The Art of the AI Pivot

Pivots are tough. But as I argued two weeks ago, pivots are how the majority of Silicon Valley’s innovation bears fruit. So it’s heartening to read a story like Gamma’s—a company that was on the brink of failure before catching the AI wave at just the right moment. Jason Shen got up close with its founder, Grant Lee, whose steerage of Gamma from struggling startup to 3 million users in three months is a masterclass in how to execute a pivot. Read this piece to learn how to turn your startup's biggest weakness into its greatest strength. As go the pivots, so goes the Valley.—Evan Armstrong

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As a startup founder and product manager, I've had to make a lot of slide decks. After I sold my last startup (Midgame, a voice-enabled AI assistant for gamers) I joined Meta, where I worked across multiple product teams and endured countless reorganizations.Every reorg came with new team strategies, product roadmaps, and schedules for weekly meetings. I spent an embarrassingly large amount of time creating presentations to share what my team was working on to various stakeholders across the company. I used Google Slides templates custom-made by the company’s designers, but still found myself struggling to adjust font sizes and resize text boxes to fit all of the information.

As I grappled with these frustrations, a friend of a friend invited me to the private beta of a startup that wanted to rethink work presentations. Founded in 2020, it was called Gamma, and it promised a way out of my slide deck hell. Instead of being limited by the 16:9 frame of a standard slide, the product gave me the flexibility to express a point with as little—or as much—content as I wanted. It was much easier to use than Google Slides.

One of Gamma’s cofounders, Grant Lee, had been stuck in a presentation-heavy role as a startup operator and consultant and shared my frustrations. The small Silicon Valley-based team, members of which had previously worked together at A/B testing platform Optimizely, had raised $7 million in funding over two years to develop a “doc-and-deck hybrid,” as Lee told me.

Gamma launched its public beta in summer of 2022, reaching the number-one spot on the Product Hunt leaderboard and with tens of thousands of new users. But it had one big problem: Very few users were having a great first-time experience, and many did not return a second time. In product parlance, low activation was leading to poor retention—most people still found it too hard to create a presentation. And the startup’s clock was ticking because its financial runway was running out.

The Gamma team managed to execute a pivot, one that integrated AI into their product. It was so successful that, after their relaunch in March 2023, it gained 3 million users in just three months—many of whom were sticking around and paying for premium plans that allowed unlimited use of its AI-generation features.

Having attempted two pivots in my own startup journey, I’m fascinated with the twists and turns founders take to find that elusive product-market-fit. I’ve written extensively about the art of pivoting, including in my 2024 book The Path to Pivot, a playbook for founders trying to find a new meaning for their companies. Despite accounting for more than 80 percent of some investors’ biggest returns, successful pivot case studies are few and far between. 

Gamma’s story is an important one for any founder operating in an industry that is constantly changing due to market conditions and emerging technologies. Let’s dive into how the company’s focus on solving its user’s “blank page problem” and well-timed AI adoption helped it graduate from a shiny toy to a rapidly growing disrupter.

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• Solving the blank page problem
• Catching the AI wave at the right moment
• Balancing automation and user agency
• The power of co-creation in product adoption