Teddy Solomon, co-founder and COO of college social app Fizz, joined Cheddar News to talk about the company's latest funding round, its operations and what lies ahead.

College Social App Fizz Raises $12M in Series A Funding

college campus social media networking app. Fizz raising 12 million in a series a round led by any, a fizz says the goal of its app is to provide a personalized social platform for each individual campus and it lets students create text, post, published photos and run polls, but only for their particular campus colleagues. So joining me now is steady Solomon co founder and C E 00 at fizz teddy. Thanks so much for coming on this show and tell me what is special about your app. Yeah, thanks for having me Kristen. So, Fiz is a social media platform created exclusively for college students to be able to share an authentic experience through a safer, a private and a more engaging environment. It was created back in 2020 when I arrived at Stanford in sort of the covid year of college where I was told I can't come to campus and I went online, I ended up on a zoom call, I met a guy named Ashton and we put together sort of a baby stanford to go have this little bubble in Scottsdale Arizona where 25 complete strangers lived. We were all freshmen And we looked around and we saw social media is totally messed up for our generation where Instagram Tiktok, these are platforms where we share a highlight reel of our life and fizz was able to come in as a platform where you share the 99% of your life that doesn't make it onto legacy social media, whether it's breaking up with your girlfriend or your pet passing away or failing an exam. These are all the things that you talk about on fizz, the highs, the lows and everything in between. That is so interesting. So trying to occupy this unique space teddy in terms of the way that people communicate. Is it video photos? Text one of the most common forms and really available forms for communication? Yeah, people will use text, they'll use gifts, they'll use images. People love to post memes on their, people will post party flyers onto the app, they'll take live pictures from the platform, will direct message. Other users. We've seen relationships form in the direct messages. It's been amazing to see the impact of all of these different forms of media on campuses. How do you moderate this? Just to make sure that it is a healthy and safe place for people to interact, right. Moderation has been our number one priority since day one. And what that means for us is students are the ones moderating the platform and the example I always give is if somebody posts Arriaga sucks at stanford a centralized moderation team of people who don't go to the school, they'll say that's bullying we need to remove that post. But stanford students would say that's the name of the dining hall. They're saying that the food at the dining hall is not good. So stanford students moderated the stanford community or howard students moderate the howard community, we have students who understand the hyperlocal continent and they're the ones making sure that the community stays safe in a hybrid model with ai moderation. Look, we know well here at cheddar news, how well hyper local content does indeed perform. I'm just curious about safety on the platform, especially cyber safety. Right? I mean we keep seeing more cybersecurity events, breaches, fraud, spams, you name it, teddy take place. And so how much of a priority is that for you And the people who interact on phys Security is a massive priority. And this platform started out just myself and my co founder Ashton, when we created that we were 18 years old, fully enrolled in Stanford. Nowadays we're able to be supported by a team of engineers that includes some of the best people in Silicon Valley people who have decades of experience here and they're able to guide us along with security consultants to make sure that it's our number one priority of Alongside things like moderation and providing the platform to students that they trust and that they enjoy and that they have a great time using because at the end of the day, what matters is how our users feel and our users, our users need to trust us and trust our platform for us to be able to achieve what we want to achieve here. So you just raised $12 million. Congratulations on that round teddy and how are you going to use that money? We're gonna use it for a few things. One is expansion, so expansion means a couple different things. One is, we're currently at 25 college campuses. How do we go expand to 100 and then 1000? So we'll be at 100 campuses by the end of february. And our goal is to get to 1000 by the end of 2023 expansion also means building our team, continuing to get great engineers And great people onto our marketing team to ensure that we have a durable and and high quality products for users to enjoy. And then we're also going to be exploring business models. We want to see how do our users use this product? What do our users want? Maybe it's a marketplace, but whatever it might be, we want to explore business models with this new capital as well. one final question here is mental health on social media platforms has been such a topic of conversation teddy. And if Fiz is a place where people can go to post about their breakup for instance and things of that nature, how will the moderation policy and team If there is one um try to handle that to make sure that mental health is a priority, right? Mental health is the number one priority. So we have a very strict set of guidelines and these guidelines are centered around protecting the individual and protecting the community from hate speech and things of that sort. So we're going to make sure that people continue to have this authentic experience where they talk about the things that they wouldn't talk about in real life, all the while, we're going to make sure that the content abides by our community guidelines. We have a great team of moderators on every campus and we provide the resources to those moderators to be able to have a positive experience because moderation is a difficult task. There's no question. And with over 1000 posts per day and most of these communities there's so much content to be scrolling through. So it's about us providing those resources to the people who are doing the hard work on the ground and making sure that everybody's having a great online experience. Alright, teddy. Solomon, co founder and C E O. F is teddy. Thank you.