E54: The Presentation Revolution with Jon Noronha, Co-Founder of Gamma

In this episode, Nathan sits down with Jon Noronha, co-founder of Gamma. Gamma is a new medium for presenting ideas, allowing you to focus on your ideas and receive beautiful, engaging content without the formatting work. In this episode, Jon and Nathan discuss the journey of building Gamma, how to coax AI to do things well, and the opportunity for AI A/B testing. If you're looking for an ERP platform, check out our sponsor, NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive

We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on other projects he's incubating. He's hiring a Chief of Staff, EA, Head of Special Projects, Investment Associate, and more. For a list of JDs, check out: eriktorenberg.com.

TIMESTAMPS:
(00:00:00) - Preview
(00:01:23) - Nathan introduces Jon Noronha
(00:06:36) - Intro - Jon Noronha introduces himself and Gamma
(00:09:36) - Gamma's origin story: building the "anti-PowerPoint" pre-GPT-3
(00:13:15) - From using AI for onboarding to generating near-complete presentations.
(00:15:11) - Sponsors: Netsuite | Omneky
(00:18:01) - If Notion and Canva had a baby
(00:23:35) - Searching for the right structure for AI, landing on HTML
(00:28:16) - Degrees of freedom - developing a constrained vocabulary of semantic blocks
(00:29:30) - Choice of model(s) – weighing cost, speed, and quality tradeoffs
(00:35:18) - Editing UI - getting AI to edit slides per user command
(00:38:04) - UI for gathering training data - following Midjourney's example
(00:40:00) AI A/B Testing: a big opportunity space
(00:43:22) - Image generation models - Baseten and Gamma's deployment of it
(00:45:37) - Pacing feature development - Trying to stay ahead of innovations like 3D, video, voice etc.
(00:47:45) Image generation for slidedecks and AI involvement
(00:50:29) Gamma's main building priorities and AI generated websites
(00:52:34) - Competing with giants like Microsoft and Google
(00:55:04) - Enterprise AI shipping challenges - Startups pioneer new patterns; giants will eventually follow.
(00:57:45) - Simplifying complexity - will models smooth over the complexity of bloated product suites?
(00:59:22) - Conclusion and final thoughts

X/TWITTER:

@thatsjonsense (Jon)
@labenz (Nathan)
@eriktorenberg
@CogRev_Podcast

LINKS:

Gamma: https://gamma.app/

SPONSORS: Shopify |NetSuite | Omneky
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