Most AI startup success stories start in November 2022. For the story of Presentations.AI, however, we have to go back to 2005.
That year, Sumanth Raghavendra, who is also the co-founder of The Ken, started his first venture. It was called InstaCall. The idea was to build an online office suite in Bangalore with a team of six engineers. They ended up cracking the product, but had no way to market and sell it. It had to wind down.
In 2012, when the iPhone opened up the App Store, the team dropped the full office suite idea and bet everything on one slice of it — presentations. That became Deck, a mobile-first presentation app.
Deck’s thesis was that users came to a presentation tool knowing what they wanted to say, and just needed help saying it visually. But that assumption fell apart really quickly. People would land on the first slide, type a title, and freeze.
This insight sent the team down a years-long road of trying to solve presentations by gathering tons of data from designers and working with traditional machine learning tools.
Then, GPT arrived. Instead of panicking, the team rebuilt itself entirely, changed its tech stack, and cracked its unit economics.
It reinvented itself and unveiled Presentations.AI in 2023.
Now, it surfaces at the top of every search for "AI presentation maker".
The startup not only survived but rode the AI wave. Sumanth tells you the story of how that panned out.
Tune in!
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This episode was produced by Vidhatri Rao and edited by Rajiv CN.
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Zeus, the mascot of Zero Shot, was generated using AI. Everything else is made by humans, just like all articles, columns, newsletters, and other podcasts created by The Ken.
Write to us at [email protected]. We are all ears!
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