Richard Hollingsworth, CO-Founder & CEO @ Fyxer AI

0:00For this watching, we have got Richard from Fixed AI joining in a minute. Fixed obviously just announced their huge Series B round yesterday when they raised$30 million, hit$17 million AR. We're going to be getting into the fundraise, the explosive growth, the state of AI across Europe generally, raising in America versus the UK, his initial round with 20 VC and where that came from, and all those good bits. So he's going to be joining any minute, which is super, super exciting.

0:30Richard Hollingsworth:I can actually see him already. Amazing. All right. I think he's in. Rich, can you hear us? I can do. Yeah. Hey, how you doing? Good. Thank you. How are you? Yeah, really well, Seb. Very nice to meet you properly. I've been so looking forward to this. You guys have had some incredible guests on recently. So very excited for it. Yeah, look, it's going well. We're having fun. Before we kick off and get into everything, we want to talk about the fundraise. We want to talk about, you know, your explosive growth. For those of you who may not be familiar with yourself or Fixer, can you give a super high level intro into who you are and what you're building?

1:06Yeah, sure. So my name is Rich. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Fixer. For those that don't know, we are the world's largest AI email assistant. This week has been an absolutely huge week for us. We have just raised our Series B. It's less than six months after we raised our Series A. we launched our product uh in the middle of last year and this year we have grown from 1 million to 18 million in ARR it's been a pretty wild year blind I was gonna say last time I so exciting yeah it's crazy like I was speaking to uh Lucy your head of marketing when when she was kind of telling me about the announcement it was 16 million dollars ARR and then it was like two days later she was like sorry it's now 17 million dollars ARR and now you're here saying it's 18 million dollars i mean yeah we we add about three quarters of a million uh a week so um it's happening very very quickly um and that number grows as well so um it's tough good good that it's a live show yeah because two seconds later it's gonna reason yeah you almost need like a live like tracker like ticking up one in the office as you can imagine uh it's super motivating and we have a bell as well that we ring for every million.

2:20No way. So it's doing well. Like we need to ring it. Yeah, that's amazing. Exactly. Get us in the office. I want to be there when you hit like 20 million or 30 million, like stream it live. Oh, the scenes when we hit 10 were absolutely wild. Like at the beginning of the year, we were just a team of four people, right? So I told them at the beginning of the year, like we have an opportunity to hit 50 at the end of the year. And the prospect of doing that seemed totally impossible at the time. And so with each ring, it feels like we get closer and closer to this impossible goal that we set at the beginning of the year.

2:56So the excitement when we hit those big round numbers is awesome. I mean, the atmosphere in the office must be amazing when you kind of hit those achievements. Can we touch on the Series B? So this was six or seven months after the Series A. Where did this come from? What enabled you to raise this money? um yeah were you getting inbounded from vcs or was this like okay we we know this is going well let's kind of like restock the war chest and just swing big what happened yeah absolutely i think i think you have to go back to uh probably a year ago um where we just launched the product for a team of four people within three months we were doing about 300k in arr and most people once they launch their product start thinking about marketing but our we are building for a billion dollars in revenue and uh in order to do that you need a proper sales engine so on day one of the company we did zero marketing we just did sales um and about a year ago we joined hf0 which is a accelerator in san francisco just four people and 8x our revenue in that time just through sales so we raised our series a off the back of a kind of sales led motion with minimal visibility over like what marketing might look like um and we targeted 17 million by the end of this year within a couple of months of testing marketing we just saw the opportunity uh for like end of year revenue ultimately grow exponentially and it became clear kind of probably in march that we were going to need to raise sort of to recapitalize the business in order to kind of meet that demand.

4:40Richard Hollingsworth:Amazing. To help with the marketing expense as well that you switched on sort of. Yeah. And ultimately the team size. One of the big lessons that we took out of this period was one spends a lot of time when you're planning for like the downside outcome. Like if this plan doesn't work what are we going to do and what we haven't done enough of was plan for what if this works and uh when we scaled from one to five million in in such a short period of time things in the business started breaking very very quickly uh for example our customer support tickets we went from responding to uh customer requests like within five minutes up to five hours and it's poor like we've kind of had to bring all hands on deck like everyone in the team We started responding to customer support tickets in order to bring that number down as quickly as possible.

5:35But kind of those scaling issues started breaking as we were growing much faster than the plan had anticipated.

5:42Richard Hollingsworth:Can I ask, in your product, you don't want things to break down because email and sort of EA activities, people get like very high urgency, I can imagine. Yeah, absolutely. And trust is really, really essential when you're so closely tied to people who see their email as an expression of their relationship with their clients. And so you can't be in a place where you're unresponsive or you're unreliable or anything like that. So it's absolutely paramount to have the business well capitalized to be able to kind of deal with the kind of scale that we're going through. And the vision of$50 million by the end of the year and$100 million next year kind of just changed the trajectory of what was going to be required in order to hit that plan.

6:32And so, yeah, we were very fortunate to be able to do the raise very quickly. We raised the$30 million in nine days, which is a metric that we measure ourselves against. um we're a like very execution orientated team uh and we see fundraising as um us stepping away from growing the business and uh the the challenge i set my team at the beginning of the year was to uh grow the valuation of the company by two million dollars every day and when you think about it through that lens stepping out of the business for weeks at a time to do fundraising It's extremely expensive. It's a big distraction for the whole team.

7:14So we really narrowly focused on doing it as quickly as possible with the best possible partners to set ourselves up for success for the rest of the year. That's an insane speed. Like how did you get ready to run the process in nine days? Did you have a target list? Did you have VCs who are interested? And how did you apply the pressure on them to get them to move quickly? There was some forethought that went into this, actually. Honestly, it's one of the biggest advantages of working with somebody like Harry and the 20VC team. As a British company, I think one of the big challenges you've got when you're going out to Silicon Valley to go and raise is, generally speaking, people won't have heard of you.

7:54And one of the promises that Harry made to us at the Series A was to close that gap. and so i i probably sent 30 emails to gps of all of the top firms in in uh in sf um before the raise and 100 of them responded to me because every single person knows who we are as a result of harry um so you know the numbers etc are like a table stakes as well but uh like it really really helps to have the right kind of support in the team around you that's um yeah yeah that's like an amazing validation of like Harry's model and the media venture model, I guess. I wanted to ask about kind of going back to your early attempts into marketing and the insane growth that you've seen, what channels have been the most successful for you in growing ARR so quickly?

8:46So the really key thing in order to grow the revenue really quickly that we realized at the beginning was A, this sales motion. We have to be able to, once you win an account, take that account from one seats to two seats to five seats to 10 seats and you also need to retain those accounts if you're not doing that there really is no point in spending any money on marketing or doing anything in that area so we spent that first six months mastering that process and actually the year culminated at the end of last year we managed to close a seven-figure enterprise deal which we actually did in seven days um with the uk the us's largest real estate broker they're a company called exp realty and you need one that that was one seat who signed up via a meta advert uh who then the product through product-led growth we got to like 10 20 seats then a salesperson in this case it was my brother archie um moved took that from a 40 seat deal to a 5 000 seat deal he did fly halfway across the US and turn up at the guy's house unannounced in order to do it, which is probably not a scalable strategy.

10:02But the way that we approach kind of go to market is very much with B2C to B2 Enterprise in mind, because that ultimately is how you're going to get this compounding growth.

10:16Richard Hollingsworth:Yeah, that's super cool. You do start, I was going to ask that you start with consumer, someone hears it, someone adopts it, and then you can target that organization and kind of go out from the individual to the enterprise deal. That's exactly right. Yeah. So today we have probably 50 % of our traffic from organic, 25 % from paid referrals, make up the rest of it. and so that gets you your first person and then from there you can grow within the organization um the kind of retention metrics etc are all much much better as soon as you get more seats in the organization as well so like everything in the company is geared towards that motion and it speaks to this how do you get to a billion in in revenue uh what a lot of people don't think about uh when you're trying to get from zero to one is like what the actual long-term journey to get to a billion in revenue, which is the outcome you really need for these companies.

11:15And the only way you get there is with sales motion. You can't just do it through self-serve. There comes a point where kind of growing beyond a hundred million in revenue is really, really hard to do. So we are fortunate. My founding team is myself, our CTO, Matt, and our CRO, Archie, who's also my brother. And having a kind of salesperson in the founding team meant that we had the luxury of choosing to do that from day one.

11:45Richard Hollingsworth:Super interesting. What really stood out to me as well is that you went from being an agency that helps you find EAs to now becoming a tech company that replaces your EA. What was like the most surprising thing about that transition for you? yeah um it's uh i think people think of this as a bit of an overnight success um but this is absolutely not true at all and the reason that we have the best product in the space um is like sure you like you need to have the best models you need to have the like the most context on the user but like really really crucially you need to have the best training data and uh so archie and i ran the largest executive assistant agency in the UK for six years.

12:30I've hired like hundreds of executive assistants. Archie has sold millions of dollars of deals with companies like PwC, huge organizations. So from our perspective, it feels like we have already built this company or like the analog version of it. And so nobody knows more about what customers want than we do. And that is the huge advantage. And what it allowed us to do was know exactly what to build. So we had instant product market fit because we knew the customer so well and the workflow so closely. We knew exactly how to build it. And some companies can spend a year doing that. So it really allowed us to move much, much faster than like alternatives in the market.

13:16And the way we see this is like this is a race. this is a 10 billion dollar opportunity and uh it's the winner takes all opportunity so being the fastest in the race is a massive massive uh advanced pitch yeah and having real empathy

13:36Richard Hollingsworth:for the user because you've kind of done it before in the service business it's kind of it's kind of like every ai founder's dream today is to be the service founder first and then slowly in the background almost plug in plug in the ai uh and you kind of did that naturally um are the i'm also interested in the client overlap like are the same people who hire a real ea the early adopters of the ai ea that's so interesting you asked that yeah we hoped they would be but they're absolutely not um yeah so in our previous company we would support the the highest people in an organization and we work with startups all the way up to as i said companies like pwc um and it would usually be people who are on two hundred thousand dollars a year plus in order to warrant the cost of a human executive assistant and we tried for six years to better leverage technology to pull the price down to better service this like middle group of people who have the same kind of characteristics of kind of busyness and email overload and meeting overload but with none of the support tool.

14:45And it was impossible to do it without AI. And when GPT-3 was released, we had this like eureka moment where we realized that the technology was suddenly available. We were sitting in our office together, like looking at each other, literally just being like, this is like completely changed the game for us. And these executive type people, So our assistants would do 2 ,000 different types of tasks for their clients. So the breadth of bespoke needs that these people had was so wide, you could never build an AI tool for them. But this group that sits below them, this manager level of people, had a much more specific acute problem, specifically with email and with meetings.

15:36things and so we knew this was like the exact point to tackle and that it would have the scale necessary for a tech company as well and maybe this kind of sense yeah that's super interesting when i i signed up to the free trial like a week ago i'm absolutely loving it and it's like for me some of the biggest value ads is is like the it's almost like it's almost like calendly built into my email so fixer will like draft a reply and be like hey feel free to book time here and for me I was like really nervous to send that email because I was like, how on earth is this going to work? Is this going to do it?

16:10And I did it. And it was just like absolutely game changing for me. And so, you know, that use case has just been a phenomenal use case for me. Drafting the emails has been has been amazing. When you look forward down the line to the future, do you see more and more use cases that you want to expand into to kind of slowly encompass that kind of the broad 2000 things? or are you going to be hyper-focused on just absolutely nailing like the email experience and the meeting experience? Once you win the trust of a customer, there is so many things that you can help them with in their life. Once you have enough context on them from the knowledge you get across their workflow, you can be so valuable to them.

16:52But right now, all we think about is being as narrowly focused as possible on predicting what the next email you're going to write is because that is where like you ask anyone on the street like what they hate most about their job is either going to be their manager or it's going to be their inbox and like so focusing really really narrowly on a bit like how cursor have just focused on what's the next line of code you're going to write just focusing on what's the next email you're going to write and if we just solve that one problem it will transform the way everybody works like i'm sure like me the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning is check your inbox and the last thing you do before you go to bed is check your inbox like wouldn't it be awesome if we could just change that amazing that's super cool um i wanted to to talk about the role that i actually posted about on linkedin the other day it's like a head of content type role paying up to 140 000 pounds a year uh you're building in public i've seen your like super high quality videos where you talk every week about fixer what you're focusing on how does this all tie in to sort of your broader social strategy you know building in public hiring an extremely qualified content lead what kind of what value do you see that adding over time so uh i think they're two two slightly separate things the um the head of content role specifically is we have a general principle that we hire the absolute best people that we can and leverage them as much as possible with AI.

18:24And so we have fewer people kind of adding more value. And just exceptional content transforms businesses, particularly ones like ours. So it makes total sense for us to get the absolute best person in London that we can. The building and public piece is more of a personal regret that I have where Harry actually told me at the beginning of the year, he was like, you need to capture this. you are going to go you know you're going to blow through your uh your plan and you're going to have this crazy journey it's such a special moment when you're four people in an office just building your team for the first time you're going to have so many firsts and he was like you need to capture all of this i was like yeah i will i will um we'll do it just like at the end of q1 and uh i kept just delaying it and when we raised the series b i looked back on this first six months of the year and regretted not capturing more of just the energy, the vibe, the exciting problems that we solve throughout the year.

19:27In the last month, we have done so many things. I've been opening our office in New York. We've been completely rewriting our product strategy, just focusing on this, predicting the next email. There's so many big moments that we've had, and it feels just crucial to capture that.

19:44Richard Hollingsworth:it's like a digital diary that you're putting together exactly yeah yeah i'm terrible at taking photos and remembering uh all of the special moments and like uh this is such a incredible experience like i want to always remember it that's awesome and have you seen a lot of traction coming from that piece so from the you know the documenting the journey side of things Is that already starting? Not from a growth perspective. We're not seeing it as like a kind of growth channel. I think the way that we look at it is more, you want people to be able to get to know you and to do that in a way that doesn't require a huge amount of input from our team, honestly.

20:31Like CEOs like myself at this kind of point get a lot of pressure to speak, spend most of the time speaking at conferences and going and doing loads of networking and that sort of thing. And honestly, that's not how I look at being my most productive self. Like the most important thing I can do is wake up every morning and like help solve what the biggest bottleneck in the company is. And so this is a really fantastic way for people to get to know the business, to see kind of the progress and how we tackle problems in a relatively light touch way, in a really authentic way. um and yeah like what's interesting is everyone that we interviewed says oh i watched the vlog and so you know it's working for that reason yeah and you're like building trust with people

21:17Richard Hollingsworth:that that's that's what it always comes down to with with these like talking head videos is people feel like they know you already whether it's going to be a customer who stumbles upon it or a future hire or whatever it could be that might help you yeah i think particularly when you're trying to hire the best people you know they've got lots of options to work out the best companies in the world and they need to know like who we are and why we're going to win and 15 minutes at the end of an interview to ask some questions to do that just isn't enough um and so we want to give them the content to be able to make decisions how big is the team now so we are 45 people uh we have grown that from, I'd say, four at the beginning of the year.

22:04We are 75 % in London office, 25 % in the New York office. And that split really is just engineering here and go to market in New York. By the end of next year, I imagine that to be more like 50-50.

22:20Richard Hollingsworth:Yeah. How has the US expansion been?

22:26so it's do you mean from kind of hiring people that and that's the thing um you know whatever

22:33Richard Hollingsworth:stands out i think hiring is one and the other one is is the uh are the clients different is is enterprise sales totally different uh in the u.s i'm actually dialing in from new york right now so uh it's very tough to find the difference um so it would be super curious but surprised you so uh i think the you have to have a u.s presence as a company like ours um and the thing that we really see is the the biggest difference between the uk and the u.s is is this just magic happens in the u.s that doesn't happen in the uk uh because the market there is just so much greater um this enterprise deal that we closed at the end of last year was an opportunity that came our way where the CEO of a public company reaches out to Archie and me personally and says, I love your product.

23:24I'm two weeks in and I've already got 30 of my team using this. Like, how do we roll this out to more of my team? And we said, how do we get, we said, we haven't done an enterprise sale yet. For you to be our first and for us to give you the resources that we need to deliver that contract, we need a million dollar contract from you. and we were in the in the midst of uh an accelerator program knowing that we were going to be raising a series a shortly and we said we need also to close the deal in seven days so that we could arrive at the demo day uh with that deal signed um they told us like there's absolutely no way uh that a public company can move that quickly in that time frame and so uh Archie decided to catch the next flight out to a town called Bellingham in Washington State, which is on the border with Canada.

24:21Flew from San Francisco to Seattle at six in the morning and landed in Seattle and rented a car and drove to 10 minutes down the road from where the CEO lives and text him to say, like, I'm here all afternoon to do a deal with you. like there's nothing we can't do in an afternoon together and uh they moved heaven and earth and signed the deal actually on the morning of the demo day pitch so i had to rewrite my presentation to uh like uh to to kind of incorporate it in which was a nice problem to have i suppose um that's the sort of thing that like only i think that only happens in america and so So we make sure that we never miss opportunities like that.

25:07Like we will always jump on a plane. If something like that comes my way this afternoon, I will be on the first flight to Washington this evening.

25:17Richard Hollingsworth:Yeah, it's very relationship driven here. I feel like Lisa Germany, it's often very process driven and very, very hierarchy driven. And here, you know, trust can go a really, really long way. Yeah, that's an absolutely amazing story, Rich. What do you think we need to do in Europe to kind of create that magic here? So the thing that really worked for us was starting up in the US. So spending the four months in San Francisco after we'd kind of launched the product, spending four months there completely transformed our belief. And I think that's the really key thing. so when we were in the uk and we were launching the product like basically everyone just said like oh but what if google do this like google are probably going to do this microsoft again and it's like it was honestly it was like exhausting uh wading through that and as soon as we touched down in san francisco the narrative totally changed where people said like i don't know if this is going to work but if it does this will be huge and we were like that is the end that is the energy that we need to take back to the uk and so at the end of the program in december when we raised the a we had the opportunity to either stay in san francisco and build from there or come back to the uk and the thing that made the decision for us was that we didn't meet we met some really talented people in san francisco but but nobody more talented than we knew in london um And the only thing that felt really different was this belief that it was possible to build these multi-billion dollar companies because you meet people every week that have done it.

27:05So it makes it so much more feasible and realistic for it to happen. And as a result, just everyone believes that this is possible. so we thought if we can bottle that up and give it to our team when they first joined fixer we give them that belief then there's no advantage to be in san francisco versus here amazing man that's a yeah it's phenomenal what you've built um we're out of time rich but thank you so much for joining like you know i'm a huge fan of the product and the journey that you've been on um so yeah i would love to get you back on at some point but otherwise just keep us in the loop of any news changes how things are going because you know i'd love to talk about it even more i think i think you're building a truly generational company and it's amazing to see like european european founders do that so um thank you for your time rich thanks so much thank you so much for having me i speak soon