The Neon Show
The Neon Show, formerly 100x Entrepreneur, is hosted by Siddhartha Ahluwalia, an entrepreneur who built and sold AddoDoc and Babygogo. After feeling underprepared to scale a larger company, he and his partner Nansi began interviewing founders and investors about the mindset needed to grow oneself and a business. Now with over 200 episodes across five years, the podcast explores what goes into building a highly successful company. Each conversation is driven by the hosts' own goal of becoming better entrepreneurs and professionals.
Episodes
How 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 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
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 f
“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 ma
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
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 w
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 who
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 bac
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 stu
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 &
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 episo
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 epis
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 cand
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 b
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, Turin
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
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 20
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
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 ambitio
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.Navne
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 &q
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 201
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 invest
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
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
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
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 unic
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 t
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 m
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
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 w
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 th
The 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 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
Vignesh 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 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 so
Can 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 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
The 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 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 br
Why $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, 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 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, 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 cal
Investor 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 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 millio
How 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 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 appl
The $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 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 r
The 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 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 compres
AI 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. 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
How 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 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
What 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 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 experienc
When 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 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 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 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
From 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 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 thems
What 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 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 lo
What Best Founders & Investors Said in 2025?
Best of 3500 Minutes in 45 Minutes2025 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 E
How 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 joins Neon Show for a 3rd time and reflects on what it meant to build inside a 150+ year-old institution. The conversation begins in 1991, the year Ratan Tata took over as Chairman, a role he would hold for 21 years. Harish explains how Ratan
What 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 out, the learnings, the failures, and why they still do it and would do it all over again.Arpita is a second-time founder, now building Mysa. Her first startup, Mech Mocha, was acquired by Flipkart. Ananda is the Co-Founder and CTO of Astra S
How 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 CRISIL, rising from analyst to CEO. Roopa has spent over 3 decades in leadership roles in India and has witnessed three key phases in India’s growth: the closed economy in the 80s, the post-liberalisation era, and the rise of tech entrepreneur
Where 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 to be a founder yet the direction is still completely undefined. That strange, uncomfortable, high-potential zone Aditya Agarwal calls “minus one.”In this episode, Aditya and Prateek Mehta breaks down what happens in this “figuring out” sta
How 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 and polished decks drive attention, but Karthik Chakkarapani, CIO of Zuora shares that nearly 80% of the startups he evaluates are found through outbound - while researching solutions, through peers, or even on LinkedIn. For many startups, th
How 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 investment of enterprise infrastructure companies at 8 VC.Bhaskar Ghosh spent 20+ years at some of the most important Silicon Valley tech companies before moving into venture capital as a Partner at 8VC.After completing his PhD in computer science f
How 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. Somesh Dash, general partner at the 45-year-old firm, has been part of IVP for more than 20 years.We start with something we are both passionate about, building in the US-India corridor. Somesh talks about the group of people who put the si
4x 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 code, he hired a sales person and ran 200+ interviews across the industry to understand the real pain points. The interviews gave Shreesha the insight that though payments were a problem, it was neither big enough nor urgent. But it was very dif
The Founder Who Mastered Timing Ft Sachin Aggarwal | Stackgen
You rarely meet someone who has built and sold five companies. Sachin Aggarwal is now building his sixth, Stackgen. The depth of lessons from someone who has been through that journey five times and still chooses to build again is simply unmatched. Even after five successful exits, he still builds like a first-time founder. He studies every new domain from scratch, speaks to 60 or 70 people before
Learn from Silicon Valley’s Best Companies (Hubspot, Google & Salesforce) w/Avanish Sahai
India is the 2nd largest startup ecosystem now. But, can it be at par with Silicon Valley?With 37 years of experience in the valley, Avanish sahai believes it can. But what made Silicon Valley the ultimate startup ecosystem? It was investors, universities and an environment where people dreamed to come live and work. And, in the last 25 years India has been going through the same transformation. A
The Game VCs Play and Win | How VCs Spot and Back Exceptional Founders with Pratik Poddar & Brij Bhushan
What makes a great venture capitalist — luck, timing, or the ability to see what others miss?Brij Bhushan (Prime Venture Partners) and Pratik Poddar (Nexus Venture Partners) talk about the long game of venture capital; the waiting, the lessons hidden in mistakes, and the emotional ride of backing founders through years of uncertainty.With Pratik, we dive into some of the biggest names in the Nexus
How One Indian Company Powers the World’s Hotels & Airlines | Bhanu Chopra, RateGain
When RateGain went public, it made history as India’s first SaaS listingFounder Bhanu Chopra talks about what went into that call, how investors saw it, and what it revealed about the Indian capital market. He shares how RateGain built its global presence before turning to India, and why he bet big on a $250 million acquisition.Today, travel is changing faster than ever with travellers planning di
How a 20-Year CEO Thinks, Prepares & Leaves a Legacy | Shiv Shivakumar, Ex-CEO Nokia & PepsiCo
How do the best CEOs think, prepare, and leave a lasting legacy? Shiv Shivakumar, former CEO of PepsiCo and Nokia reflects on decades of leading some of the most iconic companies. He shares insights on what makes a great leader, from the mindset required to the qualities that define people with a fighter’s instinct.Shiv explains why commitment and curiosity often matter more than degrees or pedigr
How Viral Bajaria Turned a Last-Minute YC Application Into a $5B B2B AI Giant | 6sense
From a last-minute YC application to a $5 billion Company built on deep technical insight.In this episode, Viral Bajaria, Co-Founder and CTO of 6sense, takes us back to the very beginning. He recounts his early days at Hulu, where managing massive data systems during the Super Bowl taught him how data could drive real business decisions.Joining one of Y Combinator’s early batches, Viral recalls be
$350M by Building Apps for iphones when IOS was like AI | Ashish Toshniwal, Calcutta -> Silicon Valley
How do you know whether an iOS app you have built has potential to be big? Getting an email from Steve Jobs is probably a strong indicator.Ashish Toshniwal, founder of 10Kr and YML (Y Media Labs), started by trying a bit of everything: classifieds, Groupons, and Facebook apps. That email made him quit his job, but as Ashish says, it took him and YML 14 years to become an overnight success. YML hel
Tesla’s Former CIO’s $4 Billion Startup That Car Giants Can’t Stop Investing In | Jay Vijayan, Tekion
Jay Vijayan, founder of Tekion, and Tesla’s former CIO, has one of the most remarkable careers in technology and automotive.Jay joined as CIO when Tesla had almost no revenue and stayed through its growth to $5 billion ARR and $35 billion market cap. Elon Musk brought him in to build Tesla’s own ERP system at a time when most companies would have chosen ready-made solutions like SAP or Oracle.Toda
What India Can Learn from Swiss Startups ft. Founder of 9 & Investor in 40 Co’s |Thomas Dübendorfer
Switzerland has quietly built one of the world’s most stable and trusted startup ecosystems.Thomas Dübendorfer, founder and president of SICTIC, Switzerland’s largest angel investing network with over 500 members and more than 400 startups joins Neon show.Thomas talks about how Switzerland’s startup scene has changed over the past decade from a cautious investor community to one that now has 58 un
Ola, Flipkart & Swiggy use This $800 Million Software to Send Notifications | Raviteja, MoEngage
Ever received a push notification on your phone? There’s a good chance it came through MoEngage.Raviteja Dodda, founder of MoEngage, shares the story of building a SaaS company from India that now sends 80 billion messages to 2 billion users across 1,200 brands. A decade-long journey of MoEngage from its early years to becoming a category leader in customer engagement. He shares how the company g
Is India Making Most of It’s GDP Growth? with Prof. Arun Kumar
This episode with Prof. Arun Kumar is a look at the Indian economy beyond headlines and GDP numbers. We discuss the paradox behind India’s growth story: when GDP rises, does it really reach the people? We explore how poverty in India has officially fallen from 27% to 5.3% in just over a decade, yet real wages have been shrinking, especially for rural workers. If fewer people are poor on paper, but
The Story of Silicon Valley Legend & Google Founding Stakeholder with Asha Jadeja Motwani
“When I saw Google change the destiny of the planet, I could not imagine doing anything else but working with brilliant entrepreneurs.”-Asha Jadeja Motwani and her husband, Rajeev Motwani, the Silicon Valley legend of technical startups, are together the founding stakeholders of Google.In the late 1990s, they came to the United States as most Indians, as students. From being part of Google’s early
How to Build a Startup in 2025? With 1/5th Cost, 1/5th Team | Shikhil Sharma, Astra Security
Cybercrime is predicted to drain the world of $10.5 trillion annually by 2025, making it one of the greatest threats to modern business.Shikhil Sharma, co-founder & CEO of Astra Security, is building one of today’s most trusted pentesting platforms. Just last year, Astra uncovered over 2 million vulnerabilities across customer systems, preventing more than $69 million in potential lossesShikhi
Stories from India’s heartland that tell a different story than GDP headlines | Subroto Bagchi, Mindtree
“Push something a millimetre in the private sector, you make an inch of progress. In the public sector, it’s a mile of progress.”Subroto Bagchi started his career as a clerk in the Odisha government in 1976, leaving postgraduate studies. Today, eight years after serving at the rank of cabinet minister in the same government, he has certainly changed countless lives, not nameless faces. In this con
How Startups Can Survive GPT7 & Win Against Model Providers | Ashu Garg,Foundation Capital | Investor Databricks,Turing,Cohesity
Ashu Garg has backed companies like Databricks, Turing, Cohesity, Jasper, and Eightfold.ai as General Partner at Foundation Capital. Over the years, he’s seen multiple waves of innovation but in his words, nothing in the last 45 years comes close to the transformation AI is bringing right now.Ashu discusses how the next wave of AI products will be driven by combining reasoning with reinforcement l
If Big AI Goes Everywhere, What’s Left for B2B SaaS? | 25 Years, 4 Startups, 3 Eras of SaaS w/ Sreedhar Peddineni & Kiran Darisi
A full founder’s arc: starting small, building global SaaS companies from Hyderabad, taking one to IPO, another to a billion-dollar exit, and then choosing to begin again (and again).Kiran Darisi began at Zoho, founding team member of Freshworks at 25, and stayed twelve years till the company went public. Today he is building Atomicwork, reinventing service management in the AI era. Sreedhar Peddi
8 Years Without Funding to $100M Raise & Now A Category Leader | Shivku Ganesan ,Exotel
A 14-year journey from bootstrap to scale.Exotel’s story is one of India’s most remarkable SaaS journeys. Shivakumar Ganesan, started Exotel in 2011, bootstrapping it from the ground up. In 2012, he raised a seed round of ₹2.5 crore, but for the next eight years, the company grew without any external funding. Then came COVID and revenue went from $10M to $5M and what followed were bold strategic m
7 Myths About Selling B2B SaaS In India Explained By Public Listed Company Unicommerce | ft. Kapil Makhija
The software that powers 25% of India’s e-commerce transactions, processes a billion orders each year, and in 2025 alone fulfilled 20 million quick-commerce orders: Unicommerce sits at the core of India’s digital retail ecosystem. It is one of the few SaaS companies from India to go public, doing so after nearly a decade of steady growth without fresh primary capital until its IPO in 2024.In this
This is How GEOPOLITICS Really Works | Rajiv Sikri, Ex-IFS Officer on Power, Trade & War
The 21st century has shattered old assumptions about diplomacy.Relationships between nations are no longer guided by ideology or morality, but driven by pragmatism and national interest.This week, former diplomat Rajiv Sikri who served 36 years in the Indian Foreign Service, offers a deep dive into how global power dynamics are shifting. We discuss why the United States still remains the only true
From 70% Imports to 65% Made in India, India Now Sells Defense Tech to 85+ Countries | Ashok Atluri, Zen Technologies
Ashok Atluri founded Zen Technologies in 1993, bootstrapping from Hyderabad at a time when India was importing 70% of its defence equipment and private players contributed just 5% of procurements. It took Zen five years to win its first contract from the Indian Army in 1998.Today, the company builds simulators and anti-drone systems, and has grown its market cap from ₹40 crore to over ₹13,000 cror
From $4.5M for 49% to $700M In The Bank at IPO: Sanjeev & Yashish On 17 Years Of Policybazaar
From idea to IPO and beyond. What does it take to back a company for nearly two decades?There are no written rules to navigate one of the most important relationships in a startup. One between a founder and an investor.This episode is an inside look at how one of India’s longest founder-investor relationships was built and tested, between Yashish Dahiya (Policybazaar) and Sanjeev Bikhchandani (Inf
Sanjeev Sanyal on Why India has No Big 4, Regulating AI & Ending Population Control
The global strategy consulting market stands at $39.5 billion, with Asia commanding $9.1 billion. India contributes just $1.09 billion. This is despite having the talent; Indians run global back-offices for McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Deloitte, and other consultancies. Yet, India continues to outsource strategy to the Big 4.Sanjeev Sanyal, PM Modi’s Economic Advisor joins us to break this down.We discuss
Growth, Migration and FDI: The Real Kerala Story with Minister P. Rajeev
This episode is not just about Kerala; it is about how a state with limited land, strict environmental regulations, and a long history of outmigration is approaching investment and growth.Kerala is a small, densely populated state with limited land to spare, not the typical site for industrial expansion. Yet it’s taking a distinct approach to building a knowledge based economy.P. Rajeev (Minister
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