His family moved from India, he built a $10B company in the US - Nikil Viswanathan (Alchemy)

Nikil Viswanathan 0:00 When you think about the world 20 years ago, what shaped our world? Government, religion, politics, countries. What is it today? Facebook, Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Bitcoin, Ethereum. My view was I wanna build something that everyone on the planet uses. The most important thing as a early-stage founder is getting product market fit. That is the only thing that matters. Very often, people solve a problem that people don't actually have. Most things you build in the beginning will not be good and people won't want them, and you have to be okay, like, throwing it away. The way that all the great companies were actually built, or most of the great companies were built, was that they actually picked a market that was really small. They dominated that market, but then the market grew really fast. So Alchemy was, like, our 16th pivot. It was really a bet-

Marina Mogilko 0:38 Yeah

Nikil Viswanathan 0:38 ... of, like, if crypto works, this is gonna be massive. If it doesn't work, you know, we'll go back to McDonald's and we'll be fine. The two most important things in life are confidence and persistence, and if you have both of those two things, you can do anything you want. I think the way I measure impact is on two axes. Your X-axis is how many people's lives do you touch? Your Y-axis, like, how deeply do you improve their life every day? Looking back, I probably would've spent a little more time sleeping [laughs] and a little more time on relationships and things like that. You have one shot at life.

Marina Mogilko 1:04 Mm.

Nikil Viswanathan 1:04 You don't get multiple chances. People ask, like,, "What are your hobbies?" Like, I don't have hobbies. Like, this is my hobby.

Marina Mogilko 1:08 Hey, guys. Welcome to Silicon Valley Girl. I have an amazing guest today, Nikil. Oh my God, there are so many things I can tell about you.

Nikil Viswanathan 1:15 [laughs]

Marina Mogilko 1:15 You're a founder of a company that is valued at $10 million. You have a sister who's also a founder-

Nikil Viswanathan 1:21 [laughs]

Marina Mogilko 1:21 ... whose company is valued at hundreds of millions of dollars. You're a Forbes 30 Under 30. You graduated from Stanford. You started multiple companies. Uh, most of them failed, which is great, and we're gonna talk about it, like, why you kept pushing. One of them ended up being the number one social app.

Nikil Viswanathan 1:39 Mm-hmm.

Marina Mogilko 1:39 And you're how old? [laughs]

Nikil Viswanathan 1:41 I'm 36.

Marina Mogilko 1:42 36.

Nikil Viswanathan 1:43 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 1:43 Oh, wait, that's amazing.

Nikil Viswanathan 1:44 It's basically, like, 100 in Silicon Valley years. [laughs]

Marina Mogilko 1:47 I don't think so. You know, I was recently at 500 Startups office in Palo Alto. They just... They, they're back to being in person, and I was surprised how many older people I saw.

Nikil Viswanathan 1:56 Really?

Marina Mogilko 1:56 And it was so promising [laughs] to me.

Nikil Viswanathan 1:58 [laughs]

Marina Mogilko 1:58 'Cause when, when we went through 500, I was 25.

Nikil Viswanathan 2:01 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 2:01 And there were a lot of, like, kids-

Nikil Viswanathan 2:03 Mm-hmm

Marina Mogilko 2:03 ... you know, just graduated from college.

Nikil Viswanathan 2:05 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Marina Mogilko 2:05 There were a couple of, like, 40-something people.

Nikil Viswanathan 2:07 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 2:07 And now I feel like it's getting older and, you know-

Nikil Viswanathan 2:10 [laughs]

Marina Mogilko 2:11 ... it gives me a chance in this industry [laughs] to-

Nikil Viswanathan 2:13 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 2:14 ... finally build-

Nikil Viswanathan 2:14 Totally

Marina Mogilko 2:14 ... a billion-dollar company. And this is what I will want to learn from

Marina Mogilko 2:18 you today. So first of all, I wanna focus on your upbringing, because I have two small kids.

Nikil Viswanathan 2:22 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 2:22 And I want them to be successful.

Nikil Viswanathan 2:24 Oh.

Marina Mogilko 2:24 And I want them to keep pushing.

Nikil Viswanathan 2:26 [laughs]

Marina Mogilko 2:26 What, what do you think... Like, how did your parents, uh, brought you up so that you're so, you know, successful?

Nikil Viswanathan 2:34 Oh, thank you. Well, thank you for having me. Uh, I... It's interesting, 'cause I don't feel like we've done anything yet. I definitely feel like we're just getting started and, uh, and I think I've always felt that way. M- I actually just had this conversation with my mom, like, two nights ago about, uh... We were talking about, um, stories from when I was a kid and, and she was telling me stuff. And I think there's a few key concepts, but I feel like the most important one... So I grew up in this, like, super small town in Texas, uh, called Lubbock, that, like, no one's ever heard of. And what I, what my mom did, so she read a bunch of books around psychology, like psycho-cybernetics and, and, like, how to raise your kids and things like that.

Marina Mogilko 3:12 And she's an immigrant, right?

Nikil Viswanathan 3:13 She is. She grew up in India, and she came here.

Marina Mogilko 3:15 When-

Nikil Viswanathan 3:15 Um-

Marina Mogilko 3:15 How old was she, would you think?

Nikil Viswanathan 3:16 Uh, she was early 20s when she came here.

Marina Mogilko 3:20 And her... And your dad, same?

Nikil Viswanathan 3:21 Also same, yeah.

Marina Mogilko 3:22 Oh, they came together?

Nikil Viswanathan 3:22 Yeah, they came together. So they got married and they came to the US.

Marina Mogilko 3:25 Got it. Got it.

Nikil Viswanathan 3:25 Um, and she basically had this theory that you need to give kids confidence when they're growing up-

Marina Mogilko 3:33 Mm-hmm

Nikil Viswanathan 3:33 ... in, in whatever they do. So she spent a lot of time, like, teaching us math, putting us in sports-

Marina Mogilko 3:39 Mm

Nikil Viswanathan 3:39 ... putting us... Like, in anything we did, she made sure that we were really good, and that confidence, like, reinforced and reinforced and reinforced over time. And I actually think what my personal opinion is that the two most important things in life are confidence and persistence, and if you have both of those two things, you can, uh, you can do anything you want, right?

Marina Mogilko 3:58 Mm.

Nikil Viswanathan 3:58 And, and I think that for me, growing up in a small town was one of the best things ever, 'cause in Palo Alto, you can't be the best at everything, right? 'Cause there's a world-class-

Marina Mogilko 4:09 So competitive.

Nikil Viswanathan 4:09 Exactly. There's a world-class violinist.

Marina Mogilko 4:11 Mm-hmm.

Nikil Viswanathan 4:11 There's a world-class chess person. There's a world-class athlete. But in T- Lubbock, Texas, I had the ability to be the best at everything. I was the best at athletics, the best at sp- uh, you know, music-

Marina Mogilko 4:19 Mm

Nikil Viswanathan 4:19 ... the best at student council, the best at math, the best at science, and you just couldn't do that in a big city, 'cause there was just not that much competition. No one cared in Texas, right? So, uh, that for 18 years was probably very... one of the core things for my, uh, mental confidence, like, after that.

Marina Mogilko 4:34 Interesting. But then you got into Stanford, and I guess there was a lot of competition there.

Nikil Viswanathan 4:38 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 4:38 How did you feel not being... Or were you the best at Stanford as well?

Nikil Viswanathan 4:41 I had a lot of fun at Stanford.

Marina Mogilko 4:42 Mm.

Nikil Viswanathan 4:43 I would say school wasn't my, like, absolute top priority. I had... I, you know, I did fine. I did well. Uh, I did undergrad and grad. But I think for me, um, I pr- really prioritized hanging out with my friends, and I loved it, and I have no regrets. I know a lot of people after college said, "Oh, I really wish I hung out with my friends more." I had the best time ever.

Marina Mogilko 4:59 Mm-hmm.

Nikil Viswanathan 4:59 I was really lucky to be surrounded by so many amazing people. And at... I don't know. I feel like I just built up that confidence over 18 years that I was like, if-

Marina Mogilko 5:09 It was enough. [laughs]

Nikil Viswanathan 5:10 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 5:10 Yeah. It was enough.

Nikil Viswanathan 5:10 I was like, if I want to be good at something, I know I can be good at it, right?

Marina Mogilko 5:13 That's great. That's interesting.

Nikil Viswanathan 5:14 And, and maybe it was a little bit of rationalization, where I was like, well, you know, I... most people [laughs] at Alchemy have, like, a 4.0 at Stanford. I didn't. I had-

Marina Mogilko 5:21 Mm

Nikil Viswanathan 5:21 ... I say I have 4.0 in fun. I did fine. I did, I did pretty well. But basically, I was like, if, if I wanted to, like, take all the hard classes and get A+, like, I could've. But I prioritized, like, hanging out with my friends.

Marina Mogilko 5:33 That, that's great. That's... [laughs]

Nikil Viswanathan 5:34 [laughs]

Marina Mogilko 5:34 Well, I didn't do that, so I think, I feel like it's a great decision. [laughs]

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Marina Mogilko 7:24 to our interview. Did you ever go back to India with your parents?

Nikil Viswanathan 7:27 Yeah, I went back, like, almost every year growing up, so been probably, like, 15, 16 times I've been back.

Marina Mogilko 7:33 Have you ever thought of moving there?

Nikil Viswanathan 7:35 No, definitely not.

Marina Mogilko 7:36 No. And your parents know, they're all like, "No."

Nikil Viswanathan 7:38 No, definitely not.

Marina Mogilko 7:38 Omnisend.

Nikil Viswanathan 7:38 Yeah. My mo-

Marina Mogilko 7:39 They have their own business, but-

Nikil Viswanathan 7:40 Yeah, my mom started a software company and, you know, she grew up very Americanized.

Marina Mogilko 7:44 Mm-hmm.

Nikil Viswanathan 7:44 She played in a rock band-

Marina Mogilko 7:45 Mm

Nikil Viswanathan 7:45 ... and she had ripped jeans, and she read, like, uh, American books and stuff like that and watched... A- and so it was very much like she knew she wanted to come to the US.

Marina Mogilko 7:53 Okay. And when you graduated from college, you went-

Nikil Viswanathan 7:56 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 7:56 ... straight into startups, right?

Nikil Viswanathan 7:57 I did.

Marina Mogilko 7:57 You did an-

Nikil Viswanathan 7:58 Straight into startup life

Marina Mogilko 7:58 ... you got offers from Meta-

Nikil Viswanathan 8:00 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 8:00 ... but you declined.

Nikil Viswanathan 8:01 I, I knew... I was, like, one of those weird kids. Like, when I was, I think, I don't remember how old I was, when I was young, I had seen Bill Gates on TV, and I was like, "Oh," like, "what is, who's that guy? What's he doing?" And my mom said, "Oh, you know, he built Microsoft and brought computers to the world." And to me, that was so cool that s- like, one person could go, like, do, press buttons on this magic metal box and build something everyone around the planet used, right?

Marina Mogilko 8:21 Mm-hmm.

Nikil Viswanathan 8:22 And from that age, everyone wanted to be, like, a firefighter or astronaut or a, well, now it's a YouTuber or a TikToker. But I said, "I wanna build software that kind of makes people's lives better for everyone on the planet."

Marina Mogilko 8:33 Mm-hmm.

Nikil Viswanathan 8:33 And, like, that was always what I wanted to do. So I think when I graduated, um, I didn't apply for any jobs. Mark was like, "Yo, come back and run this team at Facebook," but I just knew I wanted to do my own thing.

Marina Mogilko 8:43 Did you know him personally?

Nikil Viswanathan 8:44 Well, it was, it was interesting 'cause there was one desk kinda next to Mark dur- at, i- and so, okay, a little backing up.

Marina Mogilko 8:50 What year was it?

Nikil Viswanathan 8:51 This was 2011. So-

Marina Mogilko 8:53 Okay

Nikil Viswanathan 8:53 ... 2011, I was on this small team. Uh, Mark keeps the teams he likes around him.

Marina Mogilko 8:58 Mm.

Nikil Viswanathan 8:58 So I was on the small team that was launching a new product. No one used it for many years. Today it has a billion users. It's Facebook Messenger.

Marina Mogilko 9:04 Mm-hmm.

Nikil Viswanathan 9:04 Um, and y- so I just randomly happened to sit next to him all summer. Um, and it was-

Marina Mogilko 9:10 Wow

Nikil Viswanathan 9:10 ... actually a really cool experience.

Marina Mogilko 9:11 Mm-hmm.

Nikil Viswanathan 9:11 Got to, like, see through osmosis-

Marina Mogilko 9:12 Yeah

Nikil Viswanathan 9:12 ... what that was like. Um, and after that, he was like, "Yo, come back, r- come back."

Marina Mogilko 9:15 What were you building at that time?

Nikil Viswanathan 9:17 I was, I was a, uh, like, a PM intern on-

Marina Mogilko 9:19 Mm-hmm

Nikil Viswanathan 9:19 ... uh, Messenger.

Marina Mogilko 9:19 That was good.

Nikil Viswanathan 9:20 So I was, so I helped build, like, the first video calling on Messenger, helped with, like, a bunch of other things there.

Marina Mogilko 9:24 Mm-hmm.

Nikil Viswanathan 9:24 Um, but he was like, "Come back and run this, run this team. We'll pay a bunch of money," all this stuff. And I just thought about it and I was like, look, there's no amount of money that they could pay me to give up the opportunity cost of my life.

Marina Mogilko 9:36 Mm.

Nikil Viswanathan 9:36 Like, if you think about it, if somebody had gone to Mark or Bill Gates and said, "Hey, don't drop out and start Microsoft or Facebook. We'll pay you $1 billion," like, if IBM had said that to Bill Gates, of course he would've taken it. Who wouldn't have [laughs] who wouldn't have taken it, right? But then he wouldn't have started Microsoft, right?

Marina Mogilko 9:51 Yeah.

Nikil Viswanathan 9:52 And, and I think for me, like, you know, the next couple years did not play out like as I expected. We didn't go start a really great company. But, um, the fact that I was able to say, "Hey, I did my best, and I, like, tried," uh, was worth more to me than any amount of money they could pay.

Marina Mogilko 10:09 Were you that confident in those days, like-

Nikil Viswanathan 10:12 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 10:12 ... in those two years when that happened?

Nikil Viswanathan 10:14 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 10:14 'Cause th- was, was that the time when Noah Kagan was also at Facebook? Noah Kagan, Sam Lessin.

Nikil Viswanathan 10:18 Uh, yeah, Sam. Sam wa-

Marina Mogilko 10:19 Sam

Nikil Viswanathan 10:19 ... Sam was one of the people who, like, recruited me to come to Facebook, actually.

Marina Mogilko 10:21 Oh, cool.

Nikil Viswanathan 10:22 Yeah. [laughs]

Marina Mogilko 10:22 He's my investor.

Nikil Viswanathan 10:23 Oh, [laughs] amazing.

Marina Mogilko 10:24 He invested in Music Creator.

Nikil Viswanathan 10:24 Sam's great. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Marina Mogilko 10:25 Wow, that's so cool. Okay, small world.

Nikil Viswanathan 10:27 Mm-hmm.

Marina Mogilko 10:27 Um,

Marina Mogilko 10:28 but, like, I feel for a lot of founders, and I'm definitely going through th- those stages all the time. Like, you're trying to start a company.

Nikil Viswanathan 10:35 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 10:35 You're seeing all of the successes, but you're, don't find the product market fit.

Nikil Viswanathan 10:39 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 10:39 And you're thinking of, "I'm getting older. I have this family."

Nikil Viswanathan 10:42 Yeah, totally.

Marina Mogilko 10:42 You know, "Am I not better off doing something else?"

Nikil Viswanathan 10:45 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 10:45 Did you have those thoughts? How did you fight them?

Nikil Viswanathan 10:48 Yeah, that's a great question. It's interesting. I actually think I was more confident back then [laughs]

Marina Mogilko 10:52 [laughs]

Nikil Viswanathan 10:52 ... 'cause I just hadn't, like, I hadn't experienced a lot of failure in a, uh, over an extended period of time like we did-

Marina Mogilko 11:01 Mm

Nikil Viswanathan 11:01 ... for, uh, many, many years doing the startup. It was way harder than I thought. Um, and I, I know, uh, uh, most, I've s- heard, like, most startup founders say this, it's like, if you knew what it would take before you started, you probably wouldn't have started it. [laughs]

Marina Mogilko 11:14 Yeah. Yeah. [laughs]

Nikil Viswanathan 11:14 So you go into this naivete that, oh, yeah, we can figure it out.

Marina Mogilko 11:17 Yeah.

Nikil Viswanathan 11:17 How, how hard could it be? Um, I think I was also a unique situation where, you know, I w- wasn't married, didn't have kids. You know, I just graduated, didn't have many responsibilities. And-

Marina Mogilko 11:27 Did you have your student loan?

Nikil Viswanathan 11:29 Uh, no.

Marina Mogilko 11:29 Or-

Nikil Viswanathan 11:29 I actually worked through grad school. So, and-

Marina Mogilko 11:31 Oh. Same. Mm-hmm

Nikil Viswanathan 11:32 ... and, yeah, and, and paid that off. So basically, um, we, uh, uh, it was, like, a really interesting, uh, kind of time in your life, like, when you graduate 'cause the early, at any point in life, it is the best time to start a startup because as you grow older, you have more responsibilities, you have m- more, more things to take care of. The other thing I would say is, like, I had a good- Like, everyone says startups are risky.

Marina Mogilko 11:55 Mm-hmm.

Nikil Viswanathan 11:55 I actually don't think so at all. Okay, like if you are living in, you know, rural India, and if your company fails, you're gonna starve to death, it's like okay, that's a different story. But if you live in the United States, um, your worst case is you go get a job. That's most people around the world's dream job, especially if you studied computer science, especially, you know-

Marina Mogilko 12:17 Mm-hmm

Nikil Viswanathan 12:17 ... if you live in Silicon Valley. My worst case was going and running a team at Facebook, right? And even if it wasn't, Joe and I, my co-founder and I talk about this all the time, right? Like if, if I had to go work at McDonald's, I would crush it. I would be like employee of the month every month.

Marina Mogilko 12:31 Mm-hmm.

Nikil Viswanathan 12:31 And I would have no problem with that, right?

Marina Mogilko 12:32 Mm-hmm.

Nikil Viswanathan 12:32 And I think I would go... So I think, I think for me the, it's actually more risky not to do a startup, because you are missing out on the what if and like what, what could happen, right?

Marina Mogilko 12:41 Mm-hmm.

Nikil Viswanathan 12:41 And I think I've very much always been wired that way. Like, I don't mind if I try something and it doesn't work out, um, but I like really, uh, don't like not trying or missing the opportunity.

Marina Mogilko 12:52 Got it. Can I, uh, can I ask you about the student loan-

Nikil Viswanathan 12:54 Yeah, please

Marina Mogilko 12:54 ... again? 'Cause it's a great question for me as a parent. Uh, some people tell me like, you don't have... Uh, this is my financial advisor.

Nikil Viswanathan 13:01 Mm-hmm.

Marina Mogilko 13:01 I'm like, let's start saving for my kids' college fund.

Nikil Viswanathan 13:03 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 13:03 And, and he was like, "No, no, no, don't do it because they have to learn how to deal with money," and that was like the best experience for me.

Nikil Viswanathan 13:09 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 13:09 So did your parents help you with your college at all? Or was it-

Nikil Viswanathan 13:12 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 13:12 ... just you, and then you paying it back?

Nikil Viswanathan 13:14 So, so, so Stanford has this like really interesting thing where you can be a teaching assistant-

Marina Mogilko 13:18 Mm-hmm

Nikil Viswanathan 13:18 ... and they will pay for your, pay for your tuition.

Marina Mogilko 13:20 Ah, and so the, you got the scholarship.

Nikil Viswanathan 13:21 Yeah, it was really nice. I mean, it was, it was really fun 'cause I, I love teaching, and I got-

Marina Mogilko 13:25 Mm-hmm

Nikil Viswanathan 13:25 ... to do what I loved, and they, they pay for,

Nikil Viswanathan 13:28 they pay for it. And it was interesting, 'cause that's actually how I met my co-founder, Joe. So the first semest- the first quarter, you know, you are a new grad student, and you don't have... No one know, no one knows you, right?

Marina Mogilko 13:40 Mm-hmm.

Nikil Viswanathan 13:40 So, um, there's kind of a like a lottery system, and then they, they pick you. So I actually like think I didn't, I, I either didn't get an TA- TAship or whatever, but, uh, made friends with one of the ladies, Meredith, at the department, and she helped me get a TAship. The next quarter... You know, and I worked really hard, and, and, uh, I think we did a good job. So the next quarter, uh, um, several professors actually messaged me before being like, "Hey, you know, there's this matching process, but can I just snipe you early beforehand?" [laughs]

Marina Mogilko 14:07 [laughs] Nice.

Nikil Viswanathan 14:07 Um, but, but it, but I think, I think Stanford provides like a really good safety net-

Marina Mogilko 14:11 Yeah

Nikil Viswanathan 14:11 ... for people where it's like it's not, it's like not that hard. It's like pretty easy, and it's a lot of fun, so.

Marina Mogilko 14:15 Got it.

Nikil Viswanathan 14:16 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 14:16 Got it. Okay, so you met your co-founder during-

Nikil Viswanathan 14:18 I did

Marina Mogilko 14:18 ... graduate school, and you've started how many companies together, or iterated how many ideas?

Nikil Viswanathan 14:22 I mean, we've worked for, this year will be year 10. Uh, I think it's, I think I counted once. Alchemy was like our 16th pivot [laughs] , so this, this is a long time.

Marina Mogilko 14:31 Crazy.

Nikil Viswanathan 14:32 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 14:32 Have you ever thought of giving up, like not at all?

Nikil Viswanathan 14:35 Not really.

Nikil Viswanathan 14:36 I mean, there's been a couple times when people came to buy us, and we never... Actually, several times, but we never really seriously considered it.

Marina Mogilko 14:44 Alchemy or-

Nikil Viswanathan 14:45 Alchemy.

Marina Mogilko 14:45 Okay.

Nikil Viswanathan 14:46 Um-

Marina Mogilko 14:46 I'm, I'm just talking like in general when you started all the startups-

Nikil Viswanathan 14:48 Oh, even before that?

Marina Mogilko 14:49 ... like before pivot number 10.

Nikil Viswanathan 14:51 Um-

Marina Mogilko 14:51 Like any thoughts of-

Nikil Viswanathan 14:53 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 14:53 ... this is not for me. I'm not a good entrepreneur 'cause nothing is working out.

Nikil Viswanathan 14:56 Honestly, no, um, because I just knew. I was like, this is what I wanna do, and I love it, and it's a lot, and it's fun, and it's-

Marina Mogilko 15:02 Even if it's not like fame or anything or no s-

Nikil Viswanathan 15:05 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 15:05 What was... Okay, what defines success for you then? 'Cause there had-

Nikil Viswanathan 15:09 Um

Marina Mogilko 15:09 ... to be something you were like, "Okay, this is my metric for success-

Nikil Viswanathan 15:12 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 15:12 ... and this is why I keep going."

Nikil Viswanathan 15:14 No, it just, I think I had a different view. I-

Marina Mogilko 15:16 Mm-hmm

Nikil Viswanathan 15:16 ... my view was I wanna build something that everyone on the planet uses, and that's what I wanna do with my life.

Marina Mogilko 15:22 Mm-hmm.

Nikil Viswanathan 15:22 And like I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna like do it or die trying, right? Like one of those two things.

Marina Mogilko 15:27 That's amazing.

Nikil Viswanathan 15:27 And I think that I just had like a, there was... Like what would I do if I did something else? And actually, we did this thought experiment once. Like one time people were like, "Hey, we'll come buy you. We'll pay you a bunch of money." And, and just for context, Joe and I lived together out of like a tiny apartment. We worked out of that apartment. We like literally, you know, everyone said, "Don't live with your co-founder. We, uh, you'll kill each other." We lived together five years. We never got into a fight. It was like, it was awesome. And we, I was-

Marina Mogilko 15:51 Perfect match.

Nikil Viswanathan 15:51 Yeah. Out of 160 hours in a week, we were in the same room like 164 of those hours, right? And in, in the same apartment. So, and we worked out of there also. So I think when we thought about it, um, and, and like I was nine years out of undergrad, seven years out of grad school before we started paying ourselves like a real salary. And when I say a real salary, I mean it was like less than a new grad at Facebook.

Marina Mogilko 16:12 Mm-hmm.

Nikil Viswanathan 16:12 But I got guacamole on Chipotle for the first time that year, and I was like, all right, like we made it. [laughs]

Marina Mogilko 16:17 Did he have, did he have the same vision, your co-founder? Like-

Nikil Viswanathan 16:20 Yeah, I think so

Marina Mogilko 16:20 ... we're fine with it.

Nikil Viswanathan 16:21 100%. And I think, and I think-

Marina Mogilko 16:23 That's great

Nikil Viswanathan 16:23 ... but I think-

Marina Mogilko 16:23 Mm-hmm

Nikil Viswanathan 16:23 ... I think when, when one of the times when people wanted to buy us, we said, "What would we do if we had a bunch of money?" And the answer is like exactly what we're doing now, right?

Marina Mogilko 16:31 Mm-hmm.

Nikil Viswanathan 16:31 Except we'd have all our friends live together. And, and I think that for, I think we just really enjoy it, and I think to the end, to at the end of the day, it's like this is what we love. Like people ask like, "What are your hobbies?" Like, I don't have hobbies. Like, this is my hobby. [laughs]

Marina Mogilko 16:42 I just work, work, work, work. Okay.

Nikil Viswanathan 16:44 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 16:44 So let's,

Marina Mogilko 16:45 let's move to Alchemy. So you built those, uh, one of the apps that got number one-

Nikil Viswanathan 16:48 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 16:48 ... that was like the messaging app.

Nikil Viswanathan 16:50 The Down to Lunch, yeah.

Marina Mogilko 16:51 Yeah.

Nikil Viswanathan 16:51 It was, uh-

Marina Mogilko 16:51 Let's, let's talk about that one and then-

Nikil Viswanathan 16:52 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 16:53 ... move to Alchemy. Can you talk about that a little?

Nikil Viswanathan 16:54 Yeah. So it's really interesting. So basically, I think like the way I think about my life is like you have one shot at life.

Marina Mogilko 17:00 Mm-hmm.

Nikil Viswanathan 17:00 You don't get multiple chances, right? Like kind of religion, reincarnation aside. So how do you have like a really big impact? And I think the way I measure impact is on two axes. Your X axis is how many people's lives do you touch. Your Y axis, like how deeply do you improve their life every day? So number of people times depth of impact. And the area under that curve is like how big of an impact do you have on the world, and a positive impact. So for me, the X axis was obvious, right? Never before in human history could you do this on a magic metal box and build something everyone on the planet used. But now today, you have software, you have internet, you have computers, and you can do that, right? And, and I think that when you think about the world 20 years ago, what shaped our world? Government, religion, politics, countries. What is it today? Facebook, Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Bitcoin, Ethereum. So the idea here was that that was what I really loved from a young age. I got to see my mom do it, and, and I was like, all right, this is what I wanna do. Um, and, and the Y axis was really interesting. So how do you really have p- daily positive impact on someone's life? And I'd gone through like a really tough time post-college. I had like started this- ... product company. It didn't really work. Had, was trialing with a co-founder. It didn't really work out. Got dumped by a long-term girlfriend. Was really lonely 'cause I was, like, surrounded by all my friends in college, and then suddenly you're working by yourself-

Marina Mogilko 18:07 Mm-hmm

Nikil Viswanathan 18:07 ... and you don't have any fr- like, you're not living with your friends, and-

Marina Mogilko 18:09 Mm-hmm

Nikil Viswanathan 18:10 ... and stuff. So it was like a really, like, tough time. And, and I realized, like, hey, the number one thing that determines your life is the people you're around on a daily basis, right? Like, what if you had all the people you truly cared about in your life every single day, how awesome would that be? And I think for me, I said, I wanna do that, but I wanna do it for everyone on the planet, right?

Marina Mogilko 18:26 Mm-hmm.

Nikil Viswanathan 18:26 And, and that was the driving force. And we spent a bunch of time, like, building social apps to do this, and we wanted to kinda capture that dorm environment, like when you talk to your, like, best friend at, like, 5:30 in the morning, you have this heart-to-heart. Like, how do you capture that?

Marina Mogilko 18:39 Mm-hmm.

Nikil Viswanathan 18:39 So we built like, I don't even know, like six, seven different apps. Like, nothing really worked. And then finally we built this one app. There was our two friends, Ravi and Mateen, who we moved to San Francisco to be around our friends and to, to, to be around people who are building stuff. And then we were working all the time, and we'd always see them walking to, we'd walk to Safeway to get these, like, $6 combo boxes, um, a- 'cause it was like, it was, like, the healthiest, tastiest, most filling, cheapest option.

Marina Mogilko 19:04 Mm-hmm.

Nikil Viswanathan 19:04 And I got the healthy one. Joe got the unhealthy one.

Marina Mogilko 19:05 [laughs]

Nikil Viswanathan 19:06 Uh, but he's still, like, in ridiculous shape even though he eats, like, junk food. Um, and basically whenever we'd walk there to get lunch, we'd see our friends, and we were just like, "Oh, we should hang out. We should hang out." But then whenever we're free, uh, we would be like, "Oh, who's free? We don't know. Let's, like, try to text people," and then we'd just go to the gym by ourselves 'cause people wouldn't respond.

Marina Mogilko 19:22 Mm-hmm.

Nikil Viswanathan 19:23 So we, after like a year, we're just like, we never see these guys. And what... So it's just annoying to text everyone. What if you could just press a button and it would just, like, automatically text all our friends, say like, "Hey, do you wanna get lunch?"

Marina Mogilko 19:33 Yeah.

Nikil Viswanathan 19:33 "Do you wanna hang out?" And we're like, no one is gonna use this. It's literally just our friends. You know, it wasn't even in the App Store. You had to go to my Facebook profile and download it there from, like, an enterprise build link that we did. And, um, we thought no one's gonna use it, and it basically just ends up blowing up. And that was a, you know, there's a much longer story there, but, but the short answer is we did that for a while, and we built version two and three in secret, uh, and then kind of switched to crypto.

Marina Mogilko 19:57 Before you build that, build out that app, when you had this idea-

Nikil Viswanathan 20:00 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 20:00 ... okay, blasting everyone with a message, uh, like, y- your initial thought was like, I want to impact as many people in the world-

Nikil Viswanathan 20:08 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 20:08 ... like, influence. Did that correlate with that thought? [laughs] Or you were like-

Nikil Viswanathan 20:11 It did. It really did.

Marina Mogilko 20:11 Yeah?

Nikil Viswanathan 20:11 'Cause, uh, 'cause basically we had, we had said, um, okay, so we had said we wanna make it feel like you live with your friends.

Marina Mogilko 20:20 Mm-hmm.

Nikil Viswanathan 20:20 And we always thought that would be digital, like sharing-

Marina Mogilko 20:22 Mm-hmm

Nikil Viswanathan 20:22 ... stories in a digital way. Kinda like s- Snapchat, but more like text-based. And then we said, I don't know, what if we just made it easier to hang out with people in real life?

Marina Mogilko 20:30 Mm-hmm.

Nikil Viswanathan 20:30 Um, but I, I do think, at that time we had pivoted so many times. I think the pivot right before that was we were like, at some point we were just like, all right, we just wanna make something that people use. Like, even if it's not, like, exactly-

Marina Mogilko 20:43 Yeah, this, this is the thought I was looking for, right?

Nikil Viswanathan 20:45 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 20:45 Because you can't just, otherwise if all of your ideas have to be this grand idea, I'm building the next-

Nikil Viswanathan 20:50 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 20:50 ... Microsoft, it's so hard to even start.

Nikil Viswanathan 20:51 It is really hard.

Marina Mogilko 20:52 Yeah.

Nikil Viswanathan 20:52 And, and that's actually not, and we learned that was not the right way. We, like, did not, we did not brainstorm ideas in the right way, right? Um, and I can talk about brainstorming. But basically, like, we'd build a bunch of apps. No one used, no one liked any of it. [laughs] I mean, you know, a few people used it, but no one was like, "Oh, my gosh, this is

Nikil Viswanathan 21:07 amazing." And at one point I think we, like, we started building all this random stuff just for fun. We built, like, we built, like, a smart home system. We built a fridge where you could, you, you can go to, uh, ratemyfridge.com, and you can see, like, everything on our, in our fridge. We, like, scanned all the stuff in our fridge, and friends would comment. So, like, all this random stuff. We, we started this, like, bodybuilding food delivery service, and we're like, oh, we're like, let's solve a problem that we have. So we tried, we tried doing this. We, like, ordered Blue Apron, which is kind of this, like, cooking kit that comes-

Marina Mogilko 21:34 Yeah

Nikil Viswanathan 21:34 ... with, with food, and we, like, open this box, and we're like, what are we doing? Like, we, we don't know anything about operations, and we don't even know how to cook, so [laughs] like, this is not gonna...

Marina Mogilko 21:44 Mm-hmm.

Nikil Viswanathan 21:44 We, like, put it in the freezer and, like, never touched it ever again.

Marina Mogilko 21:46 [laughs]

Nikil Viswanathan 21:47 Until we moved out, we threw it away. Um, but I think at this point we were like, we just wanna make something that works, and we j- we, sorry, we just wanna make something that someone uses. And we w- so we're like, why don't we just try to solve our own problem?

Marina Mogilko 21:58 Yeah.

Nikil Viswanathan 21:58 So it's kind of back to that solving their own problem. So we were like-

Marina Mogilko 22:00 Interesting

Nikil Viswanathan 22:00 ... we don't, we were like, maybe this could be something that people use, but it wasn't like this is gonna be the big thing. And I think you see that-

Marina Mogilko 22:06 I love that thought process.

Nikil Viswanathan 22:07 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 22:07 Yeah.

Nikil Viswanathan 22:07 And I think you see that, um, there's a good thing around, like, most great companies, so especially in the consumer social space, were not built as, like, a company. It was built as a side project, right?

Marina Mogilko 22:18 Mm-hmm.

Nikil Viswanathan 22:18 Because when you look at the, the great consumer apps, they're built in, in the very beginning, they're super simple, and they're built for a very singular purpose, and most of those times, those don't look like real businesses, right? Like you-

Marina Mogilko 22:31 Yeah, like Slack, right?

Nikil Viswanathan 22:32 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 22:32 Yeah.

Nikil Viswanathan 22:32 Or even like, even like Snapchat.

Marina Mogilko 22:34 Mm-hmm.

Nikil Viswanathan 22:34 It's like you look at it, and you're like, oh, I want a pic- I want, like, a, a app to send photos of, like, my poop, which was that started out at Stanford, or, like, nudes to people, right? It's like-

Marina Mogilko 22:42 Mm-hmm

Nikil Viswanathan 22:43 ... if you said that at Facebook, if you're like, "I wanna build this as a product," you'd be, like, fired, right?

Marina Mogilko 22:47 Yeah.

Nikil Viswanathan 22:47 And but, like, then that evolves into so much more. Even Facebook, right? It was literally just a way to, like, see who's in your classes and, like, like, like stalk attractive girls, right? Like, that was what was at the beginning. But then, and then it turns into something big. And I think there's this whole thing around when you're trying to build a company, you build something that you think is, like, company worthy, that you can share with your friends and all this stuff 'cause your ego is wrapped up into it. And invariably, those things are almost always way too complex, like, not actually solving a real pain point, not figuring out a very specific need for a set of people. Um, and so I think it's very difficult to build a company, like, just brainstorming how do we build a good company.

Marina Mogilko 23:23 Yeah. Yeah. And when do you give up on the idea? What's your criteria?

Nikil Viswanathan 23:26 Okay. This is actually really important. I think that most people hang, including us, hang on to the idea way too long. Like, way, way, way too long.

Marina Mogilko 23:34 Way too long is how long?

Nikil Viswanathan 23:36 So, uh, let me give a couple examples. So I think, um, the most important thing as a early-stage founder is getting product market fit. Like, that, that is, like, the, that is the only thing that matters. All the other stuff doesn't matter. Um, and when you think about building a product, you need to be kind of excited about what you're trying to accomplish in the world. Like, I wanna bring people together, or I want to build something in this space. But you need to be very flexible on the method and the approach. Like, people get very attached to their product, and me, me, me included for sure. Like, we got very attached to our product because it's like, you know, you're building this thing. It's like you, especially if, if we go back to what we were saying before, especially if you make it feel like, hey, this is me, my company. I'm starting this thing. You know, I turned on Facebook, and now I'm gonna start this thing. It has to be, like, good, right? But the problem is, like- Most things you build in the beginning will not be good, and people won't want them. And you have to be okay, like, throwing it away. So concretely, for a consumer product, um, if you don't find retention in your early users, um, you should be able to find throwing it away. And, and, and you should not spend... The, the faster you can iterate, the better. The, the iteration speed is, like, the number one metric you should watch in, like, the early days of a startup, right?

Marina Mogilko 24:52 Mm-hmm.

Nikil Viswanathan 24:52 Like, how fast you can ship product.

Marina Mogilko 24:53 Yeah.

Nikil Viswanathan 24:54 And we got that cycle time down to, like, a couple minutes. I can tell a story about how we do that. But I think if you are spending more than, call it, like, two weeks talking to users and getting feedback, and people don't really want it, you need to change something about, about the product or scrap it. Like, you shouldn't- you should not spend more than, like, like, I would say two weeks is, like, the absolute upper limit-

Marina Mogilko 25:16 Mm-hmm

Nikil Viswanathan 25:16 ... of time you should spend on that.

Marina Mogilko 25:17 What, what's the maximum you spent on an idea?

Nikil Viswanathan 25:19 [smacks lips] Oh, I've spent years. I've spent, I've spent, like... Like, one of our early products, I probably spent maybe, like, a year. Like, half-

Marina Mogilko 25:27 You-

Nikil Viswanathan 25:27 ... eight months

Marina Mogilko 25:27 ... like iterating, changing it slightly-

Nikil Viswanathan 25:29 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 25:29 ... talking to users-

Nikil Viswanathan 25:30 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 25:30 ... back and forth, like?

Nikil Viswanathan 25:30 But, but, like, I was, like, building stuff. I was getting some people on. I was doing this. But if you really wanna move fast and get something well, like, okay, you can change stuff and you can tweak it, but, like, you should never go more than two weeks without getting feedback and shipping a new version-

Marina Mogilko 25:46 Mm-hmm

Nikil Viswanathan 25:46 ... tweaking it. Because es- especially, and this might be oriented a little heavily towards consumer social, but there's always this question of, do I just not have network effects? Like, do I not have enough people using my product? Or is it that no one just wants what I want, what I'm building, right?

Marina Mogilko 26:01 Mm-hmm. Or the market is there, but I just can't find the right problem.

Nikil Viswanathan 26:04 Exactly, right? And, and I think, I think the most important thing is very often people solve a problem that people don't actually have.

Marina Mogilko 26:11 Mm-hmm.

Nikil Viswanathan 26:11 Like [laughs] , like you should make sure that someone actually has this problem-

Marina Mogilko 26:14 And this is where you go back to solving your own problem, right?

Nikil Viswanathan 26:16 Exactly.

Marina Mogilko 26:16 Yeah.

Nikil Viswanathan 26:16 So if you can solve your own problem-

Marina Mogilko 26:17 Mm-hmm

Nikil Viswanathan 26:17 ... then, then you know that that's actually at least a problem for, like, one person.

Marina Mogilko 26:21 It at least exists [laughs] , yeah.

Nikil Viswanathan 26:22 Yeah, exists. At least exists for you.

Marina Mogilko 26:24 Okay. And th- is this how you started Alchemy?

Nikil Viswanathan 26:26 Yeah, actually it was. So we sat down and brainstormed in the wrong way, where we didn't [laughs] really know much about crypto. But 2017 happened, and it was summer, and w- we were building our so- our startup in, in our loft in San Francisco. Downstairs were these guys, B- Yanni and Michael, who were building a Bitcoin payments company, and we played beer pong together, and they were like, "Crypto, crypto, crypto." And we'd always, like, really believed in it, but we were laser focused on what we were doing, and, and kind of our mission in consumer social. So basically what we, what we did was we said, "Hey, we have summer off because we have college app, and college people are out for col- uh, for summer. So let's try crypto stuff," 'cause crypto was, like, blowing up at the time. We said, "If this is the next internet, we could build something really great here." Um, and, and it's kind of a once in a lifetime opportunity. And then basically w- it started taking off, and we're like, "All right. We're just gonna do this full time." So-

Marina Mogilko 27:17 Mm-hmm

Nikil Viswanathan 27:18 ... in the beginning we brainstormed in the way you're not supposed to brainstorm. We kinda sat in a room and, like, wrote out a bunch of ideas and, like, thought about what people would want and stuff, where instead we should've gone deep into the space and actually talked to a bunch of people. Um, and we started building this, like, hedge fund data science machine learning platform. But as we're building it, we're like, "Wow, this is really hard to build." And if it's hard for us, like, how's it gonna be... how is anybody else gonna be able to build in the space? Because if you're... You know, we had master's degrees in artificial intelligence at Stanford, and infor- and information systems and stuff. And we're like, "Okay. If the space is really gonna be broadly accessible, it needs to be accessible to novice engineer, to new developer, to people in other countries who don't have access to the, kind of, the depth of educational resources that we had access to. Um, so we need to make it easy." So, like, it, in a way it really was solving a problem for us.

Marina Mogilko 28:05 Mm-hmm.

Nikil Viswanathan 28:05 [laughs] My, my sister had tweeted this thing which was actually spot on. She's like, um, I forgot. I forgot exactly what, but she ba- It was something to the effect of, "Hey, startup founders, let me save you two years of effort. And you, whatever you're doing, you should just pivot to doing the infrastructure for that product instead." [laughs]

Marina Mogilko 28:21 [laughs]

Nikil Viswanathan 28:21 And it was, like, so true.

Marina Mogilko 28:22 Yeah.

Nikil Viswanathan 28:22 It was exactly for us.

Marina Mogilko 28:23 Yeah. Interesting. So you started, uh, so you pivoted Alchemy to this, uh, for-

Nikil Viswanathan 28:28 Infrastructure

Marina Mogilko 28:28 ... which is like Amazon for-

Nikil Viswanathan 28:30 Amazon

Marina Mogilko 28:30 ... AWS for-

Nikil Viswanathan 28:31 Yes. Exactly

Marina Mogilko 28:31 ... um, for blockchain companies. My question is, like, it started growing in 2020, right?

Nikil Viswanathan 28:39 2021.

Marina Mogilko 28:40 Yeah.

Nikil Viswanathan 28:40 So we, we started it in 2017.

Marina Mogilko 28:42 Mm-hmm.

Nikil Viswanathan 28:43 And then 2018 was kind of when we launched the, the product as you know it today.

Marina Mogilko 28:47 Mm-hmm.

Nikil Viswanathan 28:47 End of 2018. But it was really, like, two years before it started really taking off.

Marina Mogilko 28:53 But because crypto started taking off, right?

Nikil Viswanathan 28:54 Yeah, because crypto started taking off.

Marina Mogilko 28:55 How do you feel about being in the market that's so dependent on, like, whether it's-

Nikil Viswanathan 28:59 It's hard

Marina Mogilko 28:59 ... hyped up or not? [laughs]

Nikil Viswanathan 29:00 Oh, man. It's really tough because, like, I think it's a huge risky bet to take, um, because, I mean, crypto's still small today, right? Like, and, and there... The trade-off here is [clears throat] when you think it's... You can think of this graph where either you can build a business that is a big market, or you can build a business in a small market. A busin- business in a big market will have a lot of competition, right? Um, but a business small market... But it, but it has a lot of opportunity. The business small market would have way less competition, but the market is really small. And the way that all the great companies were actually built, or most of the great companies were built, was that they actually picked a market that was really small-

Marina Mogilko 29:43 Mm-hmm

Nikil Viswanathan 29:43 ... and they dominated that market, but then the market grew really fast, right?

Marina Mogilko 29:46 Mm-hmm.

Nikil Viswanathan 29:46 Which is hard to do because you have to pick something that you have strong conviction that will grow when other people-

Marina Mogilko 29:52 Yeah

Nikil Viswanathan 29:52 ... don't think it'll grow.

Marina Mogilko 29:53 Do you, do you have this conviction?

Nikil Viswanathan 29:55 I do. I do. Like, I def- I definitely do. I'm not sure about the timeframe, though-

Marina Mogilko 29:58 Mm-hmm

Nikil Viswanathan 29:59 ... which is, which is a challenge. And I think we had, we had... The conviction has grown over time. Um, we had some belief that it could be really big in 2017. We actually thought we missed it. We thought we were too late. But 2017 [laughs] was, like, actually so early.

Marina Mogilko 30:10 Yeah.

Nikil Viswanathan 30:10 Um, and I remember seeing Bill Gates say the same thing. He's like, "Oh, we thought we were missing the computer revolution," but they were actually early.

Marina Mogilko 30:16 Mm-hmm.

Nikil Viswanathan 30:16 So I think, I think for crypto, that is probably one of the most challenging things about being in the space, is because-

Marina Mogilko 30:22 Yeah

Nikil Viswanathan 30:22 ... your t- your total market size is very limited. And it's, like, somewhat in your control. I think for us it's more in our control 'cause we can help the space grow with developers, but it's not directly in our control.

Marina Mogilko 30:32 Mm-hmm.

Nikil Viswanathan 30:32 And to some degree, that's some- that's something that's, like... And a- when we started- We did a market sizing, and we... You know, if you go to VC, they're like, oh, everyone's, their pitch deck is, like, our market, healthcare market is $1 trillion. Climate market is $1 trillion. AI is, like, $1 trillion. We literally did a market size. We're like, okay, if we get all the customers in the space, we'll, we'll just guess how many there are. We're like, probably, like, $5 million. Like, if we get every customer, we're like, maybe $10 million.

Marina Mogilko 30:56 Wow. [laughs]

Nikil Viswanathan 30:57 You know, this is 2017-

Marina Mogilko 30:58 Mm-hmm

Nikil Viswanathan 30:58 ... or 2018, but... And luckily the space has grown significantly since then, but it was, like, tiny. It was really a bet-

Marina Mogilko 31:03 Yeah

Nikil Viswanathan 31:03 ... of, like, if crypto works, this is gonna be massive.

Marina Mogilko 31:06 Mm-hmm.

Nikil Viswanathan 31:06 If it doesn't work, you know, we'll go back to McDonald's,

Nikil Viswanathan 31:09 and we'll be fine. [laughs]

Marina Mogilko 31:10 Let's, let's explain a little bit the concept of what you're building to everyone who's not familiar.

Nikil Viswanathan 31:15 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 31:15 'Cause honestly, like, can you give me life, uh, like, real-life examples of-

Nikil Viswanathan 31:20 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 31:20 ... how I am probably using your technology-

Nikil Viswanathan 31:22 100%

Marina Mogilko 31:23 ... without knowing it?

Nikil Viswanathan 31:24 Yeah, 100%. So, um, basically what we do is we are building a d- the developer platform for the Web3 space.

Marina Mogilko 31:32 Yep.

Nikil Viswanathan 31:32 What that means is... So let me give you analogy. So-

Marina Mogilko 31:36 If I'm buying a CryptoPunk, right?

Nikil Viswanathan 31:37 Yes.

Marina Mogilko 31:38 I'm buying it through your-

Nikil Viswanathan 31:39 Yes

Marina Mogilko 31:39 ... platform.

Nikil Viswanathan 31:39 So yes, yes, yes, exactly. So-

Marina Mogilko 31:40 And that counts as your revenue-

Nikil Viswanathan 31:42 Yes, it does

Marina Mogilko 31:42 ... if I'm buying. Okay.

Nikil Viswanathan 31:43 Yes. So, so basically, like, when you think about the, the, the last couple shifts in technology, there's computer, and then there's internet.

Marina Mogilko 31:49 Mm-hmm.

Nikil Viswanathan 31:49 These are big shifts in the last 50 years, and, 50, 100 years. For the computer, there is... We use apps, Excel, Word, Chrome, kinda these kinda things. When, in order to build those apps on top of the computer, you needed something, right? You needed a, a platform, and that platform was Windows and Mac, right?

Marina Mogilko 32:07 Mm-hmm.

Nikil Viswanathan 32:07 Windows and Mac, what it does is hides all the complexity of RAM and CPU-

Marina Mogilko 32:11 Yeah

Nikil Viswanathan 32:11 ... and hard drive and all these things, makes it really easy for people to build apps, right? And that's what spins the cycle of the innovation in the industry. You have developers build apps, so more users come, so more developers, and so on, right? And for the internet, you have a similar thing, where anytime you open Uber or DoorDash or Airbnb, it's actually powered, all the information on that page, like when you look at the cars driving around, is actually powered by a company that you've heard of, that you never heard of, called Amazon. Amazon has two businesses, one, uh, their shopping business, and the other one where they make all their money, Amazon Web Services. 2021, AWS, or Amazon Web Services, was 75% of their profits. In 2022, it was 100%. So-

Marina Mogilko 32:44 Crazy

Nikil Viswanathan 32:44 ... basically Amazon is effectively a computer company.

Marina Mogilko 32:47 Yeah.

Nikil Viswanathan 32:47 And, like, whenever you open Netflix, Amazon is actually running the computers that show you that. So for us, we, whenever you use a crypto product, like, we are helping behind the scenes to power that application.

Marina Mogilko 32:57 Mm-hmm.

Nikil Viswanathan 32:57 So if you open Robinhood, and you buy, you know, crypto-

Marina Mogilko 33:00 Mm-hmm

Nikil Viswanathan 33:00 ... we help with that. If you open OpenSea, and you are, um, looking at a, um, a NFT or buying that, like, we're powering, we're taking that data from the blockchain and putting it there.

Marina Mogilko 33:10 Mm-hmm.

Nikil Viswanathan 33:10 Right? And there's a lot of, like, really exciting real-world, kind of tangible, uh, examples that are coming up that, um, yeah, it's super cool. It's not just NFTs and, and trading crypto.

Marina Mogilko 33:19 Can you name more?

Nikil Viswanathan 33:20 Yeah. So, um, you know, we partnered with Shell to do their... They, they have this, like, global supply chain for all their equipment that they, um, that they're moving equipment around the world, and, you know, it's pow- We work with them to power that. Um-

Marina Mogilko 33:32 How does that require blockchain?

Nikil Viswanathan 33:34 Um, so right now, uh, supply chain is kind of, like, one of the canonical examples of blockchain-

Marina Mogilko 33:38 Mm

Nikil Viswanathan 33:38 ... because, uh, it's, like, very difficult to track supply chain, and they basically, like, track all that inventory on the blockchain. Um-

Marina Mogilko 33:45 Oh, interesting

Nikil Viswanathan 33:46 ... and it makes it, it's actually much better.

Marina Mogilko 33:47 I've never heard that use case.

Nikil Viswanathan 33:48 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 33:48 Interesting. Okay.

Nikil Viswanathan 33:48 And, and, and it, it's interesting 'cause, like, it, it's, it's, like, this perfect example of where you have a bunch of different companies involved in supply chain. Like, if you think about what goes into making an iPhone, it's, you know, you have the, the person that makes the glass screen, and the person that makes the glass screen is not Apple. It's somebody else. Um, and tho- those people have people who make the components for the glass screen, and those people who have the components for the glass screen have somebody who makes the, you know, the silicon for the glass screen. And it's, like, eight layers down, and tracking all that is, like, a crazy, crazy, crazy difficult thing because those people are not gonna trust one random company to store all their data. So you have to have kind of this open system.

Marina Mogilko 34:22 And you have blockchain that's open source-

Nikil Viswanathan 34:23 Yeah, yeah

Marina Mogilko 34:24 ... so you can trust it.

Nikil Viswanathan 34:24 Exactly, exactly. So, you know.

Marina Mogilko 34:26 Can you talk about the percentages, like, of your total revenue, how much goes into that type of stuff-

Nikil Viswanathan 34:33 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 34:33 ... how much goes into consumer?

Nikil Viswanathan 34:34 Yeah. I mean, it's kind of all across the board.

Marina Mogilko 34:36 Mm-hmm.

Nikil Viswanathan 34:36 So we, we power everything from NFTs to crypto trading to decentralized finance to real-world assets, so people, like, taking stocks and bonds and putting that on the blockchain to make it more accessible for anyver- everyone to trade, to things like Shell, to, you know, we work with some of the largest brands in the world. Like, you, you open your phone, and you look at these apps, and it's like we're working with a lot of those, with a lot of those apps. So I think kinda there's, like, a wide spectrum of applications, which is one of the cool things because our success is not dependent on a specific industry vertical.

Marina Mogilko 35:07 Mm-hmm.

Nikil Viswanathan 35:07 Um, if anything in crypto succeeds, we benefit from that, so our incentive is to help everything in the space grow as much as possible.

Marina Mogilko 35:14 Are you upset with the current state of the market? [laughs]

Nikil Viswanathan 35:16 Uh, no. I think one thing that's been really interesting is the crypto market went down, like, 84% from 2021, end of 2021, through, like, you know, uh, late 2023. It's like you saw an 84% decrease in crypto prices. The thing that was most exciting to us is the number of developers that, you know, we get to see 'cause we're powering them, had actually grown 4X.

Marina Mogilko 35:37 Mm.

Nikil Viswanathan 35:37 So when you think about what makes a space popular or useful to people, it's developers building products, and that have real value for normal people like us.

Marina Mogilko 35:46 Yeah, like, I'm trying... It's just I'm struggling to, with crypto, and I'm, you, you know, always pro-

Nikil Viswanathan 35:50 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 35:50 ... technology, trying to test new things. With AI, I'm already using so many AI apps-

Nikil Viswanathan 35:55 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 35:55 ... they've replaced people for me-

Nikil Viswanathan 35:56 Yeah, totally

Marina Mogilko 35:57 ... replaced several processes. With blockchain, like, my only use case-

Nikil Viswanathan 36:00 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 36:00 ... I bought crypto. I put it on the ledger.

Nikil Viswanathan 36:02 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 36:02 It's growing. I'm happy.

Nikil Viswanathan 36:04 Yeah. [laughs]

Marina Mogilko 36:04 That, or, like, it's falling down-

Nikil Viswanathan 36:06 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 36:06 ... I'm losing 90%, I'm not happy.

Nikil Viswanathan 36:07 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 36:07 That's, that's my use case.

Nikil Viswanathan 36:09 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 36:09 Like, for ordinary customers-

Nikil Viswanathan 36:10 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 36:10 ... do you see, like, what's happening now, and what do you see happening in the next two or three years?

Nikil Viswanathan 36:14 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 36:14 Is it gonna be, like, still invisible to people who are not using crypto-

Nikil Viswanathan 36:19 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 36:19 ... to pay for things, or is it gonna change something?

Nikil Viswanathan 36:21 I think the thing that, remember, is that I think the first artificial intelligence paper was kinda written in, like, 19, uh, s- I know the rough date, like 1946 or something like that, right? And now 80 years later, we're like, "Oh, AI is happening," right? Bitcoin was released in 2000... I think late 2009. Uh, right? So, it was, or late 2008, 2009. So, basically, it was, it's been, like, 15 years. It's been, like, super, super, super early, and we're still in the very early innings. There's some great... There's, uh, there's a couple great videos that I really love. There's one of Bill Gates and a reporter talking to Bill Gates in the early days of computers, like the '80s. She's like, "But why would anyone use a computer?" And he's like, "Well, you can do, you can learn on it, you can do all these things." He's- she's like, "But how could it be better than a book?" And he's like, "You know, if you're learning, you can have these things called multimedia, which means you could have a picture that's on your computer, or you could have a, a movie that's on your computer-

Marina Mogilko 37:18 Mm-hmm

Nikil Viswanathan 37:18 ... a video that's on your computer." And he's trying to explain this to the lady, and the lady's like, "I, I just don't get it. Like, why would anyone use a computer?"

Marina Mogilko 37:23 Yeah.

Nikil Viswanathan 37:23 And I think we're still very much in that stage, where the technology's still being built out. It's still very early. The application is still very early. It feels like a toy today. Um, but I do think also being in the United States, you're kind of insulated from a lot of the reasons that it's really valuable. If you look at, like, countries like Turkey or Korea, it's, like, over 50% of the entire population, like, trades crypto or holds crypto, because partially because it's, it's a, a ways of wealth creation. Like, if your, if your country's having crazy hyperinflation-

Marina Mogilko 37:52 Yeah

Nikil Viswanathan 37:52 ... then you, you... The money you've earned, your livelihood, is being, like, devalued, like, very quickly. So, you can h- you can have this alternative way to, to kind of, like, keep your life safe. And so, that's kind of the first application. Um, then you see ICOs. You know, there was a lot of scams and stuff. But at the end of the day, it's like y- today, in order to raise money, you have to, like, know people in Silicon Valley and do these kind of things. But now anybody a- anywhere in the world can, can, can raise money, and have, like, kind of a... Imagine if Uber could fundraise from the people who rode Uber in the beginning, and everyone owned shares before it was, like, a publicly traded company, right?

Marina Mogilko 38:26 Mm-hmm.

Nikil Viswanathan 38:26 It's, it's basically taking this concept of public companies and making that available to people, uh, before.

Marina Mogilko 38:31 Yeah.

Nikil Viswanathan 38:31 And I think you'll see a lot of applications come up. One interesting thing is, like, today in California, you can actually use a blockchain license. So, if you go to the D... If you, you... There's this DMV app. You don't even know that it's powered by crypto. And if you go to the airport, you can actually use that instead of your physical license, right? And if you look-

Marina Mogilko 38:45 And it's powered by crypto?

Nikil Viswanathan 38:46 Yeah, it's actually powered on the, it's on the blockchain. So, y- yeah. So-

Marina Mogilko 38:48 Are they using your platform, or you can't say?

Nikil Viswanathan 38:50 What's that? Um-

Marina Mogilko 38:50 Are they using your platform, or you can't say?

Nikil Viswanathan 38:52 I think so. I'm not sure, actually. [laughs]

Marina Mogilko 38:53 Oh, okay.

Nikil Viswanathan 38:54 I just, uh-

Marina Mogilko 38:55 I didn't know it was blockchain.

Nikil Viswanathan 38:56 Yeah, yeah. It is. Um-

Marina Mogilko 38:57 So, this is... Yeah, I, I feel like for end consumer, it's just invisible-

Nikil Viswanathan 39:01 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 39:01 ... and we don't really realize.

Nikil Viswanathan 39:02 Yeah, 100%.

Marina Mogilko 39:03 It's-

Nikil Viswanathan 39:03 And I think that is the way it should be, right? The... When you think about the technology, the technology should never be mentioned when it's successful. So, for example, when you went to dinner yesterday, you didn't say, "I used a computer application, and then I-

Marina Mogilko 39:18 No

Nikil Viswanathan 39:18 ... used an internet application," right? It's like, no. You're like, "I called an Uber, and then I paid with Apple Pay." Y- when you are talking about the technology, it means that the product doesn't have enough benefit to, to actually stand on its own. And when we don't talk about the technology anymore, that's when we know crypto will be successful.

Marina Mogilko 39:32 Mm.

Nikil Viswanathan 39:32 We will know crypto will be successful when no one even knows that it's crypto.

Marina Mogilko 39:35 Got it. Uh, if we talk about your revenue, I don't know if you can disclose numbers-

Nikil Viswanathan 39:39 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 39:39 ... but if we compare it to 2021-

Nikil Viswanathan 39:41 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 39:41 ... now, did you fall with the market, or?

Nikil Viswanathan 39:44 No. That was one of, that was one of the really nice things.

Marina Mogilko 39:46 Mm-hmm.

Nikil Viswanathan 39:46 Uh, we've actually grown pretty significantly.

Marina Mogilko 39:48 Oh, that's great.

Nikil Viswanathan 39:48 And yeah, because, um, so our business is a usage-based business. So, we are based on, like, how many transac- like, basically, how much compute people are using. Which, which is, uh, you know, it goes both ways, right? In 2021, we grew very significantly. We grew very fast and grew very significantly. But if you have a transaction-based business, like a trading business, you actually even grew faster.

Marina Mogilko 40:08 Mm-hmm.

Nikil Viswanathan 40:09 Because you had, um, you had basically, like, as people trade, you get a cut of all the trades. But those businesses also tanked in 2022, 2023.

Marina Mogilko 40:17 Because of revenue.

Nikil Viswanathan 40:18 Yes, exactly.

Marina Mogilko 40:18 Yeah.

Nikil Viswanathan 40:18 So, our, our revenue's a lot more stable. It still grew significantly, but our user base has grown about four and a half times since 2021.

Marina Mogilko 40:26 Wow.

Nikil Viswanathan 40:26 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 40:26 And, and when you, uh, when investors or, and you came up with the 10 billion valuation-

Nikil Viswanathan 40:31 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 40:31 ... what was the multiple? If you can disclose that. I know-

Nikil Viswanathan 40:33 Uh, I can't say that.

Marina Mogilko 40:33 You can't?

Nikil Viswanathan 40:33 But-

Marina Mogilko 40:34 Okay.

Nikil Viswanathan 40:34 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 40:34 But-

Nikil Viswanathan 40:35 But I, I think I will say, like, we didn't need any of the money. Um, we didn't touch any of the money. Um, we-

Marina Mogilko 40:41 Oh, it's still in the bank?

Nikil Viswanathan 40:42 Yeah. Almost all the money we've ever raised-

Marina Mogilko 40:43 You invested that in crypto [laughs] or like what?

Nikil Viswanathan 40:45 Uh, we have some of it in crypto. But almost all the money we've ever raised is in the bank. Um, and-

Marina Mogilko 40:49 And it made so much more since then, 'cause you obviously invested [laughs] also.

Nikil Viswanathan 40:52 Yeah. So, like, we, so it's-

Marina Mogilko 40:53 Great. I did, I did the same with my Creator round.

Nikil Viswanathan 40:55 Really?

Marina Mogilko 40:55 I just invested everything.

Nikil Viswanathan 40:57 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 40:57 Gave me peace of mind.

Nikil Viswanathan 40:58 Amazing.

Marina Mogilko 40:58 [laughs] Yeah.

Nikil Viswanathan 40:59 I love it.

Marina Mogilko 40:59 Uh-huh. Yeah, no, that, that's a great position to be in.

Nikil Viswanathan 41:02 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 41:02 To just raise money to have it as a peace of mind.

Nikil Viswanathan 41:04 Exactly.

Marina Mogilko 41:05 If you raised now, would your valuation be higher?

Nikil Viswanathan 41:07 I hope so. [laughs] You never know until, see, um-

Marina Mogilko 41:09 But based on the metrics compared to, like, 2021, you've grown, grown.

Nikil Viswanathan 41:11 I mean, our metrics have significantly grown.

Marina Mogilko 41:13 Interesting.

Nikil Viswanathan 41:13 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 41:13 Wow, that's, that's so interesting.

Nikil Viswanathan 41:14 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 41:14 'Cause at first when you look at this, you're like, "Oh, blockchain, like crypto."

Nikil Viswanathan 41:18 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 41:18 "I don't know."

Nikil Viswanathan 41:19 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 41:19 But there is the whole world behind that.

Nikil Viswanathan 41:21 100%.

Marina Mogilko 41:22 Do you feel, do you still feel like you might be too early?

Nikil Viswanathan 41:25 Uh, yeah. I think that's a question we have all the time-

Marina Mogilko 41:28 Mm-hmm

Nikil Viswanathan 41:28 ... right? And I think it's too early of what scale is the question, right? Can we build a sustainable business? For sure, right? But are we gonna build the Apple, the Amazon, the Microsoft? Like, in order to do that, we're still so early.

Marina Mogilko 41:40 Mm.

Nikil Viswanathan 41:40 And I'm hoping it's, like, one to three years out that we see, like, massive adoption. It could be longer. It could be 5 years, could be 10 years. But it, it still feels very, very, very early.

Marina Mogilko 41:51 How long are you willing to wait? How long are you giving this?

Nikil Viswanathan 41:53 As long as it takes. Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 41:53 So, you're willing to be-

Nikil Viswanathan 41:54 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 41:54 ... on it for, like, 20, 30 years.

Nikil Viswanathan 41:56 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 41:56 Not pivot.

Nikil Viswanathan 41:57 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 41:57 What if you have another genius idea, and you're like, "This is what's gonna change the world," would you start a second company, or would you focus on this?

Nikil Viswanathan 42:03 Uh, that's a tough hypothetical. I think, I think it depends circumstances. Like, at the end of the day, it's like I wanna have, like, the biggest impact you can. Um, and if there's clearly another path, that has a lot more impact. Um, but as time goes along, you know, you build up more kind of a momentum in one area. So, the, the stakes to switching get higher. But, uh, but I do think we always try to have that beginner's mindset. Like, if there's something better, yeah, we should do that. Like, not, not being attached.

Marina Mogilko 42:25 Yeah, 'cause I feel like you're of that mindset-

Nikil Viswanathan 42:26 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 42:26 ... 'cause you're trying multiple ideas.

Nikil Viswanathan 42:28 Not-

Marina Mogilko 42:28 I feel like there are two types of entrepreneurs who, like-

Nikil Viswanathan 42:30 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 42:30 ... they either stick to the problem-

Nikil Viswanathan 42:32 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 42:32 ... and, like, push it till the end.

Nikil Viswanathan 42:33 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 42:33 Or people like me. I don't know. [laughs]

Nikil Viswanathan 42:35 Yeah, try different things.

Marina Mogilko 42:35 I just try new things all the time. [laughs]

Nikil Viswanathan 42:37 I mean, we've, we are very long on crypto, and, like, that is our, like- This is, I, the, as time goes along, I get more and more convicted that this is a massive opportunity and, like, a super, super exciting space, and, you know, the, the transformational shift of our lifetime. So I, yeah, I, I, I don't see anything right now, like, taking us out of crypto. But, but I think, you know-

Marina Mogilko 42:59 Even the nasty comments on YouTube [laughs]

Nikil Viswanathan 43:01 What's that?

Marina Mogilko 43:01 When I re- when I was watching some-

Nikil Viswanathan 43:03 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 43:03 ... of your interviews, people are like, "Oh, another crypto scam."

Nikil Viswanathan 43:05 Oh.

Marina Mogilko 43:05 Whatever.

Nikil Viswanathan 43:06 Yeah, I mean, that's great. That, that tells me there's opportunity, correct?

Marina Mogilko 43:09 Yeah.

Nikil Viswanathan 43:09 'Cause if everyone believes in it, Bitcoin would be like, you know, $10 million.

Marina Mogilko 43:13 Mm-hmm.

Nikil Viswanathan 43:13 But it's not. It's, like, still early. The more that people don't believe in it, the more I'm like, "Oh, okay, I'm, I'm, we're not that late.

Marina Mogilko 43:19 Mm-hmm.

Nikil Viswanathan 43:19 We're still, we still have time." [laughs]

Marina Mogilko 43:20 What do your investors think?

Nikil Viswanathan 43:22 What do our investors think?

Marina Mogilko 43:22 Are they... Yeah.

Nikil Viswanathan 43:23 Yeah, they're super long-term on this also-

Marina Mogilko 43:24 Yeah

Nikil Viswanathan 43:24 ... right? And, you know, I told our investors up front, I was like, "This is not, you're not gonna get a quick return. We're not gonna sell. We're gonna, we're building this for long term," and I think they, they are really aligned with that. We've very lucky. We've been, like, have, like, the best investors in the world, like, super supportive. We're super, super grateful. I, I feel truly grateful. We have, like, the best team. They're s- such awesome human beings, like, amazing, um, and, and, like, a really incredible set of investors.

Marina Mogilko 43:48 How many people are you now?

Nikil Viswanathan 43:50 We are about 170.

Marina Mogilko 43:51 A hun- wow, you've grown.

Nikil Viswanathan 43:52 Yeah. Yeah, we have.

Marina Mogilko 43:53 Wow.

Nikil Viswanathan 43:53 Uh, still feels very understaffed.

Marina Mogilko 43:55 Mm-hmm. And you still, so in terms of ca- I don't know if you can disclose that, but in terms of cash flow, you're able to cover all the expenses with your revenues?

Nikil Viswanathan 44:03 I, I can't, I can't share.

Marina Mogilko 44:04 Okay.

Nikil Viswanathan 44:04 But, like-

Marina Mogilko 44:04 Okay. [laughs]

Nikil Viswanathan 44:05 ... the business is going well.

Marina Mogilko 44:06 Okay.

Nikil Viswanathan 44:06 Yeah. [laughs]

Marina Mogilko 44:06 Okay. That's great. I feel like a lot of your success is attached to you being so friendly and nice and social-

Nikil Viswanathan 44:12 Oh, [laughs]

Nikil Viswanathan 44:13 I appreciate that

Marina Mogilko 44:13 ... and I was just, uh, to one of your parties.

Nikil Viswanathan 44:15 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 44:15 And how much of your success you think is networking, and what would be your advice to entrepreneurs?

Nikil Viswanathan 44:21 Uh.

Marina Mogilko 44:21 How much time do you spend networking?

Nikil Viswanathan 44:23 Uh, it's so funny you say that. Um, in college and post-college, I was like, "I hate networking. I don't want..." I never went to any networking things. I never-

Marina Mogilko 44:32 Not networking like friends.

Nikil Viswanathan 44:33 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 44:33 Being friends with people, right?

Nikil Viswanathan 44:34 Okay. So let me, let me just-

Marina Mogilko 44:35 Mm-hmm

Nikil Viswanathan 44:35 ... so I think networking, I, [clears throat] I think that it's like, in my mind, networking is, like, going to meet someone because you think you might get something from them, right? And my philosophy has always been I don't need anything from anyone. Like, I will figure out my own path, and, and I don't need-

Marina Mogilko 44:50 But you just love to be around people.

Nikil Viswanathan 44:52 Yes.

Marina Mogilko 44:52 That's what I see.

Nikil Viswanathan 44:52 Yes, yes.

Marina Mogilko 44:53 Parties and friends and-

Nikil Viswanathan 44:53 That's very different. So in networking, I actively avoid, I don't go to networking stuff. I don't do it.

Marina Mogilko 44:57 Yeah, I think it's the wrong word.

Nikil Viswanathan 44:58 I love being around people. I have, like, an amazing set of humans arou- around us, and, like, I've never met anyone with the intention of like, "Oh," like, "I wanna be friends with you 'cause I want something from you." But I just like hanging out with people I like. And as a result, like, our team, the thing I'm, like, most proud of is not the press, not the money, not the investors, any kind of stuff, but people on our team coming to me and saying, like, "This is not just the best place I've worked, it's like the best family I've ever had."

Marina Mogilko 45:22 Mm.

Nikil Viswanathan 45:22 "The most fun, like, the best community I've ever had, and I wouldn't go anywhere else even if you paid me, like, a billion dollars," right? And, and, and I think the, I think in the early days, a lot of our team just was, came, you know, people, like one of the guys, it's his six-year anniversary today. He joined Alchemy because he showed to a birthday party, my birthday party, and which was, like, an absolute rager. It was like, you know, beer pong and, like, colored lights and dance party and stuff, brought by one of my friends, and then he ended up working with us, right? So, like, all the early team was, like, our friends or from Instagram or, like, like, who, people who followed us on Instagram-

Marina Mogilko 45:54 Mm-hmm

Nikil Viswanathan 45:54 ... or Facebook and stuff. And it was like, it was like, for us, I think we have two goals. One is positively impact everyone on the planet. The second one is have a blast while we're doing it.

Marina Mogilko 46:04 Mm.

Nikil Viswanathan 46:04 And that second part is, like, super, super important to me. There's a huge cost that comes with that, right? We didn't go remote-

Marina Mogilko 46:10 Do you ever feel guilty?

Nikil Viswanathan 46:11 What's that?

Marina Mogilko 46:12 Like, I'm partying. Do you feel guilty when you're partying?

Nikil Viswanathan 46:14 No.

Marina Mogilko 46:14 I do 'cause I do it all the time.

Nikil Viswanathan 46:16 No, I mean, I work all the time. I don't, I don't really party that much anymore, but-

Marina Mogilko 46:18 [laughs]

Nikil Viswanathan 46:18 ... but, like, ooh, when I do, it's, like-

Marina Mogilko 46:20 Uh-huh

Nikil Viswanathan 46:20 ... with, with our team.

Marina Mogilko 46:21 Uh-huh.

Nikil Viswanathan 46:21 Um, but I, like, we hosted a Cinco de Mayo thing and, and stuff, but I feel like it is a, uh, I feel like there, there is a big cost to doing the, doing the, uh, I, "I wanna work with friends, and I want to, I want to have fun." Because, for example, one big thing is, like, do you go remote or not? And we said, "No, we're in person," because it's not fun to be remote, right? And that's a huge hit. You can recruit, you can recruit talent that you couldn't recruit, people... You know, in this day and age, everyone wants to work remote. So it is a huge, huge hit. Um, but I think the, in my opinion, the benefits outweigh the costs.

Marina Mogilko 46:54 Uh, what do you think about work-life balance?

Nikil Viswanathan 46:57 This one's a tough one. So

Nikil Viswanathan 46:59 I think in the early stages of a startup, it's really difficult to have any kind of semblance of work-life balance, and I really think you have to be all in. I will say that, um, it is a marathon, not a sprint. You are running very fast in the marathon, but make sure to pace yourself. One of the things, like, Joe and I went, like... You know, we were, like, it was all-consuming in the early days, and even to a degree today. Um, looking back, I probably would have spent a little more time sleeping [laughs] and a little more time on relationships and things like that. You know, recently single, so if you're watching this and have awesome friends-

Marina Mogilko 47:30 Oh

Nikil Viswanathan 47:30 ... hit me up. Um, but-

Marina Mogilko 47:32 Girls. [laughs]

Nikil Viswanathan 47:33 [laughs]

Marina Mogilko 47:33 What, what are we gonna leave your Instagram.

Nikil Viswanathan 47:36 Oh, Instagram. Yeah, yeah.

Marina Mogilko 47:36 Instagram is in the description.

Nikil Viswanathan 47:37 Uh, if you're happy, positive, driven, hit me up.

Marina Mogilko 47:39 Yeah.

Nikil Viswanathan 47:39 Um, but, but I do, but I do think, like, it is important to take some time. Like, you're not gonna have a ton of hobbies. You're not gonna have a ton of time to hang out with friends. But make time for your health and for relationships because I think that, that, um... And, and as much as possible, like, integrating that into your startup life is really great. So, like, as a team, we would go work out together a lot. Like, whenever we had startup, like, events, we'd, like, it would be a recruiting event, but we'd invite all our friends, so we get to hang out with them.

Marina Mogilko 48:03 Yeah.

Nikil Viswanathan 48:03 So it's like you can mix those worlds into a pretty good, um, especially if you become friends with other people who was your target demographic of recruiting or startup friends or whatever. Um-

Marina Mogilko 48:13 Start a company with your husband. [laughs]

Nikil Viswanathan 48:15 Yeah, exactly. There you go.

Marina Mogilko 48:16 With your boyfriend, something that I did.

Nikil Viswanathan 48:17 [laughs] There you go.

Marina Mogilko 48:18 Cool. Okay.

Marina Mogilko 48:19 Link in, uh, the description. [laughs]

Nikil Viswanathan 48:21 [laughs] Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 48:23 One last-

Nikil Viswanathan 48:24 Yeah, of course

Marina Mogilko 48:24 ... piece of advice for entrepreneurs who are trying ideas.

Nikil Viswanathan 48:28 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 48:30 Nothing is working.

Nikil Viswanathan 48:31 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 48:31 How do they keep pushing?

Nikil Viswanathan 48:33 Okay, so this is very nuanced, uh, and it very dependent on the situation, but I think a couple things. When you are building something Maybe like three piece of advice. The first one is the most important thing in, in the early days is product market fit. Nothing else matters. Press doesn't matter, investors don't matter, who's on your team doesn't really matter, you know, how... Whatever. All these other vanity metrics don't matter. The only thing that matters is do you have something that people want? So focus on that to the exclusion of everything else. Um, and the best way to do that is, like, talk to a bunch of customers and, like, stay... Like, talk to your target audience and, and stay really, um, kinda deep in that. The second thing is become a domain expert in whatever you're doing. So, like, rather than sitting in a room and trying to brainstorm, we made this mistake a couple times [laughs] , really just go live the life of the person that you, like, want to do, right? That, that you wanna build for. And I've seen this over and over. Um, some of my friends, like, who, you know, started DoorDash, like, they literally went and, like, drove the orders themselves.

Marina Mogilko 49:39 They were delivering. I remember that story.

Nikil Viswanathan 49:41 Yeah, they were delivering themselves.

Marina Mogilko 49:41 Yeah.

Nikil Viswanathan 49:41 Yeah, they were delivering themselves. And I've seen this over and over. Like, I know people who started different companies in different industries, like, and they will actually just go get jobs in that industry to, like, understand what that's like, right?

Marina Mogilko 49:51 Mm-hmm.

Nikil Viswanathan 49:51 Um, so, so that, that, that's the second piece. The third piece, and probably the most important thing... Actually, two more pieces. The third piece is you really need to make sure you're having fun. Like, if you're doing this for the money, you're not gonna last. It's not that... I guarantee you there's a lot easier ways to make money. Um, and, and really doing, doing something that you love with people that you love is, like, really the only way to, to last through what's gonna be a long journey. If you are successful, if you make it, it's gonna be 7 to 10 years minimum, right?

Marina Mogilko 50:21 Yeah.

Nikil Viswanathan 50:21 And, and, and I think that-

Marina Mogilko 50:23 Minimum, yeah. [laughs]

Nikil Viswanathan 50:24 Yeah. And, and I think that you have to make sure you're having fun. And then I think the last piece here is speed is your number one weapon as a small company, as a startup, and it's... Joe has this great quote, my co-founder, he says, "The big don't eat the slow." Sorry. The, uh, "The big don't eat the small, the fast eat the slow." So really optimize for that iteration cycle.

Marina Mogilko 50:41 Mm-hmm.

Nikil Viswanathan 50:42 Cut that down to as fast as you can, and be totally fine tossing out your product and starting over. And I think, like, the, the, the more you can move fast, have fun, and focus on building something that people actually want, um, is, is probably the, the three biggest things to getting a product market fit really fast.

Marina Mogilko 50:59 Love that.

Nikil Viswanathan 50:59 And, and actually, and I will say the last piece, finding product market fit, by far the hardest part. Everything else, much easier.

Marina Mogilko 51:06 It doesn't get easier, right? [laughs]

Nikil Viswanathan 51:07 Yeah. No, no. I think the other stuff is actually way easier. Um-

Marina Mogilko 51:09 No, I mean the product market fit with every new product doesn't get easier. [laughs]

Nikil Viswanathan 51:12 Yeah. Oh, 100%. Yeah. Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 51:14 Yeah. Thank you so much.

Nikil Viswanathan 51:15 Of course.

Marina Mogilko 51:15 That was so useful and so inspiring-

Nikil Viswanathan 51:18 [laughs]

Marina Mogilko 51:18 ... for all of the entrepreneurs and wanna-be entrepreneurs out there. Thank you guys so much for watching this. Thank you, Nikil, for your wisdom.

Nikil Viswanathan 51:24 Thanks for having me on.

Marina Mogilko 51:25 That was awesome. Thank you.

Nikil Viswanathan 51:25 Appreciate it.