Alchemy | Bringing Web3 to the World

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Hi everyone. Welcome to Gray Matter, the podcast from Greylock, where we share stories from company builders and business leaders. I'm Christine Kim, an investor at Greylock. Today we're excited to kick off Mint Condition, our new Gray Matter podcast series devoted to all things crypto and web 3. Joining me on this first episode is Alchemy CEO and co founder Nikhil Vishwanathan. Alchemy is known as the AWS of web3 and was one of the fastest growing companies in history last year, achieving a $10 billion valuation in just 16 months after public launch. Alchemy is a developer platform powering billions of dollars in transactions for the top web3 applications around the globe. If you're looking at NFTs online, it's probably coming from Alchemy underneath the hood. And while other companies this size are many thousands of people, and Alchemy has one of the smallest team to impact ratios with only 39 people at the $10 billion round. And they're known for an extremely tight knit culture. There's lots to get in here, so let's dive in. Nikhil, thanks so much for joining us today.

Thanks for having me. Super excited.

Yeah. So maybe in getting into the specifics of like, what Alchemy does as a product, the customers are and you know, just to kind of refresh, kind of get everyone up to speed on that and we'll get, I would love to get into some, some details about how you guys are thinking about this current market and what the kind of progress has been to date from 2017 till now.

Yeah, totally. So summer 2017 rolls around, we start building crypto stuff. One to two months in, we're just hacking on things. One to two months in, we actually, the first product we built was this hedge fund data science machine learning platform. Again, our background was actually in hardcore data infrastructure, machine learning, computer vision, these kind of things. So we built this kind of complex machine learning model that help people identify things that were going on the blockchain and trade on that information. We realized about a month or two in that we just had this kind of moment where we're like, wow, this is so difficult for us to do. And you know, we have a master's degree in artificial intelligence from Stanford Computer Science. And if we're struggling with this, how are we going to make Web3 accessible to, you know, people in Africa or India who are just getting starting to code and they're in elementary school and they want to play with this? Like, how do we make it accessible to the entire world? It can't be this difficult to use. So we drew this diagram. You check on the Alchemy website, there's this like nine grid diagram, which is fundamentally the core idea is this. In each of the computer, Internet and blockchain, the industry is actually formed in a similar way, where you have some platform that lets people build apps, right? Because at the end of the day, like the technology is only here as utility for people's daily lives. There's no value in technology inherently besides what it can do for humans, right? So when you look at the computer, there was two kind of like companies that really kind of provided the platform layer for computing, which was Apple and Microsoft. They built this thing called the Operating system. So we know it as Windows or Mac. What it does is it lets developers build applications on the hardware. So it kind of abstracts away the complexities of hardware, of ram, of CPU processors, and makes it really easy for people to build applications. And then the really interesting thing here is like, that is what spins the cycle of innovation in the industry. Because now developers come and build apps like Microsoft Word or Excel or Chrome or whatever it is. And then normal people like me and you come here and use those things, use those products. And then that's like, that adds value to our life. So then we get more excited about it, we tell more and more friends. So then developers see a larger market, so then they build more apps so more users come in and so on and so forth. We call this kind of the circle of life internally at Alchemy. With the Internet, you actually see a very similar thing. So there's actually this business called Amazon that powers the entire Internet. So whenever you go to open Uber or Airbnb or DoorDash or whatever it is, you. The apps are actually all run by Amazon. Amazon runs all the infrastructure for those apps. AWS on its own is a trillion dollar business, right? And it was actually really funny because I remember Jeff Bezos when I was a freshman at Stanford. Jeff Bezos came and gave this talk I was so excited to hear about. Jeff Amazon wasn't what it is today then, but it's still like a really legit company. And it was really cool. And I used the product they'd just come out. This thing called Amazon prime is super smart. And he gave this talk and it still sticks with me. Basically was a sales pitch for aws. They're launching aws. They had just made the shift from like Amazon selling books to Amazon selling everything. And now they're like making this shift. He said, you know, people will look in the future and say, wow, Amazon sold stuff. They weren't just a compute service, right? And to me, one, I was like really annoyed because I was like, man, you could be telling your story and you're instead about how you built Amazon, instead you're coming here doing talking about AWS for sales pitch. Number two, I was like, that's crazy. Like Amazon sells stuff today and like do you really think that'll be a small business compared to compute? And looking back, it was like kind of cool. I got to like witness a moment in history that in retrospect was like masterfully played out over the last 15 years. And kind of going back to that diagram, when you think about Microsoft and Apple doing that for the computing and AWS and Google Cloud and these kind of things, doing it for the Internet, empowering all applications. What we saw is like there will be a development platform for Web3. And we said we need to build that, we need to make it really easy. And the reason it's really important is two things. Number one, that's what kind of drives and enables innovation in the whole industry and kind of like bring Web3 to the world. Like just like computers would not be what they are today without Microsoft and Apple, like full stop, period. Right. And then the second thing that was really interesting to us, this was kind of the key thing where we had a gut intuition that this could be really big. But when you look at Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, those three companies, that developer platform, right? Like there are thousands of companies in technology, probably millions of companies in technology. I think there's like a quarter billion company, 250 million companies in the world. Finance, real estate, entertainment, all these things. What are the three most valuable companies on the planet? Apple, Amazon, Microsoft. Right. And like that shows you how powerful that developer platform matters. The most impactful businesses on in the planet are the ones that enable new technologies for people around the globe. So we said look, if this works, this is going to be really massive. But we're just not sure if crypto is going to be a thing. So kind of like fast forwarding the story. We waited a year to build and release a product. Actually we built this other product because we're just like the market's too early. We built this like hedge fund, data science, machine learning platform. A year in we're like, okay, like I think the need is here. So we started building it. We just went heads down for years like building the product. So August 2020 we launched publicly. Anybody could sign up and use it. So I had this conversation with my dad in December, December 2020. My dad calls me. He's like, look, you've been doing startups for eight years. You're 10 years out of undergrad, eight years out of grad school, basically have nothing to show, right? It was like a tough time. We had made no money. We've been taking, like, no salary, like, very, like, very, very low salary. My dad was like, look, you should just get, you know, multiple companies that come to acquire us. We're like, you know, company was doing okay is like a generous way to say how the company was doing. And, you know, I was like, look, just like, why don't you just get acquired? And have you thought about it? He's always been super supportive, but he was like, hey, have you thought about getting acquired? You know, you can focus on your health, you can focus on getting married because you're single still and like, all these things. And basically. And I was like, jonah had this hard turn and we just launched publicly, right? We pivoted 15, probably 15, probably 13 times. And we're like, look, if crypto hits, this is going to be a big thing. We think everyone still was like, it's not a good business. And at the time, exchanges were making a ton of money, right? Like, that's that everyone, Coinbase was just like, dominating. Finance was dominating. No other businesses were making money in crypto. Everyone's like, why don't you build an exchange? Why don't you build a hedge fund? That's what everyone said. But we said, we think it's really important. We said, look, it could be five to 10 years for crypto to take off. I think it'll be two to three, and then I think this will be really important. And we looked at each other. We're like, what would we do if we sold and had not a lot of money, but just a living? And Joe and I are still living in an apartment, I think, at this time. And basically we live together and work together. And basically we were just like, we would just do what we're doing now. This is so fun. We love it. By any means of success, we are the bottom 10% of success of, like, all of our friends. But we're having a good time and that's what matters. It didn't take two years. It took 30 days for crypto to take off. January started. I don't think we said this, probably, but companies worth $72 million in January, we blew, like, the user base blew up. Our revenue blew up. February, the company, we did around at 500 September, we did around. At three and a half billion. 55 days later we did around that 10 billion. We've actually tripled our user base since then. And the crazy part about this, we're at 39 people were. Didn't have a sales team, we didn't have marketing, we didn't have recru team. Literally we didn't have. It was just kind of basically engineers building the product and, and we were having a good time. It was just like crazy time. So that's a little bit of like, you know, the, the headline is 16 months from public launch to $10 billion company. The backstory is it took eight years and actually a lot more before that. Also just kind of tinkering on stuff.

I think the first time I met you was at East Denver and you guys were the whole Alchemy team. I realized, I thought I was just meeting a sliver of the Alchemy team, but then I realized how small you were and I actually want to kind of rewind the clock. And let's talk about your background. I would love to know a little bit about your history, how you met Joe and how you guys initially got started as entrepreneurs.

Yeah. So this is a probably 12 hour story that I'll try to condense into maybe a minute or so. It was super interesting. It's one of those stories where you look back and you can connect the dots, but looking forward, it was not obvious at all. I was one of those weird kids that everyone wanted to be a firefighter or astronaut. And I, or, you know, now it's a YouTuber or TikToker. And I had seen Bill Gates build Microsoft, which, you know, no one in Silicon Valley was Microsoft. Everyone loves Apple, but. But to me I was like, wow, like this guy helped bring computers to the whole world. And think about that impact that it had globally for, you know, billions of people. And I think I had this realization that we live and we were entering this day and age where previously when you built physical products, you could only reach, you know, thousands or millions of people by making a chair or a table or whatever. And now we live in a day and age where you have computers, you have software, you have the Internet and you can impact life for people around the world, billions of people globally. And when I was a little kid, I was like, you know, that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to build software for every person on the planet to make their life better. And ended up starting a couple of companies and building a few products in college, learned a lot of lessons, ended up. None of them ended up working out super well. During some of my other summers, I never thought I'd work in these big companies, but ended up working at Facebook, Google, Microsoft. Joe and I met because we were teaching assistants at Stanford together. And I grew up in Texas, he grew up in Washington. We both came to Stanford and I was a year above Joe at Stanford. We both studied computer science and, you know, just had the time of our lives in college. It was. It was an amazing, amazing experience and it was kind of this really cool reconnection. Joe and I, we were teaching assistants for the database class at Stanford. The reason it's interesting is databases were kind of like the precursor to blockchain. We also studied, like, distributed systems, which also kind of one of the core technologies around blockchain. We worked together for three years, built out that speaker series. One of the people we brought was Steve Ballmer. And, you know, while I was at Google, I had meetings with Larry and I'd hang out with Sergey. And at Facebook, there's one desk next to Mark, and that totally randomly happened to be my desk. Right. I'm just some random intern at the time. But the reason I point this out is not to try to impress you, but to impress upon you. I had this really unique access to the people who were shaping the world as we know today in a large part. And what I kind of realized, which it just reinforced this belief in me that. And I fundamentally pushed this, like, technology is just like great amplifier of human capabilities. And what I realized, these people are ultra driven, worked super hard, very visionary, so much respect for them. But at the end of the day, they're human beings. And if they can do it, like, we can do it too, right? So that was kind of a really important moment. Normally the class is 100 students or so. It's like a lot of fun to TA get to teach lectures and these things. That quarter, they said, let's try this thing called online learning. We had 100,000 students in the class, and it was this crazy quarter TA and. And right after that, it spun out and became Coursera. So Joe and I were kind of thrown into startup life, like day one, since meeting each other. And I think our entire journey as friends together has been building a bunch of different companies. Most of them didn't work out. And then finally we got one that ended up doing kind of well.

You guys had actually gone on a couple endeavors to start a few companies. I know one down to lunch. Some people may Know, others tell us about these different concepts that you were trying out.

One thing about me and Joe is like, we're like super idealistic, probably to a fault. We graduated college and we both had this kind of similar experience. Or I had like started trying to build this like life coaching software. Had, you know, try working on this company. Didn't really work out. Broke up co founder, broke up with long term girlfriend. Like, company wound on the company. It was like really rough time, right? You know, I went from like super happy to like really, really sad. And I was like six months out of college. I literally was six months out of college, one block away from campus, and happiness had gone from like max happiness 100% to like 10%, right? And I had this kind of realization where I was like, wow, like, why am I so sad? And number one thing that determines your life on a daily basis is the people you're around. I think a lot of people go through this in college. And then you go out in the real world and you don't have that anymore. And most people get that in their work environment. But I was kind of isolated because I'd kind of started this thing on my own and had this kind of like, aha moment. I think Joe went through a similar experience on his own. But basically we both kind of had this realization where, you know, we have this kind of framework for life. So the way we think about it is you don't get multiple shots in life. You get one chance, right? Religion, reincarnation aside. And the really crazy part about this is like, like we were mentioning before, we live in a day and age where you can press buttons on this magic metal box and build something every person on the planet used, right? And that was never possible before 20 years ago. What shaped our world? Government, religion, politics, countries. What is it today? Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Bitcoin, Ethereum, right? Like, those are the forces that shape our world. And I think we were just super excited. You know, we were nerds. It's what we loved. And from a young age, we're like, all right, we want to build software. Joe and I like, reunited around this idea, basically creating this dorm, community, post college, right? And like, we both created houses of people to live in. And we said, look, if we can make it feel like love your friends and we can do this for every person on the planet, that will be the biggest impact we can have in our lives. So that was the mission. And, you know, we. Everyone said, number one, that would be the best thing ever. But two, it's clearly not possible because you're not physically present. And what we said was, look, technology reduces the time and space between people. And that's fundamentally. We can use that to create experiences like this. So Joe tells this funny story. He was leading to Pinterest and he left Pinterest and joined and we started working together. And basically he was like, in his head, he's like, yeah, six months we'll be like Facebook and be like a billion dollar company. And you know, four years later, we have nothing to show. Nothing's working. It's like, you know, we've gone through. We're living and working out of our apartment. It was funny because the house I lived in before was this kind of like hacker house. We lived with a bunch of our friends from college. It's funny now, one of the guys, like Stanford professor and some of the guys work with us. And right before we were there, Stripe was started out of the house. John and Patrick had been working there for a couple of years and left. And then probably like maybe 15 years before that, Jerry Yang started Yahoo out of the house. So it was like this, like random house in Palo Alto, which was a really cool experience. So kind of Q. Four years of building or, sorry, it's probably two or three years of building consumer products. Nothing worked. Man, it was really tough. The single most important decision you make, your company, full stop, period, no question is who you work with, who your co founder is. Literally the single best decision I've made in my entire life for Alchemy has been working with Joe. He's definitely the smart one. So the interesting thing around the social apps was finally we built like 10, 12 products at a time. And we built this and we're like, nothing's working. We actually tried pivoting at one point. We're like, man, we just want to make something. This is probably what other people externally would call it the low point. We never felt like it was a low point. We had no money. We were like paying ourselves minimum wage and living out of an apartment and working out of there. There are times we didn't leave our apartment for seven days in a row, which now doesn't sound crazy because of COVID but back in the day, people were like, you're insane. One of our low points was we tried to pivot into a bodybuilding food delivery service because none of the social op ideas were working. We ordered a box of Blue Apron for those who don't know who what Blue Apron is kind of this, like this food delivery kit. And you Kind of assemble it and we, like, opened it and we're like, what are we doing? We don't know anything about operations and we don't even know how to cook. So we just like took the box, put it in the fridge, like, never touched again. And then the next app we built was down the lunch. So basically it was this idea. We moved to San Francisco to be with our friends. And basically what happened was we never could hang out with our friends because whenever we were free, we texted two or three of them and we're like, hey, do you want to hang out? Everyone's like, I'm busy, I'm busy, I'm busy. And of course you never hang out. We're like, one day, what if you could just press a button and would automatically message all your friends and see who's free? And we're like, no one is going to use this. It's literally our two friends, Mateen and Ravi, who are, who worked up the street from us, and literally no one's going to use this. We posted it on my face. We couldn't even download it on the App Store. It's like an enterprise build on my Facebook account. So you had to see that to download it. The app blew up. And this is a much longer story, but the short version of it is like, it ends up being the number one app in the App Store and social. Millions of people around the world. You know, New York Times put the worst photo of me and Joe in history on the front page. I will never forgive them about that. And yeah, it was just a really, really cool experience that we worked on for many years before we switched to crypto.

I love that there are so many great nuggets there and some things that I've advised our own founders to, to consider as well. And one thing that I really love that you hit on is just how important it is the people that you work with in the founder match. You know, one thing I like to test when I meet with founders is would you still work with your co founders if your idea fails, or is it more about the idea and the market and, you know, so much of an, of an opportunity when you're setting out to build a company is conviction and an idea and a market and the customers and the problem. I also think, you know, one of the things that I really look for in teams is high velocity. And so that can be high velocity and experimentation, which I think is really important for consumer to see, like what sticks and what works, even that pace of iteration and execution. I Think ultimately is something that helps, you know, companies win in the end.

It's funny you say that, because I would actually say that's probably two of the most important things, period. Like who you work with. One question I like to ask people is, what would you do if you had infinite time and. And money? And, you know, everyone has different answers, but my answer would be exactly what I'm doing now. Basically, do it for free for like eight years. Right? And I feel, like, super grateful for our team, for Joe, and just, like, truly blessed to get to work with these people. I think the second. The second thing I 100% agree with also just the velocity of iteration. Actually, one of our secret sauces is we always focus on cutting down the cycle, the iteration time. Cycle, time of iteration. So concretely, let me give you an example. So back in the day, when you submitted an app update for your app to the App Store, it used to take one to two weeks to get the app approved. Apple had to go approve the app, and then you can ship the new build versus something like a website where you just ship it and it's refreshed instantly. But the interesting thing here is like, okay, let's do your Facebook. You build a version, you spend a week or two coding a new version, you ship it to the App Store, that's like another two weeks to get approved. So now you're looking at a month. Then you, maybe you do really fast. You get feedback in a week, you build another version, another week, and then you ship another version. Right? So you're talking like one to two months to get, like a new version of your product in your user's hands. And we basically said, look, we just can't wait one to two months. Like, we need to know if our idea works or not. Like right now, right? So what Joe and I used to do, and we iterated this over time. This is kind of the final version we got to. We got more and more extreme. We would dress up as Berkeley students. We would go to Berkeley campus. It got to the point where we actually started getting recognized. People were like, wait, you guys are back? And we would just go up to random and it'd be like, you know, we didn't tell people we made the app because if we did, they would just wouldn't give us real feedback. And we would go to people and we're like, oh, you know, we're just, you know, working for this company. It kind of sucks. Here's this app. Like, what do you think? And we would just watch them Use it. And we just run around campus and do this and we watch people use it and once they, we see like oh, their feedback, they didn't understand this button or whatever, then we would sit on the steps, walk away, sit on the steps, think them, walk away, sit on the steps, plug in our phone to our computer, recode the app right there, hit refresh and then show the next person. Right. So we cut a two month iteration cycle time to two minutes and it was just insane. Like that was kind of one of our secret sauces of why we out competed everyone. Joe has this great quote that the big don't eat the small, the fast eat the slow.

Yeah. And I love that we're spending time on this history and you guys, your entrepreneurial background because there's so many foundational lessons. Explain sort of, you know, your journey to getting interested in blockchain. What were some opportunities and sort of the pain points that you were observed and ultimately what made you build alchemy?

Totally. So we were doing data launch. It was going really well. Honestly surreal to like after years of like building stuff and nothing's working. You wake up one day and it's like you look at the app store rankings, it's like number one down to launch, number two, Facebook, number three, Snapchat, number four, Instagram, and 5se. It was nuts. Summer 2017 happened. We had a college product, so we're working on version two and three of down to lunch. I think it was version three at the time and our users were college students. So everyone was out for summer around this time. We had seen bitcoin and crypto for a long time. The guys downstairs in our apartment were Michael Dunworth and Yani. They were building this company called Wyre. It was like a payments company in crypto. And we'd hang out together and party together and play beer punk together. And they'd always be like bitcoin, bitcoin, bitcoin. And Joe and I definitely believed in it. We were like, oh, this is definitely the future. But we were very, very, very focused on, on what we wanted to do and to set the stage. In 2017, this new thing called Ethereum started taking off. There was a shift when Ethereum came and it was this new building block. And let me explain what I mean by that. So there was three big shifts in technology in the last a hundred years. The first one was a computer, the second one was the Internet, and third is blockchain or Web3. Basically what we saw was this was a new fundamental building block. And Also, one more caveat on that. There are a lot of things which seem fundamental. So like AI is getting a lot of excitement. It's a transformational technology, but it's not a new building block, right? What AI is, it's just a combination of computer and Internet machines following instructions and machines talking to each other. Almost any other kind of technology you look at is really a combination of these things. And we saw blockchain as the first really big fundamental new building block. And the key insight for us was that when you have these shifts, this was a shift of our lifetime. We weren't bored when computers happened. We kind of missed the Internet. We were a little bit too young. In early 2000s, late 90s, we were still in elementary school. So when these shifts happen, number one, this is a shift of our lifetime. Number two, when you look at people who have built these transformational companies, they were there because they were early in that shift. And a lot of our investors had done that, right? When John Hennessy, who was chairman of board of Google, we'd been pretty close to and kind of saw him kind of usher in all these companies. Jerry Yang from Yahoo, Reid from. Who's a greylock from. From LinkedIn, like the. All these kind of great companies. If you're in the right place at the right time, you have a chance to build an Apple or Microsoft or like an Amazon or Google for the Internet. So that, that was what we realized. It was really tough decision because we had dedicated our lives to this. We're super focused. We turned down all these other opportunities and we had summer off because it was a college app. So we said, let us try doing crypto stuff for the summer. If it doesn't work out, we will go do. We will go back to building our social stuff, which is going pretty well, honestly. But if it does work out, we'll just kind of see, right? And it just kind of took off from the beginning. I've actually told all my friends, like, quit whatever you're doing and go into Web3, because here's the thing, right? I'm going to be super clear. We did not know crypto will for sure be successful, but we said it has. Looking at all the patterns, the excitement, the new technology, the smartest friends going to the VC interest, kind of the kind of transformational power of this new technology. We said, if this is a new technology, we can build something massive. If we're wrong, then at least it'll be as interesting to work on as anything else. But if it's right and we don't do it, we will never forgive ourselves because this is like the biggest opportunity of our lifetime. Right. So I think that was really looking at Jeff Bezos regret minimization framework was like, that was kind of what made the decision for us.

Yeah, absolutely. I am definitely in that camp of that red pill camp or you know, just thinking about how blockchain technology is going to be generational and category defining for years to come. And I think there are a few step function changes where you sense this technology is really unique, one of a kind and totally new. I think blockchain is one of those. Mobile is another. Personal computing is another. Some waves we have lived through, some waves like you, you mentioned are some things that we've heard the stories about from Silicon Valley. And I also think a more nuanced take is sometimes these, these technologies actually converge to be multiplicative. And you know, you guys are, you're naming Apple and Microsoft and Amazon and now you're on your way to be this critical layer for that developer platform. Yeah. What is it like when you know from a culture perspective, from a hiring, from an operational perspective to get a 10 billion valuation like that so quickly?

Well, you can probably see the day to day on my face with the lack of sleep lines under my eyes. I think kind of recentering on what is important to us as a team, as a business is always kind of core. And we have two core philosophies around how we think about our business. I love building things and I love people using that and having their lives get better. If we had optimized for money, there are much better ways. We could have done it earlier and faster. And there's no value judgment on whether it's right or wrong. But we view press and fundraising and all these things as tools to achieve kind of what we want, which is helping bring Web3 to the world. The two things that we care about. A ton. Like a ton. It's what Joe and I think about 247 is what our team thinks about. The first one is how do we make it a magical customer experience. And it's funny because the CEO of Dapper, who they made NBA top shot, cryptokitties, all these things, called me. This is maybe four years ago. He's like, look, what do you do? And he was like, I don't even know what you do. But our head of engineering said it's like this is the best customer experience he's had in his life. And that to me was the ultimate, ultimate praise. The second thing I Think which is equally as important. And this kind of really shaped how we run the company. We want our team that like have the best experience of their life working here. Right. It should feel like a family. It should feel like you're almost like a college dorm. One of the secret sauces we had was our first 27 people, 22 are founders. Multiple of them had run multi hundred person companies, started run multi hundred person companies. If you actually stack rank the, the size of organizations people have run, Joe and I are like squarely middle. There's more, way more people on our team that have run way bigger organizations. And everyone took like a title cut, a pay cut. Like we don't do titles. It's completely flat to come to an Alchemy. And I just feel truly grateful for that. Right. And, and Joan, I'm definitely the dumbest person at the company. Like no question. I'm not even just saying that to like be nice, but I think like that's an incredible thing because like we get to hire the best people in the world and, and you know, I think we could have grown way faster as a business. We spend zero, basically zero dollars on marketing right now and we don't have like a marketing team and we're just, I mean we're building out our go to market motion right now, but it's not like a big machine that we invest in. But you know, we could have grown way faster. But I think the thing I'm super grateful for is like I get to go into. It doesn't feel like work. No one says work. I go and I go into the office and it's, it's an absolute blast. I love the people I'm around. It's so much fun and everyone is so self driven and autonomous that it's just an amazing experience. Like I don't have to like no one at Alchemy would call me their boss. We just like work together. Right. And I think that's why we always wanted to be amazing.

Yeah. And you know, I think one other point that you were talking through is just the timing of things. So, you know, building through this period and through sort of the previous bear market of 2017, 2018, 2019, 20. And you know, there's some ups and downs in that period, but December 2020, you're right around the corner from essentially 2021, which I really categorize as this like proliferation of real consumer use cases on blockchain across NFTs and gaming and social. And you know, I spent some time on this podcast Having conversations with builders in those arenas. And so it's an incredible testament of, you know, sticking true to what you believe in through the hard times and then having that payoff in these crazy growth spurts. So I think, obviously I think about the market conditions that we're in now and the kind of climate that we're heading into and this instilling, you know, just that, that sort of feeling of endurance, enduring and kind of building through the tough times. Certainly for me and other entrepreneurs that might be listening to this, any last things you want to say about kind of building through that phase and maybe even, you know, the phase that we're in now, kind of, you know, the climate that we're in now and sort of the things that you're excited about for Alchemy's future?

Totally. I was just like having a chat with Patrick Alston from Stripe a few weeks ago, and it was really interesting because Stripe is a company that we look up to a lot and just absolutely crushing it. And it was. Chatting with Patrick basically was like, humble hat aside, what made Stripe successful? And it was really, really interesting answer. He basically was like, look, I think we executed pretty well. There's a lot of things we didn't do well. We could have done better probably, but the most important thing is we just picked a really good idea. And I was like, wow, that actually resonates a lot because I think we executed well. But I think it was like the biggest thing that determines kind of the long term success of business is like, number one is the industry, number two is the product, number three is the timing. Right? And I think we really just nailed it. And when I say nailed it, we went through a very long, intense process where it looked hopeless for like many, many years. Right. And I think when you look at a lot of what I consider the really iconic companies like Microsoft, like when Bill Gates dropped out of college, he was like, oh, shit, we missed this computer revolution. And basically what turned out was they were actually early. And that's how we felt in 2017. We're like, man, we missed it. Everyone's already doing it. Crypto's already here. It already happened. We're so late. All of our friends that were in it in 2012 or 2011 or 2013, and we missed it. I think that just the timing is so important and it's hard. You have to take a bet. The big bets often look the craziest because they could be crazy wrong, right? Like, you know, we've taken bets before and they didn't Work out. And this one like happened to work out. And I think, and I think. And then the fourth thing is the team. So I really do believe, like, and you know, this is a, another pitch to everyone of if you're not in Web3, you should do Web3. It's kind of like the Internet is happening and you know, it's 1999 or 2001. I think, I still think we're in like 1995 in crypto, but you know, we're like 2001, 2002. And you can either work at Google or Amazon can either work at Barnes and Noble or you can work at Amazon, right? And you know, Barnes and Noble is like the stable company, remember 2001, Amazon has lost 95% of their stock value. Everyone's like, Amazon's dead. All this stuff. But government or policy, people or regulators, whether they like it or not, like, technology is moving forward, right? And I think you look at crypto and you're like, do you see a world where we're going back to like gold bars and like paper, or are we going to like a digital currency that anybody around the world world can interact and transact? It's just kind of like obvious that we're going there. No, we're not sure about the timeline, we're not sure the exact implementation, we're not sure about the exact process. But like, technology is moving forward and if you pick the side of the technology that will change the world, like, it's a really exciting time and it's a lot of fun. So I think like, you know, in maybe like final thoughts, wrapping up, I would say like the biggest lessons that I've learned over the years, I'd say like three big things. Number one, like full stop, period. The most important thing you do is pick your team, right? Like picking the right team. I know just that idea in the industry is really important. But if you have the right team, like, you'll be able to figure all that out. And I think it's really, really, really important that you have a lot of fun. I think the second thing is have kind of like a higher level goal of what you're trying to do, right? And like, whether it's like, you know, I want to have this impact or I want to build this product, I want to be in this space, but be flexible in the approach, right? Like there's, there's a lot of times, like I see a lot of entrepreneurs get like wedded to their product and say like, hey, you know my goal. And I told Our, I told our team like two weeks ago, right, like, our goal is to help bring Web3 to the world, right? We want to enable people to build. If there is a better way to do that, like, we will scrap our entire business and start from scratch if that, if there's a better way. Like, you know, I don't think that's like a realistic thing that'll happen, but if it does, like, we're fine doing that. Because for us it's not. We're not trying to bring Alchemy, the developer platform, to the world. We're trying to bring Web3 to the world and whatever is the best approach there. And I think just like being flexible and if you look at like the greatest companies, I think they've done this like over and over and over again. Probably the other kind of biggest lesson, and this is maybe like early stage startup stuff that we learned was optimize for now. There's so many things that you know, in future, you're like, you're planning for this and you're planning for that and whatever. Like in startup, like, you don't know, like, in the early days it was just like we didn't even know it was going to happen like three hours later, right? So it's like there's the planning stuff doesn't matter. Like, just focus on, like, making sure you're building something that people love and like, if you nail that, everything else will take care of itself. We messed up so many things, but we like really focused on building something that people loved and we just, that was all we thought about. We weren't thinking about, like, what we would do with our finances in two years or what we would do, you know, how we'd build out XYZ sales team. We're like, do people love what we want or do people love what we have? And if not, like, how do we have a great experience for that? And that was. And just moving really, really, really fast on that.

Some truly incredible advice. I feel you guys are building a generational company in a generational category. And so I can't wait to have you back on when we're talking about alchemy at 100 billion or all the growth. It'll be amazing to look back on this podcast and see where you guys take it from here. But with that, I think it's a good place to wrap. And thank you, Nikhil, so much for joining us today.

Thanks for having me. It was a blast.