Grant Lee
@thisisgrantlee • 42,887 subscribers
Co-founder of @GammaApp
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There's a hidden tax on every knowledge worker in the world, and nobody talks about it: The design tax. You're a strategist, a sales lead, a marketer. You were hired for what you know. But every meeting, every pitch, every proposal expects you to show up with something that looks like a designer made it. I lived this. Before Gamma, I spent time in consulting and investment banking. I spent more hours formatting slides than the analysis that went into them. When my cofounders and I started Gamma, we asked: what if you never had to be a designer in the first place? Five years and nearly 100 million users later, we've refunded billions of hours of the design tax. Today, we're eliminating it for good with our biggest launch ever. Gamma Imagine — a powerful, AI-native visual creation tool directly in Gamma. Posters, logos, infographics, visuals from a single prompt. On brand, every time. AI-Native Templates. Templates were supposed to save you from design work. Instead you spent the time filling them in. So we completely rebuilt the template experience. Modify a whole deck with a single prompt, with your brand and style intact every time. Gamma Connectors. You're already thinking in ChatGPT and Claude. Now Gamma sits inside the most popular work apps in the world. No more context-switching. You were hired for your ideas, not to resize text boxes. Let Gamma pay the design tax.
Grant Lee4,701,368 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
The Stripe team published their annual letter this week. We partnered up with them to drop it into Gamma. Check it out:
Grant Lee2,062,787 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
Today, as shared by The New York Times, we’re announcing two things: >Our Series B at a $2.1B valuation led by Sarah Wang at a16z. >Reaching $100M ARR, profitably, with a team of just 50 people. That's $2M ARR per employee. PowerPoint was invented before the first website, before the Game Boy, before the Berlin Wall fell. But Gamma, and our 70 million users, are proof that an AI-native company can disrupt a category everyone assumed was won. 30 million gammas are created every single month, as we fight hard to become a new standard for communication. But we’re not stopping. We’re expanding our plans for businesses. We’re building out a full visual storytelling platform. And today, we’re releasing our API to the general public. So you can plug Gamma into wherever work happens. And to celebrate, we’re also sharing our first ever prompt guide backed by research into how our most successful users use Gamma to automate presentations, websites, and content in minutes.
Grant Lee4,435,825 Aufrufe • vor 6 Monaten
Stripe is worth $159 billion now. Like Bezos and Buffett, the Collison 'way of building a business' will create trillions in value and is worth studying. 800-word post on: 1. Craft & Beauty 2. Humility 3. Hiring 4. Culture 5. Decisions 1. On craft & beauty, You can work on something you're not proud of for 2 years. You can't do it for 30. Beauty has a practical function most people miss. When we go to a city or building that's beautiful, there's generosity in that construction. You never meet the architect, but it's a gift they've bestowed on us. Products are no different. And craft has another function that might matter even more: it's the single best way to attract extraordinary people. The best people consider themselves craftspeople, and above almost all else, they want to work alongside other craftspeople. Put bluntly: really good people don't enjoy working on shitty things. 2. On founder humility, Think carefully about what's cool and what's high status, and then make sure not to do that. Once you're succeeding, the real danger begins. Success breeds complacency. Other people are studying what you built and looking to replicate it. You can always be a month away from losing your business. The antidote is simple but uncomfortable: stay close to reality. Every week at Stripe's leadership meeting, they hear directly from a customer. It's not an A-plus scorecard every time. That's the point. It prevents you from getting delusional. And when you see a smart person holding a view that's different from your own, rather than figuring out how they're wrong, try to figure out how they're right. 3. On hiring, Think like a value investor. You're not looking for the best resume. You're looking for human capital the market has significantly underpriced. It took Patrick and John a full year to get to four people. No group will ever shape your company more than your early hires. When hiring anyone, ask: will I like the 50 people they hire? Prioritize rate of learning over everything. Over a decade, fast learners obliterate credentialed hires. It's not even close. For senior hires, one question: can they get you where you need to be in four years, in two? 4. On culture, Stripe's moat isn't technology or process or perks. It's that the people there genuinely care about solving the problems they say they're solving. That's rarer than it sounds. Care for the customer's problem, executed with craft and rigor. A culture that prizes small details and careful abstraction. And an operating rhythm that keeps it honest: micro pessimism, macro optimism. Everything is terrible today. Total conviction it'll be fantastic in two years. That tension is what keeps generational companies from getting comfortable. 5. On decisions, Make twice as many decisions at half the precision. That's almost always better than the alternative. You'll never have perfect information and you don't need it. Make the call, move forward, course correct if you're wrong. You pay a far larger price for paralysis than for mistakes. For co-founder disputes, one simple rule: whoever cares more carries the decision. Deeper conviction wins. These ideas have shaped how we build Gamma and 1000s of others. Patrick Collison John Collison
Grant Lee1,106,909 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
Excited to introduce: Gamma 3.0 A generational leap for the world's most popular AI presentation tool. Two major changes: 1. Gamma Agent - with one prompt, you can make sweeping edits across the presentation. a. Say 'make it more visual' and it will scan each slide for data that could be visualized better. b. Upload a screenshot of rough notes you want to turn into a slide and it will synthesize the info, search the web to fill gaps, and make a table for you to match your brand or theme. 2. Gamma API Say you have a sales deck you want to reuse as a template. You could build a Zapier workflow to convert all of your meeting transcripts into personalized decks, automatically sent after every customer meeting. Bonus: We’re also launching Team & Business plans, bringing visual storytelling to organizations of all sizes, and a new Ultra plan for our power users looking to push the boundaries even further. PowerPoint has over a billion users, but the vast majority struggle to use it effectively. Why is that? Because making PPTs is still slow and tedious. We want Gamma to feel different. Our goal is to both lower the floor and raise the ceiling, so that anyone can get their ideas out there. Can’t wait to see what you make with 3.0.
Grant Lee2,353,423 Aufrufe • vor 8 Monaten
Had a special friend visit the office today, but he might’ve gotten too comfortable 😅
Grant Lee165,202 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
Two years ago, we made the biggest bet in Gamma's history. AI models were getting dramatically better, and we decided to rebuild our entire product around them. People thought we were crazy, we were a small team, pre-revenue, and we were essentially starting over. That bet took us from a few thousand users to 50+ million. From zero revenue to $100M ARR. It transformed how people create and share ideas. Now we're seeing the same kind of shift happening again. The world is going agentic and just like we went AI-first two years ago, we're now building Gamma for an agent-first world. Today we're launching the Gamma connector for Claude, in partnership with Anthropic. When Claude finishes a task for you (a research summary, a project plan, meeting notes) it can now hand you a Gamma presentation built from that work. Your thinking becomes something visual, polished, and ready to share. This is our first step. We believe that as agents become the way people get work done, every agent should be able to express ideas visually. We want Gamma to be the presentation layer for the agentic world. We're just getting started.
Grant Lee113,292 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
"This is just a GPT wrapper." A common thing to hear in Silicon Valley. Even Perplexity (now valued at $20B) was seen as a GPT wrapper not long ago. But everyone gets this wrong. Every new technology or service uses existing tech and infrastructure as a pillar. Companies like Uber could not have existed without Google Maps. But could Uber be called a Maps wrapper? There is no need to reinvent the stove if you want to start a restaurant. The job of a founder is to solve users' problems so effectively that they cannot imagine going back to the old way. "Maximum value for the user" is the mantra. Users hardly care what underlying technology is used. What they do care about is whether the output (text, code, slide, or image) was accurate and if the solution provided was useful. You need to use the best tech to get the work done. Companies might use a cheap, fast model for formatting, a reasoning model for logic, and a search index for retrieval. They route traffic intelligently in milliseconds. The "wrapper" analogy also assumes you are dependent on one vendor. However, strong application layers can swap models out, just like batteries can be replaced. Generic apps don't work. The winners are the ones who dig into the painful, boring details of a specific workflow. If a company integrates deep into the user workflow, it becomes infrastructure. The product gets entrenched through distribution, integrations, design, feedback loops, and trust. And you can only get there by leveraging all existing technology as best as possible to fix the problem you've set out to solve for users. "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants" - Newton
Grant Lee63,464 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten
I came across a fascinating idea in Lulu Cheng Meservey's podcast: The smartest defense against a competitor's attack comes from physics. If your startup is criticized, you would naturally want to strike back at the exact point of criticism. If they attack your pricing, you want to defend your pricing. If they attack a feature, you want to defend that feature. Resist that urge. Why does a needle puncture the skin while a finger doesn't, even with the same amount of force? This is because Pressure = Force / Surface Area (P = F/A). If the area increases, pressure diminishes. When a competitor attacks you, they are applying concentrated force to a tiny point. This creates maximum pressure. Only responding to that particular thing does not work. You have to increase the surface area. You do that by broadening the context. They aren't just questioning your sustainability, but challenging the environmental standards of every American company. The inverse is also true. When you are positioning yourself against an incumbent, the mistake is trying to win on every front. Pick one. Minimize the surface area to maximize pressure. Blockbuster had thousands of stores and offered same-day movie delivery. Netflix knew it couldn't compete there, so it didn't. Instead, Netflix attacked the one thing everyone hated: late fees. Blockbuster made around $800M a year from them, which made defending late fees pretty awkward. Netflix kept it simple: pay monthly, no late fees, movies come to you. They didn't need to beat Blockbuster at everything. They focused on the one thing people cared about. Just remember: >When you are defending yourself, widen the lens. >When you are attacking, sharpen the focus.
Grant Lee37,376 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten
Every unicorn started as someone's 'ridiculous idea'. Founders have this impossible mandate: convince brilliant people to trade safety for a statistical improbability. Without logic, without funding, without proof... just pure conviction in something that doesn't yet exist. When Chesky and Joe Gebbia pitched Airbnb in 2008, they met with wall-to-wall skepticism. Their pitch was: "Strangers sleeping in your home." It sounded delusional. But founders' conviction is a really powerful weapon. Say something crazy once, people will think you are crazy. Say it a million times, believing it, and people will believe it. Uber had to convince investors that "We'll replace Taxis (and fight every city government)." How do you even do that? But Kalanick had a hook that cut through the noise: "Your ride arrives in 3 minutes, you can see it coming on a map, and you don't need cash." Direct and simple to understand. Trust can be engineered through shared values, conviction and repetition. Focus just on that. "Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life—think of it, dream of it, live on that idea. Let the brain, muscles, nerves, every part of your body, be full of that idea, and just leave every other idea alone. This is the way to success" - Swami Vivekananda Every unicorn attracted rebels and brilliant people through deep conviction in the company's mission. And it'll continue to be this way.
Grant Lee23,976 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten
Gamma added 20 million users in the past year — still letting it sink in. WILD. It's been a whirlwind, to say the least. But numbers only tell part of the story. Let me take you behind the scenes of Gamma's growth: 1/ Solving real-life problems We didn't set out to hit an arbitrary user target. We focused on building something people actually need. Remember the dread of staring at a blank screen and overcoming the cold start? We worked to fix that. Our AI-powered platform lets you create stunning presentations, websites, and more quickly. No more late nights struggling to design and format something from scratch. 2/ Listening to our users Most of our latest features came from real user feedback. Like when a consultant told us she was spending hours converting old PowerPoints into Gamma. We built an import tool that does it in seconds. Or when a business owner said he needed a way to quickly update his pitch deck across multiple versions. We made that happen. 3/ Building with intention Growth is great, but not at ALL costs. We've stayed lean. No fancy offices or lavish parties. Just a dedicated team, many of whom I've worked with for years now, putting in the hours to build something extraordinary. 4/ Constant innovation We ship fast and often. In the past year alone, we've rolled out: Generate presentations, charts, and visuals Transform your existing work files Create and publish a website Next month, we're dropping some major updates that will redefine how people create and share ideas. 20 million users is amazing — we feel extremely grateful. But it's not the end goal. We're aiming to fundamentally change how people communicate and collaborate. To give everyone the tools to bring their ideas to life, regardless of their design skills or technical background. So yeah, it feels like we're just getting started. Because we are. Want to be part of what's next? We're always looking for passionate people to join us in building an entirely new way to create presentations, websites, and more. Check out our careers page if you're ready to help shape the future of creative work.
Grant Lee56,078 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr
Raw creativity is a gift some are born with. But technology can level the playing field. Today we're excited to release Gamma 1.0. AI text, visuals, and now images - together in one medium to boost your creativity. Sharing some of the first creations sent over by our users🧵
Grant Lee59,241 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren
Making an A+ website shouldn't be hard. But current tools are bulky, over-templatized, and fragile. So we started building something better for our users. Introducing: Gamma sites. Now, anyone can spin up a website and maintain it completely on their own. It’s like having your own AI design partner - no design or coding skills required. You can host it on our gamma(dot)site subdomain, or on the custom domain of your choice. And yes, all sites are: → Mobile friendly → SEO optimized → Easy to edit Come launch your portfolio, side hustle, project, course, and anything else you've been dreaming of. Publishing a site has never been easier with
Grant Lee45,314 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren
![Founders oftentimes don't know how to communicate properly. They don't realize that it's a superpower they can develop. Great communication: -turns crises into trust-building moments -flips criticism to your advantage You can bend reality in your favor using Lulu Cheng Meservey's tips: >Stories are better than stats. Human stories with real people and relatable problems get better traction and recall. It's not "the tragedy that left millions without a roof," it's "the tragedy that left Mary and her three children [picture] without a roof." >Founders matter, not spokespersons. Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank used to drive to Home Depot stores, take a group of associates to an office and talk. If they had let the message and philosophy spread by itself, it'd become amorphous. It's not "Bernie and Arthur think this," it's "we think this." >Let your inner circle tell you where you're wrong, or strangers will. Create a feedback loop before you broadcast. Your inner circle, the people who have context, care about you, and aren't afraid to challenge you, becomes your testing ground. >We're more convinced by people we like, and we like people that we trust. Identity plays a significant role in trust and how information is perceived. If you are not liked, what you say will not be taken at face value. There will be an automatic filter. The reverse is also true. >Use humor. Humor disarms. It signals confidence, intelligence, and that you don't take yourself too seriously. >Communicate for maximum impact. The main goal is not to communicate just for the sake of it, but help people understand. For your words to have impact, people need to attach their own emotions to them. You have to find the common ground where what you say collides with what they care about. This is from the amazing Shane Parrish podcast.](https://image.24vids.com/tw-2007493488074719563/amplify_video_thumb/2007493416163364865/img/i84UGefo6Cs3Qvae.jpg)
Founders oftentimes don't know how to communicate properly. They don't realize that it's a superpower they can develop. Great communication: -turns crises into trust-building moments -flips criticism to your advantage You can bend reality in your favor using Lulu Cheng Meservey's tips: >Stories are better than stats. Human stories with real people and relatable problems get better traction and recall. It's not "the tragedy that left millions without a roof," it's "the tragedy that left Mary and her three children [picture] without a roof." >Founders matter, not spokespersons. Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank used to drive to Home Depot stores, take a group of associates to an office and talk. If they had let the message and philosophy spread by itself, it'd become amorphous. It's not "Bernie and Arthur think this," it's "we think this." >Let your inner circle tell you where you're wrong, or strangers will. Create a feedback loop before you broadcast. Your inner circle, the people who have context, care about you, and aren't afraid to challenge you, becomes your testing ground. >We're more convinced by people we like, and we like people that we trust. Identity plays a significant role in trust and how information is perceived. If you are not liked, what you say will not be taken at face value. There will be an automatic filter. The reverse is also true. >Use humor. Humor disarms. It signals confidence, intelligence, and that you don't take yourself too seriously. >Communicate for maximum impact. The main goal is not to communicate just for the sake of it, but help people understand. For your words to have impact, people need to attach their own emotions to them. You have to find the common ground where what you say collides with what they care about. This is from the amazing Shane Parrish podcast.
Grant Lee10,964 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten
We launched AI image editing in Gamma. A feature this powerful deserves its own video. So I watched every Tom Cruise running clip I could find and we started filming. If you want to learn more or are simply interested in watching me run through the streets of San Francisco, please give it a watch and let us know what you think! (Fun fact: the sunglasses I’m wearing in the beginning were designed by me and handmade in Japan. A passion project that James Fox and I got to work on years before starting Gamma).
Grant Lee20,259 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr
Your brand isn't just a logo—it's the story you tell when you're not in the room. Today, we're releasing a mini-documentary about Gamma's rebrand journey, and I wanted to share why we invested in this evolution after 4 years with our original identity. Our original brand was created before we even had a product. It carried us from 0 to 50 million users. It grew with us from pre-revenue to cash flow positive. So why change something that clearly worked? Because we outgrew it. What started with 3 founders has blossomed into a tribe of 30 diverse, vibrant individuals. Our values have deepened. Our ambitions have expanded from presentations to websites, documents, and social media—becoming one place for all your ideas. I've come to understand that your brand should mirror both your culture and your product. As Marshall McLuhan said, "We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us." Working with the incredible team at Smith & Diction, we developed our new identity around a single core concept: "Get your ideas out there." Gamma isn't about creating overly finessed slides—it's about helping people express their ideas quickly, in exciting ways that feel almost magical. The rebranding process took over 6 months, with every decision grounded in this philosophy. We created a variable wordmark where letters change shape dramatically and can explode simultaneously—something none of us had ever seen before. Strong brands build deep associations with their users. When your product helps people tap into their imagination and create something unique, your brand should make them feel that same sense of possibility. We're excited to show you how our new brand was born and why we believe it matters. Get the full story here:
Grant Lee21,407 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr