Nikil Viswanathan

Last updated
Nikil Viswanathan
Nikil Viswanathan.jpg
Viswanathan in Forbes, Jan 2017
Born (1987-10-06) October 6, 1987 (age 37) [1]
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
NationalityAmerican
Education Stanford University [2]
(M.S. Computer Science, 2012)
Stanford University
(B.S. Computer Science, 2010)
Lubbock High School
OccupationEntrepreneur
Awards Forbes 30 Under 30
Website nikilster.com

Nikil Viswanathan is an American billionaire entrepreneur. He is the cofounder and CEO of Alchemy, the blockchain company backed by Stanford University, Alphabet, Inc. (Google) Chair John L. Hennessy, Charles Schwab, Reid Hoffman, and other billionaire founders and executives. [3] [4] [5] Previously, Viswanathan cofounded Down To Lunch, the social hangout iPhone app which hit No. 1 in the App Store social rankings. [2] He also created Check In To My Flight, a website which let travelers automatically check in to their Southwest Airlines flight. [6] [7] In January 2017, he was honored by Forbes with their 30 Under 30 award. [1]

Contents

Early life and education

Viswanathan grew up in Lubbock, Texas and attended Lubbock High School. At Lubbock High, he was valedictorian and had the highest GPA in the history of the school. [8] While growing up, he participated in the Boy Scouts of America and was awarded the Eagle Scout honor. [9]

He attended Stanford University where he did his undergraduate and master's degrees in computer science with a focus on artificial intelligence and machine learning. [2] While at Stanford he did product management internships at Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. [2] During a winter break he built Fountainhop, a campus events platform that was used widely at Stanford, and with friends expanded it to colleges around the country. [10]

Down To Lunch

Down To Lunch is a social iPhone application created by Viswanathan and his cofounder Joseph Lau. After moving to San Francisco, they said they missed their friends because they were working all the time. [11] [12] After finding it difficult to discover which of their friends was available when they wanted to hangout, they conceived the idea of being able to press a button to send a hangout request to all of their friends. One a Sunday afternoon in a "One Direction" fueled coding session, they created the app. Within 48 hours, people around the world were using the app, even though it was only available as a link from Viswanathan's Facebook. [11] Down To Lunch rapidly started being used by students at colleges around the country, sometimes growing to be used by more than 15% of a college campus within 24 hours without any marketing. [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] The app rose to be the #1 app in the App Store social category and #2 overall. [2] [12] Down To Lunch was featured in The New York Times, [2] the front page of Yahoo, [18] Forbes, [1] Business Insider, [13] TechCrunch, [11] and other international media publications. [15] [14] The New York Times featured a front page cover story about Down To Lunch in their business section on April 20, 2016. [2]

Alchemy

Dubbed the "Microsoft of Blockchain" by the press, [3] Alchemy was started by Viswanathan and his cofounder Joseph Lau to provide the platform that enables developers to create great blockchain applications. [4] Alchemy powers 4 million users in 200 countries per week [3] and has been covered by over 50 press features including Wired, [4] Bloomberg, [5] TechCrunch, [3] Yahoo Finance, [19] and many others. The company announced $15 million in funding from Stanford University, Samsung, Pantera Capital, Coinbase, Alphabet, Inc. (Google) Chair John L. Hennessy, Charles Schwab, Jay Z, Reid Hoffman, Jerry Yang, Duncan Niederauer, Tom Glocer, Will Smith, and other billionaire technology executives, Stanford computer science professors, and professional sports teams owners. [3] [4] [5]

Check In To My Flight

While visiting his sister at Wharton, Viswanathan had an hour before he went out to a party so he built a website that would automatically check him into his Southwest Airlines flight. [6] [20] [21] He posted it on Facebook, and said over 10,000 people were on the site in just a couple weeks. [22] [7] [23] [24] He was forced to shut it down after Southwest Airlines sent him a Cease and Desist letter. [6] [25] [26]

Personal life

In January 2018, Viswanathan was named as one of the "100 Most Eligible Singles in America" and top 3 most eligible bachelors in San Francisco according to Hinge and Business Insider. [27] He resides in San Francisco. [27]

Related Research Articles

A cease and desist letter is a document sent by one party, often a business, to warn another party that they believe the other party is committing an unlawful act, such as copyright infringement, and that they will take legal action if the other party continues the alleged unlawful activity. The letter may warn that, if the recipient does not discontinue specified conduct, or take certain actions, by deadlines set in the letter, the letter's recipient may be sued. The phrase "cease and desist" is a legal doublet, made up of two near-synonyms. A cease and desist letter issued by a government entity, called a cease and desist order, is "a warning of impending judicial enforcement".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kayak (company)</span> Travel metasearch engine owned and operated by Booking Holdings

Kayak is a metasearch engine for travel services, including airline flights, hotels, rental cars, and vacation packages. It is owned and operated by Booking Holdings.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Foursquare City Guide</span> Location-based social networking service

Foursquare City Guide, commonly known as Foursquare, is a local search-and-discovery mobile app developed by Foursquare Labs Inc. The app provides personalized recommendations of places to go near a user's current location based on users' previous browsing history and check-in history.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David A. Marcus</span> American entrepreneur (born 1973)

David Marcus is an American entrepreneur. He was the co-creator of Diem, a cryptocurrency project initiated by Facebook. He is the former president of PayPal and Vice President of Messaging Products at Facebook where he ran the Facebook Messenger unit from 2014 until 2018. In December 2017, Marcus was appointed to the Coinbase Board of Directors, from which he stepped down in 2018. In 2021, he stepped down from Facebook. As of May 2022 he is the co-founder and CEO of Lightspark, a cryptocurrency startup which works on bitcoin and the Lightning Network.

Clinkle was a mobile payments company founded in 2012. In 2013 they raised $25 million and the product launched to college students on September 24, 2014.

Brian Acton is an American business executive and computer programmer serving as the executive chairperson of Signal Technology Foundation, which he co-founded with Moxie Marlinspike in 2018. Acton also serves as interim chief executive officer (CEO) of Signal Messenger LLC.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Foursquare Swarm</span> Mobile app by Foursquare

Foursquare Swarm is a mobile app that allows users to share their locations with their friends and create a record of their experiences in a personal lifelog. Swarm launched for iOS and Android devices on May 15, 2014. A spin-off from and companion app to Foursquare City Guide, Swarm allows users to check-in to a given location, and see who is nearby. These check-ins are chronologically listed to create a personal lifelog for each user, which serves as a digital library for all the places they have been, in a searchable database that can be revisited and shared.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Polarr</span>

Polarr is a startup headquartered in San Jose, California, that offers applications to allow creators to make and distribute photos and video filters. Its products include mobile apps for creators to create and search for image filters, as well web-based products to edit photos.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stellar (payment network)</span> Cryptocurrency

Stellar, or Stellar Lumens, is an open-source, decentralized protocol for digital currency to fiat money low-cost transfers which allows cross-border transactions between any pair of currencies. The Stellar protocol is supported by a Delaware nonprofit corporation, the Stellar Development Foundation, though this organization does not enjoy 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status with the IRS.

The following is a timeline of the history of the photo messaging software Snapchat.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Justin Waldron</span> American internet entrepreneur (born 1988)

Justin Waldron is an American internet entrepreneur known as the co-founder of Zynga, a mobile social gaming company, and Zynga.org, a non-profit organization to promote and facilitate the use of social games for philanthropic initiatives. In 2020 Waldron co-founded Playco, a mobile instant game company backed by Sequoia Capital, where he currently serves as president.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kavin Bharti Mittal</span> Indian internet entrepreneur (born 1987)

Kavin Bharti Mittal is an Indian internet entrepreneur and son of Business Tycoon Sunil Mittal. He is known for his role as the founder and CEO of Hike, the company behind the unicorn Hike Messenger and the Rush Gaming Universe (RGU), a mobile gaming application.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eric Ly</span> Vietnamese-born Chinese-American entrepreneur and investor; co-founder of LinkedIn

Eric Thich Vi Ly is an American entrepreneur and investor. Ly was co-founder of LinkedIn, a social networking site designed specifically for the business community, where he served as its founding chief technology officer. He is currently the CEO and founder of a blockchain based trust protocol Hub, as well as the CEO and co-founder of KarmaCheck providing candidate's background checks.

Down To Lunch was a social hangout app used by college students around the world to hang out with their friends. The app functions by allowing users to press a button which notifies friends they want to get lunch and friends can reply back and join.

Foursquare Labs Inc., commonly known as Foursquare, is a geolocation technology company and data cloud platform based in the United States. Founded by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai in 2009, the company rose to prominence with the launch of its local search-and-discovery mobile app. The app, Foursquare City Guide, popularized the concept of real-time location sharing and checking-in.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tony Xu</span> CEO of DoorDash

Tony Xu is a Chinese-American billionaire businessman and the co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of DoorDash. Born in Nanjing, China, Xu immigrated to the United States with his parents at the age of four. He earned degrees from the University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University's Graduate School of Business. Earlier in his career, Xu interned at Square, Inc., and worked for McKinsey & Company, eBay, and PayPal. He was included in Fortune's "40 Under 40" list in 2020.

Michael 'Mike' Cagney is an American entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and CEO of financial services company Figure Technologies, a member of the founding team of Provenance Blockchain and the co-founder and former CEO of SoFi. Cagney is also co-founder and was the managing member of hedge fund Cabezon Investment Group.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">DOWN (app)</span> Social networking and online dating app

DOWN is a location-based social networking and online dating application for users looking for casual relationships and hookups. Users can swipe up for more serious dating, swipe down for casual hookups, or left to pass, and continue to the next profile. DOWN bills itself as a open-minded, sex-positive alternative to other dating apps.

OpenSea is an American non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace headquartered in New York City. The company was founded by Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah in 2017.

AwardWallet is frequent flyer miles and points tracking site. It is considered to be the first in the genre, founded in 2004, and tracked more than 400 sites as of 2011. AwardWallet is based out of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. As of 2021, it has 700,000 users, despite some airlines blocking access to the app citing privacy concerns.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Olenski, Steve. "Joseph Lau, 27, and Nikil Viswanathan, 29 – pg.18". Forbes. Retrieved 2017-05-11.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Goel, Vindu (20 April 2016). "Down to Lunch Founders Pursue Less-Traveled Path to App Success". The New York Times. Retrieved 2017-05-11.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 "Alchemy is secretly fixing blockchain's node nightmare". TechCrunch. 17 December 2019. Retrieved 2020-07-20.
  4. 1 2 3 4 "The Startup That Aims to Decrypt Blockchain for Business". Wired. ISSN   1059-1028 . Retrieved 2020-07-20.
  5. 1 2 3 "Stanford Grads Get School's Backing for Blockchain Startup". Bloomberg.
  6. 1 2 3 "Lawsuit Won't Slow Down Stanford Grad". NBC Bay Area. Retrieved 2017-05-11.
  7. 1 2 "Airline Forces Stanford Grad To Shut Down His Website Because It Saved People Money". Business Insider. Retrieved 2017-05-11.
  8. ↑ "Nikil's Life". nikilster.com. Retrieved 2017-09-27.
  9. ↑ "Nikil". nikilster.com. Retrieved 2017-09-27.
  10. ↑ Gupta, Shubham. "For Students, By Students & Of Students". Tech Guru. Retrieved 2018-08-05.
  11. 1 2 3 Kulkarni, Nitish (26 August 2015). "This One-Afternoon Project Could Change How You Meet Friends". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2017-05-11.
  12. 1 2 DTL, Team. "The Down To Lunch Story". Down To Lunch. Retrieved 2017-05-11.
  13. 1 2 "College kids are going crazy for an app that helps them spontaneously 'lunch, 'blaze,' or 'chill' with friends, and it just shot up above Facebook in the App Store". Business Insider. Retrieved 2017-05-11.
  14. 1 2 "Students across campus are Down to Lunch". The Daily Universe. 2016-01-22. Retrieved 2017-05-11.
  15. 1 2 "'Down to Lunch' on the rise // The Observer". The Observer. 2016-01-21. Retrieved 2017-05-11.
  16. ↑ @vanderhueves, Alex Vanden Heuvel. "Down To Lunch app spreads across UGA's campus". The Red and Black. Retrieved 2017-05-11.
  17. ↑ "Down for pretty much anything – Campus Times". 19 February 2016. Retrieved 2017-05-11.
  18. ↑ "Down to Lunch app gets friends together as developers shun money". finance.yahoo.com. Retrieved 2019-03-31.
  19. ↑ "Blockchain dev toolmaker Alchemy raises $15M in Series A to fuel global push". finance.yahoo.com. Retrieved 2020-07-20.
  20. ↑ "Southwest Early Check In". Million Mile Secrets. 17 October 2012. Retrieved 2017-05-11.
  21. ↑ "Southwest Giveaway Winners + Free Southwest Check-in Tool + Delta Snack/Drink Giveaway". TravelByPoints. 2012-10-16. Retrieved 2017-05-11.
  22. ↑ Dremann, Sue. "Stanford grad's site nets Southwest 'cease and desist'" . Retrieved 2017-05-11.
  23. ↑ "Check In To My Flight". Check In To My Flight. Retrieved 2017-05-11.
  24. ↑ "Blog: Check into my flight.. A cool site gets takedown at Hostjury". www.hostjury.com. Retrieved 2017-05-11.
  25. ↑ "Cassidy: Southwest Airlines crushes Nikal Viswanathan's easy-check-in website – The Mercury News". 6 November 2012. Retrieved 2017-05-11.
  26. ↑ Phillips, Alice (24 October 2012). "Stanford grad site receives cease-and-desist order". Stanford Daily. Retrieved 2017-05-11.
  27. 1 2 "The 100 most eligible singles of 2018 across America, according to the dating app Hinge". Business Insider. Retrieved 2018-04-08.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.