CEO and Founder at Fathom
CEO and Founder at Fathom
Richard White is 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.
Richard White is the founder and CEO of Fathom, the #1 AI notetaker on G2 and the fastest-growing app on the HubSpot Marketplace in 2024. Fathom is a free Zoom app that automatically records, transcribes, and highlights your meetings so you can stay focused on the conversation. The company has grown rapidly to 85+ team members and is currently generating over $25 M in annual revenue – growing from $0 to $1 M in year one, $1 M to $10 M in year two, and from $10 M to $25 M in just six months. Fathom has also received 5,000+ five-star reviews on G2 and remains one of the highest-rated apps in the Zoom ecosystem.
Richard is a serial entrepreneur with deep roots in the startup space. Before Fathom, he founded UserVoice, the feedback platform used by startups and Fortune 500s alike. UserVoice is credited with inventing the feedback tab seen on millions of websites. He also co-founded Kiko, a Y Combinator–backed company built alongside Justin Kan and Emmett Shear – who later went on to create Twitch.
Richard led Fathom through a successful $2 M crowdfunding campaign on WeFunder in under three weeks. His passion lies in designing intuitive, human-centered productivity tools that users genuinely love.
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. 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.
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.
Top rated on G2
HubSpot Marketplace 2024
Five-star G2 reviews
Annual revenue in 2024
Team Members
W21 Batch
Launch Partner & Investment
Startup Growth & Scaling (0→1M, 1→10M, 10→25M)
Fundraising & Crowdfunding Strategy (WeFunder, YC, Zoom Fund)
AI in Real-World Productivity Tools
Founder Journey & Startup Leadership
Product Design & Building User-Loved Tools
Richard brings firsthand experience from multiple successful exits, scaling companies from zero to multi-million dollar revenue, and navigating the challenges of building AI-powered tools that users genuinely love.
Use these conversation starters to explore Richard's insights on startups, AI innovation, and scaling successful products, or generate new questions tailored to your audience.
What inspired you to start Fathom, and how has AI transformed the meeting experience?
How did you scale Fathom from $0 to $25M in revenue so quickly?
What lessons did you learn from UserVoice that helped you build Fathom?
How do you approach building products that users genuinely love?
What's the secret to successful crowdfunding campaigns like your WeFunder success?
"We always built Fathom around the expectation that AI would get really good," the company's CEO and co-founder Richard White told me. "When we started in 2020, AI wasn't there yet. But we were like: Hey, we're going to really focus on the things that we think are hard, which is getting distribution, building a really reliable infrastructure, and an easy-to-use product, with this expectation that when AI gets there, we'll be able to drop that into this already widely distributed easy-to-use product, and it'll just make it go from good to great."
"Fathom records, transcribes, and replaces note taking with a click of a button on your Zoom calls, so you can simply focus on the conversation at hand. Easily share call highlights with your team via email, Slack, or auto-generated summaries sent to your CRM."
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CEO & Founder
I LOVE talking to customers and prospects. But I hate trying to talk and take notes, trying to edit those notes into something understandable, and the inevitable disappointment of sharing those notes with the team and realizing that they don't convey the same impact that hearing something first hand does. Thus was born Fathom, an app for Zoom that allows you to record and highlight, in real-time, your Zoom meetings so you can write your notes later or skip the notes completely and share clips from your calls with colleagues.
Article
CEO & Founder, Chairman of the Board
UserVoice was born out of my frustrations at Kiko (YC S05) of not having an easy way to understand the firehose of feedback I was getting from our users. It was only supposed to be a side project that scratched my own itch. 13 years later and it's a profitable company that taught me almost everything I know about building products and teams. Along the way, I was fortunate enough to raise $9M from some great people and work alongside even more. I'm proud of the thousands of companies who we empowered over the years from startups like StackOverflow to enterprise companies like Microsoft. But I'm most proud of the work that we did to make it easier for people to influence the products they use every day including the invention of the "Feedback" tab that can still be seen on the sides of thousands of websites.
Product Design Lead
A single cold email to Justin Kan and Emmett Shear telling them how technically impressive, but poorly designed, their newly launched, web-based calendar app was led to me being the person employed full-time to fix it. Launched the redesigned Kiko (YC S05) app in 2006 to a number of accolades before we all realized we had no business being in calendaring and selling the company on eBay for $258K (yes, you read that correctly). Though the business wasn't a success, it launched the most impactful relationships of my life and gave me the inspiration for my most successful business to-date, UserVoice.
As one of the first apps on Zoom and first Zoom investments, what have you learned?
What are some of the challenges of customer-facing teams in a fully remote or hybrid environment?
What inspired you to start Fathom? What have you learned about how people use Zoom and take notes?
How has seed stage funding changed since you raised money in 2008 with UserVoice to today with Fathom?
Bring expertise in startup scaling, AI innovation, and entrepreneurial leadership to your audience. Richard's insights on building products that users love, navigating the challenges of rapid growth, and creating successful crowdfunding campaigns will leave your listeners with actionable strategies they can immediately implement.
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