Shows / The Neon Show
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…
Episodes
The Neon ShowWhy Super Intelligent Models Write Super Dangerous Code | Varun Badhwar, Endor Labs
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…
The Neon ShowEx-Meta VP: ChatGPT Is Just the Trailer for What’s Coming Next
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…
The Neon ShowBurning $8M on Open Source, Hitting $100M ARR and the $250 Billion Market | Harjot, CodeRabbit
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…
The Neon ShowHow AWS, AngleList and Now AI Killed The Old VC Playbook | Nakul, Audacious
From a boutique industry of ~20 firms to today where there are specialised funds for every stage, geography and category, Venture Capital has changed…
The Neon ShowWhich SaaS Companies Will Survive Anthropic and OpenAI? | Tim Guleri, Sierra Ventures
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…
The Neon Show“Yes.” Building Claude Code for Marketing | Kashish, Hightouch
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…
The Neon ShowAnthropic, Sequoia Investor: 55x Returns in 18 Months, Is Anthropic Worth Trillions? | Vishal Verma
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…
The Neon ShowWhy OpenAI Has No Moat & LLM Prices Will Collapse | Avinash Lakshman, Weilliptic
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…
The Neon ShowThe Big Problem with GPUs and How To Solve It | Randolph and Kandan, MantisGrid AI
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…
The Neon ShowWhy The Next $100B AI Opportunity Is Context Engine| Prukalpa Sankar, Atlan
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…
The Neon ShowThe Unusual Strategy That Helps ArmorCode Grow 100% YOY | Nikhil Gupta
“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…
The Neon ShowWhy Even a $100 Billion Company Wouldn't Be Big Enough | Tanay Tandon
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…
The Neon ShowThe AI Moat Everyone is Ignoring | Phalgun Kompalli, Founder UpGrad and Bodhium Labs
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…
The Neon ShowAnthropic & OpenAI Have Changed What Moving Fast Means | Krishna M, Elevation Capital
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…
The Neon ShowChatGPT Killed My $50M ARR Business Overnight | Swapnil Jain Observe Al
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…
The Neon ShowThe Al Lab Founder Who Sees The Future First | Karan Goel, Founder & CEO of Cartesia
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…
The Neon ShowIs Your Startup Model Proof? Vijay Krishnan Turing Founder & CTO On What Startups Should Build to Win
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…
The Neon ShowHow 1% Stay Rich - What India's Richest Families Do With Their Money That 99% Don't | Rohit Sarin, Client Associates
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…
The Neon ShowWhy Even With Great Products AI Startups Lose with 3x Founder Mahesh Ram, ex-Zoom AI
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…
The Neon ShowThe #1 Mistake Killing B2B Startups | Arun Penmetsa, Storm Ventures
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…
The Neon ShowGaurav Jain on Building $500M Fund, Missing Ramp and Backing Irrational Founders
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…
The Neon ShowAnd How Matic Sold 6000 Robots with Zero Marketing | Navneet Dalal & Mehul Nariyawala
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…
The Neon ShowHow to Solve AI's Biggest Problem | Atin Sanyal, Galileo
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…
The Neon ShowBeating SBI, 1% NPAs & India's Massive Loan Gap I Victor Senpaty Co-Founder Propelld
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…
The Neon ShowLessons From India's First Unicorn Founder on Building Large Businesses | Naveen Tewari
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…
The Neon ShowHow to Beat a Competitor With 100x Your Funding | Palash Soni, GoldCast Founder
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…
The Neon ShowHow 3 Friends From Coimbatore Ended Up Running American TV | The Untold Amagi Story
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…
The Neon ShowHow A 23-Year-Old Solo Founder Is Disrupting India's On-Demand Labor Market | Anjali Sardana, Pronto
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…
The Neon ShowWhy Coding is the Fastest Path to AGI | Turing CEO Jonathan Siddharth
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…
The Neon ShowQuestions Every Founder Must Answer Before Taking an Acquisition Offer | Shashank Saxena, VNDLY & Pantomath
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…
The Neon Show94% CAGR: What the Inference Boom means for your AI costs | Vamshi Ambati
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…
The Neon ShowThis Startup Can End China’s Grip on Global EV Supply Chain | Bhaktha, Chara Tech
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 Neon ShowWhat if AI has Immunity like Humans? Ft. Animesh Koratana, PlayerZero
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…
The Neon ShowWhy Your AI is Still a Demo: Lessons from Braintrust’s Field CTO
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…
The Neon ShowThe Art of Enterprise Sale: Selling Startups to Giants with Poojan Kumar
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…
The Neon ShowVignesh Kumar on Why Healthcare is Moving Faster in 2026 than the Entire Last 10 Years of SaaS
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…
The Neon ShowCan the Indian Market Alone Take You to $100M ARR? | Aneesh Reddy, Capillary Tech
Are recessions actually the best time to start your company? Aneesh Reddy, the founder of Capillary Technologies, believes that economic downturns are the…
The Neon ShowThe Internet Is Getting a Billion New Users. None Are Human | Sudheesh Nair, Thoughtspot, Nutanix & Tinyfish
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…
The Neon ShowWhy $1T Construction still runs on Spreadsheets (And How AI Fixes It) | Sneha & Graham, Merlin AI
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…
The Neon ShowWhy Signing a Fortune 500 Customer Too Early Can Kill You | Manish Jindal, Cloudflare & Arize
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…
The Neon ShowInvestor who hasn't Changed His Thesis in 5 Funds & Saw the AI Wave Before ChatGPT | Ashmeet Sidana, Engineering Capital
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…
The Neon ShowHow 24,000 companies keep their AI from Breaking in Production | Rohit Agarwal, Portkey
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…
The Neon ShowThe $600B Grocery Market Is Obsessed With Speed — FirstClub Is Betting on Quality | Ayyappan
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…
The Neon ShowThe First AI Market With 8 Billion Potential Users | Sudarshan kamath, Smallest AI
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…
The Neon ShowAI Needs to Know Why You Took THAT decision | Ashu Garg, Investor at Foundation Capital
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…
The Neon ShowHow AI Will Finally Deliver the Promise SaaS Made | Samay Kohli: From Robots to Digital Workers
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…
The Neon ShowWhat Top 1% Investors Look For in AI Startups | Umesh Padval, Seligman Ventures, Ex- Bessemer
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…
The Neon ShowWhen Founders Should Quit Their Startups with Matt MacInnis | COO Rippling
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…
The Neon ShowHow Buyers Discover Startups, From a 10-Year Founder Journey to an EXIT | Ankur Rawal & Vishwa Krishnakumar
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…
The Neon ShowFrom Startup to US IPO in 5 Years: Kanwal Rekhi’s Historic IPO of Excelan
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…
The Neon ShowWhat Went Wrong Before iD Fresh Worked | For the First Time Co-Founders Tell Their Story
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…
The Neon ShowWhat Best Founders & Investors Said in 2025?
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…
The Neon ShowHow Ratan Tata’s Leadership Shaped One of India’s Oldest and Biggest Conglomerates | Harish Bhat
Harish Bhat spent 38 years with the Tata Group, working across businesses that reach millions of Indians every day, including Titan, Tanishq, and Tata Tea. He…
The Neon ShowWhat It Takes to Build a Company: Life, Risks, and Lessons From Two Founders | Arpita & Ananda
Founders are often seen as superhumans. In this new series, we look at the humans behind the superhuman journey. The thrill of building, the guilt of missing…
The Neon ShowHow Betting on Myself Led Me from Analyst to CEO? Roopa Kudva, Ex-CEO CRISIL for 8 Years
In 1992, Roopa Kudva walked into CRISIL’s CEO Pradeep Shah’s office without an appointment, starting her 23-year career there. She spent over two decades at…
The Neon ShowWhere Founders Take “Figuring Out” as Seriously as Building ft. South Park Commons |Aditya & Prateek
Most conversations in startups begin at zero: what’s the idea, who’s the customer, how big is the market. But the stage before that, when you know you’re ready…
The Neon ShowHow Startups Can Sell to Big Companies Ft. Karthik Chakkarapani, Zuora
If you’re a startup selling to enterprises, understanding how a CIO discovers and evaluates you can change everything. Most founders believe that cold emails…
The Neon ShowHow AI Will Disrupt India’s IT Services Industry And Its 1.5M Engineers/Year | Bhaskar Ghosh, 8VC
After 20+ years at some of the most important Silicon Valley tech companies like Yahoo, LinkedIn, Oracle, Informix and NerdWallet, Bhaskar today leads…
The Neon ShowHow a 45 Year Old VC Firm Decides to Invest or Pass? | Somesh Dash, Partner at IVP
130 IPOs from over 400 startups. IVP is now in its 18th fund, with companies like Perplexity, Glean, Slack, Figma, Twitter, Uber, and Abridge in its portfolio…
The Neon Show4x Founder Shreesha Ramdas on What to Do Before You Build Your Startup
When Shreesha Ramdas left Medallia after a $6.5B acquisition he decided it was time to reinvent. At his 4th startup Lumber, before writing a single line of…