YouSaid · the spoken record

Grant Lee

lines on the record: 116
first: 2025-11-13
most recent: 2025-11-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, so you can find me on both Twitter and LinkedIn. DM's open. I honestly hear just knowing how hard the journey is in general, whether just thinking about a startup idea or you're deep into startup land, I want to be hopefully helpful. I'm going to be here.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, we'll go back to the consumer advertising concept, which is one idea at a time. So this notion of you give them one egg, someone can catch it, give them too many eggs, they're going to drop it. So don't try to throw too many concepts all at once, keep it simple. People will appreciate it. And so with every sort of presentation, like break it down into the core concepts, try to make sure you're covering one at a time. And I think once you sort of see the through line there, then it becomes easy for it to package up into something that feels more cohesive.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is vast. It's your opportunity to seize it. Like, you have to go out there, don't have a narrow view of what's possible. Always dream bigger. And so for me, that's always carried through. And every time I feel like I'm thinking too little or too small, I try to zoom out and remind myself that there's much more out there to go after.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so there's this Chinese idiom that my mom used to say. It's Jean Deed Zua, which the translation is frog at the bottom of a well. And the story is like there's a frog at the bottom of the well. He looks up every night and he sees the world and he imagines he knows everything about the world. And then one day a bird comes along and describes all the things that he sees, the ocean, the mountains, and the frog realizes that what he sees is just such a limited part of the world and you know the bird asks like, do you want to come join me and kind of see the rest of it? And so frog goes long. And so for me, you know, I came from a pretty modest childhood. My parents, we didn't have a whole lot. And I think it would have been very easy to kind of have a very narrow kind of lens on the world and be like, oh, this is what it is. But my mom never allowed me to do that. She always pulled me to dream much bigger to say, hey, the world.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mentioned this already voice panel. So again, a full disclosure angel investor, but we've been using it. And going back to kind of being a cheat code for folks that are starting to experiment a ton with different ideas, vibe coding, maybe some of these, get this into the hands of users, hear what they think about it. I think it honestly can help speed up a lot of things and save you time from wasting time on kind of the wrong ideas or ideas where there's no market.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the Lazarus project is one. I'm a huge sucker for time travel and sci-fi. So this is one I just started watching. And for me, it has like all the right ingredients for a fun show.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And kind of hit new milestones yourself, and so much of that can be both tactical but also like zooming out and thinking about what are the big picture strategic questions you as a founding team need to be thinking about. So both are great.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is written by Phil Knight, founder of Nike. And he talks about two things like one, you should chase your sort of crazy ideas. But these should be ideas you're passionate about. He was an athlete. And so not surprisingly, he focused a lot about creating tools or shoes in this case for other athletes and was passionate about that. And the second thing he taught me was going back to the team thing. He surrounded himself with other people that were super passionate about athletics and shoes as well. And so the folks that he had as his initial startup crew were all that. And I think that gives you a chance of overcoming a ton where you're focused on problems you actually care about solving. You're dealing with a team that shares the same ambition as you post-product market fit. There's a book called Seven Powers by Hamilton Helmer where I think when you think about how to build a durable business, there's so much in there. I think there's a lot that you can kind of read and reread as you kind of open.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I'll give one that's for pre product market fit, folks, and the one post product. Pre-product market fit, I would say, is shoe dog.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, just going back to the original story of that was probably the ultimate low point, you know, having an investor that spent 20 minutes listening to my pitch telling me that it was the worst thing, worst idea in the world. I think throughout the journey, there's going to be those low moments. And when I think about being a founder and working as a startup, you're honestly just trying to increase your luxuriance area as much as possible. And for me, luxurface area has two dimensions. The first dimension is people. Who are you surrounding yourself with that share your same ambition, share the same values, same principles, and find those people and then give yourself enough time to prove that you guys can accomplish great things. I'm lucky to have two amazing co-founders. We've been working on this thing for five years. There's 0% chance we'd be where we are if I didn't have them. And we've had to overcome a lot, but I guess for us.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And many that were just chasing, maybe just a big outcome were like something shiny or like something to feel good about themselves, they'll go off and then the company, you know, I guess doesn't live on or maybe has to find a different way or different path. And so, you know, something I admire is like you look at some of the founders, obviously, before the sort of AI era, you know, folks like Dylan or Melanie, Figma, Canva, you know, Ivan at Notion, they've been doing this for over a decade now. They had many chances to just leave and sunset off into doing whatever they wanted to do, but they care so much about the mission. They've stuck it through. And I think when you're talking to candidates, candidates can kind of tell like, is this something like the founders even care about? And I think you're going to have a better chance of attracting true missionaries, people that want to build with you for the long haul if it's authentic and it's something you actually care about.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, there's some of these intangibles, which is for the founding team, does this feel like this could be your life's work? Like when you're pitching a potential candidate, does this feel like something where you're actually committed? The unfortunate side of a lot of the, you know, what's happening in the AI.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where you can just throw almost anything at them and they'll figure it out. That feels that for you know you as a team just feels great because then they get what they find rewarding, which is the ability to go after hard, hairy problems and to be able to come out throughout their end feeling like they've accomplished something. And I think that for us has always been something that goes beyond just almost everything else. We give people a chance to really thrive in this environment and we try to nurture that as much as humanly possible every step of the way.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, this starts top of the funnel, which is like you meet candidates, you decide who you actually hire. And so if you don't start with a high bar there, going back to what is the goal, the goal is to hit a hiring target versus maintaining super high quality hiring bar, those are different goals. And I don't think we've ever kind of dropped our bar. And so then you bring somebody in that you think is exceptional, that brings something unique to the table that can be a good teammate when they're thriving, you just give them more and more resources. I think what you realize, you know, another sports analogy is like, you know, when you're on an A team, for instance, or a team that you feel like is exceptional, A players want actually more playing time. Like you never see a star player that says, actually, I want less playing time. They want more time on the field. They want to actually go after the hardest problems. They want to be able to feel like they're making a huge impact. And so if you have fewer exceptional teammates,”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think, I mean, just one thing to add is like, you know, that's for where we are at today. I think being adaptable means that certain things may evolve and change. And how the player coach model evolves, maybe in certain functions or as a team scales, like that's not going to be practical everywhere. I think the reality is you just have to know and be willing to kind of adopt different frameworks over time and like being honest with yourself with what's working, what's not. I think we're constantly trying to learn and evolve ourselves because I think we're doing it in a way that we don't believe really has been done before. And so we have to kind of pave our own path over time.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So both of those, I think, have been, you know, when I think about founders, they oftentimes think about innovation in the sense like we're going to innovate on products or innovate on technology. I think every founder today has a chance to innovate on org design. And that starts by just thinking about what is the type of company we want to build today? What does it mean when it comes to the management later? What sort of leaders do we hire? What does it mean when it comes to hiring specific roles and specific functions? All that is a chance for you to be very thoughtful and build a company that you're excited to be at for hopefully many, many years to come.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They still do the end work themselves, and they can mentor and coach those around them. This analogy came from, or this mindset came from something I bought from just the sports world in general, because there's a lot of sports that just move incredibly fast, like football, for instance. It moves really, really fast. And so you might have a coach that's calling into play, but the quarterback can actually make a last minute adjustment based on what he's seeing the defense do, right? And so you want a player that is on the field that can adapt as needed. And that way the coach doesn't have to call every single thing in. He's just kind of giving you the general intent of what you want to run as the play. And then the quarterback can still make the adjustments. And so all of our people leaders, our management layer is all folks that actually can make those adjustments. If they're seeing something that doesn't feel right on a daily or weekly basis, they're kind of adjusting priorities for that team. And they're still doing the work themselves too. They're so close to it. They understand what is the relative prioritization at all times.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In certain areas. And this is where, like, for instance, going back to influencer marketing, you might work with an agency rather than kind of scale up your own influencer marketing team. You work with a hyper-specialized team there. But my marketing team is all generalists. Our head of marketing more recently launched this cool drone show in San Francisco. We have like 4,000 people in San Francisco come, the Mary came by. She created that entire project and managed that entire project end to Henna herself, right? While also managing the entire marketing team. And so it's like this idea that a generalist is able to play all these different roles, can still be super high impact. For us, it also goes hand in hand with, I mentioned sort of this other role, which is the player coach. Traditional management layer is like a manager manages a ton of people, and that's kind of their core focus. All of our people leaders are player coaches in that.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This very much feels like the age of the generalist or the rise of the generalist right now. When we think about a team that can be really flat, you want people that can, you still want people that can be very spiky in certain areas. So for instance, obviously, you know, a product designer that knows how to code, that's great. It allows you to actually span across many different domains. And again, an organization that's super flat, when you're wearing a lot of different hats, that means every individual, if you're a generalist, you can wear by default a lot of different hats. And that's helped us just maintain this idea that the work, you know, the opportunity in front of us, it can easily expand. Each person plays a huge role. They don't need to wait and ask for permission. They can go after and pick up a piece of work because it's there and they can at least get it started even if they're not the one that always sees it through. And so for us, I do think this rise of the generalist is going to be important. You can always augment that by working with contractors or agencies that are hyper specialized.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of founders think about not wanting to have a leaky bucket on the product side, but the same thing applies on the team size. As you're adding the next 10 and next hundred, you're actually replicating the same DNA and not actually just adding a bunch of random people to the company.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is we want everybody that comes through the door and joins our team to really be the type of person that represents gamma. Our first 10 to 12 employees, we spent so much time really getting the DNA right. I think Brian Chesky talks about this. Like your goal is like you get that first 10 and you want to be able to then replicate the next 10 and then replicate the next 10. But that 10 needs to be all super cohesive. You need to have the shared same shared values, same principles, same ambitions, same vision. And if you don't, then like, what are you even replicating? At that point, you're just adding headcount and you can easily just be adding headcount because they're chasing the next shiny startup to join. And so for us, we really focused on that first 10. That allows us to really have this sort of community of like a teammates that basically want to stick around.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we actually, I mean, we obviously look at things like revenue employee booting. We never let that be the sort of North Star. It's not something that dictates our strategy per se. Same thing with like profitability. I think by being efficient, like that ends up becoming like a side effect of, yeah, we are profitable and growing. But I think for us more is like we care a ton about adding the right team members. So it's easy. You can almost sort of shoot yourself in the foot as a founder by just setting the wrong goals. If your goal is to double and headcount and like add 100 people to the company, then that becomes the goal, right? The goal is no longer to add the best people. It's no longer to maintain a high quality bar. The goal is to hit 100 people and that's everything everyone's focused on. So then guess what? If that's the goal, then the thing that ends up dropping is, okay, maybe we'll settle for employees that are good enough. And we're going to make sure we get to that 100 because 100 is going to help us get to the next phase of growth and the next phase of growth. And I think we've tried to resist that temptation.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so we had this mantra internally, even before the sort of AI launch for us, which was higher painfully slowly. And I think the temptation is once things start working, you just start blitz scaling this thing and start adding more and more headcount. And for us, that always, I don't know, they didn't feel right. We wanted to build the team very thoughtfully, be lean, but also be a team that every individual feels like they have an amount of impact that they can have on a daily basis. And so for us, yeah, that was from sort of the very beginning. And so even as we've scaled up, I think we've been super efficient by nature of just being a very lean team.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally. Yeah. Within a couple months, we had hit a million in ARR and became profitable. And so those are both two exciting milestones for a company that months prior were, you know, heads down figuring out how we even survive.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we also didn't have a choice because at that point, runway was also low, you know, so it's like if we weren't making money, well, you know, we would actually be in a tough spot”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, that's one hard. I think you never want to obviously just throw something together without giving it much thought. But for us, with limited resources, we focused on the only thing we thought mattered, which was getting some initial users and having that organic growth. And I think there's maybe like two checkpoints of thinking about whether or not you feel like you have product market fit. I think one checkpoint is organic growth. The second is are people willing to pay for the product. And I think if you pass both those, you feel like you've at least within some pocket of the market, you have some PMF. So I think those are both important questions to ask depending on your resources. Ideally, you can do kind of both an experiment a little bit along at the same time. And then by the time you actually have paying users, you sort of check some of those boxes for yourself.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Did use that. We did kind of integrate some Realizing that, yes, like actually at that price point, we could still generate pretty good margins and that would allow us to reinvest that profit back into growing the business, continue to add, you know, obviously headcount, but then also investing even more into inference costs, whatever we wanted to do to experiment broadly with AI. And so we've always had that like, you know, pricing and packaging doesn't not only need to be easy to understand for a user. Obviously, you have to have strong conversion rates, but it should be something where you feel like you could build an enduring, durable business off of. And if it's not right, then you can always go back and try to tweak things, but it's something you should be monitoring as early as possible.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so we kind of stumbled into having to do pricing and packaging. I mentioned our bake AI launch in March 2023. This was pre-revenue. So we wanted just to focus all of our effort on the first 30 seconds, literally all hands on deck, just trying to get that right. And we spent zero time on actually monetization. So we had a credit system. All the users get 400 credits. Once they burned through those credits, there was actually nothing more you could do with AI. It kind of just got cut off. And so Intercom for us was just blowing up with people saying, how do I purchase more credits? Like, I want to keep using this thing in a very fair question. So basically all of April, we ended up having to do a quick, you know, sort of pricing and packaging exercise. We did a couple different things. We did run a form of Van Wessen Dorp, which is just understanding what is the overall willingness to play, what willingness to pay. And so we.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Early on, things like creating the outline perplexity was actually great, you know, not one that people talk about as often, but creating the outline and doing web search and actually integrating some of those elements together for us was pretty powerful.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think surprising or not surprising, the leaderboard is constantly changing. And so this is where you almost have to have the mindset that you can be adaptable. We're just getting to the point where there's going to be more personalization too is going back to like, you know, a consultant's going to have different needs than an educator. If an educator is trying to engage their students, they may want to have language or visuals that are more animated. And that makes sense. Consultant can't get away with that. They may need something that is much more structured or information dense. And so again, like how do we actually be the same tool that can serve both of those needs? I think that's where it becomes interesting. And it's almost like there isn't necessarily even a quote-unquote best model. It's like, what's the right model for that particular user? That's also a much harder problem to solve and we're just starting to embrace some of that now.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally, yeah. And it applies to, you know, even on the visual side, finding the right image. I think certain models are great at photorealistic output versus others want more of the artistic vibe or like, you know, something that feels more abstract. And so again, you can choose the right model for the right job. It doesn't mean that you'll never use other models. It's just like as you're going through that workflow, the content might dictate what's the best use case in that particular use case. And so you're always trying to map to that. What is the end user trying to accomplish in that certain moment?”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Out again, like every model might be better served for different things. And so knowing how that actually breaks down into the end user sitting down, working on the product, working on their presentation, how do you help them? I think you can only do that by understanding that workflow and then breaking that down into finding the right tool for the right job.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so going back to the workflow, you know, you're trying to go and break down every step of the creation process for a user. So the moment of the initial idea to maybe creating an outline of what you want to present or articulate to creating the first draft, like what do we show you there to editing the content? Like, okay, I have a first draft, but it's only 60% of the way there. How do I get it to 100% of the way there? Those are all things that might require different models. Like the initial outline might be better served by something that's purpose built for actually creating the best outline, the best narrative, the best story arc versus one where you're actually going back and saying, you know, gamma, our agent can actually go and review your entire deck and say, actually, if I were to add suggestions, I would say, you know, you may want to change the visual layout on these set of cards. And you may want to actually change the imagery or the visuals for these cards to match everything else.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Visual communication. That was sort of our North Star. And then you go back into thinking okay, every step of the way, what are the tools and technology I can apply to help solve that and actually move the average person closer to that long-term vision of ours? And of course, AI has been, again, like this gift where, yes, you can apply that to solving this job. You can also apply that AI to many different jobs, figure out what is the problem you care deeply enough to go deep. Because going back to this sort of idea, like you need to own the sort of end-to-end workflow. A customer needs to have you, like you want you to live, you want your product to live in their brain somewhere where when they think about, hey, I have to create a presentation, they come to you as the default tool. And the moment they start creating it to the moment they ship it and send it to their boss, that end-to-end experience needs to feel magical, needs to feel great. And I don't think you can really do that unless it's actually a workflow. You either know deeply yourself or you care deeply to actually help solve.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But before you do that, you should think about is this a problem I can invest five to ten years into actually solving? Do I care deeply enough about it? Because if you can't, you're never going to go sort of actually think about overcoming the variety of different hurdles, whether it's other startups or other incumbent tools that are trying to start doing the same thing. And so for us, we go back to we've started this company because we really care about helping change the way people communicate their ideas. We really feel like this idea of like visual communication, visual storytelling matters. It helps elevate everybody and it gives people much more opportunity to do the things that, you know, in the past, if you weren't great at making slides, your ideas might have died and someone else that was able to actually articulate their ideas better ended up winning the deal or winning the favor of their manager or their boss. And so we felt like that was a wrong, that didn't feel right. And so could we help democratize visual storytelling?”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think the most important thing is before we even talk about the technology, we're skipping to the part where you're trying to apply the most interesting models or technology to solve some problem. Start with solving the problem you actually care about. I think it's very tempting right now to chase Chinese objects. Like a founder might be able to gain some initial traction by literally being that GPT route.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Communication, visual storytelling. And the default tool today is going into like a PowerPoint or a Google slides where the amount of effort to create something, we've all been there late at night trying to format a deck, trying to find the right layout, all this manual and tedious work. Well, what if you could abstract all that away and give them something that feels a little bit more delightful, a little bit easier, much more effortless, what would that earn you in terms of a customer that wants to come back to your product? And so that's everything we focus on is like you need to go deep into the workflow, be empathetic to the user and their job that you're trying to solve. And of course apply the best technology possible so that you're delivering on that promise about product experience that's way better than the status quo. And I think if you can be laser focused on it, it doesn't matter if you're a rapper or not. What is the technology you're doing in applying that makes a real difference? So that's the ultimate goal.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you think about maybe just literally only being a wraparound or one provider, yeah, maybe there's only limited amount of utility or value add. But then when you start thinking about, okay, I'm going to go really deep into this one workflow. And it's not just one model, it's maybe 20 plus models powering all different parts of the product. And then you think about the orchestration that's required. And you're thinking about, obviously, if you're experimenting constantly being able to test across the newest models versus models that have been around that are cheaper. You're doing a lot to really, your job is to, again, like align value, maximize the value you're delivering to the end user in a way that's sustainable for you as a business. And so there's a lot more to that. And so for us, we've always been passionate about being very close to our customers, our users, who for them, their job to be done is visual.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so for us, we made that investment in the very beginning, even if it was counter to what other startups would do, because we actually felt like it was the right thing.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally, yeah. And just going back to one part of the team part of that plays a huge role, which is you want to build a product, you know, where people talk about taste and brand and all these things. Are they emote? I'm not going to kind of throw in whether or not yes or no, but I do think it makes a difference. And for us at some point, more than a quarter of a team or about a quarter of our team was product designers. And I think that's like a unsort of unintuitive level of investment or at least that's not common like you don't see many startups like on our stage or early stage of the team's product designers. And I think that was an important investment for us because when you think about with AI companies, so many companies are trying to invent new surface areas or new user experiences. And that's not possible if you're not really getting the foundation right, really thinking deeply about user problems and how can you solve them in a novel way.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things that you're sharing broadly, but it is kind of core to our DNA. And again, going back to a team that came from Optimize, probably not surprising, but I do think that's been part of our sort of ability to actually execute at this level.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do you construct a team like ours and what I think has worked? And then, too, going back to experimentation being this sort of thing where for us has been a huge unlock, right? Because it allows you to not only test things and like, you know, iterate a ton, it allows you to build much more efficiently. And so we've been in a startup where we've had great unit economics from the very beginning. We run profitably. We have really strong margins. I don't think that would be possible if experimentation was in kind of core infrastructure to us because the temptation would be you just throw the most expensive model at every job and assume that's going to work. And the reality is that never is the case. And so for us to be able to actually test across 20 different models in production today, always trying to align kind of value we're delivering to our customers with our ability to actually scale this operation. That's been at the sort of in the background and not always things that are easily quantifiable or”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Certainly for us, the ability to sort of adapt and move fast in this environment, I attribute a lot of what we've been able to accomplish a few things. One is we do have a small team and a lean team, one that's able to move really fast. I think that means by default, we have to look for a lot of levers where a small team can do a lot of different things. So we're going to talk one, you know, obviously about like.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of always competing against what we thought was something we'd never be able to surpass, which is in real life experience. Like actually being able to work shoulder to shoulder with her colleagues and having this environment where you really feel like you're building together, like virtual office could get pretty good, but it would never beat that. And so we were almost like limited in our own imagination about how good could this product be versus the presentation product, we ended that with like a million more ideas we thought we could actually introduce that could be better than how you work in PowerPoint today. We were just so energized by it. And so for us, that was like, you know, this sort of AP test of like testing these two things that we invested equally amount of equal amount of time into and coming out at the other end realizing that one was going to be the product we poor sort of all of our blood, sweat and tears into making it great because we saw the potential in it.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we actually had two different ideas. We were parallel pathing kind of at the same time. So of course we had presentations, reimagining how people were creating presentations. And we also actually had the separate idea, which we called the lobby, which is a virtual office. This is a place where, you know, this is, again, peak pandemic, much more hybrid work, much more virtual work. And so this was a place where everybody on the team, whether you're in the same office or not, could gather, collaborate. It would feel pretty magical. And we worked on both for six months. We worked on both the virtual office and the presentation product for six months. Dog food both. So oftentimes we'd be in the virtual office presenting the presentation tool and kind of use both. And after six months, we came to this conclusion that we wanted to go all in on the presentation tool. And the reason was when we looked at the virtual office tool, we were”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I really think it's more of the mindset you go into almost any problem or opportunity is the saying of strong opinions, weakly held. I think it's totally fine to have like some of these assumptions or like hypotheses going into a lot of these things, but you should always know that there's a way to start trying to validate some of this. As a founder, you're always trying to build conviction. And so you build conviction by not having it all live in your head, but getting it out there and start testing this with users, prospect, customers, and starting to see what are the things that actually feel right. And sometimes you have enough data to be statistically significant. Sometimes it's more of a, hey, we at least were able to gut check this a little bit and get some qualitative feedback. I think that's still valuable. It shouldn't be this sort of like all or nothing like, oh, it has to be stat sig for it to be useful. I don't think that's true. In fact, I'll just share kind of the very early story of, you know, when we first started Gamma, we knew we wanted to help change the way people communicate.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think any of the ones where we, you know, we always try to chunk it down. So none of the things we're testing earlier on are like these massive features. They're always an inception or like a starting point of like, this could be something interesting. And then we take that initial learning and actually then build the product around it. It's never like, oh, we spent four months working on this thing. Let's see if anybody actually wants it. It's almost like we always start super early and there are a bunch of ideas die right away, but they're still pretty small ideas. And then the ones that kind of passed the initial test, you start building towards something that could be hopefully more game-changing or much more value add. And by the time you're actually shipping, like you've gone through 10 different layers of actually testing and iteration before it actually sees the light of day.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think this is even more probably helpful for certainly a lot of folks that are starting to do much with vibe-coded apps. Like, yeah, that's great. You've lowered the amount of time to get something out there now prove that it's useful to some set of users. And this should be, again, like every day, every week, you should be able to go through a ton of these and then build on the things that seem to be working. I feel like that's almost like a way to speedrun a lot of that early sort of era in the idea maze. You think you have something that could kind of work? How do you actually break through so that, you know, people are actually finding value in what you're building?”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yep, that, or it could be, yeah. I mean, we're lucky a lot of our designers also know how to code. So even before the recent tools, kind of come up with some sort of functional prototype and then be able to ship that so people can start playing with it.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A couple great platforms. So voice panel, which is also a YC company, full disclosure, Angel Investor, and then there's also platforms like user testing that really help you source and find these people that fit, again, that persona or profile you're looking for. So in our case, like people that are in a specific job function or create DEX regularly. And so you can use those platforms to really scale up these programs pretty fast. And then once your team knows how to use those platforms, we would have an idea in the morning and in the afternoon we're already running a pretty full scale experiment or like a research study. And by the evening or by the next day, we can actually go through all of it together.”
2025-11-13 · Lenny's Podcast · “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source