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Why You Should Join Tome
(Click the link to read online).
Modern presentation tools are quite powerful.
They’re powerful enough to handle ridiculously long presentations.
They’re powerful enough to serve as entire game engines.
In fact, they’re powerful enough to simulate any computational program.
Did you know PowerPoint was Turing Complete this entire time? A student from Carnegie Mellon proved it by building PPTXTM, a punchcard-based programming system which you can use to encode and execute any Turing Machine in PowerPoint using just AutoShapes and onClick animations.
It’s highly efficient: PPTXTM only needs O(n^2) AutoShapes to simulate n bits of memory.
By our calculations, it would take merely 3.136 * 10^25 AutoShapes to run ChatGPT in PowerPoint.
Why would you ever buy a separate no-code tool?
Unfortunately, modern presentation tools kinda suck at what they’re meant to do: help tell stories.
Students retain 15% less information when receiving lectures with a PowerPoint. Google Slides is unusable past the 8th grade and was memorably slandered on Hacker News as worse than using “cuneiform, cave paintings, or the collective medium of slam poetry and interpretive dance.” Yale’s Edward Tufte, a leading expert on information design and visual literacy, observes most slide decks do little more than “induce stupidity, turn everyone into bores, waste time, and downgrade the quality and credibility of communication.”
A big part of this is the increasingly dated idea of decks themselves.
Since PowerPoint invented the format in 1987, things haven’t changed much: decks are still these static, non-interactive, 16:9 sequences of slides that do little more than the paper flip charts or transparencies that came before.
Work has changed a lot in the past few decades, but the fundamental format of corporate storytelling hasn’t kept up.
For starters, deck-based tools are:
Stiff. 73% of people view work content from mobile devices and 80% of presentations are delivered remotely, on screens of different sizes. Presentations aren’t delivered on a single screen in a single conference room anymore, so why are we still designing them like they are?
Static. 78% of companies consider real-time data a “must-have” and 80% of companies saw revenue increase after implementing real-time analytics. Presentations are how we share data, so why are they still static?
Siloed. The average company uses 110 SaaS tools (up from 8 in 2015) and the average public SaaS company offers 350 integrations. The rest of our tools talk to each other, so why don’t our presentations?
Modern presentation tools are powerful, but there’s a reason everyone hates them:
Tome is betting that the idea of a deck itself is ripe for disruption.
They’re re-thinking how we share ideas, from the ground up.
And in doing so, they’ve built the fastest-growing productivity tool in history.
Background
Tome has built a new storytelling format by rethinking presentations from the ground up. Unlike traditional (static, non-interactive, 16:9) decks that are designed to be presented in person or printed out, Tome was designed with fundamentally different assumptions about modern presentations and use-cases.
Tome prioritizes:
Flexibility. In a remote-first world, assume people are gonna view your deck on everything from their phone to a Samsung refrigerator. Tome’s layout engine dynamically re-sizes and re-organizes content based on screen size to provide a seamless experience across both desktop and mobile devices. Slides can be as tall as you want (you can scroll) and everything is accessible via link so you don’t have to worry about files.
Interactivity. Tome allows you to embed Figma prototypes, 3D renderings, videos, live statistics, and whiteboard diagrams right into your presentation. You can even record voice and video accompaniments to individual slides. No more switching windows in the middle of a pitch.
Ease of Use. Nice-looking presentations aren’t just for board meetings anymore - people want them for everything. Tome’s drag-and-drop editor, self-reorganizing layout engine, and automatic theme generator automates much of design and formatting for you. No more aligning and re-sizing text boxes: Tomes are “beautiful by default.”
Traditional decks are great if you’ve got a dedicated management consultant slide designer and are delivering a high stakes, Mad Men-style pitch where everyone’s listening in the same room. Tome is better if you’re a product manager, sales rep, or teacher who’s delivering a lot of presentations or delivering most of them online.
It’s a new foundation for dynamic, interactive storytelling.
On top of this foundation, Tome has pioneered a deep set of AI integrations.
Thanks to early access to GPT-4, you can generate an entire Tome complete with text and images using just a prompt. You can use AI to re-write specific text in different tones or translate an entire document into a presentation. In the near future, you’ll be able to generate charts, diagrams, and even feedback on your presentation using AI. Combined with Tome’s layout engine and theme generator, it’s 10x easier to create a great looking presentation.
As a result, Tome creates value for users in two ways:
Frictionless Creation. Between generative AI, automated formatting, automated theming, and a host of integrations, you can create a better presentation faster on Tome than a traditional deck.
Frictionless Consumption. Between flexible formatting, support for audiovisual narration, native interactivity, and a web-first format, Tomes are way easier to consume than traditional decks.
The combination of these two attributes - a superior creator experience and a superior viewer experience - has created a viral growth loop that’s made Tome the fastest growing productivity app in history.
Since launching publicly in September of 2022, Tome took just 4 months to pass a million users, faster than the likes of Dropbox, Notion, Slack, and Zoom. Users are still doubling “every couple of weeks” and tripled again just last month, reaching over 3 million in total. Since it’s so easy, people are creating Tomes for literally everything: founders are using it for pitch decks, product managers for recaps, students for class projects, job-hunters for resumes, e-commerce entrepreneurs for product showcases, and even parents for bedtime stories. Michael Mignano, an investor in Tome from Lightspeed, told us he envisions people using Tome to create microsites, art portfolios, greeting cards, and even travel photo albums.
Here’s a neat Tome on career advice created by Reid Hoffman, who was Tome’s first investor and serves on their Board.
The company was founded by Keith Peiris and Henri Liriani. Keith was previously Head of Product at Citizen (a Sequoia-backed Series C startup) and head of the Instagram messaging and camera AR (filters) product teams at Meta. Henri was previously the Head of Product, Messenger Human Interfaces at Meta where he led UI on Messenger.
Owing to their impressive traction and team, Tome has been raising money at an impressive clip. They raised a $43 million Series B in February of 2023 led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Before, they had raised a $26 million Series A led by Coatue and a $6.3 million Seed led by Greylock, where the company was also incubated. Other investors include 8VC, Wing, Audacious, and angel investors like Eric Schmidt (Google), Emad Mostaque (Stability AI), David Luan (Adept AI Labs), and Bipul Sinha (Rubrik).
Tome has a strong insight about the future of presentations. They’ve used it to build an absolute rocket of a product. They’ve recruited a stacked team to keep improving it and they’ve amassed an awesome amount of ✨hype✨ in doing so.
But can they build a lasting business?
We think they’ve got a shot.
In this piece, we’ll dig deeper to see why this is the case. We’ll look at how they’re targeting a massive, globally important market. We’ll look at how they’re well-positioned to become a leader in that market. We’ll look at how they stack up against the competition, and why their team is perfect to execute on this opportunity. And we’ll do it all as thoroughly as we can.
Ready? Let’s get into why you should join Tome.
The Opportunity
We’ll begin our analysis of Tome like we do for all of our companies, from a first principle:
Large companies lead massive, growing markets.
Many companies with clear product-market fit fail to scale because they don’t meet this condition. Thus, we must establish two things:
Tome operates in a massive, growing market.
Tome will become a leader in that market.
Market Size
We all know the market for presentation software is huge. Literally everyone’s made a presentation at some point.
As early as 20 years ago, PowerPoint had over 500 million users creating over 30 million presentations a day, generating over a billion dollars in annual revenue for Microsoft. Given the dramatic, overall growth in software demand and the many alternatives that have popped up, one has to imagine the market even larger today. To dig deeper on this point would just be re-stating the obvious.
The real question is how much of that market is addressable.
More concretely, how many people would be willing to switch from a product like Google Slides to a product like Tome?
Empirically, a lot.
Tome’s 3 million users, sparkling engagement metrics, and rapid growth rates speak for themselves. People love the product and are switching over in droves, even if they’re already paying for traditional presentation tool.
But why?
Is this just a phenomenon in the tech community or is there a larger opportunity in the market?
We think it’s the latter.
As we started explaining above, decks haven’t fundamentally changed in 30 years. As a result, changes in how we work have opened up a number of friction points and weaknesses in the format:
Decks are designed to have the same dimensions by default because they assume you’re presenting in person and on a single screen.
This is no longer the case. Even before the pandemic, 80% of presentations were being delivered remote on screens of different sizes. 47% of initial outreach decks are viewed on mobile screens. Enforcing strict dimensions makes viewing a deck-based presentation far worse today than even 10 years ago. As a result, a format that’s intrinsically flexible like Tome is going to be popular.
Decks are designed to be static because they assume the audience can’t interact with it. This was true when you were viewing a deck on someone else’s screen.
This is no longer the case. With 79% of US companies offering some degree of remote/async work, most people are viewing decks on their own screens and at their own times, where they can interact. Whether it’s a presentation you’re sending an investor/client or a resource you’re reviewing as a student/employee, there’s no reason your presentation shouldn’t take advantage of this. As a result, a format that’s intrinsically interactive and multi-modal like Tome is going to be popular.
Decks are designed to be highly customizable because they assume you have a lot of time between presentations or a slide designer to work with.
This is no longer the case. Time spent in meetings has risen 8-10% annually since 2000, meaning people are delivering more presentations than ever. PowerPoint’s many design features are amazing if you’re a professional designer, but most founders, PMs, sales reps, teachers, and students don’t have the hours needed to take advantage of them all - they need something beautiful by default. As a result, an AI-first product with automatic styling and formatting like Tome is going to be popular.
Who gives presentations, how they give them, what they give them on, and who they give them to have all dramatically changed in the past few decades, but the fundamental structure of a presentation hasn’t. Modern workflows like product demos, design reviews, and status updates need something designed for them.
As a result, there’s a massive, growing gap in the market for a new product to fill: one that can address the pain points that have built over time.
This is the segment Tome is coming to dominate.
They’ve executed phenomenally on each of these pain points, which is what we’ll dig into next.
Market Leadership
So we know there are tons of people who’d love to replace slide decks with something more modern. The question now is whether Tome will be their solution of choice.
We’ll consider the question of market leadership in two parts: whether Tome can gain a lot of market share, and whether they can defend it.
Gaining Market Share
Once again, Tome’s unprecedented growth could make this a very short section. Empirically, they are gaining market share at an incredible, unprecedented pace. It’s clear they’ve 10xed something.
But what, and for who? What are the principles driving their growth?
There are two stakeholders in any presentation app: presenters and their audiences.
Tome 10x-es the experience for both.
Presenters
Tome allows you to create great presentations 10x faster by fundamentally improving how you create content, how you format that content, and how you distribute that content.
Creating Content - AI + Integrations
On Tome, you can leverage AI to create specific slides or entire presentations from a prompt or a document (complete with text and images). In the near future, you’ll be able to generate design variants, charts and diagrams from data, and even feedback on your content: a user creating a sales deck, for example, might get tips on specific points to add or re-word.
In addition, integrations make incorporating complex ideas super easy. Instead of relying on screenshots to get ideas across, you can simply embed the entire Figma prototype, staging environment, 3D rendering, or Miro Whiteboard.
Formatting Content - Layout Engine
Tome’s dynamic, tile-based system and underlying layout engine completely automates formatting. Adding something to a slide isn’t like on PowerPoint where you have to position and re-position everything yourself; when you do it in Tome, the layout engine shifts and re-sizes other tiles intuitively, dynamically re-formatting everything to keep the slide beautiful.
This layout engine also powers mobile re-formatting, which is why without any extra effort, things look good on both desktop and mobile. When combined with Tome’s proprietary color theme generator, you end up with a presentation that’s beautiful by default. No more of whatever this is:
Distributing Content - Web First
Presenting, sharing or forwarding a Tome is easier than traditional presentations. Since everything is embedded, you don’t have to switch windows mid-presentation to show something. Since its flexible and web-based, you don’t have to worry about files or downloads. Seen states and analytics mean you can see who’s looked at which slides, what they enjoyed/got stuck on, how they interacted, and much more (all of which are impossible with traditional files). Since all data is live, you don’t have to worry about sending people the latest versions.
It’s subtle, but Tome has actually introduced step-level improvements in each part of the creator’s user journey. These changes stack and amplify each other in a continuous loop to produce a creator experience that’s way better than traditional tools.
This drives retention and engagement - creators stick around and create more presentations since they like it so much. More presentations means more people looking at presentations, exposing new users to Tome as members of the audience.
This is the first half of Tome’s growth loop.
The experience of this audience is what we’ll consider next.
Audiences
Tome’s unique format makes it significantly better for audiences. A number of factors contribute to this:
Mobile/flex optimization - Tomes resize and re-organize dynamically to fit whatever screen you’re on, unlike traditional decks.
Interactivity - Users can play around with Tome’s interactive, multimodal tiles for a richer experience. This helps with understanding complex ideas (i.e. 3D designs) or reviewing content without a live presenter (i.e. a pitch deck).
Web-first - Tome’s web-first nature means users don’t have to download files or worry about version numbers.
Narration - Creators can embed voice or video recordings explaining certain segments, which can help communicate more complex ideas.
AI-native - In the future, Tome can leverage generative AI to personalize presentations around specific audience members. For instance, they might dynamically modify logos, names, or testimonials on a sales deck to make it more relevant to an audience member. When decks are personalized, 68% more people read them through in full.
Traditional presentation tools do nothing around the audience experience because for the longest time, there was no room to innovate. Back then, everyone viewed a presentation in the same way: in person, physically. When it came to the viewer, there was no product surface area to innovate on.
With the rise of remote/async work though, most presentations are delivered remotely now, meaning things have changed. With everyone viewing presentations on their own devices, there is opportunity to innovate on the audience experience.
While most other startups in the space focus strictly on the creator’s experience, Tome is one of the only ones building for audiences as well.
This drives new user activation - a dramatically better viewer experience is what prompts so many to click “Try Tome” at the top right corner of every presentation.
This is the second half of Tome’s growth loop.
When chained with their superior creator experience, Tome’s built a powerful flywheel giving them a huge leg up on the most important thing for any startup: distribution.
Distribution
Unlike most SaaS or productivity tools, Tome has a built in flywheel: users create presentations, they show their teammates those presentations, and those teammates pick up Tome to try for themselves. Since you’re mostly hearing about Tome from people you know, each step even comes with built-in social proof, which is amazing.
Unlike most companies building better storytelling tools, however, Tome has a far more efficient flywheel: by chaining innovations in both the creator experience and viewer experience, Tome’s higher activation and retention rates amplify and compound each other across cycles, giving them an exponential advantage on distribution.
Tome’s superior audience experience is subtle (and not what most pieces discussing the company focus on) but a major principle behind their explosive growth. Continuously innovating on both halves of the flywheel has likely had a major impact on the company’s viral coefficient, where even a small change can have dramatic impacts on a product’s growth trajectory.
This, at its core, is one of Tome’s secret ingredients.
The company’s mastery of viral growth shouldn’t be a surprise.
The entire executive team has tons of experience with exactly this sort of thing. Keith and Henri were product leads at Instagram and Messenger, two of the most popular consumer products ever. Head of Marketing and GTM Matthew Smith was previously CMO at TripActions, another one of the fastest growing startups in history. Board member Reid Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn, board member Dan Rose was an executive at Facebook from 2006 to 2019, and board member Michael Mignano co-founded Anchor (acquired by Spotify).
Viral growth loops are clearly something the Tome team has thought deeply about, and the result is something special: a product with the growth/retention of a consumer social app and the value capture of an enterprise productivity app.
Defending Market Share
Now that we’ve dug into how Tome’s been swiftly gaining market share, let’s consider how they can keep it.
While it’s still early days, Tome is already approaching defensibility from several angles:
System-wide Data. With their rapidly growing user base, Tome is gathering vast amounts of data around what folks like and dislike when it comes to AI-generated presentations. This gives them a huge advantage when tuning their models with RLHF.
Organizational Data. When generating presentations, people often want explainable facts and content from inside the company, which doesn’t come with off-the-shelf LLMs. We’re told Tome is building a proprietary system data layer by integrating a large number of data sources in order to make generated Tomes more accurate and relevant than vanilla LLM outputs. This will make the product even stickier among early adopters.
Product Principles. For incumbent tools, moving away from a static deck-based orientation to the dynamic system Tome has developed would mean rewriting much of their own layout engines/user flows from the ground up. It might be hard for products like PowerPoint and Google Slides to consider such a foundational shift. As Tome continues to double down on their unique product principles, the gap between them and traditional decks will become wider and harder to cross.
Again, things are still taking shape: it’s only been six months since launch. In the future, other strong assets might include Tome’s community, their collection of user-created tutorials and templates, other network-oriented features the team is building across organizations, and the company’s powerful, compounding distribution loop.
Competitive Landscape
Tome has a unique approach to storytelling, but they’re far from the only ones operating in the space.
Now that we have a unique understanding of Tome’s strengths as a product and company, let’s have a look at how they stack up against potential competitors.
Big Tech
Most promising, breakout startups come face to face with big tech at some point. Tome is no different.
In this case, they’re dancing with Microsoft’s PowerPoint, Google’s Slides, and (to a lesser extent) Apple’s Keynote. Each has a long history, tens of millions of users, and a focus on deck-based presentations. The first two have announced plans to integrate artificial intelligence.
Against the three, Tome has several product-based advantages, many stemming from the unique format they’ve built:
On creator experience, Tome’s dynamic layout/tile system makes it easier for users to create their own content and tune AI-generated content. Tome’s web-first nature and resulting integrations make it easier to convey complex ideas (i.e. using a whiteboard or prototype demo). Tome is also more free to leverage AI models from multiple sources (i.e. combining Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, and Imagen) than big tech, who will be more focused on proprietary systems.
On viewer experience, Tome is better suited for mobile and flexible experiences. It’s multi-modal interactivity means a richer experience for viewers, especially those viewing the content async. It’s web-first nature means you don’t have to worry about files and versions.
Although less satisfying, Tome’s focus as a startup shouldn’t be discounted either. It was this focus that led them to integrate AI months before anyone else, and it’s this focus that’ll help them lead on other AI-related features currently in development (i.e. AI-generated graphs, diagrams, layouts, feedback, or personalizations). While larger companies might not find it worth their while, Tome has all their AI talent focused on building custom models and features around the storytelling use case.
We also can’t discount branding. It’s hard to deny lots of people just don’t love the lack of personality and craftsmanship in products made by big tech. These people usually turn to products like Notion, Figma, Airtable, and Arc instead. Tome is quickly filling the same spot for presentations.
Startups
Tome isn’t the first startup to try re-imagining presentations.
A large number of other startups have also tried improving or re-inventing the slide deck over the past decade. Some of the best-funded companies in the space include:
Pitch - Pitch is a German startup building a more modern deck-editing tool. Features include video embeddings, integrations with real-time data sources, and modern collaboration tools. They have not yet integrated artificial intelligence. Pitch raised an $85 million Series B in 2021 from Lakestar and Tiger Global and has “tens of thousands” of teams using the platform.
Prezi - Prezi is a Hungarian startup building a moving, zooming, map-like alternative to traditional slide decks. Features include video narration, infographic creation, and modern collaboration tools. They have not yet integrated artificial intelligence. Prezi last raised a $57 million Series C in 2014 from Spectrum Equity. They had over 100 million registered users in 2021, up from 50 million in 2014.
A (non-exhaustive) list of other, smaller players includes Slidebean, Slides, Ludus, Haiku Deck, Swipe, FlowVella, SlideShare, Decktopus, Visme, Gamma, Zoho Show, Beautiful.ai, and Genially. Each has taken their own angle to the problem. Some, like Slidebean, are focused on founders and pitch decks. Several, like Decktopus, Gamma, and Beautiful.ai, have also recently launched AI features. Others, like Ludus and Slides, have doubled down on the manual editing experience and are focused on creative professionals. People are even using design tools like Canva and Figma to create slide decks.
Against most of these startups, you might prefer joining Tome for the following reasons:
Breakout trajectory. Due to what we discussed above or some other reason, Tome’s just growing way faster than everyone else. Even ignoring what this implies about their product, this growth itself is a massive advantage. It gives Tome more data to tune their models, early access to better models/partnerships/integrations, access to better talent and investors, and a number of marketing/branding advantages.
Better foundations. Most of the startups above help you make better decks, so they face the same challenges as all deck-based tools. Their traditional editing experience makes them worse for creators and their lack of flexibility/interactivity makes them worse for viewers.
Execution
Designing, building, and popularizing a new storytelling format is a tall order. When you mix in all the competition in the space, it’s obvious Tome will need an exceptional team to pull everything off.
Thankfully, they do. Consider a sampling of their roster for yourself:
Keith Peiris - Co-Founder, CEO
Keith was previously the Head of Product at Citizen (a Sequoia-backed Series C startup) and the Messaging & Camera AR Product Lead at Instagram. Before, he was a Product Management Manager at Facebook.
Henri Liriani - Co-Founder, CPO
Henri was previously Head of Product, Messenger Human Interfaces where he led UI on Facebook Messenger. He was also previously a Product Design Manager at Facebook.
Matthew Smith - Head of Marketing and GTM
Matthew was previously the Chief Marketing Officer at TripActions (Navan), the Global Marketing lead for UberEverything at Uber, and the Global head of Marketing for Google My Business at Google. He holds a B.A. in History from Yale.
Sasha Vladimirov - Head of Engineering
Sasha was previously a Senior Engineering Manager at Robinhood and a Senior Software Engineering Manager at Google, where he spent over 13 years. He holds an SB in Mechanical Engineering from MIT.
Nima Soltani - Machine Learning Architect
Nima was previously a Founding Engineer at Ghost Locomotion, the self-driving car startup which has raised over 200 million. Before, he was a Sensor Algorithm Engineer at Apple. He holds a Ph.D. in EE from Stanford.
Yuchen Liu - Founding Engineer
Yuchen was previously a Software Engineer at Airbnb, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. He holds degrees in CS from UCLA and Tsinghua.
Torehan Sharman - Machine Learning Engineer
Torehan was previously a Senior ML/Robotics Engineer at Cruise and a Program Manager at Microsoft. He holds a BS in CS from UMich.
William Fortin - Software Engineer
William was previously an early engineer and Engineering Lead at Pleo, the fintech unicorn recently valued at $4.7 billion.
Kevin Lau - Product Manager
Kevin was previously a Product Manger at Instacart and Uber. He was also the Co-Founder and Co-Director of Hack the North, Canada’s largest hackathon.
Jeong Woo Chang - Software Engineer
Jeong was previously a Software Engineer at Meta, DocuSign, and Microsoft. He holds a BS in CS from UIUC.
Tome’s culture is defined by a remarkable balance between shipping fast and maintaining an exceptional degree of craftsmanship. For instance, the entirety of automatic Tome generation was conceived, developed, and prototyped in 4 days. The idea of going from a document to a Tome went from idea to execution in the space of a weekend. This pace of execution is especially impressive considering the company’s emphasis on collaborative decision making: Keith proudly told us he’s never once pulled rank while running the company.
No doubt, much of this inherits from the consumer-social backgrounds of the founding team, where you have to ship/iterate quickly while maintaining the high degree of polish end-users expect. Perhaps it’s why Tome’s product, both in its design and growth, behaves more like a consumer social app than a traditional enterprise tool. One reviewer described using Tome “more like Instagram than it is PowerPoint.”
Reid Hoffman told us that this combination of velocity and craft makes Tome an anomaly of sorts. While the common saying is that if you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product you’ve launched it too late, he notes Tome is proof you can actually “ship great products” from the start “through intelligent design and focus on the user experience” while still learning constantly from customer engagement afterwards.
Zach DeWitt, partner at Wing and investor in Tome, agrees. He told us Tome was one the most design-centric companies he had ever worked with. Jake Medwell, Co-Founder of 8VC and another investor in Tome, emphasized the team’s strong grasp of “how presentations should be made from first principles” as another key reason for their success.
Users appear to agree:
Conclusion
While you can’t implement a deterministic finite automaton or a working game engine in Tome, you can make something even better: a beautiful presentation.
It’s about time someone disrupted the slide deck.
They’re hiring.
Thanks to Reid Hoffman, Jake Medwell, Zach DeWitt, Michael Mignano, Elisa Schreiber, Glen Evans, Vivek Gopalan, and Bela Becerra for their help with this piece.
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Finally, if you’re a founder or investor with a company you think we should cover please reach out to us at ericzhou@stanford.edu and uhanif@stanford.edu - we’d love to hear about it :)