The Modern Startup Playbook with Grant Lee, CEO of Gamma

INDIE AUDIO

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Feels like it's been a few weeks since we’ve had something new to share. This week, we’re excited to share a video we recorded just before the release of First of Kind.

Grant Lee fits the profile of a founder indie is built to support: worked in investment banking, and joined a hot YC startup that didn’t end up being the rocket ship they’d planned. Joined another venture-backed startup that found a successful outcome, but has made intentional decisions to build differently now that he’s working on something of his own.

The wave we predicted in our Indie Era of Startups talk has started to crest, and founders, like Grant, are demonstrating the benefits to this new way of building.

In this conversation, we break down Grant’s approach to building Gamma into a few discreet buckets.

The first is a small team of what he calls player-coaches. These team members are not interested in growing their org so much as focusing on results. And not just results, but results that they can manage from idea to execution. Bye-bye middle managers, hello player-coaches. Grant explains this approach best in his pinned tweet:

Instead of creating specialist silos, we hire versatile generalists who can solve problems across domains. Rather than building management hierarchies, we find player-coaches who both lead and execute. Our team leverages AI tools throughout our workflow - Claude for data analysis, Cursor for coding efficiency, NotebookLM for customer research synthesis. These aren't just productivity hacks; they're force multipliers.

Examples:

— When our growth PM needed better analytics, he didn't file a ticket with a data team—he built a self-serve system that anyone can use without SQL knowledge.
— When our marketing lead needed to understand our customers better, she fed thousands of interactions into an LLM and created actionable personas that now guide our entire strategy.
— When our design team needs to test a hypothesis, we create a rapid prototype and show it to our power users.

What we're seeing isn't just about "doing more with less." It's about fundamentally changing what's possible per person. The most valuable employees aren't specialists who excel in narrow domains - they're resourceful problem-solvers who continuously expand their capabilities. This approach creates remarkable resilience. Since everyone understands multiple functions, we don't have single points of failure when someone leaves or moves to another project. If you're building today, the question isn't how quickly you can scale headcount — it's how much impact you can create with the smallest possible team.

The future belongs to tiny teams of extraordinary people.

The next is to embrace constraints. At the time of this recording, Gamma was doing $50M in ARR and had over 50M users. Yes, you read that right. And, yes, they’ve done this while keeping their team small and wildly profitable for over a year. They do not see profitability as a lack of imagination or ambition, but the fuel for them to continue building on their own terms and timelines.

This was a phenomenal conversation, and one that touches on many of the ideas we’ve been advocating for with indie over the years. We hope you see in Grant and Gamma something to aspire to as a founder that goes far deeper than hitting the next fundable milestone.

We hope you enjoy listening as much as we enjoyed recording this one.