3 weeks ago
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Veteran entrepreneur Rakesh Mathur stepped down as CEO of the college social network Fizz, handing over the reins to 22-year-old founder Teddy Solomon.
It’s full circle for Fizz, the anonymous platform that Solomon started with his Stanford classmate Ashton Cofer before they dropped out to work on the app full-time. Mathur has been working with the young founders since late 2021, when his daughter – also a Stanford student – met Solomon at a party and proclaimed to her father that she had met “the next Mark Zuckerberg.”
Maybe Mathur’s daughter has a future career in early-stage investing because she was onto something. Fizz isn’t Facebook, and thankfully, Solomon has not yet had to testify for his company’s shortcomings on Capitol Hill. But three years later, he has made a name for himself. Fizz has raised over $40 million and spread to 250 college campuses, where students have posted on the platform about 20 million times.
“From my standpoint, I get to the stage that I find somebody who can do a better job than I can, that has the right level of passion, and then I step back and I’m a chairman, a mentor,” Mathur told TechCrunch.
Mathur decided that Solomon was ready to take the reins of the company because of how much the company had gone through in such a short time period.
“We raised money in the end of 2021, and everything was easy. 2022 was a disaster to raise money in,” Mathur said. “So he lived through that. That normally takes a whole cycle – six, seven years to go through an upturn and a downturn.”
Fizz has also faced the pressure that will plague any social media platform when it gains enough traction – what if people use the platform irresponsibly?
Fizz got into hot water last year when students at a high school in Vermont abused the platform, which turned into a hotbed for bullying. Rather than doubling down on its plans to expand to high schools, Fizz made the choice to stop catering to these younger users, who are less likely to use the anonymous platform responsibly. But at this point, some of the turbulence has settled for the company, which still has about $20 million in funding in the bank.
“The time to do something like this is when you have as much momentum as you could possibly have, and we have unbelievable momentum right now,” Solomon told TechCrunch. “We’re seeing the quickest expansion we’ve ever had, and we’re seeing just the morale in the company and around the app and the excitement around what we’re building higher than ever.”
Fizz has recently started showing advertisements on the app in an attempt to drive some revenue, working with companies like Perplexity. But now, Solomon has to learn how to run ads in a way that doesn’t detract from user experience.
“We have a wait list of companies who are trying to do advertising with us, and we’re taking it very slowly, learning as much as we can,” Solomon said. “I walk around Stanford’s campus and I see DoorDash ambassadors all around campus and companies that are really trying to reach college users, and what we can offer them is they’re all on our platform.”
For Mathur, stepping down as CEO means that he can get back to his retirement.
“I’m as much a serial failed retiree as I am a serial entrepreneur,” he said. But the intergenerational bond that the two entrepreneurs have formed isn’t going away. The two spend so much time together socially – Mathur even took Solomon on a trip across India – that his daughter, the Stanford student who first introduced them, had to warn him that he’s not allowed to go to Stanford parties.
“My friends at Stanford love Rakesh, you have no idea,” Solomon said. But Mathur doesn’t need to relive his youth – he just wants to get the coveted invite to Solomon’s weekly pancake breakfast with his Stanford friends, which takes place every Friday at 6 AM.
“Rakesh gets mad because he says I don’t invite him to pancakes anymore,” Solomon said. “That’s not true. My friends graduated, Rakesh.”
“Part of this transition was that I would get invited to pancakes,” Mathur joked. “That was the final step… I’ve got the pancake invite locked and loaded.”
Solomon learned how to run a startup, raise capital, and manage a team from Mathur. But what he values most from Mathur’s mentorship is his knack for keeping a stressful startup environment energizing.
“What Rakesh taught me most was how to have fun while you’re doing it, because Rakesh has never stopped having fun to this day, after a dozen companies and all he’s done in his career,” Solomon said. “He has an eerily similar energy to me, given how many years apart we are, but we both just love to love what we’re doing, and want to continue loving what we’re doing.”
