Podcast · Business

The Neon Show

by Siddhartha Ahluwalia · English · Business

New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 1 hr 6 min
Latest: 1 Oct 2026
Language: English

Latest episode

1 Oct 2026 · 1 hr 10 min

Which 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 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 s...

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Earlier episodes 29 most recent

S1 · E396 · 25 Sep 2026 · 56 min

“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 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, con...
S1 · E395 · 22 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 6 min

Anthropic, 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, 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 Anthro...
S1 · E394 · 18 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 6 min

Why 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 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...
S1 · E393 · 15 Sep 2026 · 43 min

The 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 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 th...
S1 · E392 · 10 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 9 min

Why 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 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 5...
S1 · E391 · 8 Sep 2026 · 50 min

The 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 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...
S1 · E390 · 3 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 3 min

Why 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 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 ~$500...
S1 · E389 · 27 Aug 2026 · 50 min

The 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 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,...
S1 · E388 · 22 Aug 2026 · 59 min

Anthropic & 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 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 f...
S1 · E387 · 14 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 8 min

ChatGPT 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 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 peopl...
S1 · E386 · 7 Aug 2026 · 59 min

The 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 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 maintai...
S1 · E385 · 31 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 19 min

Is 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 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 ...
S1 · E384 · 28 Jul 2026 · 54 min

How 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 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...
S1 · E383 · 24 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 12 min

Why 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 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...
S1 · E382 · 21 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 17 min

The #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 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 managem...
S1 · E381 · 17 Jul 2026 · 59 min

Gaurav 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 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 fir...
S1 · E380 · 14 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 7 min

And 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, 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 Fl...
S1 · E379 · 9 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 10 min

How 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 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 Fortu...
S1 · E378 · 7 Jul 2026 · 55 min

Beating 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 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 go...
S1 · E377 · 3 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 3 min

Lessons 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, 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...
S1 · E377 · 30 Jun 2026 · 1 hr 21 min

How 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, 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 ul...
S1 · E376 · 26 Jun 2026 · 1 hr 23 min

How 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 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 ...
S1 · E377 · 23 Jun 2026 · 1 hr 8 min

How 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 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 acros...
S1 · E375 · 18 Jun 2026 · 1 hr 11 min

Why 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 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 Tur...
S1 · E374 · 11 Jun 2026 · 1 hr 32 min

Questions 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 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 enterpr...
S1 · E373 · 9 Jun 2026 · 52 min

94% 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, 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 comp...
S1 · E372 · 3 Jun 2026 · 1 hr 8 min

This 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 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 Te...
S1 · E371 · 20 May 2026 · 39 min

What 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 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 witnes...
S1 · E370 · 15 May 2026 · 47 min

Why 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 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 syste...

About 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.

The Neon Show is a English business podcast from Siddhartha Ahluwalia. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.

Publisher: Siddhartha Ahluwalia
Language: English
Category: Business
New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 1 hr 6 min
Latest episode: 1 Oct 2026
Feed: RSS — paste into any podcast app
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1457308560
Website: neon.fund

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