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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
377 episodes
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. ...
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...
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 mil...
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 ...
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 infra...
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 j...
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 Vent...
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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 restric...
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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 fat...
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 F...
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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 wro...
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 fastes...
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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 i...
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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 wa...
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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, Merl...
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. ...
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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 Tech...
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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, unpredictabl...
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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 differ...
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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...
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...
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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...
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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 ju...
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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...
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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 pr...
