How Gamma pulled off their AI pivot | Jon Noronha (Co-founder and CPO of Gamma)

In this episode of In Depth, Brett sits down with Jon Noronha, co-founder and CPO of Gamma, the AI-native presentation platform used by more than 100 million people. In this conversation, he walks through Gamma’s distinct eras of product-market fit: from a pre-AI struggle with a year of runway left, to an overnight AI-fueled explosion, to today’s unplanned scramble into enterprise sales. Jon also unpacks his hard-won lessons on horizontal versus vertical bets, monetizing AI products, and why nailing onboarding turned out to be the whole game. In today's episode, we discuss: Why Gamma's all-in AI launch in March 2023 saved their startup How fixing a simple onboarding problem accidentally uncovered Gamma’s entire product-market fit Why Jon bet Gamma on a horizontal product against the advice of nearly every investor How Gamma's daily signups climbed from hundreds to over 100,000 with zero paid marketing What building three pricing tiers taught Jon about monetizing AI References Canva: https://www.canva.com/ Corgi: https://www.corgi.insure/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ Gamma: https://gamma.app/ Google: https://www.google.com/ Linear: https://linear.app/ Loom: https://www.loom.com/ Microsoft: https://www.microsoft.com/ Notion: https://www.notion.com/ Optimizely: https://www.optimizely.com/ Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com/ Slack: https://slack.com/ Zoom: https://www.zoom.us/ Where to find Jon Noronha LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonnoronha/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/thatsjonsense Where to find Brett LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson Where to find First Round Capital Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/firstround YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 01:47 Gamma’s three-era journey to product-market fit 03:41 Spotting the blank page problem pre-ChatGPT 05:11 How Gamma survived with only one year of runway 07:17 How onboarding fixes revealed the whole product 09:31 Choosing horizontal over investors' vertical playbook 13:41 Prototyping by hand before AI coding 15:36 How Gamma builds with future models in mind 20:06 The Kool-Aid mistake of a late PowerPoint export 24:31 Why the presentation industry hadn't evolved since 1987 33:30 How Gamma solves evals for taste, not just data 40:21 Jon's hardest lessons monetizing AI since 2023 44:16 The fast leap from prosumer to enterprise 47:01 Why product still beats distribution 52:06 The metric that proved product-market fit 57:36 Pricing advice for prosumer AI founders 59:01 The toils and realities of founder life