Welcome back to Found, the TechCrunch podcast where you hear the stories behind the startups from the entrepreneurs themselves. This week we’re talking to Teddy Solomon, the co-founder of Fizz, a social media app aimed at college students focusing on building community on campus. For this interview, we’re joined by TechCrunch social media expert, Amanda Silberling. Darrell, Amanda, and Teddy discuss what Gen Z is looking for in their social media, how to thoroughly moderate the platform, and how this kind of community building could go far beyond colleges.
Welcome back to Found, the TechCrunch podcast where you hear the stories behind the startups from the entrepreneurs themselves. This week we’re talking to Teddy Solomon, the co-founder of Fizz, a social media app aimed at college students focusing on building community on campus. For this interview, we’re joined by TechCrunch social media expert, Amanda Silberling. Darrell, Amanda, and Teddy discuss what Gen Z is looking for in their social media, how to thoroughly moderate the platform, and how this kind of community building could go far beyond colleges.
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Darrell Etherington 0:03
Hello, and welcome to found I'm your host, Darrell Etherington. This is the podcast where we bring you the stories behind the startups from the founders who are building them. Just a little housekeeping before we get started, please rate and review the show. That helps us immensely on whatever podcast platform you listen to. And also come and see us at early stage. That's our event with practical advice for founders. And it's coming up on April 20, in Boston. So you can use code found for a 40% discount on founder and investor passes for that event. Love to see you there. But today, we're talking to a founder of a new social media company. Those don't come along all the time these days. But this one is called fizz. And it's aimed specifically at college students and requires a college email to sign up. And it includes both anonymous and non anonymous communication. And it's a social app that is really spreading like wildfire right now. So we're speaking to co founder, Teddy Solomon, about the company, and about how he had, you know, pretty typical, but also interesting journey to get there, which included dropping out of Stanford. So let's go ahead and talk to Teddy.
Hey, Teddy, how's it going?
Teddy Soloman 1:26
I'm doing well. How about you?
Darrell Etherington 1:27
Great doing great. So we're Hello, Amanda. Amanda is the special guest this episode which Amanda is our expert on all things social and hip and cool.
Amanda Silberling 1:39
I've been Teddy ever been called hip and cool.
Darrell Etherington 1:43
You understand how those
Amanda Silberling 1:46
kids are up to these days? I use the TIC TOCs. And the instant. Yeah.
Darrell Etherington 1:54
Yeah. And so none of us are cool. Actually on this with the exception maybe of Teddy? I don't know, Teddy, would you describe yourself as cool?
Teddy Soloman 2:00
Hard to say? Hard to say?
Amanda Silberling 2:02
First question for every tech founder. Are you cool?
Darrell Etherington 2:08
Yeah, that was a good magic eight ball Answer. Answer unclear ask again later. So Tony, do you want to explain a little bit about fizz? Because typically, we just have founders tell a little bit about their company in case our listeners might not be familiar yet?
Teddy Soloman 2:22
Absolutely. Yes. So Fizz is this social media platform that is exclusively available for college students. And what it aims to be is this safer, private and more engaging space where college students can share authentic content. So in practice, what that means is you have college students who have verified with their.edu, email address, they are only communicating with a community of their peers, that people who share their common experience, and they are posting memes and polls and gifts and links and DMing each other sort of the whole nine yards, they're talking about all things campus life, from parties to classes, to confessions, and everything in between is a platform that's live on over 50 college campuses now and spreading very quickly. And it is really taking college campuses by storm because of this shift that exists within social media. So it's been a very cool experience.
Amanda Silberling 3:12
Yeah, and I think what's also interesting about Fizz is that you are very young, you dropped out of Stanford very recently. And you're creating this for people that are the same age as you and I know when we've talked in the past for pieces I've written on TechCrunch about fears, you would explained that you started this app, because you were in college, in the pandemic, when it's like Congrats, you got into Stanford now sit in your childhood bedroom and go to zoom class. And it's challenging for people to form relationships that way. So I think it's kind of interesting that this is something that you created for a particular moment for community you're a part of, and even if Stanford students and students at other universities are back on campus, now, you're still like, you know, there's always a benefit for people to feel less alone in places where they might feel alone, even if they're not physically alone.
Teddy Soloman 4:13
Totally. We have seen as this generation, myself and my co founder being this generation, we've seen what students want, and what Gen Z wants social media wise. And without a doubt, my age being 20 years old. Now, it's an absolute blessing as I am able to examine the market and listen to users and really understand their experiences and having grown up in this age of social anxiety, this age of social media, really bringing out all of this anxiety and people were I wanted to create a platform where you would feel better coming out of it rather than feeling worse with these legacy social media platforms.
Darrell Etherington 4:51
So what is the key then to making sure that people do have that as like their net outcome like I know you mentioned you know, people are initially anonymous that they can opt to share their identity. Right? So that seems like it's part of it. But what else goes into making sure that the interaction is positive and doesn't come off in a place where people are measuring themselves against each other and bullying and everything else that's happened kind of legacy social media networks,
Teddy Soloman 5:15
definitely. So one is, it's private, when you share this common experience, you actually have a sense of community. So the fact that people are verified with their.edu email addresses, it makes them connect with the other people that they are relating to on the platform. But a big step in this process of creating a safe and positive environment, which is what we always want to do is moderation, which we take a totally different approach to in the past social media platforms, many platforms have taken this centralized model of moderation, where you're gonna have a centralized team, these are people who are keeping the app safe, or at least trying to, but they don't actually understand the content within these communities. And what we say is, we are going to hire students on every campus people who actually understand the posts, and those are going to be the people who are removing content from bullying or Daxing, or offensive content or things like that, and I've given this example to Amanda before, but what we see on Stanford's campus is if somebody says Arriaga sucks, a centralized moderation team is going to remove that post for bullying and say, Stop Bullying Arriaga. But the way that we do it with decentralized moderation, you have students who know exactly what that post is talking about. They're saying the dining hall food sucks and Arriaga dining comments. And that's what's really important about the way we do that.
Darrell Etherington 6:29
Yeah, I read that example in the post that Amanda wrote, and I was like, who's Arriaga reaction until I read down? And then it's like, Oh, right. Okay. So that's a great illustrative example I follow up to that would be we've seen a lot about, you know, the effects of moderation and like what that can do to the actual moderation themselves. Is there additional risk when you're talking about people within the same school, right? Because it's not even like a population they're divorced from? It's like people who are like, they all are in the same community. And if they're taking down a, you know, a horrible post, like something that's maybe like, revenge porn, or something like the impact is much closer to home. Have you thought about that? Have you encountered that or thought about how you deal with that?
Teddy Soloman 7:08
Yeah, so our moderation system is pretty complex in the sense that a lot of the posts are removed by AI, where the most heinous posts, those are posts that are going to be removed by AI, they're never even going to make it up onto the feed, what we do see is that the posts that are extremely niche and hyperlocal, oftentimes not the worst posts, but posts that are in violation of our guidelines, or the posts that these moderators at the schools are going to be removing. And we take a lot of steps to make sure that these moderators have the resources that they need, including people on our full time team that they're in contact with on a daily basis to make sure that they have the guidance on posted should be removed to make sure that they're having a good time with the role. Because our goal at the end of the day is these moderators should be taking ownership over these communities and feel like they're providing this safe environment to their peers. And they take a lot of pride in that. And that's something we found there's a huge amount of pride in these moderation teams across campuses in the US.
Darrell Etherington 7:59
That's more like Reddit moderation, which I think Amanda, you mentioned in your piece, right, like, as opposed to sort of Facebook's traditional moderation.
Amanda Silberling 8:06
Yeah, I mean, I guess, in both Facebook groups and Reddit subreddits, you have, like groups of moderators that are creating a culture themselves. And of course, Reddit and Facebook still have guidelines of their own, but I don't know like, I mean, I have a dark crazy past of Facebook meme group moderation. So, you know, like, there are certain rules, like I fit in groups where the rule is that you're not allowed to use the letter N. So then you delete posts that use the letter N.
Unknown Speaker 8:40
Okay, well, I guess it can be a bit of a
Amanda Silberling 8:42
Yeah, it's See, this is why I'm like, You can't call me cool. I spend time and Internet communities. Haha, we're not using one letter because why not? But I'm, I'm curious of like, how are you preparing moderators to do this kind of work where there is a lot of nuance. And also I think Daryl kind of nodded to like, there's also mental health impacts for people that are in these roles. So I wonder what is the way that you're preparing people for these jobs?
Teddy Soloman 9:14
Definitely. So the way that we even get these moderators is we recruit them and interview them through LinkedIn, we will recruit them. And we'll go through this process of making sure that this is the right role for people. One piece of criteria is they know a lot about their campus. A second piece of criteria for them is that they are willing and able to moderate objectively within this community. And back in the early days of the platform, it was me Of course recruiting these moderators, because we didn't have a team of people. So the first thing I said when I got on the phone with them was this moderator role involves taking down posts that are bullying, Daxing, offensive content, things of that sort. And those words shouldn't mean anything to you right now. Because we're going to put them into context in our training. And when we do that training, we put everything into context and we give countless examples of should this post be run moved in this context, the use of the priorities moderation wise, this is the playbook essentially that you're going to have. So you never feel like you don't know what to do with a post. Because really the worst thing we can find with the moderation process is moderators who are confused moderators who feel like they don't have a playbook moderators who feel like they're moderating subjectively and not objectively. So we always take those efforts beforehand to make sure that every single moderator is on the same page with one another. And then every single moderator understands our guidelines when put in context.
Amanda Silberling 10:30
And what is like the workflow look like for those moderators? Like do they have set times like Wednesdays, from two to five view are moderating or is it more like as they're just checking fizz through the day? Or how does that work?
Teddy Soloman 10:45
It's a combination of things. So one is as they're on the feed, they're able to remove posts that are violating our guidelines. I would say that the majority of posts though, come down from community reporting, where the community can report posts that are in violation of guidelines. And those posts are quickly reviewed by moderators who get a push notification, effectively saying, this post has been reported for spam or this post has been reported for bullying. And they will act on that very quickly, we find that our response time across campuses is below two minutes. And these posts get removed from the feed really almost immediately. So it's a very quick process. And it's all about having enough moderators on the campus. And we'd like to recruit 15 on each campus we go to.
Darrell Etherington 11:24
Yeah, I think I mean, obviously we'd well a lot of moderation. But it does make sense in the context of like a social app now. Right. But it does seem like at least you you're thinking about it throughout and putting a lot of effort into it upfront, which is I think one of the big misses maybe all the existing ones did I still think I mean, for me, I look at it and go it's unmoderated Abul like I leave me out of it. But it's like you had a different thought, which is that people still need this kind of community. I mean, let's talk about kind of how you got into this and why you wanted to do this to begin with, like, we talked about the context of coming to school, in the pandemic. And I think Amanda had a great quote from you in that article about like you were dropped into like a group meet with like, at 400 people or something, which I doubt everyone's just going to clam up and you're not going to have any kind of real conversations. Right. But why did you think you should be the one to do this? And why did you kind of pursue fears to begin with?
Teddy Soloman 12:15
Totally, I mean, it really takes me back to that moment where I got accepted into Stanford right at the start of the pandemic, I get in, I'm stoked, obviously, I'm like, This is the greatest moment in my life. I've gotten to Stanford ready to go to college. And then they dropped that bomb on us, which basically says, You can't come to campus. I was devastated. I was always someone who wanted to like go experience the college experience. And I was hurt by that. So I went online, I ended up on a zoom call, I got put into a breakout room with a guy named Ashton eventually went on to become my co founder. And in that breakout room over the course of two minutes, we decided we're going to put together a group of 25 Strangers, 25 freshmen at Stanford, who are going to go live in Scottsdale, Arizona, and there was absolutely no reason why we picked Scottsdale Arizona, people asked me like, I liked a burger place there when I visited there. But otherwise, we just didn't want to break the bank. We wanted to create this college bubble. And it was the moment that we arrived in Scottsdale and started talking to these freshmen at Stanford, these people we had never met that we knew a platform like fizz had to be created. And what I mean by that is, they talked about their experiences on Instagram, and their experiences on Instagram, where we are looking at these curated highlight reels, we're looking at these glorified moments of people's lives, we go on to Instagram, we see the fakest moments possible, we post the fakest moments possible. And then we leave the platform feeling terrible about ourselves. And then there was Group Me where like you mentioned, we had this 1200 person Group Me for the class of 24 at Stanford. And in this group, me there were maybe four or five people who spoke, nobody was comfortable saying anything attached to their name out of this fear, this social anxiety that our generation has been raised with. And there was this massive whitespace in social media. So that's why we set out to build phys, we knew that we could create a safe platform, if we valued moderation from the get go, we knew we could create an engaging platform, because we were surrounded by people who were telling us what they wanted. They were telling us we want this platform, we need a place to connect. We don't know what's going on at Stanford, we have no way to connect with our peers, we have no way to ask questions to people. And it was very clear that we had to build fizz from that point. So that was two months into freshman year when it got started. And passion and I have been running with it ever since. And we really do feel ownership over this cause just out of what we heard around us our freshman year and continue to hear around us and what we've seen growing up in this generation of social media.
Amanda Silberling 14:39
I have so many questions about getting 25 strangers to live together in Arizona. But it kind of I feel like I'm doing a how do you do fellow kids but like, I was not in college that long ago, even though I'm like, Oh no, it's like, almost five years.
Darrell Etherington 14:57
Oh, boy, Amanda on that road, no. But like,
Amanda Silberling 15:02
I lived in a house that had 18 people in it for three years in college, and it was a disaster at times. And we were all like, mostly friends. So I'm like, how did this happen?
Teddy Soloman 15:17
Yeah, I mean, putting that group together was absolute chaos, because we had no way to really reach people. So it didn't like cold DMing people on Instagram, meeting friends of friends, even if your friend didn't want to go to Scottsdale, their friend might have wanted to go to Scottsdale. And we quickly put together a big group of really great people, people who we are friends with to this day, some of which dropped out of Stanford two more of which dropped out of Stanford to come work for Phys. It was an unbelievable experience. It still baffles me how it sort of came together or how 25 college freshmen parents agreed right to send their kids to Scottsdale, Arizona, but it's awesome. So I wouldn't trade it for the wall.
Darrell Etherington 16:01
Yeah, I mean, it sounds like an innovative and when you're in the position of okay, well, this is our experience with COVID. And with everything else, like what alternatives do we have? And that seems like a reasonable one, right? Especially when you look around and you're just like, oh, everybody's forming like houses for various things. Like why not just apply that to everyday people also, right? Is that influence at all? Like you're looking around, you're looking at like influencer houses and that kind of shit going on?
Teddy Soloman 16:26
I think we just wanted to get away from home, to be honest. I think we wanted to go to college,
Darrell Etherington 16:32
I'm trying to think back to being like 18 or whatever. It's tough.
Amanda Silberling 16:36
Like if I were 18 in 2020, I would have been like, good. Hey, why not go to school? Yeah. So thinking like, Well, how do you like you have to be someone that has the money to do that. But then at the same time, you're not paying room and board at a college and right? Yeah, I don't know, in college dorms are stupid, expensive. I'm like, Why did I have to pay like $1,000 a month to share a bedroom and not have my own bathroom? Like, I just got into studio off
Teddy Soloman 17:07
campus. It was so much cheaper than room and board to be able to go do what we did. We were jumping around Airbnb is across the country. And it was probably half the cost of what room and board at Stanford costs. So that was another another plus to it. Yeah.
Darrell Etherington 17:22
So going back to the fifth, I just I'm curious about kind of like, what happens, you know, the college experience, obviously is like what you're in right now. And it's what you're experiencing right now. And that's like always a great place to start when you're founding a business. Do you think it extends beyond in the same way that some of your predecessors did? And what does that look like? Because it seems like a key ingredient, at least in the way you've been presenting it is that it's like limited to these diet Jews, right?
Teddy Soloman 17:46
Yeah. So it absolutely extends beyond colleges, as long as we stay true to our definition of community. And what that means is, for example, Reddit is interest based. Next door is location based, we are experience based experience is community, if you share a common experience, the content is going to be relevant to you. And that's what we truly believe. So this could absolutely extend into the workforce, it could extend into alumni groups, we already see students at the GSB. At Stanford, it's really an undergrad focused platform, but students at the GSB are coming to us constantly. And they're saying, We want a fizz community for the business school. There's so much room to expand because everything in society is community based. But right now, we're really focused on this initial market of us undergrad and taking over every college in the US.
Amanda Silberling 18:33
Yeah. And the growth has been so fast. Like I think you raised a seed in October. And then by November, you had a 12 million Series A. And also we haven't talked about yet that you have CEO Rakesh, who is like a veteran of Silicon Valley, who you met through his daughter at Stanford. And that's also just like a really interesting dimension to this, where you kind of have the dual forces of like, longtime Silicon Valley guy, and then like 20 year olds with an idea that people resonate with, right. And I wonder, like, what's the dynamic like, with how you and recache kind of like, move through this growth?
Teddy Soloman 19:27
Yeah, so the dynamic is awesome. The story behind me having met Rob cash, which, you know, Amanda, was there meeting his daughter at a frat party at Stanford, which is something that can only really happen at Stanford. And it's very bizarre that it happened that way. But the dynamic both between myself, my co founder, Rob cash, as well as the dynamic within the company, really revolves around the fact that the average age in the company is somewhere in the high 30s. But the median age, probably around 22. And it's very much a youthful vibe within the company. Right? Kash brings all of this experience where he has gone and been a leader and 10 plus companies he's exited numerous times. He knows how to go down a successful path in Silicon Valley. And then you've got myself and Ashton and him. And I just got out of college where we did just over a year of college, we've never been through this before. And the combination is incredible, because you have me and Ashton who really, really understand our market, because we were just a part of it. And we really still feel like we are currently a part of it as 20 year olds and as parts of this generation. And then you've got Rob cash, who stunningly understands our market, to the greatest extent you could possibly imagine for somebody from his generation, and also knows how can we take this product that we built really as a side project originally at Stanford, and turn it into a company and reach as many people as possible. The reason Rob cash came on board in the first place was because he understood our mission, our mission was much bigger than create an app for Stafford. Our mission revolved around the fact that there is this massive, as I've said, generational shift in social media, where as people move away from the big players from Twitter, and Instagram, and platforms like that, towards platforms like be real, or Fizz, or more authentic spaces, Rakesh understood that we saw that we saw the big picture. And it's been amazing working with him.
Darrell Etherington 21:23
The generational shift is something that I keep coming back to just because it's most interesting to me, because we've seen it happen over time and time again, and like it is inevitable, regardless of what Zuckerberg and everyone else would like it will happen, right? Like they will lose their edge and younger generations will choose other options. Now. I'm curious if you're looking around at the landscape. Now, I know you we've talked about moderation and privacy and things like that, but like, what about things like political discussion, or like freedom of speech? Like what do you think about those issues on the networks now? Because they're obviously quite fraught? And do you think about how your users and how your generation thinks about those issues and what that might look like on a platform designed, you know, first for younger users?
Teddy Soloman 22:08
Yeah, it's super interesting to see. Because what CES is, is it's this platform that encompasses everything. And when a platform encompasses everything that includes political discussion, we find the platform to be incredibly apolitical. But within campuses, there are people who obviously disagree with one another. And what they value about phys is that they have this space to openly have discourse, where their name is not attached to it. And it really does create an awesome space for the exchange of ideas. And it's really not a political platform. And I wouldn't necessarily say our generation is a political generation, per se, I don't know that our generation wants to constantly talk about politics on social media, because there's so much of it all around us. So we find that our users prefer to talk about the more basic things that happen in life, like failing an exam, or like making a meme about dining hall food or talking about an event on campus. But when political discussion comes up, it's important that we allow that to happen. And as long as it doesn't move into the area of hate speech or offensive content, and stays really just opinions and discourse. It's important, and it's an important thing to have on our platform. Yeah, I'm
Darrell Etherington 23:18
definitely tired of it as well on my social media. But
Amanda Silberling 23:24
it's interesting that you say that your generation isn't political, because I feel like in my experience, I would disagree even though I guess I'm a millennial, Gen Z, cos. But I think also something that I feel like that gets lost in a lot of the discussions around content, moderation, and freedom of speech on platforms, like Twitter is like the rhetoric becomes like, we're gonna turn Twitter into a place where you can have civil discussions, and it's like, you already can. And I think, I don't know, I mean, with any social platform, it's just a matter of are people willing to engage in debates about potentially heated issues, while still acknowledging the humanity of people that disagree with them. And I wonder if maybe Gen Z is better at that, because they've grown up with the internet and have just gone through the cycles of knowing when it is or is not productive to engage. And I don't know, it's also just so hard to cast a net and say, This is what Gen Z does. And I'm sure my perspective of Gen Z is skewed based on like, I don't know, I used to teach and like creative writing workshops for high schoolers. That's a very specific demographic of teenagers.
Darrell Etherington 24:40
But that's a good point that you make that I don't know that I have any answers about it, but like, my generation grew up without the internet, right? We didn't have it when we were young. And then it became a thing when we were mostly formed human beings, essentially, I guess, and then we sort of immediately got this idea like, Oh, now It's divorced from identity. And I can say whatever I want to people, and there are no repercussions. And also, they're not a real person, because they're on the internet. Like we had that that was our prevailing thought, because it seemed unlinked from reality to us. But perhaps that's not true for your generation.
Teddy Soloman 25:17
Yeah, I'd say my generation grew up with only the internet. So everybody around me hasn't had in person interaction. Because if you want to meet someone new, you're going to meet them online, you're not going to meet them by walking up to them on the street and saying, Hey, tell me your life story. Like, I'd love to learn more about you. I love doing that, as I do
Darrell Etherington 25:36
that every day. I love going out there. And I love hearing the stories of these people on
Teddy Soloman 25:39
campuses, but it's not normal for them. And because
Amanda Silberling 25:43
I started, go ahead, oh, no, just gonna say like, I've made like really close friends on Tinder. And I'm like, that's not what it's for. You go on a date with somebody and you're like, I don't know if I want to date you. But do you want to be best friends?
Teddy Soloman 25:59
Right. And that's sort of how it goes, I think. So I love traveling around to these college campuses, and actually meeting students on the ground and hearing their stories. And I think initially, when you walk up to someone, and you try to talk with them, and you try to learn more about them, they're shocked by it. Because it's just not something we do. And that's another reason why we needed fizz. We need to fizz to be able to connect people in a space because if you can't connect in person, you have to be able to connect online. And that is the nature of Gen Z right now.
Darrell Etherington 26:30
Man, are you gonna say something? I was just gonna ask about the name. But I can save that for later. If you have something relevant to the
Amanda Silberling 26:35
I don't know, it's hard to know. It's like when you're doing a podcast, it's like, Alright, I got to like, be on topic. We're talking about like making friends on. But
Darrell Etherington 26:44
you could definitely talk more about that. I feel like well, did you should embrace that, because Bumble has Right. Like that's a big part of
Amanda Silberling 26:52
Yeah, but that, but I feel like I wouldn't use a dating app to make friends. But it just kind of, I don't know what it says about me that I'm very successful at making friends with people that I went on, like one date with, but no, I mean, I think I'm just being like, Ah, yes, back in my day. But it is really interesting even to see how like in like, 2013 When I got into college, there was a big Facebook group instead of a big group me. And then now the most recent research from Pew about Gen Z social media usage is that literally nobody uses Facebook. Like not literally nobody. That's not the statistic but like, no one uses Facebook. And I feel like that puts fears in a really interesting position because I feel like people are disillusioned with Instagram. They're disillusioned with Snapchat, they're not using Facebook. Twitter isn't really as big a platform as we make it seem when we obsess over everything Elon Musk does all the time. Then people are in a place where they're wanting something new and different. But I also think
Darrell Etherington 27:54
tick tock is just a consumption mechanism. Oh God more replacement for cable than it is for
Amanda Silberling 27:59
social I feel like a lot of people feel intimidated by posting on Tik Tok because it is your literal face. But then Fizz is sort of the exact opposite of that because you're anonymous, and you're posting like text or memes or something like that. And on that
Teddy Soloman 28:15
Facebook note, when I got to Stanford, I was told there's a Stanford 2024 Facebook group, and I did not have a Facebook account. So I created a Facebook account, I tried to figure out what was going on, couldn't really figure out what was going on. But I just saw an empty group. And I was like, I think Stanford or maybe the parents of Stanford are trying to push this new social media platform Facebook, not actually a new social media platform. And then I just deleted the app and called it a day. So it's definitely different from my brother, who was four years older and used Facebook all the time. But now really, no one our age uses it.
Amanda Silberling 28:51
Yeah. Like I used to use Facebook all the time. But now I only use messenger. So I don't know. But another thing that we should probably address before we just talk about all of our experiences when we were 18. What social media platforms did we use? And how often I was doing weird shit on Facebook. So I mentioned this in the series a write up that I did. But you guys had a bit of a issue where there was one point toward the beginning when there were students that found security issues and then fizzes lawyers threatened to them, and then the EFF Electronic Frontier Foundation got involved. And it seems like that is all settled. But I don't think we've really talked about like, how did that impact the company and like, what did you learn from that? Or like, Do you have any regrets about how that all went down?
Teddy Soloman 29:48
Yeah, I'm happy to talk about that. So back when Ashton and I were fully enrolled students at Stanford, the company was Ashton and Teddy. We were informed of the security vulnerabilities, we fix the security vulnerability Have these within 24 hours and brought on security experts to help us do that. And we notified all of our users, we said on our website, what had happened and that we had fix these vulnerabilities. And we put out a notice to them, as well as sending out a push notification in the app. And then we were told by legal team to send over a letter because the security researchers had not followed industry protocol. They responded to us, we met with them in person, it was resolved amicably. And ever since then, we've been putting together a team of the best engineers and security people in Silicon Valley. And we have a great engineering team. And we have a full company now and security has been a top priority for us. That was all resolved. Honestly, within a week or two of it originally happening, the security issues were resolved within 24 hours. I know it popped back up into an article a year later, but we totally value security, and absolutely, really appreciate the efforts that were made to help us fix those problems early on,
Darrell Etherington 30:57
I think, like on that topic, you know, being so young as a founder, like what was the learning process like and like, where did you look to for resources, when you were trying to figure out some of the stuff and the early challenges and stumbling blocks and just understanding how to build a company. You know, when you presumably had not build one before, though I don't I shouldn't make that assumption. But I had
Teddy Soloman 31:17
not built a company. I had no intention of going into the startup space. I was very much into journalism. So I thought I was gonna go into college basketball journalism, I went down a very different path.
Darrell Etherington 31:27
Right? Because you were at the Stanford Daily, right, which is right TechCrunch alma mater, Anthony Ha was one time editor. I think Stanford Daily. But anyways, yeah,
Teddy Soloman 31:37
I did a college basketball podcast for Stanford Daily. I also wrote about college basketball for them, and was very close to going to Medill at Northwestern. So I really was close to going down that path in terms of finding resources and finding help in the early days of the platform. One was digging into the Stanford network, we were able to talk to people who had dropped out of Stanford people who had been through it, and hadn't intended on going into the startup space, but just ended up in this space building a company, we were able to meet people like Rob cash very early on, who was the most instrumental in helping us through all of these processes, because we met Rob cash and brought Rob cash on as CEO, before we dropped out of Stanford, which was in December of 2021. So we had a lot of guidance from early on. And we were fortunate to have that because I would totally be lying to say that we weren't extremely confused. We had this product that was super viral on Stanford's campus. And we were so excited about it, but had no idea how to build the company. So that is,
Darrell Etherington 32:35
that's where we got that help. And ricochet has built and exited a number of companies
Teddy Soloman 32:39
he has he's built about 10 companies and exited seven times, I believe.
Amanda Silberling 32:44
Yeah, I think when I interviewed him, he referred to himself as a failed retiree.
Teddy Soloman 32:52
Yeah, I mean, the story behind that is after that frat party, it was like 2am. And Rob cash, his daughter went home, and then sent me a text and said, You need to meet Rob cash. When we met him, he was like, I just want to play golf all day, and I have retired. But then he was like, but I also want to full time be the CEO of is, and I want to build the company, because he's literally addicted to startups. He is the definition of a serial entrepreneur, he does not have to be doing this. But he loves the fact that we have a mission. And we have a problem that we're trying to solve here. And I couldn't have possibly expected how dedicated he would be to the cause. And he's the number one champion of his across the board.
Darrell Etherington 33:33
related question, but like, given the range of possible outcomes, how attractive is like an acquisition exit to you? I would imagine, you know, some of them can be quite acquisitive, especially Zuckerberg, although it's not his, like, crazy money season spending season probably these days. But like, yeah, that would you entertain a sale? Or somebody to come knocking right now? Or are you in the mood to build or will how's that work? It's
Teddy Soloman 33:55
not attractive at all to us. We're definitely in the mood to build. And we're building something much bigger than what we've even seen so far. So an acquisition is definitely not on our minds right now.
Amanda Silberling 34:06
Yeah. And then I mean, it's kind of interesting, because then you have people like Nikita Breyer, who sold two companies, one to Facebook and one to discord, both of which are teens complements each other, but honestly, which I mean, he's posted a lot of memes on Twitter, like about just essentially making the same company twice and selling it to two different social media platforms. I mean, I do think that does indicate that there is interest in these sorts of anonymous apps, but also, there's a lot of value to just building it out and seeing what you can do without bringing in the same big tech platforms that your audience is disillusioned by
Teddy Soloman 34:51
totally, and platforms like das and he's great at creating apps that are very viral, and then exiting quickly. And what We're doing is totally different. We're attempting to build the biggest social media platform to ever exist. So it's not an anonymous app that's going to be acquired by XYZ. It's we're building the biggest social media platform here. We're building the community platform for not just college students, but eventually everyone. So it's much bigger for us.
Darrell Etherington 35:17
What do you think about like revenue models? Do you imagine it'll be straightforward sort of advertising revenue? Or have you given much thought to that yet? Are you focused on growth? Or what?
Teddy Soloman 35:26
Yeah, so right now, we're not disclosing our possible paths to monetization. But we very much are listening to the users, that is the most important thing for us. Because we know that when you have these super high density communities, so much happens within them. And there's so many capabilities for us to make the product better while creating a path to monetization.
Amanda Silberling 35:47
And then one last question I would have is that we've talked about how things like fizz was built out of a way of forming a sense of camaraderie. And maybe if like, you see, somebody says, Oh, I bombed that chemistry exam. And you're like, oh, yeah, I did, too, even though it seems like I'm the only one who didn't do well. But do you think that there's limitations to how a community can grow when things are kept anonymous, I
Teddy Soloman 36:17
think what we're providing to users is the ability to both be anonymous, but also be verifiable, we have verified display names that people can have within the platform, we have verified organizations within the platform. And I think we provide that perfect mix for users, we see that users oftentimes do not want to have their name attached, because that directly is what strips away the social anxiety. And if you walk out of a class, and you I mean, this happened with an econ exam that I took, I went on to the platform, I'm like, wow, that was a brutal exam. And the first thing I see is six posts that people who just walked out, and they're saying, Oh, my God, that was a brutal exam, I feel so much better about myself. And I don't want everybody on there to know that I just failed that exam. Like, I don't want everybody to know that. But I want to know that everybody else is sharing in my experience, and this is the first opportunity to be able to have that. So I think people really value not having their name attached, or at least having the ability to not have your name attached.
Amanda Silberling 37:17
Yeah. And when I was in college, on my campus, there were like 10 suicides over like four years. And I think, like, a lot of the discourse around that was people like pretending everything is okay. And everybody is doing incredibly and no one has any problems. And you're the only one that is struggling with transitioning to college and making friends and deciding what you want to do with your life or whatever. And I do think that even though sometimes, anonymous platforms get kind of misconstrued as like platforms for bullying, there is a real mental health benefit of people just being able to say like, Yeah, I'm also struggling. And this is hard. And then seeing that you're not alone is powerful
Teddy Soloman 38:05
totally. And it's called Duck syndrome. And it doesn't just exist at the Stanford's of the world. It exists everywhere. We have launched on campuses ranging from Stanford to Abilene, Christian to Ilan to Hampton, and everything in between. And as we go to these campuses, we find that people love to present themselves in their daily life as I'm doing great. I'm doing awesome. But beneath the surface, they are really struggling and they're struggling to stay afloat with duck syndrome is, and fizz acknowledges that, and people ask me, they say, is a positive platform? I tell them? No, it's a safe platform. It's a real platform. What that means is, not all of the content is going to be positive or negative content can include I just failed my exam, or I just broke up with my significant other or things of that sort. But that's not a net negative, that is a net positive that allows people to express themselves and get those feelings and experiences out there. And it's a real platform because that's what life is life isn't always positive fizzes the same way.
Darrell Etherington 39:03
Yeah, my hope would be that you eventually convince people to start associating that more and more with themselves because it's like, we're all just big human messes and just put it out there. Right? Totally. That's one of the only good things about aging is they eventually you're like, Oh, I'm just a human mess, like all the other human messes, and I'm just gonna tell everybody that and then everybody will feel good about it.
Teddy Soloman 39:23
Yeah. And it's, it's really, it's a mindset that our generation doesn't exactly have yet. Because when I show up to these campuses, and I go talk to everybody, like I was at Scripps, and I showed up at Scripps bingo night, and I was just talking to everybody there. It's not something that anybody else would do people feel a lot of shame they feel a lot of anxiety when they do things like that. I'm like, why not? Like let's just talk about life and live life. So yeah,
Darrell Etherington 39:47
so we do have to close pretty soon I need to know what the name is from though because I find it like I know you used to be called but so is it just like you went with the next word that also had Tuesday ads or what is the or Interesting story.
Teddy Soloman 40:01
So yeah, we were originally called Buzz, which was sort of around the idea of like, what's the buzz on campus? And we thought, how else could we possibly sort of like Word that and what name would be really relevant to us? We eventually came upon fizz just sort of talking through names. And we thought, What's visit on campus, we renamed our hot page to the phys ed page because things build up. And it was quick. It sounded great. It really resonated with us in the sense of things really fizz on campuses when we show up. An example would be betting Cookman. We got 90% of the student body on in about 10 hours on that campus. And campus was fizzing as we like to say. So the name just resonates with us for that reason. Gotcha.
Amanda Silberling 40:43
What if it's a community of people who really like fizzy water?
Darrell Etherington 40:46
I mean, I mean, I count myself among that community. Yeah,
Teddy Soloman 40:49
definitely. I'd say one, one in 100. People are like wait, fizzes, not a soda company. Why?
Amanda Silberling 41:00
Well, I mean, this is how you can move on for communities that aren't college students is just have like people that love seltzer. What's visit in the fizzy water world? And that's a great way to wrap up with a horrible joke.
Darrell Etherington 41:16
Yes, I mean, yeah, if you want to pivot down the road that's always available to you. So I think it's smart. But thanks very much, Teddy. It's been great having you on and great talking to you about Phys. Ed. Thank
Teddy Soloman 41:25
you guys so much for having me.
Darrell Etherington 41:28
Found is hosted by myself Managing Editor Darrell Etherington and TechCrunch plus reporter Becca skew tech were produced by Maggie Stamets with editing by Cal Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator Alyssa stringer leads audience development and Henry pic of it manages TechCrunch his audio products. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week.
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