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There is a multibillion dollar war happening in the world of AI note takers. I'm sure you've seen them in your Zoom meetings. Fireflies did a Tender offer at $1 billion last year in 2025 and says they've been profitable since 2023. And Otter says it ended 2025 at a $100 million run rate. Zoom, Google and Microsoft are also launching their own AI native note takers. And then there's Richard White. He's building Fathom.
B
We basically went 0 to 11 to 10, 10 to 30 in the first three years of monetization.
A
He is by far the most capital efficient of all the note taker CEOs having raised just $30 million to grow well past $30 million of annual revenue. But how does he manage his cash?
B
Yeah, probably never more than a million in the bank. Yeah, 1.5 to 2, 1 to 2 million constantly.
A
But how did he grow so quickly when he raised such a small amount? Well, he gave the product away for free, which was shocking because of this.
B
That gave us the confidence to say we can give this away for free and actually lose a lot of money. We were losing like $50 a user per month in the first couple years of Fathom.
A
Then he hired salespeople before there was anything to sell. Why would he do this?
B
I had hired three of my best salespeople from UserVoice and I said, I've got nothing for you to sell today, but one day I will.
A
If you're building an AI tool and you want to beat your VC backed competitors, this episode is for you. Watch until the end and you'll learn three things. Number one, how to use your data as a moat. I'm talking integrations, CLI, MCPS, you name it.
B
So we're actually going to have first class direct integrations which Claude and ChatGPT, an M CP server for anything else you might use. And we're also looking at adding in kind of like support for people running kind of local bots as well local agents.
A
Number two, the six part retention playbook Richard used to extend the lifetime value of his customers despite a very competitive market.
B
I'm a big fan of kind of like attacking metrics in order of risk. So I think a lot of people like they launch and they're trying to monetize and get acquisition and prove retention. And I'm a big fan of like, okay, let's take those five kind of metrics and take them one at a time.
A
And number three, the top growth channel, Richard and Fathom used to grow from 1 million to 30 million of revenue very quickly. Let's jump in. Hey, folks. My guest today is Richard White. He's the founder and CEO of Fathom, an AI meeting assistant. He launched in 2020 after running UserVoice for over a decade. He's raised about 17 million bucks, including a recent Series A, scaled to millions of revenue and built one of the fastest growing AI productivity tools with thousands of companies using it daily. Richard, you ready to take us to the top?
B
Let's do it.
A
All right. I was just thinking, like, what could I share on my screen so that people see how bit of a power user I am? But there's a bunch of customer information that I probably can't share, but you can look in your database. We are a daily user of Fathom at Founder Path. And I think to give the audience context on why I wanted Richard on Guys, there's a lot of noise in the space right now. He has competitors that are sort of very loud and out there. He sort of built this in a very sort of a way that we like to teach on the podcast, which is capital efficient, distribution oriented, and user focused. So, Richard, on that note, I mean, maybe that's a good place to start one of your recent rounds here. First off, let me just take a step back. For people that don't know what the product is, why don't you give the product pitch?
B
Sure, yeah. So Fathom is a free AI meeting assistant. You know, we take notes on your Zoom Google Meet. You know, Microsoft Teams calls, as you mentioned, we've been around a couple years. You know, I think we are not the loudest person in our space, but we really pride ourselves on two things. One is like, the quality of the output, highest quality transcript, the highest quality summaries. And now we pride ourselves a lot on being the thing that plugs in to all the other tools you're using. So we're about to launch an MCP server. We have our API and all that stuff is available for free. And so we really hang our head on quality and giving a lot away for free, frankly. That's part of our distribution kind of story, if you will.
A
Well, so let's jump into that. I mean, I think one of the early investors you brought in was Zoom's fund. I mean, clearly trying to go deeper on an integration there. Does that turn off all the other providers in terms of them wanting to give you access when they know Zoom's in your sort of on your cap table?
B
No, I think, you know, I think for the most part. The interesting thing about buildings, businesses, they're not really APIs. They're all kind of undocumented. Like, you know, historically we captured stuff with, with bots and I think we'll talk about how we're going to have some not bot options here coming up soon. But they're kind of undocumented APIs. It's not really much any of the platforms can do. And candidly, I think Zoom for a while has been the leader in this space. Certainly for the people we're going after which are customer facing teams and organizations, you know, open, a lot of them are Zoom first, right? So no, it was not. You know, I think something we did earlier on in this journey and it really paid dividends being, you know, we were one of the first apps on the Zoom app marketplace. You know, Zoom invested, Zoom heavily promoted us and they've been a fantastic partner.
A
Yeah. I found an example guys, just so you can see why we ended up. I'll actually, I'll give this analogy we use because there's everyone's using different call recorders, right? We use Fathom. Fathom is like our favorite pair of jeans, right. We wear them six times a week. It's pretty much always open. We use it the most a tool like you know, granola obviously also in the space we use them as like if we want to put on and do like a very special sort of thing. It's like a, think of it like a SWAT thing. We put on our army uniform. We maybe do it once a month and like we'll, we'll do that, right? So no Bot in the experience. It's off to the side, it's a transcript happening. Then there's the others which I would describe like adio. For example ATT IO start off as a CRM. I would view them as sort of like socks, right? You sort of have to have them but they're not making any sort of style statements like my jeans would and you know, they record the calls but when you go into the CRM they don't have like I'm going to show you guys here what, what Fathom does. I found a call I can actually share here because there's no information. Like they just make it so easy inside of here to get the key takeaways topics instantly. Like the second the call stops, this basically pops out which is valuable. So very tight feedback loop. The transcript is very easy to copy and paste which Richard, I don't know if you can track how much your users do this, but all these foundation models where you can upload project files to teach it a brain. So much of that is us copying. It's me interviewing my here, my database team and putting it into Claude project and saying, help me understand how to code on Gitlack using Conductor based off what my engineering team taught me on Fathom. Are you seeing that a use case? A ton.
B
100%. And so we're, we're kind of, we're about to do this really big launch next week and part of it's a whole new redesigned desktop experience. Part of that is making this process so much easier. So we're actually gonna have first class direct integrations with Claude and ChatGPT, an MCP server for anything else you might use. And we're also looking at adding in kind of like support for like people running kind of local bots as well, local agents, where we're gonna start emitting all of your meeting data, like the summary you see here, the transcript directly to your file system so that you can just immediately, you know, you don't have to make any API calls sort of thing. So, yeah, we see that a lot and we want, we wanna encourage that. We wanna make that as easy as possible. We want Fathom to be the easiest, you know, meeting platform to get your data out of it. Cause it's your data.
A
But that's not. What you just said is not standard. I mean, adio. Doesn't even have a Copy transcript button in their interface. It drives me insane. So I don't use them because it's like it's a walled garden. It's an Apple approach in this space. Why did you make the decision that the best way to win is to be the opposite of a walled garden?
B
I mean, I think it's a little contrarian, I think, you know, going back to kind of the fundraising strategy, I think a lot of our competitors have now raised a lot of money and I think it's forcing them to monetize at the individual level. We have kind of two products. We have product that we were kind of giving away for free to individuals. And then we have another product sits on top of that for people that are running teams that helps them kind of understand what's happening across all those meetings their team is having. And we kind of can monetize there, which allows us to be really generous to individuals, even if you never join a team. And it's kind of our strategy. And so frankly, I look at this as like we're happy to give away the data because we're always upstream from any use case there. And so like over time there's always things we can first party in. Right. I'm not, you know, I want to support the salesperson that's building their own CRM and cloud code today because we can learn a lot from that person about what things we can build into the, into the product in the future. Right.
A
This makes a lot of sense. I want to get the growth story before I do that though. I don't even know what we pay you guys but it's never come up because I just know we get so much more value relative to what we're paying. But what is the average customer paying you today?
B
Average customer. So we price pretty aggressively. Like I tell our team, we never want to always on price. We price ourselves even on parity with people that we think have much lower quality transcription and summaries. But the average user is about $25 if you look at across all our plans, about $25 per seat. And then we probably average, I think around 8 to 10 seats is our average.
A
Interesting, interesting. Okay. So I mean can I take, what is that? 8 times 25 means the average company on your platform might be like what is that, 200 bucks a month? Something like that.
B
Yeah, something like that. That's right.
A
Interesting. And is that, do you see yourself trending more towards how do we go get the enterprise with a thousand seats or. No, let's go get every new vibe coder using a $25 one seat plan on, on Fathom.
B
I mean we, we generally. Yeah, so we generally monetize kind of, you know, teams on individuals. You know, I don't think we're at the place we're seeing enterprise. We certainly see that. You know, it's a wide distribution. If that average is 10, you know, it ranges from two seats up to 200 seats sort of thing. I think the enterprise itself, you know, I'd hesitate to say I don't think we do much with the enterprise today with by the more traditional definition of like thousands and thousands of employee companies. I don't think those companies in general are like yet digesting tools like this. Right. I think there's, there's still a lot that they're still figuring out their AI strategies, they're still figuring out their data governance strategies around this. But what we have seen consistently over the last three years is like every year we keep seeing larger and larger companies. You know, three years ago I saw nothing but 10 person companies, 20 person companies. Two years ago, you know, 50 person companies and we just see this kind of melt up and I think that works really well because I think one of the biggest risks to doing a startup is like you try to jump to enterprise and you abandon what's working which with kind of small and medium to sized businesses, the enterprise need as you know, like they need a ton of features that lower smaller companies don't do not. I think it's easy to sometimes convince yourself like if I add this one feature, we'll be enterprise ready. And it's like, no, no, no, there's 50 other things after you add that one thing. So we've done a really good. I'm really proud of our discipline on this of like not chasing those big deals, but consistently getting better and better about services, large companies every week.
A
Interesting. Guys, remember, I am not just a YouTuber. I'm investing in my third fund. We've deployed $250 million into 550 software companies so far. Again, @founderpath.com if you're interested in capital, I would love to cut you a check because I know you're investing in your education. You watch my show. So sign up@founderpath.com and when you get the onboarding email, I reply and I see all those. Just reply and say, nathan, I found you through YouTube and I'll make sure to prioritize you. I would love to cut you a check. Check out founderpath.com tell me more about the backstory here. In terms of your own journey, I know you are you. This is a long. Anytime I see someone 18 years at a startup, I go, respect. This is a guy or gal that doesn't. That does not quit. What was user voice and was this bootstrapped? Did you raise? What'd you learn there?
B
Yeah, so quick story on my journey, like so my background is computer science. I was an engineer by trade. Early my career I kind of said, hey, okay, coder. But I'm actually a better designer. And I actually found a way to kind of like push myself onto a team that happened to be in the first batch of Y combination, which at the time didn't mean anything now obviously means. And so I worked with Justin Konin and Emmett Shear who went on to do Twitch on this thing that was basically a Google Calendar for a Google Calendar. And one of our big challenges there was like gathering customer feedback at Scale Eco started in the same room as Reddit. So uservoice you could think of as really as Reddit for customer feedback. And so we were trying to use crowdsourcing basically to like organize Feedback at scale. And it was a fun business. It was like, you know, I call it my finishing school for startups because I was there for about 12 years. It started off as like a PLG company before we, you know, called things PLG. It ended up as like enterprise business that we were selling to Yahoo and Microsoft and Netflix and Meta and stuff like that. And honestly, Fathom then kind of came out of certain things. Like every startup I've done has come out of problems I ran into at the previous one. And so user voice came out of my challenge of getting feedback at Kiko and Fathom came out of my challenges of just taking notes and doing user research at UserVoice. And so it was like early 2020 on a ton of zoom calls. Like a lot of us were at that point. I was actually researching some other products and I was just like, gosh, I went back to back meetings and me trying to talk to people and be a stenographer at the same time and pack out some notes and clean up those notes afterwards, like, this is an insane way to live. And so we really kind of in 2020 developed a core hypothesis that like, why doesn't this exist today? Why isn't there a note here for everyone? And tools like GONG existed at that point, which were like sales specific versions of this that were very expensive. And we looked like, why is it only for sales? Well, the answer in 2020 was transcription was exceptionally expensive. And there was AI. It's hard to remember this, but like the first generation of AI tools was really mediocre. And so we kind of bet Fathom on two things happening. One, we thought transcription cost was going to zero and we thought it was kind of a commodity. And that gave us the confidence to say we can give this away for free and actually lose a lot of money. We were losing like $50 a user per month in the first couple years of Fathom.
A
I have to drill deeper on that now. What was the biggest month of losses, do you remember, in the early years? Are we talking like a million net burn in one month?
B
No, no, thankfully, it's like one of those things, like we were still small enough that like, you know, it never was. You know, it's kind of funny, transcription costs dropped to near zero right around the time. If they didn't, we would've been screwed. It was one of these things where we're directionally correct. If transcription engines are like whisper and things come out a year later, we're probably dead. And so, yeah, so it was like this fun little Game of chicken we were playing. Right?
A
In fact, I go deep on Fathom, but close the user voice story first. What was the best year of revenue when you were there? And how did you transition out? There's a lot of founders right now in a business where they've raised 9 million of capital like you did, going, I really want to go to this other thing, but I don't know how to tell my investors, I don't know how to tell my team, how do I transition out?
B
Yeah, we got to about 10 million in revenue with that company. It was pretty steady growth over the, you know, I think we monetized to what, two years in so over 10 years to that $10 million amount. I asked my myself two questions at the end of every here. One is, am I uniquely qualified to run this business? And is this business uniquely qualified to teach me something? And in 2019, for the first time, I said no to both of those questions. And once I kind of had that clarity, I was ready to move on. What I actually did was I kind of took a group of people in the org and I started working on other projects. Like, I kind of moved myself into a quasi PM position because that's kind of my role. And I elevated who I was planning to be CEO to like a president position. And we didn't say this is the transition yet, but kind of giving you the keys to the core business. And I'm going to help you by trying to build like a new business on the side. And really it's a way for me to like kind of start slowly, transition, you know, still be here without kind of looming over your shoulder, if you will. And so we had kind of like a nine month overlap period. And then it was like, great, got this car, I'll get off the next stop. And so it worked pretty seamlessly, to be honest.
A
Okay, now going into Fathom, Walk me through how you got your first 10 customer. When was the first line of code written for Fathom and when how'd you get your first 10 customers?
B
First line of code was like fall 2020. You know, I think customers didn't come for a long time. I'm a big fan of kind of like attacking metrics in order of risk. But then a lot of people, like they launch and they're trying to monetize and get acquisition and retention. And I'm a big fan of like, okay, let's take those five kind of metrics and take them one at a time. And so we first focus on freezer retention. Once we feel like, we had that, then we focused on onboarding, activation, then we focused on acquisition, then we focus on referral. And the last thing, we're going to focus on monetization. But I think, to answer the spirit of your question, you know, we spent probably the first year me just hustling, trying to get people to use the product. And I was like, gonna make, you know, because it's something that's. There's so many different failure modes for this thing. Right. It's an undocumented API. It's joining meetings, it's building these bots. And so I remember I would kind of like every week get 30 people to, like, volunteer to try my product. And, you know, I'd handhold them through the setup process and then see if they stuck with it. And I think we went through about, you know, 800 people before we got to a cohort where I put 50 people in it, and I got 30 people, you know, three weeks later. Right.
A
So what month or year was launch?
B
Launch was almost exactly a year after first line of code. So it was August of 2021, and we managed to zoom launch a marketplace. And we were one of their launch partners. We were one of like 50 apps that launched on that marketplace. So that was what was driving kind of our, like, okay, we have to
A
launch at this point, if you will, forcing function. When was your first dollar of revenue? Was it within a month of launch or later?
B
A year? It happens in August for us. So a year later, we got our first drop of revenue. And frankly, if I had been up, to me, it probably would have been two years. We actually really want to focus more on just the free user experience and referral loops and stuff like that. We had been doing a funny thing where we actually raised about 30 million to date. We didn't really ever talk about the first 10 million we raised. We raised during 2020 and 2021. It was like a very heady time. We're. It was very easy to raise. And we were raising money every six months. We never had more than 12 months of Runway for the first two, three years of the company.
A
So 2021 to 2022, just to be clear there, you'd raise about 10 million bucks from super, super angel rounds, that kind of thing.
B
No, at that point, we'd only raised probably about three or four. Okay, so we raised. We're raising basically two, two and a half a year sort of to fund this, if you will.
A
Okay, take me into 2023. What.
B
What happens 2023? So, you know, we Kind of put some of our gross projects on hold. We said, you know, early 2022, we gotta figure out this. We always knew how we'd want to monetize with, like, a team product, not by charging individuals. We said, great, we gotta go run at this. About a year before that, I had hired three of my best salespeople from User Voice. And I said, I've got nothing for you to sell today, but one day I will. I mean, I want you to join now, and I want you to become a real an expert in the product and get to know our customers and just, you know, kind of be a customer success person. And then one day I'm going to tell you, like, all right, it's time to sell, and you're going to hit the ground running. And like I said, at least in this moment, it was like, okay, it's time to sell. And they're like, what are we selling? I was like, well, here's the Table 10 features we're going to sell. And they're like, how many of those exist today? I was like, one of them. And so we literally built out a pitch deck, and we're like, cool. We're selling kind of the roadmap here, right? And so literally, we had this product called Team, you know, Fathom for teams. And, you know, it was a pitch deck for the most part. And thankfully, you know, we had so many users and they've been using this completely for free. There's so much goodwill there that a lot of people are like, look, I don't know if you'll ever build these features, but we love the product so much, we want to stick around. We will.
A
How many are we talking, Richard? How many free users in 2022?
B
Tens of thousands.
A
Wow. Okay. But not 100,000. Between 10 and 100,000.
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like in the thousands. And so. So, yeah, so we kind of ran it then. And so long. In first month, we got to 100k and MRR.
A
And then in August, you had your first dollar of revenue. And by. By June. September.
B
100k. Sorry, 100k of ARR. Sorry. Oh, God.
A
I was gonna say, holy mackerel, you hit the ground running.
B
Yeah, no, we. But overall, we basically went. In the first year, we went zero to a million. Took me about a year to get to a million in ar. It was a pretty steady rate, but that was kind of a slog because we're still, you know, and then we kind of, at the end of that, we got close to that million. That unlocked kind of like, the last kind of seed round that we raised, that was how we kind of bridge the gap that we have created by not fundraising a lot in 2022.
A
What was that? 2023 LA quote, last seed round, you're talking 3, 4 million?
B
It's about 3. Yeah, exactly. 3.
A
Interesting. Now take me into something you do, something very unique. I want to give you the chance to sort of shine here and explain your strategy, because most founders don't do this. I mean, you people would say, oh, I want to go raise from Andreessen or someone, and you're like, screw that. I want as many customers to participate in our fundraise as possible. It's maybe a good retention strategy. We're going to go up on We Fund or King's Crowd. What was the strategy here?
B
We, I think from the. From the get go, we always had kind of a contrarian fundraising philosophy. I mean, even before we got to these, like, we funder things, we had, you know, we raised that $10 million. The first 10 million we raised up until our seed round. Like I said, we did it over, like, seven, eight different rounds, or tranches, if you will. Like, we did it all on safe notes for the most part. One part was price, and we did it from a lot of people. We had, like, 100 people on the cap table for that 10 million. And so it was kind of intentional. I actually, you know, I've done this game before. I felt very confident, confident in my abilities in the, like, you know, kind of formation phase of the company. And I said, look, I don't want to go get one institutional investor that'll do the whole round. I actually really want to hear from, like, bunch of different voices. And so it gave us flexibility. We used fundraising almost as a currency to build a coalition. It's like, early on, I raised money from Zoom and anyone who had anything to do with Zoom. Like, I raised money from. From Jim over at Maven Ventures, who. Who named Zoom. Like, I was like, cool, we need to get in Zoom. We're gonna raise money from everyone, dude. Oh. At some point, we realized we're gonna sell to sales. And so I raised money from everyone who had anything to do with sales software. And then this was kind of a natural extens, you know, at some point, we were actually. We gave equity to, like, our first hundred users. Actually, I think it's maybe like 200, 250, like, borrowing kind of a page out of some of the crypto playbooks. It was like, if you were early power user, we gave You a small
A
bit of equity in fathom 0.01%, like give me a cent a rain.
B
It's small, right? Like it's thousands of dollars worth today. It's not like millions of dollars worth of worth something ownership, but it's something. And at some point it's like, you know, our investor like, what are you doing? I was like, no, no, no, this is going to work. And I was like, well, I want to keep doing this, but maybe we should stop giving away for free at this point. Like we have a real business. And so we kind of set up this principle where every time we raised a round, we reserve 15% of it to for our users to invest. And we did that at our seed round and at our Series A. In a world where fundraising I think is a little crazy these days, trying to find this from kind of non typical investors, you know, whose money would I rather have? Someone where we're one of only two investments they do in a year or someone where They've invested in 15 things this month. Right. And so in general I was looking for. That's also why I liked having 100 angels. I feel like in general a lot of these angels, it was, they had more skin in the game, they're more willing to make that call for me to that company that where we need needed an end or something like that.
A
So yeah, you gamified, you viral coefficiented your fundraising process, which is great. All right. And is everything else here pretty accurate? You raised this at a 73 million valuation, it looks like. Is this right? You're doing about 7.7 million of ARR then, is that right?
B
I think when we raised our Series A, we were doing actually around like, I guess by the time I got announced maybe. I think when we first papered it it was like three and a half million, but we were ramping pretty quickly. We basically went got it 0 to 11 to 10 and 10 to 30 in the first three years of monetization.
A
Wow. Okay, so 2025, you broke 30 million of revenue. ARR. Wow. Are you comfortable sharing where you're at today or what your plan is for
B
2026, the stretch goal, we are still competitive enough. I mentioned this. I like kind of laying low. So I'm not going to tell people where we are today. I'll tell you where we were last year sort of thing. But I like our strategy is just to be kind of like we're under the radar, we're one of the top three people by usage in the space. But we're not even, I think, in the top five or 10 by fundraising, raising amount. So I'm happy with that position.
A
No, no, I didn't. Because I know your personality a bit. I had to ask. I didn't expect an answer, though. But I know the growth is impressive. It doesn't surprise me because of how addicted I am to the product, so. Makes a lot of good sense there. I want to end on two questions. One, comfortable sharing how many customers today, and two, what AI features are you thinking about? Sort of, you know, the next one, two months that might be coming out.
B
So, like I said, we've got a big launch coming out. We're rolling out the ability to capture meetings in any different kind of modality. Like today we've got video capture. My new favorite mode is audio capture with just the audio, not the video, because I really like being able to get the notes and click on them and hear that part of the conversation. We've also got transcript only, which, you know, some of our top competitors have. So we're launching those two new modes you can capture without a bot in the meeting, which we're increasingly seeing as something people would like to see. Right. Especially in these more sensitive meetings or internal meetings where we don't want as many bots as people. So we're moving directly away from the bot. We're also, as I mentioned, we're rolling all this stuff to make it really, really easy to work with AI. The feature I'm really excited about is something we call Ask Fathom. It sits on top of all of your team's meetings and it's now a thing where you can ask it any question and you reference some of these like, you know, AI CRMs and stuff like that. And it's funny because I. I've seen some of these ads about like, oh, you can just ask the AI anything. You can ask us that too. You can ask Fathom now, what are the trends and competitors mentioned over the last three weeks? What are the features that are coming up that we don't have good answers for? You can also set up alerts on these things. Tell me any times a pricing discussion that doesn't go well. And so this ability to kind of just really.
A
I don't have that, do I?
B
You don't. I don't think this is all coming out next week. So all this stuff is coming out. A lot of that's on. Some of that's on our team product. But even as an individual, you would ask questions of this. So whether you're Doing this in quad. Right. Or you do this open call or you're using our kind of first party tools. We're kind of moving to this role where it's not about the notes, it's about having this like he knows everything about every meeting, every part thing that's happening in your org and you can just query it for information.
A
So it's not, it's not this, it's basically this, but at an org level across all transcripts.
B
Yeah.
A
And I have that if I switch over to our team account. I'm just not demoing that right now because there's sense set of customer data. But that, that makes a ton of sense. Really interesting. And what is the top use case for you? Is it head of product, interviewing customers, flagging bugs and feature opportunities or like what is the number one use case?
B
We've mostly focused on kind of customer facing use cases. So a lot of sales, a lot of customer success, a lot of client services. What we're excited about with this new launch, right. With some of these botless captures, it's moving more into internal meetings. And you know, we kind of see ourselves being upstream from CRMs and from knowledge management. Right. And so like, you know, think about all the documentation you create internally about things that all comes out of meetings for the most part. Right. And so the ability to like query and ask questions is really powerful. So yeah, today focus on customer facing. But our goal is use fathom wall to wall in your org.
A
Yeah, I love that. Richard, you're not a clickbait kind of guy, so this is going to be a hard one for me to drag out of you, but I'm going to ask it. Can you give anything around just the usage? Can you say number of recordings per day or per month or number of questions asked to fathom or any kind of quantifiable usage metric?
B
Yeah, I think you could, you know, hundreds of thousands of daily users.
A
Interesting. Does that mean hundreds of thousands of daily recordings or transcripts?
B
Oh yeah.
A
Have you passed a billion life to date?
B
No.
A
Interesting, interesting. I'm a clickbait guy, so I like these.
B
I love it. Yeah. All right, you're right. I am not a clickbait guy. I don't, I don't even have like Instagram. I don't even have any of these things. I don't really know.
A
You're, you're, you're. The only way I was able to get you live is because. I don't know why you said yes, but maybe it's because I just Use it a ton. I've obviously close with Pat and Active Capital and I'm a fan of what you're building.
B
Any user emails me, I, you know, I'll raise my hands. So I. We appreciate your. Your usage and your loyalty.
A
Awesome. Well guys, if people want to. Richard, if people want to check you out as the best place, just fathom A.I.
B
correct.
A
Yeah, guys, he cut his teeth in one of the first batches of YC and this one, 2006 or seven ended up putting in his time, his startup, his startup education at user voice. Almost 18 years there before saying, you know what, let's get Fab off the ground. 2020, first line of code and said, you know what, let me focus on retention first, then onboarding, then acquisition, then referral, then monetization. 2021 of August, they launched part of the Zoom Marketplace. Marketplace launched and then in 2022, in August they got their first dollar revenue and then scaled aggressively from there. 100k of ARR in the first 30 days. By 2023 in August, a million of revenue. Then 10 million. 2024, 30 million in 2025. I couldn't get the 2026 number, but you can do the math. You draw a beautiful little line, you connect the dots and you can sort of see where it's going. He's got a cool new product coming out related to AI and, and getting bots out of your meetings, but still getting transcriptions or screen recordings or only one or the other. Check it out at Fathom AI. Richard, thanks for taking us to the top.
B
Thank you.
A
You won't believe this. CEOs revenue next episode right now.
Podcast: SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Host: Nathan Latka
Guest: Richard White, Founder & CEO of Fathom
Date: May 21, 2026
Episode Focus: How Richard White built Fathom, a leading AI-powered meeting assistant, into a $30M ARR SaaS business—losing $50 per user during early growth and outpacing heavily-funded competitors with capital efficiency, a product-led approach, and a contrarian fundraising philosophy.
This episode explores the remarkable growth of Fathom, an AI note-taker and meeting assistant, in a fiercely competitive market dominated by the likes of Fireflies, Otter, Zoom, Google, and Microsoft. Host Nathan Latka delves into founder Richard White’s unconventional strategies—from giving the core product away for free (at significant short-term losses) to building a robust SaaS business with impressive capital efficiency and innovative user-centric fundraising. Listeners gain deep insight into Fathom’s product philosophy, go-to-market playbook, fundraising methods, and roadmap.
“Probably never more than a million in the bank. Yeah, 1.5 to 2, 1 to 2 million constantly.” – Richard White (00:41)
Burning Capital to Build Loyalty:
“That gave us the confidence to say we can give this away for free and actually lose a lot of money. We were losing like $50 a user per month in the first couple years of Fathom.”
— Richard White (00:52)
Built Two Core Products:
Unique Talent Strategy:
“I had hired three of my best salespeople from UserVoice and I said, I've got nothing for you to sell today, but one day I will.”
— Richard White (01:05, 15:45)
Long-Term Bet: Sales team joined early, did customer success, and learned the product while features were in development—so they hit the ground running at launch.
Quality & Accessibility as Differentiator:
“We pride ourselves on two things. One is… the highest quality transcript, the highest quality summaries… and giving a lot away for free, frankly. That's part of our distribution kind of story.”
— Richard White (03:00)
Seamless Data Export & Integrations:
“We want Fathom to be the easiest meeting platform to get your data out of it. Cause it's your data.” (05:57)
Anti-Walled Garden Approach:
“I think it's a little contrarian… we can monetize [teams], which allows us to be really generous to individuals, even if you never join a team. We're happy to give away the data because we're always upstream from any use case there… over time there's always things we can first party in.”
— Richard White (06:55)
Pricing: Average of $25 per seat, most companies average 8–10 seats ($200/mo typical company spend) (07:51)
Customer Focus: Not enterprise-first—most traction is with small to medium businesses; enterprise adoption is increasing gradually (08:35).
Retention Over Monetization:
“We focused on freezer retention… onboarding, activation, acquisition, referral. The last thing, we're going to focus on monetization.”
— Richard White (13:52)
Growth Timeline:
“We basically went, in the first year, we went zero to a million… then 10, then 30 in the first three years of monetization.” (19:50)
“We gave equity to, like, our first hundred users… borrowing kind of a page out of some of the crypto playbooks… Now every time we raised a round, we reserve 15% of it for our users to invest.”
— Richard White (18:50)
Capture Modes:
“We've got a big launch coming out… the ability to capture meetings in any different kind of modality... audio capture with just the audio, not the video… transcript only… capture without a bot in the meeting.”
— Richard White (20:47)
‘Ask Fathom’:
“This ability to kind of just really... you can ask Fathom now, 'What are the trends and competitors mentioned over the last three weeks?'… set up alerts... 'Tell me any times a pricing discussion that doesn't go well.'”
Usage Stats:
On Capital Efficiency:
“He is by far the most capital efficient of all the note taker CEOs having raised just $30 million to grow well past $30 million of annual revenue. But how does he manage his cash? Yeah, probably never more than a million in the bank.”
— Nathan Latka, then Richard White (00:30–00:41)
On Aggressive Product Betting:
"We were losing like $50 a user per month in the first couple years of Fathom."
— Richard White (00:52)
On Data Ownership:
“We want Fathom to be the easiest meeting platform to get your data out of it. Cause it's your data.”
— Richard White (05:57)
On Building for Power Users:
"Fathom is like our favorite pair of jeans, right. We wear them six times a week."
— Nathan Latka (04:30)
On Startups & Product Development:
“Every startup I've done has come out of problems I ran into at the previous one… Fathom came out of my challenges of just taking notes and doing user research at UserVoice.”
— Richard White (10:32)
On Retention & Growth:
“I'm a big fan of kind of like attacking metrics in order of risk… retention, onboarding, activation, acquisition, referral, then monetization.”
— Richard White (13:52)
Richard White’s Fathom is a masterclass in SaaS capital efficiency, user-driven product thinking, and creative go-to-market. By betting early on massive cost collapse in AI transcription, building an ecosystem-friendly (not walled-garden) product, and inviting users to become investors, Fathom outpaced its competitors—not by outspending them, but by outlearning, outserving, and outcompounding large and small customer loyalty.
Check out Fathom’s latest product enhancements and vision at fathom.ai.