This is epicenter episode. 364 with nikhil viswanathan.
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Apple. Today, our guest is nikhil
viswanathan. He's the co-founder and CEO of
alchemy alchemy's apart form, that provides a suite of
developer apis and tools for aetherium.
So running and maintaining in a theorem node.
Well it's not that easy, especially if you're doing that
in a production environment where you might have thousands
of users depending on those nodes to use your app and over
the years, we've seen several services enter the space that
provide apis like these into your, as probably the most
notable example. Well out Jimmy came around about
two years ago and they just came out of stealth mode.
So you can now go to the website, create an account and
start using the API right away. What they do is the obfuscated
away node infrastructure and they offer, a suite of tools
that make it super easy to for developers to just start
building. So there are Pi provides all of
the endpoints that you would expect, from a vanilla etherium
node. But there's also all these other
things that they offer that you just don't get out of the box
with a vanilla node. So, for You can make an API call
that will pull up all of the tokens and balances available on
an address. That's something that would
take, you know, lots of time to build if you were doing that on
top of a vanilla know. You'd have to build that
infrastructure yourself. They also provide access to the
trace module in the opening, theorem client or previously
known as the parody client and they have monitoring tools with
usage analytics which is really useful for a developer.
And another cool feature that I really like which is A
notification API for mobile apps.
So if you have say a wallet for example, and that wallet has to
send you a notification to a user when a transaction
completes or when they receive funds on an address, for
example, well, they have the API that allows you to build that
into your app really easily, so I really like Alchemy because
I'm generally, I'm just a fan of developer tools that make it
easy for people to onboard and build on a platform.
And if I was building in an etherium app today, I don't know
if I'd have the patience or the Skills to set up, you know the
node infrastructure and the apis for my app so I can definitely
see myself using something like this to build the Prototype and
even take a nap into production. So I think having more services
like this is a really good sign for the ecosystem because it
shows that there's a certain level of maturity in the space
and it just allows developers to come in and start building apps
on aetherium without having to learn all of the intricacies of
running and maintaining infrastructure.
I do have some concerns however, about services like these
creating Central points of failure in aetherium.
And this is a concern, I have not only with Alchemy but other
apis, validation Services, node providers in general.
So on one hand, I think there's a natural tendency to move
towards more services like these because it creates a more robust
infrastructure for the apps in the ecosystem.
And it just takes away a lot of overhead for developers, but on
the other hand, I think it would be undesirable.
Herbal to end up in a situation, where, let's say 80% or more of
the apps in the ecosystem, rely on one or two services like
these. I think that in a situation such
as this, it would be reasonable to.
Then ask the question. What's the point, if most of the
apps and services in defy were relying on a handful of services
that could potentially shut down or sensor, transactions, for
example. So, I think this is something
that should remain. On top of mind and should be
part of the ongoing conversation and etherium when it comes to
the ecosystem that we want to build.
And I invite companies like Alchemy to also take part in
that conversation before we go to our interview with nikhil.
I'd like to tell you about a free webinar that will teach you
how to get started and build sophisticated application on the
platform. This is suitable for both
Enterprise developers or independent blockchain
developers. It's happening on November 17th
and I'll tell you a little bit more.
Later on during the interview. But for now, here's our
conversation with nikhil viswanatha.
We're here with Nicole viswanathan.
Thanks for joining us today. Thank you for having me.
We've been wanting to have you on for a little while.
Now, Alchemy has been in the space for somewhere around three
years I want to say and recently the company kind of came out of
stealth mode like for a while. It was, I remember it, you know,
looking into Alchemy like in 2018 and it seemed a bit selfie
and, you know, like you had this, like I remember there was
still like this, you know. Us to use the platform kind of
thing. And now it's like, a full-blown
developer platform that you can create an account.
Like I did that before during this call and, like, play around
with the, with the tools and everything.
And so, yeah, tell us a bit about your background and how
you became involved in the Block Chain space.
Yeah. Absolutely.
So quick background. So I actually grew up in the
small town in Texas that no one's ever heard of.
But, you know, there's no building over four stories tall
and everyone drove a pickup truck, he was super fun.
Came to Stanford. Did my undergrad and grad?
In computer science, machine learning, artificial
intelligence and have a really great time.
Absolutely loved it. Always knew I wanted to do small
companies startup stuff. Ironically over the Summers.
I ended up doing the exact opposite which is product
management at Google Facebook and Microsoft and Head Start a
couple companies and college post-college, you know, I really
thought about my life and I realized I was like what I want
to do had one of those, you know, 1/10 or 1/8 life crises
thing and thought about is that, you know, what I want to do with
my life. And I think, I think about my
life, personally, the way in measure is on to Accent your x
axis is how many people's lives, you touch.
And your Y, axis is How Deeply do you impact their life every
day. And it's basically the number of
people times the depth of impact and for me, that that kind of
x-axis was always obvious. Never before in human history,
could you press buttons on this magic metal box and build
something that every person across the planet used, right?
And that it's so crazy that we live in a day and age with
computers would software internet and blockchain.
We can build products that affect everyone around the world
and this wasn't possible. 20 years ago, when you think about
the major shifts that happens in the world.
You know, before 20 years ago, the major forces that govern our
world were country's government religion, like these kind of
things. And today's technology, right?
Technology companies, the Facebook, the Google, the
YouTube, Instagram have a bigger impact than essentially, any
country in the world. So for me that was all, you
know, from a young age I loved computers.
I knew this is what I wanted to do.
I had built a bunch of Things are not at this point in my
life, probably built like 50, 60, different products since I
was in sixth grade. So that was just something I
love doing. I love creating.
I love making things and the y axis for me was really
interesting and we had, you know, how do you really have
daily impact on daily? Positive impact on people's
lives and I don't do this kind of rough.
Period post College where I missed all my friends.
I was really lonely and broken my long-term girlfriend which
starts company but it wasn't working out and I really thought
about it. I said, you know what is The
number one thing that determines your happiness on a daily basis
and for me that was the people I was around, right?
Imagine that time when you're surrounded, by all these
incredible amazing people and you're just like truly happy.
And I said, you know, I really want to recreate that and if I
can do that for every person on the planet, that would be
amazing and everyone was like, you know, that's crazy, it's so
impossible do but if you could do it, that would be the best
thing ever. So we spent several years, my
co-founder actually my same, co-founder with Alchemy Joe who
we met at. Stanford teeing, the database
class. It was funny because we tear the
database class. Normally, it's an easy class to
TA because you have like a hundred students really fun,
it's really easy that quarter. We just they decided to say Hey,
what if we turn it to open it up to anybody in the world can use,
do the class turns out 120,000 students, signed up for the
class and I remember staying up the night before writing code to
integrate PDF certificates and all these things.
So the the story is the next quarter that became Coursera.
So we were Joe and I were kind of like the first unpaid
employees. Of course, they're so we met
there. We've been working on products
to make you feel like you live. Your friends.
We built a bunch of different products is really hard.
It took a long time and nothing was working.
We built this one app. We thought no one would use it
and suddenly like, it becomes a number one app in the app store
and social millions of people around the world from page and
other times, it's kind of this crazy story, which I'm happy to
go into. But, during that time, we had
seen. So this was around 2015 to 2017
and we had seen crypto for a really long time, and we
actually really believed it. And it was interesting because a
couple of the guys who lived in our apartment complex, Couple
units below us were Michael and Jana and they started a company
called wire. And we used to all hang out and
we play beer, pong and party together.
And we have these like 3M conversations how like Bitcoin
was a future the world. And you know Joe and I like
totally believed in it and really excited about it but I
think there was a fundamental shift for us where, you know, we
had this heart-to-heart in 2017 and we were like, wow, like
we've seen this happen for a long time but there's a massive
new shift happening with the theorem and a theorem was really
the game. For us.
And the reason it was the game changer for us was is no longer
digital currency, which we totally believed in.
But we had said, hey, we're going to dedicate Our Lives to
this other thing, but suddenly, we realized it was a new
paradigm in terms of programming.
It was a new fundamental building block.
Like when you think about the big shifts in technology over
the last you know 50 years you have the computer, the internet
and blockchain and the computer, they fundamentally, give you a
new building block each one of these.
So computer says, hey, we're going to let you create
programs. The internet says we're Give you
a new building block of instant connectivity.
You can connect with anyone anytime anywhere, right?
And what can you create with that, right?
And what blockchain does is it gives you a new building blocks
as you can have or what a theorem does.
It says you can have programmable money and that was
amazing to us. We said, wow, like this is going
to change everything. And you know, when you think
about a lot of our investors have found it a lot of these,
you know, Seminole companies in for the internet stage, or the
computer age, you know, where this Yahoo or LinkedIn, or
Google like we have seen. We have I'd seen them kind of be
in the right place the right time or said, look this another,
massive shift if blockchain plays out like, we think it will
be, this will be an internet scale technology.
We can't miss this. So that's kind of the Genesis of
how we got really excited about it.
And the rest is history. So talk about your y-axis so
basically Alchemy it gives us blockchain develop
infrastructure. How do you figure blockchain?
Develop infrastructure touches people this deeply.
Absolutely, that's a great question.
So I think when I think about this there, when you going back
to the three big ships, I really, this is really like, my
mental framework, computer internet blockchain and they
actually all formed in a similar way.
We're at the funded. Let's just look at the computer,
it's a little hard to kind of visualize without a diagram.
Which I usually use, but just use your imagination for now.
So, at the bottom layer, the computer was a bunch of
Hardware, right? Was a set of protocol, so it was
your RAM, your hard drive, your CPU, all the fundamental
components that made the computer, but a computer was
just a fancy typewriter until you had user applications.
Right at the very top layer is word, excel Chrome, like these
kind of things that enable computers for everyone around
the world to be accessible besides the people who like,
know how to write code. So, when you think about that,
Where hardware and protocol are. And then the top layer of
applications, the middle layer is the platform layer and what
the platform layer does. So in for the computer, that was
Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OS, what it does?
Is it abstracts away the hardware and it makes it easy
for developers to build applications.
So now what happens is developers can build things.
So, normal users can use those and then once it has this
virtuous cycle because now users come and they say, oh, Wow,
there's a lot of applications. Let me come use this cool thing
called a computer. So then more developers come
because now there's more applications and more users and
then they create more applications and so on and so
forth. So when you look at the
internet, you see the exactly the same thing, it's just three
layer stack. The bottom is HTTP FTP SMTP like
the protocols that run the internet.
And we actually there was an internet before the World Wide
Web, right? But what is what is the internet
today to us? It's Facebook, it's YouTube,
It's Google and that that top layer is Meyer and the
abstraction layer in the middle. That was needed.
The developer platform layer is actually the web browser, right?
And that is what abstracts away. The underlying protocols and
makes it easy for developers to build.
So, similarly, in blockchain what we see is you have a theory
of Bitcoin. You have all these other chains,
right? And that's the bottom layer and
people are trying to build applications, you know, anything
from a coinbase to Walmart doing stuff on the blockchain to a
crypto kitties to games. Whatever it is these
applications applications can be anything, right?
And the The challenges, we're kind of in the early days of
computer in the sense of, in the early days, what happened, you
know, IBM built their own operating system and deck built
their own operating system and ALT are built their own
operating system. Everyone had their own operating
system, so in, but then my windows came along and said, hey
we're going to make it easy for developers.
I'm going to standardize this so the way we see ourselves and you
know obviously each technology is slightly different.
The internet slightly different from computer or slightly
different from blockchain but fundamentally what we see
ourselves as What our mission here is to enable the builders
to create applications and provide value to users.
If you think about that, chain of how blockchain adoption
happens, it's developers, build applications, and users use
those applications and get real value from it.
And what we're seeing right now is it's kind of like the 1991 of
the internet where it's so difficult to build it so hard to
build and our goal as a company, is to enable Builders by letting
them have the tools. They need to build great.
Applications. And so, why focus on the
developer infrastructure and more?
Specifically why etherium? Why this focus on ethereum?
When there's so many other blockchains out there?
Absolutely, that's a great question.
So, let me answer the first question first.
So why developer infrastructure? So, going back to the, at the
end of the day? What do we want out of
blockchain? What is the purpose of watching
the purpose of any new technology?
Well, I guess scientists think. It's interesting just for the
hell of it, but the Reason that new technology exists is to
provide value to people around the world and enable them to do
new things that we're never possible before.
And this is a little bit of a side track, but one of my main
thoughts around, adoption of blockchain is we will know that
blockchain is successfully adopted once the word blockchain
and crypto is no longer used, right?
And let me explain that. So, when you go to dinner, you
don't say, oh, you know, I use this internet app to call a car
to get me here, and I'm using a computer app, too.
Swipe my credit card and pay, right?
You just say like no I call an Uber and then I, you know, just
pay to Apple pay or swipe my card.
And once there is utility that is provided, that is the
technology is irrelevant. We have to get the point where
if we were mentioning blockchain in the product name, then it's
not valuable because it's not a new technology.
So we need to get to the point where the technology and the
product value from that is the value that the user gets and
it's not. I'm using this because it's
watching. So the second question is, how
do we actually get there? How do we get to a state where
there's tremendous value provided by blockchain to people
around the world which all of us obviously believe in because
that's why we're here. And the answer to that is going
back to that chain developers build applications and those use
it users use applications and the challenges that first link
in that chain is a critical piece because it's almost today.
Imagine trying to build a skyscraper with a hammer and a
shovel that's the state of the Sick where it's so difficult to
build applications and our goal is saying, hey, you know,
instead of a hammer shovel if you want to build an Empire
State Building and we give you a crane, we give you a bulldozer,
we give you, I love construction equipment.
So I know a lot of these names but we will give you the power
tools and the construction equipment needed to create the
applications. And in the reason that we chose
this as we said this is the single most important value.
Add we can do to the ecosystem and help push all the ecosystem
forward and then the second question is, why it Miriam and
the answer is that's where the majority of developers are and
Alchemy will support and is in the process of supporting any
chain that has a lot of developer adoption because our
goal is to push for the entire ecosystem.
We're not we don't take alliances on certain trains.
Our goal is saying people want to create things with
blockchain. How do we make that happen and
how do we help the ecosystem in the builders algorithms?
Running a free webinar to teach developers how they can use the
platform to build sophisticated. Applications for use cases, like
crowdfunding asset tokenization Supply Chain management.
And even gaming applications, you'll learn how to get started
with the command line, tools and use the SDK and rest apis.
You'll also learn about the Al Gore and Foundations grant
program and additional funding opportunities.
That the AL Grand ecosystem has to offer.
So if you're building on a blockchain protocol, that has
unfeasibly high transaction fees and doesn't provide the speed
you need, or if you are for a large Enterprise or financial
Ian and are interested in learning how to build
applications that can integrate in your current technology stack
or if you have no blockchain experience at all and just are
looking to take that first step into something new.
Well, this webinar could be for you.
Visit aljazeera.com, epicenter sign up.
Once again, it's free and it's happening on November 17th.
But if you're listening to this after that date, no worries.
You can still go to that page and watch the replay.
We'd like to thank Al Gore and for those support of the
podcast. So let's talk about what Acme
actually offers to devs. It's any theorem API.
What does that mean? As someone who's never built an
app before? What does it mean to me?
Absolutely, that's a great question.
So, Alchemy has a suite of products that we offer?
Let me let me talk about each one really quickly.
So fundamentally kind of backing up again, fundamentally anything
that's difficult for developers. We want to make that easy.
Like that is our guiding vision and that is we want to enable
developers to build. On your applications.
They couldn't vote before because it was too difficult,
period. Full stop.
And we will do whatever it takes to make that happen.
The actual product line. So the first challenge we had,
so we were build it. So Joe and I, you know, have
coded every single day for last. Call it like 17 years or life
over team kind of various somewhere.
Very, very senior Engineers who just built a lot of products and
built worked as a bunch of different companies.
So we had seen firsthand what tools are in other Industries.
When we started building block chain, we were building other
products and was just so difficult.
And we had built this like hedge fund machine learning data,
science, platform, that powered power assets for four billion
dollars in assets for our customers.
And we're like, wow. It is so difficult to build in
this space and so what we did is we actually ended up talking to
about, I think at the time about 80 different customers and we
said, hey we want, what are your challenges?
Because we have this whole list of challenges and we had built
as crazy infrastructure and house that no one else in the
world. Had that enabled us to find out
data and machine learning that basically was was proprietary to
us. And we said look we can just
open this up to everyone but rather than just opening up.
How do we actually find out what's most value to people?
So the first challenge that people had that unanimously,
that every single, I think, out of the 80 people, we emailed and
asked, I think about probably seventy seven of them said, this
was the number one problem, so who's very clear to us?
And that number one problem was, it's very difficult to Rotten
node infrastructure for blockchains right?
And and I think I think also the community does, people don't
actually realize like the Gap in parody teams.
Have contributed so much to it theorem and the community,
actually owes them a huge debt of gratitude because these
people are single-handedly building the tools that power
all the things behind the scenes, right?
So I think, I think that was the first thing we were very
impressed and they're small teams.
These are not big teams of these are not.
If you think of like the number of people who work on Apache or
than other people, Work on my SQL.
These are like order of magnitudes larger than the teams
that work on getting Perry. So I think first off, they don't
like an incredible job, the research they have.
The second thing is, it's very difficult to run blockchain
infrastructure. So let me give you.
Let me give you like a quick example and stop me if this
getting a little bit too technical but let me give just
one example. So In traditional web, let's say
your Facebook and you have one web server that is sending
traffic that is serving traffic for let's say you have 100
users. On Facebook suddenly now
Facebook, you know, let's say Facebook takes off and you have
a million users. What do you do?
So, you actually just spin up, more web servers, more computers
to hand to handle that traffic and then you split traffic
across all of those, right? And the problem is you can't do
that in blockchain. So let's go through blockchains.
An example, let's say You're Building crypto kitties and you
know crypto kitties has one web server.
One node that's running and node is equivalent blockchain server.
So now suddenly imagine you A bunch of traffic and a bunch of
people joining. So now you say, okay let's just
spin up 10 more nodes. The problem is you can't
actually just split traffic across those and let me explain,
why? So as a user what will happen,
I'll say okay I'm going to buy this crypto Kitty and now that
that transaction gets routed to know day, right.
But now you hit refresh and say, oh I'm going to go view this
other cap, this time your and you want to get the you want to
see all the cats. Um, this time you request gets
routed to node B and fundamentally blockchains RDC.
Tries Network and they all don't have the same information at the
same time, eventually everyone will agree on the same blocks
that happened. But at any given point in time,
the most recent information is actually not agreed upon by
everyone in the network. So what happens is the user to
the user, they hit refresh and they will look at their cat list
and it looks them like their cats, not there and their
money's gone. So then they freak out and
think. Whoa, what just happened, which
is not actually the case, the thing is just the transaction
hasn't propagated to the other node in the network.
Work. So the kind of high level of
what that means is you can't horizontally, scale
infrastructure and blockchain and that, that is how it's done
in every other industry. So we what we did is we sat down
and we said, look notes are great if you're serving, kind of
like a very light a pin for us, we said, look, we want to be
able to scale to Enterprise infrastructure and provide the
scalability. And then there's a whole Suite
of other challenges that that people have with nodes.
So we said, look, we want to make this easy.
So we actually sat down I built a new type of decentralized
infrastructure from scratch. It took years of work for us to
build this and it was the product of us having to build
this internally for ourselves first in.
So we call it super node, it is it is a completely new type of
decentralized architecture that we've built.
That enables extreme reliability infinite scalability.
So it's almost like an AWS style thing.
Now where before if you had more traffic, you know, you need to
spend weeks spinning up a new node, depending on the type of
note. So if you have They have
surgery, traffic, you're just hose.
You can just spin up a new note on demand.
So now, you have eight of developers have an AWS like
capacity, where they can just infinitely scale, it, it will
handles all the data correctness and it handles a bunch of other
things around that. Can you become a little bit more
technical here? What exactly is this
decentralized service that you've built?
So basically, do you just run your own death and opening
theorem notes in the background and kind of serve that to the
person who caused the API. What exactly does your system in
head? Yeah, absolutely.
Great question. So we have a little bit of a
diagram on our website. You can check it out, but the
short answer is no, so kind of conceptually what we do.
Is we had to build custom decentralized data stores, for
every specific type of data that is stored in a node.
So for example, so for transactions, you can query
transactions and a certain way on the Node and we take that
data and design a custom data store for that data, that allows
you to say right now, maybe. I don't know.
You can say, hey, get me transactions and in this block,
but one thing in terms of supernote, what it lets you do
is now you can say get me all the transactions for this
address, which is Not possible on an actual note, right?
And be and by designing custom data structures for each
specific type of data that's on a node.
We basically we interact with nodes to pull data off.
But then we are own decentralized, infrastructure
serves and provides the data that people and provides
extended provides an additional query layer on top of the
etherium. That's extended beyond what is
normal, okay, so you better generalized indexer the said it,
mmm, no, it's not an indexer in the sense that, you know, No,
we're just storing this in a database and then we provide
information. We provide access to it in
different ways. It's truly that let me give a
good example. So basically think think about
this right? When you're running.
If you want to run a database on your own computer, let's say
you're building a website you want to run my sequin your own
computer that's a database, right?
And then Google uses a database to store the entire web and to
index the whole web, right? So like technically that's still
a database but the technology is like fundamentally very
different and kind of similar here you can run a node yourself
but the technology that Hugo is completely different.
It's a new type of indexing and storing and serving method.
That's kind of akin to how a Google or Facebook would store
insert their data. Can you be a little bit more
explicit about how it's different when you say it's
completely different? Yeah, let me, let me give you,
let me give like one concrete example.
So when I say it's completely different, the reason it's
completely different is the type of data structures that we use
to store each type of data is completely different.
So for Example. So, on a node you can query
etherium locks. So you can get a certain range
of logs. If you ask for more than that
range, it'll crash. And you can only query in the
kind of like, certain type of patterns.
So what we did is we said, look, we're going to use to.
So for this, for our logs, in particular, we use a Time series
data base and then we also use another indexing method to store
the actual information. So what that lets us do and we.
So we basically like store it and serve it in a different way
and what that lets us do is now, you know, we can so We built a
whole system so kind of like there's a node right.
We built a whole system just around storing and serving logs
and so now online is you can start, you can query about I'm
not sure the exact numbers here but roughly about 10 times, the
range of what you could query on a theorem node, you can query on
Alchemy. So what it does is it gives
developers extended functionality.
So that now because we build this custom data source for
logs, they can query things that they weren't possible before.
Kind of back to the original question supernote is just one
piece of developer platform. So this this was the core
technology that we worked on for many, many years to kind of
really perfect this and make it really, really good.
And then on top of that, we have for other products.
So one is alchemy build. So how can we build is a suite
of developer tools that enable debugging crash reporting.
All the tasks that are you would do in traditional web
development. All the tools that you need you,
those don't exist in blockchain and we built Suite of tools to
enable developers to debug problems faster.
So for example, one one of our users his in Hawaii he had a
rogue server that was just spinning and sending a bunch of
transactions that he didn't even realize.
So using these tools, these visualization tools, he was able
to find that instead of down whereas it had been running for
weeks and he just didn't even realize or another example was
there are certain kind of bugs that take days to debug and with
the correct insights you can you can debug it in under 15
minutes. So that's the second.
Peace. Then there's Alchemy Monitor and
what Alchemy monitor does is provide detailed insights and
analytics for the blockchain. And it captures things that are
not possible through a traditional Google analytics.
Or, you know, those kind of tools because these are kind of
blockchain specific and then the last piece is alchemy notify.
Actually to Mark, Alchemy notify right.
Now, when you think about a normal app, if you use Instagram
or use Facebook, you get notifications when things
happen. When someone likes your photo
and someone comments on your wall, Blockchain the challenges.
These events are not exposed by nodes.
So for example, when an address receives currency like, let's
say and you send me a theorem that is not an event that the
node sends and says, hey, you know, this wallet received five
dollars or five a teeth. So what we do is we built a
notification system that watches the blockchain for all these
types of events and stores them and it provides an API and the
end outcome is the user. Now, Now, you can when you use
apps, you can get notifications on important events in that
wasn't possible before. The last thing we do is we
actually think of our support as a products, we do real-time
Global support for all of our customers, 24/7 around the
world. And it's not that you're
talking, this poor person, you actually talk to the core
Engineers that built the product.
So that, that for us, is a really key part of alchemy
experience. So just to sum up the the
product lines, you have the super node which is the theorem
API and we'll get a little bit more into that in a minute.
There's the developer tools that allows it.
Opportu like prototype and debug in this sort of thing.
There's the monitoring tools that allows you to understand,
sort of, like, your users data Etc.
And then there's this notification thing which I think
is kind of cool. We're like, let's say you have,
you know, your your building wallet, for example, you'd like
for your users to receive notifications on like blockchain
events, right? So, like on transaction received
or on transaction, it's like complete, or like, some smart
contract action or some like that, then that user can receive
a notification. I'd like to spend A little more
time on the supernote thing, you know, let's suppose we have a
someone who's building etherium smart contracts and they've
spent up their own node and they're using this one endpoint
to build and deploy their third app.
Like what specifically are the kinds of things that they're
going to be able to do with the super node?
And what kinds of data are they going to be able to pull from
that API? That they're not that they're
currently not able to get with you know the the RPC calls that
they Back to the guests, note. Absolutely.
That's a great question and that breaks down into kind of four
key benefits that people the reason that people use super
node. So the first one is on average,
it depends on the size of your project and the size of your
team. But on average people spend
about a quarter of an engineer's time to to Engineers time
maintaining and in Basin caring for nodes and typically to build
out a reliable note infrastructure system that even
if it doesn't have data correctness in these other
properties, That we talked about, you need three to six
months, really make it hard and that is what we've seen from
larger customers. So the number one reason that
people use us is they don't have to think about it and it just
works like it's Ultra reliable and it's just it's just always
up. It's kind of like why you'd use
AWS instead of running your own server, it just, it just works.
So you don't have to upgrade the hard drive, you don't have to
wait for crashes. It doesn't go down.
So that's it, you know, if your internet shuts down you don't go
down. Like that's that's the first
thing. The second thing is the
scalability that we talked about the He says suddenly, you know,
let's say our traffic doubles. What happens if you're running
around note, you need a sink, a new node from scratch and you
need to split traffic over and we already talked about the
problems with load balancing. But thinking that new node at
minimum, minimum takes many, many, many, many hours.
And a lot of times it takes weeks, right?
Depending on the type of dog you have.
So that's scalability is super important.
The other thing is the, the query apis so right now, so we
kind of have two options. Number one is you can you can
just use the standard, a theorem apis.
We give little bit extended functionality on that.
So you can query a broader range of logs, you can query Transit
things in certain ways. I kind of an extended capacity
that you couldn't before. And then the second piece of
that is, we actually provide a suite of higher level apis on
top of the theorem that are an extra query layer on top.
So for example, let me talk you through a couple of these.
So one is let's say you want to do you have an address and you
want to get all the tokens in that address that?
That token, that that address fault that's actually not an
etherium query. You can make you have to check
every smart contract that you. Let's say, let's say there's a
thousand roughly 1,000 popular tokens, that people might hold,
right? You have to go to every single
smart contract for each token and say hey does you know
Sebastian's address have 0x know?
Okay. Does Sebastian's address have
auger? No.
Okay. Just Sebastian's address have
Khyber. Oh yeah, it has some Cairo.
Okay, cool. So you have to make 1,000
queries just Just to get the token balance for a single
address, right? And what we did is we said okay
obviously this is not feasible for any kind of real time wall
or anything like that. So we need to build a system
where we can they can give us an address and we'll give them all
the tokens based on that address, right?
So that's an example of one of the higher level apis and like
that, you know the transaction history thing I was talking
about and there's several of the apis we power, but the goal here
is take a call thing, that shouldn't be complicated and we
will make that really easy for Developers.
So Nicholas, how does Acme kind of set itself?
Apart from developer products that were out there when you
guys started. So I'm thinking of in fuhrer,
truffle Alessio all of these products.
How is Acme better? Yeah, it's a good question.
I think like all of these are like fantastic products in and I
really like one of our core philosophies is we don't really
think about other people's competition because we're here
to expand the space the market as a whole is very small for
crypto right there. No 10 billion dollar revenue or
100 billion dollar Revenue companies in Vegas.
It's not many hundred billion dollar companies regardless,
but, you know, our goal really is to help expand the space and
we will do whatever we can to help push Developers for and we
love it when other people, you know, build great tools for the
space. So that to us is this is very
collaborative. And we are here to we're all
here to expand the ecosystem and I think all of the companies
that you mentioned, have served really great purposes for
different parts. The developer experience, our
core focus and Alchemy is we want to help people.
And, you know, before we were mostly focused on Enterprises
and large companies. And now recently, as you guys
mentioned, we just opened up to self-serve.
So anybody now can sign up and use alchemy in our goal, is,
when you are building a product, we want to really provide the
tools, you need to get started. And then also the tools, you
need to really scale and have a stable surface.
So for example, Most of the tools we provide we build things
when they are not available in other places and when they are
available in other places like a truffle.
I think it's a great example. We don't build, we don't build
what truffle does and when people ask us, we say go to
truffle, we think they're great. So our tool set is complimentary
and that way and we focus on the areas that we think are are not
surprised now. So let's talk about the note
infrastructure business because this is this is a business that
I've sort of Industry that I can find kind of fascinating here
because I think there's a lot of implications for the broader
ecosystem but also maybe some think some risks as well.
If we look at sort of like the the ethos of crypto you talked
earlier about AWS and how AWS scales, the web.
I think that a lot of people Smiles that work in the space,
the way that we should scale crypto.
Be shouldn't resemble that you know like 141 but we'll get into
a little bit of that in a second as the ecosystem murderers like
there's already different layers in this in this infrastructure
stack. So you know you have companies
like alchemy that are providing apis for aetherium.
You have other companies in the space or doing more node as a
service where you spin up your own node and they provide you
perhaps with some apis on top as well.
Then there's some other layers in that stack that are more
geared towards validation services.
So I'm talking about companies like bison.
Trails skills here in France offer validator as a service or
knows that the service as you consume mature.
As you see, these types of companies further
differentiating this themselves or being more and more
Consolidated. I guess.
My question there is, you do see, Alchemy providing also
validation as a service in the future with all the
infrastructure that you've built.
I'm sure would be fairly easy, you know, set that up for, for
customers, is that a future towards which you're tending?
That's a great question. So, I think all of these
different types of services, provide, really distinct pieces
of value. And I think added glance, it can
look like they're pretty similar, but when you say
running a note, is a service running, validator running,
develop a developer platform, they're actually very different
businesses at their core and they're very they serve.
Different markets. So, like all the companies you
named, we have zero overlap in terms of customer base, with any
of those companies. Like, we've never had a company
say, oh, we're deciding between you and this other company,
right? So one of the really interesting
things like our and actually many of those companies that you
named actually do compete with each other.
We're just a little bit separate and for us like our guiding
North Star is how do we provide a great developer experience and
how do we make it easier for people to build blockchain
products? And that is what we live?
Weeee will we sleep and we breathe every single day, you
know, we right now we parenting or public.
Stats are about 70% topic, Theory and applications, we
power, the majority defy seven, a half billion a year on
transactions in 99 percent of countries of the world.
And the only way we've been able do that is by having laser focus
as of this point in time developers don't need
validation. Like that's not you know
validation staking that's not something that developers want
in the future who knows? Like at least as far as I can
see that. It doesn't seem to be something,
our focus is on the developer tooling.
How do we build better better analytics?
How do we build better debuggers?
How do we build better kind of the fundamental construction
equipment that developers need? And that's our laser focus.
Will we never do it? I don't think I can say that
because I can't predict the future and if I could I would
definitely know which chains going to win.
But my focus our focus at Alchemy is just laser focus on
the developer and say anything we can do to make that
experience better. That's what we care about.
And that's where you want. And as of right now, it seems as
far as we can see Ford. It's very much on the same path
that we're been and continue heads down.
Working on that. Hmm.
I mean, do you think it's possible though?
Fuck me like perhaps, you know, it's not on your road map, but
do you think that, you know, if you look at the way other
Industries, have Consolidated, you know, if you look at a
company like AWS, or, or Azure, and all the types of services
that these companies offer within the Web space, right?
As Alchemy grows and becomes. Hopefully like a massive player
in the space and a very successful one.
Do you think that it's possible for Alchemy to start providing
also those other building blocks that make up the infrastructure
that powers defy, not just the notes themselves but you know,
validating Services, perhaps other types of services as well.
Yeah. Okay, so that is really a
question, you know, as we grow do, we expand into those areas,
I think, fundamentally it boils down to who's your target to
choose your target market in, who's your customer?
And right now, the customer is for all the companies that
you've described are kind of like funds and people who are
staking and people who have assets that they want to earn
interest on, right? And it right now, our customer
is the developer, the engineer at the people who are building
things as far as I can see. And you write a lot of those
companies that you mentioned like are in direct competition
are going for same market and it's, it's very lucrative market
so happy for them for us, you know, our, our core Focus, Is
developer, as of the current present moment.
We don't see developers. We don't see, like a developer,
a core action of the developers is not necessary that they need
a steak, maybe for their own personal assets, but that's not
like a core thing that they need.
Right now. If that is the case, let's say,
crypto involves in a way that developers need mechanisms to be
able to stay gasps. It's in order to build things,
sure, maybe will support it then, but I think the thing I
can very confidently say right now is, we are not trying to go
and build tools. For a hedge fund to stake their
assets. That's not like our Core
Business. Our Core Business is whatever
developers need. So in the sense that developers
in the future crypto pivoting and enabling developers do that,
we would definitely support that if that's not the case where
we're going to stick to helping developers.
Okay? Just for the listener.
So currently you are a subscription service.
So basically I pay a flat fee and then I get to make.
I mean it's a tiered subscription service but I got
to make a number of API calls. What are you currently do with
the data that the data tray that the user leaves?
If I connect a service and they make an API call it, you can
make the connection between my IP address and my contract keys,
I hold and the kind of interactions I engage in which
is potentially extremely valuable information.
So do data mining that do you save that, what's your, what's
your commitment to use a data? So one of the really nice things
of our business, which I'm very glad about because You know like
the legal diligence down on us is we so fundamentally we don't
store any private Keys. We've actually people have asked
us a lot like can you optimize my transactions?
And can you start private keys were like, no, we're not going
to touch that because that's a whole another issue when we
start controlling, use this one. So, in terms of funds, we have
no axis. I think, I think the actually,
let me give you a quick model of like, a mental model of how you
can think about. This is we are a pipe to the
blockchain. So there's a blockchain here and
there's a user here. The user needs to take a
packaged piece of data and put it on the blockchain.
And we're kind of like a pipe or a good fast, reliable pipe, But
ultimately, were a pipe to the blockchain.
Right. Exactly.
But you your pipe, that kind of knows what traffic goes through
it. I never thought that you guys
kept private keys or whatever. I'm totally aware of that.
But basically you being able to make the connection between my
IP address and the information that I query and the
transactions I sent that is potentially super valuable no.
Yep. That so that's very question.
The question is like we have IP address and and this package of
data. So two parts that answer.
So that. So the first part is when the
transactions are all public so there's no kind of secret
information. There, we don't know in terms of
broadcasting transaction, in terms of the IP address, that is
the only piece of data that we do have.
It's like, okay, your IP address IP address can be spoofed, it
can be faked. We don't even know if it's like
a real IP address. We take user data, very
seriously. We even No, like no one's
complained or no one's asked about this, we don't sell the
data. Our business is not, we've had a
lot of people ask, like, can you sell data?
That seems like, that's just not our business.
Our business is providing customers with a great developer
experience. So we are answers.
We do nothing with the data. We have systems, that we can't
even look at the data ourselves and to be clear, we don't
actually have any data. The only thing we have is an IP
address of the user. That's all we have.
We don't have their name, we don't have their email, we don't
have, you know, anything else about that user, right?
But you might have, you might have like, In data.
So you if you have the IP address and I suppose with, with
the monitoring tools that you do have, and then there must be
some data about transactions that, you know, that it's
available for developers to use. Like, for example, what are the,
you know, what transaction or what?
Data are my clients or users of my, of my of my client basically
what API calls are being made and what transaction requests
are being made into which smart contracts Etc.
Like this, this kind of metadata and not necessarily just direct
user data like names and email addresses.
But the This kind of metadata must exist.
Somewhere on your on your systems.
Does it not? Yes.
Oh, you're right. So we I mean we know which API
calls are made but again like there's no like user
identifiable information, we don't store it.
I mean, we to the needs, we need of like, you know, we let the
user debug their product but we don't look at it.
We don't dive into it. We definitely don't sell it.
Not that you know I know there are companies that do that and
nothing against that. We just chose for our Core
Business. Be providing the service.
And it's really interesting because there are certain types
of data that people are very sensitive about, you know,
whether its private keys or identify if we could identify,
which users had which addresses, or which users were sending
transactions, or which users were do this.
That would be a whole nother story, but Nickel in effect you
can. So basically, if you look at how
easy it is to actually identify addresses on the blockchain, if
you now also have the IP data that goes with it, it becomes
even easier and I totally agree that IP data can be spoofed and
so on. But being diligent about this
100% of the time is nigh impossible.
So, basically, I mean that's, that's the reason why, you know,
whistleblowers have such a hard life and so on, because
basically staying truly Anonymous on the internet is
really hard. Yeah, that's true.
I think so. Two points of that one is again,
literally the only piece of data we have is IP and and that is
like even for our own internal metrics.
When we think about, How many users use your platform?
It's actually really hard to tell because I peas are not
correlated to actually users very clearly, right?
Your phone. If you if you drive another mile
on your phone, your phone picks up a new IP address.
So it's very kind of, it's very unmatchable to people.
The second thing is most of our traffic actually, the majority
of our traffic is back end services.
So mostly IPS we have or just from Amazon so like people's own
AWS clusters hitting us, I don't know the exact status top of my
head, but I know it's about like 70% of that.
That is actually back in traffic from customers.
So, we don't, we don't see any eyepiece in that case, Okay?
Understood as a user of depth, as someone whose privacy consent
forgive me. I'm Drivin.
So, as someone whose privacy consent, I kind of want to know
if a Dap used a service like yours.
What are your thoughts as to this?
Because basically, if I connect to add a pin in reality actually
connect to you, that's something that the user should probably
know, right? So, when you Adapt your
connecting either to that company, if they run their own
notes or connecting, the upper be right, and kind of diving,
too, little bit of technical architecture of a dab here.
So basically there's two ways adapt can be constructed either.
The company can say, we're going to Route all the transactions
through kind of our own back-end system and our own, our own
proprietary systems and then that back-end system Cory's
Alchemy for data and returns it. So in that case we get Zero
information about we don't even get the IP address right?
And then you know they can use the web three on the front end,
which means the the queries are made from that users, from that
users computer. So that in that case, the user,
the only information that is passed is the IP address.
So in either case, in one thing that's interesting in this goes
to the, the discussion about centralization and
decentralization. One thing that's interesting is
when you're using adapt, if there are, if the company runs
the actual software and the know, So and the nodes, then all
of the in all, it's essentially like you're using a centralized
service that's hitting that individual company.
But with Alchemy you know the front end is served by the the
product and then the back end is served by Alchemy so it's almost
like in a way you're only depending partially on that
individual company, so I'd like to turn it back to the sort of
like ecosystem and The Business of blocking apis.
Do you have an idea today of how many Nodes, you know if you look
at the entire theory of node landscape, you have an idea
today like any approximation of how many I guess nodes is not
the way the real good way to look at it because you're not
like really you're providing an API or not really increasing the
number of nodes in the network but I guess one way to put it
would be. Do you have any idea of how many
daps in the broader? Dap ecosystem.
Use alchemy and perhaps also like suppose.
Our main competitors and fura as you know, their back-end.
That's a great question. I mean, obviously, I don't know
a numbers by know, I know our numbers.
See, what can I say publicly? We have thousands of developers
using us, so we have a lot. So we have it.
Got to the point where it's actually pretty cool over the
last couple of years, you know, in the beginning, we would get
so excited. Whenever we got a customer, I
mean, we still get very excited, we get a customer.
Ultimately, that's what we are here for is to help people build
great applications. And now, it's got to the point
Aunt, where the majority of time I used crypto stuff, I would say
a huge percentage of time I find out, I can like look into our
look and say like oh we have customer support chats with
other customers and Telegram and I'll just search that company's
name and we have a customer support chat with them, so I'm
like, oh cool, they're using Alchemy.
So I think in terms of one of the really cool things is as
we've seen in terms of growth of the ecosystem we've seen as
defies been blowing up. We've seen a ton of Really,
really cool things. I was explaining this to a
friend. I think one of the most
interesting things about the defy ghosts didn't what I think
fueled the growth of the device. Ecosystem is every company in
crypto effectively every defy project effectively has an open
read write API for anybody to use, right?
And imagine if like Facebook Google Amazon, they all had read
write apis. Anybody could build on will be
more difficult for Facebook, right?
But the Innovation that would happen on top of that would be
mind-blowing. I think that's one of the really
Lee cool things that you've seen in terms of speeding up, T5, and
for us, in terms of the growth of our user base.
It's been really cool to see that because we kind of like
directly correlate to the number of number of projects in the
space like we have certain percentage and and with that it
grows and that was the main reason for us spending months
and months and months building out self-serve where anybody can
sign up and use it, which is actually very tricky
infrastructure and developer challenge to solve.
So it took us probably about Five months to build this and
our whole Focus. There was before we kind of only
serve the largest companies. And now we said we want to make
blockchain accessible to everybody and that was always
the goal but is very difficult technically to do.
And now, you know, we start seeing people on our free tier
who are very tiny companies and then suddenly the blow up, and
they'll be one of the largest people in space, and they kind
of started out from that from that small free tier.
Hmm, I want to come back to this.
Topic of AWS, which I was mentioning earlier, and then is,
you know, I think to a lot of people in the space scaling
etherium and scaling, the blockchain systems, in general
translates to increasing decentralization, essentially,
right? Like so having more nodes,
having diverse validator set or mining power, you know, what do
you say to developers or people in the ecosystem who fear that
services like Alchemy and Other sort of, like, node aggregation,
services or apis. We're essentially there's
there's aggregation of or centralization of access.
What do you say to those people who think that this is
detrimental or somehow goes against this goal of bringing
further decentralization? And I mean, I want to give you
like a concrete example. Like if if in 5 or 10 years from
now, 80%, or more of Daps on etherium or are using one or two
apis? Do you think that that's a
success for aetherium? Yeah.
Do you see that as a success for a theorem?
Or do you see that as a risk potentially for powerful
entities, like governments, for example, to step in and like
break defy. Yeah, absolutely.
I think that's a great question. And something we thought about a
lot, right, in the very beginning before we built
anything, we were convinced that we needed to build a pure
decentralized solution for this and that's what we Started
building. So we actually built all the
tech. It's actually very complicated
technology problem to do a decentralized network to support
this. And the reason is when you think
of like, let's say, you take something like auger, we have
betting Market something happens, and you need to settle.
You need to settle the results of an real world event and you
need to settle it within, you know, it's a couple days or
whatever. It's on target, right?
For an API service, there's a real world event, someone
sending someone a piece of data and we need to settle at and
like 20 milliseconds to know if that's Right, or not.
And there's this thing where you know, just having someone steak
and then slash into they give wrong isn't actually going to
work because the damage has been done like that incorrect data
has been sent and that that could have massive consequences.
So it's just very complicated structure that we spent months
thinking about. We had some of the kind of like
like math Olympiad type Minds working on it to kind of figure
out a really cool solution for it.
And we had, we actually ended up coming with a really good
solution and then we ended up talking to go back to that. 80
customers and we just ask them, like, you know, how much do you
care about this? How much do you want?
Decentralized, decentralize product.
How much do you want? Whatever?
And, you know, honestly, we were blown away.
This is one thing about user feedback where you do something
and you think it's so obvious and everyone knows, and then
users are like, oh actually you're an idiot.
And the people who design like we just did we just did, right?
So what we found was number one, people didn't care.
They said, we want something that works because when you
think about this, there's two pockets enter, when you think
about it, the first Stage is getting a product that works and
then it's like having like a completely truly decentralized
product, right? And right now when you think of
it and then the second, the second p and everyone's just
focus on that first piece. Now, making something that
works. And the second thing that's
super important, understand, and this was the Crux of, the, of
the reason that people said, we want this solution first, make
sure you have the decentralized version, our back pocket.
And when the time is ready and when we feel like we need it,
people will build it out. But the thing is, there's a very
big difference Between us and aw us right?
In terms of like you know the centralization aspect and the
answer it goes back to. I think we're a Pike's, the
blockchain, we don't store any blockchain data, the data we
give you can get from anywhere else, right?
Which is why the super node is actually a small part of our
business, the developer tools are a huge chunk of our business
and the reason for that is people can switch off at any
time. Essentially, one of the things
we provide is we provide a commodity service.
Of course, we do a better more reliable, the will always be the
alternative. And this is not so much a
criticism on. I'm not directing this as a sort
of criticism on on Alchemy just in terms of you know the vision
that I think a lot of us have envisioned right, for what
blockchain system should look like, right, do you think that
it would be a success if you know, 80% or more?
Or it's a 90%, like, some huge number of daps were pointing at
to API URLs basic, like to API endpoints or one API endpoint.
Would you see that as Is potentially a risk for defy to
get shut down or even like if your service go down or if like
you're competitive service, go down and all of a sudden like
there's 50% of the ecosystem that goes down with it and defy
by this time Powers trillions of dollars and in market cap and
like the entire economy goes down.
Well, the defy economy, what does that catastrophic scenario?
Look like in your view and is that desirable given where we
know like blotching comes from, it comes from the desire to have
things are decentralized, that are resilient Etc.
Yeah, absolutely. I think first to be clear a
success in blockchain means that we're providing new value a new
product that we couldn't do before.
And, and that, it cannot be checked out like it.
The not being shut, down is a really important piece.
And I would say like if Alchemy was more like an Amazon service
that you know, Amazon has Amazon has all these companies data and
if Amazon goes down like they're not getting their data back,
right? So, I think a success case for
us in alchemy would be a Truly that, you know, nodes just get a
lot better and they, you know, everybody can run their node and
that works and we're just focusing on building the tooling
around it. Like our goal is not to be, we
don't want to be a note infrastructure company.
We want, it's actually not a great business to be in the
developer tools is actually a much better business from the
business side because nodes are very expensive to run.
So, for, for when we think about the defy case, let's say there's
there's two, you know, two apis, providing or one API providing,
you know, the majority. So right now, we do about 7% the
top apps. But let's say, That I think
there's two cases here. There's a case where you know,
if God forbid you know, something happened and the
government comes and says hey we gotta shut this down.
If the case was that these companies would be hosed.
That would not be good. That would be a very bad thing
but if the case was the company could just, you know, just run
their node Point, like, literally one of the nice things
about alchemy, which is a great thing for the customer.
Not so great for us, but you can switch on and off Alchemy, in
one line of code. Like, literally all you do is
you take your line of code. Point that John server takes
less than three minutes to switch on less than three
minutes to switch off, which is tough.
Because what that means is we have to continually, when users,
business, our customers business, because it could be
anybody who sort of opening time.
So I think I think the way that it's going right now is we're
providing a suite of tools on top of node functionality, which
I think are very valuable but people are not dependent on us
as much as for our business, our investors will love it to have
people depend on us, but the only way that we're able to do
this is by providing continually good service.
I get, I get what you're saying and like I get the argument that
one can simply change the API URL like that, they just change
the endpoint basically and and then they can point somewhere
else and it's in all their data is still there.
Everything works out, of course, all the day this still there.
I think it might be a bit harder because because you offer, also
this additional features, there's some lock in there and
they might have to like rejigger the rap for it to work without
those additional services and those additional API.
Points. I'm just thinking more in terms
of like ecosystem, resiliency and what I would hope is that
the ecosystem is spread out in such a way that, you know,
there's 20 alchemy's, right? There's like several companies
like yours offering varying types of services and maybe even
like nice services for certain types of daps that provide them
like specific types of API calls and so that we have a more
resilient ecosystem that doesn't rely on.
Like very large actors that can easily take down the entire the
entire space and an instant. Absolutely.
I think that's again, I think that's super important and in
realistically, what would happen?
If a company switches off, Alchemy, the transition will be
easy, but kind of continuing development on your product
would just be slower. And I think, I think, the
trade-off here is we thought about this internally like do we
build a decentralized system? Right?
And the question for us was, let's say we can push the space
two years ahead by building the centralized version first
because it's easier. To build and we're able to
provide better tooling and better and better developer
experience on top of it versus taking two years longer to build
a decentralized version, right? So for us, when we think about
this, because nothing in life is free, right?
So when you think about building a decentralized version of
product versus kind of developer tooling, that's more, that is
more of a centralized pipe. The trade-off.
There is the time to Market and how fast you accelerate the
ecosystem, right? So if we felt like, it was a
case where people I'd be stuck on us and you couldn't switch
off and it be shut down. Then we wouldn't have done it,
right? But in the case we said hey we
can push the ecosystem two years ahead by providing developers
the tools. They need to build things, you
know, in one fifth the time then that and that and they can
switch off at any time, I think that's the trade-off.
You have to make. And I think for us, we we fully
believe that there should not be any kind of, like, single point
of failure or even a few points of failure in the ecosystem.
And right now, we don't think that's the case.
Maybe let's switch gears and kind of get to the to the last
section. So I'd like to talk about you
investor. So you actually have a very
eclectic Suite of investors and Sebastian made me not start with
this. But how did you meet Jay?
Z is actually really funny. That I get that question.
We get that question a lot. So first off I think let me
preface this with low story. So the first time that Joe and I
my co-founder and I started working at it, literally the
Very first day, I remember walking up the stairs, we're in
this, that the Stanford incubator and I asked, I was
like, what kind of music do you? Like is girlfriend?
Sarah was there. And Sarah says he loves teenage
girl, pop. And my answer was perfect.
That's exactly what I love. We're going to get along super
well. So I've actually like, never
really listened to Jay Z's music.
Like I've never really hit play on it, I don't really listen to
rap, it's just not, it's just not my thing.
So Jay-Z and a bunch of other investors have been a kind of
like inbounded us. We were always, like, look, we
just want to build product we Very fortunate position where,
you know, we ran our company super lean and we never needed.
Cash was always kind of inbound interest.
So one investor was like, Hey, JC really wants to meet you guys
and we were, you know, we were like we're sorry, we're like
heads down working and during this time, the company is going
really crazy and we're working really hard.
And there were days, we had left our apartment like six days in a
row. So, you know, he got this call a
changeling me really wants me. You know, you know, we really
got to focus. We have, we need, folks, our
company and I know he really wants to talk to you and I was
like, all right, like Like we had just wrapped up doing a
fundraising round and he and there.
And I just honestly just didn't want to do any more best her
cause I want to get back to work.
So we said look, okay. Yes, the way relationship we
have with our investors is we really want coaches and mentors.
We don't need, we didn't need cash but we said look we want to
personally. Should we want text you on call
you email? You want to learn from you guys
are like you know whether it's you know, the Reid, Hoffman or
Charles Schwab or the term of order Google.
It's like we've been very lucky to learn from all these
incredible people. So What the semester said.
Hey, you know Jay Z, you don't have any media entertainment
people, and they're really smart your Smith.
I'm like, all right. Cool, let's jump on the phone
tomorrow and then they said, oh I can't because Beyonce had just
launched her album that day and they were going on tour and all
right. Well, I guess like, you know,
just it's fine. It's not gonna work out.
It's totally fine. So we get this call from Jay-Z
the next day and he and he calls his, he's a God to eat.
My dinner, really fast to talk to you guys.
And and so, we ended up having this really great conversation.
We Interviewed and asked about his life and you know what, what
he was looking for in like why he wanted to work with us and
these things. And was he excited to mentor and
Coach us? And honestly, I have to say I
was blown away. I again I listen to like One
Direction and Jonah was no One Direction in Taylor Swift's.
Like I really knew nothing about Jay-Z and he's super smart guy.
Very kind, very charismatic. Yeah, we were like to Morocco.
All right, welcome to the family.
So what at Jay-Z's, the woods on Ethiopia and, you know, if, um,
death tooling Can we talk more about the business side around
how to run a company, how to run a business, how to think about
your team and Brandis up? So there's other things that we
like talk to you about. We don't we don't we don't
necessarily need every investor to be deepened developer Towing
We're also wondering about this earlier before we go on the
show, you the Stanford is one of your investors.
We didn't know that Stanford had like a VCR more investment arm.
What is that all about? There's a couple different
Venture arms out of Stanford. There's a Stanford endowment.
There is the Stanford startx fund.
There's the president's fun. So yeah, we say a directly
invested and we have a really close relationship with them.
And this was also, when John Hennessy, the German border,
Google was present at the Time. So he also personally invested.
So we've been like very, very tight in in the Cs Department,
computer science department, multiple of this computer
science, professors are investors and so just really,
really close. I mean, I spent six years there.
Undergrad and grad. Joe did the same.
So, a lot of love for our school, Great.
So where can people go to find you and start building on off
me? Yeah, absolutely.
So our website is alchemy API to IO and you can follow me on
Twitter Instagram, Nick elster. So it's at ni Ki L St.
ER, feel free to shoot me, an e-mail, DM would happy to help
and if there's anything I can do, feel free to reach out.
Oh, thank you, thanks for joining us today.
Thanks for having me. Thank you for joining us on this
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