I deeply just felt the pain. Eventually I was a CFO and overseeing essentially all of our internal communication and it was all Google slides at the time. And I kept thinking “why is this still so frustrating?” We’ve learned it since we’re kids and the tooling really hadn’t evolved. So it was my own personal frustration over a couple of decades to build this and take that inspiration and reimagine it.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91132501/gamma-founder-grant-lee-on-making-slide-creation-effortless?partner=rss&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=rss+fastcompany&utm_content=rss