Interview with Paul Van Zandt, the CEO of Fresco [2023]

Of course, thanks for having me here. Fresco is an online whiteboard that enables people to collaborate in real-time from anywhere. This is an incredibly versatile solution that can be used to improve processes across a variety of different industries. Through Fresco, you can diagram and organize ideas on a customizable whiteboard, create and track tasks internally to ensure your ideas are met with real action, and import and export data to share your ideas across multiple platforms.

The journey to create Fresco really started at the University of Washington as I finished my undergraduate degree at the very beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. I immediately realized how much needed to change in order to accommodate remote and hybrid learning environments, and soon learned how much that applied to the professional world as well. The idea for Fresco was really born from that realization and the understanding that I wanted to make an impact in improving people’s workflows and lives through our platform.

Fresco isn’t only a collaboration tool, but it’s a way to connect and communicate throughout an entire organization. Being able to share a board in real-time allows teams to communicate dynamically through multiple mediums and increases the rate that they can create and refine ideas. Increasing the velocity of innovation and growth has always been a major goal for Fresco, and using an online whiteboard is the perfect way to do just that.

Fresco’s task manager is the perfect tool to integrate into the project management environment, especially when you’re using a whiteboard to diagram and storyboard ideas. Being able to collaboratively create and track tasks in real-time means anything you conduct on the board can be easily documented in the task manager. Doing this ensures that you won’t ever have any information that slips through the cracks again, and you’ll know exactly what needs to be done to meet your goals.

Work-life balance is something that everyone struggles with, so for me the most important thing to do it plan my days/weeks thoroughly. I find that I lack balance when I don’t have a daily schedule that I adhere to. Because of this, I’m always wondering what else can get done and what I left on the table. When I plan everything out in advance, however, I am able to trust that if I follow that schedule, I don’t need to worry outside of work about the next thing.

Being a founder is stressful and time consuming, but it’s also incredibly freeing. It’s really nice being able to make your own priorities and schedule, and this is something that I definitely don’t take for granted. I try to be as open about this as possible to maintain positivity and understanding with our team so that they can enjoy some of these benefits as well.

I think AI assisted tools are on the forefront of marketing and I’d love to bring either a content creation engine or marketing engine onboard to see how that can help us save time and help us grow.

The market for online whiteboard has a couple of really big players – this isn’t a mystery. These tools have an abundance of features and are extremely powerful, but this is actually where they miss out. Using a big online whiteboard can actually be incredibly challenging if you aren’t there for the massive feature set or large design implications. Our tool is smarter, more intuitive, and more accessible than anything else on the market, and that’s where we can win.

My biggest piece of advice is to start networking as much as possible with your idea, and get it out there. It can only grow from there, but doing nothing with it is the only way to ensure that nothing happens.

We want to become a market disrupting company that is able to revolutionize the way people brainstorm and collaborate together. Ideally, this moves us around the world and into companies everywhere. Ideally, we can have offices on multiple continents and be reaching thousands of clients in the next couple of years.