What happens when transcription costs drop from £3 an hour to nearly zero and AI can write better meeting notes than any human? Alex Theuma sits down with Richard White, CEO and founder of Fathom, the AI meeting system used by thousands of teams to automatically capture, transcribe, and summarise their calls. Fathom has built a viral growth engine around a simple insight: everyone hates taking notes, but only managers will pay for meeting intelligence.

Richard shares how they built "the chassis" first and waited for AI to become the engine, why they abandoned building internal AI tools in favour of smart vendor selection, and his contrarian advice for established SaaS founders: fork your company rather than bolt on AI as a feature.

In this episode, we explore:

(01:19) What Fathom does and the meeting note-taking problem

(01:57) Building from a personal pain point at his previous startup

(03:21) Starting with hypotheses about where AI was heading

(04:46) The viral growth loop and network effects strategy

(06:38) Alex's own discovery journey as a Fathom customer

(08:07) The agentic era and opening up the platform

(10:39) Competition dynamics and being "past peak note taker"

(13:36) AI adoption internally and the 100M/150 people goal

(15:50) Why building internal AI tools was a disaster

(18:08) Advice for established SaaS founders: fork your company

Links mentioned:

Richard White on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/rrwhite

Fathom: https://www.fathom.ai/

The AI Revolution Show is the intelligence podcast for B2B software founders navigating the platform shift, the founders building through it, and the founders already on the other side. Hosted by Alex Theuma, founder of Shift AI Events. Subscribe so you don't miss the next episode.