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?
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