Presentations as Durable Content Systems
Grant Lee, co-founder of Gamma, on rethinking the primitives of presentations
Notion won by turning documents into a place, not just a file. Its left hand tree, nested pages, and block based pages gave users a single home where notes, tasks, wikis, and lightweight databases could live together and link to each other. That solved a real pain in Google Drive, where work was scattered across separate Docs, Sheets, and folders. Gamma is drawing on that same lesson for presentations, that better organization and reuse can matter as much as better design.
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The contrast with Airtable is useful. Notion’s pull was intuitive structure for writing and knowledge, while Airtable’s pull was automation and workflows built on top of a base. One helps organize thinking, the other helps operationalize repeatable processes.
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Gamma’s product direction follows directly from this. Early on it described slides as a poor fit for async, discoverable company knowledge, then built cards that can expand, collapse, embed live apps, and later reflow into webpages. That makes the unit of work more reusable than a static 16 by 9 deck.
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The strategic implication is that presentation software is moving closer to workspace software. Gamma has explicitly framed itself as a hybrid of slides, docs, and webpages, and later found strong demand for turning one artifact into a presentation, document, or microsite instead of maintaining separate files for each format.
Going forward, the winners in this category are likely to be the tools that become a durable content system, not just a prettier editor. Notion showed that strong hierarchy can create habit and retention. Gamma’s next step is to make presentations similarly searchable, remixable, and publishable across internal docs, external decks, and web pages from the same underlying content.