laurayd.x ✨

five years ago, I was an intern @AforeVC and @GammaApp was just a team with an idea... Today, gamma is a $2b company with 70m users and $100m+ in run rate, and we are excited to launch the @AforeVC x @GammaApp $10,000,000 Ideas to Reality Fund. ready to back the next generation of founders - learn more and apply - thank you @alexrkonrad for the coverage in @UpstartsMediaCo !

Congratulations to @DoorDash @andyfang Aryan, Aayush, Marcus and the Metis team on the acquisition. @gjain said it best: If there was any doubt on what student founders @AforeVC starting AI companies can do ... look no further (that was some fast IRR!)

There's a hidden tax on every knowledge worker in the world, and nobody talks about it: The design tax. You're a strategist, a sales lead, a marketer. You were hired for what you know. But every meeting, every pitch, every proposal expects you to show up with something that looks like a designer made it. I lived this. Before Gamma, I spent time in consulting and investment banking. I spent more hours formatting slides than the analysis that went into them. When my cofounders and I started Gamma, we asked: what if you never had to be a designer in the first place? Five years and nearly 100 million users later, we've refunded billions of hours of the design tax. Today, we're eliminating it for good with our biggest launch ever. Gamma Imagine — a powerful, AI-native visual creation tool directly in Gamma. Posters, logos, infographics, visuals from a single prompt. On brand, every time. AI-Native Templates. Templates were supposed to save you from design work. Instead you spent the time filling them in. So we completely rebuilt the template experience. Modify a whole deck with a single prompt, with your brand and style intact every time. Gamma Connectors. You're already thinking in ChatGPT and Claude. Now Gamma sits inside the most popular work apps in the world. No more context-switching. You were hired for your ideas, not to resize text boxes. Let Gamma pay the design tax.

Today we’re announcing that @NitraFinance has raised a combined $187 million in financing as we build the AI-native operating system for healthcare practices. We're also announcing that Dr. Richard Park, founder of CityMD and healthcare legend, will be joining Nitra’s Board.

@arshdilbagi so cool!

The hard part about LLM failures is that their outputs rarely look like failures. The demo “works.” The output sounds coherent. The user actively uses the product. And your dashboard looks normal. Meanwhile, the system can be wrong, unsafe, or quietly driving up token spend. And you won’t notice until the damage adds up. Prompts often serve as business logic (policies, safety, and product context). But many teams ship them without the basics, such as versioning, reviewable changes, end-to-end traces, and eval gates. In production, it doesn’t crash. It degrades via wrong answers, policy misses, and surprise spending. No crash. No error. No alert. I cover this exact issue in my @Stanford CS 224G guest lecture on AI Observability and Evaluations. Here are the core ideas: • If you only log the final output, you’re guessing. Full traces show where it broke. • Evals are feedback loops. Use clear pass/fail criteria tied to outcomes. • Run evals continuously on production traces and don’t wait for support tickets. The moat isn’t prompt cleverness. It’s a measured improvement. Full lecture + blog below 👇

any healthcare x ai or technical would-be founders interested in joining dinner w/ peers (2nd-time healthcare founders) planning round 2? have 1 spot just open at our informally named "healthcare foundery friends" dinner next mon

going on a roadtrip looking for founders & new ideas... where should we go next? @GammaApp @AforeVC @Stanford @UCBerkeley @UCLA @usc @Columbia @MIT @Harvard

@TaskletAI let’s do this!

Introducing Instant Apps — your Tasklet agent can now build live, interactive apps for you on-demand. Describe what you need & get the perfect custom UI in seconds — connected to your real, live data. 🧵

BART down in SF today but #10mfund is in business! @AforeVC @GammaApp

@thisisgrantlee looks Soooooo good!!! @thisisgrantlee acting skills grow exponentially along with @GammaApp user growth !

The Stripe team published their annual letter this week. We partnered up with them to drop it into Gamma. Check it out:

Stripe is worth $159 billion now. Like Bezos and Buffett, the Collison 'way of building a business' will create trillions in value and is worth studying. 800-word post on: 1. Craft & Beauty 2. Humility 3. Hiring 4. Culture 5. Decisions 1. On craft & beauty, You can work on something you're not proud of for 2 years. You can't do it for 30. Beauty has a practical function most people miss. When we go to a city or building that's beautiful, there's generosity in that construction. You never meet the architect, but it's a gift they've bestowed on us. Products are no different. And craft has another function that might matter even more: it's the single best way to attract extraordinary people. The best people consider themselves craftspeople, and above almost all else, they want to work alongside other craftspeople. Put bluntly: really good people don't enjoy working on shitty things. 2. On founder humility, Think carefully about what's cool and what's high status, and then make sure not to do that. Once you're succeeding, the real danger begins. Success breeds complacency. Other people are studying what you built and looking to replicate it. You can always be a month away from losing your business. The antidote is simple but uncomfortable: stay close to reality. Every week at Stripe's leadership meeting, they hear directly from a customer. It's not an A-plus scorecard every time. That's the point. It prevents you from getting delusional. And when you see a smart person holding a view that's different from your own, rather than figuring out how they're wrong, try to figure out how they're right. 3. On hiring, Think like a value investor. You're not looking for the best resume. You're looking for human capital the market has significantly underpriced. It took Patrick and John a full year to get to four people. No group will ever shape your company more than your early hires. When hiring anyone, ask: will I like the 50 people they hire? Prioritize rate of learning over everything. Over a decade, fast learners obliterate credentialed hires. It's not even close. For senior hires, one question: can they get you where you need to be in four years, in two? 4. On culture, Stripe's moat isn't technology or process or perks. It's that the people there genuinely care about solving the problems they say they're solving. That's rarer than it sounds. Care for the customer's problem, executed with craft and rigor. A culture that prizes small details and careful abstraction. And an operating rhythm that keeps it honest: micro pessimism, macro optimism. Everything is terrible today. Total conviction it'll be fantastic in two years. That tension is what keeps generational companies from getting comfortable. 5. On decisions, Make twice as many decisions at half the precision. That's almost always better than the alternative. You'll never have perfect information and you don't need it. Make the call, move forward, course correct if you're wrong. You pay a far larger price for paralysis than for mistakes. For co-founder disputes, one simple rule: whoever cares more carries the decision. Deeper conviction wins. These ideas have shaped how we build Gamma and 1000s of others. @patrickc @collision

@jaiglazer looks gooood in the snow

@kevinhou22 @AforeVC @GammaApp @thisisgrantlee thank you Kevin!!

@AforeVC @GammaApp @thisisgrantlee Congrats!

the news is out! we're incredibly excited to partner with portco @GammaApp team and @thisisgrantlee on a $10,000,000 @AforeVC x @GammaApp Ideas to Reality fund - powering the next generation of founders @GammaApp went from idea to $2B in 5 years now, Gamma makes it easier than ever for founders to tell their stories. pre-idea, pre-product, pre-traction - no problem. we want to learn your story. apply today through Mar 24, 2026! thank you @alexrkonrad for the scoop

@abakermi @GammaApp @AforeVC we heavily index on founder qualities! creativity, grit, technical superpowers sometimes fit for what they’re trying to do, eg in consumer space, attempting apps for nearly 10 years and shown ability to launch experiments that get at least some users to care

@laurayd @GammaApp @AforeVC congrats on the first pitch! gamma makes everything look so clean, been using it for my own decks lately btw curious - what made it stand out beyond just the presentation tool? 👀

just reviewed my first founder pitch in @GammaApp and it was honestly so much more enjoyable - easy on the eyes and delightful to scroll through. congrats to them on receiving the 1st founder mtg invite of @AforeVC x @GammaApp #10mFund! can’t wait for more !

this is still a compliment of progress bc (1) obviously 💙 our founders, (2) they built these products so fast and so recently! if ytrday was the anniversary of claude code, what does this mean 1 year from now for the claude code of marketing, ops, investing, … beyond

after using for the last 1 month: @claudeai cowork, @TaskletAI, @obvious, kairos.computer (disclaimer: latter 3 all portcos💙), my conclusion is: the fight for the nontechnical user is on … and they all sort of work, while sort of suck

@_nicolealonso @andruyeung a smart man 😁♥️

@laurayd @andruyeung haha yes Andrew is my boyfriend of 2+ years :)

.@_nicolealonso is the only human in the universe who can run 30-50 mile races with a big smile on her face the entire time So proud of you

@dreamer @eladgil @swyx @dps @swyx some gamified actually fun experience which helps turn knowledge in people’s heads about each other into a network which correctly rewards participants or somehow incentivizes them and can help match the right people skillsets talent bar culture personality to hiring

Kicking off now: @eladgil, @swyx, @dps take your agent ideas and build them in real time in @dreamer. Reply in this thread with your ideas. We’ll build a few of the best ones and share progress + links as we go. You dream it. We build it. 👇

@dreamer @eladgil @swyx @dps time optimization and effective director - tell me how to spend each hour or 15 min window of my day starting with what work tasks i should do and every friday tell me if i’ve been effective or what else to do @swyx

@Besciai @andruyeung i vote to keep donkeycorn i think its hilarious

@andruyeung Mini-corn (might already be a thing), moose, buck, successful business

My best friend (non-technical, spent most of his career in tech sales) just spent the last few weeks vibe coding a beautifully designed app that solves a real problem It’s been his pet project. He doesn’t see it yet, but I believe if done right, it can be a “donkey corn” — a company that generates $1m+ a year He’s a great example of what to do during this AI era: have the agency to tinker, ship, and stay curious, even on weeknights and weekends It reminds me of the quote: “What the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years.” — Chris Dixon