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

**Kayvon Kay** (0:00)
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 contrary, and 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.

**Richard White** (1:30)
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've worked the first batch of Y Combinator, if I want to date myself. I did a product before this called User Voice, but as you kind of eluded to for the last five, almost six years, I've 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.

**Kayvon Kay** (2:10)
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.
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? 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, the vision and the strategy you saw and how you brought it together.

**Richard White** (2:51)
Sure. Yeah. I mean, it was actually even right just before COVID. 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. I think it was 15 to 20 a day. A lot of them were research sessions where I've got 20 minutes, I was back to back to interview someone, demo something, get their feedback, rinse and repeat. And it's one of those things where 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 fix this. And so I remember just thinking how crazy it is, the way we share knowledge out of meetings and stuff. It's like, I meet with someone, I have this great experience, they tell me some really interesting quotes or facts or whatnot, and then I heard we scribbled down notes and then try to 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 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? No one likes taking notes, no one likes reading notes. Notes were also like a really poor artifact to 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 kind of shrugged their shoulders, like, okay, right? So I just want to look at this and be 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. Nothing with AI yet, obviously.