Rethinking presentations for business communication
Grant Lee, co-founder of Gamma, on rethinking the primitives of presentations
The hard part is not making slides prettier, it is becoming the default place where every team stores, finds, updates, and collaborates on important business communication. A finance board deck pulls in spreadsheets, charts, historical files, comments, permissions, and audit sensitive workflows. That is a very different product job from helping designers make branded assets, which is why design tools can expand broadly without automatically becoming the system for company wide presentations.
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Design tools organize work around assets, templates, and visual components. Finance and leadership teams organize work around named files and the content inside them, like the Q4 board deck or last year's budget review. That changes how search, folders, reuse, and collaboration need to work.
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Horizontal presentation tools also have to connect to the rest of the company stack. Grant Lee points to embeds from tools like Google Sheets and BI systems as table stakes for data heavy decks. Gamma itself started with internal collaboration first, then planned to earn the right to move into higher stakes external and go to market use cases.
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The market evidence fits that split. Figma built a huge business around product and design workflows, while Canva scaled by serving marketing, social, video, and presentations across many visual formats. But even in enterprise, teams often use Figma and Canva alongside other tools rather than replacing every document workflow with one design product.
The next wave belongs to products that merge document search, live data, and real time collaboration into a single presentation workflow. That favors tools built around communication first, not design first. As presentations become more like living web documents, the winners will be the products that can handle both a product review and a board meeting without forcing teams back into files, exports, and screenshots.