Explore every episode of the podcast The Neon Show

Dive into the complete episode list for The Neon Show. Each episode is cataloged with detailed descriptions, making it easy to find and explore specific topics. Keep track of all episodes from your favorite podcast and never miss a moment of insightful content.

	Title	Pub. Date	Duration
	Burning $8M on Open Source, Hitting $100M ARR and the $250 Billion Market \| Harjot, CodeRabbit	15 Oct 2026	01:01:48
We live in strange times where AI is turning every problem into a coding problem but no one is reading the code solving those problems. On this episode of the Neon show, we have Harjot, Co-Founder & CEO CodeRabbit. Harjot explains why they didn’t go after code generation, the infinite demand for software that is coming, why Jira and Linear are being bypassed, and why he calls today's fundraising market the weirdest he has seen. We also explore CodeRabbit’s $8M open-source investment, the company’s $1.5B valuation, what successful agents will look like, and why founders need to learn to kill their ideas. Watch this episode to learn about the future of software engineering and how to ride a tech wave. 00:00 Why Coding Space Exploded 00:37 From Copilot to Claude Code 01:55 Why CodeRabbit Ignored Code Generation 04:23 Is Code Review a $250B Market? 06:24 When Claude Code Fights CodeRabbit 07:16 Developers Are Now Reviewers 10:54 Clones, Rivals and the Benchmark Problem 13:08 The Weirdest Fundraising Market Ever 17:04 Seats, Margins and the Amazon Prime Problem 21:24 Finding Co-Founder in Family 24:16 Why GitHub Can't Go Away 25:59 Will AI Agents Replace Figma? 29:12 Why Adding More Engineers Creates Chaos 30:38 The Early Decisions That Worked 31:18 Sandboxes in 2023 and Skipping MCP 32:32 The $8M Open-Source Bet 33:11 From Free Users to a Paid Business 35:50 Punjab, Alcatel-Lucent and Silicon Valley 39:08 Building, Selling, and Exiting First Startup 43:50 Right Product, Wrong Timing 45:06 You Can't Create a Wave 49:38 Does Vibe Coding Need Code Review? 51:33 Every Problem Becomes a Coding Problem 53:50 Where Founders Should Build Next 56:29 The Market for Agent Change Management 59:55 Code Review, Security, and What Comes Next ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/neon-fund Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: / siddharthaahluwalia Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice Send us Fan Mail
	How AWS, AngleList and Now AI Killed The Old VC Playbook \| Nakul, Audacious	09 Oct 2026	01:25:49
From a boutique industry of ~20 firms to today where there are specialised funds for every stage, geography and category, Venture Capital has changed radically. On this episode we have Nakul Mandan from Audacious Ventures. Nakul came to Silicon Valley at 28 expecting to be fired. He left Lightspeed in 2020, spent 14 months raising a $90M first fund in the middle of a pandemic, then watched ChatGPT changing the game entirely during his first two years of investing. In this episode, Nakul shares how his thinking evolved from being thesis-driven to people-driven, why he believes only five thousand people shape Silicon Valley, why there is always a younger, hungrier investor coming for you and how to invest millions of dollars in 20 year old founders. Watch this episode to understand the new Venture Capital and how it's operating in the hyper-speed AI world. 00:00 The Most Intense VC in Silicon Valley 02:30 5,000 People Run Silicon Valley 05:44 The Drive Behind the Intensity 09:13 Why You Never Arrive in Silicon Valley 11:17 Sourcing, Picking, Winning, Helping 14:37 The Ego-Bruising Reality of Fundraising 19:55 Bull Runs, Crashes, and ChatGPT 22:44 Slowing Down Deployment 24:21 Why $1B AI Companies Can Still Be Cheap 27:38 How AWS, YC, and AngelList Changed Venture 32:30 The Freedom (and Pressure) of Building Audacious 39:27 Making VC Math Work 43:06 Defining the Improbable Outcome 45:29 The 5 Traits of Exceptional Founders 48:16 When You’re on the Fence, Lean In 50:51 The Audacious Unfair Advantage 56:40 The Power Law of People 58:07 Finding Exceptional 21-Year-Old Founders 01:03:30 Backing WorkOS and Multiverse 01:10:39 Passing on Figma 01:20:24 Bubbles, Time Diversity and Staying Power 01:23:14 Why Ambitious Founders Move to Bay Area ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: / theneonshoww LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/neon-fund Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: / siddharthaahluwalia Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail
	Which SaaS Companies Will Survive Anthropic and OpenAI? \| Tim Guleri, Sierra Ventures	01 Oct 2026	01:10:09
Tim Guleri has spent 25 years in venture capital. Before that, he built companies with $3.8B in combined exits. And before that, he was a Punjabi guy selling Bibles door to door in the US. In this episode, we go deep into AI, venture capital, fundraising, SaaS, Silicon Valley and how great investors actually make decisions. We discuss the Gatorade Rule for equity, why Airtable sold for 2x, why 9–5 fails in Silicon Valley, why revenue durability matters more than hyperspeed growth, why Tim still operates at 120% all the time, how Sierra selects 30 companies out of 30,000, and how he missed Salesforce. Listen to this conversation to learn what it takes to win gold in the Olympics of tech. 00:00 Selling Bibles to $3.8B in Exits 01:03 Operating with Only One Gear 03:02 The Founder LOVE Framework 05:17 Four Audiences Every Founder Must Win 07:24 My $100B Mistake: Salesforce 10:42 Avoid Building Companies with 'Stretch Marks' 13:10 The Gatorade Theory of Startup Funding 15:46 Don’t Chase the Next Anthropic 18:22 Raising Sierra’s 14th Fund 19:31 Is AI Really Killing SaaS? 24:30 Golden Age of Indian Entrepreneurs 29:36 How Sierra Selects 30 Out of 30,000 32:11 "We Are Street Fighters" 35:34 Why Real Work Happens After Hours 35:57 Why He Refused to Retire After a $3B Exit 37:24 What 25 Years in Venture Teaches You 40:28 Silicon Valley Has an IPO Problem 44:00 How a VC Firm Survives for 100 Years 46:07 Is 3x Growth Still Enough? 50:49 Why Party Rounds Ruin Startups 56:32 Investing in Pre-Revenue Startups 59:10 Why Great VCs Need Killer Instinct 01:04:55 How Sierra Moves Fast ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: / theneonshoww LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/neon-fund Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: / siddharthaahluwalia Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail
	“Yes.” Building Claude Code for Marketing \| Kashish, Hightouch	25 Sep 2026	00:56:15
Now, everyone’s talking about building AI harnesses and context layers. Kashish has been building these for years and Hightouch has now reached a stage where they are challenging giants like Adobe and Salesforce while crossing $100M in revenue. In this episode we discussed how and why LLMs like ChatGPT and Gemini are failing marketing teams at enterprises, why marketing is a coding problem, what makes a harness “ thick”, why it’s a CEO’s job to be Chief Pipeline Generator in early years, controversial decisions that worked perfectly for Hightouch and why now is the time for 100x Marketer. Listen to the episode to look into the future of marketing 00:00 Quitting VC to become a Founder 01:35 Travel Startup with Terrible Margins 03:25 From Slack Agents to Customer Data 04:31 Saving a Bank $6M on "Unmarketing" 05:45 Why Make Composable CDP? 07:53 Why Every Other CDP Was Broken 11:33 Where Hightouch Creates Real ROI 12:48 Agents That Surface Revenue 16:47 Inside a Multi-Million Dollar Enterprise Rollout 21:41 Will AI Replace Marketers? 25:18 Why Skipped SMBs for Fortune 500 26:54 The Rippling Model of Running a Startup 27:48 Going Multi-Product Early 29:38 The 100x Marketer 33:03 Unstructured Data, Lead Lists & Synthetic Signals 34:49 How AI Launches Ads in New Markets 36:13 Does Marketing Success Guarantee Revenue? 38:07 What Is a "Marketing Harness"? 40:52 Thick Harness vs. Thin Harness 45:10 How Hightouch Fits Into the Enterprise Stack 46:54 Controversial Founder Decisions 49:15 Building the Company of Tomorrow 52:07 AI, GTM and Sales ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ https: https://www.linkedin.com/company/neon-fund Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail
	Anthropic, Sequoia Investor: 55x Returns in 18 Months, Is Anthropic Worth Trillions? \| Vishal Verma	22 Sep 2026	01:05:40
How do investors(LPs) invest in investors(VCs) when the world is changing so fast? Vishal Verma has invested in 20+ VC(Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, General Catalyst) funds and has seen 4 market cycles. Vishal has spent decades investing in and alongside some of the biggest venture funds in Silicon Valley. In this episode, we cover the less talked about side of venture ecosystem: LPs, family offices, access, co-investments, fund cycles and how VC has changed. We also discuss Anthropic, SpaceX, trillion-dollar IPOs, the shrinking Silicon Valley middle class, why large VC funds can no longer make small bets, roll-up strategies and what Vishal has learned from investing through multiple market cycles. Watch this episode to learn how venture ecosystem works 00:00 From ISRO to Silicon Valley 04:06 From Operator to Investor 05:58 The Early Sequoia Bet 08:07 From $300M to $15B Funds 12:24 Access Matters More Than Capital 15:02 Building Redwood Collective 19:10 Trillion-Dollar IPOs 27:24 How Silicon Valley’s Mafias Compound 31:30 How VC Returns Changed 34:02 The Disappearing Middle Class 36:14 Why People Are Leaving California 37:36 Why Big Funds Can’t Make Small Bets 39:30 Why Unicorns Aren’t Enough Anymore 40:18 What Happens After the IPO 43:02 VC Firms Becoming Financial Giants? 45:56 Why He Ignores IRR 49:25 Is AI a Commodity? 53:10 Next Generation of VC Funds 59:00 Inside the Roll-Up Strategy 01:02:36 Surviving Four Market Cycles ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail
	Why OpenAI Has No Moat & LLM Prices Will Collapse \| Avinash Lakshman, Weilliptic	18 Sep 2026	01:05:35
What if we are looking at the wrong layer? Avinash helped build Dynamo at Amazon, created Cassandra at Facebook, two of the most widely used distributed systems in the industry. Later he founded Hedvig, which was acquired for $225M with a team of under 15 engineers. Now with Weilliptic he is building the infrastructure layer for a world run by autonomous AI agents. In this episode Avinash explains why he believes open-weight models will win, why LLMs will become commodities, why Python will become a serious problem for data-centers as millions of agents come online, why enterprises will need an immutable audit trail for agents, and what happens when a 10-person company starts running 1,000 autonomous agents. Watch this episode to to understand the business and tech of AI infrastructure. 00:00 Is AI Infra in a Bubble? 03:08 The Missing Path to Profits 06:06 What Actually is AI Infrastructure? 08:41 Why Cloud Never Got Cheaper 11:42 The Cloud Lock-In Trap 15:21 Inference Providers Will Consolidate 19:58 AI Has a Python Problem 25:50 Rust + WASM is the Future of AI Security 27:08 From Dynamo to Cassandra to Hedvig 29:27 Why Avinash Started Welleptic 32:43 Solving Data and Compute Sovereignty 36:53 AI Needs an Audit Ledger 39:17 Why Avinash Started Hedvig 40:15 Building for the Multi-Cloud World 41:50 $52M Raised, Only 15 Engineers 43:01 Why Infrastructure Takes Time to Sell 44:52 The $225M Acquisition 46:00 What Makes a Good Deal? 50:07 How Hedvig Grew to $15M+ ARR 57:44 How Welleptic Makes Money 01:00:43 When 10 Employees Run 1,000 Agents ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail
	The Big Problem with GPUs and How To Solve It \| Randolph and Kandan, MantisGrid AI	15 Sep 2026	00:42:45
We don't want the industry to fall apart, that's why we started this company. 6 months ago, everyone was talking about model deployment. Now everyone has moved on to agentic AI deployment and autonomous agent swarms. But all of this is running on an infrastructure that itself is not automated. And this underlying infrastructure has massive GPU cluster systems. If even one GPU fails the whole training workload fails. You can't have 100,000 employees managing 100,000 GPUs. But LLMs are not the right solution for managing the infrastructure. Kandan and Randolph have spent decades operating large-scale telecom and cloud infrastructure, in a world where pagers used to run lives of people managing it. With MantisGrid they have come together to build 'The' model for AI infrastructure. Watch the episode to understand why making AI infrastructure autonomous is so important, why LLMs are not the answer, and what it takes to build the systems that will keep millions of agents running. 00:00 — Invisible Infrastructure Behind AI 01:05 — The Pager Nightmare 04:01 — The GPU Problem Nobody's Solving 05:38 — The Cloud Infrastructure Story 07:53 — Why Just Watching Isn't Enough 09:35 — Building the Waymo of AI Infrastructure 15:00 — How an Autonomous AI Infra System Works 20:35 — What Happens to DevOps? 22:46 — Why LLMs Shouldn’t Run Production 29:14 — The Path to a Billion Dollars 32:06 — The Problem Hyperscalers Can’t Solve 37:03 — Earning Trust to Run Infrastructure 39:55 — When Agents Start Managing Agents ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail
	Why The Next $100B AI Opportunity Is Context Engine\| Prukalpa Sankar, Atlan	10 Sep 2026	01:09:02
Context has become one of the busiest categories in AI. Every CIO now wants context Engine. Every legacy data catalog and knowledge graph platform has started calling itslef a "context platform”. At the same time reports say that 60% of CEOs say they’ve got $0 benefit from AI. To understand the nuances, on this episode we have Prukalpa, Founder of Atlan. Atlan started solving this problem back in 2020, long before it became the hottest category. And today it counts 20% of the Fortune 500 as customers with an 85% competitive win rate. Prukalpa explains how context for agents requires knowledge, expertise, and norms, why Gartner’s “context is king” made the category hot but also created confusion in the market, and why companies now treat context as strategic IP. 00:00 Context Is King 03:20 From Data To Agents 05:00 Scaling To 200 Customers 06:37 Product Market Fit Truths 11:19 Landing The First Customers 18:44 Data Teams Couldn’t Trust Their Data 21:07 Building the Enterprise Brain 26:19 Problem With Horizontal Products 30:21 Why CIOs Buy Context Now 34:59 Positioning in a New Category 36:33 Context as a Business Asset 37:20 The Shared Enterprise Brain 40:50 Shaping the Category 41:22 What is AI Native? 43:21 Self Improving Company 46:50 Team Patterns of Frontier Companies 48:42 Judgment and Taste Matter More Now 50:04 Atlan AI Experiments 50:59 Building Investor Network 55:14 Waterbridge to Peak XV to Insight 59:37 Don’t Rush to Find PMF 01:01:57 Everyone Must Build 01:06:17 Real Bottleneck to Scale Isn't Sales ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail
	The Unusual Strategy That Helps ArmorCode Grow 100% YOY \| Nikhil Gupta	08 Sep 2026	00:50:20
“You have to take crazy risks” Nikhil Gupta got fired at 42, made his first VC pitch in 2000, got the idea for ArmorCode while buying toilet paper during the pandemic and received his first VC cheque in 2020. Today ArmorCode has raised $81M, grown 100% year-over-year, and counts some of the world's largest enterprises as customers. Nikhil Gupta, Founder & CEO of ArmorCode, shares why he studied 7,000 security companies before starting up, why 3 early customers can be the "kiss of death" for startups, why customers don’t always tell founders the truth, why developers hate security tools and why security is the ultimate bottleneck to AI’s growth. This conversation is as much about enterprise security as it is about a founder’s conviction and refusing to give up on a dream. ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail
	Why Even a $100 Billion Company Wouldn't Be Big Enough \| Tanay Tandon	03 Sep 2026	01:02:48
How do you fix a $5 Trillion Industry which wastes $500 Billion on mouse clicks every year? By not considering even a $100 Billion company a success. By hiring people who are heat-seeking missiles for pain. By questioning every default. By solving hard problems, then choosing even harder ones. By moving with an urgency that surprises everyone but you. In this episode, Tanay Tandon, Co-Founder & CEO, Commure explains why US healthcare is a massive but inefficient market, which pays ~$500B in administrative “work tax,” and how language models and agentic software can automate much of that work, make healthcare feel like a Waymo, and give healthcare professionals more time to focus on actual care. Watch this episode to learn what it takes to build and win in a massive, inefficient market. 00:00 - Heat-Seeking Missiles for Pain 01:30 - Speed Above Everything 03:11 - The $5 Trillion Healthcare Problem 03:56 - Epic Wasn't Built for AI 06:13 - The $500 Billion Admin Leak 07:24 - Why Healthcare Moves Slowly 10:14 - Why Hospitals Are Hard to Sell To 12:09 - The Real Opportunity Is Labour 13:41 - Point Solution or Platform? 15:16 - One Customer Pays $100 Million 22:46 - More Bad Days Than Good Days 25:18 - AI Changed the Healthcare Game 28:40 - Incentives Matter More Than Technology 30:24 - Healthcare's App Store Moment 32:20 - Why $100 Billion Isn't Big Enough 36:19 - Who Takes the Blame When AI Gets It Wrong? 38:32 - The Waymo Moment for Healthcare 39:46 - How the Best Startups Hire 42:12 - Customer Obsession Beats Everything 43:52 - Stop Paying the AI Experiment Tax 51:10 - Insurance Companies Are Terrific Enemies 55:34 - The Hidden Opportunities in Healthcare 59:35 - How to Win AI Talent War ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail
	The AI Moat Everyone is Ignoring \| Phalgun Kompalli, Founder UpGrad and Bodhium Labs	27 Aug 2026	00:50:20
When brands can't figure out how LLMs are ranking them, what do they do? upGrad raised close to $800M, made year long online degrees mainstream in India when everyone said it wasn't possible, and in the process became a trusted brand in Indian education. Phalgun Kompalli is the co-founder of upGrad. Now, on his second founder journey, he is helping brands become visible to AI. In this episode, Phalgun shares why he chose to build an AI company, how Bodhium Labs helps brands influence LLMs, why lazy marketing is dead and why AI services can be more defensible than AI products. He also shares hard-won lessons from upGrad, from expanding into too many markets at once, to hiring far too fast, to discovering that a highly valuable brand can be worth nothing to a customer. 00:00 Founding UpGrad 02:55 Why We Bet on LLMs 06:35 The GEO Moat 10:18 Inside the LLM 12:07 Why Services Won Early 13:35 Building an AI Research Lab 18:46 Why India Sells Differently 22:11 From Consultant to Founder 26:50 The Early Hiring Lessons 26:55 International Expansion Mistakes 27:47 The EdTech Boom and Bust 31:12 How We Found Product-Market Fit 32:59 Supply Before Demand 34:58 Differentiation Is Not Enough 36:29 Borrowing Trust to Scale 38:01 Why Offline Still Matters 40:55 Why Cambridge Lost to MICA 45:33 Raising the First Big Round 46:42 The Pain of Starting Again 48:31 The Future of AI + Education ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: / theneonshoww LinkedIn: / beneon Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: / siddharthaahluwalia Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail
	Anthropic & OpenAI Have Changed What Moving Fast Means \| Krishna M, Elevation Capital	22 Aug 2026	00:59:22
When frontier labs can build everything, when moving fast doesn't mean what it used to, and when what was impossible can now be done in days, what do you build and how do you build it? Krishna M is an AI Partner at Elevation Capital. He has seen the 0-to-1 journey twice as a founder and has also experienced what large-scale building looks like at tech giants like Meta and Cohesity. In this episode, we discuss why a founder's fearlessness and ambition will define the destiny of the company far more than technical skills. Krishna shares how Indian founders have come a long way and now build like they know no fear. We then explore how OpenAI and Anthropic have changed what it takes to build startups, and what founder traits are needed to create outlier companies in this era. Watch this episode to understand the new definition of startup speed and what to build when frontier labs can build entire product categories themselves. 01:00 From 2x Founder to AI Investor 03:37 Why Bet on the US-India Corridor 07:07 Can Indian Founders Build Giants? 10:13 What Makes Krishna Bet on a Founder? 12:33 The Founder Traits That Matter in AI 14:18 Why Speed Is the New GTM 17:52 The New AI Founder 19:13 How Krishna Builds Conviction 23:26 Why Elevation Bet on Portkey 28:20 How Elevation Evaluates AI Startups 31:17 The AI Security Opportunity 32:04 Your PMF Can Die in a Quarter 32:57 Why Open Source Still Matters 34:11 India's Infrastructure Advantage 36:51 Where the Next AI Opportunities Are 41:35 What Matters Beyond Revenue 43:36 Why India + US Is a Powerful Combination 44:59 What Cohesity Taught Him About Scale 47:13 Selling Data to Broke Professors 50:18 Why Two Weeks in SF Won't Work 52:06 Fundraising Trap Founders Miss 56:47 Outliers Aren't Well-Rounded 58:49 "We're Wrong More Than We're Right" ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: / theneonshoww LinkedIn: / beneon Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: / siddharthaahluwalia Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail
	ChatGPT Killed My $50M ARR Business Overnight \| Swapnil Jain Observe Al	14 Aug 2026	01:07:32
Observe AI raised $125M from SoftBank at an $850M valuation, went on to cross $50M ARR, and worked with some of the world's largest enterprises. But after 10 months everything changed. From a growth stage startup, Observe became an early stage startup, not because they did anything wrong, but because world changed forever very fast. In this episode, Swapnil, Founder & CEO of Observe AI candidly shares what it takes to rebuild a company after you have already built it, why changing people and culture are harder than changing the product, why today's AI winners could disappear as the technology stack changes, and why he thinks we are still in the first innings of AI. This conversation is as much about AI as it is about a founder's drive to win. Chapter Markers 00:00 ChatGPT Made Our $850M Startup Irrelevant 00:38 From SaaS to AI Agents 04:30 Growing Fast, But Also Dying 07:36 Why VCs Bet $200M+ on Observe 09:26 FOMO Made Me a Founder 13:30 We Had Users, But No Buyers 15:27 Why BPOs Were the Wrong Market 17:26 “I’ll Never Sell in India” 22:30 YC Made Me Think Bigger 27:22 From $1M to $50M ARR 30:13 Building AI Before ChatGPT 31:11 The Birth of Observe 2.0 32:18 When ChatGPT Changed Everything 33:15 When AI Agents Take Over 34:58 Rebuilding a $50M ARR Product 35:47 When Co-Founders Leave 38:50 Will AI Actually Kill Support Jobs? 43:51 “AI ARR Is Not Real” 45:45 Most Pre-AI Companies Are Bloated 47:34 Learning GTM by Doing It 51:24 Changing Product Is The Easy Part 58:29 Why Voice AI Is Just the Beginning 01:01:25 The Founder Playbook 01:04:10 What Makes a Great Product? 01:05:37 “I’m Here to Win” ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: / theneonshoww LinkedIn: / beneon Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: / siddharthaahluwalia Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail
	The Al Lab Founder Who Sees The Future First \| Karan Goel, Founder & CEO of Cartesia	07 Aug 2026	00:58:53
Karan is the co-founder and CEO of Cartesia, an AI model lab building the next generation of real-time voice intelligence. In this episode, Karan explains what all goes into building an AI Lab company; from massive datasets to pre-training to post-training to inference engines, plus a heavy dose of relentless evaluation, and obsession with every layer of the stack. We also discuss why existing AI benchmarks are not very helpful, why latency is voice AI’s biggest enemy, and why maintaining context across long conversations is one of the hardest unsolved problems. Apart from the cutting edge tech, this conversation explores Karan’s journey from researcher to founder, building Cartesia with a five-person founding team, raising capital, and realizing why first-time founders waste years focusing on things that ultimately don’t matter. If you want a glimpse into the future of AI, watch this episode. 00:00 Trailer 01:35 From DPS to Stanford to Cartesia 02:35 From Counter-Strike to AI 04:28 Another Research Paper Wasn’t Enough 06:48 The Story Behind “Cartesia” 07:17 Building a Company With Five Technical Founders 09:55 From Research Project to Startup 13:54 Cartesia’s Audacious Vision for 2035 15:07 What It Takes to Build an AI Model Company 18:55 Why Faster AI Doesn’t Have to Be Worse 24:12 AI Still Has a Memory Problem 27:14 Why Context Builds Trust 27:50 Will AI Replace Entire Account Teams? 29:16 Hold Music Is Now a Salesman 30:30 Designing AI That Feels Personal 31:31 Building With Cartesia 34:48 Voice AI’s Enemy #1: Latency 38:50 Why AI Labs See the Future First 41:32 Finding Product Market Fit 45:34 Great Products Don’t Need Much Marketing 48:12 Very Few Things Matter 52:26 How Big Can Voice AI Get 55:53 Fundraising And Mission 58:15 What Cartesia Is Ultimately Building ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the centre of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail
	Is Your Startup Model Proof? Vijay Krishnan Turing Founder & CTO On What Startups Should Build to Win	31 Jul 2026	01:18:41
What if the company quietly making OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Meta's models smarter was founded in India? Turing is one of the companies shaping how AI is advancing. It started in 2018 as a talent platform that found the top 1% of the world's engineers, became a unicorn in 2021, and then made a bet almost nobody understood at the time. In early 2022, long before ChatGPT existed, Turing began helping OpenAI improve its models by feeding human expertise directly into training. Today its network of more than four million vetted engineers and domain experts powers the post-training and evaluation work behind the frontier labs, and the company crossed roughly 300 million dollars in revenue while staying profitable, at a 2.2 billion dollar valuation. Vijay Krishnan is the co-founder and CTO. He was an NLP researcher at Stanford back when almost no one believed that predicting the next word could ever turn into reasoning, and he explains why running a modern model company without human-in-the-loop data is like entering a race with three tyres instead of four. He walks through how a model is actually taught to use software like Salesforce, why coding became the beachhead for every lab, and what changed for Turing the moment Scale AI was absorbed into Meta. The conversation then turns to the question every founder is now asked in the room. What is your moat against Claude? Vijay's answer is to go deeper than the frontier labs can reach, into the outcome you own and the context that lives inside an enterprise. If you are excited about how AI actually gets built, who really trains the models, and how to build a company that survives the labs, this episode is for you. 00:00 - Trailer 02:20 - The Indian company quietly behind OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic 04:50 - How Turing went from a talent platform to a unicorn to an AI research partner 08:20 - The bet nobody understood 11:50 - Why a model company without human data is "racing on three tyres" 15:50 - Why coding became the beachhead for every frontier lab 19:50 - What changed for Turing the day Meta bought Scale AI 23:50 - "What is your moat against Claude?" 29:50 - Will AI create more lawyers, not fewer? 34:50 - The teams where engineers haven't written code in six months 39:50 - 16% of the Philippines' GDP is under threat from AI? 43:50 - How you actually teach a model to use Salesforce 49:50 - How robots are taught real-world work 54:50 - Why million-dollar researcher packages are breaking startup hiring 59:50 - The one kind of AI company that gets stronger as the models improve 1:04:50 - Product vs. services, and the trap that quietly kills AI startups ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the centre of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail
	How 1% Stay Rich - What India's Richest Families Do With Their Money That 99% Don't \| Rohit Sarin, Client Associates	28 Jul 2026	00:54:20
How do India's wealthiest families actually manage their money, and why does the man who looks after roughly ₹50,000 crore of it own zero stocks himself? Rohit Sarin is the co-founder of Client Associates, which he started in 2002 as India's first multi-family office and has grown into the largest in the country, managing around ₹50,000 crore for more than 1,100 wealthy families. The firm acts as a personal CFO for a family's entire wealth, doing for a household what a finance chief does for a company. He built it the hard way. He left a senior banking career at Deutsche Bank and Kotak, walked away from a full salary into a negative net worth, and took no salary in the first year so every rupee could go into building revenue. The firm's first working machine was an old computer he won at a Deutsche Bank auction. His most contrarian view is about how ordinary Indians treat the markets. He believes trading is a zero-sum game, and the data backs him. A SEBI study found that 93 per cent of individual F&O traders lost money over three years, worth more than ₹1.8 lakh crore, with only about one per cent earning a meaningful profit. Rohit made money on seven of ten trades and still ended underwater because the three losses wiped out all seven gains, so he closed his demat account entirely. He reads the AI boom the same way, as a bubble much like the dot-com era where a rare Amazon survives, and points to Byju's as a reminder of what happens when growth runs ahead of discipline. What the rich do differently is stay patient. They spend on their needs and rarely on their wants, and their real goal is to stay rich across generations rather than to get rich quickly. His own line for it is that wealth is a gift given by the impatient to the patient. He is equally clear that this is India's century, that the country has just crossed the income level where consumption compounds, and that the next ten years may be its best for anyone who starts investing early. He lays it all out in his book, Unlocking Wealth: Secrets to Getting Rich at Any Age. If you are excited about how India's richest families think about money and where India's next decade is headed, this episode is for you. 00:00 - Trailer 01:50 - The personal CFO for India's richest families 03:50 - Quitting a full salary for a negative net worth 05:20 - The old computer he won at a Deutsche Bank auction 06:50 - The first clients and the two crore bar he borrowed from Merrill 09:20 - How many dollar-millionaires India really has 11:50 - The income level where a country's wealth suddenly compounds 14:20 - What is really driving India's wealth creation 16:50 - How old-money families decide who controls the wealth 19:50 - The tech gap that changed who leads a family office 22:50 - Is the AI boom just the dotcom bubble again 26:50 - Why he is telling family offices to sit out AI for now 30:50 - The asset classes the ultra-rich actually hold 33:50 - Why the rich are moving money beyond India 37:50 - The one thing the ultra-rich do that the 99% do not 41:50 - His relationship with wealth, and needs versus wants 44:50 - Advice to first-generation founders who just got rich 48:50 - Why this is India's century and its best decade 52:50 - 93% lose money trading, and the demat account he closed 55:50 - The book he wrote for every young Indian 57:50 - Rapid fire: the best investment he has ever made ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the centre of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail
	Why Even With Great Products AI Startups Lose with 3x Founder Mahesh Ram, ex-Zoom AI	24 Jul 2026	01:11:32
What does a founder learn from watching the CEO of a 32 billion dollar company make his biggest AI bets from the inside? Mahesh Ram has built and sold three companies. Thomson Reuters acquired his first, GlobalEnglish went to Pearson after teaching English to more than ten million people at companies like IBM and HP, and Solvvy, one of the first conversational AI companies, was bought by Zoom in 2022. He then spent two and a half years heading AI products at Zoom, sitting beside founder Eric Yuan as the company raced Microsoft into the AI era. In this conversation, Mahesh takes apart the three decisions that put Zoom ahead. Eric refused to charge for AI Companion because he believed everyone in the world should have AI, he publicly promised to never train models on customer data; and he built a model-agnostic layer instead of betting the company on any single lab. Zoom shipped weeks before Microsoft Copilot. Mahesh also shares the operating habits that made it possible, from the five-part rule Eric demands on every decision to the radical transparency that turned his own team into owners. He is just as direct about the question every founder now asks: whether OpenAI or Anthropic will simply take their market. He answers that the model companies cannot see the hundreds of custom applications running quietly inside every enterprise, so the durable business is the one that owns the messy, multi-party workflows they will never touch. On the wider fear that AI will kill SaaS, he thinks the shift is real but that Silicon Valley badly overestimates how fast it arrives, which leaves a huge opening for founders willing to go out and become the educators their market trusts. He closes on what he has learned selling three companies, why the best ones are bought and never sold, and the community of Indian origin founders he now runs that grew from three hundred people to more than two thousand in a single year. If you are excited about building enduring AI and software companies, this episode is for you. 00:00 - Trailer 01:27 - The three time founder who keeps destroying complexity 03:08 - Two billion people learning English with no teacher 04:45 - Building conversational AI before anyone knew what AI was 07:21 - How Zoom came to acquire Solvvy 11:08 - Working with Eric Yuan, a true force of nature 13:43 - The three bold AI bets that beat Microsoft to market 15:09 - Why Eric made Zoom's AI free and refused to touch your data 17:29 - The five part rule Eric demands on every decision 21:25 - Radical transparency: share everything except one thing 23:32 - What Mahesh would build differently today 29:05 - The moat question: how do you survive OpenAI and Anthropic 35:33 - What Claude and OpenAI can never see inside a company 41:01 - Will AI kill SaaS? And why Silicon Valley is too early 42:25 - Become the educator: the biggest opening for founders 45:39 - The Indian founder community that 10x'd in a year 52:43 - Where the founder DNA actually came from 1:00:42 - Why he has no regrets building Solvvy too early 1:01:57 - What actually gets a startup acquired 1:05:14 - Why you keep the acquisition circle very tight 1:07:47 - The real job in enterprise sales: get your buyer promoted ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the centre of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail
	The #1 Mistake Killing B2B Startups \| Arun Penmetsa, Storm Ventures	21 Jul 2026	01:16:57
Can the biggest AI labs simply walk into any market and replace the software companies already sitting there? Storm Ventures has spent 26 years building an answer for B2B founders. The firm has made close to 200 investments, backed 11 unicorns, and produced some of the cleanest enterprise exits in Silicon Valley, from AirGap Networks selling to Zscaler to earlier winners like Marketo and MobileIron. Its portfolio today runs from Tekion in automotive retail to Atomicwork in IT service management, Krisp in voice AI, and Synthpop in healthcare. Arun Penmetsa is a Partner at the firm. He built enterprise software at Oracle and Google before moving into venture, and he now leads Storm's work in AI, security, and digital health. In this conversation, he is unusually specific about how the decisions actually get made. He meets ten to twelve founders every week; the entire partnership makes only six to eight investments a year, and the single filter he trusts most is urgency. If a buyer can comfortably wait six to twelve months, the pain is not real, and the company is already in trouble. Arun is direct about the question every AI founder now gets asked, which is whether OpenAI or Anthropic will simply take their market. He answers that the foundation model companies will own a handful of core verticals and leave the rest, so the durable business is the one that owns the full stack between the model and the interface and delivers a real outcome inside law, healthcare, construction, or a market as unglamorous as convenience retail. He also lays out where he is placing his next bets, from physical AI and humanoid robots that can retool an assembly line on the fly to vertical companies like Tote that rebuild the software running gas stations and corner stores, where a single day of downtime can cost an owner tens of thousands of dollars. If you are excited about building enduring B2B and AI companies, this episode is for you. 00:00 - Trailer 01:21 - The 26-year-old B2B fund behind AirGapp, Marketo and Tekion 02:47 - The patterns Storm has seen repeat across 200 investments 05:37 - What actually drove seven clean exits 06:37 - The airgap story: the agentless bet that Zscaler bought 13:10 - The one signal Arun trusts more than pedigree 14:37 - Where the moats survive once the models get this good 18:01 - Why Storm backed Atomicwork against ServiceNow 20:00 - Two weeks to decide: how the fastest deals happen 25:27 - The cold email that gets a venture partner to reply 28:52 - The funnel: 500 founders a year, 6 to 8 checks 35:31 - Why Stanford on the resume buys you nothing here 38:13 - The pattern behind every 4 billion dollar outcome 40:44 - The question every AI founder gets: can OpenAI replace you 46:16 - The mistakes that killed companies Arun believed in 50:14 - The million-dollar wall every B2B founder hits 53:30 - Why buyers have already decided before they call you 58:12 - AI agents that stay on a one-hour insurance call 1:08:33 - Physical AI: assembly lines that rebuild themselves 1:12:39 - Tote: the fuel pump they built to win gas stations ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the centre of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail
	Gaurav Jain on Building $500M Fund, Missing Ramp and Backing Irrational Founders	17 Jul 2026	00:58:43
Gaurav Jain has seen more than 10,000 startups, built the world's largest pre-seed fund, backed startups like Gamma, Hightouch and Goldcast and has missed Ramp(you can't be a great investor without having a great anti-portfolio :)) A decade ago, when Gaurav started Afore Capital, pre-seed wasn't even a recognized category. Today, pre-seed is what some of the world's most ambitious startups raise as their very first institutional capital. When Gaurav Jain and Anamitra Banerji started the firm ten years ago, "pre-seed" was almost a slight, a label for founders who couldn't raise a proper seed round. They set out to build the world's largest pre-seed fund anyway, closing $47 million on a $40 million target, and every fund since has closed above plan. Afore now runs more than $500 million across four funds. In this conversation Gaurav shares his journey from Dehradun to Silicon Valley and every lesson learned about backing great startups. Like how being in the very best companies matters more than anything else. He is also convinced that the genuine bottleneck is talent. There is a great deal of money in the world and very few people who can build something truly large, which is why at the earliest stage founders tend to choose their investors as much as investors choose them. If you want to understand how the earliest checks actually get written, and what it really costs to say no, this episode is worth your time. 00:00 - Trailer 01:00 - From Dehradun to Google to starting Afore 02:08 - The Waterloo co-op that talked him out of every job 03:18 - Back when "pre-seed" was an insult 05:44 - When Sequoia said "I guess we're pre-seed investors too" 07:26 - Afore's three products, and the experiments that failed 09:01 - Hightouch was a travel company when they invested 11:02 - Goldcast: no visa, no money, funded anyway 12:07 - The through line is always the team 14:44 - The Ramp miss 17:24 - "Founders pick us more than we pick them" 18:45 - The constraint isn't capital, it's talent 22:24 - The Solana miss, when it was still Loom Protocol 24:46 - Ramp's Super Bowl ad, the buses, his wife's business 25:32 - What he looks for in founders 28:50 - Coachability, happy ears, and the Mom Test 31:28 - The biggest mistake: falling in love with the idea 35:04 - The three things that matter, and "50% of zero is still zero" 39:25 - "100% storytelling, 0% data" 41:25 - Investing in India, and the fear of being dumb capital 44:41 - "Sign the deal before Monday" 47:26 - One engineer now does the job of 20 51:43 - Raising from LPs, the undiscussed part of VC ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail
	And How Matic Sold 6000 Robots with Zero Marketing \| Navneet Dalal & Mehul Nariyawala	14 Jul 2026	01:07:04
What does it actually take to build a robot that cleans your home when everyone before has failed? Matic is a home robot that sweeps and mops your floors, navigating entirely with cameras, no LIDAR. It shipped its first unit in 2024 and has since sold 6,000 units at ~2,000 a month, almost entirely by word of mouth. And is now the largest consumer robotics company shipping in the United States. Navneet Dalal (a computer-vision pioneer who co-invented HOG) and Mehul Nariyawala met building Flutter, a gesture-recognition app that became #1 in 72 countries and was acquired by Google, where they then worked on Nest cameras and shipped one of the first deep learning algorithms in the wild. Matic is the company they decided would be their last: they wrote "Not For Sale" on the wall on day one and built it to last 20 to 30 years. Their bet was deliberately contrarian. They chose the "unsexy" floor-cleaning market, a category with a net promoter score of -1 that people keep buying anyway (21 million robot vacuums sold in 2024), because entering an existing market beats creating a new one and because it's the foundation for true indoor autonomy. Then they put roughly $35 million of their own money in, about 70% of their net worth, with no plan B. Along the way they lay out a full worldview: why robotics is 100x harder than software (the demo is only the first 20% of the work); why humanoids doing your chores are still 5 to 20 years away (the data problem), why no consumer hardware sells above $2,000; and the skin-in-the-game philosophy captured by his late father's advice: "Sell your home if you have to, but keep the company alive." If you're excited about how home robots actually get built and what it really takes to bet everything on hard tech, this episode is for you. 00:00 - Trailer 01:08 - When they quit Google to start Matic 03:30 - Solving home cleaning with cameras only — no LIDAR 04:46 - The $35M bet: funding Matic themselves 07:36 - What a "level 5" robot in your home really means 08:00 - Why they started with floor cleaning — on purpose 09:45 - The rule: never create a new market with your first product 10:02 - iPod, iPhone, Tesla — all entered existing markets 11:38 - Why new hardware gives you only one shot 13:02 - "Make something people NEED, not want" 16:25 - Why the demo is only 20% of robotics 18:50 - Teaching a robot like raising a child 21:30 - How far are humanoids from real homes? 22:22 - The data problem: "500 years of driving data a day" 22:56 - 90% in the lab, 60% in the real world 26:49 - Why no consumer device sells above $2,000 27:38 - Would you buy a $10,000 humanoid — for what? 28:47 - "History rhymes": General Magic to the iPhone 29:38 - Earning trust after 20 years of broken robot promises 30:31 - Shipping the first robot 30:45 - 6,000 units, all word of mouth, zero marketing 31:10 - Why they're US-only for now 31:50 - The investors: Sutter Hill to the Collison brothers 33:20 - Two companies, both acquired by Google 35:00 - The Flutter story: #1 app in 72 countries 35:25 - Why nobody believed machine learning worked in 2011 38:40 - Microsoft Kinect: 8 million units in 60 days 40:30 - The Google acquisition — and the $35M number 44:40 - The near-death moment: switching to NVIDIA 53:10 - iRobot's bankruptcy and what it means for Matic 53:55 - The real scale of robotics: 21M robot vacuums a year 57:45 - Putting 70% of their net worth on the line 58:40 - His father's advice: "sell your home, keep the company" ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: / theneonshoww LinkedIn: / beneon Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: / siddharthaahluwalia Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail
	How to Solve AI's Biggest Problem \| Atin Sanyal, Galileo	09 Jul 2026	01:09:52
How do you know whether an AI agent is doing its job or quietly failing in production? Galileo is building the trust layer for AI. Its evaluation and observability platform is how enterprises measure whether the output of an LLM or an agent is good or bad. Galileo started before "LLM" was even a word. When Atin showed his prototype to Stanford's Chris Ré, his own first question was "what is a language model?" Today its customers include Reddit, Airbnb, P&G, Comcast, and six of the Fortune 50. Atin spent a decade in big tech before co-founding Galileo with Vikram Chatterji in early 2021. He worked on the knowledge graphs behind Siri at Apple, then became one of the leads and architects of Michelangelo, Uber's AI platform, that hosts thousands of models across pricing, ETA, and demand. That Uber experience taught him the lesson the whole company is built on; that in AI, observability and evaluation are the real bottleneck, and bad data is catastrophic. As ChatGPT turned every AI output into something a user sees directly, the measurement problem went from academic to mission-critical. So Atin made a contrarian bet: instead of using giant LLMs to judge other LLMs, Galileo built Luna, small 1-3B parameter models that run evals at breakthrough latencies of 100 milliseconds and below. If you are excited about how AI actually gets shipped, trusted, and controlled inside real enterprises, this episode is for you. 00:00 - Trailer 01:14 - From India to Apple, Uber, and Galileo 01:34 - Where the name "Galileo" came from 02:38 - Building Siri's early knowledge graphs at Apple 03:29 - Becoming an architect of Uber's Michelangelo 05:15 - Why every AI output is now mission-critical 06:45 - How Atin and Vikram zeroed in on Galileo 07:42 - "What is a language model?" 09:38 - Building the world's first feature store at Uber 11:27 - Language models and tokens, explained simply 14:19 - Where the observability insight came from 15:53 - Quantifying uncertainty and hallucinations 16:36 - The first customers and first use case 19:15 - How the product evolved from a data scientist tool 23:18 - Why ChatGPT changed everything for Galileo 23:57 - The enterprise AI adoption curve, 2021 to 2026 26:35 - Why they built the Luna model 28:32 - Turning LLM "writers" into "calculators" 28:51 - Attacking the latency problem 31:48 - Luna: the modeling and infrastructure innovation 33:09 - What evals are, and why they blew up 34:26 - The case for small language models 36:58 - What "general reasoning" really means 40:39 - AI usage is exploding — and why that matters 43:08 - Online vs offline: the "it worked on my machine" problem 44:33 - The evals flywheel and evals-driven development 46:56 - Galileo in a nutshell 47:39 - What real agents in production look like today 49:30 - A sales intelligence platform, powered by Galileo 50:47 - The agent control product 52:12 - Building GTM as a hardcore engineer from India 54:43 - Garbage in, garbage out: nailing the ICP 55:42 - How the pitch changed from customer 1 to 20 57:27 - Why Atin switched from CTO to CPO ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail
	Beating SBI, 1% NPAs & India's Massive Loan Gap I Victor Senpaty Co-Founder Propelld	07 Jul 2026	00:55:03
Who is funding the students that India's banks won't touch? Propelld is one of India's largest education-focused lenders, giving loans to roughly 1.5 lakh students every year — matching SBI — with a team a fraction of the size and no branch network. In a single financial year it now disburses more education loans than SBI did in six years of its history. Victor started Propelld in 2016 with a thesis born out of a Milton Friedman paper: a good student should never have to walk away from a good opportunity just because they don't have the money. Propelld hit its stride by going exactly where traditional lenders refuse to — 70% of its borrowers come from tier-3 cities, a segment banks treat as too risky. Instead of chasing the safe 1% of students at IITs and IIMs, Victor made a bet most lenders never make. He built the ability to underwrite the end-use itself — a "Crystal score" for institutes and courses that measures employability and real ROI. The result: NPAs held at ~1%, roughly one-tenth of what banks see the moment they step outside tier-1. Victor has a clear view of where lending goes next. In a post-LLM world, risk, distribution, and fulfillment get radically more efficient — one person already drives ₹50 crore of disbursal a year, and OPEX is projected to fall toward 2% at ₹6,000 crore AUM. His ranking never changes: NPAs first, unit economics second, growth third. If you are excited about how AI is rebuilding lending — and who gets to dream bigger because of it — this episode is for you. 00:00 - Trailer 00:50 - The two numbers that tell Propelld's story 01:55 - Why 70% of borrowers come from tier-3 cities 02:21 - How NPAs stay at 1% 02:52 - Why education is a great asset class 04:04 - Building a "Crystal score" for institutes and courses 05:31 - End-use control: why an education loan isn't a personal loan 06:27 - Why banks only lend to IITs and IIMs 08:36 - Measuring employability to underwrite the end-use 10:23 - 10 years at the intersection of fintech and edtech 11:46 - Why education financing is only ~5% penetrated 17:53 - Do India's graduate really not get a job? 21:12 - The 8% data point, and quantifying ROI 22:24 - The social mobility no one can price 25:39 - From IIT Madras and a global bank to building Propelld 27:41 - How the post-LLM world rewires lending 30:26 - How fast an institute gets onboarded and a loan disbursed 32:12 - Profitable at a ₹1 lakh ticket size 34:13 - The financials: doubling revenue, holding costs flat to FY30 37:19 - Lending as an ecosystem enabler, not just a loan 39:33 - The most valuable courses in a post-LLM world 41:40 - The bet on arts graduates as coding gets commoditized 43:32 - The Milton Friedman paper that started it all 46:53 - 100 investors, and the few who said yes 48:33 - Co-founding with school friends since class 6 50:24 - Settling disagreements over food and Hampi trips 51:31 - The most common mistake fintech founders make 52:51 - The one metric that ranks above everything: NPAs ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail
	Lessons From India's First Unicorn Founder on Building Large Businesses \| Naveen Tewari	03 Jul 2026	01:02:53
Most founders build one unicorn. Naveen Tewari built two. InMobi started with a simple bet: mobile would become the world's most important computing platform, and advertising could make it free for everyone. Every Indian VC said no. Naveen flew to San Francisco on a maxed-out credit card and returned with a $7 million round from Kleiner Perkins and Ram Shriram. Later came a $200 million investment from Masayoshi Son. Overnight, InMobi became India's first unicorn. Then he did it again. Glance, built quietly inside InMobi over three years, is now one of the fastest-growing consumer apps in the US, with more than 10 million monthly active users in the US. The thesis behind both companies is the same. The world's most powerful technologies, first mobile and now AI, only reach masses when someone figures out how to pay for them. Naveen believes advertising is that mechanism, and that InMobi is uniquely positioned to subsidise AI access at population scale, just as it helped subsidise mobile a decade ago. If you want to understand how one founder from India has quietly helped shape two technology eras, this episode is for you. 00:00 - Trailer 00:57 - Why Naveen became a founder 03:26 - How co-founders met and came together 11:33 - The pivot from mKhoj to InMobi 15:02 - Can AI be subsidised for mass consumption? 16:12 - Expanding globally before the US 18:29 - Which industries can delay entry to US market? 20:53 - What is Glance? 23:55 - Incubated within InMobi for 2 years 25:17 - What changes when you face failure in public? 29:10 - How the SoftBank round changed InMobi 32:53 - Maxing out credit cards to pay bills 38:18 - $7Million Kleiner Perkins & Ram Shriram round 43:07 - Hypergrowth journey: Series A to Series C 45:41 - $200 million funding from Masa 53:31 - Change of VC ecosystem in India 54:34 - How building for B2B differs from B2C 58:50 - How AI is changing InMobi and Glance ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail
	How to Beat a Competitor With 100x Your Funding \| Palash Soni, GoldCast Founder	30 Jun 2026	01:20:37
How do you get an inbound from OpenAI and Anthropic? Goldcast is the video content platform behind companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, GitHub, Uber and Airbnb, before it was acquired by Cvent in a nearly $300 million deal earlier this year. Palash Soni (Co-Founder and CEO, Goldcast) joins the Neon Show. Goldcast entered one of the most overfunded categories in SaaS. Hopin alone had raised more than $1 billion. This is the story of the decisions that helped Goldcast survive the category and ultimately become one of the biggest MarTech acquisition stories of the last few years. Enterprise customers are won long before they ever sign a contract. We trace that idea through Goldcast's journey, from landing Drift as its first marquee customer and reaching its first $1 million in ARR, to the relationships that quietly compounded over the years and eventually led to an inbound from the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic. We discuss how retention has always been MarTech's biggest challenge and why AI doesn't fundamentally change that. And why acquisition, not an IPO, is the most realistic outcome for most companies in the category. This episode is about winning in a market everyone had written off, and the decisions that turned Goldcast into one of the few companies left standing. 00:00 - Trailer 00:36 - How Palash caught the startup bug 05:51 - Meeting the co-founders 08:50 - Fundraising has never been easy for Goldcast 10:36 - How we got a term sheet in 2 days 12:43 - We quit HBS and they became our first customer 18:47 - Customers told us our product looked ugly 19:50 - How Drift founder changed the course of Goldcast 21:44 - When competitors raised $250 million 23:31 - How Goldcast got high-profile angel investors 30:33 - The elevator pitch of Goldcast 31:06 - When companies in your space are crashing 32:36 - Was virtual events even a valid space after COVID? 43:15 - How Goldcast won OpenAI 44:38 - What led to the acquisition 53:33 - One thing Palash would change about the last 5 years 56:58 - Founders should define company values 58:48 - Why we had an unusually large post-sales team 01:01:09 - Retention in MarTech has always been subpar 01:04:36 - Is acquisition the only path for a MarTech company? 01:09:16 - How Goldcast got great logos 01:11:01 - How the three co-founders split roles 01:12:05 - If not acquisition, then what? 01:14:20 - How founders move to higher ACVs 01:16:21 - The ethos of the founding team 01:17:25 - The book that changed me ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail
	How 3 Friends From Coimbatore Ended Up Running American TV \| The Untold Amagi Story	26 Jun 2026	01:22:37
Who powers the cloud infrastructure behind NBC, Warner Bros. Discovery, Olympics, and the Super Bowl? Amagi, built out of an office on Bannerghatta Road in Bengaluru. What started there grew into a company that went public at an $825 million valuation and today has a market cap of over $1.3 billion, earns 73% of its revenue from the US, and proved that world-class enterprise technology can be built in India and sold to the world. Co-founders Srividhya Srinivasan and Baskar Subramanian take us back to the days after selling their first startup to a NASDAQ-listed chipmaker, when they landed on an idea almost nobody in India's broadcast industry believed in: regionalizing satellite TV ads. That business grew to ₹180 crore in revenue. Then the founders made a bold call: "Enough of this hardware mess. We'll host only on the cloud." It meant shutting down an 8 year old profitable business to back a cloud platform that was barely making a few crores. That decision transformed Amagi into the company it is today. 18 years later, Amagi went public, as a strong example of building a truly global enterprise software company from India. But the IPO itself was far from an obvious decision. The founders share why going public was the right choice despite not needing capital. This episode will tell you how category-defining companies are built. 00:00 - Trailer 01:00 - How three college kids became founders 04:55 - The startup idea validated by a palmist 07:10 - How founders split roles (w/o designations) 11:04 - What Amagi 2.0 does 14:29 - Bannerghatta Road runs Olympics for the US 15:54 - Only 10% of TV networks are on the cloud 16:50 - Why shut down a profitable business? 21:25 - Why one co-founder moved to the US 28:06 - Did Amagi really need the IPO? 31:10 - What is Amagi 2.0? 36:04 - Selling to the US: then vs. now 40:44 - How NBC signed with Amagi 43:56 - How intent is measured through contracts 46:58 - 5 major decisions that changed Amagi 52:08 - How AI is changing Amagi 57:45 - Being the CTO of a public company 1:02:57 - US vs India Market: US is fast to experiment 1:04:48 - Enterprises Need Human Touch 1:11:12 - Cloud and TV: No one Believed 1:13:34 - What will Happen to Hollywood ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Nansi on: LinkedIn: https://in.linkedin.com/in/nansi-mishra X: https://x.com/nansi_mishra ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail
	How A 23-Year-Old Solo Founder Is Disrupting India's On-Demand Labor Market \| Anjali Sardana, Pronto	23 Jun 2026	01:08:19
Why did global VCs invest $60M into India's most operationally heavy marketplace problem? The early bet was undoubtedly on the founder, Anjali Sardana. A 23 year old biology graduate from Georgetown University who is today the solo founder of Pronto. The company founded on 2nd April 2024 is at a $200 Million valuation, just a year later and they are growing at god-speed. What began in a single hub in Sector 56, Gurgaon is today 22,000 bookings a day, 5,000+ professionals, and operations across India's biggest cities. But Pronto was never just about convenience. It was built on a belief that India’s home services market is broken not just for customers, but even more so for workers. No income stability. No safety net. No formal identity in the system. Not many individual investors write a $20M cheque. Lachy Groom did, alongside General Catalyst and Gladebrook. One year in, Pronto’s growth explains the conviction. This episode is the story of the chaos, the urgency and the belief behind one of India's fastest moving startups. 00:00 — Trailer 01:32 — What is Pronto? 03:16 — Hiring the first 30 pros in a single day 06:13 — Delivering uniforms in 48 hours 08:02 — Hustling to make the first payroll 09:23 — The first home office 11:28 — Why the customer app is only a nice-to-have 17:18 — How pros are trained 21:11 — How Gurgaon, Mumbai & Bangalore behave differently 29:17 — TAM expands based on ease of access 34:58 — Mission is bringing dignity to formal labour 42:27 — Pronto's 30-year vision 42:48 — How US investors see Indian startups 44:37 — How a ₹400 headhunter brought the first hire 47:05 — Final round interview for Pronto's chief of staff 49:29 — How Anjali hires missionaries 54:31 — One thing Anjali would always do as founder 58:29 — One thing she's most proud of 59:29 — One value Pronto would never compromise on 1:01:44 — A company with urgency as core value 1:03:55 — What needs to change in India for Pronto to succeed? 1:05:18 — How to build a win-win-win business 1:07:40 — Why was this problem not solved yet? 1:09:02 — If Pronto fails, what would be the reason? 1:10:05 — How Anjali spends a day as a solo founder 1:15:30 — One lesson learned the hard way ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/neon-fund/ X: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Nansi on: LinkedIn: https://in.linkedin.com/in/nansi-mishra X: https://x.com/nansi_mishra ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail
	Why Coding is the Fastest Path to AGI \| Turing CEO Jonathan Siddharth	18 Jun 2026	01:10:48
Who is teaching the world's most powerful AI models to think? Turing is one of the largest data partners to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Nvidia. At a $2.2 billion valuation it has become one of the most important infrastructure layers in the AGI race. Jonathan Siddharth started Turing in 2018 with a thesis that talent matching is a trillion-dollar problem. Turing reached unicorn status in 2021. Then, in 2022, as the foundation model race accelerated, OpenAI approached Turing to provide coding data for ChatGPT. Jonathan recognised that frontier AI labs faced an enormous bottleneck: high-quality training data and human intelligence at scale. Instead of remaining just a talent marketplace, he made a bet that most unicorn CEOs never make. He built a second business on top of the first and leaned back into his AI research roots. Jonathan has a clear view of what needs to happen before we get to super intelligence. The four keys to unlocking AGI: coding, reasoning, tool use, and multimodality. He believes we solve for those four, and AI can do almost anything a human can do in front of a computer. If you are excited about where the AGI race is heading this episode is for you 00:00 - Trailer 01:06 - What Turing does 05:55 - Why OpenAI reached out to Turing 8:28 - How GPT-3 became ChatGPT 17:54 - How ImageNet breakthrough changed the world 21:12 - The largest provider of coding data to AI labs 24:34 - Four keys to super intelligence 28:45 - Every human will run multiple companies in 10 years 32:27 - Can agents have self-improvement loops? 34:36 - The future of software engineering 36:26 - Agents should create, humans should steer 39:46 - Is the line between products and services companies blurring? 40:42 - How an agent can handle hiring end-to-end 43:36 - Every human can now write software 45:22 - Will workflow SaaS disappear? 47:46 - No fine-tuning vs fine-tuning camps 51:49 - A case study in compute constraints 57:06 - Why the world needs so much compute 1:01:26 - Where Jonathan would invest today 1:03:16 - Where cybersecurity is heading 1:08:31 - How the world will look in 10 years ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail
	Questions Every Founder Must Answer Before Taking an Acquisition Offer \| Shashank Saxena, VNDLY & Pantomath	11 Jun 2026	01:31:43
Most AI failures won't come from a bad model. They'll come from bad data. Shashank Saxena spent most of his career on the buying side of enterprise technology before founding VNDLY which was acquired by Workday for $510 million. He then joined Sierra as a Managing Partner before going full time as Co-founder and CEO of Pantomath, a data operations center for enterprises that are betting their future on AI agents. We discuss why data quality is becoming one of the biggest challenges in enterprise AI. An AI agent fed bad data for 12 hours doesn't go rogue. It just makes 12 hours of wrong decisions: rejecting insurance claims, issuing credit cards, or drilling in the wrong location. As more business decisions are delegated to AI systems, companies will need far greater visibility into what is happening across their data infrastructure. Shashank also shares the decisions that led to VNDLY's acquisition, the advice he'd give founders evaluating acquisition offers today, and why a Michael Jordan analogy continues to motivate him as a second-time founder. If you're building enterprise software, selling to large companies, or trying to figure out whether experience is an asset or a liability in the AI era, this episode is for you. 0:00 - Trailer 01:00 - How Shashank became a second-time founder 07:20 - Where Pantomath sits in the data stack 10:55 - How a broken Tableau report turns mission-critical with AI 12:55 - Who Pantomath sells to 15:35 - Solving for a problem that doesn't exist yet 19:03 - How have founder expectations changed today? 20:31 - Series B companies pre- and post-AI 21:26 - The Michael Jordan example 23:57 - How a repeat founder chooses investors 25:10 - What value Snowflake adds as a strategic investor 27:05 - Data is not an open category today 28:34 - The astounding Databricks outcome 29:08 - The reality of the $100 million ARR number 31:48 - Will non-human workers 100x in the next few years? 36:00 - How to protect data in motion 37:26 - How comfortable are we giving full access to agents? 39:47 - Where is automation fastest today? 42:09 - Why entrepreneurs tend to like uncertainty 43:28 - Why Shashank chose to be a founder 45:48 - A customer-driven $510M acquisition 48:32 - Employees vs contractors in any organization 51:22 - Building from Ohio vs the Bay Area 53:14 - Learnings from selling to enterprises 56:31 - How Shashank raised from Tier 1 US VCs 59:19 - Heads down or network as a founder? 1:02:47 - First-time vs second-time founder edge in AI 1:06:22 - Hiring as a repeat founder 1:08:08 - How enterprise sales has changed 1:10:52 - How do you sell for a problem that isn't visible today? 1:12:58 - Best piece of advice 1:16:27 - The only advice for a founder considering M&A 1:21:06 - Position yourself to be capable of taking risks 1:24:51 - What matters to an enterprise buyer? ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail
	94% CAGR: What the Inference Boom means for your AI costs \| Vamshi Ambati	09 Jun 2026	00:51:56
Vamshi Ambati has spent more than two decades in AI, through the symbolic era, statistical era, and the neural wave we're experiencing today. A CMU PhD, founder of LatentStructure and Predera (which was acquired), now an investor at Virama Ventures, he's one of the sharper voices on what's actually happening under the hood of the AI boom. We discuss a simple question: Who wins when models become cheaper and more abundant? And try to answer this by looking at how inference spend v/s compute spend is shifting, and why inference may become the biggest infrastructure opportunity of the next decade.Vamshi explains what actually goes into the cost of a token, why AI is simultaneously getting cheaper and more expensive, and why the inference market alone could reach $1.3 trillion by 2030. If you're building in AI or someone who wants a clear mental model of where this industry is headed, this conversation is for you. 00:00 - Trailer 0:45 - How an AI researcher thinks after 20 years 05:53 - Where enterprise AI adoption is headed 08:35 - Drawing parallels between cloud and AI 11:20 - If building is cheap, what's valuable? 13:37 - Can computing get cheaper? 16:41 - What is inference, really? 22:22 - Why coding and customer support got eaten first? 26:48 - Which technologies are overvalued and undervalued? 29:56 - An accidental entrepreneur's journey 33:15 - Why is healthcare slow to adopt technology? 38:59 - Landing Walmart as a customer 42:36 - Should founders build in services if product isn't visible? 43:47 - Is Palantir a product company or a services company? 44:15 - How to win as a forward-deployed company 46:23 - What it takes to land large enterprise customers 49:20 - Building sales muscles as a technical founder ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail
	This Startup Can End China’s Grip on Global EV Supply Chain \| Bhaktha, Chara Tech	03 Jun 2026	01:07:39
China processes nearly 90% of the world's rare earths. Rare earths are hidden inside everything from EVs and smartphones to fighter jets, making them one of the most critical materials powering the modern economy. When China restricted rare earth exports in April 2025, the world saw the huge risk of depending on a supply chain controlled by a single country. For Bhaktha Keshavachar, however, it was validation of a bet he had made 6 years earlier. After exiting Ezetap, Bhaktha founded Chara Tech to create electric motors that don't need rare earth magnets at all. The journey was anything but easy. Six years of R&D. Investors who didn't understand the problem. Customers who weren't convinced. And a motor technology that engineers had known about for over 200 years but never successfully commercialized at scale. Today, Chara is shipping hundreds of motors, signing major customers, and finding itself at the center of a global geopolitical shift. Bhaktha explains how software became the breakthrough that made rare-earth-free motors practical and what it takes to build a deep tech company long before the market believes the problem exists. If you are interested in building deep tech for the world, this episode is for you. 0:00 - Trailer 01:10 - When China bans rare earth exports 04:15 - How today’s rare earth shortage is like 1970s oil embargo 05:26 - Are rare earths really rare? 07:23 - Why China has a monopoly 11:43 - 3 reasons why Chara was founded 15:11 - How Chara made a 200-year-old technology practical 16:45 - How software protects deep tech startups 18:53 - The conviction to build deep tech in 2016 21:52 - Why electricity is still the biggest opportunity 26:59 - 4+1 technologies every country should possess 28:17 - The story of 6 years in R&D 33:16 - The response from early customers 36:10 - How China’s ban changed Chara’s journey 39:30 - Why Growth-stage fundraising for DeepTech is Hard 44:28 - What India needs to win in deep tech 52:53 - 3 things needed for a deep tech startup 55:10 - Why the wealthy should invest in deep tech 58:00 - Where Chara is today 01:03:47 - Why Intel lost the race it was winning ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/neon-fund/ X: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Nansi on: LinkedIn: https://in.linkedin.com/in/nansi-mishra X: https://x.com/nansi_mishra ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail
	What if AI has Immunity like Humans? Ft. Animesh Koratana, PlayerZero	20 May 2026	00:39:28
Will your software soon be a living organism with its own immune system? Animesh Koratana, founder of PlayerZero, started his software career long before he founded the company. Growing up in Atlanta, he spent his childhood inside his father’s software business, watching engineers sitting through the unglamorous work of QA and keeping systems alive after launch. He saw early that writing software was only half the problem. Maintaining it was the real battle. Years later at Stanford, he witnessed the birth of GPT-2 and Codex, the very foundation of GitHub Copilot. While much of the world focused on how AI would help engineers write software faster, he became obsessed with a different question: What happens when companies are flooded with AI-generated code that no single engineer fully understands? With PlayerZero, Animesh is building toward what he calls self-healing software: systems that behave less like static machines and more like living organisms with their own immune systems. At the center of that vision are “Context Graphs” which captures the "institutional memory" of a company: the deep knowledge held by a senior engineer who has spent years understanding how complex software breaks, the failure modes it develops, and the decisions behind fixing it. If you are building software today and wondering how reliability, debugging, and ownership will work when machines write most of the code, this episode is for you. 0:00 — Trailer 0:45 — Building Self-Healing Code 2:03 — First Exposure to LLMs Through GPT-2 3:45 — What Is PlayerZero? 5:42 — Institutional Memory of a Senior Engineer 7:10 — How Context Is Built 10:06 — The Viral “Context Graph” Piece 16:24 — The Outcome PlayerZero Delivers 19:59 — When the Agent Tells the Human What to Do 23:43 — Who Is PlayerZero Selling To? 26:56 — Why Software Should Be Treated Like Biology 28:54 — The PlayerZero Customer Pitch 30:37 — Can Software Really Have an Immune System? 35:15 — How Animesh Chose His Investors 36:55 — What’s Next for PlayerZero? ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail
	Why Your AI is Still a Demo: Lessons from Braintrust’s Field CTO	15 May 2026	00:46:30
85% of AI teams will hit a serious production failure this year. The only thing separating them from the 15% who don't? Evals. After nearly two decades of building AI systems at Microsoft, Facebook, and Dropbox, Ameya Bhatawdekar is now Field CTO at Braintrust, the AI observability platform used by Airtable, Notion, Stripe, Dropbox, Vercel, Cloudflare, Lovable, and Replit. We discuss a shift that most teams underestimate. The winners in AI are not just shipping faster. They are building systems that behave predictably, improve continuously, and earn user trust over time. As traditional monitoring breaks down in a probabilistic world, observability now requires learning how an AI system reasons, not just how it performs. This leads to a new paradigm where agents are no longer just executing tasks, but also analyzing and debugging other agents. The episode also traces the evolution of machine learning itself. From feature engineering to deep learning to transformers , each leap increased capability and reduced control. Evaluation is now where control sits. Ameya is clear on one point. Moving fast with weak evaluations feels like velocity, but it compounds into technical debt, unpredictable failures, and ultimately a loss of user trust. The teams that win are the ones that invest early in rigor, especially in understanding context, which is quickly becoming the hardest and most critical layer in AI systems. If you are a founder or engineer moving beyond the demo phase and trying to build durable, high-quality AI systems, this episode will change how you think about shipping. 0:00 — Trailer 00:55 — What’s Braintrust? 05:01 — What agents are shipping today 07:54 — What evals look like in practice for Notion & Zapier 09:44 — Evals vs Classic monitoring 11:33 — Who is the Field CTO? 16:35 — What goes wrong when agents fail 18:26 — Agents analyzing other agents 24:17 — Evals are existential in vibecoding 25:52 — Ship fast with weak evals or slow with strong evals? 25:41 — What makes enterprises trust an LLM? 29:25 — Do AI startups know how good their product is? 30:23 — 3 ML systems: Microsoft, Dropbox, Meta 36:30 — How the 2017 transformer paper changed everything 38:20 — All algorithms are predicting the next word 43:40 — What LLMs will do in 1 year ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail
	The Art of Enterprise Sale: Selling Startups to Giants with Poojan Kumar	11 May 2026	00:39:39
What does it take to build a company that industry giants want to buy? Poojan Kumar built and exited two enterprise infrastructure companies, PernixData to Nutanix and Clumio to Commvault. He began his career at Oracle, where he wrote the original code for Exadata and helped scale it into a billion-dollar product line. But his real founder journey began when he left the corporate world to chase what he calls the “Discontinuity Thesis.” At PernixData, that discontinuity was the shift from hard disks to flash storage. The company scaled to $25 million in revenue before being acquired by Nutanix. At Clumio, the discontinuity was public cloud. Clumio went on to raise $186 million to build a cloud-native backup and cyber resilience platform before being acquired by Commvault, where Poojan now serves as GM of the business line. If you want to understand how enduring enterprise companies are actually built and acquired this episode is for you. 0:00 - Trailer 0:48 - 25 Years in Enterprise 03:02 - Founders Should Look for Discontinuity 04:25 - $25M ARR, $60M Funding & an Exit in 6 Years 06:28 - The Thesis Behind Clumio's Acquisition 07:36 - The Landscape of Data Backup 09:08 - What Should Founders in Security & Data Build? 11:48 - Cloud vs AI: The New Data & Storage Stack 13:59 - The Unanswered Questions Enterprises Have Today 16:38 - How Infra Changed Between Pernix, Clumio & Today 18:31 - Scaling to $25M Before Acquisition, Twice 20:43 - Why is AI Adoption Bottom-Up, Not Top-Down? 21:26 - Claude vs Codex vs Copilot 22:34 - When Cloud Outgrew the Backup Playbook 25:41 - Are Fragmented Clouds Silent Killers? 28:06 - Fundraising Takes You from Point A to Point B 32:29 - Selling to Commvault vs Nutanix 34:33 - What Leads to an 8-Figure Exit? 36:55 - How a Technical Founder Excelled at Sales ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail
	Vignesh Kumar on Why Healthcare is Moving Faster in 2026 than the Entire Last 10 Years of SaaS	30 Apr 2026	00:39:54
Healthcare has never moved this fast. Pharma giants are no longer just buying software. They are writing $50 million checks for access to a single foundational model. Systems of record are being replaced, and the shift is unfolding fastest in a place most people did not expect: healthcare. Vignesh Kumar, Partner at Sierra Ventures, has spent 13 years at the center of this enterprise shift. He has sourced and invested early in companies across Enterprise AI, including two unicorns, Phenom and Reify Health, with Reify reaching around a $4B valuation and Phenom crossing $1B. Over 40 years, Sierra has backed 300+ startups, resulting in 11 IPOs, 7 unicorns, and 104 acquisitions, and manages over $2.4B in assets. Today, the firm is a focused early-stage enterprise AI investor, writing first institutional checks while staying disciplined on fund size, growing from $150M to $270M. This episode is on how the next generation of companies in Enterprise AI will be found, funded and scaled. If you are building in AI or exploring healthcare, this will help you see the shift earlier and act on it with more clarity. 0:00 – Trailer 1:04 – Where Sierra Ventures invests? 3:33 – How to keep fund size aligned with stage 5:19 – Sierra's historical DPI 5:52 – Deals that drove big returns 8:25 – Sierra's exits 9:53 – The formula for high returns 11:47 – The perfect US–India founder example 13:07 – What outcomes VCs expects from startups 14:34 – How the partner consensus works 15:56 – Why Sierra invested in Smallest AI 17:28 – From first meeting to term sheet 17:57 – Healthcare has never moved this fast 23:20 – Where Vignesh invests 24:39 – Only one foundational model bet 25:28 – Is SaaS dead? 27:44 – How PMF changes in the AI era 30:16 – How a VC calculates market risk 31:19 – What kept Vignesh at Sierra for 13 years 33:17 – How to bet on futuristic startups 34:58 – The anti-portfolio 35:50 – First-time vs second-time founders 36:43 – Why great storytellers attract best talent ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail
	Can the Indian Market Alone Take You to $100M ARR? \| Aneesh Reddy, Capillary Tech	23 Apr 2026	01:20:00
Are recessions actually the best time to start your company? Aneesh Reddy, the founder of Capillary Technologies, believes that economic downturns are the ultimate filter for identifying products that have a "right to exist”,which is only earned when a product solves a deep, non-negotiable pain point for the customer. This idea has shaped Capillary’s journey that led to a 4500 Crore IPO, 250 million consumers and 100,000+ stores worldwide. We explore the internal culture at Capillary that has not only retained 20% of its core team for over a decade but has also served as a launchpad for 50+ startups. Aneesh offers a contrarian view on leadership that founders should micromanage their teams for the first six months to instill the right DNA before scaling. We also discuss expansion into the US market, detailing the "Risk vs Reference" framework that defines how sales strategies must pivot when moving between continents. He shares what went wrong in Capillary’s early attempt to enter the US, the lessons from that experience, and what eventually helped them succeed in the market the second time around, leading to the US now contributing over 50% of their revenue. If you are a founder building in SaaS or looking to scale from India to the world, this episode with Aneesh Reddy is for you. 00:00 – Trailer 01:50 – What to build that has not been commoditized 05:20 – Customer-facing or fast-changing products will survive 09:08 – How Capillary hit early PMF 13:54 – Risk vs Reference in the US & Asia 18:10 – How Capillary won the US market (after failing first) 24:56 – Outbound & partnerships that work better in the US 30:30 – Right to exist differs in startups vs large companies 35:34 – Micromanage in startups for the first 6 months 40:47 – How Vipassana changed the founder 49:57 – How 1/5th of the team stayed for 10+ years 55:29 – The culture that created 50+ startups 58:24 – The right metrics to go IPO in India 01:01:53 – The choice to build a product company 01:05:24 – Pioneering acquisitions of US startups 01:09:18 – Why not build a roll-up to get $200 million ARR? 01:10:43- 5 major decisions behind Capillary’s journey 01:14:46 – Why are top SaaS stocks down? ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail
	The Internet Is Getting a Billion New Users. None Are Human \| Sudheesh Nair, Thoughtspot, Nutanix & Tinyfish	16 Apr 2026	01:09:54
From employee #16 to $1B ARR at Nutanix, then scaling ThoughtSpot to $150M ARR and a $4B+ valuation now building for a world where agents will drive the internet. Sudheesh Nair joins the Neon Show. The internet as we see it today was optimized around human strengths and weaknesses, using algorithms to monetize our greed and fear. But as agents take up more of the internet, that playbook starts to break. We are moving from a web of discovery to an outcome-driven internet, where agents care only about the destination, not the journey. As an operator who has scaled companies, Sudheesh believes sales is a noble profession where there is no middle ground. You are either a hero or a zero. Sales is not a function at the edge of the company, it is the primary job of every employee in a company. When that happens, teams stop acting like mercenaries chasing targets and start behaving like missionaries focused on customer outcomes. Beyond agents, we also discuss building companies and whether there are right or wrong reasons to start. Sudheesh’s view is simple. There are no right or wrong reasons, but you have to be brutally honest with yourself about why you are doing it. This episode is one hour of clear thinking on agents, sales, and the realities of company building. 00:00 – Trailer 01:49 – What % of the internet is agents today? 10:25 – How far are we from trillions of agents? 12:47 – Why isn’t the internet ready for agents? 18:31 – Consumer is a tough game 19:49 – Selling to enterprises = high value / low risk 22:14 – A noble profession with only heroes or zeroes 24:41 – Only 3 reasons why people buy anything 26:14 – How we got Fortune 500 customers in just 18 months 27:28 – The wrong reasons to start a company 31:05 – Cursor vs Claude vs Codex 34:30 – Do investors prefer failed founders over first-time founders? 35:06 – 3 reasons why an enterprise will sign your startup 39:52 – PMF has to be proven every day 41:21 – What’s the play b/w OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic? 45:12 – Drivers vs passengers in companies 47:17 – The muscles you build as an operator 50:45 – Hire one person when you actually need four 51:41 – Why is marketing the most in-demand skill? 53:50 – Nutanix: from 0 to $1B ARR in 26 quarters 54:55 – The hardest choice Nutanix made 59:25 – Talent is universal. Opportunities are not 01:04:08 – Selling is everyone’s job 01:05:58 – Passion comes from value creation ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail
	Why $1T Construction still runs on Spreadsheets (And How AI Fixes It) \| Sneha & Graham, Merlin AI	09 Apr 2026	00:47:04
Can AI Rebuild the $1 Trillion Construction Industry? Construction is one of the largest industries in the world, yet most projects still run on Excel sheets, fragmented tools, and disconnected workflows. Sneha Kumari (Co-founder, Merlin) and Graham Blake (CPO, Merlin) break down why construction has remained one of the least digitized industries and why that is finally starting to change. We explore why traditional ERP systems like NetSuite or Dynamics fail construction companies, how Merlin is rethinking enterprise software for builders, and why AI may finally make it possible to coordinate the massive complexity behind modern construction projects. Sneha also shares her journey from industry operator to first-time founder, how Merlin found early product-market fit, the power of word-of-mouth growth in construction, and what it takes to build a vertical SaaS company in a “non-sexy” but trillion-dollar industry. If you're curious about how AI can transform deep, complex industries this conversation is for you. 00:00 – Trailer 00:40 – Merlin x Neon 02:07 – Software for construction 04:37 – What convinced Graham to join 06:25 – Founder insights that discovered the pain points 08:43 – The team behind Merlin 10:15 – Challenges of building tech in construction 11:51 – Biggest pain points for Merlin’s customers 17:16 – Does ERP need a revolution? 17:55 – Merlin’s end-to-end ERP approach 20:39 – Why customers aren’t happy with existing solutions 24:36 – Why an AI-native approach makes sense 28:23 – What % of construction budget goes to tech 30:37 – How Y Combinator changed a first-time founder 31:50 – The role Neon played in Merlin 33:34 – Current players that excite the founders 36:43 – What it takes for Merlin to reach $10M ARR 39:57 – How to build with zero sales constraints 43:06 – Why become a founder? 45:56 – Build only for an industry you truly understand 47:41 – Why construction over manufacturing 48:38 – When customer called previous software a “black box” ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail
	Why Signing a Fortune 500 Customer Too Early Can Kill You \| Manish Jindal, Cloudflare & Arize	02 Apr 2026	01:20:01
What if the biggest mistake you can make as a founder is signing Apple as your first customer? Manish Jindal spent 10 years at Cloudflare as employee #45, helping take the company from $10 million revenue to a $60 billion public company. Manish breaks down the Cloudflare playbook: why they intentionally said “no” to Fortune 500 companies early on to protect their product, and how a single phone call from a CIO birthed their entire enterprise motion. Throughout his career, Manish has joined companies that already showed early product–market fit in large markets, allowing him to spend a decade helping scale them. Now as the President at Arize, he is building the “plumbing” that allows giants like Walmart and Uber to move from building AI agents to real-world production. We discuss why “boring” infrastructure is a more durable bet than flashy AI apps, and why owning the data remains the ultimate competitive edge. Manish also shares insights on building Go-To-Market (GTM) teams in the Cloudflare era and how that strategy has shifted in the AI era. If you are a founder or leader trying to scale a startup, this episode with Manish Jindal is for you. 00:00 – Trailer 01:00 – How Manish chose companies with early PMF 03:45 – Founder’s belief is most important 04:35 – Entering dev tooling when it wasn't popular 08:20 – Never leave a Co. you believe in for wrong reasons 09:45 – The “boring” industries that do well in Long run 12:40 – It’s easy to build an agent, but hard to scale one 15:06 – Why infra won’t be winner-take-all 18:02 – The keepers of data will win 20:20 – From million to billion in Cloudflare’s journey 21:32 – The “holy sh*t” moment happens fast for Cloudflare 24:30 – The CIO call that led to Cloudflare’s enterprise plan 27:04 – $50M and $100M ARR path of Cloudflare 28:33 – Build enterprise motion slowly or aggressively? 29:51 – Why Cloudflare didn’t want Apple as customer 32:10 – Early PMF at Splunk, Cloudflare, and Arize 35:40 – Choosing only decade-long stints 39:01 – Why Manish didn’t start his own company 43:37 – How GTM has changed in the AI world 54:25 – What agents need to work well in production 01:00:51 – Which enterprise use cases qualify for AI? 01:03:52 – What went wrong with Air Canada Agent? 01:04:52 – How customers are discovered 01:09:01 – Claude & Cursor are the most powerful agents today 01:10:55 – How Manish chooses companies to invest in 01:15:15 – Why acquisitions will become the Norm 01:18:35 – Technology is not a moat anymore ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail
	Investor who hasn't Changed His Thesis in 5 Funds & Saw the AI Wave Before ChatGPT \| Ashmeet Sidana, Engineering Capital	26 Mar 2026	01:22:51
What does it look like to run the same playbook across five venture funds? That is the bet Ashmeet Sidana has made at Engineering Capital. From Fund One to Fund Five, he has written the first check into founders solving problems with Technical insight. His portfolio includes Rubrik, now a public company, SignalFx which was acquired by Splunk for $1 billion, and CodeRabbit, last valued at $550 million. Ashmeet runs Engineering Capital as a solo GP and the fund has been oversubscribed since Fund One. Ashmeet says that the most common way technical founders fail is by “playing house.” Founders who build beautifully organized systems and clean processes, but don’t obsessively seek product market fit. His view is that founders should ruthlessly prioritize finding PMF above everything else. Ashmeet is an investor who has seen enough cycles to know what actually compounds, and is still early-stage enough to care about the details that most people have moved past. 00:00 – Trailer 01:15 – Where does Engineering Capital place its bets? 10:07 – How the VC landscape has evolved 11:20 – Are technical founders the norm in AI? 16:23 – Why the name Engineering Capital? 16:50 – What every VC looks for in a founder 21:34 – Why Founders Choose Your Term Sheet 26:26 – Rule of 1-2 in-person meetings daily with founders 31:42 – Does AI give younger founders an edge? 32:59 – Founders must ruthlessly prioritize 35:58 – The trap of “playing house” 37:40 – PMF can change overnight, Ex: Facebook 40:13 – 1 in 10 companies fail due to lack of PMF 43:17 – The most valuable skill a founder can have 44:19 – Why have a Chief Engineer at a VC firm? 45:44 – The job of every CEO is to learn 46:09 – Solo founders are much riskier 48:15 – An accidental entry into VC 49:52 – Solo GP: risks and rewards 53:34 – $250M across funds 54:43 – Why solo GPs work better in the US 58:25 – Where Ashmeet’s portfolio companies are located 01:00:57 – Be very careful of vanity metrics 01:02:15 – Vibe coding will change the face of software 01:03:36 – Don’t chase trends in how companies are built 01:05:58 – $100M ARR is the outcome of a strong package 01:06:35 – How affordable is Bay Area for young founders? 01:11:32 – AlexNet, not ChatGPT, was the real AI inflection point 01:12:57 – US Public Companies Are Down 50% in 40 years ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail
	How 24,000 companies keep their AI from Breaking in Production \| Rohit Agarwal, Portkey	19 Mar 2026	01:18:44
Over 1 Trillion AI tokens pass through Portkey every single day. Every AI product eventually runs into the same problem. The prototype works, but once it goes live the system has to manage multiple models, rising token costs, unpredictable latency, and infrastructure that was never built for AI workloads. That is the problem Rohit Agarwal is solving with Portkey, an AI gateway that sits between applications and the models, whether that’s GPT-4, Claude, or Gemini. With 24,000 companies routing their AI through Portkey, Rohit sits on ground-level data on how AI is actually being used in production. Which models enterprises are betting on. Where costs are quietly climbing. How usage patterns shift as companies move from pilots to real products. When AI spend surpasses cloud spend, and Rohit believes it will, the infrastructure running underneath it becomes one of the most important bets in tech. This episode explores what it takes to run AI systems at that scale. 00:00 – Trailer 01:05 – 500 billion AI tokens every day 04:05 – First to call an "AI gateway" 07:26 – Where did the Gateway insight come from? 12:08 – How Portkey is winning this space 13:05 – Picking the right gambles over wrong ones 14:16 – What are LLM endpoints? 15:21 – AI will 100% surpass cloud spend 19:00 – Hype is coming from people still in Q&A mode 19:33 – AI employees over humans in customer support? 23:00 – For AI startups, traffic > revenue 24:43 – The bubble is in valuations, not utility 26:05 – How Rohit built his personal automations 28:38 – Costliest model is most used now 33:21 – What's going right and wrong for AI companies 37:49 – Hiring a VP of sales after $15M is possible today 39:57 – What edge does Claude have over other models? 43:35 – Founders need a "why me vs. why Anthropic" story 52:56 – What if Anthropic or AWS builds a gateway? 55:41 – Predictions for the next 12 months 59:40 – How big is the opportunity in Agents? 01:00:48 – Startups now have to prove it's not a weekend project 01:01:54 – Is Build v/s Buy no longer a Debate? 01:03:50 – What would Rohit build if starting up today? 01:05:58 – How Portkey is different from an API gateway 01:08:26 – MCP / tool calling enables agentic workflows 01:12:00 – Portkey's Community-driven early GTM 01:13:34 – Startups have only 2 reasons for Open core ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail
	The $600B Grocery Market Is Obsessed With Speed — FirstClub Is Betting on Quality \| Ayyappan	12 Mar 2026	00:59:55
Is the best grocery platform one that decides what it WON’T sell? That is the bet Ayyappan is making with FirstClub. Fewer products. Stricter rules. While most quick commerce apps are trying to deliver orders faster, he is asking a different question. What if consumers need not “faster or cheaper”, but a retail platform where they can trust every item listed on it? A place where you do not have to read every label, check multiple reviews, or wonder if the top result is there because a brand paid for it. FirstClub is trying to solve a harder problem. It is trying to define what “quality” means for everyday products we consume, starting with groceries. India has received the highest quick commerce funding of any country in the world, at $9.24B over the last 10 years. Yet only 1% of Indians use quick commerce services today. With a large market still open for expansion and the possibility of better unit economics over time, FirstClub is building a countertrend to the hype around Indian quick commerce. Ayyappan brings eleven years of experience at Flipkart, and has also served as SVP at Myntra and CEO of Cleartrip. This episode is the story till here and the plans ahead for Firstclub. 00:00 – Trailer 01:01 – The Costco of Indian quick commerce 04:32 – Building a counter-trend company 06:15 – What consumers say v/s what they actually want 09:37 – The only retail platform to Ban 200 ingredients 12:34 – Why can’t the big players solve this? 13:21 – A simple rule of thumb for food 16:03 – Brand stories from FirstClub 19:20 – Is the problem access or income? 21:29 – Who are the 20 million FirstClub consumers? 24:14 – Only 1% of India uses quick commerce 26:04 – What does “quality” mean in grocery? 32:34 – How will FirstClub monetize without brand sponsorships? 34:53 – Do consumers behave differently across categories? 39:30 – Why is Myntra so powerful in fashion? 42:24 – What Myntra taught Ayyapan that Flipkart didn’t? 43:53 – Unlearning to build for Quick commerce 48:25 – Why Indian consumers are very experimental today 50:59 – Is India one country when it comes to quality? 52:43 – If Ayyappan was a product, what would he be? 54:47 – The hardest belief to defend while building FirstClub 56:26 – Akshayakalpa & The Whole Truth 57:48 – Not niche, but premium ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/neon-fund/ X: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Nansi on: LinkedIn: https://in.linkedin.com/in/nansi-mishra X: https://x.com/nansi_mishra ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail
	The First AI Market With 8 Billion Potential Users \| Sudarshan kamath, Smallest AI	06 Mar 2026	01:09:25
Will smaller AI models win over large language models? Sudarshan Kamath grew up in Mumbai, taught himself AI before most Indian companies were even hiring for it, and bought the domain "smallest.ai" for $100 in 2022, two years before the company existed. Today, he runs Smallest AI, a startup focused on real time voice AI. He started with self-driving cars, training large models and compressing them to run on vehicle hardware in real time. That's where he first saw what small models could do: a hundredth of the size, almost no loss in accuracy. Two years later he put in his own $150K, got some GPUs, and started training. Eighteen months later he had a seed round, a Series A, a seven-figure enterprise deal, and a $150M acquisition offer he turned down. Most of the data that goes into large models is noise. Strip it out, train small, and you get a model that matches a giant at a fraction of the size and runs in real time. That insight is what Smallest AI is built on. 00:00 – Trailer 00:51 – Sudarshan's journey before Smallest AI 05:00 – Arjun Jain & Yann LeCun 08:20 – Why build in voice AI in 2024? 15:09 – Why move the company from India to the US? 17:25 – Hiring talent via LinkedIn and X 18:49 – What large US funds actually bring to startups 21:03 – Raising a seed round with zero revenue 26:06 – Strong intros from US VCs 28:23 – What the first enterprise customer teaches you 31:50 – Raising Series A with Seligman Ventures 32:19 – The $150M acquisition offer 34:32 – When should founders sell secondaries? 36:24 – Who are Smallest AI's customers? 38:28 – What are state space models? 40:16 – Are GEPA models closer to AGI? 41:23 – Growing 10× in three months 48:03 – This is not a winner-takes-all market 49:32 – Why this is a trillion-dollar market 50:08 – Why large AI labs are not building in voice 51:26 – What it takes to reach $100M ARR 54:21 – The biggest goal for 2026 57:11 – Voice costs 1000× more than text 01:02:04 – How Smallest AI cracked large enterprises ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail
	AI Needs to Know Why You Took THAT decision \| Ashu Garg, Investor at Foundation Capital	27 Feb 2026	00:49:25
What if AI can learn the “why” behind decision making of humans? Ashu Garg and Jaya Gupta recently wrote one of the most discussed articles on AI this year. Their idea drew public responses from Dharmesh Shah, Aaron Levie, and Arvind Jain. Enterprise software has always captured what happened. It records the order, the ticket, and the approval. But it has never captured why it happened. It does not store the reasoning, the exception, or the past decisions that shaped the outcome. Ashu argues that this missing layer is the biggest opportunity in enterprise AI right now, and that the startups that capture it will be the biggest winners in AI. In this episode, we go deeper into what context graphs really are, how they get built, why startups have an edge over incumbents, and how close we are to seeing this work in practice. 00:00 – Trailer 00:32 – What are context graphs? 02:48 – Why agents haven't lived up to the hype? 05:18 – The "why" of Decision Making 08:17 – How agents will store data for context graphs 10:38 – What will be possible for Digital twins? 14:02 – Can context graphs reveal a company's moat? 15:50 – Guardrails on Access for agents 19:50 – Managing agents vs being managed by agents 23:01 – Will winners be vertical or horizontal players? 25:56 – The future is agent swarms 28:43 – Finding PMF is what makes a great CEO 31:40 – What will set apart successful enterprises of 2030 33:44 – Where Foundation Capital is investing 35:16 – Why AI won't be winner-takes-all 37:38 – Where will the context graph reside? 40:45 – Will systems of record be replaced? 42:42 – Human in the loop → hands-off execution 44:46 – A reality check on where we are today 46:43 – Where startups will win in orchestration ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail
	How AI Will Finally Deliver the Promise SaaS Made \| Samay Kohli: From Robots to Digital Workers	21 Feb 2026	01:04:50
Samay Kohli spent 12 years at GreyOrange, scaling it to over $100 million in revenue and a $3 billion valuation at its peak, making it one of the world’s largest warehouse robotics companies. Two years ago, he started again with Budy, this time in the US senior care industry. In this industry, decisions are emotional, sales cycles can run for years, and multiple stakeholders are involved. While the market sits at the intersection of real estate, healthcare, and hospitality, most sales still depend on manual follow-ups and scattered tools. Budy builds digital workers for sales teams: AI teammates that handle follow-ups, scheduling, and lead management across CRMs, calendars, and inboxes. Instead of adding another layer of software, Budy went zero UI-UX and focused on enabling sales teams in an industry with 99% inbound leads to manage their cold leads better. Today, Samay joins Siddhartha (Partner at Neon Fund, and a proud investor in Budy) and shares his journey from building robots to building digital teammates for a very non-traditional industry. 00:00 – Trailer 01:00 – What Budy is building for senior care 05:15 – Real Estate × Healthcare × Hospitality 06:25 – Zero UI UX technology 10:09 – AI teammates not assistants 12:03 – How sales teams operated before Budy 12:51 – A ninety nine percent inbound industry 13:45 – The real cost of senior care homes 15:35 – Can a CRM alone solve this 17:55 – Direct benefits of a digital worker 20:49 – Two founder archetypes 22:06 – Can lights out operations become real 24:49 – What Samay underestimated about the market 25:58 – The largest players in the industry 29:07 – Treat your customer’s company like your own 30:52 – Entrepreneurship as a profession 35:36 – Unlearnings as a second time founder 37:30 – What digital workers actually are 39:47 – The original promise of SaaS 42:04 – The next decade of digital workers 45:25 – Digital workers that read best selling books 47:26 – Will Claude build CRMs 49:38 – Business etiquette across the world 55:18 – How a second time founder chooses investors 01:01:00 – Why every team member should track the P and L 01:02:14 – How Samay’s view on growth evolved ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail
	What Top 1% Investors Look For in AI Startups \| Umesh Padval, Seligman Ventures, Ex- Bessemer	13 Feb 2026	00:51:57
Do startup valuations today make sense? Umesh Padval, an early investor in Cohere, now valued at about $7 billion shares why Cohere stood out at the time of his investment. He shares what he saw early that made him believe this was not just another AI model company. Umesh is the Founding Managing Partner, Seligman Ventures and previously at Thomvest and Bessemer Venture Partners. He brings experience from investing across multiple tech cycles, from chips to cloud to AI. Umesh talks about how deals are really done in venture capital and what he looks for when everything feels noisy and crowded in AI. He also shares why many strong companies are choosing to stay private and what has changed in the IPO market. Public markets now demand cash flow and durability, not just fast growth. Umesh talks about why open source has become a powerful sales funnel for modern AI companies. Developers become the first users, and community adoption turns into long-term enterprise revenue. After four decades in Silicon Valley and 20 years as a VC, Umesh shares what keeps him in building and investing. 0:00 – How big is the scope for investing in AI startups? 04:04 – Do unit economics justify large AI valuations? 06:00 – Thomvest’s LLM investment thesis (Cohere case study) 09:18 – Are CTO roles changing in AI 11:21 – Traits of the best AI founding teams 13:40 – Timeline to find the best founders 16:52 – Partnership with Jyoti Bansal 19:07 – Where is the IPO market headed? 23:40 – Salesforce–Clari acquisition 25:18 – Is profitability a prerequisite to go public? 26:00 – Can the India–US corridor beat US–Israel? 28:53 – Umesh’s investment philosophy 31:08 – Open source as a sales funnel 33:38 – IIT → Stanford → Startups 41:45 – The only CEO with 60 direct reports 43:43 – Why Jensen never does 1-on-1s? 48:23 – What ultimately drives Umesh Padval? ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail
	When Founders Should Quit Their Startups with Matt MacInnis \| COO Rippling	07 Feb 2026	01:20:33
Matt MacInnis spent 6 years as COO at Rippling and now leads as CPO. He joined Rippling in 2019, when there were only 70 people, and has led the company across multiple stages. Before that, Matt was a founder for 9 years, building Inkling after 7 years at Apple. These three chapters of his career shape this conversation. We focus on how to build and operate teams as a company scales. Matt explains how he thinks about speed versus real progress, and which parts of building a company should move fast and which should move slowly. He shares how he decided when to introduce processes at Rippling, when to keep things informal, and how to recognize when a process that once helped the company had started to slow it down. We discuss how his role changed as Rippling grew from around 70 people to 100, then to 500, and now to thousands. He explains what he paid attention to at each stage and which metrics he deliberately did not obsess over. These are practical lessons for founders, from the earliest days of a startup to the challenges of scaling a large organization. 0:00 - Trailer 01:11 – One thing people get wrong about building a business? 04:01 – Great founders find markets that already exist 06:36 – What does a “death march” mean at Apple? 10:11 – How to build a good team in early-stage startup? 12:33 – Learnings from Apple to Inkling 18:11 – Processes to set up in startups 25:20 – Humans always optimize for comfort (and why that’s bad instinct) 33:09 – Why success teaches you more than failure 36:01 – How should processes change as company scales? 42:11 – How is AI changing the software industry? 54:03 – If Matt were starting up today, how would he do it? 57:07 – How would Next-gen PM roles look like? 01:01:51 – Matt shares about Rippling CEO Parker 01:04:32 – Founder instinct vs Data 01:06:06 – Over-optimizing for employee comfort 01:07:27 – If building a startup feels comfortable, it’s probably dead 01:08:36 – One thing only CEO’s should do forever 01:11:15 – One piece of startup advice Matt doesn’t trust ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail
	How Buyers Discover Startups, From a 10-Year Founder Journey to an EXIT \| Ankur Rawal & Vishwa Krishnakumar	30 Jan 2026	01:03:45
This is a special episode from the Neon Fund. In 2025, the US saw $1.8 trillion worth of M&A deals, around 25× more than India. But India’s startup ecosystem is much younger, which makes every acquisition a playbook for founders on process, pricing leverage, and stakeholder management. Neon backed Zenduty in 2020, when the founders had been bootstrapping profitably for two years and were already growing at a pace many VC-backed startups aspire to. Today, founders Ankur Rawal and Vishwa Krishnakumar join Siddhartha, Partner at Neon, to discuss one of the most untalked acquisitions of 2025. Over a 10-year journey, Zenduty pivoted to SRE in 2020. Vishwa and Ankur also share insights on the future of the DevTools space, which they believe will always be a strong choice to build great products, because engineers are among the hardest end users to please. This episode is a founders’ view on how acquisitions work in Indian SaaS. 00:00 – Trailer 01:00 – Initial years of a decade-long journey 07:12 – How Zenduty chose its investors 11:04 – How much should founders dilute? 12:24 – Building with profitability before & after fundraise 14:45 – Six years of survival before the pivot 17:01 – Why the pivot to the SRE space? 18:39 – How Zenduty differentiated from PagerDuty 19:12 – End users are the toughest to please in engineering 20:39 – Is market attractive if biggest player is valued only $1.5B? 25:22 – Why acquisition and not a Series A? 27:18 – The process before acquisition 29:23 – How pricing negotiations work 31:51 – Should devtool companies build from India or US? 34:58 – Three types of connects at physical events 37:06 – What physical presence at events signals 39:06 – Founders’ feedback on Neon Fund 41:41 – “Don’t build in silence” 43:50 – How to build a core AI-native company today 47:54 – Do first-time founders have an edge in the AI era? 52:08 – Cost to PMF has drastically gone down 54:48 – What hard problems are startups solving today? 55:37 – Why are acquisitions rare in India? 1:00:20 – How US investors are facilitating M&As 1:01:14 – How to make your brand visible to potential acquirers ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail
	From Startup to US IPO in 5 Years: Kanwal Rekhi’s Historic IPO of Excelan	22 Jan 2026	01:18:15
Kanwal Rekhi first came to the US in the 1960s. He took his company public on Nasdaq in 1987. As a young Indian in the US, he was laid off from his first three jobs. That experience pushed him towards entrepreneurship. At the time, Indians were known and hired for technical and mathematical skills, not as founders building companies on US soil. But Kanwal and his co-founders decided to bet on themselves. They faced rejection from nearly 50 investors before one VC agreed to invest $2 million for 50% of the company. In just five years, the company went public. From being appointed CEO overnight to being removed by the board two months before the IPO for a more “wall street-acceptable” CEO, this is a story of many firsts. After Excelan, Kanwal co-founded TiE in 1992 and has mentored tens of thousands of entrepreneurs. Beyond a personal story, Kanwal Rekhi is a turning point in how Indian founders came to be seen in Silicon Valley. 0:00 – Trailer 01:11 – How TiE was formed 07:11 – DoT Hatao, Desh Bachao 11:31 – Career opportunities in the 70s 13:41 – When Indians weren’t trusted to build companies 15:44 – Pioneers in computer networking 16:51 – Finding an Investor after 50 rejections 20:31 – Becoming CEO overnight 23:29 – Spare the story, show the numbers 24:17 – The “Wall Street acceptable” CEO for IPO 27:30 – Founders have to be financial thinkers 28:14 – How Excelan could go public in just 5 years 29:27 – Cost is unrelated to pricing in software 31:12 – Do Indian companies need Americans to lead? 34:05 – Benefits of registering in the US 36:53 – $1 trillion to solve India’s problems 40:49 – Policies for India’s startup ecosystem 42:01 – Enabling entrepreneurs in villages 44:41 – India in the 80s v/s today 50:36 – US vs India vs China 01:04:52 – How did IITs start allowing donations? 01:07:25 – AI investments of Silicon Valley Quad 01:18:29 – What Kanwal Rekhi looks for in founders? ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail
	What Went Wrong Before iD Fresh Worked \| For the First Time Co-Founders Tell Their Story	15 Jan 2026	00:54:41
Where did the journey of iD Fresh start? It began when a 19-year-old Abdul Nazer decided to run away from home to Bangalore with ₹100 in his pocket. He did any job that came his way: cook, cleaner, conductor and sold anything he could, from clothes and vegetables to spices and peanuts. Along the way, he brought his three brothers to Bangalore. Even with huge losses in business, they never stopped looking for new opportunities. Their first real glimpse of success came from a tea stall run out of a rented room that cost ₹80 a month. Despite strong demand, the tea business was still running at a loss. The turning point came when they started opening the stall at 2 in the morning: a disruptive business model, says PC. Those ₹2 cups of tea taught them lessons they would carry forward. Abdul Nazer and PC Mustafa together share these stories for the first time. Their journey reminds us that no success is overnight, especially not for these brothers. It was at their kirana store in Indiranagar that the idea of iD Fresh was born. Five brothers with no background in food technology spent six months experimenting with recipes before finding their hero product. This is the story of five founders who pushed past their circumstances. Today, iD Fresh is at a scale the founders never dreamed of growing up in Wayanad. 00:00 – Trailer 00:55 – Dropping out of studies 02:32 – 19 Year Old that Runaway to Bangalore 04:35 – First job as a cook 11:25 – When Nazer decided to become an entrepreneur 14:01 – Huge loss in Vegetable business 16:15 – Starting the kirana store that led to iD 18:00 – On the verge of shutting down 20:10 – How Lambu Tea Stall became profitable 24:16 – When PC decided to do business with Nazer 25:14 – All the (failed) businesses that led to iD 27:04 – Why PC decided to come back to India 28:23 – The origin story of the idli batter idea 31:40 – The first $50k investment 32:57 – Cracking the batter without any food tech expertise 34:38 – The first recipe that became iD’s hero product 35:35 – Why iD failed to sell 100 packets in 6 Months 41:15 – The first customer approval 43:06 – Building awareness was the biggest challenge 44:35 – Lack of cold storage in supermarkets 45:22 – The inventory model of iD 46:25 – How the initial team was built 48:35 – Story of team spirit 50:15 – When iD Fresh Chennai & Mumbai Failed 52:27 – How the chemistry worked between the five brothers 56:52 – The buyout offer of ₹20+ crores 57:35 – How founders build the mindset to hire experts 1:00:50 – Did the runaway child achieve his dream? 1:03:09 – How Nazer’s choices directly led to iD 1:04:45 – Building within value systems 1:07:26 – Summary: what really worked for iD Fresh ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail
	What Best Founders & Investors Said in 2025?	29 Dec 2025	00:49:57
Best of 3500 Minutes in 45 Minutes 2025 was a great year for The Neon Show. 60 episodes, 72 guests, and thousands of minutes of insightful conversations on everything around building a business. You’ll hear perspectives from Founders scaling companies across the world, sharing the real challenges behind building high-growth startups; Investors on how they spot opportunities and make bold bets; and Ecosystem leaders who have navigated multiple cycles and understand what truly lasts. This episode is a carefully curated highlight reel. The sharpest ideas, boldest bets, and timeless lessons that defined this year. Watch it for clear takeaways to carry into 2026 on building companies that last for decades. 0:00 – Trailer 01:26 – Paras Chopra 03:37 – Avanish Bajaj 06:53 – Vijay Rayapati 08:33 – Ashu Garg 11:39 – Kiran Darisi 16:40 – Asha Jadeja 20:33 – Sanjeev Bikhchandani 23:22 – Alok Goyal 26:41 – Shiv Shivumar 29:34 – Saurya Prakash 31:59 – Raviteja 37:21 – Ashish Toshniwal 43:54 – Bhaskar Gosh 47:32 – Somesh Dash ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/ Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail

About Methodology Contact Support me Privacy Policy Legal Notice