The following interview was conducted by Sacra—February, 2022

Background

Grant Lee is the CEO and co-founder of Gamma. We talked to Grant to learn more about how visual communication tools like slides, images and videos are becoming essential for sales & marketing, product, HR and potentially everyone in an organization—and how Canva, Figma, Microsoft Office and Google Suite and others are trying to build the 'creative productivity' suite that stitches them all together.

1. Big picture, how do you think about the history of slides, and what made you excited enough about the format to devote your time to it at Gamma?

2. You mentioned that one of the biggest timesucks here is the design and formatting aspect of slides, but you also seem to be saying that companies that are just building beautified versions of Google Slides are missing the point. Is there some kind of fundamentally different primitive that’s needed that departs from Google Sheets? How do you think about that?

3. In terms of how folks use slides and presentations in general, do you see any difference between internal communications versus various external use cases?

4. Does it make sense to talk about these as two different kinds of products entirely, since the use cases and the contexts are so different? Has that influenced your product thinking at Gamma at all?

5. I’d love to get your take on design tools like Canva and Figma. One of our theses has been that Canva and Figma both want to get wall-to-wall adoption inside companies, and part of that maybe involves functionality around slides. I know some people make slides in Figma. How do you think about the opportunity for taking a design approach to slides?

6. You shed some light on horizontal tools like PowerPoint and Slides, where it's actually powerful to be part of a bundle because you do have access to other tools. But despite this advantage, what kinds of trends are you seeing that make PowerPoint and Slides less effective over time at solving the key jobs to be done around slides and presentations?

7. You’ve mentioned Notion and Airtable. I'm curious if you have thoughts on how those companies specifically were able to take on free and bundled software, like Sheets and Docs, and build sustainable standalone businesses. How do you think about what made that a successful play?

8. How do you at Gamma think about what a set of primitives might be for the 21st-century presentation?

9. Is there a bias towards internal or external use cases at all with Gamma?

10. If you’re PowerPoint, then you already have quick access to other files that the go-to-market team might need. Do you have an idea in mind for how to get into that ecosystem and that flow of documents, such that it can be as easy to get that into Gamma as it is today from other tools that people are using?

11. For your beta testers now, what does the profile look like? Are there specific kinds of personas who would use Gamma?