How To Stay Ahead of the AI Game?

Interview Transcription

Lili: So Grant Lee, I'm very excited to have you here, co-founder of Gamma, which is one of my favorite AI tools. Honestly, I've been fan-girling Gamma on my website a lot. I wonder how can it be that there are no glitches? What is your secret?

Grant Lee: Thanks for that. Well, it's very kind to say there are no glitches. I think we've tried our best to minimize the amount of bugs and glitches. We always start by testing a lot of things internally. We call it dog fooding, where any set of new features, even at the earliest stages, we're using internally in the ways that we think our users are also going to use well before we ever start rolling it out to users. And then when we do feel confident, we start to share with more users, and we do more of a gradual roll out. So we don't turn it on for everybody; we kind of roll it out just to make sure things are performing as expected and the users aren't going to run into issues before we actually roll it out fully.

Lili: Okay, cool. You were mentioning new features. Do you have anything exciting lined up that we could share already?

Grant Lee: Definitely. I think in the near term, we're going to have to do much more AI editing. To be able to either upload your own image or take an existing AI image and further refine it. Give it instructions around being able to change the background or add objects or change the words. So those capabilities are coming soon. And in addition, the ability to have AI suggest different layouts, different ways to visualize your content so that you might try expressing the same information but just slightly differently.

Lili: Perfect. If we think about maybe AI in the future and Gamma in the future, what would you say how will presentation makers change in 10 years from now? Is there any crazy idea that you already have that you could share with us?

Grant Lee: A lot of it has been really the same longer-term vision that we've had from the very beginning, which is we believe the way people communicate and express themselves - there haven't been sort of new tools that allow people to do more than they have in the past. And so when we think about if someone were to create a static 16x9 slide, it's pretty limited in the way you can share that information. What if the same presentation could be much more immediately mobile friendly, mobile responsive so you can share it on any device? What if it could be multimedia rich and interactive so that it's much more engaging and you can share it async even if the presenter is not there for you to present? What if you had the ability to have the content be able to express their ideas in ways that felt more engaging?

So there's a lot we can do across all those dimensions. We also feel like today when it comes to content creation, people don't do too much because it's pretty difficult. You have to kind of piece together many different tools. If you want to do graphic design, you have to go to Adobe or maybe a tool like Canva. If you want to build a website, you have to go to a completely different tool. If you want to build a presentation, go to PowerPoint or Google Slides. We want to be the sort of all-in-one, the place where all of that content can live in one place, and it could be much more malleable so you can go from one format to the other without really having to think about it. It could be much more effortless.

Lili: Very cool. You mentioned the websites, and I saw you have a website builder where I can basically just copy any website. I wish I had this when I was building my website - would have been super helpful. Regarding the websites - can you say something about that? Like, is that a big focus of yours? Is this something that you really want to build up because it's very lucrative, I would guess, for a company?

Grant Lee: It's definitely a market we believe a lot in. I think there's obviously a lot of website builders out there today. We want to take a slightly different approach, which is to make it even simpler for people to really own themselves the entire process of design, development, editing, maintenance so that they don't need to hire others to do it for them. A lot of the website builders today have pretty fragile templates, so once you modify or edit anything, everything starts breaking. We want to make sure that's not the case.

So it's an area - we want to be a multiformat product, so presentations, websites - again, we want that to all live in one place. It means it'll take us a little bit longer to get the website product more fully featured to have capabilities that you might expect, things like forms and more interactivity. So yeah, we definitely want to invest there, and it's something we'll continue to improve over time.

Lili: I would love to know - you're developing your product, and maybe sometimes people come back to you and tell you they've used it in a completely different way than you expected it. Are there some crazy stories like, "Oh, this is something that you can do with Gamma"?

Grant Lee: It's interesting - when we first started building Gamma, we wanted to create building blocks that could be used for a lot of different things. Similar to Lego or actual building blocks that kids play with, you can basically let your imagination take you to wherever you want to go. I think that's the fun part about building software in that way - if you can create something that allows the user to come with their imagination, then you can allow them to create a lot of things.

So we've seen all sorts of things. Even in the very beginning before we had our website product, people would often describe what they created as like a mini website or a micro site. That was because of the interactivity, the mobile friendliness that came about. So for them, they felt like they had discovered a brand new capability because in PowerPoint, you never describe what you created as a website or a micro site - you describe it as a deck or slide deck.

I think when we started seeing people create these much more interactive experiences - building their entire training course all within Gamma, being able to then sell that course or use that course as a way to engage with their community - has just been really cool. Because I think in the past, they would have really struggled to do it themselves and would have had to maybe lean on a developer to create that for them. And obviously, that's expensive, time-consuming, and then hard to change. So we've now seen many people create all sorts of artifacts that can be shared in different ways and then allow them to actually potentially even build a business around it.

Lili: Awesome. I would like to ask you a couple of my questions more generally about AI because you're at the forefront. So what's the craziest thing you heard about AI so far?

Grant Lee: It's probably the tiny teams, the small teams doing really incredible things that historically would take much more time and much bigger teams. In the US, companies like Coder, obviously on the coding side, more recently Lovable Bots, we've heard are growing really fast. I think that's just really fun to see because I think that means that there could be other teams - not everybody needs to create a venture-backed business, but it means that a lot of small teams can create really meaningful products or projects or all sorts of services that can all be built upon AI. For me, that's the most exciting thing - how much is now possible and how quickly it can happen.

Lili: And we will be the ones benefiting from all this, right? Like we will have all these crazy great tools to work with.

Grant Lee: Totally, yeah. The ones that want to learn it. I feel like there's still a gap between people that are willing and eager to just jump in - I think they're going to be able to take advantage of all of it, and a few years down the road, they'll benefit from it. I do think there are some people that still feel a little bit scared or intimidated or maybe dismissive of how big this could be. So I worry that maybe in a few years, they'll regret not having jumped in sooner.

So I'm hoping that more and more people realize this is just such a gift. No matter what you're trying to do, whatever sort of industry or background you have, I think AI can help you, and it just might be helping you in different ways.

Lili: That's actually really good cue to one of my questions. So do you believe that AI will have a bigger impact on our lives than the internet?

Grant Lee: That's a great question. I feel like every technology shift or these sort of revolutions all build upon the previous one, right? You can't really have one without the other. The internet created a massive amount of information and connectivity and really the infrastructure needed for even AI to thrive. So you can't really say AI alone would have had all this value. I think you kind of need both, and I think both working together is really where a lot of the magic happens.

You can have these apps that can be shared across the internet and then can really democratize or give access to this powerful technology no matter where you are in the world. So I really think they kind of go hand in hand, and it takes the sort of sequencing that each one can build upon the prior generations' innovation.

Lili: What AI tool do you use the most?

Grant Lee: Outside of Gamma, there's really just the obvious ones around ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity are ones that can be like daily use - constantly checking or doing research or going deeper down the rabbit hole for different ideas. Obviously for us, internally we communicate both internally and externally using Gamma, so for me a lot of my work is using that.

Other tools that our broader team leverages a ton - obviously our development team, Cursor is one that is being used more and more. When we do things like customer research, Notebook LLM is a great one just to synthesize a lot of information. Midjourney is a great tool for creative assets and really ideation. We're about to launch a new brand, and so to build, explore, and iterate has been really awesome using that tool.

And then for things like customer support, Intercom is a daily tool that we need to be able to serve our customers and users, and they have a lot of great AI functionality that's just really helped us streamline our entire work.

Lili: Amazing. This was a whole list of AI tools. I will have to extract that. Perfect. Last question - do you have any tips, tricks, or hacks for using AI? You mentioned so many - how can we get the best out of it?

Grant Lee: In general, the generic answer is you just got to come in with a beginner's mind because everything's so new and it's also moving so fast. It's not worth trying to say, "Hey, this is the exact way it has to be done." We're all kind of participating in this evolution together.

So subscribe to a few newsletters that you think are well written, find a few YouTube channels that you think capture or are able to provide some useful education, go on social media - whether it's Twitter or LinkedIn or TikTok, Instagram - follow a few creators there because you can follow some of the interesting things.

And then, when you look at your own life and where are you spending time that you wish you could have back - many of our users wish they weren't spending so much time formatting slides or all the tedious tasks related to creating a slide deck, and so they've picked up Gamma as a way to change that.

So look at your own life - where do you feel like you're wasting a lot of time that you wish you could get back? And then go on Google or ChatGPT or Claude and ask, "What tools are out there that help me solve this problem or help eliminate the tedious tasks related to this problem that I'm facing?" And then see if you can learn that tool because I think that's the best way to learn - acknowledge the pain points that you already have today and see if you can solve it with AI.

Lili: I think this is perfect. Thank you so much.

Grant Lee: Awesome.