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?
00:06:49 · Grant Lee, Jonathan Brebner
[00:06:49] S1: It was one of the core ideas from the beginning, but I would say it wasn't necessarily the core idea that led to the initial inflection point in terms of growth and usage. Mhmm. We did have the... You know, this notion of if we can make it, you know, more malleable, mobile friendly, all those things. We thought that was going to be important, but what really mattered to our early users was the fact that you could create stuff effortlessly. It was really really fast. You don't have design skills, you don't have design background, design resources, but you can still go in and create something that looked professional and worthy of sharing. And, you know, for us, it was a good learning moment that, you know, sometimes, you know, you have a list of things that you think are value props, you just show it to the world and let the world tell you what's actually useful. [00:07:30] S0: Yeah. They they look at, 90% of it, they're like, I really don't... I just see the one thing, they're like, oh, what about that? [00:07:35] S1: Totally. And you will never know really until you kinda get it out there. [00:07:38] S0: Yeah. So if I recall correctly, early on, there was another pretty well funded competitor in the space. Great. Right? And in fact, they sort of, like, raced out to just kind of a a crazy funding lead. Right? They had a bunch of, like, top tier investors on their cap table. [00:07:51] S1: Right.
00:07:51 · Grant Lee, Jonathan Brebner
[00:07:51] S1: Right. [00:07:52] S0: And they either don't exist anymore or pivot away, to something else completely. I'm not so interested in, like, the the sort of specific details of, like, oh, what what were the things that you did different, than that company? But I am interested in, like, the psychology of it. Right? Because you you have remained... I mean, even up until now, but but especially in those early years, you were very lean. Right. Right? And to be kind of a lean team in a world where there's this, like, you know... So, like, investors were trying to king make. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Were there specific ways that you kind of thought about that, or were you actually just trying to, like, tune it out?