Guest bios
- Nikil Viswanathan, co-founder and CEO of the web3 developer platform Alchemy, built products at Google, Facebook and Microsoft.
- Usha Viswanathan, Nikil's mother, co-founded the software company Starnik and bootstrapped it through the dot-com boom and bust.
- Nikil's Alchemy went from public launch to a multi-billion-dollar valuation in about 16 months with a tiny team.
Nikil Viswanathan is the co-founder and CEO of Alchemy, the web3 developer platform behind infrastructure for NFT projects, DeFi protocols and financial institutions experimenting with blockchain. A Stanford computer science graduate, he built products at Google, Facebook and Microsoft and co-created Down to Lunch, a social app that reached number one in the app store's social rankings. Alchemy went from public launch to a multi-billion-dollar valuation in about 16 months with a tiny team, and was profitable enough to leave much of its funding untouched. His mother, Usha Viswanathan, studied commerce in India and took a master's in MIS in Texas before co-founding Starnik, a software company, with her husband, Balu, bootstrapping it through the dot-com boom and bust while raising two children. Nikil's sister, Tara, is a co-founder and former CEO of Rupa Health.
Show notes
What happens when you combine a decacorn founder at the heart of the crypto infrastructure revolution with the original entrepreneur in the family who quietly built software long before “cloud” and “SaaS” became buzzwords?
In this special episode of Money Majlis, we sit down with the son-mother duo of Nikil and Usha Viswanathan to explore both the future of financial plumbing and the values that shape the people building it.
Nikil is the co founder and CEO of Alchemy, often described as the “AWS of blockchain” - a web3 developer platform that powers a massive share of global blockchain activity, from NFT marketplaces and DeFi protocols to tokenization pilots and stablecoin rails used by major financial institutions. In just about 16 months from public launch, Alchemy went from zero to a multi billion dollar valuation with a tiny team, delivering a “team to impact ratio” that most banks and big tech firms can only dream of.
Usha, meanwhile, is the president and co founder of Starnik, the cloud software company she built with her husband Balu while raising two children, bootstrapping through the dot com boom and bust and modelling resilience, curiosity and an almost “insane” work ethic that both Nikil and his sister Tara, former CEO and co founder of Rupa Health, now see as their core foundation.
Across the conversation, we move from the big picture to the deeply personal. Nikil explains why he believes we are moving from a world shaped by governments and banks to a world shaped by platforms and protocols – and why crypto rails will replace much of today’s antiquated financial infrastructure. He breaks down crypto’s four core use cases - from store of value to global payments and AI native money – and offers a hard hitting message to bankers who still think of digital assets as “that thing my nephew trades at night”. We also unpack how Alchemy emerged from 16 prior “failed” products, what it really takes to build at extreme speed, and how banks can escape the proof of concept graveyard and move tokenization into production.
Then we switch lenses to Usha’s story: a journey from commerce in Chennai to MIS in Texas to building Starnik and raising two founder CEOs. She shares practical parenting hacks, the rituals that kept the family grounded, and how to raise curious, kind and courageous children in a world of hyper connected ambition. Together, Nikil and Usha reflect on family as a “startup incubator”, ethics at the edge of money and health, and why - whether you are running a family, a startup or a bank - your values remain the ultimate operating system.
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