March 19, 2025 • 45 mins
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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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Jason Frazell (00:11):
Hey everybody, this is a special one for me and
it's somebody that I met sixminutes ago, which is different
than usual, and as you all knowthat are listeners.
I do a lot of speaking withfounders.
Some of the founders haveproducts that I've either never
heard of or I'm just not in themarket for.
And when Richard and his teamreached out, I said, holy cow, I
(00:34):
have to talk to Richard.
Richard is the CEO and founderof Fathom AI Note taker.
Which happens to be a productthat I've used for, since it's
been in beta, which is amazing.
So when I saw I go, I go, I, myfirst thought Richard was the
fathom note taker that I've beenusing.
I'm like, I know this thingwell.
I use it all the time.
And so I'm here with Richardtoday.
I'm really glad you're here, andI maybe get to learn a little
(00:56):
bit more about your process andabout the company than just
being an end user.
So Richard, welcome again.
Richard's the founder and CEO ofFathom ai.
Richard White (01:05):
Jason, thanks for having me.
Jason Frazell (01:06):
Yeah, I mean, I'm gonna say this Richard.
I'll make a maybe a fun joke forthose who get it.
We are not recording this inFathom in Zoom.
We're actually recording this inanother product for a specific
reason.
We're recording this inRiverside and I'd suggest we
record in Fathom and we're notgonna do that'cause I usually
use Riverside.
We're here.
So Richard, I'd love to startout and just give the audience a
little context on what Fathom isand then we'll go back.
(01:31):
In history and talk about yourjourney to get there.
But you know, in a nutshell,what is Fathom note taker for
those who don't know?
Richard White (01:36):
Yeah, I mean, I think, I've never met anyone who
likes trying to have a meetingon Zoom or Google Meet or
Microsoft teams and take notesat the same time.
Right.
No, it's probably one ofeveryone's least favorite things
to do.
Certainly it was mine before Istarted Fathom about five years
ago.
And so we kind of just kind ofthought, gosh, this is back in
2020.
We thought, gosh, we think AI.
(01:59):
We think everyone, everyonehates taking notes, so why don't
we make a free product that justsits in your meetings, records
it, transcribes it, and takesnotes for you so you can just
focus on having a great conversaconversation and not trying to
be a, you know, a courtstenographer as well as a
salesperson or founder or whatyou name it.
So yeah, so that's what we setout to do and been pretty
(02:20):
successful.
Again, thanks for being an earlybeta user.
We've, we had fantastic earlyusers that gave us a lot great
feedback and also spread theword about fathom.
Their friends and theircolleagues and whatnot.
And so it's been a really funride, honestly.
Yeah.
And I think we've been, we'vekind of proven out that yep, no
one likes taking notes andthey're no super excited to have
a product do it for them.
(02:40):
Especially, no one do it forfree.
Jason Frazell (02:42):
The next, the next iteration is my Fathom
robot that comes in an in-personmeeting and takes notes for me.
I, I am the perfect user forsomething like this.
I hate taking notes in anycontext, whether it be Zoom
person, I'm just not a, I'm nota good note daycare.
I don't like it.
I know that I can't be fullypresent.
So when you all come out withyour 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.
(03:03):
No problem.
Richard White (03:04):
We are looking into that.
I have the same problem whereit'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'thappen.
Like, because I, I, that musclehas atrophied so much for me
that yeah.
I just, I'm just not used toscribing even an in-person
conversation, so, yeah.
Jason Frazell (03:21):
So.
Cool.
Well let, let's start back withyou're, you're history of what's
gotten you to, you know, thefounder and CEO of, of Fathom.
What, what's your background andwhere did you come from prior to
this?
Richard White (03:33):
Yeah, so I was originally a computer science
graduate.
So early my career was anengineer.
I was a very classic founderengineer.
It's like, you know, kind of acrappy engineer.
Like, I can get stuff out prettyquickly.
But it's not pretty.
It's not, it's not your remotelybulletproof.
I early my career kindtransitioned over doing product
design.
And when I did that, it'sactually when I started working
(03:54):
with a company in the firstbatch of I Combinator.
Jason Frazell (03:56):
Mm-hmm.
Richard White (03:57):
Called Kiko.
And we like shared the, weshared a room in, in Cambridge
with like, Reddit and some otherfolks.
And so that was kinda a cool.
Entree into a really rich veinof entrepreneurs that were out
here in, in San Francisco whereI live now.
Yeah.
And so that kind of got mereally focused on, on, you know,
starting cool softwarecompanies.
(04:17):
I started this company calledUser 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 myfinishing school for
entrepreneurship because yeah.
It was a good not great companylike pretty reasonably
successful, but like we had towork for every inch, if you
will.
Right?
And so we really had to get goodat execution and it gave me an
opportunity to branch out fromnot just doing product and
(04:39):
design but to like running thesales team for a minute, running
the marketing team for a minute.
Like, so it made me, I think, akind of a very T-shaped kind of
entrepreneur, right?
Mm-hmm.
Where disciplines, obviously Igo on design and.
But I know not enough to bedangerous across all these, and
those that, those warnings were,I think, super impactful and
(05:00):
helpful when it came time tostart found
Jason Frazell (05:02):
nice.
The lot of there's a lot ofthings I wanna dig in on there.
And the first thing is, and Ialways ask a founder this, when
did you know that you were gonnabe, you were gonna found a
company?
Richard White (05:15):
Company?
I was very fortunate in that Igrew up with, my parents were
divorced, and both my stepdadand my father, both
entrepreneurs.
Okay.
Yeah.
And so I kind of grew up withthis like default assumptions,
what you did.
I remember I sold pictures tokids in first grade class and
you know, and then in highschool I was selling like fake
Oakley that I got from mybrother in New York City,
(05:36):
shipped them down, me, Carolina,I had
Jason Frazell (05:37):
fake Oakley, absolutely.
Hack.
Richard White (05:39):
Yeah.
Sold sold like mixed tapes, mix.
We burn CDs.
So I was always doing somethingkinda on my own, I think.
Jason Frazell (05:45):
Yeah,
Richard White (05:46):
early in my career I went.
I was an employee at a couplecompanies as a software
engineer, and I realized I'm aterrible employee.
Yeah, I just, you know, I don'ttake direction.
Well, you know, you really gottaexplain the why to me for me to
do it.
But I'm a really good founder.
Like I'm really self-motivatedkind of person.
So yeah, I think it was veryfortunate that like I was just
surrounded by kind ofentrepreneurship and I think
the, I grew up in NorthCarolina.
(06:06):
I think the biggest problem, mychallenge I had there is outside
of my family, there wasn't a lotof, it was really hard for me,
get friends and colleagues to.
You know, start startups'causeeveryone's just so happy to
like, eh, I kinda like having asalary and you know, a car and a
house and stuff.
Perfectly legitimate things youwant.
Sure.
And so then when I got into thislike Y Combinator group, which,
(06:26):
you know, everyone kind of knowsY Combinator now, but at that
point no one knew what that was.
But I was also sudden, oh Ifound 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 thatintersection of.
Personal background, desire andfinding the right group of
people was super impactful.
Jason Frazell (06:44):
Yeah.
You also mentioned the founder,one of the, one of the many
founder dilemmas is being reallygood and especially a technical
founder.
Passion as a passion is productdesign, engineering, and then
one day you find yourself havingto have sales conversations or
having to have HR conversationslike doing it all.
(07:08):
I'm curious if you'd share withus.
How did that go when youstarted?
'cause most technical founders,I know they hate sales.
Like they wanna like get intothe product and do the thing and
then Yeah, like, and, and thenthe, the technical details
should sell itself or the, thevalue should sell itself.
And now that you've had a lot ofexperience that you know, it, it
doesn't, it like some of thosethings still don't matter.
I'm so curious, like what you'velearned about that for other
(07:30):
founders listening that maybe alesson you can impart is, you
know, somebody and we're talkabout how you've raised some
capital and you've had a lot ofsuccess with Fathom that you've
managed to.
Do that and then eventuallybuild a pretty decent sized
team.
Richard White (07:43):
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 yourlaptop writing code.
Fathom's a little bit different,right?
'cause I had a somewhatsuccessful company before, and
so I got to start with.
Four great engineers and I inmonth three hired my best
salesperson sort of thing.
Mm.
So I would say if I think aboutkind of more my user voice
(08:04):
experience, I think it's moreapplicable to a lot of folks.
If you're first time founder,you know, I think there's a lot
of, the biggest thing you haveto overcome is your own, getting
your own head about thesethings, right?
Like, mm.
Especially if you're a technicalfounder, it's easy to be like, I
don't know how to do sales.
I don't wanna do sales, I don'twant, I don't like doing things
I'm not good at.
And like, find someone to dothis.
(08:25):
And I think as you then watchpeople do it, you're like, oh,
it's not that.
It's not, you know, to do itsuper well is like takes, you
know, 10,000 hours, but like youcan do it.
Right.
And I think a lot of my friendsthat were the most successful
ones were the ones who were intheir twenties and early
thirties, still had, they hadalmost the hubris to be like, I
can do anything, right?
(08:45):
Like, mm-hmm I can go do salesfor us.
I can figure out our marketing.
Right.
I think one of the things Ireflect on is that I often get
very in my head and I'd spend alot of time trying to find an
expert to teach me how to doextra Y or Z.
Sure.
And I would actually move a lotslower than my peers because of
that.
Right.
I think it was only want tofigure it out.
Gosh.
You know, don't wait forperfect.
Right.
(09:05):
Perfect enemy of good.
Don't wait to find, yes, there'ssomeone who's a better marketer
or someone better salespersonout there than me, but we speed
is everything in startups.
Even if I do a crappy job, it'sstill better than the
alternative sort of thing.
Yeah.
And so I think that was mylesson for the first company.
And then for Fathom, my lessonwas more like, let's build a
company that actually plays mystrengths.
(09:27):
Right.
Which is, yeah.
Yeah.
You know, user voice started offas like this freemium product
and then evolved into anenterprise product and I was
much better running the freemiumcompany.
Mm.
Played in my strengths arounduser experience and product
design.
And so for Fathom, we kinda hadthis thing.
We're gonna just focus.
We're not even trying to sellanything for two, three years.
(09:47):
We're just gonna try to make anawesome product that people use
day in, day out.
And actually, my, you know, mysales leader, I brought in, I
told her, I was like, you'reactually not gonna sell anything
for two years.
I just want you here and you'regonna act like a customer
success person, and you're justgonna help everyone and become a
product expert.
And at some point we're gonnahave something for you to sell.
This is a tough pitch to asalesperson, by the way.
(10:07):
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 hightrusts and so it's, that's one
of the advantages of, of being asecond time you can go grab
someone, say, Hey, look, I needyou to do this.
It's a little different thanwhat you normally work on, but
just trust me, we're gonna getthere, sort of thing.
So, brilliant.
But yeah, so I think Fathom islike, we play in my strengths,
right?
We go find, yeah.
(10:30):
We build a business model that.
Is the one I wanna wake up everyday and work at.
Jason Frazell (10:36):
You say something you said there reminds me, I was
in a conversation yesterday withsome founders and they were
supporting somebody and theywere the, the topic was remote
versus in person and how they'regetting, if this is something
that you all have dealt with ornot, and.
The, they have a company aboutthe same size as Fathom, and
they were, they're strugglingwith the decision on it because
they're getting their ventureventure backed.
(10:58):
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 ownlifestyle.
Yep.
And, and they've had a reallysuccessful company.
And somebody else in the groupsaid something that really
resonated with me, that it'sanother way of saying what you
just said.
They said, remember, as afounder, your business is always
a reflection of you.
(11:19):
And how you see things, yourenergy, your vibe, you're
bringing in your own.
And they said it, it wasbrilliant.
It's like you're bringing in,you bring in your own mindsets,
including your limited mindsets.
You bring in all of thesethings, 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.
(11:39):
And when you're trying to doeverything or you're, you're
doing something that you're notpassionate about, like whether
or not you say it, your vibe isgonna give it off.
As humans, we're just designedto do that.
Richard White (11:50):
I don't think, I think in a lot of these
decisions you make about, youknow, what's our target market,
what's our product?
Are we in person, we remote?
I actually don't think there'sgenerally any wrong answers.
Right?
Yeah.
All of them are fine.
The only wrong answer is to kindof like not commit to one
direction and to kind of likehesitate maybe we'll do
something in between and also todo something like you don't want
do, because yeah, it will beobvious to everyone.
(12:12):
Like, you know, I.
User voice started off asremote, and then we built an
office.
Then we built a second office,and I spent half my life
traveling to these offices, andat some point Fathom was like,
why'd I do that?
Like, I don't, I don't like evenworking in, I'm not even that
effective in an office.
I'm much more effective when Ihave my own focused time in my
own space.
And so, fathom, we were likecommitted from the early days,
like we're gonna be a remotecompany and, you know, because
(12:34):
that's a company I wanna livein.
It's like, yeah, you know, I'vetalked to other founders,
they're like, oh, what's thebiggest 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 didI do that?
Totally.
Why, why don't I build, youknow, build the thing I wanna
live in sort of thing.
It's your house, right?
Yeah.
So build, do you wanna live innot the house someone tells you
you should be building, right?
Jason Frazell (12:56):
Yeah.
And that was, and that was a bigpart of that conversation was,
and this was specifically aboutsome, some venture, some venture
capital folks that had investedin their A with like, you need
to be this, you need to do that.
Right.
And they said everybody's gonnahave an opinion.
Richard White (13:11):
Yeah.
Jason Frazell (13:11):
But it's not their company.
And you know they're investorsand you listen and you're
respectful and.
And, and what ends up happeningthere, I'm sure, and it probably
happened for you as well, is youend up resenting your own
business.
And boy, what a terrible placeto be because I said, if you're
gonna resent what you do for aliving, go work for somebody
else and let them pay you to dothat as opposed to like having
your
Richard White (13:29):
Yeah.
Whole point we do this is sothat 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 alot too with like enterprise
sales where there's generallyyou raise money, there's a lot
pressure to be like, okay, gomarket founders who.
You know, don't love doing salesand pick a business or market
that forces them to start doingenterprise sales from day one.
Like, yeah, why did you do that?
(13:54):
It doesn't play to yourstrengths.
Right?
Well, that's what our investorssaid we need to do.
It's like, nah.
You know?
Yeah.
If you're doing something,'causesomeone else tells you to do it,
your heart's never gonna reallybe in it.
Right?
Jason Frazell (14:04):
Yeah.
So I have an adage in life, Ilike to say, Richard is, find me
somebody who really likes beingtold what to do.
There's very few of us,especially those of us who are
like, you know, like highperforming or like, have some
ideas about, and especiallypeople that are creative, like
you're obviously a very creativeindividual as well as a great
technical person.
You don't like being told whatto do.
Richard White (14:25):
Yeah.
Jason Frazell (14:28):
Let's talk about building teams.
Building teams, some, anylessons that you wanna share
with us and you've scaled.
You've scaled fathom quitesubstantially, 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 somefounder-led sales and some small
(14:49):
teams to a real co, like a, nota real company, but a company
with all departments and doingall sorts of things.
What are some of the things thatyou've had to learn slash
overcome as you've scaledspecifically as the founder?
Richard White (15:05):
I mean, I think the, the, you know, the classic
one is just like, which of yourLegos to give away sort of
thing, right?
Mm.
I think you're always, you'realways probably a little late
giving them away too, right?
Like, you, you stay engaged inthings a little too long.
I is, I think the failure mode Isee the most, at least that was
the case for me.
You know, I think it's, it's sodifferent when you're doing your
(15:26):
first start versus like yoursecond one to a.
We were about a year ago.
We were about 15 people, we'reabout 70 now.
And huge growth.
Those, yeah.
Of those 15 people, I thinkabout two thirds of them were
people I'd worked with before.
Yeah.
And the other third were folksthat, the other folks that
worked with before, it was allin network.
Right.
Nice.
So, I mean, I think that is sucha huge, huge hack.
(15:49):
And I think you can access thisearlier in your career, but than
we, than I did.
But like finding folks thatyou've worked with before or
folks you've worked with, haveworked with sort of thing is
like, it's such a hack'causeit's so hard to vet, so hard to
have that shotgun wedding ofrecruiting, especially at the
early stage, right?
Like it just means something youdon't know and run through a
rooting process and having itwork out is, is hard as you got
(16:11):
a high failure rate.
Yeah.
So, you know, I think, and Ialso think it.
The other thing you, you can getconfused by is like, having a
big team feels fun.
Everyone's like, oh, becauseevery investor's like, how big's
your team?
You go to some cocktail partywith a bunch of entrepreneurs.
Everyone, first question.
'cause no one will say whattheir revenue is, right?
That's like two.
Oh, of course not.
Yeah.
So the, the, the safe fanningmetric for everyone is how big,
(16:33):
how big's happen.
How big's your team?
And so then you subconsciouslystart thinking that that's also
the like metric, metric ofsuccess.
Yeah.
I actually try to hire aslittle, I like we're things like
we hire almost retic, like wetry not to hire because yeah,
every additional person makesthis move a little bit slower.
Sure.
And I think most of my friendshave.
(16:55):
Very fortunate to be aroundpeople that have been very
successful, built really bigcompanies.
Ones that have gotten acquired,gone, public, you name it.
And they all, you know, they alltalk 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 everleave, don't ever, you know,
don't ever grow.
You hear that all the time.
So I, I think there's somethingto be said for staying in that
(17:16):
zone a long time, because youcan 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 ofpeople scale the team too early.
Yeah.
And I remember talking to myfriend Michael Sebel, who's one
of the partners at yc, and I waslike, 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 yougot pretty far with four.
(17:38):
Like why do you immediately need12?
And that Yeah.
Fair point.
Right.
So I think, you know.
So our lessons have been figureout 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, gowith the people you got there
with, right?
Like there's also this tendencyto bring in big execs and
(17:58):
whatnot.
I'd much rather promote fromwithin.
Folks that really understand ourculture, they get it.
Like they can train the nextgeneration of folks.
So yeah, I think that's been mybiggest lesson learned for
Fathom is there's a.
Building the product kind ofstarts 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'sa 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, asyou were saying that I, you were
talking about Reddit.
I'm just thinking about the CEOEO of Reddit is like, I really
can't go out with my familyanymore because my wife is too
famous and I was, and my companyis all these things and like,
yeah, that there's probablysomething to be said for those
days where you're like in thecode and doing the things and
(18:40):
like, Hey, we want, we want toadd this feature.
How long is that gonna take?
Three days of coding overnightor whatever, and like just do it
and having the money.
Is great too, right?
Like there's there, there's bothof those things.
First thing I wanna talk alittle bit about is enterprise
moving, moving up market.
I know you all have moved up.
(19:00):
Market.
When I first started, I, Ididn't even think about it.
I, I just knew I was theperfect, the perfect target
market for the beta and thenimmediately became a paid
customer that this is reallyvaluable.
Like no brainer.
I shouldn't tell you this, I'dprobably 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 anannouncement
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 otherfounder 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 morefor it.
Like, we don't, like, we're,we're totally happy.
Giving, giving the thing awayfor 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 tobusinesses.
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 tosomebody else who's, who's
listening, who's got a, asimilar product that works great
for a solopreneur or even likean individual, like I'm sure
Fathom is used like a schoolboard meeting, like there's a
million places you can usetechnology like this, and then
suddenly you're calling onFortune 500 where they have
(20:11):
procurement departments and ITdepartments, and how does this
fit into our tech stack?
Like what are some lessons thatyou've learned and you and the
team have learned about movingup market?
Richard White (20:22):
So I'd say the one thing, there's a handful of
things I think we got reallyright, and one of them was, I'm
a big fan of like attack, likekey kind of metrics in order,
like don't do multiple things atonce.
And so for us in the beginningit was like we don't care about
anything other than making aproduct that individuals will
use day in, day out.
Right?
And I don't need a big number offolks, but I'm not gonna worry
(20:44):
about onboarding.
I'm not about monetizing, I'm.
Free user retention.
And I think in the early days wegot, I probably personally
reached out to my network andmanually onboarded.
It was really a messy process,like 600, 800 people until I got
to a cohort of like 50 peoplethat kind of stuck with it every
week.
And that took us almost a yearto get to that point.
(21:05):
Yeah.
And then we said, great.
Okay, we've got, we feel goodabout this.
Now let's focus on.
How do we get better atonboarding, right?
How do we make it easier for youto kind of become a user and
make the onboarding processreally good?
And then once we get to that,we're like, okay, now we'll
focus on like how do we make iteasy for your refer fathom?
And then only then if we getthrough that, we'll start
thinking about like, how do wemake money off this?
(21:26):
And we always have this thesisthat.
We don't need to make money offindividual users.
We'll make money when someonewants 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 createall these workflows,
automations.
And so I was very adamant withthe team early on.
Like anyone gives you feedbackabout, Hey, I want features for,
to use as a team.
We don't care about that yet.
We wanna see laser focus on justmaking the product awesome.
(21:49):
Like really, really amazing forindividual, for the people on
the meetings that are using thisto 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 dothat, you end up kind of like.
You know, I see all people,they're like, they launch and
they're trying to figure outlike retention and activation
and monetization all at the sametime.
It's really, really hard to dothree things well at once, and
so I'm a big fan of like do itin serial.
And so we did that.
And then I also think I.
Once we started monetizing, youknow, as I mentioned, I brought
(22:16):
in, we had, I think at thispoint 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 teammission product.
Start talking to folks.
And you know, we were talking inthe beginning, very small
companies and now we're talkingto much larger companies.
Sure.
I would say we get this pressurelike, oh, when are you guys
gonna go market?
You go up market.
We don't really go up.
(22:37):
Yeah.
What we've noticed is that upmarket comes to us.
Totally.
And so if you, you often startwith like this, like early users
or early adopters that are smallcompanies that are sold
entrepreneurs and they're thebest people to start with.
They'll give you great feedbacklike yourself.
They'll be really engaged.
They'll tell their friends.
And then just kind oforganically, you'll see large
and large companies come to theparty.
Like they'll hear about thesethings and they're, they're
(22:58):
never, you know, your Fortune500 is never the first people to
adopt the thing, right?
No.
And so while we said, it's likewe just gonna be aware of that,
you know, as, as we kind of boilthis 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 morewhat we looked at.
Right?
Yeah.
And so there's a handful ofthings that, okay, if you wanna
sell to a 200 person company,you're gonna need soc two and
(23:20):
this and this and this.
Great.
You wanna get the 500 personcompany, you now need SSO and
skim and da, da, da.
And so I actually think theworst thing you can do is, and I
see this a lot too, where it'slike, 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 moremoney in the in, we make money
with Enterprise and we're gonnathrow away all existing users
and just start doing someoutbound to these folks that
(23:42):
never used this before.
It's like you just threw awaythe one thing that was working.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So don't abandon your, don'tabandon, you know?
Or these companies happen a lotwhere they raised their prices,
right?
And they price themselves outtathat early market.
And that's when a new startupcomes in and takes that market
over and then they come up fromunderneath you.
So I think it's super importantfor us to like.
We don't a abandon, we don'tlike leave our core art,
(24:03):
digital, virtual audience.
We just kind of stack neweraudiences 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'tbeen to the space in a while,
but I used to work at a, acouple of cybersecurity
startups.
We would call this for thesecurity 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 anycloud 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 wifeworks at Big Tech where they,
you know, they have their ownsolution now.
She used to use Dropbox and putpretty sophisticated
intellectual property in aDropbox, and then suddenly their
(24:44):
IT department's like, no.
I'm sure the same thing hasprobably happened with, with you
all As, as people are using,they're installing Fathom from
the Zoom store, and I know Zoomdidn't use to have as many, you
know, controls or install, andthen they go, oh, this is super
useful and I'm sure this hashappened to you all.
You're like, oh, the CRO isusing it.
You're like, yes, because theCRO is gonna have budget to roll
(25:05):
it out to his, his or her salesteam.
Then you go, but it goes, no.
We got our data in the cloud, wedon't know what people are
talking about and nice to sellthe financial services.
So I know there's all sorts ofadditional things with, with
the, the really regulatedindustry, but it sounds like
you've had a similar experiencewhere people are using it and
it's great and then thesecompanies go, oh, how do I, how
(25:28):
do I control this in a way thatfeels good and also gives my
users their.
Or freedom to use the solutionsthey want.
Is that, so it's almost like apoll.
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 ourmonthly metrics with the team,
revenue is actually my numberfour priority.
And and it's below usage.
'cause I always say like, if youhave a product people are using
day in, day out, you'll almostalways find a way to monetize.
Like, and I think a lot of folksget hung up on it.
I know there's a lot of likestartup advice, like charge
(26:03):
early and often make sure you'resolving a real pain.
I don't actually believe inthat.
I actually think for mostproducts, like just getting
people to use it proves thatyou've got a real pain.
And like in 2025, I think thatlogic made more sense 15 years
ago when there weren't that manysoftware companies out there.
Yeah, there's a million of themnow.
Yeah.
And so you get like one chanceto make a good first impression
(26:24):
and break through and becomesomething people use regularly
now.
This is very specific advice toa product like ours, right?
If you've got some enterpriseproduct that only gets used once
a month and it's a complianceproduct, throw everything I
said, but you're buildingsomething that your ideal user
should be using this every dayor every week, then I think, I
always think that is the hard,that's the hard part to get to.
(26:45):
You get people using somethinghabitually, you've, everything
else gets way easier.
Jason Frazell (26:49):
Yeah.
Speaking from my personalexperience, I remember when you
moved to, when you moved, whenyou turned on the paid switch.
It was like, yeah, it was likea, my con, like I would like the
conversion.
I would, without, we don't needto get into the conversion
metrics, but I'll bet you yourconversion rate was probably
higher than a lot of otherproducts in a space like this,
in terms of you're already usingit, it's already in your
(27:09):
workflow, you know, it'svaluable.
And for, like you said, I don'tknow many people that are like,
I love taking paper notes ortyping notes on a, on a screen
where you're like, oh wait, youmean there's a solution that
isn't as good, but I love thisone and it does all these
things.
That's worth significant.
Resource and to most people thatI know and you know, you've
(27:32):
probably heard this feedback alot.
I do a lot of trainings and likethe, the group I was with
yesterday, we had three fathomnote takers I had to remove from
the meeting before it evenstarted.
That's a good sign.
I'm like, I'm like, oh yeah, wegotta 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'relike, yeah, we don't wanna
record these.
I'm like, you know that threeoutta the five of you had your
(27:52):
fathom note taker here beforeyou showed up.
Richard White (27:56):
Yeah, it's, I mean, our conversion actually is
pretty good.
I don't actually think it'sactually, I don't think it's
world class because we focus somuch on making the free product.
Like I think there's a lot ofcompanies that try to make the
free product.
You know, something you can'tactually use forever.
Right?
Mean that's the game everyoneshows.
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 thinkconsumers are pretty savvy to
this now, and they're prettyskeptical of things that have,
it's got a free tier, everyoneknows.
The company's like, oh, it's notreally a free, it's, it's a
trick.
Right?
It's like a, yeah.
Bait and switch.
But we work really hard to makesure you can use this
legitimately for free forever.
It won't have all the bells andwhistles, but it'll certainly
have, it'll certainly solve thecore problem, right?
(28:35):
Yeah.
Of taking notes for you andthings like that.
So it, it is interesting.
But yeah, we, I mean it, youknow, it's funny'cause you know,
when the market shifted abouttwo years ago, 20 22, 20 23, you
know, we went from this worldwhere everyone cared about
usage, everyone cared aboutrevenue, and we were still out
there being.
But we still just care aboutusage, revenue will come sort of
thing.
And so that actually was achallenge in fundraising because
(28:58):
people were so focused now onyou be profitable and you gotta
make a bunch of money.
Right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's, that's, that's theopposite of the playbook we're
running where we're like, let'sgo get a bunch of users, even
free users, and you know, getthem to love it.
Get them to tell their friends.
I mean, it's a unique producttoo.
You bring it to your meetings soyou're natural, you're telling,
you naturally share it withother people.
And so I think that's where thevalue of free is.
(29:18):
I say like a lot of times.
I'd rather you be on free.
'cause if you're free, you kindof, 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'repaying, you pay me 10 bucks a
month, then you kind of likeI've, I've given you 10 bucks a
month.
I don't owe you anything.
So yeah, I'm a big fan of thepower of free.
Jason Frazell (29:36):
Yeah.
You just, you just reminded me,Richard, or just spark that for
me, what a viral marketingcampaign 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 firstsaw it three years ago, I was in
a mastermind.
I was in, I think it was whenyou first came out and it's
like, Hey, I'm testing out thisnew thing.
I'm like, what does it do?
And they actually explained it,and I'm like, oh, that sounds
(29:56):
useful.
And it was, it was because Iasked'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, signupstream.
Is that right?
It's like, yeah.
Have to explain.
You have to, you'd have toexplain what this thing is in
your meeting and naturally turnsinto 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'llgive them and we'll cover them
in any order you see fit.
I wanna talk about raisingcapital, always something my
audience likes to hear about.
You have successfully raisedcapital.
And the other thing I want totalk about, maybe actually let's
do that first and then I wannawrap by talking about what do
(30:35):
you see as what's next in thespace that you live in?
Because AI is obviouslyeverywhere and you live in a
very specific way of using ai.
I am curious.
I'm not asking for the productof roadmaps.
We're like, what do you, what doyou see as what's next for the
kind of way that Fathom doesthings?
So yeah, let's start withraising capital.
Curious to hear your experiencewith how that went for you and
(30:56):
any lessons learned and mindsetsthat you went through.
Because I don't know what thestatistics are now, but what is
it about, I think 65 to 70pitches to get capital.
And you also have to have aproduct that people actually
want too.
Like people will pitch that.
The market never materializes.
So yeah.
Anything you'd wanna share withthe audience and for you and I
(31:16):
about your experience raisingcapital?
Richard White (31:18):
Yeah, it's, it's everyone's favorite topic.
I always hesitate to talk aboutthis too much'cause I, we did
stuff that's so different than Ithink most people do.
Oh, okay.
And I'm not sure howreproducible 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 lastyear, 17.
But before that, we'd raisedabout$10 million.
Mm-hmm.
But the largest, but we did thatover 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 werebasically raising, I think the
average, we had like a hundredpeople in the cap table.
I think over that$10 million.
I think the average check sizewas like 70 5K.
This is a kind of intentionalprocess.
Like, I hate fundraising, I hatethe, 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
(32:08):
that just don't get it and I'vegotta 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 hearno a lot know who likes to hear.
No.
Richard White (32:15):
Yeah, I do.
Like, you know what I like aboutfundraising is I like having
smart people poke holes in my,in my business.
Yeah.
I actually find that reallyinteresting.
But they're like, let's go spenda month.
Of my like, you know, a month ortwo months of my time being
completely distracted and notfocused on the business.
I hate that part.
So we did something a little bitdifferent and I think, you know,
I think it's a little harder toexecute this maybe in this
(32:36):
market.
'cause again, we started in2020, which is pretty frothy.
And I had done a previousbusiness and got to about 10
million revenue.
So like, and I had like a bignetwork of folks.
But what we did in the beginningwas, I think when we first
started, we raised 500 k fromfriends and family, like
basically.
Angels.
And then three months later weraised, we got into yc and then
we raised like a million off of,we got into yc and then we got,
(32:59):
I think four months later wegot, or five months later, we
got the demo day for yc and weraised 1.5 and then six months
after that raised another 1.5.
And so a couple of things wereinteresting, like.
We did nothing but small checks.
So I had a different thing.
It was like I probably did 30meetings, but my win rate was
like 75, 80%.
And so I just kept stackingsmall 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 Iwas going to get people, part of
this was intentional is I thinkin the early days I felt like I
didn't want just like one seedfund to give me one feedback.
I was like, I actually want abig coalition of people that
have different perspectives.
Right?
Yeah.
So I had a, a bunch of folks ata background in engineering, a
bunch of folks at a backgroundin design.
(33:42):
At some 0.1 round we got nothingbut folks that had a focus on,
like, they were all sales techCEOs.
Yeah.
And so whatever I, you know, andso at some point, like we need,
oh, we need a connection toZoom.
Oh, we need a connection toSlack.
I could just go to thisaudience.
50 to a hundred people and itwas really useful to me.
It was like just kind of likethis, you know, it wasn't, it
was pretty lightweight, but itwas like a, this big network of
(34:03):
folks we could call on.
The other nice thing about itagain is like, I just could kind
of raise my own.
We need to, but we were alsopretty 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 andthey wanna invest.
Great.
Let's use that to catalyzearound, because I think the
hardest thing when you'refundraising is to create a sense
of urgency.
Yeah.
And create what we call insales, that critical event.
And in this case, we just waiteduntil a critical event happened,
and then we would quickly kindof like, you know, coalesce
around that to, to raise money.
(34:34):
The other thing that happens,like we never had more than like
12 months of runway up until ourseries A, we never had more than
12 months of runway.
And I saw that as like afeature, not a bug, where I was
like, yeah.
I, I only work well underpressure.
I know that about myself.
Sure.
And so I have such highconfidence ince in this product.
'cause I use it myself andchange how I work that, you
know, if we need more than 12months of runway at a given
(34:55):
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 fouryears if it's not working sort
of thing.
Yeah.
So brilliant.
I don't know.
It's not exactly the mostreproducible strategy.
And then for our, even ourseries 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, threefirms, but I didn't run a
(35:17):
process.
They gave me a deal that I couldlive with and I got back to
work.
Amazing.
So yeah, so I think it's adifferent construction.
Very different than I think yourstandard roadshow kind of way.
Sure.
But again, it played well to ourstrengths.
Jason Frazell (35:29):
Yeah.
Thanks for sharing that.
That's, that is definitely notthe normal story, which is
arguably, not arguably.
That's really interesting thatyou were, it's interesting that
you went out and you wanted alot of interesting things there.
One thing that I'm reallyinterested in, we don't have
time for today, is likecollecting the small checks,
like making that on purpose.
Building a big cap table with abunch of names with small
(35:50):
stakes.
'cause a lot of people, that'snot 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 in50 K, they actually sometimes
care more about your outcomethan, yeah, 2 million out of a
slush fund from some.
VC that has 2 billion undermanagement, right?
Yeah.
So when we did get institutionaland we have some institutional,
I also intentionally only foundinstitutions, institutional
(36:14):
ambassador VCs that weregenerally like on their first or
second fund.
They were still trying to proveit.
Nice.
Yeah.
And so I found all that to beuseful.
We also raised money from ourusers.
We raise about.
3 million from our users aswell.
We did one round that was justusers and part of our series.
Hey, we did 10% of that roundfor users, and so we've done
every non-traditional kind offundraising 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 itbroad on AI or really Sure.
You know, narrow it down to.
Kind of where you see Fathomgoing.
What, what do you, what do yousee 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 2020and our, yep.
There was no, there were no LLMsin 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 likewe thought LMS gonna get really
good, which was kind ofcounterintuitive.
You go back to 2020, we had thisother thesis that we thought
transcription was going to,transcription at the time was
pretty expensive.
We thought that it was going tobasically approach zero very
quickly, and so thus we can giveaway this note taker for free.
And we kinda thought like we'regonna really work on the hard
(37:24):
parts, which is like making itreliably record, make it easy to
use.
At some point AI will show upand we'll just get to basically
drop that into the existingsystem, right?
Mm.
And the AI part in a lot of waysis some of the easiest parts of
building Sure.
A product like Fathom.
The hard part is reliabletranscriptions and reliable
recording and storage anddistributed systems and all that
sort of fun stuff.
(37:44):
And so, you know, know.
It's easy to be directionallycorrect and we got a little
lucky on timing.
All the stuff happened rightwhen we needed to.
Right.
Sure.
Transcription became free rightwhen we need it to come free or
been bankrupt, you know.
AI really showed up kinda late2023 in a way where it was like,
ah, the AI can now write notesbetter than you can Sure.
For an individual meeting.
(38:06):
And so I'm kinda giving thatcontext, like where we're
excited now is like AI's at apoint where it can do really
awesome things for you on asingle transcript, right?
Yeah.
So it's like I can basicallygive you a chat GPT interface
for your meeting.
It'll write your follow upemails, it'll answer any
questions you have about thatmeeting, whether you are on it
or you're just some colleaguesent it to you.
You can write the notes, you canfind the action items,
everything you'd want.
(38:27):
What we're looking at now is howdo we now do this for a big
group of meetings?
How do we look across all thesales meetings you had in the
last quarter or all of the, youknow, all of the standups you
had last, you know, last year?
How do we start giving youinsight across Watson meetings?
Help me find every moment where,you know, there was an objection
that our sales team didn'thandle well or Yeah, someone was
(38:47):
asking about this integrationthat we don't have and now we're
getting to point where AI can dothat kind of stuff.
Right?
Sure.
It's kind of.
I think for a while people havewanted that to exist and it's
turns out you couldn't justthrow 10,000 hours of
transcripts into the, into chatGPT and do anything useful.
Yeah.
But we're now getting a pointwhere that that is possible.
And so we're really excitedabout what you can do when
(39:09):
you've got an AI that has sat inevery meeting that you've been
in and every meeting that yourteam's been in and can answer
you any question you have aboutthose meetings.
We've always had this thesisthat a lot of information in any
organization.
Is really only in thesemeetings, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
Way more than what's in youremail or in your Slack Totally.
And whatnot.
And so that's the thing we'rereally excited to unlock for
(39:30):
folks, is really making thesecond brain for you where you
just, yeah.
Even more have meetings and youdon't, not only have to remember
what happened in individualmeeting, you don't have to
remember anything.
You just ask question, wait, Iknow 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 wetalk a little bit more about,
you know, where people can takea look at Fathom.
Obviously I'm a fan, a personalfan.
How do you use it with yourteam?
How does the exact team atFathom use Fathom?
I.
I
Richard White (39:58):
mean, we use it every meeting.
I mean, I think what's fun aboutthis product is you have a bunch
of use cases.
Obviously the sales team usesit, right?
And we use it a lot for sharingknowledge about what we're
hearing from, you know, as wetalk about going at market,
right?
Like, oh, this customer had thischallenge.
Great.
Send me the highlight of themdiscussing this challenge,
right?
Or now.
What's, what's search, what'sused, the new fathom search that
we're beta testing and find me,how many times has it ever
(40:20):
happened?
Let's watch all those clips.
So a lot of kind of marketintelligence we use it for on
the sales team.
Mm-hmm.
We use it a lot in recruiting.
So, you know, someone has anintro 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 andthey'll kind of like, you know,
because I recruiting is if.
(40:42):
You have to get to ask the same80% of questions every step of
the process.
And so it's very easy now to belike, oh, you know, I talked to
Sarah.
The conversation's great.
A few things were interestingconversations we should double
click on in the nextconversation.
Yeah.
So that's super cool.
And then obviously for internalmeetings, right?
Like people can't make everymeeting.
I think there's a lot of meetinginflation, especially in remote
(41:04):
companies.
And so you can kind of almostlike.
In some ways, fathom allows youto take meetings and make them
async.
And so it's like, oh, totally,you make this meeting or you
don't necessarily need to beinvited to every recurring
marketing meeting we have.
Hey Tim, you're not on therecurring marketing meeting, but
we talked about something youshould see.
So here's the, here's the linkto that meeting, da, da, da.
So yeah, I think it, it's apretty, it really allows you to
(41:26):
be a much more efficient remotecompany.
Jason Frazell (41:30):
And I was, I, I had a feeling you were gonna go
there.
And the question I was gonna askthat you answered was, do you
have a culture now where peoplecan say, Hey, I can't, not even,
I can't make the meaning.
I could make it, but it doesn'tfeel like the high impact thing
I'm doing today.
Richard White (41:45):
Right,
Jason Frazell (41:45):
man.
You wanna talk about an easysales pitch?
Just tell people, Hey, like thisproduct helps you to be in less
meetings that you were inbefore.
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 everyonehates meetings.
Yeah.
They don't actually hatemeetings.
What they hate is they hate allthe busy work that comes with
meetings, free work, post-work,da da, da.
And they hate being in meetingswhere only 10% of that content
is relevant to them.
And with Fathom, we're gonna beable to solve both of those
problems.
Right?
We're already solving a lot ofthe first one.
(42:13):
Yeah.
And you know, you can manuallysolve the second one.
And I think a lot of the AIwe're building next will kind of
automate, right.
Hey, make sure Jason saw thislast discussion we have and
it'll immediately tell you aboutit sort of thing.
So yeah, I think we're gonna runthis world where, you know, this
is one of the best problemsurfaces is to apply modern
LLMs.
(42:34):
It just makes, it's right up thefairway for what LMS are good at
doing.
Jason Frazell (42:38):
Yeah.
I'll, I'll share with you my, myfavorite thing is what are my
action items and when are theydue by, like, ask it that.
Yeah.
So good.
They're like, oh yeah, I forgotthat they said this thing, or
they said it as they ran outthe, they left Zoom and ran out
and you know, like, and droppedthat in.
They're like, oh no.
Like, and like actually get a,like a to-do list with not only
(42:59):
the to-dos, but when they're dueby or hey, like, and I do
coaching work and facilitationwork.
Like, oh, that person hadcommitted to getting that other
person the thing, so it's notactually mine.
I'd say, Richard, just to remindyou, you had agreed to send, to
send Sam, you know, the, thedeck that you used to raise
capital, whatever.
It's so.
Richard, thank you so much forbeing on, I, I've been looking
(43:20):
forward to this conversationever since it came my way.
Let's talk a little bit aboutjust the wrap here.
You know, I know a lot of peopleknow you in the space, they
wanna try it out.
What's the best way, and I'mgonna give this to you.
I, I have a way that I hook itin, 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 fewminutes.
You can use it if you'relistening us now, if you, you
can get use it on your nextmeeting.
And I'm on LinkedIn.
I've got this weird kinda likebit map avatar on LinkedIn, but
just Richard White on LinkedInfor Fathom.
Yeah.
Anything you love or hate inthat experience, let me know.
I'm all ears.
Cool.
So yeah.
(43:58):
Yeah.
Love feedback from otherfounders and entrepreneurs.
Jason Frazell (44:01):
Awesome.
It's also in the Zoom app store.
If you go in a, you have a, youhave a, you have an approved
app, which which says a lotbecause I know Zoom vets, any
partner that's gonna be in therehas 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 allin there as well.
Yeah.
Awesome.
Richard.
We will make sure that all ofRichard's information and the
Fathom video information is inthe show notes.
(44:24):
Thank you so much.
I, as a user, I can't wait tosee what y'all come out with
next to make my life easy, eveneasier.
I'll leave it with this.
I was just telling somebodyelse, I'm a big AI guy.
My dream for years has been tobe Tony Stark.
Wake up in the morning and talkto some thing in the sky and
have it do all the things Idon't wanna do.
And note taking is right at thetop of my list.
So thank you.
Thank you for creating anawesome product.
(44:45):
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 andgive us a shout out or take a
moment to leave a review oniTunes.
If something from today'sepisode pique your interest and
you'd like to connect, email usat podcast@jasonzell.com.
(45:11):
We love hearing from ourlisteners because you're cool
people too.
Hey everybody, this is a special one for me and
it's somebody that I met sixminutes ago, which is different
than usual, and as you all knowthat are listeners.
I do a lot of speaking withfounders.
Some of the founders haveproducts that I've either never
heard of or I'm just not in themarket for.
And when Richard and his teamreached out, I said, holy cow, I
(00:34):
have to talk to Richard.
Richard is the CEO and founderof Fathom AI Note taker.
Which happens to be a productthat I've used for, since it's
been in beta, which is amazing.
So when I saw I go, I go, I, myfirst thought Richard was the
fathom note taker that I've beenusing.
I'm like, I know this thingwell.
I use it all the time.
And so I'm here with Richardtoday.
I'm really glad you're here, andI maybe get to learn a little
(00:56):
bit more about your process andabout the company than just
being an end user.
So Richard, welcome again.
Richard's the founder and CEO ofFathom ai.
Richard White (01:05):
Jason, thanks for having me.
Jason Frazell (01:06):
Yeah, I mean, I'm gonna say this Richard.
I'll make a maybe a fun joke forthose who get it.
We are not recording this inFathom in Zoom.
We're actually recording this inanother product for a specific
reason.
We're recording this inRiverside and I'd suggest we
record in Fathom and we're notgonna do that'cause I usually
use Riverside.
We're here.
So Richard, I'd love to startout and just give the audience a
little context on what Fathom isand then we'll go back.
(01:31):
In history and talk about yourjourney to get there.
But you know, in a nutshell,what is Fathom note taker for
those who don't know?
Richard White (01:36):
Yeah, I mean, I think, I've never met anyone who
likes trying to have a meetingon Zoom or Google Meet or
Microsoft teams and take notesat the same time.
Right.
No, it's probably one ofeveryone's least favorite things
to do.
Certainly it was mine before Istarted Fathom about five years
ago.
And so we kind of just kind ofthought, gosh, this is back in
2020.
We thought, gosh, we think AI.
(01:59):
We think everyone, everyonehates taking notes, so why don't
we make a free product that justsits in your meetings, records
it, transcribes it, and takesnotes for you so you can just
focus on having a great conversaconversation and not trying to
be a, you know, a courtstenographer as well as a
salesperson or founder or whatyou name it.
So yeah, so that's what we setout to do and been pretty
(02:20):
successful.
Again, thanks for being an earlybeta user.
We've, we had fantastic earlyusers that gave us a lot great
feedback and also spread theword about fathom.
Their friends and theircolleagues and whatnot.
And so it's been a really funride, honestly.
Yeah.
And I think we've been, we'vekind of proven out that yep, no
one likes taking notes andthey're no super excited to have
a product do it for them.
(02:40):
Especially, no one do it forfree.
Jason Frazell (02:42):
The next, the next iteration is my Fathom
robot that comes in an in-personmeeting and takes notes for me.
I, I am the perfect user forsomething like this.
I hate taking notes in anycontext, whether it be Zoom
person, I'm just not a, I'm nota good note daycare.
I don't like it.
I know that I can't be fullypresent.
So when you all come out withyour 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.
(03:03):
No problem.
Richard White (03:04):
We are looking into that.
I have the same problem whereit'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'thappen.
Like, because I, I, that musclehas atrophied so much for me
that yeah.
I just, I'm just not used toscribing even an in-person
conversation, so, yeah.
Jason Frazell (03:21):
So.
Cool.
Well let, let's start back withyou're, you're history of what's
gotten you to, you know, thefounder and CEO of, of Fathom.
What, what's your background andwhere did you come from prior to
this?
Richard White (03:33):
Yeah, so I was originally a computer science
graduate.
So early my career was anengineer.
I was a very classic founderengineer.
It's like, you know, kind of acrappy engineer.
Like, I can get stuff out prettyquickly.
But it's not pretty.
It's not, it's not your remotelybulletproof.
I early my career kindtransitioned over doing product
design.
And when I did that, it'sactually when I started working
(03:54):
with a company in the firstbatch of I Combinator.
Jason Frazell (03:56):
Mm-hmm.
Richard White (03:57):
Called Kiko.
And we like shared the, weshared a room in, in Cambridge
with like, Reddit and some otherfolks.
And so that was kinda a cool.
Entree into a really rich veinof entrepreneurs that were out
here in, in San Francisco whereI live now.
Yeah.
And so that kind of got mereally focused on, on, you know,
starting cool softwarecompanies.
(04:17):
I started this company calledUser 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 myfinishing school for
entrepreneurship because yeah.
It was a good not great companylike pretty reasonably
successful, but like we had towork for every inch, if you
will.
Right?
And so we really had to get goodat execution and it gave me an
opportunity to branch out fromnot just doing product and
(04:39):
design but to like running thesales team for a minute, running
the marketing team for a minute.
Like, so it made me, I think, akind of a very T-shaped kind of
entrepreneur, right?
Mm-hmm.
Where disciplines, obviously Igo on design and.
But I know not enough to bedangerous across all these, and
those that, those warnings were,I think, super impactful and
(05:00):
helpful when it came time tostart found
Jason Frazell (05:02):
nice.
The lot of there's a lot ofthings I wanna dig in on there.
And the first thing is, and Ialways ask a founder this, when
did you know that you were gonnabe, you were gonna found a
company?
Richard White (05:15):
Company?
I was very fortunate in that Igrew up with, my parents were
divorced, and both my stepdadand my father, both
entrepreneurs.
Okay.
Yeah.
And so I kind of grew up withthis like default assumptions,
what you did.
I remember I sold pictures tokids in first grade class and
you know, and then in highschool I was selling like fake
Oakley that I got from mybrother in New York City,
(05:36):
shipped them down, me, Carolina,I had
Jason Frazell (05:37):
fake Oakley, absolutely.
Hack.
Richard White (05:39):
Yeah.
Sold sold like mixed tapes, mix.
We burn CDs.
So I was always doing somethingkinda on my own, I think.
Jason Frazell (05:45):
Yeah,
Richard White (05:46):
early in my career I went.
I was an employee at a couplecompanies as a software
engineer, and I realized I'm aterrible employee.
Yeah, I just, you know, I don'ttake direction.
Well, you know, you really gottaexplain the why to me for me to
do it.
But I'm a really good founder.
Like I'm really self-motivatedkind of person.
So yeah, I think it was veryfortunate that like I was just
surrounded by kind ofentrepreneurship and I think
the, I grew up in NorthCarolina.
(06:06):
I think the biggest problem, mychallenge I had there is outside
of my family, there wasn't a lotof, it was really hard for me,
get friends and colleagues to.
You know, start startups'causeeveryone's just so happy to
like, eh, I kinda like having asalary and you know, a car and a
house and stuff.
Perfectly legitimate things youwant.
Sure.
And so then when I got into thislike Y Combinator group, which,
(06:26):
you know, everyone kind of knowsY Combinator now, but at that
point no one knew what that was.
But I was also sudden, oh Ifound 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 thatintersection of.
Personal background, desire andfinding the right group of
people was super impactful.
Jason Frazell (06:44):
Yeah.
You also mentioned the founder,one of the, one of the many
founder dilemmas is being reallygood and especially a technical
founder.
Passion as a passion is productdesign, engineering, and then
one day you find yourself havingto have sales conversations or
having to have HR conversationslike doing it all.
(07:08):
I'm curious if you'd share withus.
How did that go when youstarted?
'cause most technical founders,I know they hate sales.
Like they wanna like get intothe product and do the thing and
then Yeah, like, and, and thenthe, the technical details
should sell itself or the, thevalue should sell itself.
And now that you've had a lot ofexperience that you know, it, it
doesn't, it like some of thosethings still don't matter.
I'm so curious, like what you'velearned about that for other
(07:30):
founders listening that maybe alesson you can impart is, you
know, somebody and we're talkabout how you've raised some
capital and you've had a lot ofsuccess with Fathom that you've
managed to.
Do that and then eventuallybuild a pretty decent sized
team.
Richard White (07:43):
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 yourlaptop writing code.
Fathom's a little bit different,right?
'cause I had a somewhatsuccessful company before, and
so I got to start with.
Four great engineers and I inmonth three hired my best
salesperson sort of thing.
Mm.
So I would say if I think aboutkind of more my user voice
(08:04):
experience, I think it's moreapplicable to a lot of folks.
If you're first time founder,you know, I think there's a lot
of, the biggest thing you haveto overcome is your own, getting
your own head about thesethings, right?
Like, mm.
Especially if you're a technicalfounder, it's easy to be like, I
don't know how to do sales.
I don't wanna do sales, I don'twant, I don't like doing things
I'm not good at.
And like, find someone to dothis.
(08:25):
And I think as you then watchpeople do it, you're like, oh,
it's not that.
It's not, you know, to do itsuper well is like takes, you
know, 10,000 hours, but like youcan do it.
Right.
And I think a lot of my friendsthat were the most successful
ones were the ones who were intheir twenties and early
thirties, still had, they hadalmost the hubris to be like, I
can do anything, right?
(08:45):
Like, mm-hmm I can go do salesfor us.
I can figure out our marketing.
Right.
I think one of the things Ireflect on is that I often get
very in my head and I'd spend alot of time trying to find an
expert to teach me how to doextra Y or Z.
Sure.
And I would actually move a lotslower than my peers because of
that.
Right.
I think it was only want tofigure it out.
Gosh.
You know, don't wait forperfect.
Right.
(09:05):
Perfect enemy of good.
Don't wait to find, yes, there'ssomeone who's a better marketer
or someone better salespersonout there than me, but we speed
is everything in startups.
Even if I do a crappy job, it'sstill better than the
alternative sort of thing.
Yeah.
And so I think that was mylesson for the first company.
And then for Fathom, my lessonwas more like, let's build a
company that actually plays mystrengths.
(09:27):
Right.
Which is, yeah.
Yeah.
You know, user voice started offas like this freemium product
and then evolved into anenterprise product and I was
much better running the freemiumcompany.
Mm.
Played in my strengths arounduser experience and product
design.
And so for Fathom, we kinda hadthis thing.
We're gonna just focus.
We're not even trying to sellanything for two, three years.
(09:47):
We're just gonna try to make anawesome product that people use
day in, day out.
And actually, my, you know, mysales leader, I brought in, I
told her, I was like, you'reactually not gonna sell anything
for two years.
I just want you here and you'regonna act like a customer
success person, and you're justgonna help everyone and become a
product expert.
And at some point we're gonnahave something for you to sell.
This is a tough pitch to asalesperson, by the way.
(10:07):
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 hightrusts and so it's, that's one
of the advantages of, of being asecond time you can go grab
someone, say, Hey, look, I needyou to do this.
It's a little different thanwhat you normally work on, but
just trust me, we're gonna getthere, sort of thing.
So, brilliant.
But yeah, so I think Fathom islike, we play in my strengths,
right?
We go find, yeah.
(10:30):
We build a business model that.
Is the one I wanna wake up everyday and work at.
Jason Frazell (10:36):
You say something you said there reminds me, I was
in a conversation yesterday withsome founders and they were
supporting somebody and theywere the, the topic was remote
versus in person and how they'regetting, if this is something
that you all have dealt with ornot, and.
The, they have a company aboutthe same size as Fathom, and
they were, they're strugglingwith the decision on it because
they're getting their ventureventure backed.
(10:58):
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 ownlifestyle.
Yep.
And, and they've had a reallysuccessful company.
And somebody else in the groupsaid something that really
resonated with me, that it'sanother way of saying what you
just said.
They said, remember, as afounder, your business is always
a reflection of you.
(11:19):
And how you see things, yourenergy, your vibe, you're
bringing in your own.
And they said it, it wasbrilliant.
It's like you're bringing in,you bring in your own mindsets,
including your limited mindsets.
You bring in all of thesethings, 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.
(11:39):
And when you're trying to doeverything or you're, you're
doing something that you're notpassionate about, like whether
or not you say it, your vibe isgonna give it off.
As humans, we're just designedto do that.
Richard White (11:50):
I don't think, I think in a lot of these
decisions you make about, youknow, what's our target market,
what's our product?
Are we in person, we remote?
I actually don't think there'sgenerally any wrong answers.
Right?
Yeah.
All of them are fine.
The only wrong answer is to kindof like not commit to one
direction and to kind of likehesitate maybe we'll do
something in between and also todo something like you don't want
do, because yeah, it will beobvious to everyone.
(12:12):
Like, you know, I.
User voice started off asremote, and then we built an
office.
Then we built a second office,and I spent half my life
traveling to these offices, andat some point Fathom was like,
why'd I do that?
Like, I don't, I don't like evenworking in, I'm not even that
effective in an office.
I'm much more effective when Ihave my own focused time in my
own space.
And so, fathom, we were likecommitted from the early days,
like we're gonna be a remotecompany and, you know, because
(12:34):
that's a company I wanna livein.
It's like, yeah, you know, I'vetalked to other founders,
they're like, oh, what's thebiggest 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 didI do that?
Totally.
Why, why don't I build, youknow, build the thing I wanna
live in sort of thing.
It's your house, right?
Yeah.
So build, do you wanna live innot the house someone tells you
you should be building, right?
Jason Frazell (12:56):
Yeah.
And that was, and that was a bigpart of that conversation was,
and this was specifically aboutsome, some venture, some venture
capital folks that had investedin their A with like, you need
to be this, you need to do that.
Right.
And they said everybody's gonnahave an opinion.
Richard White (13:11):
Yeah.
Jason Frazell (13:11):
But it's not their company.
And you know they're investorsand you listen and you're
respectful and.
And, and what ends up happeningthere, I'm sure, and it probably
happened for you as well, is youend up resenting your own
business.
And boy, what a terrible placeto be because I said, if you're
gonna resent what you do for aliving, go work for somebody
else and let them pay you to dothat as opposed to like having
your
Richard White (13:29):
Yeah.
Whole point we do this is sothat 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 alot too with like enterprise
sales where there's generallyyou raise money, there's a lot
pressure to be like, okay, gomarket founders who.
You know, don't love doing salesand pick a business or market
that forces them to start doingenterprise sales from day one.
Like, yeah, why did you do that?
(13:54):
It doesn't play to yourstrengths.
Right?
Well, that's what our investorssaid we need to do.
It's like, nah.
You know?
Yeah.
If you're doing something,'causesomeone else tells you to do it,
your heart's never gonna reallybe in it.
Right?
Jason Frazell (14:04):
Yeah.
So I have an adage in life, Ilike to say, Richard is, find me
somebody who really likes beingtold what to do.
There's very few of us,especially those of us who are
like, you know, like highperforming or like, have some
ideas about, and especiallypeople that are creative, like
you're obviously a very creativeindividual as well as a great
technical person.
You don't like being told whatto do.
Richard White (14:25):
Yeah.
Jason Frazell (14:28):
Let's talk about building teams.
Building teams, some, anylessons that you wanna share
with us and you've scaled.
You've scaled fathom quitesubstantially, 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 somefounder-led sales and some small
(14:49):
teams to a real co, like a, nota real company, but a company
with all departments and doingall sorts of things.
What are some of the things thatyou've had to learn slash
overcome as you've scaledspecifically as the founder?
Richard White (15:05):
I mean, I think the, the, you know, the classic
one is just like, which of yourLegos to give away sort of
thing, right?
Mm.
I think you're always, you'realways probably a little late
giving them away too, right?
Like, you, you stay engaged inthings a little too long.
I is, I think the failure mode Isee the most, at least that was
the case for me.
You know, I think it's, it's sodifferent when you're doing your
(15:26):
first start versus like yoursecond one to a.
We were about a year ago.
We were about 15 people, we'reabout 70 now.
And huge growth.
Those, yeah.
Of those 15 people, I thinkabout two thirds of them were
people I'd worked with before.
Yeah.
And the other third were folksthat, the other folks that
worked with before, it was allin network.
Right.
Nice.
So, I mean, I think that is sucha huge, huge hack.
(15:49):
And I think you can access thisearlier in your career, but than
we, than I did.
But like finding folks thatyou've worked with before or
folks you've worked with, haveworked with sort of thing is
like, it's such a hack'causeit's so hard to vet, so hard to
have that shotgun wedding ofrecruiting, especially at the
early stage, right?
Like it just means something youdon't know and run through a
rooting process and having itwork out is, is hard as you got
(16:11):
a high failure rate.
Yeah.
So, you know, I think, and Ialso think it.
The other thing you, you can getconfused by is like, having a
big team feels fun.
Everyone's like, oh, becauseevery investor's like, how big's
your team?
You go to some cocktail partywith a bunch of entrepreneurs.
Everyone, first question.
'cause no one will say whattheir revenue is, right?
That's like two.
Oh, of course not.
Yeah.
So the, the, the safe fanningmetric for everyone is how big,
(16:33):
how big's happen.
How big's your team?
And so then you subconsciouslystart thinking that that's also
the like metric, metric ofsuccess.
Yeah.
I actually try to hire aslittle, I like we're things like
we hire almost retic, like wetry not to hire because yeah,
every additional person makesthis move a little bit slower.
Sure.
And I think most of my friendshave.
(16:55):
Very fortunate to be aroundpeople that have been very
successful, built really bigcompanies.
Ones that have gotten acquired,gone, public, you name it.
And they all, you know, they alltalk 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 everleave, don't ever, you know,
don't ever grow.
You hear that all the time.
So I, I think there's somethingto be said for staying in that
(17:16):
zone a long time, because youcan 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 ofpeople scale the team too early.
Yeah.
And I remember talking to myfriend Michael Sebel, who's one
of the partners at yc, and I waslike, 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 yougot pretty far with four.
(17:38):
Like why do you immediately need12?
And that Yeah.
Fair point.
Right.
So I think, you know.
So our lessons have been figureout 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, gowith the people you got there
with, right?
Like there's also this tendencyto bring in big execs and
(17:58):
whatnot.
I'd much rather promote fromwithin.
Folks that really understand ourculture, they get it.
Like they can train the nextgeneration of folks.
So yeah, I think that's been mybiggest lesson learned for
Fathom is there's a.
Building the product kind ofstarts 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'sa 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, asyou were saying that I, you were
talking about Reddit.
I'm just thinking about the CEOEO of Reddit is like, I really
can't go out with my familyanymore because my wife is too
famous and I was, and my companyis all these things and like,
yeah, that there's probablysomething to be said for those
days where you're like in thecode and doing the things and
(18:40):
like, Hey, we want, we want toadd this feature.
How long is that gonna take?
Three days of coding overnightor whatever, and like just do it
and having the money.
Is great too, right?
Like there's there, there's bothof those things.
First thing I wanna talk alittle bit about is enterprise
moving, moving up market.
I know you all have moved up.
(19:00):
Market.
When I first started, I, Ididn't even think about it.
I, I just knew I was theperfect, the perfect target
market for the beta and thenimmediately became a paid
customer that this is reallyvaluable.
Like no brainer.
I shouldn't tell you this, I'dprobably 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 anannouncement
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 otherfounder 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 morefor it.
Like, we don't, like, we're,we're totally happy.
Giving, giving the thing awayfor 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 tobusinesses.
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 tosomebody else who's, who's
listening, who's got a, asimilar product that works great
for a solopreneur or even likean individual, like I'm sure
Fathom is used like a schoolboard meeting, like there's a
million places you can usetechnology like this, and then
suddenly you're calling onFortune 500 where they have
(20:11):
procurement departments and ITdepartments, and how does this
fit into our tech stack?
Like what are some lessons thatyou've learned and you and the
team have learned about movingup market?
Richard White (20:22):
So I'd say the one thing, there's a handful of
things I think we got reallyright, and one of them was, I'm
a big fan of like attack, likekey kind of metrics in order,
like don't do multiple things atonce.
And so for us in the beginningit was like we don't care about
anything other than making aproduct that individuals will
use day in, day out.
Right?
And I don't need a big number offolks, but I'm not gonna worry
(20:44):
about onboarding.
I'm not about monetizing, I'm.
Free user retention.
And I think in the early days wegot, I probably personally
reached out to my network andmanually onboarded.
It was really a messy process,like 600, 800 people until I got
to a cohort of like 50 peoplethat kind of stuck with it every
week.
And that took us almost a yearto get to that point.
(21:05):
Yeah.
And then we said, great.
Okay, we've got, we feel goodabout this.
Now let's focus on.
How do we get better atonboarding, right?
How do we make it easier for youto kind of become a user and
make the onboarding processreally good?
And then once we get to that,we're like, okay, now we'll
focus on like how do we make iteasy for your refer fathom?
And then only then if we getthrough that, we'll start
thinking about like, how do wemake money off this?
(21:26):
And we always have this thesisthat.
We don't need to make money offindividual users.
We'll make money when someonewants 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 createall these workflows,
automations.
And so I was very adamant withthe team early on.
Like anyone gives you feedbackabout, Hey, I want features for,
to use as a team.
We don't care about that yet.
We wanna see laser focus on justmaking the product awesome.
(21:49):
Like really, really amazing forindividual, for the people on
the meetings that are using thisto 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 dothat, you end up kind of like.
You know, I see all people,they're like, they launch and
they're trying to figure outlike retention and activation
and monetization all at the sametime.
It's really, really hard to dothree things well at once, and
so I'm a big fan of like do itin serial.
And so we did that.
And then I also think I.
Once we started monetizing, youknow, as I mentioned, I brought
(22:16):
in, we had, I think at thispoint 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 teammission product.
Start talking to folks.
And you know, we were talking inthe beginning, very small
companies and now we're talkingto much larger companies.
Sure.
I would say we get this pressurelike, oh, when are you guys
gonna go market?
You go up market.
We don't really go up.
(22:37):
Yeah.
What we've noticed is that upmarket comes to us.
Totally.
And so if you, you often startwith like this, like early users
or early adopters that are smallcompanies that are sold
entrepreneurs and they're thebest people to start with.
They'll give you great feedbacklike yourself.
They'll be really engaged.
They'll tell their friends.
And then just kind oforganically, you'll see large
and large companies come to theparty.
Like they'll hear about thesethings and they're, they're
(22:58):
never, you know, your Fortune500 is never the first people to
adopt the thing, right?
No.
And so while we said, it's likewe just gonna be aware of that,
you know, as, as we kind of boilthis 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 morewhat we looked at.
Right?
Yeah.
And so there's a handful ofthings that, okay, if you wanna
sell to a 200 person company,you're gonna need soc two and
(23:20):
this and this and this.
Great.
You wanna get the 500 personcompany, you now need SSO and
skim and da, da, da.
And so I actually think theworst thing you can do is, and I
see this a lot too, where it'slike, 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 moremoney in the in, we make money
with Enterprise and we're gonnathrow away all existing users
and just start doing someoutbound to these folks that
(23:42):
never used this before.
It's like you just threw awaythe one thing that was working.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So don't abandon your, don'tabandon, you know?
Or these companies happen a lotwhere they raised their prices,
right?
And they price themselves outtathat early market.
And that's when a new startupcomes in and takes that market
over and then they come up fromunderneath you.
So I think it's super importantfor us to like.
We don't a abandon, we don'tlike leave our core art,
(24:03):
digital, virtual audience.
We just kind of stack neweraudiences 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'tbeen to the space in a while,
but I used to work at a, acouple of cybersecurity
startups.
We would call this for thesecurity 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 anycloud 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 wifeworks at Big Tech where they,
you know, they have their ownsolution now.
She used to use Dropbox and putpretty sophisticated
intellectual property in aDropbox, and then suddenly their
(24:44):
IT department's like, no.
I'm sure the same thing hasprobably happened with, with you
all As, as people are using,they're installing Fathom from
the Zoom store, and I know Zoomdidn't use to have as many, you
know, controls or install, andthen they go, oh, this is super
useful and I'm sure this hashappened to you all.
You're like, oh, the CRO isusing it.
You're like, yes, because theCRO is gonna have budget to roll
(25:05):
it out to his, his or her salesteam.
Then you go, but it goes, no.
We got our data in the cloud, wedon't know what people are
talking about and nice to sellthe financial services.
So I know there's all sorts ofadditional things with, with
the, the really regulatedindustry, but it sounds like
you've had a similar experiencewhere people are using it and
it's great and then thesecompanies go, oh, how do I, how
(25:28):
do I control this in a way thatfeels good and also gives my
users their.
Or freedom to use the solutionsthey want.
Is that, so it's almost like apoll.
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 ourmonthly metrics with the team,
revenue is actually my numberfour priority.
And and it's below usage.
'cause I always say like, if youhave a product people are using
day in, day out, you'll almostalways find a way to monetize.
Like, and I think a lot of folksget hung up on it.
I know there's a lot of likestartup advice, like charge
(26:03):
early and often make sure you'resolving a real pain.
I don't actually believe inthat.
I actually think for mostproducts, like just getting
people to use it proves thatyou've got a real pain.
And like in 2025, I think thatlogic made more sense 15 years
ago when there weren't that manysoftware companies out there.
Yeah, there's a million of themnow.
Yeah.
And so you get like one chanceto make a good first impression
(26:24):
and break through and becomesomething people use regularly
now.
This is very specific advice toa product like ours, right?
If you've got some enterpriseproduct that only gets used once
a month and it's a complianceproduct, throw everything I
said, but you're buildingsomething that your ideal user
should be using this every dayor every week, then I think, I
always think that is the hard,that's the hard part to get to.
(26:45):
You get people using somethinghabitually, you've, everything
else gets way easier.
Jason Frazell (26:49):
Yeah.
Speaking from my personalexperience, I remember when you
moved to, when you moved, whenyou turned on the paid switch.
It was like, yeah, it was likea, my con, like I would like the
conversion.
I would, without, we don't needto get into the conversion
metrics, but I'll bet you yourconversion rate was probably
higher than a lot of otherproducts in a space like this,
in terms of you're already usingit, it's already in your
(27:09):
workflow, you know, it'svaluable.
And for, like you said, I don'tknow many people that are like,
I love taking paper notes ortyping notes on a, on a screen
where you're like, oh wait, youmean there's a solution that
isn't as good, but I love thisone and it does all these
things.
That's worth significant.
Resource and to most people thatI know and you know, you've
(27:32):
probably heard this feedback alot.
I do a lot of trainings and likethe, the group I was with
yesterday, we had three fathomnote takers I had to remove from
the meeting before it evenstarted.
That's a good sign.
I'm like, I'm like, oh yeah, wegotta 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'relike, yeah, we don't wanna
record these.
I'm like, you know that threeoutta the five of you had your
(27:52):
fathom note taker here beforeyou showed up.
Richard White (27:56):
Yeah, it's, I mean, our conversion actually is
pretty good.
I don't actually think it'sactually, I don't think it's
world class because we focus somuch on making the free product.
Like I think there's a lot ofcompanies that try to make the
free product.
You know, something you can'tactually use forever.
Right?
Mean that's the game everyoneshows.
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 thinkconsumers are pretty savvy to
this now, and they're prettyskeptical of things that have,
it's got a free tier, everyoneknows.
The company's like, oh, it's notreally a free, it's, it's a
trick.
Right?
It's like a, yeah.
Bait and switch.
But we work really hard to makesure you can use this
legitimately for free forever.
It won't have all the bells andwhistles, but it'll certainly
have, it'll certainly solve thecore problem, right?
(28:35):
Yeah.
Of taking notes for you andthings like that.
So it, it is interesting.
But yeah, we, I mean it, youknow, it's funny'cause you know,
when the market shifted abouttwo years ago, 20 22, 20 23, you
know, we went from this worldwhere everyone cared about
usage, everyone cared aboutrevenue, and we were still out
there being.
But we still just care aboutusage, revenue will come sort of
thing.
And so that actually was achallenge in fundraising because
(28:58):
people were so focused now onyou be profitable and you gotta
make a bunch of money.
Right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's, that's, that's theopposite of the playbook we're
running where we're like, let'sgo get a bunch of users, even
free users, and you know, getthem to love it.
Get them to tell their friends.
I mean, it's a unique producttoo.
You bring it to your meetings soyou're natural, you're telling,
you naturally share it withother people.
And so I think that's where thevalue of free is.
(29:18):
I say like a lot of times.
I'd rather you be on free.
'cause if you're free, you kindof, 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'repaying, you pay me 10 bucks a
month, then you kind of likeI've, I've given you 10 bucks a
month.
I don't owe you anything.
So yeah, I'm a big fan of thepower of free.
Jason Frazell (29:36):
Yeah.
You just, you just reminded me,Richard, or just spark that for
me, what a viral marketingcampaign 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 firstsaw it three years ago, I was in
a mastermind.
I was in, I think it was whenyou first came out and it's
like, Hey, I'm testing out thisnew thing.
I'm like, what does it do?
And they actually explained it,and I'm like, oh, that sounds
(29:56):
useful.
And it was, it was because Iasked'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, signupstream.
Is that right?
It's like, yeah.
Have to explain.
You have to, you'd have toexplain what this thing is in
your meeting and naturally turnsinto 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'llgive them and we'll cover them
in any order you see fit.
I wanna talk about raisingcapital, always something my
audience likes to hear about.
You have successfully raisedcapital.
And the other thing I want totalk about, maybe actually let's
do that first and then I wannawrap by talking about what do
(30:35):
you see as what's next in thespace that you live in?
Because AI is obviouslyeverywhere and you live in a
very specific way of using ai.
I am curious.
I'm not asking for the productof roadmaps.
We're like, what do you, what doyou see as what's next for the
kind of way that Fathom doesthings?
So yeah, let's start withraising capital.
Curious to hear your experiencewith how that went for you and
(30:56):
any lessons learned and mindsetsthat you went through.
Because I don't know what thestatistics are now, but what is
it about, I think 65 to 70pitches to get capital.
And you also have to have aproduct that people actually
want too.
Like people will pitch that.
The market never materializes.
So yeah.
Anything you'd wanna share withthe audience and for you and I
(31:16):
about your experience raisingcapital?
Richard White (31:18):
Yeah, it's, it's everyone's favorite topic.
I always hesitate to talk aboutthis too much'cause I, we did
stuff that's so different than Ithink most people do.
Oh, okay.
And I'm not sure howreproducible 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 lastyear, 17.
But before that, we'd raisedabout$10 million.
Mm-hmm.
But the largest, but we did thatover 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 werebasically raising, I think the
average, we had like a hundredpeople in the cap table.
I think over that$10 million.
I think the average check sizewas like 70 5K.
This is a kind of intentionalprocess.
Like, I hate fundraising, I hatethe, 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
(32:08):
that just don't get it and I'vegotta 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 hearno a lot know who likes to hear.
No.
Richard White (32:15):
Yeah, I do.
Like, you know what I like aboutfundraising is I like having
smart people poke holes in my,in my business.
Yeah.
I actually find that reallyinteresting.
But they're like, let's go spenda month.
Of my like, you know, a month ortwo months of my time being
completely distracted and notfocused on the business.
I hate that part.
So we did something a little bitdifferent and I think, you know,
I think it's a little harder toexecute this maybe in this
(32:36):
market.
'cause again, we started in2020, which is pretty frothy.
And I had done a previousbusiness and got to about 10
million revenue.
So like, and I had like a bignetwork of folks.
But what we did in the beginningwas, I think when we first
started, we raised 500 k fromfriends and family, like
basically.
Angels.
And then three months later weraised, we got into yc and then
we raised like a million off of,we got into yc and then we got,
(32:59):
I think four months later wegot, or five months later, we
got the demo day for yc and weraised 1.5 and then six months
after that raised another 1.5.
And so a couple of things wereinteresting, like.
We did nothing but small checks.
So I had a different thing.
It was like I probably did 30meetings, but my win rate was
like 75, 80%.
And so I just kept stackingsmall 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 Iwas going to get people, part of
this was intentional is I thinkin the early days I felt like I
didn't want just like one seedfund to give me one feedback.
I was like, I actually want abig coalition of people that
have different perspectives.
Right?
Yeah.
So I had a, a bunch of folks ata background in engineering, a
bunch of folks at a backgroundin design.
(33:42):
At some 0.1 round we got nothingbut folks that had a focus on,
like, they were all sales techCEOs.
Yeah.
And so whatever I, you know, andso at some point, like we need,
oh, we need a connection toZoom.
Oh, we need a connection toSlack.
I could just go to thisaudience.
50 to a hundred people and itwas really useful to me.
It was like just kind of likethis, you know, it wasn't, it
was pretty lightweight, but itwas like a, this big network of
(34:03):
folks we could call on.
The other nice thing about itagain is like, I just could kind
of raise my own.
We need to, but we were alsopretty 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 andthey wanna invest.
Great.
Let's use that to catalyzearound, because I think the
hardest thing when you'refundraising is to create a sense
of urgency.
Yeah.
And create what we call insales, that critical event.
And in this case, we just waiteduntil a critical event happened,
and then we would quickly kindof like, you know, coalesce
around that to, to raise money.
(34:34):
The other thing that happens,like we never had more than like
12 months of runway up until ourseries A, we never had more than
12 months of runway.
And I saw that as like afeature, not a bug, where I was
like, yeah.
I, I only work well underpressure.
I know that about myself.
Sure.
And so I have such highconfidence ince in this product.
'cause I use it myself andchange how I work that, you
know, if we need more than 12months of runway at a given
(34:55):
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 fouryears if it's not working sort
of thing.
Yeah.
So brilliant.
I don't know.
It's not exactly the mostreproducible strategy.
And then for our, even ourseries 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, threefirms, but I didn't run a
(35:17):
process.
They gave me a deal that I couldlive with and I got back to
work.
Amazing.
So yeah, so I think it's adifferent construction.
Very different than I think yourstandard roadshow kind of way.
Sure.
But again, it played well to ourstrengths.
Jason Frazell (35:29):
Yeah.
Thanks for sharing that.
That's, that is definitely notthe normal story, which is
arguably, not arguably.
That's really interesting thatyou were, it's interesting that
you went out and you wanted alot of interesting things there.
One thing that I'm reallyinterested in, we don't have
time for today, is likecollecting the small checks,
like making that on purpose.
Building a big cap table with abunch of names with small
(35:50):
stakes.
'cause a lot of people, that'snot 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 in50 K, they actually sometimes
care more about your outcomethan, yeah, 2 million out of a
slush fund from some.
VC that has 2 billion undermanagement, right?
Yeah.
So when we did get institutionaland we have some institutional,
I also intentionally only foundinstitutions, institutional
(36:14):
ambassador VCs that weregenerally like on their first or
second fund.
They were still trying to proveit.
Nice.
Yeah.
And so I found all that to beuseful.
We also raised money from ourusers.
We raise about.
3 million from our users aswell.
We did one round that was justusers and part of our series.
Hey, we did 10% of that roundfor users, and so we've done
every non-traditional kind offundraising 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 itbroad on AI or really Sure.
You know, narrow it down to.
Kind of where you see Fathomgoing.
What, what do you, what do yousee 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 2020and our, yep.
There was no, there were no LLMsin 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 likewe thought LMS gonna get really
good, which was kind ofcounterintuitive.
You go back to 2020, we had thisother thesis that we thought
transcription was going to,transcription at the time was
pretty expensive.
We thought that it was going tobasically approach zero very
quickly, and so thus we can giveaway this note taker for free.
And we kinda thought like we'regonna really work on the hard
(37:24):
parts, which is like making itreliably record, make it easy to
use.
At some point AI will show upand we'll just get to basically
drop that into the existingsystem, right?
Mm.
And the AI part in a lot of waysis some of the easiest parts of
building Sure.
A product like Fathom.
The hard part is reliabletranscriptions and reliable
recording and storage anddistributed systems and all that
sort of fun stuff.
(37:44):
And so, you know, know.
It's easy to be directionallycorrect and we got a little
lucky on timing.
All the stuff happened rightwhen we needed to.
Right.
Sure.
Transcription became free rightwhen we need it to come free or
been bankrupt, you know.
AI really showed up kinda late2023 in a way where it was like,
ah, the AI can now write notesbetter than you can Sure.
For an individual meeting.
(38:06):
And so I'm kinda giving thatcontext, like where we're
excited now is like AI's at apoint where it can do really
awesome things for you on asingle transcript, right?
Yeah.
So it's like I can basicallygive you a chat GPT interface
for your meeting.
It'll write your follow upemails, it'll answer any
questions you have about thatmeeting, whether you are on it
or you're just some colleaguesent it to you.
You can write the notes, you canfind the action items,
everything you'd want.
(38:27):
What we're looking at now is howdo we now do this for a big
group of meetings?
How do we look across all thesales meetings you had in the
last quarter or all of the, youknow, all of the standups you
had last, you know, last year?
How do we start giving youinsight across Watson meetings?
Help me find every moment where,you know, there was an objection
that our sales team didn'thandle well or Yeah, someone was
(38:47):
asking about this integrationthat we don't have and now we're
getting to point where AI can dothat kind of stuff.
Right?
Sure.
It's kind of.
I think for a while people havewanted that to exist and it's
turns out you couldn't justthrow 10,000 hours of
transcripts into the, into chatGPT and do anything useful.
Yeah.
But we're now getting a pointwhere that that is possible.
And so we're really excitedabout what you can do when
(39:09):
you've got an AI that has sat inevery meeting that you've been
in and every meeting that yourteam's been in and can answer
you any question you have aboutthose meetings.
We've always had this thesisthat a lot of information in any
organization.
Is really only in thesemeetings, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
Way more than what's in youremail or in your Slack Totally.
And whatnot.
And so that's the thing we'rereally excited to unlock for
(39:30):
folks, is really making thesecond brain for you where you
just, yeah.
Even more have meetings and youdon't, not only have to remember
what happened in individualmeeting, you don't have to
remember anything.
You just ask question, wait, Iknow 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 wetalk a little bit more about,
you know, where people can takea look at Fathom.
Obviously I'm a fan, a personalfan.
How do you use it with yourteam?
How does the exact team atFathom use Fathom?
I.
I
Richard White (39:58):
mean, we use it every meeting.
I mean, I think what's fun aboutthis product is you have a bunch
of use cases.
Obviously the sales team usesit, right?
And we use it a lot for sharingknowledge about what we're
hearing from, you know, as wetalk about going at market,
right?
Like, oh, this customer had thischallenge.
Great.
Send me the highlight of themdiscussing this challenge,
right?
Or now.
What's, what's search, what'sused, the new fathom search that
we're beta testing and find me,how many times has it ever
(40:20):
happened?
Let's watch all those clips.
So a lot of kind of marketintelligence we use it for on
the sales team.
Mm-hmm.
We use it a lot in recruiting.
So, you know, someone has anintro 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 andthey'll kind of like, you know,
because I recruiting is if.
(40:42):
You have to get to ask the same80% of questions every step of
the process.
And so it's very easy now to belike, oh, you know, I talked to
Sarah.
The conversation's great.
A few things were interestingconversations we should double
click on in the nextconversation.
Yeah.
So that's super cool.
And then obviously for internalmeetings, right?
Like people can't make everymeeting.
I think there's a lot of meetinginflation, especially in remote
(41:04):
companies.
And so you can kind of almostlike.
In some ways, fathom allows youto take meetings and make them
async.
And so it's like, oh, totally,you make this meeting or you
don't necessarily need to beinvited to every recurring
marketing meeting we have.
Hey Tim, you're not on therecurring marketing meeting, but
we talked about something youshould see.
So here's the, here's the linkto that meeting, da, da, da.
So yeah, I think it, it's apretty, it really allows you to
(41:26):
be a much more efficient remotecompany.
Jason Frazell (41:30):
And I was, I, I had a feeling you were gonna go
there.
And the question I was gonna askthat you answered was, do you
have a culture now where peoplecan say, Hey, I can't, not even,
I can't make the meaning.
I could make it, but it doesn'tfeel like the high impact thing
I'm doing today.
Richard White (41:45):
Right,
Jason Frazell (41:45):
man.
You wanna talk about an easysales pitch?
Just tell people, Hey, like thisproduct helps you to be in less
meetings that you were inbefore.
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 everyonehates meetings.
Yeah.
They don't actually hatemeetings.
What they hate is they hate allthe busy work that comes with
meetings, free work, post-work,da da, da.
And they hate being in meetingswhere only 10% of that content
is relevant to them.
And with Fathom, we're gonna beable to solve both of those
problems.
Right?
We're already solving a lot ofthe first one.
(42:13):
Yeah.
And you know, you can manuallysolve the second one.
And I think a lot of the AIwe're building next will kind of
automate, right.
Hey, make sure Jason saw thislast discussion we have and
it'll immediately tell you aboutit sort of thing.
So yeah, I think we're gonna runthis world where, you know, this
is one of the best problemsurfaces is to apply modern
LLMs.
(42:34):
It just makes, it's right up thefairway for what LMS are good at
doing.
Jason Frazell (42:38):
Yeah.
I'll, I'll share with you my, myfavorite thing is what are my
action items and when are theydue by, like, ask it that.
Yeah.
So good.
They're like, oh yeah, I forgotthat they said this thing, or
they said it as they ran outthe, they left Zoom and ran out
and you know, like, and droppedthat in.
They're like, oh no.
Like, and like actually get a,like a to-do list with not only
(42:59):
the to-dos, but when they're dueby or hey, like, and I do
coaching work and facilitationwork.
Like, oh, that person hadcommitted to getting that other
person the thing, so it's notactually mine.
I'd say, Richard, just to remindyou, you had agreed to send, to
send Sam, you know, the, thedeck that you used to raise
capital, whatever.
It's so.
Richard, thank you so much forbeing on, I, I've been looking
(43:20):
forward to this conversationever since it came my way.
Let's talk a little bit aboutjust the wrap here.
You know, I know a lot of peopleknow you in the space, they
wanna try it out.
What's the best way, and I'mgonna give this to you.
I, I have a way that I hook itin, 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 fewminutes.
You can use it if you'relistening us now, if you, you
can get use it on your nextmeeting.
And I'm on LinkedIn.
I've got this weird kinda likebit map avatar on LinkedIn, but
just Richard White on LinkedInfor Fathom.
Yeah.
Anything you love or hate inthat experience, let me know.
I'm all ears.
Cool.
So yeah.
(43:58):
Yeah.
Love feedback from otherfounders and entrepreneurs.
Jason Frazell (44:01):
Awesome.
It's also in the Zoom app store.
If you go in a, you have a, youhave a, you have an approved
app, which which says a lotbecause I know Zoom vets, any
partner that's gonna be in therehas 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 allin there as well.
Yeah.
Awesome.
Richard.
We will make sure that all ofRichard's information and the
Fathom video information is inthe show notes.
(44:24):
Thank you so much.
I, as a user, I can't wait tosee what y'all come out with
next to make my life easy, eveneasier.
I'll leave it with this.
I was just telling somebodyelse, I'm a big AI guy.
My dream for years has been tobe Tony Stark.
Wake up in the morning and talkto some thing in the sky and
have it do all the things Idon't wanna do.
And note taking is right at thetop of my list.
So thank you.
Thank you for creating anawesome product.
(44:45):
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 andgive us a shout out or take a
moment to leave a review oniTunes.
If something from today'sepisode pique your interest and
you'd like to connect, email usat podcast@jasonzell.com.
(45:11):
We love hearing from ourlisteners because you're cool
people too.
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