Winners Welcome Podcast, Episode 14 with Teddy Solomon, Co-Founder and CEO of Fizz.

Teddy Solomon didn’t set out to build a social media company. He wanted to be a college basketball journalist. But when COVID kept him off Stanford’s campus during his freshman year, he and a small group of classmates built something to make sense of their scattered, disconnected college experience. That something became Fizz, and five years later it’s live on 800 campuses, closing in on 1,500 by the end of the fall, and recently hit number one overall on Saudi Arabia’s App Store.

On this episode of the Winners Welcome podcast, Teddy sits down with Harlem Capital Managing Partnerm Jarrid Tingle, to talk about what it actually took to get there. He walks through the donut-fueled campus launches that got him chased off Pepperdine by campus police, the call from his now-mentor Rakesh that reshaped how he thought about leadership, and the decision to move his entire New York-bound team out of the Bay Area because, in his words, San Francisco had lost its energy for consumer.

The conversation covers a lot of ground: why Fizz built an ads business without disrupting the product, what most founders get wrong about Gen Z, and the one trait Teddy looks for in every single hire. It’s a rare, candid look at what it takes to build a durable consumer platform in a category most investors had written off.

This episode is powered by Gunderson Dettmer, the number one law firm in venture capital globally, built exclusively for the innovation economy.

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About The Winners Welcome Podcast

The Winners Welcome Podcast brings elite founders and top investors into thoughtful conversations on pushing past possible, sharing the conviction, standards, and lessons behind building generational companies.

About Harlem Capital

Harlem Capital is a venture capital firm that backs the next generation of winners. The firm partners with exceptional founders with the irrational motivation to build generational companies. All Winners Welcome.

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