Grant Lee, co-founder of Gamma, shares the journey of building a presentation tool to 100 million users and $100M ARR. He discusses the strategy of being 'different, not just better' than incumbents like Microsoft and Google, the importance of starting with a strong product thesis before integrating AI, and the disciplined 'hire painfully slowly' approach that allowed a small team to achieve massive organic growth.
Ping Wu, CEO of Cresta, and Sequoia’s Doug Leone discuss the transformation of contact centers with AI. They explore a dual approach, blending AI-powered human agent assistance with full automation, to meet enterprises where they are. Wu details the immense technical challenges of deploying AI at scale, from orchestrating over 20 models in real-time with sub-800ms latency to solving for legacy on-premise systems. Leone provides a framework for building AI companies at speed, arguing that value will accrue in the application layer and that we are at the beginning of an "Industrial Revolution 2.0".