Balu and Usha Viswanathan always tried to instill good values, a strong work ethic and confidence in their two children, Nikil and Tara.
Now, those kids are now highly successful CEOs of tech startups with millions of dollars in funding.
Tara, 33, is the founder and CEO of health tech startup Rupa Health, which was reportedly valued at between $80 million and $120 million in March 2022. The company raised an additional $18.5 million in August 2022, according to an SEC filing.
Nikil, 35, is the founder and CEO of blockchain startup Alchemy, which topped a $10 billion valuation last year.
"When they were young, we never thought they would become entrepreneurs," Usha, their mother, tells CNBC Make It. "Our goal was to just make them into amazing human beings — the best human beings they could be."
The parents might not have set out to raise white-collar executives while raising their kids in Lubbock, Texas. But they can now understand how the lessons they most adamantly championed helped set their children up for success, they say.
"What we actually told them was: 'Take risks, but be ready to face the failures,'" says their father, Balu.
Role modeling risk-taking and resilience for their kids
Successful entrepreneurs are known for their ability to stomach major risks — like starting a company from scratch, despite the fact that around 20% of new businesses fail within their first year, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Meanwhile, psychologists and successful founders alike champion the importance of embracing failures as learning experiences. Nikil and Tara got a firsthand look at how to turn entrepreneurial struggles into success by watching their parents build a tech business in Lubbock when they were young children.
Until 2000, the Viswanathan parents had worked successful professional careers: Balu as a critical care doctor and Usha as an accountant. That year, with Nikil and Tara still in grade school, the couple launched a tech consulting business. Usha returned to school to get a master's degree in information systems management.
They were inspired by the stories of Silicon Valley, with founders building successful tech businesses from scratch to take advantage of the late-1990s internet boom.
"All of these people becoming successful, and the internet coming over. That bug bit me and I basically just had a burning desire inside me," Balu says.
But when the internet bubble burst around the time Starnik launched, the children witnessed their parents struggle. Usha and Balu now realize it helped teach Tara and Nikil the importance of persistence, they say.
"They saw us do that. We'd gone through a lot of struggles in the beginning," says Balu. "Here I am with no experience in running any business at all. Zero."
The parents still run their company, Starnik Systems, which makes cloud-based utility billing software for clients like utility companies and the U.S. Air Force. It handles over $4 billion in transactions per year, according to the Viswanathans.
'We just believed in them'
Watching his parents launch their business taught him that "you can do anything," Nikil wrote in an email to CNBC Make It.
His mother "didn't have a clue about how a computer worked" when she came to the U.S. from India, he noted. But when she went back to college to study computer science, "she read the whole programming book multiple times while sitting in the parking lot after driving us between tennis and violin practice, and ended up getting the highest score in the class."
The parents' foray into tech came with a side benefit, too: It introduced Tara and Nikil to computers and the software business at very young ages.
"Seeing our parents do it just made it normal," Nikil wrote. "We would talk about business at dinner, and it was so much fun being a part of the journey."
We felt that whatever they were experiencing — the rise, the fall — whatever it was, would be good for them.Usha Viswanathan
"Work became dinner conversation. We all helped out," Tara added in a recent Mother's Day Twitter thread, discussing the inspiration she and her brother took from the Viswanathan's "family business."
Perhaps most importantly: Once Tara and Nikil launched their own entrepreneurial endeavors, their parents didn't express worry when the businesses didn't immediately take off.
Nikil and his co-founder ran Alchemy for two years out of a small apartment before landing a major multimillion-dollar funding round, Usha notes. Instead, the parents offered support while making it clear that "we were very comfortable with them not being successful," she says.
"We felt that whatever they were experiencing — the rise, the fall — whatever it was, would be good for them," Usha adds. "We had gone through a decade of struggle. So we said, 'That's fine. They will do fine.' We just believed in them."
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