Why Building With AI Got Easy and Maintaining It Got Brutal with Fathom CEO Richard White
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Most people are reacting to AI. Our guest for this episode built for it three years before it arrived. Two bets. Transcription costs would fall to zero, and AI would get good enough to actually do something with what it heard. Both were contrarian then. Both were right. Fathom is now the top-rated AI note-taker on G2, and Richard is one of the few people who can tell you what actually changed and what didn't. We get into why building software has never been easier and maintaining it has never been harder. Why your years in business are an advantage in this shift, not a liability. And why the real bottleneck right now is not the technology. It's what you can see. If you have been waiting for the right moment to move, this is it.
Richard White's background is engineering and product design. This is the Vault Unlocked. Let's unlock it.
Richard, welcome to the show. I'm excited to have you. I just for the for the guests and the viewers listening. Why don't you tell us a little bit of who you are? I'm excited because I use your product. I love your product. It's in our business today. I've seen you've changed it quite a bit. And I'm excited to have you here. But for the listeners that may not know, tell them who Richard White is.
I'd like to think I'm a product designer and kind of technologist. You know, no one's let me write code of production in, gosh, maybe 10, 15 years. So I'm not sure I can claim being a technologist as much anymore. But that was my background originally kind of in engineering design, done a couple of startups. I worked at the first patch of Y Combinator. If I want to date myself, I did a product before this called User Voice. But as you kind of alluded to for the last year, Five, almost six years have been spent working on Fathom, which is the number one kind of rated on G2 AI note taker for people on lots of back-to-back meetings. It's been a really fun ride with a really great team. And the most fun part about it is talking to folks like yourself who love and use the product every day.
Yeah, I mean, I've used a lot of different AI note takers and I've used Fathom before and then we switch and now I'm back to Fathom and I'm sold. To me, I find it's the most easiest interface, just the usability of it. And I love that. I just feel like it's not overbuilt. It's just built just exactly for what it is. Take us back to... Where did this start? Like, where did you see that this was needed? Because the one thing I do know about Fathom was way before this huge, the AI craze and everything. So you saw something way before. That's what I'm interested in, like the vision and the strategy you saw and how you brought it together.
Sure. Yeah. I mean, it was actually even right just before COVID happened. Honestly, it was working on a different product, was working on a totally different product and totally different space and just found myself on a ton of Zoom meetings. Like I think it was like 15 to 20 a day. A lot of them were research sessions, right, where I've got 20 minutes almost back to back to like interview someone, demo something, get their feedback, rinse and repeat. And it's kind of one of those things where like, you know, if you run into a problem once a day, you don't maybe do anything about it. You run into it 20 times a day. You're like, oh my God, this is really painful. I need to like, I don't want, I need to fix this.
Right. And so, you know, I remember just kind of kind of thinking how kind of crazy it is the way we kind of share knowledge out of like meetings and stuff, right? It's like, oh, I meet with someone. I had this great experience. They tell me some really interesting quotes or facts or whatnot. And then I hurriedly scribble down notes and then try to like clean them after the meeting and remember exactly what they said. It's a very stressful situation, right?
Why did Richard White start Fathom before AI went mainstream?
It's like being a court stenographer, right? And also being the lawyer interviewing the person on the stand at the same time, right? It's like you're kind of doing both. And No one likes it, right?
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