Rethinking Team Building: how a 30-person Startup serves 50 Million Users — Grant Lee, Gamma
Jul 15, 2025 · 18:06
Grant Lee, CEO of Gamma, explains how his 30-person team serves 50 million users by ditching blitzscaling for lean teams of generalists and player coaches. He argues that hiring generalists—like his head of design who codes, researches UX, and mentors—enables rapid adaptation. Player coaches, such as engineering leads who still write code, make fast technical trade-offs without top-down mandates. Scaling with brand and culture, Gamma invests in a living culture deck and three weekly all-hands meetings to maintain tribal knowledge. In Q&A, Lee advises doing the job yourself before hiring for non-engineering roles, probing for high agency by asking candidates to drill into problem layers, and using work trials (five successes, high failure rate without) to avoid mismatches. He also wishes they had prioritized infrastructure for experimentation earlier given AI's speed.
