$50M ARR With 30 Employees, Inside Gamma's Journey From Zero To 50+ Million Users | Co-founder And CEO Grant Lee The Peel With Turner Novak podcast

$50M ARR with 30 Employees, Inside Gamma's Journey From Zero to 50+ Million Users | Co-founder and CEO Grant Lee

published 4d ago

Content provided by Turner Novak. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by Turner Novak or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://staging.podcastplayer.com/legal.

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 design around the story.

Gamma has put up impressive metrics, growing from zero to 50 million users and $50 million in ARR 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.

Grant 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.

We also talk about Gamma’s success hiring generalist’s, why a quarter of the team is designers, and why they’ve never raised large funding rounds and don’t subscribe to Silicon Valley’s 996 working hours.

Thanks to Anamitra and Gaurav at Afore, Shiyan @ Hustle Fund, Evan @ South Park Commons, and Voss @ 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

Careers at Gamma

Follow Grant

Follow Turner

Subscribe to my newsletter here to get every episode + the transcript in your inbox every week.

99 episodes