Rich White, UserVoice founder and Fathom CEO, discusses the future of meetings and how he made Zoom calls suck less

We’ve met some brilliant product minds on this show over the years. If you’re a long-time listener you hopefully enjoyed discussions with legends like Phil McKinney, former CTO of HP, and Philippe Cases, founder and CEO of Topio Networks, among others. Today’s guest belongs on that list.

Rich and I first met when he was starting UserVoice around 2010 and I was at ServiceNow. I love his approach to innovation. He pioneered the idea that listening to customers can be as easy as adding a feedback tab to every web page back when all that existed were clunky survey tools. Today, thousands of sites use the widget he invented. 

He’s now out to make meetings more productive by helping attendees focus on conversations while an app transcribes them and offers simple buttons to annotate what’s happening. It’s obvious once you’ve used Fathom that this is the future of meetings.

Rich White is not only a serial innovator but also a repeat entrepreneur who has raised from a group of exceptional investors over the years and was part of the YC Winter 2021 batch. Enjoy!

Listen and learn…

1. As a product expert and innovator, how to know when you've found "an itch worth scratching"
2. What is "product-market fit" and how to know when you've achieved it
3. What is a viral coefficient and how do you calculate it
4. How the "jobs to be done" framework led Rich to develop the key feature of Fathom
5. The hardest problem Fathom has solved… has nothing to do with voice transcription
6. How Fathom trains developers to practice responsible AI

References in this episode:

• Project Linchpin from the US Army is centralizing more than 685 AI projects
• Phil McKinney on AI and the Future of Work
• Philippe Cases on AI and the Future of Work
• Fathom