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

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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