00:27:27 · Jonathan Brebner
[00:27:27] S0: Everyone, like, has their own advice about starting companies. Right? And, you know, a lot of it gets turned into content on various platforms. Right? Like, people become LinkedIn influencers or, I mean, every investor has their own... You know? Like, I go on and on about storytelling and stuff like that. I often find myself wondering how much of it is that, the meme of the plane with, like, all the bullet holes through it. Yeah. Survivorship. But... No. Yeah. Exactly. Survivorship bias stuff. Are there any things that you have come to believe are like... Actually, no. This is... This kind of conventional wisdom is not in that category. This is actually very important. And then are any where you're like, I don't know. That that seems, like, very kind of arbitrary or specific to certain types of companies.
00:28:07 · Grant Lee
[00:28:07] S1: Yeah. I mean, we're obviously all biased to, like, what's worked for us. And I can't imagine trying to build Gamma without my two cofounders. And I think what helped us succeed, you know, early on and in in through today is we have very complementary skill sets. We love spending time together. And like when you work on things, it feels like play. Like, it just feels energizing. And even... I I think we we didn't really know that until we started tinkering early on. This is pre fundraise. It's just like, okay, let's spend some nights and weekends building this, you know, prototype. No stakes. Like, if it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out, we don't owe investors back any money. It's just like, hey, let's spend... Let's invest our own time and energy. And fortunately, that time and energy was one where, like, every time we got together, was like, I was super excited. And it's this moment of you work with somebody and they're, you have this moment of it's like the yes and, right? Like, you'll throw an idea out there and be like, oh, yeah, that's cool. What if also that and... And then you keep on building on one on one another. And like, for us that was from day one. And so when we came down to like, we have this working prototype, it was like obvious, we're gonna go try to raise money because we really wanna do this thing. And I I would just encourage people like, as you're in the tinkering phase, yeah, just give yourself permission to find people where you do feel that click, where time spent together feels energizing. And ultimately if you were to envision yourself like four or five years down the road, having spent all this time and energy working on this thing and let's just say it didn't work out, would you feel like it was, just like a like a complete waste of time? You know? Like, can you imagine like having spent five years and it all just not doing... Like, gone nowhere? And for me, I felt like it was absolutely worth the bet because time together with them, I think would have been... Just made us stronger and better at just product building in general. And I think I would have come through through on the other side just being, you know, a better, builder in general. And so, like, for me, was a no brainer.
00:30:03 · Jonathan Brebner, Grant Lee, S2
[00:30:03] S0: That's probably conventional wisdom that is actually very right. Like, you should enjoy spending time with your co... Because you're... Yeah. That's gonna be miserable if [00:30:12] S1: you don't. If you don't. Yeah. But but I think being honest with yourself is is is important. And so not not trying to rush into that, giving yourself a little time to tinker and play before you, you know, go all in on something, think is, you know, something to... For us, I think would have made a big difference. [00:30:27] S0: Alright. I think that's a great note to end on. I appreciate you joining us at, you know, if you haven't used Gamma, what... What's wrong with you? Go use it. It's... It'll help you be a better storyteller. Right? I shouldn't say that. I shouldn't say what's wrong. You should go use this this great thing, that, a very, very great, team is building. And so we do have a couple minutes just for questions if you guys have any. [00:30:50] S2: Hey. Yeah. I I love Gamma. My first experience of using Gamma was also magical. I was like, woah. This is way closer to what I was imagining than I thought. It felt, when I first used it, very much as a consumer product, and there is a lot of consumer growth that you talked about. I'm very curious how you're now thinking about balancing Gamma as an enterprise tool versus continuing to invest in kind of consumer growth and virality and what's the balance there?
00:31:15 · Grant Lee
[00:31:15] S1: Great question. You know, for us, we felt like prosumer was going to be, you know, our initial entry point, but our ambition is to build, you know, new standards. So if we're gonna, you know, become a new standard, for sure businesses have to be using us as well. So, we've just started the sort of b two b motion for us. And we knew what we wanna do on the prosumer side is start building a brand that, has general, you know, broad awareness. People can recognize it, can start trusting it. And internally within a company, you start building up bottoms up love. You have individuals that have their individual accounts, and they're all using it. And when, you know, IT or HR or procurement is asking, like, which tool should we explore? There's already a pocket of users that love the product. And so that's given us a a... Now a chance to actually go in, have these b to b conversations, go much bigger, start expanding. And so we're early in that... The sort of that journey, but for sure, sort of prosumer is the core growth engine that leads to a lot of the sort of top of the funnel for the b to b. And, and then we also have our API business, which is pretty new. API business also overlaps a lot with businesses and, you know, businesses, you might have end users using the product, but you also might have teams, like go to market teams that want to automate a lot of content creation. And so they're both leveraging the API as well as end users using the product on a daily basis. And so for us, yeah, we really feel like all three prosumer b two b API can work pretty well together as, like, a, you know, cohesive unit.
00:32:44 · Jonathan Brebner, Grant Lee, S3
[00:32:44] S0: The ultimate goal is to take down PowerPoint and slides. You gotta eventually [00:32:48] S1: Yeah. [00:32:48] S0: You gotta go after the the last readout of of... Anyway. [00:32:54] S3: Grant, thank you for doing this. So our ten year anniversary at SPC is coming up soon. And as we kinda both reflect back and kinda plan for the future, I'm curious, what would you tell SPC to think about for its next decade? Like, what are we doing well? What could we do better? What's your feedback, and what are your future requests? [00:33:16] S1: Yeah. That's a great question. I think one thing that's just always been obviously valuable and important is just that this notion of community and bringing the community together. I do think like even for myself, I studied mechanical engineering, but for most of my career, was like on the finance and operations track, so more of a non technical background. And I do think, you know, this is gonna be an age of many startups be... You know, can be built by people that maybe don't have traditional backgrounds and maybe they're still... You know, you can... In my case, meaning two technical cofounders and working really well together. So how do you be... Bring people from very different walks of life that might be domain experts in in a specific area that can partner really well and and and again, in our case, have complementary skill sets that together can build something special. And, yeah, I think there's opportunity for this community to represent some of that and and to kinda bring those folks together in a in a deeper level.
00:34:08 · Jonathan Brebner
[00:34:08] S0: Awesome. Alright. We'll do one more. First off, awesome podcast. Appreciate it. Second off, I I obviously saw your background. Clearly, you have a background in finance. I think there are a lot of really cool AI companies today that are sort of touting crazy ARR metrics. Sorry. You guys are one of the very few that outwardly said, hey. Like, we're profitable. Did you think about unit economics and things like this sort of intrinsically based on your sort of finance background, or how did that sort of come into play? Was that thought of or just sort of the case of what happened?