Teddy Solomon, co-founder of Fizz, secured $41 Million in funding from top-tier investors, leading to the fast growth of his community-driven social app.
Teddy Solomon, co-founder of Fizz, secured $41 Million in funding from top-tier investors, leading to the fast growth of his community-driven social app. This success is attributed to strong metrics, authentic leadership, and financial discipline, indicating a later-stage funding round such as Series B+.
So, at the lowest points, you need to be able to operate as your best self. And at the highest points, you can't get too high. If you're stable, if you're grounded, well, that's how you can go and build a great company. It's about staying leveled and knowing that things could go poorly at any given moment. And we're going to have to persevere through that moment. All righty. Hello everyone and welcome to the Dealmaker Show. So today we're going to have a really amazing founder uh joining us. We're going to be talking about the building, the scaling, the financing, all of the above. Uh I think that his story is quite impressive, very inspiring, you know, journey too. uh you know starting with with sports at a very competitive level you know early on in his life but again brace yourself uh for impact because it's going to be quite the the conversation and without further ado let's welcome
our guest today Teddy Solomon welcome to the show thank you thank you for having me Alejandro pleasure to be here so born and raised in San Francisco give us a walk through memory lane how was life growing up for you yeah it was interesting growing up in the middle of a relatively big city. I think uh quite different from most people's experiences, but I had a relatively traditional upbringing, at least within the context of uh being born and raised in San Francisco. Um, growing up, I had a couple key passions of mine. I was never that much of a school guy. I was always kind of working on my own projects and I was going and uh doing things outside of the classroom. So, uh, when I was really young, I got into pingpong or table tennis. Uh, when I was nine years old, I went to this rec center near my house and I met a guy named Lamb. He was 85 years old. Um, spoke no English and he taught
me how to play ping pong at the age of nine. Um, over the course of the next decade, I ended up becoming a competitive table tennis player. Um, I played in the Olympic trials in 2020, lost miserably, but uh, still had the opportunity to really play at a high level, which was a great time. And I think other than that, um, I I really was into college basketball uh, from the age of three. It was sort of my life's passion. I wanted to be a college basketball journalist. Uh I was in San Francisco, went to elementary school two blocks away from the University of San Francisco and uh had the opportunity to eventually build my own media outlet in high school and travel all around the country covering college basketball. That was my dream long term and to this day still one of my great passions, great hobbies. And you know, with it being April now, I no longer have any hobbies. So, uh just trying
to to get right along now that March Madness is over. So entering Stanford, Stanford was a quite a pivotal experience for you even though it didn't, you know, obtain the desirable outcome, you know, when you started it, you know, because you didn't really go all the way, but give us, you know, kind of like a sense of um of what happened there, you know, so you enter Stanford and then, you know, all types of stuff happens, you know, that really pushes you into the venture world. Yeah, I 100% did not expect to end up in the place where I am right now. Um, back in 2020, I arrived at college in a really weird time. My senior year of high school was when the pandemic hit. Um, so March of 2020 was my senior year of high school. And then September of 2020 when college was supposed to start, we were in really the core of the lockdowns, the shutdowns, the uh the COVID pandemic. So Stanford told
us you can't come to campus. And that was crushing to me. Somebody who really loved the concept of the college experience. I had seen that through my journeys covering college basketball. I knew that I wanted to get an experience with other people. I love people. I think people are interesting. So I wanted to go meet my classmates and not just live at home. Um so I got onto a Zoom call back in about August of 2020 and it was a hundred people who did not want to just live at home. They wanted to go experience something akin to college even though we couldn't come to campus because of the pandemic. And I got put into a breakout room on this Zoom call with a guy named Ashton. He was in Columbus, Ohio. I was in San Francisco. And I said to him, I'm like, Ashton, I've got this idea of a bunch of Stanford freshman going and living in Scottsdale, Arizona. It is 116 degrees. It's super cheap
right now. We knew we couldn't afford to live in the Bay Area on our own. uh and Ashton was on board. So we went and we convinced about 25 Stanford freshman to move with us to Scottsdale, Arizona. And uh that is what led me on a pretty unbelievable journey over the course of the next few years. I guess touching on your point of how did I not last there that long? Um I initially wanted to be a college basketball journalist. Like I said, from the age of three, that was what I wanted to do. I thought that was my calling. Um, but it was when I arrived in Arizona and looked around me and saw, well, people are on Instagram where they post twice a year. It's a highlight reel. It's not a place where they uh really talk about anything real in their life. It's 1% of their lives. I use it. Other people use it, but it's entertainment. Um, Zuck is in court right now saying it's entertainment and not
social media. uh there was a giant group chat where maybe three people would speak because having grown up on social media, you're expected to present the most perfect version of yourself. If you can't do that, then don't say anything at all. So, we said, well, there has to be uh another way. There has to be some way to bring community together in an authentic way to be able to encompass the 99% of things that don't make it onto Instagram and Tik Tok. And that's what eventually led me on the journey, which I'm sure we'll talk about, that that led to me dropping out. So let's let's talk about to the um obviously you know you you you the whole experience happened during university but I want to talk about to dropping out because here you are in one of the top universities in the world and dropping out of it you know that's a quite the decision uh and I know that obviously that came out of
uh a frat party out of all places so um you know walk us through the sequence there of events. Yeah. So, where I where I just left off was, you know, we saw this problem in social media and we knew there had to be a solution. We wanted to be able to connect with our peers at Stanford. So, we spent our freshman year going and building uh what we call Fizz, which is this private verified community you verify with your.edu email. Once you're in, you can post images, polls, videos, gifts, links, DM people, buy and sell, the whole nine yards. Like the one-stop shop for campus life. We always believed there had to be a way to build communities around shared experience, context, and identity. and school was the logical starting point when it came to that. So, we spent our freshman year jumping around the country. We lived in Michigan, we lived in Tennessee, we lived in Florida, we lived in
Arizona, we lived all over the country, and that was while we were building the app. Well, fast forward to uh summer of 2021, uh at 6:00 in the morning, me and a bunch of friends of mine, we walked around Stanford's campus and we threw flyers under people's doors at 6:00 in the morning. Uh and the app fizz which we had been building for the last 8 months just exploded on campus. By dinner time the majority of the school was on. It was outrageous. And we you know being people who didn't even expect to end up in the startup or apps world. Uh we were like what what do we do about this? And then within you know two or three days we had every single VC in Silicon Valley in our email inbox. We're like what is going on right now? This is like I want to cover college basketball. like that's that's what my dream is. Uh it was wild. We decided to not take money in that moment. But it was when we
came back to school in fall of 2021, uh that I went to a frat party, this the story that you're referencing there, uh this infamous frat party where I showed up, I gave my phone number to some people and I met this girl named Ela. She texted me at 3 in the morning and she said, "You need to meet my dad. He's a serial entrepreneur. he's really interested in what you guys are doing. And me and my co-founder Ashton, well, we were really intrigued by that. We had always thought, well, the reason we're not dropping out is we don't we don't have that mentorship. We never wanted to be in the startup world. We just love our product and we love the reason why we're building it and the problem that we're solving. Um, so I went and I met Rakkesh, uh, who was her dad. And after a manyhour conversation, he basically said to us, "Look, I'll put $750,000 into the company, and I'll come on as the
initial CEO of…