Last fall, Rakesh Mathur stayed up until the wee hours of the morning, waiting for his daughter to come home from a frat party at Stanford.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe walks in at 2:30 with just a big, beaming smile. There\u2019s no apology or anything like that,\u201d Mathur told . \u201cShe says, \u2018Papa, I met the next Mark Zuckerberg!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
The founder of ten startups and a longtime investor, Mathur isn\u2019t naive. It\u2019s a big declaration to call a twenty-year-old at a Sigma Nu party the next big social media founder (and nowadays, the Zuck comparison may not be the most flattering). But by the end of the weekend, Mathur was all in. He invested $750,000 into Fizz, co-founded by Stanford dropouts Teddy Solomon and Ashton Cofer, and then joined the company as CEO.<\/p>\n
About a year later, Fizz just closed a $4.5 million seed round, which Mathur led himself. Now, the anonymous, college-only, Reddit-like social app has spread beyond Stanford to campuses like Rice, Elon, Dartmouth, Wake Forest, Chapman and Tulane, with plans to expand to over 1,000 campuses by the end of next year.<\/p>\n
An app to mitigate isolation on college campuses<\/h2>\n
Who is this so-called, \u201cnext Mark Zuckerberg\u201d anyway, and how did he convince a sixty-something-year-old Silicon Valley veteran to helm his nascent social media platform?<\/p>\n
Solomon, a former economics major, starts the Fizz origin story by declaring he was part of Stanford\u2019s \u201cCOVID class.\u201d He matriculated in fall 2020, possibly the worst time for eager teenagers to begin their next adventure. As expected, it was difficult to make friends or feel like part of a community when the pandemic made it unsafe to live and socialize on campus.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe essentially got to Stanford and felt extremely disconnected from Stanford,\u201d Solomon told . \u201cThere\u2019s so much social anxiety. We got put into a GroupMe with 1,200 students, where four people talked probably, and we were like, this doesn\u2019t work.\u201d<\/p>\n
So, he set out to build an app by college students, for college students, seeking to help his fellow classmates feel less lonely and form meaningful connections on campus.<\/p>\n
Fizz is only available to college students, and users can only access the Fizz community for their own college (Fizz showed me a demo of the app, but I wasn\u2019t allowed to make my own account to test it, since I\u2019m not a student). On the app, students can publish anonymous text posts, polls and photos, which classmates can upvote or downvote. Users can DM each other, choosing to reveal their identity if they so desire.<\/p>\n
At first glance, Fizz appears like a less heinous YikYak, but Mathur and Solomon say Fizz is different because students can only register if they have a valid .edu address for their school.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe biggest differentiating factor is the way that we do moderation,\u201d Solomon told . Fizz hires about fifteen moderators per school who can supplement standard AI-based content screening. The moderators are paid, but Solomon declined to share how much they make. \u201cPosts are removed within less than a minute on average, across all of our communities. We\u2019re able to mute banned users, and if you\u2019re banned from the community, you\u2019re not coming back in, because you don\u2019t have another school email address that you can put in.\u201d<\/p>\n
Solomon thinks that peer moderation is key, since only students familiar with campus culture can parse the nature of hyper local posts.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf somebody were to post \u2018Arrillaga sucks\u2019 on the app, a centralized moderation team overseas would say, \u2018Arrillaga? They\u2019re bullying Arrillaga. We need to take this post down,\u2019\u201d Solomon explained. \u201cBut Stanford students would say, \u2018That\u2019s the name of the dining hall, they\u2019re talking about food in the dining hall.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
The founder also said that 95% of Stanford\u2019s approximately 7,600 undergrads have downloaded the app; at Rice, that figure is 70%. Some of this adoption might be a bit inflated. Fizz promotes the app on campus to students by offering a free donut in exchange for downloads, a tactic that\u2019s pretty common for startups targeting college students. But according to Solomon, Fizz has kept a solid footing on campuses regardless.<\/p>\n
\u201cOn any given campus, we\u2019re going to have 50 to 60 percent of our users getting onto the platform every single day,\u201d Solomon told .<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/gp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/create-P.jpg\")
<\/p>\nImage Credits:<\/strong> Fizz<\/p>\n<\/div>\n With its own CEO leading the seed round, Fizz raised $4.5 million to expand to more campuses around the country. By the end of the 2023 academic year, Fizz hopes to be on over a thousand U.S. campuses. But growth at that fast a rate needs to be handled delicately, or else Fizz could turn into a cesspool faster than you can say YikYak.<\/p>\n Other investors in Fizz include Lightspeed, Octane and other angels. Mathur himself has exited six startups, including the e-commerce company Junglee, which he sold to Amazon in 1998. Mathur has also sold consumer-facing startups to companies like Dropbox and OpenTable.<\/p>\n Fizz is not the first app to capitalize on students\u2019 desire for a more authentic social media experience. Jamie Lee dropped out of Columbia to build Flox, a social app that helps friend groups connect. Another Stanford student, Liam McGregor, just raised a $5 million seed for Marriage Pact, an intense dating app with no swiping that\u2019s intended to forge deep connections based on in-depth questionnaires.<\/p>\n Fizz has also taken hold at the same time that BeReal is becoming increasingly popular among Gen Z users. Like Fizz, BeReal seeks to create a more authentic alternative to apps like Instagram. BeReal and Fizz both leverage a college ambassador program to jumpstart adoption among their target audiences.<\/p>\n It\u2019s still up in the air whether BeReal is all hype or a true hit \u2014 the app needs to prove it can maintain its popularity and start making money \u2014 and Fizz will face the same challenges.\u00a0Though Fizz isn\u2019t currently monetizing, Solomon and Mathur say that they\u2019ve thought about creating a marketplace for students to buy and sell things, like textbooks or bicycles.<\/p>\n Fizz currently has 22 full-time employees, who operate out of a house in Palo Alto near Stanford\u2019s campus.<\/p>\n \u201cInstagram is basically just a curated highlight reel,\u201d said Solomon. \u201cWe wanted to create something where people can actually communicate with one another.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last fall, Rakesh Mathur stayed up until the wee hours of the morning, waiting for his daughter to come home from a frat party at Stanford. \u201cShe walks in at 2:30 with just a big, beaming smile. There\u2019s no apology or anything like that,\u201d Mathur told . \u201cShe says, \u2018Papa, I met the next Mark […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1216222,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1216221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrity-gossip"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1216221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1216221"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1216221\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1216221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1216221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1216221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Fizz, or fizzle out?<\/h2>\n