Joining Gamma

50M users. $50M ARR. All built by a tiny team…on just $23M raised. And now I get to be a part of it.

It’s the first day of school all over again: today is my first day at Gamma. After 4.5 unforgettable years at Matrix, I’m joining the team at Gamma to lead core product for the best AI-powered presentations & storytelling tool in all the land.

Gamma’s momentum is undeniable, but it’s only half the story. The other half is that it’s hard to imagine a product or a team shaped more like me.

Not everyone knows this, but slides are my Roman Empire. Right after college, I started my career as a PM on the PowerPoint team at Microsoft. Later, I joined the Quip team as one of the first PMs, ultimately launching (and later, sadly, sunsetting) Quip Slides. “Desktop publishing” has been a fascination of mine ever since I laid out my high school’s literary magazine in PageMaker. And more recently, I started chasing the thread of what I called “tools for imagination” at the very start of the generative AI wave in the fall of 2022…with some extremely long blog posts to back it up.

I’ve had my eye on Gamma for ages now because they’re building the ultimate tool for imagination: a new way to get your ideas out there that breaks the boundaries of traditional presentations. As I wrote back in 2022, “tools for imagination will engage our analytical and creative sides at once, helping us to make leaps and ultimately to create more: to say more of what we meant to say in the first place, and discover what lies beyond what we already had in mind.” That’s Gamma through and through.

Meanwhile, the Gamma team is one of a kind. What they’ve built with (way) fewer than 50 employees is frankly astonishing: a product loved and depended on by tens of millions of people around the world, earning the right to keep building by monetizing with the purest product-led-growth motion I’ve ever seen. I’ve gotten to know the whole founding team deeply over years of regular catchups, dating back to 2021. They’d share their breakthroughs, I’d opine on what makes the presentations market hard, and then they’d get right back to building and having breakthroughs. This year, I decided I had to join the band, and thankfully they agreed.

But beyond the big picture of momentum, product, and team, huge life decisions are made in the small: who’s the one person you’ll get to spend more time with than anyone else? For me, that’s Jon Noronha. Now Gamma’s cofounder and CPO, Jon became one of my first-ever work friends when we toiled side by side in the computer lab upstairs at the Science Center at Harvard College while we were both students there, fixing people’s laptops and joking around in the lulls. Later, I somehow convinced him to volunteer at ROFLCon (the harebrained internet culture conference I started with friends during college) and then take a meeting with a recruiter at Microsoft, where we both ended up launching our careers in product. I’ve always hoped we’d find a way to work together again, and now we have.

Big thanks and big hugs to Grant, James, Jon, and the whole Gamma team for this opportunity. And to the Gamma community: I can’t wait to get to know you. Reach out anytime at diana@gamma.app!