00:02:10 · Jonathan Brebner, Grant Lee
[00:02:10] S0: So to be clear, the opportunity was take on PowerPoint. Right? I get... You you were saying it... An incumbent with great distribution PowerPoint. Sort of underselling it. And Google Slides. Yeah. But And Google Slides. Right. Yeah. Like, yeah. Talking about, like, built in distribution there. Exactly. Office and and, Google Suite. Yeah. What led to you... I'm very interested in the mechanics of how people discover or decide on the thing that they actually wanna go and build. What was the process that led up to being like, yeah, PowerPoint. Let's kill PowerPoint slides. [00:02:40] S1: Yeah. In many ways, there was a, maybe a problem I've been thinking about for a long time. So I started my career in investment banking and consulting. Lived many A lot of slides. Late nights Yeah. Living in slides, editing slides, formatting slides, and even then just having the feeling like [00:02:57] S0: You dream in slideshows, don't you?
00:02:57 · Jonathan Brebner, Grant Lee
[00:02:57] S0: You dream in slideshows, don't you? [00:02:58] S1: Yeah. Dreaming in slideshow, why am I spending so much time formatting and trying to design the thing rather than the content itself? So, you know, that, know, obviously slides as a format has been a medium for communication throughout my career and after the last startup I was... I was acquired, I went back into advising early stage startups. I was using Google Slides as how I'd communicate to my clients and just had the same frustration. One late night trying to prepare for a big meeting the next day, getting all my ideas onto, you know, this canvas and again spending 90% of the time, you know, formatting the deck rather than actually working on the content, the structure, the story And, that tipping point was, okay. You asked them the question, like, what if there's a better way? [00:03:42] S0: Okay. So I guess it sort of makes sense, especially having come from, like, if you were doing anything consulting or... I mean, you went through and and had been living in slides for, like, your whole career. But at that point, you had to also convince people to come and join you. Right? So your founding team is is sort of like getting the band back together a little bit. Right. You you...
00:03:42 · Jonathan Brebner, Grant Lee
[00:03:42] S0: Okay. So I guess it sort of makes sense, especially having come from, like, if you were doing anything consulting or... I mean, you went through and and had been living in slides for, like, your whole career. But at that point, you had to also convince people to come and join you. Right? So your founding team is is sort of like getting the band back together a little bit. Right. You you... [00:04:00] S1: Can you tell us a little more about that? Optimizely. Yeah. So, you know, my two cofounders and I, we worked together for five plus years at another startup called Optimizely. And that's where, you know, we became friends, we worked together, we've had talked about maybe someday trying to do something together. And yeah, early on when it was just me with the idea, you know, they're the first two I called and we, you know, decided, hey, what if we just allowed ourselves some time to tinker in the space, come up with some prototypes, what might it look like if we try to reimagine the way people present their ideas? And after about four or five months of tinkering, that gave us a first chance of actually creating a working prototype, something we can use ironically in this case to actually pitch our idea. So we used instead of Google Slides, we used the prototype of Gamma to pitch the idea of Gamma and try to raise our initial round of funding. [00:04:50] S0: Yeah. I remember I was chatting with, Evan, one of the other investing partners here. [00:04:54] S1: He was the first track in.
00:04:54 · Grant Lee, Jonathan Brebner
[00:04:54] S1: He was the first track in. [00:04:55] S0: And he mentioned that, yeah, I mean, you used the product in the pitch for the product. Right. How good was the product at the time? Or how much of it were you sort of like, you don't don't pay attention to this part. No. No. No. This is what I want you to... Where were... Were you hiding bits of it? Or or
00:05:08 · Grant Lee
[00:05:08] S1: Yeah. I mean, it definitely wasn't a truly usable product, but I think it captured the spirit of what we're going after, which is we weren't trying to be better than PowerPoint, but we were trying to be fundamentally different. And so for us being different was better than being better. We wanted to approach it with a new lens. What would the primitives look like if we could embrace the way people, you know, were working today, rather than sitting in the front of the same screen, like same projector, so many of us can consume information on our phones or different devices. So we knew we wanted something that could be, you know, mobile friendly by default, it could be interactive, it could be multimedia rich. And all that came through in the prototype. You can go through it, you can click on things, really have control around like information density, and really build and navigate in ways that just aren't possible with a traditional slide deck. I do think the the prototype, even though it's pretty rudimentary, conveyed a lot of those concepts. And even in a very short demo, I can show you that, yeah, maybe our long term direction doesn't look exactly like this, but we're going to take a fundamentally different approach to to this category. Yeah.
00:06:10 · Jonathan Brebner
[00:06:10] S0: You you identified something that was significantly different enough, kind of a core thesis about how this is different than PowerPoint. The... It's interesting that, you know, you bring up the bit about kind of mobile and the, like, adaptability of the form. Obviously, like, if you use Gamma now, that's one of the most notable things about it is how kind of seamlessly it reformats things to whatever kind of size screen you're using. And it's just... It's meant to make it very, very easy to just port whatever you're trying to communicate to whatever platform you have to do it on. Was that the kind of core idea from the beginning, or was that one that you were sort of tinkering around being like, there has to be something better? And then you finally got on this thing, and you're like, why... I can't, like, just, like, do this with my Yeah. You know, like, static slide or... You know?