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How one startup hits $1.67M ARR per employee
One startup just hit $1.67M ARR per employee while most companies struggle to break $300K. Here's their exact playbook.
Matthew Berman
September 16, 2025
In partnership with
Gamma is an outlier. The numbers are insane.
$0 to $50M ARR in under 4 years.
Negative lifetime burn (they have more cash than they've raised).
50 million users served by a team of just 30 people.
That's ~$1.67M ARR per employee. Read that again.
Their CEO says they did it with four simple tactics: Influencers. Brand. Testing. Dogfooding.
But that's the surface story. And Big Players don't trade in surface stories.
Go to Gamma .app and sign up for your account.
After signup, you will be taken to this page.
Choose what you want to create. In my example, I chose a presentation.
— Rowan Cheung (@rowancheung)
3:32 PM • May 16, 2023
Those aren't four separate tactics. They're four gears in a single, hyper-efficient growth engine. An engine that only kicked into high gear after a critical pivot that saved them from "existential angst" and a "dwindling runway."
Here's what really happened when they were 3 months from shutting down...