487 | How Fathom AI Dominated a Competitive Market with CEO Richard White

Nov 25

Richard White 0:00
It's not just the product experience, it's also the support experience. Like, we've invested a lot in having our really killer support team, I think that's an example where, like, paradoxically, most companies don't, no matter how good your product is, people are gonna have issues with it, questions about it. Make great support team. It's actually a great input into the product, right? We spent a year refining the first versions product before we ever really launched. My first test in this product was, can I build a version that, you know, 50 people used day in, day out? There was a lot of little things you had to fix to get to that point. People only use this product in a hurry, right? You're getting on a meeting. Things gotta work, right? It kind of is a product that requires you to have really good user experiences. For always using in a hurry. You're trying to replace something that has really good user notes are easy, and again, you're familiar with it. You've been doing it for 1050, whatever, years, dude, I

Chaz Wolfe 0:41
appreciate your time, man. I mean, you've created a business that just has all kinds of amazing intricacies that that we've used. So I just, I get to have a kind of a unique perspective. So happy to hear that, yeah, man, I would love to, I'd love to start with, you know, Fathom may have been, you know, one of a kind when you when you launched, but now it feels like there's an AI tool for everything. And I'd love to hear, uh, what Fathom is doing, even in this environment right now, at the end of 2024 to maybe be a lead in in AI, because that's what it was, that's what it's always been, at least, that's what I've known it to be. How is Fathom staying on the on the cutting edge of all AI,

Richard White 1:22
yeah, it's funny. I think we had a thesis for this business, which was, you know, transcription was gonna become almost free, and AI was gonna get really good. Yeah, both those things are kind of obvious now, especially that last part, yeah, we started this in 2020, when, you know, I remember getting a lot of flack from our early investors putting AI in our name, because four years ago, people didn't actually like aI because the first generation of AI products weren't very good. And so we kind of had the theory of, like, it's gonna get really good. Transcriptions can become kind of free. No one really wants a transcript, but you will need a transcript to do the cool things with AI, right? And we kind of said also, if you wait to start this business, when those two things are true, it'll be, like, two years too late, that's right. So, you know, because there's a lot of other things that go around this product, right? There's a lot of video recording infrastructure, transcription infrastructure, you name it, and then, just like, building out good user experience and stuff like that. So, yeah, I would answer this question, you know, how are we seeing ahead of the competition? Kind of two ways, right? One is, we did all that foundational groundwork before AI got here, right? And that allows us to have a lower cost structure than anyone else, which allows us to give away more of our product than anyone else. So that's still always one of the things we we really lean on is like, Fathom has a really killer free product, so much so that a majority of people just use this product for free. And we love that, right? Because that's how we it's how we market, right? We don't have anyone in marketing. Our marketing is users, using data on meetings, yeah, and then, and then the other part is we actually have a whole team where all they do is spend all day testing the latest large language models against kind of different use cases, both ones we already support, like, you know, taking notes or finding action, item, see if we can find a way to do it, you know, better, faster, cheaper, and also opening up like new, AI functionality, right? Like we're looking at stuff now where, how can we look across a set of meetings? Maybe it's a deal you're working and maybe it's every meeting you've had with a company. Maybe it's a recurring meeting you have with your team, and start giving you insights on those. So it's kind of cool because, you know, as you know, this AI stuff is such that, like, every six months, it gets twice as good in half the cost, and it kind of opens up every six months, like a whole new set of use cases. And so we kind of work backwards from, what can we do with the AI today and get it into the product?

Chaz Wolfe 3:36
Yeah, I love that. I want to switch same vein. But like, you know, four years ago, maybe four and a half years ago, you know, the world shutting down. You know, we're in the middle of COVID. Fathom is, is in the launching stages, beyond maybe the initial launch. But really, really like, starting to, you know, become something and and probably COVID helped with that kind of a natural circumstances, but still navigating inside of that. So brand new company, brand new technology. People don't like AI, all the things that you just said that you were kind of doing below the ground surface, and then boom, COVID hits, which ultimately we know now is this, this, I'm sure, an accelerator for the business. But go back to 2020, your mind, your team. What was it like building an AI product in the middle of

Richard White 4:24
COVID? In some ways, this is gonna sound crazy, kind of an ideal time to start a company, because we don't have a lot of distractions. I think, you know, when I started my first company, I was in my late 20s, and I was already living with like CO like, my colleagues, my co founders and we were just kind of like we would write code to we fell asleep on our laptop. We lived in Santa Cruz, just the sleepy little like, you know, beachside town. We lived there during the winter, so there's nothing to do, right? I remember like we just had extreme focus, because we had no social ads whatsoever. I think one of the challenging things as being a second time. Multi time founders, especially once you get into your 30s and 40s, like, you have a lot of like, you got a lot of social commitments you gotta like, life is good, right? There's a lot of fun things to do. And so in some ways, you're kind of fortunate, like with COVID, it's like, well, there's nothing else to do except, you know, hide out in your house and work on your shirt up all day. So, and then, obviously, as you mentioned, the tailwinds of like, we had the idea for Fathom pre COVID And, like everything in startups, like some things are, you know, you got to get the right, you got to get the main things right yourself. But you often get lucky on timing and certain other things. And certainly, you know, terrible experience for all of us. But if there's a silver lining, it was for our business that, like, oh, everyone really now is very fluent in using video conferencing tools, and that's what we hook into. Yeah,

Chaz Wolfe 5:45
yeah. It makes me think of, you know, I've got a couple buddies that, at that time, worked for zoom and, you know, just regular sales job until 2020, right? And was, you know, shooting fish in a barrel and making more money than they didn't even know what to do with, you know, as a sales guy, and speak about it, I don't know if you can't speak about that, but I think zoom was an early investor. What was that like to have such a, probably a large partner of momentum and also just credibility?

Richard White 6:14
Yeah, I mean, Zoom is definitely one of the things. Yeah, I mentioned, like, you know, you gotta eat certain things, right? Like, we were, we're directionally correct about AI getting good. We're directionally correct about transcription becoming free. We got pretty lucky on the timing of both those things too, right? Where it's like, if transcription costs went down slower than than they did, we might be not having this conversation. And Zoom's another place where we got pretty lucky, where we always had this theory that, like, Fathom at scale, would spread kind of word of mouth, viral it, right? You'll bring it into your meetings, right? Because it's going to take notes in your meeting. It has to be in the meeting. You'll have to explain why it's there, and it'll kind of turn a natural opportunity for you to, you know, tell the other person about this product, and they'll sign up for it. So we always have that theory. The challenge with all those businesses is like, how do you get the first 10,000 people, right? Because how do you get the first set of users. And I think it was literally three weeks after we started the company that Zoom announced they were building this whole new marketplace. And that was both exciting and terrifying at the same time, like, Oh, that's awesome. Not many. How often do new marketplaces get launched? And also terrifying, because they listed 35 companies that were going to be in the launch, and it's in two months, and we're not one of those 35 and so we actually did a lot of things to try to get into zoom and get into this program, like I raised money from people, anyone who had a connection to zoom, even people that worked at zoom, I raised money from and in the end, while that really mattered was someone told me the person running the name of the person running this program, since Ross and I just emailed Ross and was like, Hey, I've heard about this program. I think, you know, think would be a great fit for it. Just a cold email to him, and yeah, very thankful and grateful. He was like, oh, yeah, sounds great. Join Yeah. You should definitely get in the program, which is kind of insane when you think about it. Zoom, is that this crazy skill in middle of COVID the launches marketplace. They've got, you know, you know, big names, JIRA, sauna, etc, and then they've got this company, fathom, that doesn't have a working alpha, right, as we launched a product, right? So I think we got really, really fortunate in that. And so that led one thing familiar, right? That led to us building relationship with the product folks as we built out on their platform, which led to us launching, you know, when that marketplace launch, like, eight months later, quickly becoming one of their top apps, which led to, kind of them investing us and so on and so forth.

Chaz Wolfe 8:30
Yeah, some cross cross pollination, yeah. Would you, you know, I mean, you've, you've kind of used the word lucky a couple times. I think that most entrepreneurs, you know, kind of subscribe to this, you know, hard work and like Bootstrap and, you know, get it all done and plan out accordingly. And but the reality of it is, is that some of those things that happen along the way, we can, we can be prepared for, you were prepared to work with Zoom. You did the work to connect with Zoom. But some of that's just, it just happened to work at the right time. You know, what would you, what would you say to the person right now who's maybe in alpha stage or has already launched a business and they're feeling discouraged about, you know, no, quote, unquote breaks, what's the, what's the message to them when hearing, yeah, we, you know, three weeks later, got, got successful with a random cold email, you know, what

Richard White 9:19
would you say to him? I think the thing that has been the most helpful to me in this journey with Fathom is from an early like I, this is a problem that I had, right, like I, part of the starting story for Fathom was at my previous company was just doing a ton of zoom calls, pre pandemic, really, for, like, user research and and, you know, that led to me being like, gosh, you know, doing you do 1520 zoom calls a day. Try to take notes on them while you're trying to talk to someone. Right? This is terrible. We should call it solution. And so we built a first prototype that I used myself. And it wasn't perfect, but it was like, tell heading in the right direction, and I could tell how much it changed as it got better and better. I could tell how much. Changed how I worked and how, like it became such an integral part of my work day, right? And this is like my I think it's a pretty common hack, but this is like my hack almost all of my startups, I think, exceptional one worth solving problems that I had. And I think, you know, because whole problem you have as long as a lot of other people have it, it's not just, like, a super small market, right, right? It allows you to have, like, this really high conviction, as long as you can stay sober about its impact, right? I think sometimes we tend to be like, well, I made, you know, my baby is kind of ugly, right? Software, baby, right? And, but it kind of works, right, you know, yeah, most of the time, right? Like, you have to be honest with yourself about, like, how good is your product? Right? Because, yeah, the bar for having a really good product is really high. It's not it can technically do the job. It's, does it crush that job and or it seems magical when people blow away. So one way to way of saying, like, we've had a lot of spots and found where things did not go how we thought they would. The zoom thing was the scary part. You know, when we post launched, we launched, we didn't get nearly the traffic we thought we would, or we got a lot of traffic, not the users we thought we would. But at every point on the journey, I just could fall back on, like, I know what this product, how this product has changed, how it work, and that just gives me such strong conviction to, like, weather, any of the rest of the stuff, right? And I, I think that's the foundation of which I build everything else off of. It's like, okay, I know this works for me. I'm confident that there's a lot of folks that work for cool. We can weather the missteps on the way. Yeah,

Chaz Wolfe 11:31
I'm gonna give you two opportunities here. One, talk to the the Fathom user, what's, what's the ultimate hack of this? You know, changed my workflow or my daily work. And then for the guy that doesn't take notes at all, what do you tell these two individuals? What were the two hacks? Yeah, I

Richard White 11:50
think notes are kind of terrible, actually, when you think about it, right? Like, even I was a pretty good note taker, right? I would, like, beautifully, I could have a conversation with you. I could kind of multitasking, right out, you know, one word mnemonics, to remember the parts of what you're saying. I could book out time on my calendar to clean it up five minutes after the call, right? Make it make sense. And I would do all that work, and I'd still find out two weeks later. I'm like, I don't exactly remember what meeting this was or who this was, right? Sure, you know, there's just, I always kind of think it's like, we note taking is kind of crazy because, like, we have these really rich conversations, and we throw away 99% of them, and we have a few bullet points on text on, yeah, Word doc or Google Doc or notepad. What's really cool about this is, I think, you know, we get a lot of folks that are like, I love taking notes, and my notes are really personal. And, you know, you can probably get successful in business without learning how to take notes, right? And becomes a very personal thing you crafted over 1015, 20, whatever years you've been in industry. And so I think we generally always have this hump of like, Ah, this AI can't do good as good a job as I do, sure. And the trick is, actually, you don't really even need the notes. The way I work is I have a meeting and I get the action from the system right afterwards. I do those, obviously, but then I just forget about it. And if I met with you again two weeks later, it's that the day of right where I'm like, oh, like, I meet you at the person again. Well, we go back and look at the previous Fathom recording a summary. Click into the you know, our notes actually link you back to meetings. We don't think of notes as being the output. We think of notes as being like a table of contents back meeting. So I spent I booked out five minutes to go look at that previous recording, scan the summary, watch the last two minutes, and when I get back on that meeting, it's like I just got off the previous one, even though it was two weeks or two months previous. And so I think it's just a totally different way to work where I'm not trying to dutifully capture all these things because I need them. I just have this system that's just cataloging every interaction I have, yeah, when I need to have another follow up interaction with that human or I need to reference it to someone else, I just go back to that AI and say, hey. All right, I know I had a meeting with Tim. Oh, yeah. What did Tim say about this? And I can just, what do we ask the AI that? So it really is like having almost an intern strapped, you know, tied to touch your hip wherever you go, yeah, yeah.

Chaz Wolfe 14:00
I think that's a really good description, because I think there are people who are note takers, like you said, and, and that's fine if you if you're going to refer to them in between, then that's fine. But really, you know, the purpose is to to be able to, you know, build a relationship and holding on to certain pieces of information that was that rich conversation that you were referring to helps humans build the relationship. And obviously, then you can now attach that to, you know, building relationships typically equals sales, you know, and revenue and growth in in any business owner's life. What would you say to to the guy listening right now, who's maybe, you know, not even heard of Fathom at all. He's heard of maybe AI and note taking, but why should he take the opportunity to go to fathom, download it, try the free version, or potentially use it with his team as as somebody who is not even thinking about this, this element of life?

Richard White 14:53
Sure. Yeah. I mean, it's a pretty easy pitch, right? Because I don't think I've met anyone who likes taking notes or. Or, like, trying to multitask while having a conversation, right? So, yeah, if you're on any kind of video meetings at all, yeah, I think you owe it to yourself. We actually were the number one ranked product on g2 last year across 100,000 products. She too is like, Yelp for business software. So, you know, I've actually been blown away by how much we get, you know, messages from users every day being like, I can't believe I've never had this. It's the most impactful thing I've added to my toolkit in the last year. So to that percent, I'd say, like, if you're on any meetings at all, video meetings at all, and as long as you don't absolutely love taking notes, even if you do absolutely love taking notes, you should give a shot again. What do you do is it's completely free. And like, free forever, not like a trap, not like we're you know, there's a lot of freedom products where it's like, oh, free for 10 minutes and then you got to start paying us. That's not how we roll. And the thing I'd also say is, like, if you try and don't absolutely love it, find me on LinkedIn. Tell me why. I will send you money for coffee or something like that, right? I'll send you 20 bucks, right? Just like I will take that feedback about how we can make it better. I say this on I've said some few podcasts, no one's messaged me yet. So I think that means we're doing something, right? Yeah, yeah. I

Chaz Wolfe 16:04
think that, you know, just from the little that I know of your background, you kind of mentioned it here a second ago, that this isn't your first company that you've started, and from what I know of your background, that client experience, if you I'm not sure if you would call it that, but you know, just the the product, the mixture of of whether they're using it properly, or what are they're getting out of it, that's been, like, really important to you. Why do you think that that has been an integral part for Fathom specifically, I

Richard White 16:30
think having great user experience, which right? It's not just the product experience, it's also the support experience. Like, we've invested a lot in having our really killer support team. I think that's an example where, like, paradoxically, most companies don't they just, kind of, like, we just want to minimize this. I think that's silly. Like, I think no matter how good your product is, people are gonna have issues with it and questions about it. Make great support team. It's actually a great input into the product, right? Great support team teaches you a lot about how to improve the product. But, yeah, I think, you know, we spent, we spent a year refining the first versions product before we ever really launched. Like, my first test of this product was, can I build a version that, you know, 50 people use day in, day out. And there was a lot of little things you had to fix to get to that point, because people only use this product in a hurry, right? You get it on a meeting, things gotta work, right? And so it kind of is a product that requires you to have really good user experience. Because, for experience. If you're always using in a hurry, you know, you're trying to replace something that has really good user experience, right? Like, notes are easy, like, you know, and again, you're familiar with it. You've been doing it for 1050, whatever, years. So I think, again, we thought a lot of rally, if we're going to replace notes, has to be really easy to use. It can't be this, like, you know, can't feel like you're flying an airplane for the first time. There's a bunch of levers you gotta pull. It just gotta feel like it just works. But, yeah, I mean, that's kind of my background is engineering, but early my career, I kind of shifted over, like, product design, and so I also tend to gravitate towards these ideas where good user experience execution, I think, is actually a differentiator in a marketplace. Yeah,

Chaz Wolfe 17:59
for sure, how do you think building this company? You said, obviously not your first obviously not your first one. You also mentioned, you know, now your 20s, maybe it's the 30s or 40s that you know, you're building a second or third, you know, I'm referring to maybe the listener. But for you, specifically, in that kind of second round or maybe third round, little bit older, a little bit wiser, a little bit more experience. How was this one different? Or what did you take into this one that maybe you took from some of the previous experiences? Good or bad?

Richard White 18:25
Yeah, I think this is like a really interesting topic we'll talk about, which is, like, founder idea fit type thing, where it's like, yeah, certain ideas, certain things are just gonna require a lot of time, right? Like, best suited to someone in there early in their career that's willing to work six half days a week, sort of thing, right? Other things are more suited to people that can, like, you know, have a track record, raise more money out the gate, have a more senior team from the start, etc, etc. So, yeah, I think there's different ways to play the game. I am kind of a gamer. I always say used to be a now. I just like, watch a lot on YouTube, but I kind of like this analogy of, like, playing Minecraft. Have you ever played Minecraft before? Yeah, yeah. So first time you play Minecraft, you kind of just dropped in this world. And it's completely unclear, like, what the rules of the game are. Is this even the game? What am I supposed to do? And, you know, I think, I think it took me, like, half an hour figures, like, punch a tree to get some wood to build a torch, like it, you know, it's not obvious, right? And I kind of, like, that's your first startup, right? Where you kind of get dropped in this, this world, in this game, and it's like, you know, maybe you read a book or two here, but it's still entirely unclear what exactly you should be doing in what order. And I always it's kind of like, it's like, everything's an essay question, right? What's our go to market strategy? What's our, you know, product strategy, how are we going to fundraise? All these things are like, I don't know, right? And when you kind of do a second or third startup. It's kind of like you've already watched 10,000 hours of people playing Minecraft on YouTube, right? And it's like, I get dropped in this world, and with half an hour, I haven't just punched a tree, I've built a whole castle and like, because I now know how the game is played, and all those things that felt like essay questions now I feel like multiple choice questions. What's your good market strategy? Well, there's only really like. Six to choose from. Three of these don't make sense for this business. And two, two of these, I don't want to do. Okay, so it's gonna be this one, right? And so I just think it's, it's kind of fun six times around. It's like speed running an old video game. And you can kind of, you know, you've got more contacts, you've got more networks, you don't have as much time, and sometimes you want more social distractions and commitments and stuff like that. So it's a, definitely a work harder and smarter kind of mode when you're doing that, kind of like, you know, older guy or gal kind of startup, if you will. But I found it really rewarding. You

Chaz Wolfe 20:31
know, it's interesting, this work harder and smarter, play sometimes, especially new founders or, you know, brand new entrepreneurs, there's not really this Hurry up, just work smarter, because you have to experience, you know, you got to tap on the tree to find the wood, and you have to know all those things. There's ways to fast forward that, you know, coaches and groups and stuff, but, but reality of it is, is you gotta, you gotta press in and and so what does that speed round look like? Or what is the the balance? I don't, I don't, I don't, not a big fan of that word. But what's that balance look like for you, like, you got other social commitments as a family? Is it is what like, what does that look like for you specifically? And then, how would you say that that's, you know, as you're talking to maybe that other, maybe more experienced, further down the road, maybe a little older entrepreneur who's looking to find that, what would you say that was, was good for you, that you could share with

Richard White 21:19
them? Yeah, you know, like, like I said, first startup was, like, you know, falling asleep at my laptop, waking up and coding again, right? Sort of thing, right? It's a six and a half days a week, no social life, no girlfriend, no nothing. And then, you know, this time around again because of COVID, looked closer to that than to a nine to five certainly, right? It was actually, I had, was living in San Francisco. I left San Francisco during COVID, actually, no matter, around quite a bit, stayed in Tahoe for a couple summers, and was just like, found a cabin in the woods, and kind of just like, worked all day. It's cabin. Difference is, like, you know, I didn't fall asleep writing code this time I had, it wasn't just me and a co founder. I had four kind of senior engineers that I hired on day one, that I knew from my last company. And so, yeah, I was doing more of the, like, one level up from, like, writing the code type stuff, right? Where are we going? Product, Vision type stuff. But I was like, taking, you know, two hour hikes in the afternoon into auto sort of thing, and then working in the evening. So a little bit more sustainable pace, certainly still probably, you know, way more than 40 hours a week type thing. But, you know, stuff never feels like work to me, right? Yeah, when it does feel like work, I generally find that that's when I should probably be hiring someone to do something, because it's like, clearly that means that's not probably in my wheelhouse to do it, yeah? But yeah, I think, you know, I think, like, there's a lot of things you're right, like, sometimes the only way to get that experience is you've got to do it yourself. I remember, you know, I was surrounded by people that become very, very successful, and I'm very fortunate, called friends. And almost all the ones that did really well, that started their companies, generally their 20s, the ones that just kind of like, figured it all out for first principles themselves, did really well. I tend to focus a lot on, like, reading books or trying to talk to gurus or whatever. And the folks did really well just write. I don't know. I think I'm smart. I can probably figure this out, right? And those folks can do really well. So I think it's just like, You got to just put in your time and find your, you know, find your path. There is no, I don't think there's certain things in probably groups you can join and books you can read, but there's no, there's still no northwest passage for just like, getting in there and doing the work for

Chaz Wolfe 23:20
sure, what do you think is, is the most exciting piece of AI for you personally Fathom or not fathom, what's just happening in AI right now that you're personally excited

Richard White 23:32
about? I mean, what I'm personally excited about is just, yeah. So, like I said, we kind of built this business assuming that some point AI would get really good and would almost like, drop a new engine into a car, right? And that's kind of what happened, right? Like, when we hit GPT four level AI last fall. That's when we went from like, oh, the AI can take decent notes to Oh, no, the AI can write better notes than any human right? And now we're getting to this place where the AI can do things on two different dimensions, one I mentioned earlier, which is it cannot just look at a single meeting. It can look at like a lot of content, right? It can look at hours and hours of meeting content, pull out trends, you know, pull out insights, right? Almost could be like a sales coach watching your entire team. There's a lot of things you can do once you can go from we can fit an hour of content to this AI to we can fit 10 hours, 100 hours into it. And then the other angle is, like, it just starts to figure out, not just, you know, everything to date has been text based, and now you're getting things where actually you can we're now just giving it audio, and it can figure out tone, right? And be like, oh, like, where in this conversation was this person frustrated or really excited? And they, pretty soon, we'll be getting to, like, you know, facial recognition. Oh, where were they not paying attention? Where were they super engaged? Where are they smiling and happy? That's kind of cool. When we started this, I was really interested in those things. I remember asking my team three and a half years ago, like, we got to do, like, sentiment, but like, not just based on the text, because in a business context, the text of what you say, like, oh, yeah, we're, you know, I. To run a sales team in house company for a bit. I remember, you know, the sales people, oh, they're gonna buy. They said they're gonna buy, yeah. How did they say that? Right? Like, what's the intonation they use, right? There's a difference feeling, oh, yeah, we're definitely gonna buy this. Or yeah, we're gonna get it, right? You know, there's and now, and, yeah, a big difference. Three and a half years ago, when we went looked at this, the only way to do it was like this, AI that was trained on, like, the TV sitcom Friends and so it like all it would pick up on, like, super bombastic, like, emotions, right? It wouldn't pick up on subtlety, you see, in business. But now you have these. Ai said, Really, you can pick up on subtlety. It's kind of crazy. I mean, I have another friend who kind of, our head of AI kind of talks about this. I think a lot of folks talk about this is like, you know, AI almost, like, three years ago was like a middle schooler, and then last year as a high schooler, and now is in college. And, you know, it's almost, it's like a, say, human but, but growing in dog years sort of thing, right? Yeah. And so you almost, pretty soon have, will have an army of PhDs at your disposal that can never get tired and are always consistent at work. And it's kind of kind of wild, a little scary, but pretty, pretty wild. Yeah,

Chaz Wolfe 26:08
it's funny, when you said that about the sales, just tonality, you know, I used to train sales guys in a way that was very similar. But, you know, they would say, you know, he's gonna buy data or what, you know, something similar. And I would say, was there anywhere in his phrase, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because, if he said, Yeah, he ain't buying, right? Yeah, exactly. So it is interesting, you know, how, as humans, we don't often think, I mean, first off, to be at that level of awareness as a human, I think is a major skill. You know? Yeah, it's not easy. Yeah, no, not at all. And that definitely takes mastery of communication and listening and being able to put kind of two and two together, but, but to train an AI model to to pick up on those human elements that can now again, which is, I guess, what AI has really been able to do, fathom, is no different, but I can now human better. It. It's not going to replace humans. Okay, so maybe to a degree, but, but now I can use the AI tool, in this case, to pick out the spots that I just didn't human very good. I didn't, I didn't hear when he said, Yeah. And I thought, well, shoot, Surely he's a buyer, but, but the AI was now able to pick that nuance up and help me human better and, aka, get the deal or not get the deal, or follow up in a way because of the note taker that helped me, you know? So I think there's a lot of human individual can do, you

Richard White 27:34
know? I think everyone's worried about kind of AI replacing everything, and that's certainly a concern. But I think at least in the short to mid term, there's just a lot of, like, AI assist type stuff like this, right, where we're really trying to allow you to do things that humans do well, which are have conversations and, you know, follow threads. Like, you know, it's tough to, if there's a salesperson to do a good diagnosis, if you're worried about following some script and you're not paying, you know, it's much easier when you need to agree, I'm gonna just kind of follow the thread and have a normal human conversation sort of thing. One of my other features I really like is like, we we do stuff where, like, if you start monologuing, like, I am I, and every founder is prone to do like, it gives you useful like, alert, like, Oh, you've been monologuing for like, 90 seconds, and it just starts ticking up, right? And people tell me, they're like, oh, yeah, I love that, right? Again. That's just a place where, how can we just thought about, like, you know, how can AI not just help you after the meeting, but in the meeting, be a bad meeting participant, sort

Chaz Wolfe 28:25
of thing that's live right now. Yeah, yeah. It's fun. Okay, we need to make sure that that's my team that's listening in the background, make sure that's on all the round tables.

Richard White 28:36
I mean, the other thing that I'm excited with AI is like, I think the thing that's always Yeah, when I talk to my friends, I've had a lot of, I guess I've been very fortunate that, like, I fell into this stream of like, why come your founders 15 years ago? And, you know, folks, a lot of my friends have gone on to, you know, go, IPO and whatnot. And the number one thing they always complain about is like, yeah, they're always like, Oh, how big is your company? Oh, it's like, 10 people, 50 people, whatever. Like, Oh, I missed those days. That part was so fun. Now that we're 500 1500 people, it's just really challenging, right? Like, there's just kind of thing, like, once you get above the Dunbar number, like, 150 people, that's when politics creep in, because people can't know everyone and all these sorts of things. And I think with AI, I mean, Sam Altman talks about, like, what's the first company that's going to be, you know, a billion dollar revenue company. It's one person that's kind of crazy, probably possible. I just think more about, like, can we get to 100 million in revenue? It's usually kind of like, the, you know, the that's like, the big, you know, it's the moonshot, like 100 people. And will AI allow us to do that? And I think it's quite possible, right? And just think of, you know, obviously the economics of that are great. But also just like, yeah, imagine how nice that company can be, right? It can spend one I can spend a lot of benefits, but also, just like the humans are all going to know each other, it can be just so much easier to coordinate work. It's gonna be so much easier to move fast, because you're like, every person you add just adds this extreme kind of like strain on your culture and your communication patterns, all these sorts of things. So, yeah. That to me is, I think the other thing I'm really interested in is like, how do we become an AI first org, and we think about having a really strong operations team that partners with all of our functional leaders and says, Great, how can, how can we help you, or be the AI first sales team, the AI first support team, the AI for success team. And yeah, and again, not just replace the humans will and Haley, but like, find spots where, like, ah, AI is better at this than a human and, like, what's and then find the spots where the humans are better, right? Like, I think, you know, sales, customer success a good example. That's where I'm really excited about. Like, we're gonna be, like, a really highly available we're gonna have to, like, gatekeeper people from you, because AI will do a good job of taking away the little things so that when you do have a really complicated problem, we can put you with a person that is really well trained to solve that problem, right? Yeah, because we can afford to do X, all the little crap got taken out by the AI, right? And so I'm pretty excited about that vision as well. Yeah, I

Chaz Wolfe 30:53
think that's a beautiful picture that probably isn't very far down the road, if we're just being honest. But what do you what do you think you know, kind of thinking about the team and and over the last few, few years? I mean, I'm sure a lot has changed, but feedback from the team members, growth issues, things, things that you've experienced that you look back on. You're like, if I had either listened to that suggestion about the product or about the business, or if I had gone around this curve a little differently with the team than this way, what were some, maybe just one example of just, you know, again, because growing that business, the team wise, the dynamics are very unique. So what pops up is, like the most impactful thing that maybe didn't go well with the team specifically.

Richard White 31:39
I mean, you know, Fathom was like 10 to 15 people. Like we've been around for four years, and for about three of those years where we were 10 to 15 people, and then the past year, we've grown about 45 so I would say we probably, and that's all happened in the last like six to eight months. So I, you know, probably we have yet to learn what the lesson from the hard there's probably gonna be a hard lesson from that group. Hard lesson from that growth period. We probably get to learn it. I will say. I'll draw from my experience at user voice, my previous company, where I think my lesson with the team was, I was, again, early in my career, and I was, you know, I kind of thought the thing you did was, once you raise some money and things were going well, like you hire folks, and you just kind of give up your Legos, right? And to a certain degree, that was good, but I also, like, gave up the Legos in the areas where I was really competent, and then I, like, overly, was overly deferential to those folks, and like, gave them a lot of space to to run with, run with things and make mistakes. And I think one thing I've learned from this company is, like, the core of this company is the product itself. And my background is in product design and engineering like that is, that is what I do, right? And so probably the last thing I will give up is, you know, bringing someone in to take over that piece, right until we know we're really far down the line. We've nailed it. And instead, I will bring in folks that can do all the complimentary things, right? Run the support team, run the success team, run the data team, run the AI team, run all the things that are the inputs into me. It's like scale, like I still put myself at the center of this thing, at least for now. And almost my one friend describes, like having a really good company's almost like putting on an Iron Man suit. And it's like, you think about a thing, it happens whatnot. And I think we're kind of, I'm trying to build that right now where, how can I still be the connector, where I'm still aware of the top bugs, I'm aware of, you know, the top like, onboarding issues and etc, etc, and then I can synthesize that into, like, Okay, here's the priority we're going to work things in, and that allows us to move fast. I think in the past, too many folks, it was too egalitarian, and it just made things go really slow. So we had to convince everyone of everything. Yeah, in this place, it's like, no, I'm gonna be Yeah, I'm very candid with folks, like, it's a benevolent dictatorship, but it's still a dictatorship from the product perspective, and it will be valid for the foreseeable t shirt, right? And so yeah, I think that's the big thing I learned. It's like, find great people, but make sure they're complimentary, and don't just find folks that that are kind of take you out of your zone of genius, right? Yeah. I found myself becoming a manager which I wasn't as good at, as opposed to being a product manager, which I was really good at. Yeah,

Chaz Wolfe 34:11
yeah, it makes sense. Well, you you kind of touched on one of my favorite topics, just speed in general. I'm a pretty urgent individual. My team kind of knows this, and we use the predictive index assessments. And so anytime I get introduced to somebody, it's like, hey, so just so, you know, he's in the top 3% of all urgency, of all people like, move faster or it's not gonna work, you know, right? And so knowing that, obviously have to move fast in tech as well, especially AI. What does that look like from an urgency. You know, you've got all these different types of individuals in your organization. 45 is, is still a large enough team where you can't, you know, bob and weave, like you did when you were 15, but, but it's still small enough to really, you're saying you can move fast. How is urgency talked about? Or is it? Is it a core value, like, there's just so much that goes into that. Especially in tech and AI, what are your thoughts on that? Yeah,

Richard White 35:03
and I think, you know, this is one of the things we always said is, like, we're gonna, you know, our version of work life balance is, we're gonna all work really hard for a couple years, and then we're gonna have lots of, we're gonna have lots of balance after that sort of thing, right? Like, you know, you're, you're coming here to 1000 because we're on this mission. We're gonna run really hard at it, because we don't, someone else will. And on the other side of that is, like, all sorts of career opportunities and opportunities for work life balance sort of thing. So, yeah, I actually talk a lot about actually, like, things like reliability and user experience being our biggest risks, right? Like, I always kind of say, like this, this product can't go down if it goes down a couple times, like, it's a product you have to be able to rely on. Yeah, that created kind of level of urgency of like, oh, we are always on right? We are always paying attention to what we're shipping and whatnot. I think I, you know, I talk a lot about speed internally. I think one of the challenges as things start to go really well, how do you kind of, you know, because some days you could just, everyone could stop, and things would numbers would still go up, sort of thing. So, like, you know, I think it's important. I always, I don't try to scare the team, but I try to remind them that, like, yes, things are doing well for us, but like, we're still very much in this arena. Like, we have not won yet, right? I think that's we raised our Series A earlier this year. We were, like, we use the series A as, like, we're trying to get these metrics to raise series A for a while. And then what would one challenge? Like, oh, raise your J, great. Now, what? Right? Like, there's always, like, milestone hangover, like, what's the next thing you get to so I kind of push our team, like we we report weekly, like we have a our goal is to grow 4% every week, and that comes out to about 7x a year. And so we highlight and every every week ask, like, how are you getting 4% better this week? How is the product every week? And I think that's a good I really like that framing, because it's like, it's not per month, which is, people don't remember what they did in a month. Yeah, it's not per day, because things happen per day. But if you kind of focus everyone, like, how are we getting 4% better every week? It works pretty well. I also see, like, you could do a lot with a really small team. I think that's one of the things you hear. If you go through things like Y Combinator, they just talk about, like, it's amazing. What you know, we had till last fall, three engineers. Like, three engineer, three really good engineers. Can do a lot so, but yeah, speed for anything I'll trade, yeah, money for speed, time for like, you name it like, that is the primary currency here. Yeah,

Chaz Wolfe 37:16
yeah. That's super interesting. I think that there's, I was a clip. I think maybe in the last week or so, maybe Cody Sanchez had posted, I can't remember exactly, but she was talking about billionaire mentor of hers, I believe. And he said the the number one difference between, you know, billionaires and millionaires, not even considering just, you know, startup, you know, non, non successful. But with speed, he's like, by the time I have, by the time you have an idea, I've had the idea. I've implemented an idea. I'm on version three of try it. Fail. Make some adjustments. Try again. And when you move fast, when you have just ultimate speed, that's the game. It's just not even really staying ahead, because I'm not concerned about, really, their movements, because they're that's so last year, you know, we're working on stuff that they don't even, they're not even aware of yet, you know. So I think that that's a, it's a big, big

Richard White 38:11
deal. This is why, I think you mentioned that, like, you know, I'm successful. Friends almost figured things out from her first principles. Versus, like, the median was more like me, where I was, like, consulting a bunch of people, it takes a lot of time to consult with. You're like, oh, yeah, how should we build this good market motion? And if you're just the only inputs you need are yourself. You can make a decision really quick. If you need to feel like you need to go talk to five people to get the answer that just inherently is slow, right? So I think that's one part of it. Their part is like, I think also, there's a lot of work that doesn't matter. Like, we don't do any planning for engineering team, like we don't do estimate, like, there's like in engineering, they have, like, sprints and planning and estimation. There's all these things to try figure out. When are we gonna launch this feature? It's all false precision as well, as far as I'm concerned, right? And you spend a bunch of time, any time that the engineer spend that isn't, like, writing code or fixing, you know, or reading code, like is, you know, there's some discussions whatnot, maybe design sessions, but like, in meetings to discuss the work we might do and total waste of time, right? And so, like, paradoxically, we're a meeting software, but we actually try to minimize our meetings. We try to minimize the amount of planning we do. Because all like, we want a little bit of planning. Like, I've got a high level of view of, sure, here's what we're doing, here's what we're not doing, in the order which we can do things we don't. Every week sit down and have an executive team, or every month sit down like, oh, let's go figure out the exact goals for I think there's a lot of time people spending planning and goal setting and all these things, 8020, man, like, you know, like, if I you have to have some goals. But just, you know, my goal is, like, 4% a week. There you go. You don't have to go recompute that every week. Just what's your new goal? I don't know what was the last week? Multiply by 1.04 right? Like, it simplify assumptions like that. That just allow you to, like, not, I think easy to get seduced. Into thinking you need all of these apparatuses that you read, that big companies have, right? They have those things because that's what it takes to marshal 1000s of people in the same direction, right? You're 10 people. You shouldn't need anything like, other than, you know, five minute speech in the morning. Let's go get them and like, everyone should know where they're going, so for

Chaz Wolfe 40:17
sure. Yeah, I think that you're right, that that the you know, does it move the needle? Is the question that I ask myself often nowadays where it's like, there's a lot of things we could have done. And even over the last seven days, you look back, you're like, I spent time on that bummer. Yeah, right, yeah, recalculating, going, yeah, no, no. We should stop doing that. We should absolutely stop doing that. It was fun, it was good, but it doesn't move the needle. It doesn't actually get us what we what we say that we want. And so I think that's an interesting conversation. AI or not? Ai, in fact, when you were talking a few minutes ago about just, you know, kind of the first level experience, and kind of a seeing it for yourself and then going, Oh, like this makes more sense, rather than just learning it from someone else, I remember my first business. It was a retail franchise, edible arrangements as the brand and as my first Valentine's Day, where, you know, just hundreds more orders on this one single day, and just logistically crazy. And I remember my very first one. Actually owned two stores at the time, and this was the first time I'm experiencing Valentine's Day. And I, you might as well just kick my face in rich like I had no teeth left. I was all bruised. I hadn't slept in three days, literally, no exaggeration, and afterwards, because, though I had experienced it, I immediately went to work on that's never going to happen again, that's never going to happen again, that's never going to happen again. And because I experienced the kicking in of the teeth and the face and the bruising and all the fun stuff, is I was able to create action steps that then led me away from all those things. And so, you know, kind of circling back here to speed became not just my friend of like, Let's just hurry up and try things. It was like, no, no, we're not going to do this. And we are going to do this based on the experience of me just jumping in there, not having a plan, and going, Holy smokes. We got to do that different next time. You know.

Richard White 41:56
I mean, I think this kind of like doing personal retrospectives on your decisions is, like, how you like, how you learn faster, right? Like, oh yeah. I used to drive my ex girlfriend crazy because we play, like, Fortnite together. And after every game of Fortnite, I'd try to retrospective, like, what we did wrong? Like, let's just, like, can we just play this game? Like, I don't know how to actually do that. Like, it's just game. I was like, no, no. Everything I do I like retrospective, almost to the tedious but, but you're right that you just get this training of doing that, because that's how you that's how you are. You really, you just keep, you just keep bumbling into a bunch of things. You don't really figure out what backwards. You're not actually going to get better at it, right? So you have to be but so I think that's really, that's right, silly comment. Well, the listener has
Chaz Wolfe 42:36
been paying attention at all. They've got some incredible things for me today, but that little nugget that we were just talking about is probably, probably a little secret gem rich you you've built an incredible business. You guys are, you know, on the way to the moon. I just so appreciate your time. The ways for folks to be able to jump in, obviously, the website, but any other tools or resources that you would like to share about, fathom that the listeners can grab a hold of. Of course, we'll listen anything down in the show notes as well, but sure, how can they connect with you? Yeah,

Richard White 43:05
and share the products. It's fathom. Dot video. It's free. Again, if you don't absolutely love it, find me on LinkedIn. Make sure white on LinkedIn. I've got this old bitmap emote like Avatar sort of thing. Send me a message. Tell me you know what you thought of it, good, bad or ugly. Love to hear it. And if you have any other questions just about startups whatnot, that's whatnot, that's best way to reach me as well is just ping me on LinkedIn. The best thing to have in my career have happened through cold emails and messages. So I try to try to pay it back forward. Yeah, ever sure which one is by, yeah, by responding to those so and if you don't hear from me once, feel free to nag me. I you know, it's not because I don't want to respond to you. It's probably just a little underwater. So, yeah, yeah, that
Chaz Wolfe 43:42
little, that little nugget Rich, I think, is a lot of maybe not, founders, entrepreneurs, successful people, whatever their endeavor, they they got an experience like that, and so they're willing to give back. I think it's just a matter of asking for it. So I appreciate you giving that opportunity to our listeners. Thanks for being here, man. Blessing to you. The business. We're a fan. My old team uses it. And if you're listening right now and you're not using fathom, or if you have a different other product, don't even say their name, just go to fathom. Become a rich fan like I am, and jump on the AI note taking wagon with us. So Rich. Appreciate you, man. Talk to you soon. Thanks
Richard White 44:17
for having me. Bye. Bye.

How do you build and scale a startup in one of the most competitive industries? In this episode of Driven to Win, I sit down with Richard White, CEO and founder of Fathom AI, to discuss the journey behind the #1 top-rated AI notetaking tool on the market today. Richard reveals how launching during COVID-19 gave his startup a unique edge, the importance of timing, and the strategies that helped Fathom stand out in the crowded AI space. From securing key partnerships like Zoom through cold emailing to prioritizing user-centric design, Richard shares his most effective growth strategies.

Richard White:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rrwhite/
Website: https://fathom.video/

Chaz's favorite morning drink to fuel him for his day:

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