This Entrepreneur Raised $41 Million To Build A Community-Based Social App For Gen Z

Teddy Solomon has demonstrated that in the startup world, the best entrepreneurs aren’t just born, they are forged through unexpected challenges, relentless creativity, and the courage to take leaps when the stakes are highest.

Teddy is the co-founder of Fizz, the fast-growing, community-driven social app that has taken U.S. college campuses by storm. From competitive ping pong to pioneering a new category in social media, his journey impresses with its vision and authentic leadership.

Listen to the full podcast episode and review the transcript here.

From San Francisco to the Olympic Trials

Teddy’s early years were marked by a fierce competitive spirit and a deep passion for sports. Growing up in a traditional household in San Francisco, he wasn’t a conventional classroom kid. Instead, he was more interested in following personal projects outside of school.

At just nine years old, Teddy picked up ping pong at a local rec center with the help of Lam, an 85-year-old who spoke no English but taught Teddy the game with incredible patience and wisdom.

Over the next decade, Teddy honed his skills, eventually competing in the 2020 USA Olympic Trials for table tennis. Despite ending in defeat, this experience taught him invaluable lessons about persistence and discipline.

Parallel to his love for table tennis was Teddy’s deep passion for college basketball. Starting at just three years old, Teddy dreamed of becoming a college basketball journalist.

He went to elementary school two blocks away from the University of San Francisco, home of his favorite team, the USF Dons.

By high school, Teddy had already built his own media outlet and traveled across the country, covering college hoops. These experiences were a precursor to the entrepreneurial instincts that would later define his career.

A Pandemic, A Zoom Call, and the Birth of Fizz

When Teddy entered Stanford in 2020, he expected the whole college experience. Instead, the COVID-19 pandemic shut down campus life ahead of his freshman year.

He was devastated because he wanted to go out and meet people. But where others saw disappointment, Teddy saw opportunity.

On a fateful Zoom call meant for 100 displaced freshmen, Teddy met Ashton Cofer. Their discussion centered on wanting to experience something like college, even though they couldn’t visit the campus due to the pandemic.

Together, Teddy and Ashton hatched a plan: move a group of 25 Stanford freshmen to Scottsdale, Arizona, to live together and recreate a version of college life. During that time, Teddy noticed that social media wasn’t solving the need for authentic, everyday human connection.

Instagram was a highlight reel; group chats were dead zones. There had to be a better way for young people to connect around the full, unfiltered spectrum of life experiences, and not just the curated 1%.

That realization led to the creation of Fizz, a private, verified, and hyperlocal community platform. Here, using their dot-edu email, students could post authentically and anonymously and connect with their peers on the Stanford campus network.

Essentially, it was a channel to bring the community together on the 99% of daily life that doesn’t make it to Instagram and TikTok. Users could post images, polls, videos, GIFs, links, send DMs to people, buy and sell, and more, essentially serving as a one-stop shop for campus life.

Teddy and Ashton had always believed there had to be a way to build communities around shared experience, context, and identity, and school was the logical starting point.

How a Frat Party Changed Everything

Fizz’s big break came unexpectedly in 2021. After months of development, Teddy launched Fizz at Stanford by distributing flyers across campus at 6:00 a.m. By dinner, the majority of the campus was on the app.

Almost overnight, venture capitalists flooded Teddy’s inbox. But despite the frenzy, Teddy and Ashton initially declined investment, believing it was too early. Three months later, Teddy met a Stanford freshman named Ila at a frat party.

That same night, Ila sent off a 3 am text, introducing Teddy to her serial entrepreneur father, Rakesh. Rakesh offered $750K in seed funding if they were willing to drop out of Stanford and pursue Fizz full-time.

He also offered to serve as the initial CEO. After some late-night whiteboarding, Teddy and Ashton decided to bet everything on Fizz. They left Stanford and never looked back.

In retrospect, Teddy recalls how they were intrigued by the offer but hadn’t considered entering the startup world, as they lacked mentorship. They loved the product and were building it because they identified a problem and wanted to solve it.

Building Fizz: From College Campuses to a National Phenomenon

Fizz quickly evolved from a scrappy campus experiment into a powerhouse community platform across the country. Today, Fizz is used by Gen Z students at top universities like Stanford, Yale, Princeton, Tulane, Dartmouth, SMU, Rice, Vanderbilt, and Duke.

Some of Fizz’s key differentiators:

• Private, Verified Communities: Students join using their .edu emails, ensuring real, local engagement. They connect around their shared experience, context, and identity.
• Full-Spectrum Sharing: Students post everything from parties, classes, memes, jokes, confessions… the whole nine yards with respect to campus life.
• Massive Engagement: 30% of weekly active users create content, with 25 million+ posts to date.

Fizz democratizes access to information and connection on campus, ensuring that the socially active and the socially reserved have a platform for authentic expression. Since it is hyperlocal, it’s relevant to students’ experiences.

Fizz also features a peer-to-peer marketplace and a centralized feed, which people use as an alternative to legacy platforms like eBay or Facebook Marketplace.

Raising Capital the Right Way

Fizz has raised $41M, remains incredibly capital-efficient (with 80% of their last round still in the bank), and is building a new kind of ad engine. Users appreciate the engine through value-driven partnerships with companies like Perplexity, Quizlet, Kalshi, and Fortune 500 companies.

Storytelling is everything that Teddy Solomon was able to master. The key is capturing the essence of what you are doing in 15 to 20 slides. For a winning deck, take a look at the pitch deck template created by Silicon Valley legend, Peter Thiel (see it here), where the most critical slides are highlighted.

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Teddy and Ashton have generated substantial revenue through advertising, despite having no sales team and zero team members working on monetization full-time.

They have offered users incentives, such as a free 12-month subscription to Perplexity Pro or a complimentary one-month subscription to Quizlet Plus.

Teddy explains that they have been able to fuel their product initiatives and growth using the money they have raised. They have also built a great team, which is now in New York, but previously was in Palo Alto. He sees them as the people who will help Fizz reach its next milestones.

Lessons Learned During the Fundraising Journey

Teddy’s fundraising philosophy offers essential lessons for founders:

• Raise From Strength: Always have runway; don’t fundraise out of desperation.
• Let Metrics Speak: Fizz boasts the highest Day-30 retention and engagement rates ever seen in top social media platforms.
• Be Authentic: Investors were drawn not just to the numbers, but to Teddy’s genuine passion for users and community building. He personally visited more than 200 campuses across the US, immersing himself in the user experience. His objective was to understand the psychological experience behind why people need a platform like Fizz and why it changes their lives.
• Find the Right Partners: Teddy believes in finding people who can add value to the company. He is happy about the people on the Fizz cap table and board. These people are supportive of his vision in terms of how he wants to operate the company, but also provide much-needed expertise.

Today, every top VC is vying to lead Fizz’s next round, but Teddy remains patient, preferring to stay focused on building rather than rushing to raise more capital unnecessarily. He also believes in running a lean operation.

Why Fizz Moved to New York

A pivotal recent move for Fizz was relocating its headquarters from Palo Alto to New York City. Teddy firmly believes that New York, not Silicon Valley, is the future of consumer startups, particularly for brands targeting the Gen Z audience.

New York offers:

• Closer access to users and young consumer talent.
• Proximity to advertisers and partners.
• An unmatched cultural energy that fuels creativity, collaboration, and momentum.

Fizz’s team, now comprising around 25 people, includes experienced operators in supply chain management, former TikTok product leaders, and a strong contingent of recent college graduates, ensuring the DNA of the user base remains deeply woven into the company culture.

As Teddy opines, young people graduating from college and entering the workforce don’t want to leave work at 8:00 pm and find that the city has shut down. In New York City, they can go to a comedy show, bar, or restaurant and do whatever they want. It’s a dynamic city, and people love it.

The Vision for Fizz’s Future

Fizz isn’t stopping at college campuses. The recent launch of Global Fizz, a broader version connecting students across multiple campuses, signals the next frontier. Teddy reveals how they’ve seen about a 60% to 70% increase in daily active users over the past four weeks.

Teddy envisions a world where people connect meaningfully based on shared identity, context, and experience, beyond just physical location. In five years, the “real social” space will be dominated by Fizz, while Instagram and TikTok continue their evolution as entertainment-first platforms.

Fizz’s expansion beyond colleges will allow Gen Z to build communities wherever they find commonality, while retaining privacy and authenticity, unlike traditional platforms that dilute the intimacy of social sharing.

For instance, a student at Stanford not only cares about the Stanford experience but also wants to connect with students nearby, at schools like Santa Clara University or the University of San Francisco. Or, they may want to interact with peer academic institutions, like Princeton or Yale.

Teddy wants to provide people with a space to connect across whatever lines exist in terms of their individual schools, while also maintaining a sense of privacy.

Teddy’s Advice to His Younger Self

If Teddy could offer one piece of advice to his younger self, it would be this.

“How you perform, act, and think during the lowest points will determine how well the company does. Stay even-keeled through the highs and lows, persevere, and remember that death is the only thing that kills a company.”

Operate at your best during the lowest points without getting too low, and avoid getting too high with the highs. That’s Teddy’s motto. Celebrate success, but stay locked in and composed in those moments, and find your way through challenges.

That emotional discipline, combined with Teddy’s relentless focus on users and authentic leadership, is what’s propelling Fizz from a late-night idea in a Scottsdale Airbnb to one of the most promising social platforms for Gen Z.

Teddy continues to visit numerous campuses every month to spend time talking to college students and Fizz users. He asks questions to develop a better understanding of what to build and how to improve the Fizz product.

Final Thought:

Teddy Solomon’s story reminds us that the next generation of iconic entrepreneurs won’t just be the ones who chase trends. They’ll be the ones who stay grounded in community, build for real needs, and bet on themselves when it matters most.

Fizz isn’t just another social app. It’s a movement.

Listen to the full podcast episode to know more, including:

• Fizz was built to capture the 99% of life that Instagram and TikTok miss, creating a real, meaningful community.
• Teddy’s background in competitive sports taught him grit, focus, and the art of perseverance–lessons he now applies to building Fizz.
• Staying even-keeled through highs and lows is critical. “Death” is the only true failure for a startup.
• Fizz’s impressive $41M fundraising success stemmed from strong metrics, authentic leadership, and financial discipline.
• Teddy believes NYC, not the Bay Area, is the best place today for building high-energy, consumer-first companies.
• The next phase connects campuses and communities nationwide, with privacy, relevance, and shared experiences at the core.
• Fizz’s focus isn’t just scale. It’s about transforming how Gen Z builds relationships in a digital-first world.

 

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