The Neon Show
Hi, I am your host Siddhartha! I have been an entrepreneur from 2012-2017 building two products AddoDoc and Babygogo. After selling my company to SHEROES, I and my partner Nansi decided to start up again. But we felt unequipped in our skillset in 2018 to build a large company. We had known 0-1 journey from our startups but lacked the experience of building 1-10 journeys. Hence was born the Neon Show (Earlier 100x Entrepreneur) to learn from founders and investors, the mindset to scale yourself and your company. This quest still keeps us excited even after 5 years and doing 200+ episodes. We welcome you to our journey to understand what goes behind building a super successful company. Every episode is done with a very selfish motive, that I and Nansi should come out as a better entrepreneur and professional after absorbing the learnings.
Episodes
Open source is under attack, AI code is more hackable and the things a founder can control now are very very few.
Varun Badhwar is a 3x security founder, his last startup was acquired by Palo Alto networks where he grew the business from $5M ARR to $100M ARR. Now he is building Endor Labs to add controlled chaos to world of AI written code.
Varun explains how nation-state actors are exploiting defenseless open-source ...
Why would a top AI leader leave Meta at the peak of the AI boom?
Manohar Paluri is the co-founder and CTO of Warp Sciences. Before that, he spent years at Meta, where he worked closely with Yann LeCun. He started his career as an intern, and his alma mater includes IIIT Hyderabad, SRI and Georgia Tech.
In this episode Manohar explains why the magical personal assistants are just the trailer for AI, why physical intell...
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...
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 ...
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 Silic...
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 “...
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, c...
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...
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. Y...
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...
“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 st...
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 explai...
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 wh...
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 fo...
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 take...
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 ...
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 i...
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'...
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...
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 ...
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