Richard White - CEO of Fathom AI NoteTaker

Jason talks with Richard White, the CEO of Fathom AI Note Taker. They talk about Richard's journey to becoming a successful founder, why a free product is sometimes the best marketing strategy for growth, and how he thinks about what it takes to successfully scale a team of people from below ten to over fifty.

“When you build a business, build one that plays to your strengths—not what someone else tells you to do.”

Richard White is the founder and CEO of Fathom.video, a free app that records, transcribes & highlights your calls so you can focus on the conversation instead of taking notes. 

Fathom was a part of the Y-Combinator W21 batch, is one of only 50 Zoom App Launch Partners, and is one of a small handful of companies Zoom has invested in directly via their Zoom Apps Fund.

Prior to Fathom, Richard founded UserVoice, one of the leading platforms that technology companies, from startups to the Fortune 500, use for managing customer feedback and making strategic product decisions. UserVoice was notable for being the company that originally invented the Feedback tabs shown on the side of millions of websites around the world today.

Richard previously worked on Kiko, a company in the first batch of Y-Combinator, with Justin Kan and Emmett Shear who subsequently went on to found Twitch. Richard is passionate about designing intuitive productivity tools with delightful user experiences.

Try Fathom for free: https://fathom.video

https://www.linkedin.com/in/rrwhite/

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Transcript

Jason Frazell: 0:11

Hey everybody, this is a special one for me and it's somebody that I met six minutes ago, which is different than usual, and as you all know that are listeners. I do a lot of speaking with founders. Some of the founders have products that I've either never heard of or I'm just not in the market for. And when Richard and his team reached out, I said, holy cow, I have to talk to Richard. Richard is the CEO and founder of Fathom AI Note taker. Which happens to be a product that I've used for, since it's been in beta, which is amazing. So when I saw I go, I go, I, my first thought Richard was the fathom note taker that I've been using. I'm like, I know this thing well. I use it all the time. And so I'm here with Richard today. I'm really glad you're here, and I maybe get to learn a little bit more about your process and about the company than just being an end user. So Richard, welcome again. Richard's the founder and CEO of Fathom ai.

Richard White: 1:05

Jason, thanks for having me.

Jason Frazell: 1:06

Yeah, I mean, I'm gonna say this Richard. I'll make a maybe a fun joke for those who get it. We are not recording this in Fathom in Zoom. We're actually recording this in another product for a specific reason. We're recording this in Riverside and I'd suggest we record in Fathom and we're not gonna do that'cause I usually use Riverside. We're here. So Richard, I'd love to start out and just give the audience a little context on what Fathom is and then we'll go back. In history and talk about your journey to get there. But you know, in a nutshell, what is Fathom note taker for those who don't know?

Richard White: 1:36

Yeah, I mean, I think, I've never met anyone who likes trying to have a meeting on Zoom or Google Meet or Microsoft teams and take notes at the same time. Right. No, it's probably one of everyone's least favorite things to do. Certainly it was mine before I started Fathom about five years ago. And so we kind of just kind of thought, gosh, this is back in 2020. We thought, gosh, we think AI. We think everyone, everyone hates taking notes, so why don't we make a free product that just sits in your meetings, records it, transcribes it, and takes notes for you so you can just focus on having a great conversa conversation and not trying to be a, you know, a court stenographer as well as a salesperson or founder or what you name it. So yeah, so that's what we set out to do and been pretty successful. Again, thanks for being an early beta user. We've, we had fantastic early users that gave us a lot great feedback and also spread the word about fathom. Their friends and their colleagues and whatnot. And so it's been a really fun ride, honestly. Yeah. And I think we've been, we've kind of proven out that yep, no one likes taking notes and they're no super excited to have a product do it for them. Especially, no one do it for free.

Jason Frazell: 2:42

The next, the next iteration is my Fathom robot that comes in an in-person meeting and takes notes for me. I, I am the perfect user for something like this. I hate taking notes in any context, whether it be Zoom person, I'm just not a, I'm not a good note daycare. I don't like it. I know that I can't be fully present. So when you all come out with your physical thing that goes into a meeting, and, I mean, actually you can do that, right? You can open up a Zoom and say, Hey, we're gonna record this. No problem.

Richard White: 3:04

We are looking into that. I have the same problem where it's like people, you know, wanna meet in person. I'm like, can we not? Because I don't remember. It's almost like it didn't happen. Like, because I, I, that muscle has atrophied so much for me that yeah. I just, I'm just not used to scribing even an in-person conversation, so, yeah.

Jason Frazell: 3:21

So. Cool. Well let, let's start back with you're, you're history of what's gotten you to, you know, the founder and CEO of, of Fathom. What, what's your background and where did you come from prior to this?

Richard White: 3:33

Yeah, so I was originally a computer science graduate. So early my career was an engineer. I was a very classic founder engineer. It's like, you know, kind of a crappy engineer. Like, I can get stuff out pretty quickly. But it's not pretty. It's not, it's not your remotely bulletproof. I early my career kind transitioned over doing product design. And when I did that, it's actually when I started working with a company in the first batch of I Combinator.

Jason Frazell: 3:56

Mm-hmm.

Richard White: 3:57

Called Kiko. And we like shared the, we shared a room in, in Cambridge with like, Reddit and some other folks. And so that was kinda a cool. Entree into a really rich vein of entrepreneurs that were out here in, in San Francisco where I live now. Yeah. And so that kind of got me really focused on, on, you know, starting cool software companies. I started this company called User Voice, which was a platform for product feedback. Did that for a long time. Did for about 10 years. And really I called that like my finishing school for entrepreneurship because yeah. It was a good not great company like pretty reasonably successful, but like we had to work for every inch, if you will. Right? And so we really had to get good at execution and it gave me an opportunity to branch out from not just doing product and design but to like running the sales team for a minute, running the marketing team for a minute. Like, so it made me, I think, a kind of a very T-shaped kind of entrepreneur, right? Mm-hmm. Where disciplines, obviously I go on design and. But I know not enough to be dangerous across all these, and those that, those warnings were, I think, super impactful and helpful when it came time to start found

Jason Frazell: 5:02

nice. The lot of there's a lot of things I wanna dig in on there. And the first thing is, and I always ask a founder this, when did you know that you were gonna be, you were gonna found a company?

Richard White: 5:15

Company? I was very fortunate in that I grew up with, my parents were divorced, and both my stepdad and my father, both entrepreneurs. Okay. Yeah. And so I kind of grew up with this like default assumptions, what you did. I remember I sold pictures to kids in first grade class and you know, and then in high school I was selling like fake Oakley that I got from my brother in New York City, shipped them down, me, Carolina, I had

Jason Frazell: 5:37

fake Oakley, absolutely. Hack.

Richard White: 5:39

Yeah. Sold sold like mixed tapes, mix. We burn CDs. So I was always doing something kinda on my own, I think.

Jason Frazell: 5:45

Yeah,

Richard White: 5:46

early in my career I went. I was an employee at a couple companies as a software engineer, and I realized I'm a terrible employee. Yeah, I just, you know, I don't take direction. Well, you know, you really gotta explain the why to me for me to do it. But I'm a really good founder. Like I'm really self-motivated kind of person. So yeah, I think it was very fortunate that like I was just surrounded by kind of entrepreneurship and I think the, I grew up in North Carolina. I think the biggest problem, my challenge I had there is outside of my family, there wasn't a lot of, it was really hard for me, get friends and colleagues to. You know, start startups'cause everyone's just so happy to like, eh, I kinda like having a salary and you know, a car and a house and stuff. Perfectly legitimate things you want. Sure. And so then when I got into this like Y Combinator group, which, you know, everyone kind of knows Y Combinator now, but at that point no one knew what that was. But I was also sudden, oh I found my tribe, I found all the other people that, you know, wake up every morning and want to build something. And you know, I think that that intersection of. Personal background, desire and finding the right group of people was super impactful.

Jason Frazell: 6:44

Yeah. You also mentioned the founder, one of the, one of the many founder dilemmas is being really good and especially a technical founder. Passion as a passion is product design, engineering, and then one day you find yourself having to have sales conversations or having to have HR conversations like doing it all. I'm curious if you'd share with us. How did that go when you started?'cause most technical founders, I know they hate sales. Like they wanna like get into the product and do the thing and then Yeah, like, and, and then the, the technical details should sell itself or the, the value should sell itself. And now that you've had a lot of experience that you know, it, it doesn't, it like some of those things still don't matter. I'm so curious, like what you've learned about that for other founders listening that maybe a lesson you can impart is, you know, somebody and we're talk about how you've raised some capital and you've had a lot of success with Fathom that you've managed to. Do that and then eventually build a pretty decent sized team.

Richard White: 7:43

Yeah, I mean, I think you know, user voice and fathom very different companies, right? Like your, your first startup, you gotta do everything yourself. It was fall asleep with your laptop writing code. Fathom's a little bit different, right?'cause I had a somewhat successful company before, and so I got to start with. Four great engineers and I in month three hired my best salesperson sort of thing. Mm. So I would say if I think about kind of more my user voice experience, I think it's more applicable to a lot of folks. If you're first time founder, you know, I think there's a lot of, the biggest thing you have to overcome is your own, getting your own head about these things, right? Like, mm. Especially if you're a technical founder, it's easy to be like, I don't know how to do sales. I don't wanna do sales, I don't want, I don't like doing things I'm not good at. And like, find someone to do this. And I think as you then watch people do it, you're like, oh, it's not that. It's not, you know, to do it super well is like takes, you know, 10,000 hours, but like you can do it. Right. And I think a lot of my friends that were the most successful ones were the ones who were in their twenties and early thirties, still had, they had almost the hubris to be like, I can do anything, right? Like, mm-hmm I can go do sales for us. I can figure out our marketing. Right. I think one of the things I reflect on is that I often get very in my head and I'd spend a lot of time trying to find an expert to teach me how to do extra Y or Z. Sure. And I would actually move a lot slower than my peers because of that. Right. I think it was only want to figure it out. Gosh. You know, don't wait for perfect. Right. Perfect enemy of good. Don't wait to find, yes, there's someone who's a better marketer or someone better salesperson out there than me, but we speed is everything in startups. Even if I do a crappy job, it's still better than the alternative sort of thing. Yeah. And so I think that was my lesson for the first company. And then for Fathom, my lesson was more like, let's build a company that actually plays my strengths. Right. Which is, yeah. Yeah. You know, user voice started off as like this freemium product and then evolved into an enterprise product and I was much better running the freemium company. Mm. Played in my strengths around user experience and product design. And so for Fathom, we kinda had this thing. We're gonna just focus. We're not even trying to sell anything for two, three years. We're just gonna try to make an awesome product that people use day in, day out. And actually, my, you know, my sales leader, I brought in, I told her, I was like, you're actually not gonna sell anything for two years. I just want you here and you're gonna act like a customer success person, and you're just gonna help everyone and become a product expert. And at some point we're gonna have something for you to sell. This is a tough pitch to a salesperson, by the way. I was, I was gonna say,

Jason Frazell: 10:07

I mentioned to have High Trust. Wait, what? Yeah,

Richard White: 10:10

yeah, yeah. I'm very fortunate, you know, this is her name's Amanda, like worked with her at User Voice, you know? Yeah. And I developed a lot of high trusts and so it's, that's one of the advantages of, of being a second time you can go grab someone, say, Hey, look, I need you to do this. It's a little different than what you normally work on, but just trust me, we're gonna get there, sort of thing. So, brilliant. But yeah, so I think Fathom is like, we play in my strengths, right? We go find, yeah. We build a business model that. Is the one I wanna wake up every day and work at.

Jason Frazell: 10:36

You say something you said there reminds me, I was in a conversation yesterday with some founders and they were supporting somebody and they were the, the topic was remote versus in person and how they're getting, if this is something that you all have dealt with or not, and. The, they have a company about the same size as Fathom, and they were, they're struggling with the decision on it because they're getting their venture venture backed. They have some people saying, Hey, you should do this. They also, like the founder, doesn't love in-person work for a variety of reasons. Partially mm-hmm. For their own, for their own lifestyle. Yep. And, and they've had a really successful company. And somebody else in the group said something that really resonated with me, that it's another way of saying what you just said. They said, remember, as a founder, your business is always a reflection of you. And how you see things, your energy, your vibe, you're bringing in your own. And they said it, it was brilliant. It's like you're bringing in, you bring in your own mindsets, including your limited mindsets. You bring in all of these things, and that was just such a good reminder of me. And you said it, you're like, oh, this is more of a reflection of who I am, my strengths. And when you're trying to do everything or you're, you're doing something that you're not passionate about, like whether or not you say it, your vibe is gonna give it off. As humans, we're just designed to do that.

Richard White: 11:50

I don't think, I think in a lot of these decisions you make about, you know, what's our target market, what's our product? Are we in person, we remote? I actually don't think there's generally any wrong answers. Right? Yeah. All of them are fine. The only wrong answer is to kind of like not commit to one direction and to kind of like hesitate maybe we'll do something in between and also to do something like you don't want do, because yeah, it will be obvious to everyone. Like, you know, I. User voice started off as remote, and then we built an office. Then we built a second office, and I spent half my life traveling to these offices, and at some point Fathom was like, why'd I do that? Like, I don't, I don't like even working in, I'm not even that effective in an office. I'm much more effective when I have my own focused time in my own space. And so, fathom, we were like committed from the early days, like we're gonna be a remote company and, you know, because that's a company I wanna live in. It's like, yeah, you know, I've talked to other founders, they're like, oh, what's the biggest regret? They're like, well, I, I built, we put our office, you know. 40 minute commute from my house. Why? You know, they're like, why did I do that? Totally. Why, why don't I build, you know, build the thing I wanna live in sort of thing. It's your house, right? Yeah. So build, do you wanna live in not the house someone tells you you should be building, right?

Jason Frazell: 12:56

Yeah. And that was, and that was a big part of that conversation was, and this was specifically about some, some venture, some venture capital folks that had invested in their A with like, you need to be this, you need to do that. Right. And they said everybody's gonna have an opinion.

Richard White: 13:11

Yeah.

Jason Frazell: 13:11

But it's not their company. And you know they're investors and you listen and you're respectful and. And, and what ends up happening there, I'm sure, and it probably happened for you as well, is you end up resenting your own business. And boy, what a terrible place to be because I said, if you're gonna resent what you do for a living, go work for somebody else and let them pay you to do that as opposed to like having your

Richard White: 13:29

Yeah. Whole point we do this is so that we have Yeah. The whole point to do this. Making your

Jason Frazell: 13:33

own,

Richard White: 13:34

yeah. I mean, I think you see this a lot too with like enterprise sales where there's generally you raise money, there's a lot pressure to be like, okay, go market founders who. You know, don't love doing sales and pick a business or market that forces them to start doing enterprise sales from day one. Like, yeah, why did you do that? It doesn't play to your strengths. Right? Well, that's what our investors said we need to do. It's like, nah. You know? Yeah. If you're doing something,'cause someone else tells you to do it, your heart's never gonna really be in it. Right?

Jason Frazell: 14:04

Yeah. So I have an adage in life, I like to say, Richard is, find me somebody who really likes being told what to do. There's very few of us, especially those of us who are like, you know, like high performing or like, have some ideas about, and especially people that are creative, like you're obviously a very creative individual as well as a great technical person. You don't like being told what to do.

Richard White: 14:25

Yeah.

Jason Frazell: 14:28

Let's talk about building teams. Building teams, some, any lessons that you wanna share with us and you've scaled. You've scaled fathom quite substantially, and, and people wanna look into that. You can probably find it online, but you've, you've had to grow, you've had to grow from some founder-led sales and some small teams to a real co, like a, not a real company, but a company with all departments and doing all sorts of things. What are some of the things that you've had to learn slash overcome as you've scaled specifically as the founder?

Richard White: 15:05

I mean, I think the, the, you know, the classic one is just like, which of your Legos to give away sort of thing, right? Mm. I think you're always, you're always probably a little late giving them away too, right? Like, you, you stay engaged in things a little too long. I is, I think the failure mode I see the most, at least that was the case for me. You know, I think it's, it's so different when you're doing your first start versus like your second one to a. We were about a year ago. We were about 15 people, we're about 70 now. And huge growth. Those, yeah. Of those 15 people, I think about two thirds of them were people I'd worked with before. Yeah. And the other third were folks that, the other folks that worked with before, it was all in network. Right. Nice. So, I mean, I think that is such a huge, huge hack. And I think you can access this earlier in your career, but than we, than I did. But like finding folks that you've worked with before or folks you've worked with, have worked with sort of thing is like, it's such a hack'cause it's so hard to vet, so hard to have that shotgun wedding of recruiting, especially at the early stage, right? Like it just means something you don't know and run through a rooting process and having it work out is, is hard as you got a high failure rate. Yeah. So, you know, I think, and I also think it. The other thing you, you can get confused by is like, having a big team feels fun. Everyone's like, oh, because every investor's like, how big's your team? You go to some cocktail party with a bunch of entrepreneurs. Everyone, first question.'cause no one will say what their revenue is, right? That's like two. Oh, of course not. Yeah. So the, the, the safe fanning metric for everyone is how big, how big's happen. How big's your team? And so then you subconsciously start thinking that that's also the like metric, metric of success. Yeah. I actually try to hire as little, I like we're things like we hire almost retic, like we try not to hire because yeah, every additional person makes this move a little bit slower. Sure. And I think most of my friends have. Very fortunate to be around people that have been very successful, built really big companies. Ones that have gotten acquired, gone, public, you name it. And they all, you know, they all talk about with a twinkle in their eye. You know, when you tell'em, oh, we're 15 people, we're 20 people. They're like, oh, it's the best. Don't ever, you know, don't ever leave, don't ever, you know, don't ever grow. You hear that all the time. So I, I think there's something to be said for staying in that zone a long time, because you can be really efficient with 15 people. I. We now had to grow the team to, to hit our new goals. Yeah. And that's, but I think a lot of people scale the team too early. Yeah. And I remember talking to my friend Michael Sebel, who's one of the partners at yc, and I was like, we just raised a series A and we had like four engineers. Like we need 12 engineers. And he is like, do you really? He is like, you seem like you got pretty far with four. Like why do you immediately need 12? And that Yeah. Fair point. Right. So I think, you know. So our lessons have been figure out what things you wanna focus on, whatnot. If you've got folks in network, bring them in. I'm also a big fan of like, go with the people you got there with, right? Like there's also this tendency to bring in big execs and whatnot. I'd much rather promote from within. Folks that really understand our culture, they get it. Like they can train the next generation of folks. So yeah, I think that's been my biggest lesson learned for Fathom is there's a. Building the product kind of starts is the first thing you have to do. Sure. But once you get some success, now you're shifting in the company building and yeah, it's a whole different game to play.

Jason Frazell: 18:20

I want to dig in on a, there's so many things I, I, I'll tell you, Richard, as you were saying that I, you were talking about Reddit. I'm just thinking about the CEO EO of Reddit is like, I really can't go out with my family anymore because my wife is too famous and I was, and my company is all these things and like, yeah, that there's probably something to be said for those days where you're like in the code and doing the things and like, Hey, we want, we want to add this feature. How long is that gonna take? Three days of coding overnight or whatever, and like just do it and having the money. Is great too, right? Like there's there, there's both of those things. First thing I wanna talk a little bit about is enterprise moving, moving up market. I know you all have moved up. Market. When I first started, I, I didn't even think about it. I, I just knew I was the perfect, the perfect target market for the beta and then immediately became a paid customer that this is really valuable. Like no brainer. I shouldn't tell you this, I'd probably pay a lot more for it.

Richard White: 19:16

That's great. Don't worry. We we're, we hear that a lot. I think I actually got it. Richard's like, can we have an announcement

Jason Frazell: 19:22

to make, we're tripling our price for anybody who said, no, I'm kidding. It's

Richard White: 19:24

funny, I got a, I got an email from one of our investors this morning. Be like, I've got this other founder who uses Fathom and loves it and doesn't pay for it, and. Has some ideas for how you can, I was like, that's cool. We don't need you to pay more for it. Like, we don't, like, we're, we're totally happy. Giving, giving the thing away for free and being very generous with it. That's part of our model. Yeah. So, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Don't worry. So,

Jason Frazell: 19:44

so the first thing is moving up market and going into selling to businesses.

Richard White: 19:50

Mm-hmm.

Jason Frazell: 19:50

Curious how, you know, like any lessons learned there in that road and. You know, what would you say to somebody else who's, who's listening, who's got a, a similar product that works great for a solopreneur or even like an individual, like I'm sure Fathom is used like a school board meeting, like there's a million places you can use technology like this, and then suddenly you're calling on Fortune 500 where they have procurement departments and IT departments, and how does this fit into our tech stack? Like what are some lessons that you've learned and you and the team have learned about moving up market?

Richard White: 20:22

So I'd say the one thing, there's a handful of things I think we got really right, and one of them was, I'm a big fan of like attack, like key kind of metrics in order, like don't do multiple things at once. And so for us in the beginning it was like we don't care about anything other than making a product that individuals will use day in, day out. Right? And I don't need a big number of folks, but I'm not gonna worry about onboarding. I'm not about monetizing, I'm. Free user retention. And I think in the early days we got, I probably personally reached out to my network and manually onboarded. It was really a messy process, like 600, 800 people until I got to a cohort of like 50 people that kind of stuck with it every week. And that took us almost a year to get to that point. Yeah. And then we said, great. Okay, we've got, we feel good about this. Now let's focus on. How do we get better at onboarding, right? How do we make it easier for you to kind of become a user and make the onboarding process really good? And then once we get to that, we're like, okay, now we'll focus on like how do we make it easy for your refer fathom? And then only then if we get through that, we'll start thinking about like, how do we make money off this? And we always have this thesis that. We don't need to make money off individual users. We'll make money when someone wants to set this up for their whole team and they're like, oh, I want all my meetings in one workspace so that I can create all these workflows, automations. And so I was very adamant with the team early on. Like anyone gives you feedback about, Hey, I want features for, to use as a team. We don't care about that yet. We wanna see laser focus on just making the product awesome. Like really, really amazing for individual, for the people on the meetings that are using this to take their notes.

Jason Frazell: 21:53

Yeah.

Richard White: 21:54

And so I think that worked out really well.'cause I think if you don't do that, you end up kind of like. You know, I see all people, they're like, they launch and they're trying to figure out like retention and activation and monetization all at the same time. It's really, really hard to do three things well at once, and so I'm a big fan of like do it in serial. And so we did that. And then I also think I. Once we started monetizing, you know, as I mentioned, I brought in, we had, I think at this point we had three salespeople that weren't selling. And at some point we said, great, now we need to start selling. All right, here's our team mission product. Start talking to folks. And you know, we were talking in the beginning, very small companies and now we're talking to much larger companies. Sure. I would say we get this pressure like, oh, when are you guys gonna go market? You go up market. We don't really go up. Yeah. What we've noticed is that up market comes to us. Totally. And so if you, you often start with like this, like early users or early adopters that are small companies that are sold entrepreneurs and they're the best people to start with. They'll give you great feedback like yourself. They'll be really engaged. They'll tell their friends. And then just kind of organically, you'll see large and large companies come to the party. Like they'll hear about these things and they're, they're never, you know, your Fortune 500 is never the first people to adopt the thing, right? No. And so while we said, it's like we just gonna be aware of that, you know, as, as we kind of boil this frog as we kind of. As the up market comes to us, what features they need for us to be able to close them is more what we looked at. Right? Yeah. And so there's a handful of things that, okay, if you wanna sell to a 200 person company, you're gonna need soc two and this and this and this. Great. You wanna get the 500 person company, you now need SSO and skim and da, da, da. And so I actually think the worst thing you can do is, and I see this a lot too, where it's like, oh, we got, it's great for user base. We got great metrics. But our VCs are not pushing us. Like we need to make a lot more money in the in, we make money with Enterprise and we're gonna throw away all existing users and just start doing some outbound to these folks that never used this before. It's like you just threw away the one thing that was working. Yeah. Yeah. So don't abandon your, don't abandon, you know? Or these companies happen a lot where they raised their prices, right? And they price themselves outta that early market. And that's when a new startup comes in and takes that market over and then they come up from underneath you. So I think it's super important for us to like. We don't a abandon, we don't like leave our core art, digital, virtual audience. We just kind of stack newer audiences on top of that. Right. Companies. Yeah. I,

Jason Frazell: 24:08

I don't know if this is a, a term that's used in this space and I, I, I haven't been to the space in a while, but I used to work at a, a couple of cybersecurity startups. We would call this for the security people we'd sell to the Dropbox problem.

Richard White: 24:21

Hmm mm-hmm. I

Jason Frazell: 24:22

dunno if you've ever heard that term before.

Richard White: 24:23

Yeah.

Jason Frazell: 24:24

Yeah. It's where like. Oh wow. This is a, and and it can be any cloud storage, but cloud storage when it came out was like, wow, this is super useful and I'm gonna do it on my, and my wife works at Big Tech where they, you know, they have their own solution now. She used to use Dropbox and put pretty sophisticated intellectual property in a Dropbox, and then suddenly their IT department's like, no. I'm sure the same thing has probably happened with, with you all As, as people are using, they're installing Fathom from the Zoom store, and I know Zoom didn't use to have as many, you know, controls or install, and then they go, oh, this is super useful and I'm sure this has happened to you all. You're like, oh, the CRO is using it. You're like, yes, because the CRO is gonna have budget to roll it out to his, his or her sales team. Then you go, but it goes, no. We got our data in the cloud, we don't know what people are talking about and nice to sell the financial services. So I know there's all sorts of additional things with, with the, the really regulated industry, but it sounds like you've had a similar experience where people are using it and it's great and then these companies go, oh, how do I, how do I control this in a way that feels good and also gives my users their. Or freedom to use the solutions they want. Is that, so it's almost like a poll. It's almost like a poll thing, which is just an amazing place to be as a company like yours.

Richard White: 25:41

And then, I mean, my old philosophy is always like, you know, if we do our monthly metrics with the team, revenue is actually my number four priority. And and it's below usage.'cause I always say like, if you have a product people are using day in, day out, you'll almost always find a way to monetize. Like, and I think a lot of folks get hung up on it. I know there's a lot of like startup advice, like charge early and often make sure you're solving a real pain. I don't actually believe in that. I actually think for most products, like just getting people to use it proves that you've got a real pain. And like in 2025, I think that logic made more sense 15 years ago when there weren't that many software companies out there. Yeah, there's a million of them now. Yeah. And so you get like one chance to make a good first impression and break through and become something people use regularly now. This is very specific advice to a product like ours, right? If you've got some enterprise product that only gets used once a month and it's a compliance product, throw everything I said, but you're building something that your ideal user should be using this every day or every week, then I think, I always think that is the hard, that's the hard part to get to. You get people using something habitually, you've, everything else gets way easier.

Jason Frazell: 26:49

Yeah. Speaking from my personal experience, I remember when you moved to, when you moved, when you turned on the paid switch. It was like, yeah, it was like a, my con, like I would like the conversion. I would, without, we don't need to get into the conversion metrics, but I'll bet you your conversion rate was probably higher than a lot of other products in a space like this, in terms of you're already using it, it's already in your workflow, you know, it's valuable. And for, like you said, I don't know many people that are like, I love taking paper notes or typing notes on a, on a screen where you're like, oh wait, you mean there's a solution that isn't as good, but I love this one and it does all these things. That's worth significant. Resource and to most people that I know and you know, you've probably heard this feedback a lot. I do a lot of trainings and like the, the group I was with yesterday, we had three fathom note takers I had to remove from the meeting before it even started. That's a good sign. I'm like, I'm like, oh yeah, we gotta press remove'cause it was confidential meeting. We're like, we actually can't, we don't record these meetings. And it was funny'cause they're like, yeah, we don't wanna record these. I'm like, you know that three outta the five of you had your fathom note taker here before you showed up.

Richard White: 27:56

Yeah, it's, I mean, our conversion actually is pretty good. I don't actually think it's actually, I don't think it's world class because we focus so much on making the free product. Like I think there's a lot of companies that try to make the free product. You know, something you can't actually use forever. Right? Mean that's the game everyone shows. Oh yeah. Like Zoom. Yeah. Free 40 minute meeting, you're, that's not

Jason Frazell: 28:14

useful.

Richard White: 28:14

Right. And so I think, I think consumers are pretty savvy to this now, and they're pretty skeptical of things that have, it's got a free tier, everyone knows. The company's like, oh, it's not really a free, it's, it's a trick. Right? It's like a, yeah. Bait and switch. But we work really hard to make sure you can use this legitimately for free forever. It won't have all the bells and whistles, but it'll certainly have, it'll certainly solve the core problem, right? Yeah. Of taking notes for you and things like that. So it, it is interesting. But yeah, we, I mean it, you know, it's funny'cause you know, when the market shifted about two years ago, 20 22, 20 23, you know, we went from this world where everyone cared about usage, everyone cared about revenue, and we were still out there being. But we still just care about usage, revenue will come sort of thing. And so that actually was a challenge in fundraising because people were so focused now on you be profitable and you gotta make a bunch of money. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's, that's, that's the opposite of the playbook we're running where we're like, let's go get a bunch of users, even free users, and you know, get them to love it. Get them to tell their friends. I mean, it's a unique product too. You bring it to your meetings so you're natural, you're telling, you naturally share it with other people. And so I think that's where the value of free is. I say like a lot of times. I'd rather you be on free.'cause if you're free, you kind of, you, you're actually more likely to do nice things for us, like tell your friends or write a review for us than if you're paying, you pay me 10 bucks a month, then you kind of like I've, I've given you 10 bucks a month. I don't owe you anything. So yeah, I'm a big fan of the power of free.

Jason Frazell: 29:36

Yeah. You just, you just reminded me, Richard, or just spark that for me, what a viral marketing campaign is. Oh. Here comes a fathom note taker. And I remember like, what, what's a fathom note taker. What does that thing do? And I, I remember when I first saw it three years ago, I was in a mastermind. I was in, I think it was when you first came out and it's like, Hey, I'm testing out this new thing. I'm like, what does it do? And they actually explained it, and I'm like, oh, that sounds useful. And it was, it was because I asked'em like, what's that thing?

Richard White: 30:00

I mean, that's, that's it's, that's like, yeah. 70% of of our, you know, sign upstream. Is that right? It's like, yeah. Have to explain. You have to, you'd have to explain what this thing is in your meeting and naturally turns into a sales pitch, right? Yeah. If we do job right. So, yeah.

Jason Frazell: 30:14

I want to cover off on a couple more things before we wrap one. Sure. Love to talk about, and I'll give them and we'll cover them in any order you see fit. I wanna talk about raising capital, always something my audience likes to hear about. You have successfully raised capital. And the other thing I want to talk about, maybe actually let's do that first and then I wanna wrap by talking about what do you see as what's next in the space that you live in? Because AI is obviously everywhere and you live in a very specific way of using ai. I am curious. I'm not asking for the product of roadmaps. We're like, what do you, what do you see as what's next for the kind of way that Fathom does things? So yeah, let's start with raising capital. Curious to hear your experience with how that went for you and any lessons learned and mindsets that you went through. Because I don't know what the statistics are now, but what is it about, I think 65 to 70 pitches to get capital. And you also have to have a product that people actually want too. Like people will pitch that. The market never materializes. So yeah. Anything you'd wanna share with the audience and for you and I about your experience raising capital?

Richard White: 31:18

Yeah, it's, it's everyone's favorite topic. I always hesitate to talk about this too much'cause I, we did stuff that's so different than I think most people do. Oh, okay. And I'm not sure how reproducible it is, so I always give this kind of caveat. So,

Jason Frazell: 31:31

yeah,

Richard White: 31:32

we, you know, so we, I'll work backwards. So we raised a series A last year, 17. But before that, we'd raised about$10 million. Mm-hmm. But the largest, but we did that over like seven rounds, quote unquote rounds, if you'll Wow.

Jason Frazell: 31:47

Yeah.

Richard White: 31:47

But they, they were, nothing was traditional. So we basically, we were basically raising, I think the average, we had like a hundred people in the cap table. I think over that$10 million. I think the average check size was like 70 5K. This is a kind of intentional process. Like, I hate fundraising, I hate the, let's build the deck, let's talk to 50 people. I find it really distracting. I find it kind of demoralizing'cause you get a bunch of people that just don't get it and I've gotta convince you of something and you're going to hear and

Jason Frazell: 32:12

you're going to hear no. Statistically you're gonna hear no a lot know who likes to hear. No.

Richard White: 32:15

Yeah, I do. Like, you know what I like about fundraising is I like having smart people poke holes in my, in my business. Yeah. I actually find that really interesting. But they're like, let's go spend a month. Of my like, you know, a month or two months of my time being completely distracted and not focused on the business. I hate that part. So we did something a little bit different and I think, you know, I think it's a little harder to execute this maybe in this market.'cause again, we started in 2020, which is pretty frothy. And I had done a previous business and got to about 10 million revenue. So like, and I had like a big network of folks. But what we did in the beginning was, I think when we first started, we raised 500 k from friends and family, like basically. Angels. And then three months later we raised, we got into yc and then we raised like a million off of, we got into yc and then we got, I think four months later we got, or five months later, we got the demo day for yc and we raised 1.5 and then six months after that raised another 1.5. And so a couple of things were interesting, like. We did nothing but small checks. So I had a different thing. It was like I probably did 30 meetings, but my win rate was like 75, 80%. And so I just kept stacking small checks and

Jason Frazell: 33:17

were And was your ask in those meetings, a small check, was that by design? For the most part? Yeah, for the most part. I

Richard White: 33:22

wasn't going after institutional. I was setting my own price and I was going to get people, part of this was intentional is I think in the early days I felt like I didn't want just like one seed fund to give me one feedback. I was like, I actually want a big coalition of people that have different perspectives. Right? Yeah. So I had a, a bunch of folks at a background in engineering, a bunch of folks at a background in design. At some 0.1 round we got nothing but folks that had a focus on, like, they were all sales tech CEOs. Yeah. And so whatever I, you know, and so at some point, like we need, oh, we need a connection to Zoom. Oh, we need a connection to Slack. I could just go to this audience. 50 to a hundred people and it was really useful to me. It was like just kind of like this, you know, it wasn't, it was pretty lightweight, but it was like a, this big network of folks we could call on. The other nice thing about it again is like, I just could kind of raise my own. We need to, but we were also pretty smart about, we had raised whenever we had poll,

Jason Frazell: 34:12

so it's like, oh,

Richard White: 34:13

some event just happened. Like we just got into yc. Oh, someone heard about that and they wanna invest. Great. Let's use that to catalyze around, because I think the hardest thing when you're fundraising is to create a sense of urgency. Yeah. And create what we call in sales, that critical event. And in this case, we just waited until a critical event happened, and then we would quickly kind of like, you know, coalesce around that to, to raise money. The other thing that happens, like we never had more than like 12 months of runway up until our series A, we never had more than 12 months of runway. And I saw that as like a feature, not a bug, where I was like, yeah. I, I only work well under pressure. I know that about myself. Sure. And so I have such high confidence ince in this product.'cause I use it myself and change how I work that, you know, if we need more than 12 months of runway at a given point, if we run outta money, like fine, I want to, I want to fail or succeed quickly. I don't, I don't wanna be. Here plugging away for four years if it's not working sort of thing. Yeah. So brilliant. I don't know. It's not exactly the most reproducible strategy. And then for our, even our series A, we didn't run a process. Like we had a firm come to us, they already knew about us. You know, I talked to two, three firms, but I didn't run a process. They gave me a deal that I could live with and I got back to work. Amazing. So yeah, so I think it's a different construction. Very different than I think your standard roadshow kind of way. Sure. But again, it played well to our strengths.

Jason Frazell: 35:29

Yeah. Thanks for sharing that. That's, that is definitely not the normal story, which is arguably, not arguably. That's really interesting that you were, it's interesting that you went out and you wanted a lot of interesting things there. One thing that I'm really interested in, we don't have time for today, is like collecting the small checks, like making that on purpose. Building a big cap table with a bunch of names with small stakes.'cause a lot of people, that's not what they want. Yeah. And they're raising

Richard White: 35:53

My other thesis is like, I think. If you get an angel putting in 50 K, they actually sometimes care more about your outcome than, yeah, 2 million out of a slush fund from some. VC that has 2 billion under management, right? Yeah. So when we did get institutional and we have some institutional, I also intentionally only found institutions, institutional ambassador VCs that were generally like on their first or second fund. They were still trying to prove it. Nice. Yeah. And so I found all that to be useful. We also raised money from our users. We raise about. 3 million from our users as well. We did one round that was just users and part of our series. Hey, we did 10% of that round for users, and so we've done every non-traditional kind of fundraising you can imagine.

Jason Frazell: 36:37

I love the creativity. I love the creativity. Yeah. Let's talk next. What do you see? What's next in, you can keep it broad on AI or really Sure. You know, narrow it down to. Kind of where you see Fathom going. What, what do you, what do you see is what's next for all of us out here?

Richard White: 36:53

Well, I'll, I'll back up a little history. So, you know, we started in 2020 and our, yep. There was no, there were no LLMs in 2020. Right. Also,

Jason Frazell: 37:00

good, good timing for a note taker for virtual meetings.

Richard White: 37:03

Yeah, that too. So we had this thesis that like we thought LMS gonna get really good, which was kind of counterintuitive. You go back to 2020, we had this other thesis that we thought transcription was going to, transcription at the time was pretty expensive. We thought that it was going to basically approach zero very quickly, and so thus we can give away this note taker for free. And we kinda thought like we're gonna really work on the hard parts, which is like making it reliably record, make it easy to use. At some point AI will show up and we'll just get to basically drop that into the existing system, right? Mm. And the AI part in a lot of ways is some of the easiest parts of building Sure. A product like Fathom. The hard part is reliable transcriptions and reliable recording and storage and distributed systems and all that sort of fun stuff. And so, you know, know. It's easy to be directionally correct and we got a little lucky on timing. All the stuff happened right when we needed to. Right. Sure. Transcription became free right when we need it to come free or been bankrupt, you know. AI really showed up kinda late 2023 in a way where it was like, ah, the AI can now write notes better than you can Sure. For an individual meeting. And so I'm kinda giving that context, like where we're excited now is like AI's at a point where it can do really awesome things for you on a single transcript, right? Yeah. So it's like I can basically give you a chat GPT interface for your meeting. It'll write your follow up emails, it'll answer any questions you have about that meeting, whether you are on it or you're just some colleague sent it to you. You can write the notes, you can find the action items, everything you'd want. What we're looking at now is how do we now do this for a big group of meetings? How do we look across all the sales meetings you had in the last quarter or all of the, you know, all of the standups you had last, you know, last year? How do we start giving you insight across Watson meetings? Help me find every moment where, you know, there was an objection that our sales team didn't handle well or Yeah, someone was asking about this integration that we don't have and now we're getting to point where AI can do that kind of stuff. Right? Sure. It's kind of. I think for a while people have wanted that to exist and it's turns out you couldn't just throw 10,000 hours of transcripts into the, into chat GPT and do anything useful. Yeah. But we're now getting a point where that that is possible. And so we're really excited about what you can do when you've got an AI that has sat in every meeting that you've been in and every meeting that your team's been in and can answer you any question you have about those meetings. We've always had this thesis that a lot of information in any organization. Is really only in these meetings, right? Yeah, absolutely. Way more than what's in your email or in your Slack Totally. And whatnot. And so that's the thing we're really excited to unlock for folks, is really making the second brain for you where you just, yeah. Even more have meetings and you don't, not only have to remember what happened in individual meeting, you don't have to remember anything. You just ask question, wait, I know I had this conversation. Where was it? Who else had it? It's pretty exciting stuff.

Jason Frazell: 39:44

That is very exciting. Richard, to wrap up before we talk a little bit more about, you know, where people can take a look at Fathom. Obviously I'm a fan, a personal fan. How do you use it with your team? How does the exact team at Fathom use Fathom? I. I

Richard White: 39:58

mean, we use it every meeting. I mean, I think what's fun about this product is you have a bunch of use cases. Obviously the sales team uses it, right? And we use it a lot for sharing knowledge about what we're hearing from, you know, as we talk about going at market, right? Like, oh, this customer had this challenge. Great. Send me the highlight of them discussing this challenge, right? Or now. What's, what's search, what's used, the new fathom search that we're beta testing and find me, how many times has it ever happened? Let's watch all those clips. So a lot of kind of market intelligence we use it for on the sales team. Mm-hmm. We use it a lot in recruiting. So, you know, someone has an intro call with a, with a, you know, intro screen with someone, the next person in the, in that kind of a screening process. We'll watch that recording and they'll kind of like, you know, because I recruiting is if. You have to get to ask the same 80% of questions every step of the process. And so it's very easy now to be like, oh, you know, I talked to Sarah. The conversation's great. A few things were interesting conversations we should double click on in the next conversation. Yeah. So that's super cool. And then obviously for internal meetings, right? Like people can't make every meeting. I think there's a lot of meeting inflation, especially in remote companies. And so you can kind of almost like. In some ways, fathom allows you to take meetings and make them async. And so it's like, oh, totally, you make this meeting or you don't necessarily need to be invited to every recurring marketing meeting we have. Hey Tim, you're not on the recurring marketing meeting, but we talked about something you should see. So here's the, here's the link to that meeting, da, da, da. So yeah, I think it, it's a pretty, it really allows you to be a much more efficient remote company.

Jason Frazell: 41:30

And I was, I, I had a feeling you were gonna go there. And the question I was gonna ask that you answered was, do you have a culture now where people can say, Hey, I can't, not even, I can't make the meaning. I could make it, but it doesn't feel like the high impact thing I'm doing today.

Richard White: 41:45

Right,

Jason Frazell: 41:45

man. You wanna talk about an easy sales pitch? Just tell people, Hey, like this product helps you to be in less meetings that you were in before. Done. Very cool.

Richard White: 41:53

I legitimately think that's where we're going, right? I think we're totally Everyone. Everyone, everyone says everyone hates meetings. Yeah. They don't actually hate meetings. What they hate is they hate all the busy work that comes with meetings, free work, post-work, da da, da. And they hate being in meetings where only 10% of that content is relevant to them. And with Fathom, we're gonna be able to solve both of those problems. Right? We're already solving a lot of the first one. Yeah. And you know, you can manually solve the second one. And I think a lot of the AI we're building next will kind of automate, right. Hey, make sure Jason saw this last discussion we have and it'll immediately tell you about it sort of thing. So yeah, I think we're gonna run this world where, you know, this is one of the best problem surfaces is to apply modern LLMs. It just makes, it's right up the fairway for what LMS are good at doing.

Jason Frazell: 42:38

Yeah. I'll, I'll share with you my, my favorite thing is what are my action items and when are they due by, like, ask it that. Yeah. So good. They're like, oh yeah, I forgot that they said this thing, or they said it as they ran out the, they left Zoom and ran out and you know, like, and dropped that in. They're like, oh no. Like, and like actually get a, like a to-do list with not only the to-dos, but when they're due by or hey, like, and I do coaching work and facilitation work. Like, oh, that person had committed to getting that other person the thing, so it's not actually mine. I'd say, Richard, just to remind you, you had agreed to send, to send Sam, you know, the, the deck that you used to raise capital, whatever. It's so. Richard, thank you so much for being on, I, I've been looking forward to this conversation ever since it came my way. Let's talk a little bit about just the wrap here. You know, I know a lot of people know you in the space, they wanna try it out. What's the best way, and I'm gonna give this to you. I, I have a way that I hook it in, but what's the best way for people to check it out?

Richard White: 43:38

Yeah, just go to FM video. Sign up, it's free. You'll get set up in like a few minutes. You can use it if you're listening us now, if you, you can get use it on your next meeting. And I'm on LinkedIn. I've got this weird kinda like bit map avatar on LinkedIn, but just Richard White on LinkedIn for Fathom. Yeah. Anything you love or hate in that experience, let me know. I'm all ears. Cool. So yeah. Yeah. Love feedback from other founders and entrepreneurs.

Jason Frazell: 44:01

Awesome. It's also in the Zoom app store. If you go in a, you have a, you have a, you have an approved app, which which says a lot because I know Zoom vets, any partner that's gonna be in there has to, which is probably a bit of a pain if you're a partner, but for those consumer like, Hey, I need a thing, you're all in there as well. Yeah. Awesome. Richard. We will make sure that all of Richard's information and the Fathom video information is in the show notes. Thank you so much. I, as a user, I can't wait to see what y'all come out with next to make my life easy, even easier. I'll leave it with this. I was just telling somebody else, I'm a big AI guy. My dream for years has been to be Tony Stark. Wake up in the morning and talk to some thing in the sky and have it do all the things I don't wanna do. And note taking is right at the top of my list. So thank you. Thank you for creating an awesome product. We're on it, Jason. Thanks you for having me. Yeah. Thanks so much, Richard.

Speaker: 44:48

Thanks for listening to another episode of Talking to Cool People with Jason Frizzell. If you enjoyed today's episode, please tell your friends, follow us on Instagram and Facebook and give us a shout out or take a moment to leave a review on iTunes. If something from today's episode pique your interest and you'd like to connect, email us at podcast@jasonzell.com. We love hearing from our listeners because you're cool people too.