Richard White

Like I raised money from Jim over at Maven Ventures who named Zoom.

Like I was just like, cool, we need to get in Zoom.

We're gonna raise money for everyone we need.

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 extension of that where, you know, at some point we were actually, we gave equity to like our first hundred users.

Actually, I think it'd be like 200, 250.

Like borrowing kind of a page out of some of the crypto playbooks.

It was like, if you were an early power user, we gave you a small bit of equity in Fathom.

0.01 percent like give me a cent a range it's small right like it's thousands of dollars worth but today it's not like millions of dollars 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 this is gonna 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 race around 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 a hundred 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 needed an end or something like that.

I think when we raised our series A, we were doing actually around like, I guess by the time it got announced, maybe I think when we first tapered it, it was like three and a half million, but we were ramping pretty quickly.

We basically went zero to one, one to 10, 10 to 30 in the first three years of monetization.

We are still competitive enough.

I mentioned this, but I like kind of laying low.