Note-Taking is the Most "Up-the-Fairway" use of AI

Jeffro (00:01.899)
Welcome back to Digital Dominance. Today, I’m excited to chat with Richard White, a serial entrepreneur and the founder of Fathom Video, a tool that takes the hassle out of note taking by recording, transcribing and highlighting your Zoom calls. Richard has a track record of designing intuitive productivity tools, including UserVoice, which changed how many companies handle customer feedback. So in this episode, we’re going to explore how tools like Fathom are kind of really transforming the way we work. We’ll talk about the future of productivity software and the potential trade-offs of relying on AI for tasks like note taking. So Richard, welcome to the show. Yeah, absolutely. I was excited when the opportunity came up to have you on the show because I personally use Fathom to record all my zoom calls. So I really like how it gives you everything all together with the recording the transcript, know, the search feature. So thanks to you and your team for making a great tool.

Richard White (00:34.136)
Thanks for having me.

Richard White (00:50.318)
Well, thank you so much. We have great users like yourself to give us lots of feedback on how to make it better all the time. So we appreciate it.

Jeffro (00:58.198)
Yeah, definitely. Well, I’m also curious, can you give us the short version of what inspired you to create Fathom in the first place?

Richard White (01:04.43)
Sure, yeah. So I was working, as you mentioned, on my previous startup, UserVoice, and I think a lot of folks were just on a lot of video meetings. And it’s one of these things where I think January of 2020, I was doing some user research projects, and I think I was probably doing 15 to 20 Zoom calls a day. And I remember when we working on something else, I was like, you know really sucks is trying to talk to someone and type out notes at the same time. And just kind of had this belief that, gosh, aren’t we, can technology do this for us yet? And the answer is like not quite yet in 2020, right? We didn’t have large language models in that in 2020, but we felt pretty confident that they were going to show up pretty soon and be really good. And we also thought that, you know, transcription costs, which had historically been really exorbitant, expensive thing to do, was going to come down dramatically. And we thought there was like an interesting opportunity to basically go build an AI note taker for everyone that you could give away for free and that’s kind of what we set out to do with Valid.

Jeffro (02:06.602)
Awesome, well think you did a great job with that. And obviously now you have competitors like Otter and Fireflies and now Zoom even has its own AI companion. And everybody’s gonna have their own opinion about which is best. But in general, how do you see tools like Fathom kind of changing the way we approach virtual meetings and online collaboration?

Richard White (02:09.198)
Thank you.

Richard White (02:25.07)
I mean, that’s what’s been so fun about this product is like, I could see how it changed my work life from the early days, right? And went from, you know, oh crap, I missed this thing this person said, and are trying to rapidly take down notes to, like, oh, someone said something to me three weeks ago. Let me pull it, and within 30 seconds, I’ve pulled it up and I’m watching the clip of them saying that, right? And it’s like, almost I have like 300 % better kind of memory than I should have sort of thing. I mean, what we’ve seen is, you know,

Jeffro (02:30.763)
Mm-hmm.

Richard White (02:53.422)
People are a lot less stressed because a lot of us are in back-to-back meetings and so we’re trying to remember everything. It also really gave great collaboration with clients or with people on your team. If I’m having kind of a client meeting, rather than trying to tell my colleague exactly what was said, I can just like, watch this two minute clip of this meeting, right? And you can really get a sense, it’s like you were there, right? And so we kind of are able to take meetings and almost like time shift them and make them asynchronous content that we can pass around the organization. And I also seen there’s a lot of agency folks I’ve talked to because we work with a lot of agencies and service providers where they’ve also said it’s invaluable for keeping their clients honest, right? It was like, oh, we have a recording where you said you committed to doing this or you told us to go down this direction. And then two weeks later, you’re trying to tell us you didn’t do that.

Jeffro (03:32.991)
Yes.

Richard White (03:42.22)
what’s where you watch the tape, right? Sort of thing. So I think it’s just a win-win-win all around.

Jeffro (03:48.234)
Yeah, I was actually going to mention that. That’s a great use case that, you know, I’ve done that. I’ve gone back like, wait a minute, I’m pretty sure this was the price I quoted you or something like that. And you mentioned another use case where if I’m handing it off to my team member and they can just run with it, they don’t have to be there for the meeting because that creates complexity with scheduling additional people to be there. Like, okay, you don’t have to sit through the meeting. I can do it, ask the questions and then say, okay, here’s what they want. Go do this. Right.

Richard White (03:50.07)
Yeah

Richard White (04:13.282)
Yeah, I think there’s so many folks sit through so many meetings where they only need to see half of it or a third of it. And the idea that we can put less people in that meeting, you can pass off other folks, they can watch it at 1.5x, right? So just the time savings there is pretty incredible.

Jeffro (04:26.056)
Yeah. Yeah. And it’s comforting knowing that it’s there if I need it. And I can pay better attention to the person on the other side of the call, because I’m not like constantly like going down to my notes and all of that. So what are some other benefits of using an AI note taker besides the obvious ones that we’ve just touched on?

Richard White (04:36.888)
Yep, 100%.

Richard White (04:46.7)
Yeah, I again, I think there’s benefits of personnel in the meeting, right, which is like increased focus, reduced cortisol levels, right, reduced stress. There’s a lot of collaboration benefits, right, again, from being able to kind of make this stuff asynchronous.

Jeffro (04:55.975)
Yeah.

Richard White (05:03.822)
And I think, you we also use it for things like hiring and recruiting. We use it across the org. use it for internal meetings. We use it for customer meetings. We use it for hiring, right? And like same sort of thing. Most times when you’re hiring folks, you’ve got four people having interviews and they ask 80 % of the same questions, right? And so now it’s like, oh, someone meets with a candidate and the next person watches that recording. Oh, here’s an interesting answer from this candidate. Let’s like dig in on this and whatnot. And so everything feels much more collaborative than you know, before where it’s like, you weren’t in the meeting, you really had no idea what happened, right? We were all kind of passing scant notes trying to figure it out.

Jeffro (05:40.043)
Well, and I also like that it just follows me around automatically. I don’t have to remember to turn it on because otherwise I would all the time. I previously, used to like, if I promised somebody, yeah, I was going to record the meeting or I do a webinar. Like, oh man, I forgot to hit record at the beginning. But now my fathom is just there automatically. It knows when the meeting and it comes in and starts recording for

Richard White (06:00.142)
Yep, yeah, I’ll make records for you, I’ll make notes for you, I’ll make you grab your action items. You also, also have like a chat GPT interface for it too. So if you wanna ask questions about me, which I find is useful when I’m listening to other people’s meetings, right? I’m like, oh, did Rich and the client talk about this? And it’ll just automatically find that part of the meeting and watch it for you. So it’s great for folks both in and not in the meetings, I believe.

Jeffro (06:12.095)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffro (06:23.432)
Yeah. So obviously there’s lots of pros. I love it. I think it’s a net positive. Are there any negatives though? Is there anything that we lose by using AI to take notes for us instead of us writing it down ourselves? Because we’re always taught like there’s some mind hand connection, like you remember it better if you actually write it yourself.

Richard White (06:42.018)
I do think there’s something to that, right, in terms of like, you know, yeah, I was taught that as well, right? But I kind of, it’s gonna just change my behavior. Like I’m not trying to hold things in my head anymore. I don’t need to, I can only just refer back to it later or find it later. And we’ll tell you one thing that’s made me worse at, I’m really bad at in-person meetings now. Like am I, I’m bad at kind of taking notes in person or remembering how to handle that, right? I kind of I actually try to move everyone to a Google Meet or a Zoom or Microsoft Teams meeting, even though I prefer meeting people in person, right? There’s a human connection there. if I have an in-person meeting now, it feels like it just kind of goes, it disappears. It never happens sort of thing. So I do think there’s a little bit of like a, there’s a muscle that I’ve let atrophy there to a certain degree.

Jeffro (07:24.723)
But overall, like you said, especially, you you guys started right kind of at the beginning of the pandemic. So the way we do work has shifted tremendously and more of us are working from home and everything. this is having this as an option for our default mode of meeting is, of course, a huge time saver. What about for business owners who are kind of hesitant to trust certain tasks to AI or automation? Like maybe they’re worried it will misinterpret something or misspell something or misunderstand. What’s the best way to kind of

Richard White (07:41.826)
Except 100%.

Jeffro (07:54.919)
for them to start incorporating some kind of productivity software into their workflows without feeling like they’re losing something or, you know, kind of giving up essentially.

Richard White (08:06.254)
It’s interesting. you know, we started this business before large language models were there and we kind of were building at the rest of product, the recording, the transcription, whatnot. And then when LMS came out, you know, about what’s, guess now about two years ago, a year and a half ago, the early ones were kind of inaccurate, right? Like they would hallucinate things and they would say things that didn’t, that definitely weren’t set, right? I’m pretty happy to report like that doesn’t happen anymore.

I shouldn’t say it doesn’t. I’m sure there’s some examples of it, but it’s gone down 99.9 % from where it was 18 months ago. So I think whereas 18 months ago, you might be a little worried of like, is this actually faithfully retelling the story? I think now we’ve largely kind of gotten that out of the system. Some more modern LLMs don’t have the hallucination problem. At least for this use case in meetings, right? I think if you…

We get folks all the time asking us, hey, can I take transcripts from 50 meetings and throw them in chat GPT? And I’m like, it’ll lose a lot in that, right? You can’t figure that out. And we’re working on solutioning that, but for a given specific meeting, you want to ask a question about it, LM’s do a great job today at being pretty faithful to the source material.

Jeffro (09:18.13)
Yeah, so, I mean, that kind of leads to the next question too. Like, how do you balance automation while preserving human input and creativity without just feeling like, all right, whatever it spits out, I’m gonna use that.

Richard White (09:32.472)
I mean, yeah, to be fair, we’re, I’m from the church of AI here, where I’m kind of like, we’ve got a lot of religion around this. mean, one of our internal goals for the company is how do we become, you know, a hundred million dollar company with only 150 employees? And the big way we’re gonna do that is by leveraging AI a lot. I kind of think it allows, you know, I don’t think any business would kind of differentiates itself or lives or dies on how good its team is at taking notes and meetings. So I think it just, what people don’t like about meetings is they don’t like the busy work and they don’t like being in meetings that they don’t have to be in or are irrelevant to them. And this kind of gets rid of both of those things, which gives them a lot more time back. And so I think it really opens up time where you can have smaller teams with greater output because they’re not doing all this busy work. so I think that’s where AI is best deployed today where it’s like, an intern could do this, right? Like, well, the AI can be the intern then instead, right? And then we have, it’s a little more reliable than the intern, it’s much more accurate, like it costs less, that sort of thing. But really it’s allowing us to have smaller teams that are really good and get to spend time doing things humans are good at, like creativity and brainstorming and strategy and stuff like that.

Jeffro (10:48.103)
Yeah. So I know automation and AI, obviously, are in a lot of areas. We’ve got AI running cold email campaigns, crafting personalized messages. They do it on LinkedIn. Do you foresee this happening with video calls as well? Like, if I’m onboarding a new client, and I’m like, here, meet with my AI agent who’s going to talk to you, ask the questions, and take the notes.

Richard White (11:09.794)
This has actually been the number one question I’ve been asking a lot of folks lately. It’s like, how soon does AI replace 80 % of what a sales team does type thing? Or 80 % of the sales process, if you will. It certainly can write emails well today, which kind of begats this question of like, does that just ruin all the emails? Because every AI can write really good emails and what’s really the value of it.

Jeffro (11:18.247)
Mm-hmm.

Richard White (11:34.19)
I do think there’s a, you know, the consensus from people I talked to that I think are pretty smart seems to be kind of like anything. You know, if you think about a sales process or a meeting you might have, all the part that’s repetitive, the AI can maybe take over from you, right? So instead of having three meetings with the client, maybe you’re having two because there’s an AI agent that does, answers a lot of the upfront questions, right, that they might have about how your agency works.

And the client might like that because they get instant access that information, right? They don’t have to wait the scheduled time with you and whatnot. And so almost like that AI is doing the initial work to make sure you guys are a good fit. And then you’re coming in and you don’t have to do the FAQ. You can get directly into, okay, I hear that you talked to Fred, our AI, and it said this, right? I think that’s pretty clearly going to happen. And people will be upfront that, talk to the AI and it won’t be kind of off putting. It’ll be great. That’s a win for both of us. There’s just other.

question which is like how soon does like the AI able to copy you and I can’t tell when I’m talking to you or I’m talking to the AI generated version of you right there was a product that came out a months ago called Pickle and it was like basically you could be laying in bed having a zoom call and it would make a real-time video image it looked like you were sitting at your desk like beautifully looking at the person right a couple of friends of mine signed up for it and turns out it’s like not as good as its demo video, but like that’s the kind of thing that I think will definitely come in the next couple years. So it’ll get better. So it’s kind of interesting, like, you know, this human AI hybrid sort of thing where like, you know, if I face tune my video call a little bit, can you tell the difference between me and a generated version of me? I don’t know.

Jeffro (13:04.122)
It’ll get better.

Jeffro (13:17.402)
Yeah, or do you just turn off the video and the AI says, sorry, I’m feeling a little under the weather today. And then you have no idea, right?

Richard White (13:21.07)
You have no idea, because I can certainly do the audio today, right? Yeah.

Jeffro (13:27.481)
Yeah. Well, and it’s interesting. maybe there’s from that, there’s an upcharge like, no, I want to meet with a real person, not the robot. Okay, you can pay a little extra and we’ll get a team member there. Or you have some hybrid where it’s like, you’ve got an AI sitting in the meeting with you, giving you a teleprompter like, hey, ask them this question next, or, here’s a good way to overcome that objection they just raised. And so you’re just kind of reading off the screen now and not even thinking.

Richard White (13:54.766)
I mean, I think like anything, there’s many ways people want to communicate and different ways they want to buy. So if anything, I think it’ll allow you to give clients different options, right? And I imagine there’ll probably be little bit of a generational divide in this, right? Like I think there’s like some stuff about like, know, young millennials, certainly Gen Zs don’t like having phone calls or like one-on-one. They’d probably prefer to talk to the AI, right? It’s like a lower stakes conversation sort of thing.

So I think anything that gives people more options in how they communicate and how they buy is not a terrible thing.

Jeffro (14:29.061)
What else do you see coming in the future of productivity tools and the role of AI as that comes together?

Richard White (14:36.802)
I mean, I think the thing we’re most excited about is when these AIs can have a bigger data set to look at to start giving you insights, right? So like today, Fathom can do a really good job of looking at a single meeting or a group of meetings, small group of meetings, right? And giving you some information about it. So you know, can give you a really good notes up single meeting or, you know, let’s say you’ve got five meetings and a deal you’re working on Fathom can group all those together and tell you, you one summary and you know, wonder if it’s asked questions about it. But today with modern LMS, if you want to say, Hey, look across every meeting I’ve had in the last six months and you know, tell me how I could have done better. Tell me what trends are like, it doesn’t do a good job with that. But I think that’ll be there probably by the end of this year. In fact, we’re prototyping some stuff in our product to do that where you can start saying things like, tell me every time someone had an objection to our pricing and their tone was negative, right? And they’ll go, cool, I’ll go find you all this moment. So that’s a stepping stone to it, kind of proactively telling you, hey, it looks like your pricing might be too high based upon the trend line we’re seeing and reactions across all the meetings your team’s having or something like that now you’re getting the kind of like Avengers Jarvis level type stuff where it’s like, you know, each company has its own kind of Jarvis. It’s like, ah, I’ve been sitting at all your meetings. These three meetings are ripe to be, you know, rethought of because there’s not a lot of interactivity and stuff like that. So I think that’s the next kind of big step is AI is to just have a more context on all of the meetings you’ve had in your business.

Jeffro (16:15.236)
Okay. Yeah. And so I’m curious to hear as Zoom rolls out, you know, they’ve got their own AI companion and other tools are adding stuff. What’s next for you guys? How do you stay ahead of that and develop new things? How does that even affect your pricing model? Because you’ve got a free forever plan. Does that continue to work? Or at a certain point, you’re like, we can’t just store all these meetings forever, right?

Richard White (16:39.566)
We always knew we could do a very robust free version that you can use forever because we have another product that we sell for if you’ve got a team and you want to collaborate with your team. You want one workspace where my entire company’s meetings are in. And that’s where we make our money. And even charging less than anyone else in the space, we still do this well. So it allows us to afford having the free version. But yeah, no, mean, I think It’s a lot of competition in the space. I think relative to the platforms, what’s nice is most people are on multiple platforms. So almost everywhere I know, if they’re on Zoom, they’re also on Google Meet occasionally. If they’re on Google Meet, they’re also on Zoom occasionally.

Microsoft Teams. And so I think most folks want a solution that’s going to work on any platform they happen to have a conversation on. And then your future will also support in-person meetings so I can start having them again and not feel bad about it. So I think there’s a lot of opportunities for that, for us to basically differentiate from platforms in that way. And I think all the stuff that’s coming with AI, there’s just, this is probably the most up-the-fair way use case for AI that I’ve seen.

Wookie in your meetings, help you have less of them, help you understand what’s happening, help you understand what’s happening in the meetings you’re not in, right? The content in your company’s meetings is one of the biggest data sets in your organization. It’s on par with email or what’s in your Slack or in your Microsoft Teams. And we just see such outsized benefits from productivity for deploying stuff like this.

Jeffro (18:09.144)
Well, tell me what the in-person version is going to be like. Does that mean you have to wear smart glasses to record the other person, or is it just setting your phone on the table and having it listen?

Richard White (18:17.344)
It’s funny, we don’t think people are quite ready for wearables where like, I don’t think people want a little lapel pin that’s like, this is always being recorded, right? I don’t think people want that. So V1 will probably look like dropping the phone down in the middle of the room and it can kind of pick up on whatever I’m saying. That’ll be V1.

Who knows, maybe we’ll get to glasses next year. I still think that’s breaking some social norms that people aren’t quite ready for in a way that recording meetings is pretty standard at this point.

Jeffro (18:51.159)
Yeah, well, it’ll be fun to see. And it sounds like you guys have a lot of cool ideas that you’re working on already. So you mentioned you’ve got a big goal of getting to the company, $100 million with 150 employees. I think that’s a really cool goal because it drives you to innovate in the very thing that you are putting out in the marketplace. So that’s kind of a cool way to help yourself grow and still provide value along the way.

Richard White (19:17.518)
Yeah. I mean, I think we’re already at 70, so we’re already halfway there. We’re not quite halfway there on revenue. So it’ll be challenging, but I do think it’s like, you know, I have a lot of friends who had startups and some of them got in public and whatnot. And all of them also really enjoyed the part where they were small. Right. And it’s like so much easier to the business, so much easier to turn when you need to turn. And so we chose the 150 number, because that’s the, as you probably know, like the Dunbar number.

It’s like that’s the most number of friends you can have theoretically. And so there’s like this theory that above that number is when politics creep into companies sort of thing. so, yeah, we’ll see how we do. But I think it’s promising. I think there’s a lot of roles where we can take, there’s just so much busy work in every organization that AI can kind of get rid of and again, leave the really smart human level stuff to the humans.

Jeffro (19:52.256)
and

Jeffro (20:09.923)
Yeah. I guess my other question before we wrap up would be, you know, we’ve got a lot of service business owners on the calls. Some of them do, you know, sales meetings on Zoom. Others don’t. A lot of them go out to somebody’s house to talk to them about a project or something. so until there is that in-person thing, you know, this isn’t as helpful. What are your recommendations for them? How they can leverage AI to help with their productivity and keep them engaged today?

Richard White (20:39.04)
I can’t actually run the name of it. There is actually a startup that is specifically for services businesses that are going door to door almost, right, or doing in-person meetings. And they are actually shipping them like a wearable or the field tech or the field wrap. It’s like, you know.

is literally recording every conversation that they’re having with the customer. And surprisingly, don’t get, my understanding is they don’t get a ton of pushback on it because it allows, you know, it’s, I think, it’s comforting to the buyer as well to know like, okay, what this person’s saying is not BS because they’re being recorded and sent back to Central. So I wish you’d remember the name, I’ll follow up and send it to you afterwards. so there are, if that’s the kind of business you’re running, there are solutions for you like that out there as well.

Jeffro (21:22.572)
Yeah, and I imagine it’d be important to share that recording with the client, right? To let them know like, hey, we’re going to do this. You get access to it too, for some of the same reason we talked about earlier. So you can hold us accountable. If we made a promise, you can say, no, no, it’s in this recording. The guy told me this is what it’s going to cost.

Richard White (21:36.76)
Well, this is the real question I get just even in our business, It’s like, how are my clients and prospects gonna feel about being recorded? And my general answer is like, they’ll actually feel okay with it, but if you actually give them the recording afterwards, they’ll actually see it as a positive. Because they have the same problem you have, which is they can’t remember everything you said, and they don’t want to take notes either. And so that’s, think, it’s one of those things where you get to kind of create value for your clients with almost no work.

Jeffro (22:05.077)
Yeah, and now you don’t have to take up space in your house with a filing cabinet of all the notes you’ve written down for every interaction. You just have a cloud backup somewhere that holds all this stuff or just a Fathom account, right?

Richard White (22:08.238)
Yeah, right.

Richard White (22:16.61)
Yep, 100%.

Jeffro (22:18.38)
Cool. Well, Richard, thanks for joining me today. It is exciting to see all the ways technology is making our lives easier. Fathom has been a big part of that for all these Zoom calls over the past few years. For all of you guys at home, if you aren’t using an AI note taker yet, you should definitely consider using Fathom. I use it. I like it. They have a free forever plan that is awesome. So check out the links in the show notes to get started with Fathom. And I’ve got one last question for you, Richard, because I’m curious. Do you know what the percentage is for the number of recordings

Richard White (22:42.702)
Thank

Jeffro (22:47.551)
that are never looked at. As I imagine, that’s pretty big.

Richard White (22:52.718)
I actually don’t know this off the top of my head. I’d say order of magnitude, I think it’s actually lower than you think, it’s about 30%, I think. But a lot of them get referred back to much later. There’s this big fall off curve where there’s a lot, we’ll get that data to do some of their follow up action items and then they refer back to them three weeks later. I do this a lot myself, I don’t look at this until I meet with the person a second time and then I hurriedly watch, revisit it 10 minutes before the next meeting.

Jeffro (23:00.265)
Okay, interesting.

Jeffro (23:22.05)
Yeah, that makes sense. Very cool. Well, thanks again for being here, Richard. Thanks to all you guys for listening. If you thought this was valuable, please leave a review for the show on Apple or Spotify. And that’s it for today. Take care and we’ll see you next time.

Richard White (23:23.374)
Yeah. Cool.