Richard White

and honestly fathom then kind of came out of some things like every startup i've done it's 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 user voice 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 taker for everyone?

And tools like Gong existed at that point, which are like sales specific versions of this that were very expensive.

And we looked at like, why is it only for sales?

Well, the answer in 2020 was transcription was exceptionally expensive and there wasn't 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 your subscription 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 of years of Fathom.

No.

No, thankfully it was 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 have been screwed.

It was one of these things where we're directionally correct.

If transcription engines or 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.