Why Building With AI Got Easy and Maintaining It Got Brutal with Fathom CEO Richard White

Uh, 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, uh, AI notetakers, uh, and I've used Fathom before, and then, you know, we switch, and now I'm back to Fathom and I, I'm, I'm, I'm, you know, I'm act- I'm sold.

Like, it's like, it- it's, to me, it's, I find it's the most, uh, easiest, uh, interface.

Uh, it just, the usability of it, and I, and I love that.

I just feel like it's not overbuilt, it's just built, like, just exactly for what it is.

Take us back to w- where did this start? Like, where did you see that this was, uh, needed? Because the one thing I do know about Fathom was way before this huge, the AI craze and everything.

So you, you saw something way before.

That's what I'm interested in, like, the vision and the strategy-

[laughs]

... you saw and how you brought it together.

Sure.

Yeah, I mean, it was actually even right just before COVID.

Honestly, was working on a different product, was working on a totally different product, uh, 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, 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, had this great experience.

They tell me some really interesting quotes or facts or whatnot, and then I scr- 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? It's like being a court stenographer, right, and also being the, the, the, the lawyer kind of inter- 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? No one likes taking notes.

No one likes reading notes.

Notes are also like, we're like a really poor artifact.

I'd share with my team and a lot got lost.

You know, I'd have this amazing conversation.

I'd share the notes with my team, and they'd kind of shrug their shoulders and be like, "Okay." Right? So I just remember looking at this and being like, "Gosh, there's something-- Don't we have the technology to fix this at this point?" Right? And, you know, if you go back to 2020, there were tools that were doing call recording.