The Art of Storytelling

Welcome Shareholders,

Every Sunday, We'll highlight one company to do an in-depth breakdown of their business, financial situation, and whether or not it's a worthy investment opportunity - large or small. In today's edition, we'll look at a startup looking to reinvent presentations with AI.

AI has taken the spotlight in the venture capital world, with industry behemoths like OpenAI and Anthropic attracting hundreds of millions in funding. Amidst the hype, startups are pivoting to incorporate "AI" into their offerings while venture funds scramble to raise new capital to exploit this burgeoning market. However, the likelihood of another OpenAI or Anthropic emerging in the startup landscape is slim, given the immense resources required to train such advanced models.

The next generation of AI unicorns is more likely to arise from startups that adopt this cutting-edge technology to create innovative consumer and enterprise-facing software. One such contender is Tome, a trailblazing company that's reimagining the presentation interface with AI at its core. The question now is whether Tome has what it takes to disrupt a long-stagnant industry and capitalize on the growing demand for flexibility and customization in presentation software.

What's the Buzz?

Since raising $26 million in its Series A funding round in February 2022, Tome has made significant strides. Liriani and CEO Keith Peiris, both former Meta managers, spent two years developing Tome before launching a free beta test in September and integrating AI models from OpenAI just two months later. In a mere 134 days, this San Francisco-based startup surpassed the one million user milestone, outpacing renowned productivity tools like Dropbox, Slack, and Zoom.

The company has capitalized on the influx of users by raising a recent $43 million Series B funding round, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and featuring prominent investors such as Coatue, Greylock, Stability.ai CEO Emad Mostaque, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. This investment boosted Tome's valuation to $300 million, a substantial increase from its $175 million valuation during the 2021 Series A round. Tome has achieved all of this without making a single penny to boot. But what does Tome do, and why is there a Buzz around the startup? Let's take a look.

How Tome Got Started

The inspiration behind Tome can be traced back to the dissatisfaction its founders, Peiris and Liriani, felt while working with expression tools such as stickers, augmented reality, and layering elements. They noticed that these tools often prioritized appearance over the core story being told, resulting in a lack of substance in PowerPoint presentations.

Driven by the desire to create a tool that focused on storytelling rather than design, Peiris, Liriani, and ex-Meta product manager Seth Rosenberg of Greylock embarked on a journey to develop a better presentation tool during the 2020 pandemic lockdown.

Their frustrations with PowerPoint and Google Slides—particularly their limited mobile functionality and reliance on static screenshots—led them to explore the potential of AI-powered tools. They realized that large-language models like OpenAI's GPT series could revolutionize pitch decks by learning their typical structures, just as they did for text prompts.

Upon receiving positive feedback from fellow product managers on an initial mock-up, Peiris and Liriani began developing what was then called Magical Tome. With the support of billionaire Reid Hoffman, Rosenberg's Greylock colleague, they raised a seed round and welcomed Hoffman to their board. Tome's rapid success story began in February 2022 with a Series A funding round led by Coatue, raising $26 million. The company's growth continued with a recent Series B round, raising an additional $43 million.

What Investors Think

Investor Michael Mignano, a former cofounder of podcast startup Anchor and current Lightspeed partner, was captivated by Tome's potential after seeing its AI tools in action through an announcement video on Twitter. Eager to learn more, Mignano quickly sought an introduction to Tome's founders through previous backer Nakul Mandan, founder of Audacious Ventures.

Following a productive call with the founders, Mignano was so impressed that he flew to San Francisco the next morning and offered a term sheet for Tome's Series B within days. He believed that the innovative format and speed at which high-quality presentations could be created using Tome were unparalleled in the industry.

Successful examples of creativity democratization often stem from a combination of user-friendly tools and the invention of a brand-new format. WordPress and Blogger simplified the process of publishing traditional long-form writing, while Twitter and Facebook introduced more accessible short-form writing formats, generating immense value for both creators and the platforms themselves.

Similarly, TikTok's highly creative and entertaining format revolutionized how people share and consume video content. In each instance, creators benefited from reduced friction and vast distribution, while the platforms (Twitter, Facebook, TikTok) captured significant economic value through unique, ownable formats.

Tome's innovative approach addresses a widespread pain point in presentation software and offers a more engaging and valuable solution. This blend of accessibility and innovation has piqued the interest of investors, who recognize Tome as a promising venture with the potential to transform the way people create and share presentations.

Market Monopoly

The presentation software landscape has seen Microsoft's unwavering dominance for more than three decades, primarily due to its flagship PowerPoint program. Despite attempts by tech giants like Apple with Keynote and Google with Google Slides, both have been unable to significantly disrupt Microsoft's stronghold.

Microsoft's success can be attributed to its robust ecosystem and network effects, which have allowed it to maintain a competitive edge in the presentation software space. The lucrative nature of this market cannot be overstated: Microsoft controls a staggering 95% of the market share and generates $45 billion in revenue from Office and related services.

As Tome ventures into this highly monopolized market, it faces the challenge of carving out a niche for itself and capturing the attention of users who have been reliant on Microsoft's products for decades.

What's Wrong With Presentations Today

In today's fast-paced digital world, presentations play a crucial role in communication, yet creators often find themselves grappling with outdated and clunky tools. Designing these presentations can be a frustrating and time-consuming process, as creators spend hours tweaking table sizes or paying thousands of dollars to consultants just to achieve a marginally improved appearance. Furthermore, the end product often falls short of both creator and consumer expectations.

The rigid, 16x9 grid format is ill-suited for viewing on smartphones or tablets, while the content remains flat and static due to the limited web technology available at the time of its creation. Sharing these presentations can be cumbersome, as they are typically large files that must be downloaded for a complete viewing experience, reflecting the lack of cloud infrastructure in place when the format was created.

Despite these shortcomings, presentations continue to be a widely used medium, primarily due to inertia. The format, a relic of an earlier era of the internet, persists because everyone is familiar with it. However, this familiarity has led to a stagnation in innovation, placing a ceiling on how compelling presentations can be.

Tome aims to address these pain points by offering a modern and user-friendly solution to presentation creation. By tackling the fundamental issues with current presentation tools, Tome seeks to redefine the way people create and share their ideas, ultimately breaking free from the limitations of traditional formats.

How Does Tome Work

Tome's innovative software offers a fresh approach to presentation creation, reimagining the traditional PowerPoint system of slide-friendly, uniform tiles. The platform allows for the automatic placement and sizing of text and images on its canvas, providing a more streamlined and user-friendly experience.

What sets Tome apart is its modular tiles system, where changes made to one tile dynamically update others, ensuring a cohesive and visually appealing presentation. With the integration of AI, Tome leverages multiple large-language models to efficiently generate content in response to a user's prompt. The process begins with the software creating a framework for the output and setting its length and style. Subsequently, smaller queries to the AI models populate the presentation with corresponding images and text. Users can then fine-tune the results or request additional pages through further prompts.

While Tome is versatile enough to generate various types of content, from engaging marketing pitches to visually rich architectural designs, it has truly struck a chord as a formidable alternative to PowerPoint and Google Slides. By offering a modern and intelligent solution to the challenges of traditional presentation tools, Tome is poised to revolutionize the way people create and share information.

A Giant Step Forward

One of the key differentiators between Tome and conventional PowerPoint presentations is the efficiency it brings to the creative process. Peiris highlights that Tome's magic lies in its ability to create presentations in minutes rather than hours. This is made possible through the user-friendly desktop and mobile app, which simplifies the embedding of various internet content like Figma prototypes, spreadsheets, videos, tweets, and GIFs. Users can also pair this content with 3D models and live data tables that update automatically.

Tome's fluid page structure adapts to the user's desired content instead of forcing them to modify their message to fit a rigid format. This flexibility ensures a more personalized and visually appealing presentation. Furthermore, Tome encourages collaboration by allowing users to share their creations with colleagues for edits and comments throughout the process.

By addressing the limitations of traditional PowerPoint presentations, Tome is reinventing the way individuals and teams create compelling, visually engaging, and efficient presentations that cater to modern-day needs.

Tome Toolbox

Tome's technological advancements make it a superior alternative to traditional PowerPoint presentations. Its creative tools are designed to be user-friendly, enabling creators to quickly and easily drag in a range of useful, beautiful, and modern features. Text appears flawless and stylish without the need for endless font searching or manual adjustments to letter spacing or shadows. Tables are simple, functional, and versatile.

Seamless integration with modern products like Figma, Airtable, Framer, Miro, and Looker allows creators to effortlessly share designs and connect external data sources without being a spreadsheet expert. Content from videos, images, websites and even tweets can be perfectly displayed from the moment they are placed on the canvas, eliminating the need for time-consuming recreation of frequently used design elements.

Tome's intuitive tools empower anyone, regardless of their professional background or expertise, to create compelling stories within minutes. This efficiency saves valuable time and resources that would otherwise be spent on professional deck design.

Democratizing Presentations

Tome's innovative format offers significant improvements over traditional presentations in terms of both creation and consumption. As a cloud-native platform, Tome presents live data, eliminating the need for static, bloated .ppt or .pdf files to be downloaded on local devices.

Tomes can be instantly accessed on any device—desktop, tablet, or smartphone—addressing a longstanding issue with classic presentations that have struggled to adapt to modern device compatibility. Anyone who has attempted to view a lengthy deck on their phone minutes before a crucial meeting can attest to the frustrations associated with this process.

Thanks to Tome's responsive grid system, which leverages modern web technologies unavailable during the inception of legacy presentation software, the viewing experience is optimized for smartphones, making it as native as watching a TikTok video.

Tome's AI Leap

Tome's AI-driven approach is empowering users to create captivating presentations limited only by their imagination. With the intuitive prompt bar, users can request any content they desire, be it based on a long-form document, a simple outline, or even a single sentence. Tome's AI capabilities then deliver results that are not only aesthetically pleasing but also thematically fitting.

The platform goes beyond generating text, offering auto-created images and visuals, suggesting reworded copy, and recommending new titles for pages. As Tome continues to evolve, it plans to introduce proactive, high-quality content suggestions, automatic citations, and seamless integration with other data sources. This could include importing a team's KPI progress from a metrics dashboard or information about team members from a website's About page or HR platform.

Microsoft's Response

As Tome makes waves in the presentation space, Microsoft is not standing idly by. Recently, the tech giant unveiled Microsoft 365 Copilot, a game-changing feature aimed at eliminating mundane tasks from daily office work. Powered by OpenAI's ChatGPT technology, Copilot seamlessly integrates with Microsoft 365 apps, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook.

Within the PowerPoint application, Copilot appears as a text box, enabling users to delegate tasks effortlessly through simple prompts. The AI then leverages information from across your Microsoft 365 accounts, such as emails, notes, and documents, to craft relevant responses. For instance, Copilot can generate a celebratory presentation for a high school student by sourcing photos from the user's OneDrive account. Microsoft envisions Copilot as a transformative tool that allows employees to focus on more productive and creative tasks while the AI takes care of time-consuming duties.

As AI-driven tools like Tome and Microsoft 365 Copilot become increasingly prevalent, one can't help but wonder: Is Tome's solution truly secure in a world where AI is becoming a standard feature? Does it possess a sizable enough competitive advantage to maintain its position in the market? Ultimately, only time will reveal the true impact of these AI advancements on the future of presentations and productivity.

Bottom Line

Leveraging AI, powerful tools, and an innovative format, Tome enables anyone to tell a great story. Users don't need to be native speakers to find the right words, possess design skills to find the perfect image, or be presentation experts to craft a compelling narrative flow.

The versatility of Tome's format not only addresses traditional presentation needs but also caters to a wide array of creative applications, such as design portfolios, lesson plans, microsites, moodboards, children's stories, and travel itineraries. This adaptability positions Tome as a game-changer in the presentation and content creation landscape, with immense potential for future growth and innovation.

While Tome's groundbreaking features and cutting-edge technology are undeniably impressive, the road to unseating Microsoft's longstanding supremacy in the presentation space remains a challenging one. Yet, with the swift rise of game-changing platforms like TikTok standing toe-to-toe with Facebook or ChatGPT giving Google a run for its money, we're reminded that disruptive forces can emerge and shake up the status quo more quickly than ever before. As Tome forges ahead, refining and expanding its unique offerings, it might not be long before we witness a transformative shift in the world of presentations, with Tome potentially toppling Microsoft's reign and redefining the landscape for years to come.