Presentations as Company Memory
Grant Lee, co-founder of Gamma, on rethinking the primitives of presentations
The core divide is that design tools are built to retrieve reusable assets, while work tools are built to retrieve decisions and narratives. In practice that means Canva and Figma win when a team wants a logo file, template, or approved visual, while board decks, all hands updates, and planning docs depend on finding a specific file from a specific moment, with its text, comments, and surrounding context intact. That pushes search, hierarchy, integrations, and collaboration in different directions.
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Figma and Canva start from a designer workflow. Their native objects are components, templates, and brand assets. That is why they naturally optimize for shared libraries, visual consistency, and reuse across many outputs, not for archiving years of meeting driven documents by topic, date, and author.
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Horizontal presentation and document tools have to behave more like a company memory system. A finance lead needs to search for the 2019 board deck, pull in a live table from Sheets, and pass comments across teams. Gamma frames this as a content and communication problem, not a pure layout problem.
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This is why wall to wall expansion is harder than adding a slide feature. Canva can broaden use cases and become stickier across teams, but enterprise expansion eventually turns into an either or decision against Microsoft and Google, where search, permissions, storage, and collaboration matter as much as design quality.
Going forward, the winners in presentations will look less like canvas editors and more like systems for packaging, finding, and reusing business context. AI strengthens that shift, because once formatting is automated, the real product advantage moves to structure, retrieval, and integration with the rest of a company’s work.