Richard White: Streamlining note-taking for Zoom calls Startup Foundations

Richard White is a serial entrepreneur, founder & CEO of Fathom and previously User Voice. Richard’s current company is a Y-Combinator backed startup, working on a video plugin that enables recording and managing highlights from Zoom calls.

In our conversation with Richard, we dig deeper into his current venture Fathom Video. We talk about the problem its trying to solve, which is, simply put, note-taking during sales and customer support calls. Richard also discusses potential use cases for their software and addresses the risks related to building a product that is so closely connected to one specific platform.

We also discuss Richard’s fascinating startup journey, which starts with working on Kiko along with Justin Kan and Emmet Shear (who went on to found Twitch), going through the very first Y Combinator batch in 2005, selling Kiko on eBay for quarter million dollars, and eventually founding his first company User Voice.

The User Voice days were still early days of startups in general, and Richard tells hilarious story of finding one of his co-founders on Craigslist. He also speaks on the division of labour between him and other co-founders, building the first MVP, incorporating and their first fundraising efforts.

Richard also talks about his experience of doing Y Combinator as a repeat founder and shares battle-tested advice to first-time founders.