Sid Viswanathan and the Business Card That Wouldn’t Die

In January 2024, Sid Viswanathan had to print business cards. This was an irritating development for someone whose early career had involved helping people escape the things. He was heading to a conference for Alchemy, his latest company, and the little rectangles were apparently still required. He had hoped never to order another batch.

He marked the occasion with a LinkedIn post that gave him a suitably ridiculous former title: “Chief Transcribing Officer.” At CardMunch, the startup he had co-founded years earlier, he had done his share of typing information off business cards. A much larger transcription operation eventually handled the work. Now the paper had returned, neatly bearing the name of another venture.

There is a useful joke here about the durability of stationery. There is also a useful way into Viswanathan’s career. Again and again, he has been interested in the distance between meeting someone and doing something with that connection. A card becomes a contact. A message becomes a partnership. An introduction becomes a company. The machinery matters because people have other things to get on with.

A mechanical engineer looks for a door

Viswanathan graduated from Watkins Mill High School in Maryland in 2002. Four years later, he graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with an engineering degree. His professional starting point was Johnson & Johnson’s Global Operations Leadership Development program, a fairly orderly beginning for a career that would soon acquire several changes of direction.

A work rotation took him to the Bay Area. The speed of the software business caught his attention. His mechanical engineering background, however, did little to persuade technology employers to hire him. He has described that mismatch as one of the pressures that pushed him toward starting a company himself. The route into the industry would have to be constructed.

His first attempts at entry were almost touchingly analog. He found product managers on LinkedIn and mailed handwritten letters to their employers’ headquarters. One reply suggested he should have saved the stamp money. Later, investor Manu Kumar supplied a more useful condition: the founders would have to understand and build their own product. Viswanathan distilled the lesson as “you can’t outsource company ethos.”

The distinction between those two responses is rather satisfying. One closed a door. The other handed him some tools. His later work gives that early encounter its significance: a founder could learn enough to make something, even if his degree did not immediately persuade someone else to give him a desk.

“you can’t outsource company ethos.”Sid Viswanathan, on a lesson from Manu Kumar

The paper pile gets a software team

At Carnegie Mellon, Viswanathan and Bowei Gai had spent late nights discussing ideas. Their eventual CardMunch circle included two more university alumni, Sudeep Yegnashankaran and Manu Kumar. The university network helped with practical necessities, from advice and equipment to legal assistance and contributors. The connections were already doing much of the work the product would later promise.

Kumar’s desk had a familiar problem: business cards accumulating without becoming useful contacts. The team discussed that problem and the companies that might care about solving it. LinkedIn came up at the beginning. Kumar also recalled an earlier Viswanathan project, Rolotrak, aimed at maintaining valuable relationships. Contact management had occupied him before CardMunch acquired its memorable name.

The company began in December 2009. An alpha followed in March 2010, a beta in June, and an App Store launch in August. The founders chose an eight o’clock morning start rather than the late-night schedule associated with startup folklore. Those dates make the eventual acquisition feel less like a sudden discovery and more like a series of things finished on time.

CardMunch let someone photograph a business card and receive a usable phone contact. Human transcribers checked the information. That arrangement is revealing: the convenience depended on work happening beyond the screen. A user could enjoy a simple action because someone had taken responsibility for all the less simple actions behind it.

Lunch, followed by LinkedIn

The CardMunch team also had a less formal operating system for controlling expenses. A company lunch could mean making the rounds of Costco’s free samples. On another occasion, after a meeting at LinkedIn, the founders slipped back toward the cafeteria to fill their backpacks with food. They encountered an engineering director who had just seen them out. Some networking opportunities arrive with unusually poor timing.

The relationship survived the catering incident. At a LinkedIn developer event in November 2010, the team demonstrated its product to engineers. Interest spread. LinkedIn announced the purchase in January 2011, a little over a year after CardMunch’s incorporation. For the founders, a network they had wanted to work with became the place they went to work.

Viswanathan joined LinkedIn as a product manager. In November 2011, his announcement of the rebuilt CardMunch described three principal screens: capture a card, browse contacts, inspect a person’s details. LinkedIn profiles added work history, education and mutual connections. The card supplied the starting point; the network supplied context that paper could never comfortably hold.

By January 2012, CardMunch had reached two million digitized cards. Viswanathan announced the milestone himself. It is a pleasingly concrete measure for a product like this: two million small administrative chores moved off somebody’s desk. Behind the number were all those meetings whose useful details might otherwise have remained in a jacket pocket until laundry day.

A detour with dessert

His next experiments did not stay confined to address books. In March 2015, Viswanathan and Samir Shah launched Sweetness in San Francisco. A sender could select baked goods from local businesses, pay $20, and have a gift delivered. The recipient supplied a delivery address after receiving a text message, sparing the sender that particular bit of detective work.

The distinctive addition was a personal video message. Cupcakes and macarons did the material part; the sender’s face and voice supplied the sentiment. Viswanathan wanted convenience without draining the feeling from a gift. The product made room for the awkward, personal business of telling someone you were thinking about them. A few taps could arrange the delivery. They could also carry a little affection.

That project belongs in his story because it gives his interest in connections a different scale. CardMunch helped professionals remember people. Sweetness helped someone make a gesture. Both started with an ordinary social habit and asked which parts software could make easier while leaving a recognizable human exchange intact.

A cold message becomes a co-founder

For Truepill, the consequential connection arrived through LinkedIn again. Viswanathan contacted Umar Afridi, and an initial message developed into weeks of email exchanges and eventually meetings. By 2016 they were co-founders. The professional network that had acquired his earlier company had become the means of finding a partner for another.

Their early working lives were practical. They bootstrapped for roughly a year and a half before joining Y Combinator’s 2017 class. Viswanathan packed and labeled boxes while the two founders ran the young business. When investors wanted a presentation, the team used a spare deck built around what they had already accomplished. Variations of it helped raise $39 million across three rounds.

That history helps explain his preference for founding teams with enough complementary skills to get to market themselves. Every task delegated too early introduces another dependency. His own education in building had been forced by an investor’s condition; now the lesson had become a way of choosing colleagues and organizing a company.

He served as Truepill’s president and became CEO in February 2022. He left that role in August 2023. By November he had joined Alchemy, where he is founder and co-CEO alongside Peter Park; Susie Crowe is also a founder. The sequence contains both tenure and departure. One company’s title gives way to the uncertain work of beginning again.

The garage across the street

Viswanathan’s writing supplies a useful view of what catches his attention. In a 2016 essay, he recalled passing a small garage near his San Francisco office. The occupants kept working on the same black Audi. He initially took them for mechanics, then enthusiasts. They were actually the team at Cruise Automation, later acquired by General Motors.

What impressed him was the conviction required to attempt something that ambitious with such modest surroundings. His account reads like the observations of a person still susceptible to the surprise of Silicon Valley. He could walk past an idea every day, mistake it for a repair job, and then discover that a major company wanted to buy it.

The same month, he published an essay about Peyton Manning after attending Super Bowl 50. He focused on preparation, mentorship and enjoyment of the daily work. The retirement speech interested him for its small remembered pleasures: teammates, rituals, shared experiences. A founder preoccupied entirely with the eventual exit, he argued, was missing much of the reason to be there.

Those essays give the business-card episode a little more weight. For someone fascinated by networks, the encounters themselves remain valuable. The software can tidy the records. It cannot attend the dinner, find the right colleague, or take an interest in what is happening across the street.

Another company, another introduction

Alchemy publicly announced a $31 million seed round in October 2024, led by Andreessen Horowitz. Its backers included Magic Johnson Enterprises and Sheryl Sandberg. For a founder who had written about what athletes could teach entrepreneurs, having Johnson involved in a new venture added a rather enjoyable turn to the story.

Yet the small detail from earlier that year remains the better ending. Viswanathan had to order business cards. The person who had helped digitize them was going to walk into another room, meet more people, and hand them a piece of paper. Software had changed his career. The ancient social ritual had proved quite capable of keeping its appointment.