From Slides to Interactive Cards
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Grant Lee, co-founder of Gamma, on rethinking the primitives of presentations
the primitive is really one that’s stuck in a constraint that existed in the past
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This is the core bet behind Gamma, that presentations stop being pages and start being containers for layered, interactive content. Once the job is no longer fitting an idea onto a printable rectangle, the product can let one card expand, collapse, embed a live Airtable or Loom, and work as both something to read alone and something to present, which pushes the format closer to a web document than a deck.
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Traditional slide tools assume a fixed canvas because they were built for paper handouts and projectors. That forces a tradeoff between too little detail on one slide, or too many slides in a linear sequence. Gamma replaces the slide with a flexible card that can be any height and reveal detail only when opened.
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That product choice matters more in hybrid work. When each person has their own screen, a presentation can become something people click through, search, comment on, and revisit later, instead of a one time visual aid controlled by one presenter at the front of the room.
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The market validated that this was a real wedge, but also showed the bar is high. Pitch improved collaboration and design inside the old deck model, while Gamma grew by moving further toward AI generated, web native outputs. By October 2025, Gamma reached about $102M ARR versus Pitch at $9.4M ARR in 2024.
The next step is that presentation software keeps dissolving into a broader content layer for work. The winners will be the products that can turn a prompt, a doc, or a dataset into something that reads like a memo, presents like a deck, and publishes like a microsite, without forcing users back into page sized boxes.