Slide Decks vs Searchable Company Memory
Grant Lee, co-founder of Gamma, on rethinking the primitives of presentations
Founders reaching for Notion shows that the real competitor to slide decks is no longer better slide design, it is searchable company memory. In remote and hybrid teams, the winning tool is the one that stores old thinking in reusable blocks, lets teams link it together, and makes it easy to turn one source document into onboarding, investor updates, sales collateral, or a meeting artifact without starting from zero each time.
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Notion won early by replacing scattered Google Docs and Sheets with a left rail tree, linked pages, and reusable blocks. That solved a very concrete problem, teams could actually find the board memo from two years ago, update it, and send people back to the same living page instead of making another file copy.
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Gamma was built around the idea that slides are a bad database for knowledge. Its card format removes the fixed page limit, supports embeds like Loom and Airtable, and lets one artifact work both as something to present live and something to read later, which is the gap between PowerPoint and Notion.
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This behavior also hints at why horizontal workspace tools keep expanding. Dock packages content for buyers in a persistent shared workspace, and Grammarly moved into Coda to gain a team canvas and system of record. The pattern is that content creation gets commoditized, but the place where work lives and gets reused stays strategic.
The next wave of presentation software will look less like slides and more like structured publishing for work. Products that combine reusable content blocks, AI assisted drafting, and web native sharing will keep taking jobs away from decks, while standalone slide tools get pushed toward narrower design centric use cases.