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

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