Richard White is founder and CEO of Fathom.video, a free app that records, transcribes and highlights your calls so you can focus on the conversation instead of taking notes.
Fathom was a part of the Y-Combinator W21 batch, is one of only 50 Zoom App Launch Partners, and is one of a small handful of companies Zoom has invested in directly via their Zoom Apps Fund.
Prior to Fathom, Richard founded UserVoice, one of the leading platforms that technology companies, from startups to the Fortune 500, use for managing customer feedback and making strategic product decisions.
Richard previously worked on Kiko, a company in the first batch of Y-Combinator, with Justin Kan and Emmett Shear who subsequently went on to found Twitch.
Richard is passionate about designing intuitive productivity tools with delightful user experiences.
What you will learn
- Discover how Fathom.video, a free app that records, transcribes, and highlights your calls, can revolutionize your productivity by allowing you to focus on conversations instead of taking notes.
- Understand how Richard’s frustration with taking notes during user research calls inspired the creation of Fathom, an AI-powered tool that summarizes meetings.
- Learn how Richard’s early exposure to computers and programming at a young age fueled his passion for technology and led to a successful career in the tech industry.
- Gain insights into the era of building custom computers and how it compares to today’s plug-and-play devices like MacBooks.
Transcript
Jeff Bullas
00:00:03 – 00:00:30
Hi and welcome to the Jeff Bullas Show. Today I have with me Richard White. Now, Richard is the founder and CEO of Fathom.video, a free app that records, transcribes & highlights your calls so you can focus on the conversation instead of taking notes.
Prior to Fathom, Richard founded UserVoice, one of the leading platforms that technology companies, from startups to the Fortune 500, use for managing customer feedback and making strategic product decisions. UserVoice was notable for being the company that originally invented the Feedback tabs shown on the side of millions of websites around the world today.
Jeff Bullas
00:01:00 – 00:01:30
Richard previously worked on Kiko, a company in the first batch of Y Combinator with Justin Kay and Emmett Shear, who subsequently went on to found Twitch. Richard is passionate about designing intuitive productivity tools with delightful user experience and I’m sure there’s a bit of AI in there somewhere. So Richard. Welcome to the show. It’s an absolute pleasure to have you here.
Richard White
00:01:30 – 00:01:32
Oh, thanks for having me, Jeff.
Jeff Bullas
00:01:33 – 00:01:46
So Richard. Yeah, in looking, you know, doing a bit of stalking on you about, you know, on linkedin and also the bio you gave me, you’ve done a bachelor, you done a B A in computer science. Is that correct? I think so, isn’t it?
Richard White
00:01:47 – 00:01:53
Yep. In a pass away. People used to let me ship code. They don’t let me do that anymore, but that was where I started.
Jeff Bullas
00:01:53 – 00:02:14
Ok. Right. So what did, did you fall in love with computer science or is something sort of like this an opportunity to make money? Was it a passion project or something that you just said? I really love doing this. How did the passion for technology science emerge for you? Like be interested in what that looks like?
Richard White
00:02:15 – 00:02:56
Well, to date myself, II, I graduated with my comp sci degree in 2003. So I went to college in 1999. So probably myself and one other person, a good friend of mine, were the only two people I think in the computer science department that weren’t there because they were told it was a good career. Uh, I actually got started programming when I was 10 or 12. Um, so very fortunate that my father, one day I brought home this computer and just would let me tear it apart and play with it and, you know, I think I started off playing video games on it but eventually learned to like programs on it and mess with it and things like that. So, uh yeah, was, was hacking on computers and building websites and stuff from a really young age actually.
Jeff Bullas
00:02:57 – 00:03:04
So, did you actually, because there used to be a stage where you actually built your own computers. Um, I don’t know whether you’re in that era where you
Richard White
00:03:04 – 00:03:07
was in the, I was, I was old enough to remember that. Yeah, we built our own computers.
Jeff Bullas
00:03:08 – 00:03:27
Yeah, because it used to be. Well, I want to, I want to sleep. It was almost like building a AAA pro cycling, you know, machine. Really? Like, you’re going OK. I want fast bearings. I want an, um, aerodynamic frame. So if it were a computer it would be, I want a faster hard disk, I want a lot of storage. I want the biggest screen. So I’m sure
Richard White
00:03:27 – 00:03:48
you did. You took a lot of pride in it too. You like, look at my thing I built, it’s, you know, it’s, we were having this, it was probably about 3.5 ft tall, kind of like a tower, right, with a bunch of stuff in it. Uh, and now it’s kind of funny to think about it. I just grabbed the latest Macbook and called it a day. Right. But, yeah, back in that day there were a lot of options. I felt like you were, uh, it was, uh, like everyone’s building these kits if you will. So.
Jeff Bullas
00:03:49 – 00:04:13
Well, I even remember like, I’m not that tick, but I remember taking the cover off, you know, PC compatibles and IB MS and actually plugging in a new memory board for example. So because it was slow or, or whatever. But, um, yeah, it was, and also they’re very impressive, especially gaming machines. It’s almost like a tower of power, isn’t it? It’s like, ok, here’s, here’s my other brain and look how big it is, right?
Richard White
00:04:13 – 00:04:16
That of the space heater too.
Jeff Bullas
00:04:18 – 00:04:35
OK. So you go to UNI because you’re passionate about it. Dad luckily had identified that and brought home, you know, a computer for you. So, um, at UNI, were you doing any side hustles like that? Um,
Richard White
00:04:36 – 00:05:03
university is actually probably the only place I wasn’t doing a side hustle because I was just having too much fun being in university. Um, you know, in high school. I had like the number one website for like Playstation cheat codes which made like, I think, like $400 a month and like a revenue. Um, I also had like a little thing where I would like this back when you burn CD, like, burn C DS for, for kids in my high school, like, would make mix tapes if you will on CD si did it for both students and teachers and you,
Richard White
00:05:03 – 00:05:24
you know, I’d sell you these mixed CDS for like 20 bucks and you meet my car and I give you your CD. And then I also have these fake Oakleys. I got shipped from New York and I’d sell you some fake Oakleys too. So I had a lot of side hustles and, uh, and really elementary school through high school and then I just had a lot of fun in college, uh, and kind of got back to the start up stuff afterwards.
Jeff Bullas
00:05:25 – 00:06:13
Yeah. So, um, you’ve been, you’ve been in tech essentially. It’s about 20 years. So, um, you’ve, there’s been quite a few changes in that time. So social media merged in the last 20 years. Really? So it was nearly two thousand, I think we had myspace and I remember my kids rushing upstairs to go and, and try to get to the computer first after dinner because they actually wanted to get on. And, um, and of course Facebook overwhelmed myspace, sorry. Um, uh Rupert Murdoch bought myspace for half a billion dollars and consequently, it’s worth about 5 million today. I think so. Um, it wasn’t one of his best investments. So, um, so you finished college? What, what was the, what did you do after that? Was there any inspiration? Did you go and work for a big corporation? What happened after that?
Richard White
00:06:14 – 00:06:40
I work for a couple of small corporations. I actually tried to do a start up right before college and it was like, you know, it was like a video server software. And I just really struggled to find, I was, I grew up in North Carolina and I really struggled to find other entrepreneurial minded folks. Everyone kind of wanted to just go, you know, books and new programs, wanted to go work at IBM or, you know, you know, be a freelancer or something like that. So after college, I actually,
Richard White
00:06:40 – 00:07:03
You know, as I mentioned, I was having so much fun in college. So instead of going to work at IBM, I went to work at these smaller kinds of development shops, agency type places and I worked at a couple of them. I’m not a very good employee is what I learned from those two experiences and thankfully kind of like a year into my tenure, the second spot. Um I’ve been talking about some side projects, things I wanted to build, some sort of products I want to build. And
Richard White
00:07:03 – 00:07:27
One of them was like an online calendar. So you can think of it like Google calendar before Google calendar. It was just kind of like Gmail came out and I was like, oh this is cool. I want to build the calendar version of Gmail. Uh not a super unique idea but there it was right. And a colleague of mine was like, oh you missed it. Someone just built it. And he sent me this tech Crunch article of these guys that had built this like calendar. It was really, we were looking at it being kind of bummed like, oh man,
Richard White
00:07:27 – 00:08:05
They beat me to it. They got this, you know, that’s why I wanted to build. And then I looked at it and I was like, gosh, it’s really technically pretty impressive. But my gosh is poorly designed, it just looks like bad UX. And even though my background was computer science, I really want to be a product designer. Um Probably because I thought programming was gonna get automated away. Uh And I was like, well, I should push into more creative pursuits like design. And so I literally cold emailed these guys. You mentioned that in the uh in the intro, my working with Justin Conner, Emmett Shear who went on and found Twitch. I literally Cold email those guys and said, yeah, you built this calendar product. I want to build one too.
Richard White
00:08:05 – 00:08:31
Yours looks pretty technically cool, but it actually is impossible to use, it looks like crap. And I was like, but I’ll help you fix it. And so I started working with them part time through that cold email and that cold email was like a, one of those like sliding doors moments in my life because I was, you know, living in North Carolina, probably, if I don’t send that email, you know, I would have bought a house, would have gone to work at IBM. We wouldn’t be having this conversation, but instead I ended up working with these guys, end up, you know, going up to Boston
Richard White
00:08:31 – 00:08:48
during the coldest weeks of the year, working with them uh in the first Bache Y Combinator, which now has turned into like, you know, one of the best start communities in the world. So I really lucked into the ground floor of something really amazing in that community, which brought me up to California and completely changed the trajectory of my career.
Jeff Bullas
00:08:50 – 00:08:56
So you did that. Um How long were you there for? Is it a year or so?
Richard White
00:08:56 – 00:09:26
Yeah, I worked, I worked with Justin and Emmett probably for about a year. Maybe not. Like we, we basically, we built this thing, we made a new version. I helped them design the new version. It was a lot easier to use. Uh Then I think we had this realization that we were like three guys right out of college and none of us had even used the calendar before and we were like, do we think we’re actually the people who are gonna make the billion dollar calendar business? And we didn’t really, we didn’t think that was, that was true. So Justin had the idea to sell that company on Ebay. So we ended up selling the company on Ebay.
Richard White
00:09:26 – 00:09:38
Uh And it was kind of this hilarious thing where like, people made fun of us for the first three days and then it sold for like a quarter million dollars on ebay. And then I remember techcrunch wrote articles like, is this the future of M and A? And I was like,
Richard White
00:09:38 – 00:10:07
you know, no, is the answer to that question. Um But it was a really fun ride and again, got to meet some, some great folks, you know, we shared the y commentary office with Reddit. So the founders of Reddit were in the same room with us and I was, you know, watching them talk to themselves all day on fake accounts to like create, create community. And so those are all still my best friends to this day. So, uh yeah, I worked with those guys for about a year. They went off to do Justin TV, which turned into Twitch. I did not join them for Justin TV,
Richard White
00:10:07 – 00:10:32
which, you know, my financial advisor would tell you it was a mistake. Um But I remember this was before it was Twitch. It was Justin wearing a camera on his head, live streaming. His life and I was just like, uh I don’t, I see a lot of challenges in that business. I don’t see any product design challenges and that’s kind of what I want to focus on. So I went off and did a different start up instead. But that’s what kind of got me in that group, got me out to California and, and really in the slipstream of like, it’s a really great start up community.
Jeff Bullas
00:10:33 – 00:10:38
So you mentioned you found use of voice. Uh was that shortly afterwards or is that
Richard White
00:10:38 – 00:11:09
correct? Yeah. And it was actually all of my startup. I basically have this weird feeling. It’s not that weird, but every start up I join is a problem I saw at the previous company I was working at. So I joined Kiko because I was like, oh, we need a better calendar as there is gmail for calendaring at Kiko. When I was running product design, we had enough users where I was getting tons of user feedback and I was like, I’m spending hours a day reading customer feedback, user feedback, which is not a bad use of time. Gosh, there’s gotta be a better way to do it and working across the room from reddit. I like reddit for customer feedback.
Richard White
00:11:09 – 00:11:24
That was us, your voice, basically built red for customer feedback. And then your voice was doing a bunch of user research on Zoom and that’s what led to fathom. So kind of uh I’ve been very fortunate to keep stumbling upon these ideas that are pain points of mine that turned out to be pain points of lots of other people as well.
Jeff Bullas
00:11:24 – 00:12:17
Well, typic, well, typically a lot of the success stories of uh start ups um especially last 2030 years is basically solving problems and um some of them end up being global problems because now we actually have a connected, global world connected by internet and the web. And um yeah, for example, she’s heard this story but Uber was started because two American guys were stuck in the rain in Paris trying to hail a taxi and said there’s gotta be a better way than getting wet, waiting for a taxi to show up. And Boober was born out of that problem solving. So um which today we find um we love because you know Saturday night in any city is trying to hail a taxi is basically a nightmare, add a little bit of rain and cold and yeah, so,
Jeff Bullas
00:12:18 – 00:12:37
So what was the, so the inspiration for fathom? OK, let’s go straight to fathom then in terms of because we talk more about A I as well in terms of how you see that playing out. Um So when did you start fathom and, and what was the problem you wanted to solve with fathom?
Richard White
00:12:38 – 00:13:03
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, right before the pandemic, I was working, I was doing, I was still working at user voice. I was doing research on products and we were thinking about new products we could build. And so we’re on a lot of zooms with a lot of potential customers, you know, doing user research, asking questions. Do you have this pain point? What about the solution? And you know, while I’m doing that, I’m doing like, you know, I think at this point, I was doing something crazy, like 10 to 15 of these calls a day
Richard White
00:13:03 – 00:13:19
back to back to back five minute break in between. So I could, you know, take the notes I’d scribbled down or typed out furiously while talking to someone and turn them into something better and then, you know, once a week I’d synthesize that and something better still to the team. And it was that point, it’s like, you know, it’s classic, like you stub your toe on
Richard White
00:13:20 – 00:13:43
corner of your counter once a month and you don’t do anything, you stub your toe on it every day. You’re like standing down in the corner of that cabinet, right? And that’s basically what happened here. I was like, ok, this product workout is kind of cool. But you know, what’s a real pain is, I’m terrible at talking to someone and trying to take notes at the same time, I’m always missing something. It’s super stressful. Um And oh, by the way everyone I talk to has the same problem, right. No one likes doing it. Right.
Richard White
00:13:44 – 00:14:13
And it’s not very, it’s not very effective either. Right. I spent a lot of time and energy perfecting these notes, craft them. I look at them two weeks later too, I don’t remember which meeting that was or who that was. And, you know, I’d hand these notes off to my team to try to like, hey, here’s what I’ve learned and there’s, you know, it just really fell flat. A lot was lost, kind of in translation that came from a telephone. And so, you know, early 2020 mid 2020 started thinking more about this problem. There were some companies that were doing something in this space. Um A lot of them,
Richard White
00:14:14 – 00:14:28
a lot of them really focused on things like transcription or they focused on sales people. Um and we kind of thought, you know, this is bigger than sales and it’s not transcription. Like I don’t want to read a transcript after the meeting. I want actual notes. So we kind of had this epiphany that like,
Richard White
00:14:29 – 00:14:54
Well, no one wants a transcript, but we think A I is gonna get a lot better in the next couple of years. And then I will be able to take a transcript and turn it into something you actually do want like structured notes, right? Like you would write yourself. Um But with the benefit of like those notes are linked back to the meeting you had. So if you don’t remember a section I can just double click on that part of the note and actually watch it, which makes it way better than a note, right? Um And the other thought we had was that like, well,
Richard White
00:14:54 – 00:15:11
We also think that transcription is a commodity and the price of that is gonna go to zero. It’s pretty expensive even four years ago, but the price is gonna go to zero. And so what if we give this product away for free, give this product away for free people, you know, love free products. They’ll share it with their friends or network.
Richard White
00:15:11 – 00:15:47
And then when A I gets really good, we’ll just be able to, we’ll do all the hard parts, the video infrastructure, you know, the recording infrastructure, transcription, we’ll do, we’ll build out that in distribution and then once A I gets really good, we’ll just be able to like drop that into the product and make the product so much better. Um And that was basically the thesis behind fathom. Um And that’s basically what we did, right? It takes about two years to build out the product. So it’s like it’s gluten free, you know, note taker records, transcribes, summarizes in the last year. A I got so good that the meeting summaries you get now are so good that it just makes the pro the whole product itself, you know, way better than even when we started,
Jeff Bullas
00:15:48 – 00:15:48
right.
Richard White
00:15:48 – 00:15:49
So it worked out very well.
Jeff Bullas
00:15:50 – 00:16:04
So, obviously, fathom video is a lot bigger than just transcription and note taking. So what is, give us a sort of like a thumbnail sketch of what fathom video is all about and what I suppose your premium features are obviously.
Richard White
00:16:05 – 00:16:38
Yeah, I mean, we really have two people. We try to help, right? We try to help the person that’s at the meeting. Not having to worry about missing something, not having to worry about writing their notes after the call, not having to worry about filling in their CRM or you know, sending something into their notice or what have you, right? So in that part, we try to give away for free, we do have a premium version there where we’ll give you some of our best, our best A I templates. They cost too much for us to give away for free. So we like adding this premium add on, but the core product with A I summaries transcription recording is all completely free.
Richard White
00:16:39 – 00:17:04
And then we have another user which is the manager of those folks. And so what we find is we tend to give fathom away, it ends up working its way into companies, sales teams, success teams, product teams, consultants, you name it. And then, you know, a manager catches wind of this and says that’s great. I’d like to roll this productivity gain out to all of my folks. I want them all to have that benefit. But I’d also like to be able to audit what’s happening in these meetings. And that’s the other thing that,
Richard White
00:17:04 – 00:17:19
you know, I, my last user voice, I ran sales for a time. And so I’ve been on the other side of people taking notes where trying to understand I got 10 sales people. They are having 10 calls a day. How do I possibly understand what they’re hearing? Right. And, how I can improve the product or sales process.
Richard White
00:17:20 – 00:17:45
And it’s really hard to form notes and you know what fathom helps you do as a manager is be able to kind of drill down into that raw truth. Like I was famous at user voice for saying like yes, but what did they really say? Right? Like what’s the tone they use? Like , the words are very different, right? Ways to say yes, I’m gonna definitely buy that right? There’s one of those ways to say it where you’re definitely not going to buy it and there’s one which you really are, right? And I think savvy people know what that looks like. And so what we really help you do is
Richard White
00:17:46 – 00:18:20
grab parts of meetings, right? I don’t wanna rewatch the entire meeting. I wanna be alerted whenever a competitor gets mentioned or I want to be on my team to grab, hey Rich, like this person asked this interesting question. OK, just grab that clip of that call, send it to an engineer, send it to the product team. And so we really make meetings. It’s kind of interesting, we’re making these meetings which are generally synchronous and usually only available to people there, almost like a document you can kind of pass around and be like, you know, and almost everyone can collaborate around a meeting that happened in the past. Um And so really helping managers and teams just kind of collaborate around meetings without having to invite everyone to that meeting.
Jeff Bullas
00:18:22 – 00:18:43
So do you see you sell? So you tagging an enterprise, is that so you have an ideal customer profile and, and the old acronym CP, which um I just heard recently actually, which is strange. But anyway, um ideal custom profile ICP um is, is yours more an enterprise sale now? Is that really where you’re playing or not?
Richard White
00:18:43 – 00:19:00
Not really, it’s, I mean, I think, I think we’ll eventually get there. I think like a lot of start ups, we started with really small teams. Um You know, those are generally the teams that are willing to experiment, they want to try new things, they wanna, you know, it’s tough sometimes for big teams to change all their processes, right? We were talking before about A I and how hard it’s going to rethink these things.
Richard White
00:19:01 – 00:19:25
Um It’s a lot easier for companies to kind of grow up with kind of A I enabled products like fathom from day one. So we work with all sizes but you know, we work with solo entrepreneurs, freelancers, you know, all the way up to, you know, 50 person sales teams and stuff like that. So it really spans the gamut. It’s a PLG product so you can just sign up and use it. And so that makes it really easy and accessible to, I think a lot of, a lot of different groups,
Jeff Bullas
00:19:25 – 00:19:27
a PLG product. What does that mean?
Richard White
00:19:27 – 00:19:43
Uh Yeah, product. It’s a, it’s a fancy new product led growth, which is just a fancy way of saying like you can sign up for it without talking to someone, right? Like basically, like you could just, you don’t have to talk to a sales team. You can just go in and within a minute or two, you get it set up and it’s running.
Jeff Bullas
00:19:44 – 00:20:18
Ok. Um I’m not something today but a great PLG. Um I, I mean to say, I remember I was talking to um I was involved with a start up called Shut Rock a long time ago. Well, right at the beginning, which is a New Zealand start-up, which has over 300 employees today. Um And the acronym IC P came up in a message from the CEO to me because I asked him a question and I looked, so I said, what’s an IC P? And I came up with it was a name of a band or something or
Richard White
00:20:19 – 00:20:43
insane clown posse. I think it was like, very, very vulgar, like a rap group from the, like, there’s always two acronyms for everything. And it’s funny how every industry has their own. And you go in and, you know, my girlfriend works in finance and it’s just alphabet soup sometimes. Obviously I don’t, I didn’t catch half of that.
Jeff Bullas
00:20:44 – 00:21:26
There’s a saying of mine. I see if you see an acronym, shoot it. Um, just because of the trouble within all of our industries, we get stuck in using acronyms like, you know, marketing seo um what’s that really mean? For most people? I have no idea. But anyway, search engine optimization. So the thing I’m interested in though is you start a company. This is pre um chat GPT, isn’t it? Yeah. So how’s Chat GPT and Generative A I and the training of those, which is another question we are running out of, we haven’t got a lot of time but how’s Chat G BT and generative A I helped your business?
Richard White
00:21:27 – 00:21:54
Yeah, I mean, I, I remember getting a lot of flak from our early investors because in 2021 I, when we were launching the product, we put A I in the name and they didn’t put A I in the name. No one likes me right now. Like I look really smart to those investors now. Um Yeah, I think we, we always had, you know, one of the benefits of, I think sometimes being in Silicon Valley is like kind of knowing, you know what the zeitgeist thinks about things, right? And the zeitgeist of that era was like,
Richard White
00:21:54 – 00:22:15
yeah, yeah, just the first generation of quote unquote A I tools were really not A I tools. So a lot of machine learning tools in the back end were really unsophisticated, which is why they weren’t that good. Um But there is a general consensus that these tools are gonna get really good in the next couple of years. Um And like I, like I said earlier, like we kind of predicated fathom on that idea that
Richard White
00:22:16 – 00:22:45
one transcription costs go down to zero, but two that A I would get really good. And so we built out a few tools in advance of that to help you use fathom without A I uh or some really limited A A I. But the expectation was always that at some point, you know, chat GPT or something like this, some sort of, some sort of A I will come out and we’ll be able to use that and it’s just gonna make everything so much stronger. Um It came a lot faster than I think most folks I know, including myself, thought, right. I think it’s
Richard White
00:22:46 – 00:23:23
at least a year, maybe two ahead of schedule sort of thing. Um But when it did, obviously, it created probably the greatest gold rush we’ve ever seen in that. Um Or as I’ve seen in my lifetime. Um And so, you know, it’s, it’s really exciting because it took a long time to build out the core of this product. There’s actually, it’s pretty complicated actually to build this infrastructure for real time video streaming, recording, transcription, you name it. Um But now on that, on that foundation we can with a, I quickly build out a lot of new features and functionality. Uh mm Really? That is really magical, right? Like there’s something you can do with the large language models is,
Richard White
00:23:23 – 00:23:45
you know, I’ve been in tech for a while and I’m still kind of like every day I can’t believe I can do that. That’s really cool. And not only that, it’s like every six months, it gets orders of magnitude better right now. Right. And um it’s unclear whether that trend will continue, but certainly there’s a, so it’s like there’s so many opportunities to improve a process or improve some products with A I right now.
Jeff Bullas
00:23:46 – 00:24:28
Yeah, it was, it was interesting. I was reading a discussion the other day about, you know, things like Moore’s Law. And is there an algorithm? A growth law that will cost Moore’s law is about processor speed, doubling every two years. And pretty well. It’s stuck to that for the last I think, 50 years or something. The thing about um A I and especially in generative A at the moment is it’s not doubling every two years. It’s like, I don’t know what it might be within months. So we’ve got this sort of exponential growth curve happening that is happening in front of us. Um So in terms of um A I, I’d be interested in your thoughts on
Jeff Bullas
00:24:29 – 00:24:53
What do you think it’s gonna do to the industry? It is, it’s a big question. But where do you see it for you? And also generally, where do you see A I going in terms of helping business grow, developing tools uh helping, you know, entrepreneurs run a billion dollar business with only five people. For example, where do you see the big opportunities with generative, you know, A I chat G BT MS and the big language models.
Richard White
00:24:53 – 00:25:24
Well, you know, I think, you know, if you go back 15 years, there was this big shift where things like open source made it so much easier to make software. It used to be, you had to raise $5 million just to make any piece of software because everything would be bespoke and then open source, the cons open source came out and then it really went wild in the 2000 teens and it made it so it’s really easy to make software. Um The problem is you’d have all these software businesses and support them. You’d have these very,
Richard White
00:25:24 – 00:26:13
you know, people intensive labor intensive operations, things to back them up, right? Support teams, sales teams, marketing teams, you name it. And so though the software can scale pretty well, the operations still scale linearly with usage sort of thing. And so that enabled you, it kind of enabled the proliferation of a lot of small companies. It’s easy to get started, build some software but it doesn’t scale. You get, it gets really challenging because going from 10 people to 300 people is really challenging, right? Like organizing that many humans get harder and harder at scale. And I think even if, even if A I advancements stop today, right? Because there’s some, some people think it’s gonna plateau for a minute. Some people keep on Rey, I kind of think even if it doesn’t move an inch for the next 10 years,
Richard White
00:26:13 – 00:26:55
there’s even with the current proper language models, so many opportunities to improve processes in companies, right? Like there’s so many things, you know, that, that you, you kind of look at, I think we’re kind of fortunate in that we’re a small company growing up in this era. So we don’t have to think about how we remake processes and we’ve already got all these people we’ve hired do this sort of stuff. We can kind of start from the ground floor being great before we go hire 40 sales people. Let’s look at how we use A I, so we don’t, you know, hire 10, right? Um And it’s, it’s pretty exciting and also scary at the same time, right? Uh from a societal perspective. Um But as an entrepreneur, it’s really exciting in terms of just like
Richard White
00:26:56 – 00:27:28
so many opportunities to build businesses. I know so many people that were semi-retired that were like really good, like tech builders that are like coming out of retirement to start companies now because you know, it’s such a gold rush and not just from a funding perspective but from a there true is so many use cases out there, you can apply these things to you mentioned chat GP T, I mean chat EV is pretty cool but I think almost no one wants to use an open ended interface, right? Like it reminds me of the old school if you remember the old like do video games where it’s like, you know, you smell, you, you, you hear a wind and you got to type in some answer and like 90% of the
Richard White
00:27:28 – 00:27:55
you give or it’s like that didn’t work, right? That’s how it feels sometimes with, with, with chat GP T or like you don’t get the best answer. So there’s this big kind of like gold rush of people taking what the LM can do and finding specific disciplines and be like, oh, we found the right incantation for these models to give you a great meaning summary or to write you this great cold outbound email or to write you this blog post or whatnot. And so um it’s really pretty, pretty crazy times honestly,
Jeff Bullas
00:27:55 – 00:28:32
it is and uh I think you described it well is that you know, chat GT is a general model. In other words, everyone’s leaning into how we can actually use it for very specific niche needs. And I think that’s where the option lies with more tools, better tools uh that and combinations of tools that we haven’t thought of before. I’m aware of your time. Um Richard. So uh last question I ask as a human, not as an A I or an avatar, what brings, which I always ask all my guests. Um What brings you deep joy and happiness that you would gladly do for free if you had the time and the money.
Richard White
00:28:33 – 00:29:14
Um Well, I’d honestly build software for free. But uh yeah, you know, honestly, you know, the thing that makes me love building software products and building companies like this is the fact that I get a lot of joy out of getting messages from users saying like, oh, I love this product. It saved me so much time. It’s made my life easier, sort of thing. And like, I don’t, you know, I was, and I think a lot of the best founders I know have that kind of same mindset where they’re kind of like, I first and foremost, I was excited to put something out in the world that makes the world a little bit better. Um outside of that though, you know, uh I feel like I was also very fortunate on the way to have. I think
Richard White
00:29:15 – 00:29:36
One of the things you know, I mentioned, I grew up in North Carolina. I have now been out here in San Francisco for like 15 years and I know Silicon quote unquote, Silicon Valley gets a lot of flak and rightfully so, but I will also say that the culture, the core culture of Silicon Valley is one of giving. Um And what I mean is that like, people don’t care as much about how much money you make or blah, blah,
Richard White
00:29:36 – 00:30:15
The social capital here is like, what have you built? That’s cool and like how helpful are you to people? And it’s always impressive how much here, really powerful, smart, influential people will trip over themselves to help others. Um And I, you know, I would be a fact that and coming up and so whenever I get cold emails from founders, whenever possible, I try to take those and give whatever advice I can and I hope they only listen to about the right third of it, right? Because, you know, I’m sure I’m wrong two thirds of the time. But uh I think that’s kind of the ethos of Silicon Valley that I want to kind of pay it forward or pay it back on. Is everyone here is just super open to like, hey, I mean,
Richard White
00:30:16 – 00:30:43
you know, we’re not, I think if you go to New York, the finance world, everyone competes and they’re all kind of like, it’s a very cut throat, everyone’s get each dog eat dog in, in San Francisco at least. And the second street just feels like we, we all want to help each other build, we’re all, we’re all building our old Lego castles, right? We want to help everyone else build the best one, right? Because we just fundamentally believe that like the role is better for having these, these tools and these things in place. Right. So, um, that’s what I get really excited about. It’s just
Richard White
00:30:43 – 00:30:56
meeting, you know, young founders and new or just new founders of any age and you know, see if I can cut a few, help them cut a few corners, right? And not fall into a few of the traps that I fell into.
Jeff Bullas
00:30:56 – 00:31:33
Cool. I know time is short, but um great to hear that. And at the end of the day, you’ve just confirmed, I think nearly a 90 year old Harvard study, which says that the thing that brings us most joy is other humans and the connection with those and making a difference and sounds like you are. Um, thank you very much Richard for sharing your ideas and experience. I wish we had more time. Uh We might loop back in a little while and uh see how things are going and maybe have a longer chat. But thank you very much for sharing your experience and expertise and wisdom and uh look forward to catching up in real life one day. San Francisco’s a great city and I’ve been there many times. So,
Jeff Bullas
00:31:34 – 00:31:49
Thank you very much. Have a great, great rest of the day and, uh, we’ll, we’ll, we’re about to compare the transcription of two different services, including yours. So I’m sure yours is gonna be really, really good. So, um, but yeah, thank you very much, Richard. It’s been an absolute pleasure, mate.
Richard White
00:31:49 – 00:31:52
Jeff. Thank you for having me. It’s been fun. Ok.