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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
367 episodes
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...
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, ...
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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, fr...
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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 Founder...
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 ...
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 ag...
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 leade...
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, uncom...
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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 Zuor...
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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+ year...
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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 ...
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