The Neon Show

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 last startup was acquired by Palo Alto networks where he grew the business from $5M ARR to $100M ARR. Now he is building Endor Labs to add controlled chaos to world of AI written code.

Varun explains how nation-state actors are exploiting defenseless open-source repositories, how AI agents invent open-source libraries, why super intelligent models write super dangerous code and how we live in strange AI world where no one is control.

Watch this episode to learn about the business and tech of securing billions (and billions lines of code).

00:00 Army Kid Turned Serial Founder
02:28 Bored at Salesforce, Built CipherCloud
05:13 Nothing Prepares You to Be CEO
08:02 $12M Raised, $250M Exit
09:47 “You’re My Biggest Competitor”.
12:40 Did RedLock Sell Too Cheap?
15:06 Why Leave Palo Alto?
18:37 Securing Code From Prompt to Deploy
20:36 Why AI Writes Hackable Code
24:41 Your Moat Can Vanish in 90 Days
29:58 Darth Vader in the Office
31:04 Things Founders Can Control
33:13 Win Customers Before First Sales Call
34:53 My Research is My Distribution
39:53 Without Trust Your Sales Funnel is Leaky
44:33 A Security Bug Can Wipe $40B Overnight
46:06 $9K Fix for a $90K Problem
49:05 War Between Engineering and Security
51:15 Hire Salespeople in Pairs
55:35 Inventing Cars vs Going Electric
58:30 100x Code, 100x Vulnerabilities?
01:02:04 Don't Build in the Bubble
01:03:02 Claude Isn't Done Until Endor Says So
01:04:25 AI Agents Make Up Libraries
01:06:09 Your Job Is to Be Bought
01:09:00 Why 90% of Startup Acquisitions Fail
01:11:42 Why Palo Alto Wins at M&A
01:14:10 Rapid Fire: AI Tools, GTM Hacks and More

-------------
India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it.
This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India.
What is Neon Fund?
We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before.
Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon.
-------------
Check us out on:
Website: https://neon.fund/
Instagram: instagram.com/theneonshoww/
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/neon-fund
Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww

Connect with Siddhartha on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/
Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7
-------------
This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice

Send us Fan Mail

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 Meta, where he worked closely with Yann LeCun. He started his career as an intern, and his alma mater includes IIIT Hyderabad, SRI and Georgia Tech.

In this episode Manohar explains why the magical personal assistants are just the trailer for AI, why physical intelligence is the hardest bottleneck in tech, the truth behind open-weights vs. closed models, and why he wants to build scientific superintelligence when he could have worked on anything.

If you are interested in solving the hardest problems, watch this episode.

00:00 Why Leave "Center of the Universe"?
00:57 Frontier Models and Plane Wi-Fi
03:40 AI Has Conquered Bits Not Atoms(Yet)
07:13 Why Real World Is AI's Hardest Loop
11:29 AI Assistants Are Just the Trailer
14:01 Will Frontier Eat All Software?
17:43 Open Source Isn't Truly Open?
26:28 What If Hardware Gets 10x Better?
29:58 Is Sovereign AI Needed?
38:04 Why Zuckerberg, Sundar and Elon Launch on X
42:07 Perception Drive Reality Until It Doesn’t
43:20 Spot, Learn, Leap, Build
47:46 What Yann LeCun Taught Him
50:56 Zuckerberg and $1B Instagram Bet
54:51 Finding The Bottleneck is The Hack
57:40 The Super Hard Problem To Solve
01:03:30 How to Accelerate Scientific Discovery
01:05:44 Can You Make the Elephants Dance?
01:11:10 Silicon Valley Is a Mumbai Local Train
01:14:55 The World Will Beat Pessimism Into You
01:19:14 How to Keep Going When Things Get Hard
01:23:45 Macro Optimist and Micro Pessimist

-------------
India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it.
This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India.
What is Neon Fund?
We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before.
Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon.
-------------
Check us out on:
Website: https://neon.fund/
Instagram: instagram.com/theneonshoww/
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/neon-fund
Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww

Connect with Siddhartha on:
LinkedIn: / siddharthaahluwalia
Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7
-------------
This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice

Send us Fan Mail

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 Neon show, we have Harjot, Co-Founder & CEO CodeRabbit. Harjot explains why they didn’t go after code generation, the infinite demand for software that is coming, why Jira and Linear are being bypassed, and why he calls today's fundraising market the weirdest he has seen.

We also explore CodeRabbit’s $8M open-source investment, the company’s $1.5B valuation, what successful agents will look like, and why founders need to learn to kill their ideas.

Watch this episode to learn about the future of software engineering and how to ride a tech wave.

00:00 Why Coding Space Exploded
00:37 From Copilot to Claude Code
01:55 Why CodeRabbit Ignored Code Generation
04:23 Is Code Review a $250B Market?
06:24 When Claude Code Fights CodeRabbit
07:16 Developers Are Now Reviewers
10:54 Clones, Rivals and the Benchmark Problem
13:08 The Weirdest Fundraising Market Ever
17:04 Seats, Margins and the Amazon Prime Problem
21:24 Finding Co-Founder in Family
24:16 Why GitHub Can't Go Away
25:59 Will AI Agents Replace Figma?
29:12 Why Adding More Engineers Creates Chaos
30:38 The Early Decisions That Worked
31:18 Sandboxes in 2023 and Skipping MCP
32:32 The $8M Open-Source Bet
33:11 From Free Users to a Paid Business
35:50 Punjab, Alcatel-Lucent and Silicon Valley
39:08 Building, Selling, and Exiting First Startup
43:50 Right Product, Wrong Timing
45:06 You Can't Create a Wave
49:38 Does Vibe Coding Need Code Review?
51:33 Every Problem Becomes a Coding Problem
53:50 Where Founders Should Build Next
56:29 The Market for Agent Change Management
59:55 Code Review, Security, and What Comes Next
-------------
India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it.
This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India.
What is Neon Fund?
We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before.
Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon.
-------------
Check us out on:
Website: https://neon.fund/
Instagram: instagram.com/theneonshoww/
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/neon-fund
Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww

Connect with Siddhartha on:
LinkedIn: / siddharthaahluwalia
Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7
-------------
This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice

Send us Fan Mail

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 changing the game entirely during his first two years of investing.

In this episode, Nakul shares how his thinking evolved from being thesis-driven to people-driven, why he believes only five thousand people shape Silicon Valley, why there is always a younger, hungrier investor coming for you and how to invest millions of dollars in 20 year old founders.

Watch this episode to understand the new Venture Capital and how it's operating in the hyper-speed AI world.

00:00 The Most Intense VC in Silicon Valley
02:30 5,000 People Run Silicon Valley
05:44 The Drive Behind the Intensity
09:13 Why You Never Arrive in Silicon Valley
11:17 Sourcing, Picking, Winning, Helping
14:37 The Ego-Bruising Reality of Fundraising
19:55 Bull Runs, Crashes, and ChatGPT
22:44 Slowing Down Deployment
24:21 Why $1B AI Companies Can Still Be Cheap
27:38 How AWS, YC, and AngelList Changed Venture
32:30 The Freedom (and Pressure) of Building Audacious
39:27 Making VC Math Work
43:06 Defining the Improbable Outcome
45:29 The 5 Traits of Exceptional Founders
48:16 When You’re on the Fence, Lean In
50:51 The Audacious Unfair Advantage
56:40 The Power Law of People
58:07 Finding Exceptional 21-Year-Old Founders
01:03:30 Backing WorkOS and Multiverse
01:10:39 Passing on Figma
01:20:24 Bubbles, Time Diversity and Staying Power
01:23:14 Why Ambitious Founders Move to Bay Area

-------------
India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it.
This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India.
What is Neon Fund?
We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before.
Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon.
-------------
Check us out on:
Website: https://neon.fund/
Instagram: / theneonshoww
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/neon-fund
Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww

Connect with Siddhartha on:
LinkedIn: / siddharthaahluwalia
Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7
-------------
This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice.

Send us Fan Mail

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 still operates at 120% all the time, how Sierra selects 30 companies out of 30,000, and how he missed Salesforce.

Listen to this conversation to learn what it takes to win gold in the Olympics of tech.

00:00 Selling Bibles to $3.8B in Exits
01:03 Operating with Only One Gear
03:02 The Founder LOVE Framework
05:17 Four Audiences Every Founder Must Win
07:24 My $100B Mistake: Salesforce
10:42 Avoid Building Companies with 'Stretch Marks'
13:10 The Gatorade Theory of Startup Funding
15:46 Don’t Chase the Next Anthropic
18:22 Raising Sierra’s 14th Fund
19:31 Is AI Really Killing SaaS?
24:30 Golden Age of Indian Entrepreneurs
29:36 How Sierra Selects 30 Out of 30,000
32:11 "We Are Street Fighters"
35:34 Why Real Work Happens After Hours
35:57 Why He Refused to Retire After a $3B Exit
37:24 What 25 Years in Venture Teaches You
40:28 Silicon Valley Has an IPO Problem
44:00 How a VC Firm Survives for 100 Years
46:07 Is 3x Growth Still Enough?
50:49 Why Party Rounds Ruin Startups
56:32 Investing in Pre-Revenue Startups
59:10 Why Great VCs Need Killer Instinct
01:04:55 How Sierra Moves Fast
-------------
India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it.
This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India.
What is Neon Fund?
We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before.
Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon.
-------------
Check us out on:
Website: https://neon.fund/
Instagram: / theneonshoww
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/neon-fund
Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww

Connect with Siddhartha on:
LinkedIn: / siddharthaahluwalia
Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7
-------------
This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice.

Send us Fan Mail

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, controversial decisions that worked perfectly for Hightouch and why now is the time for 100x Marketer.

Listen to the episode to look into the future of marketing

00:00 Quitting VC to become a Founder
01:35 Travel Startup with Terrible Margins
03:25 From Slack Agents to Customer Data
04:31 Saving a Bank $6M on "Unmarketing"
05:45 Why Make Composable CDP?
07:53 Why Every Other CDP Was Broken
11:33 Where Hightouch Creates Real ROI
12:48 Agents That Surface Revenue
16:47 Inside a Multi-Million Dollar Enterprise Rollout
21:41 Will AI Replace Marketers?
25:18 Why Skipped SMBs for Fortune 500
26:54 The Rippling Model of Running a Startup
27:48 Going Multi-Product Early
29:38 The 100x Marketer
33:03 Unstructured Data, Lead Lists & Synthetic Signals
34:49 How AI Launches Ads in New Markets
36:13 Does Marketing Success Guarantee Revenue?
38:07 What Is a "Marketing Harness"?
40:52 Thick Harness vs. Thin Harness
45:10 How Hightouch Fits Into the Enterprise Stack
46:54 Controversial Founder Decisions
49:15 Building the Company of Tomorrow
52:07 AI, GTM and Sales
-------------
India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it.
This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India.
What is Neon Fund?
We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before.
Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon.
-------------
Check us out on:
Website: https://neon.fund/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/
https: https://www.linkedin.com/company/neon-fund
Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww

Connect with Siddhartha on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/
Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7
-------------
This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice.

Send us Fan Mail

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 Anthropic, SpaceX, trillion-dollar IPOs, the shrinking Silicon Valley middle class, why large VC funds can no longer make small bets, roll-up strategies and what Vishal has learned from investing through multiple market cycles.

Watch this episode to learn how venture ecosystem works

00:00 From ISRO to Silicon Valley
04:06 From Operator to Investor
05:58 The Early Sequoia Bet
08:07 From $300M to $15B Funds
12:24 Access Matters More Than Capital
15:02 Building Redwood Collective
19:10 Trillion-Dollar IPOs
27:24 How Silicon Valley’s Mafias Compound
31:30 How VC Returns Changed
34:02 The Disappearing Middle Class
36:14 Why People Are Leaving California
37:36 Why Big Funds Can’t Make Small Bets
39:30 Why Unicorns Aren’t Enough Anymore
40:18 What Happens After the IPO
43:02 VC Firms Becoming Financial Giants?
45:56 Why He Ignores IRR
49:25 Is AI a Commodity?
53:10 Next Generation of VC Funds
59:00 Inside the Roll-Up Strategy
01:02:36 Surviving Four Market Cycles

-------------
India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it.
This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India.
What is Neon Fund?
We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before.
Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon.
-------------
Check us out on:
Website: https://neon.fund/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/
Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww

Connect with Siddhartha on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/
Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7
-------------
This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice.

Send us Fan Mail

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 become a serious problem for data-centers as millions of agents come online, why enterprises will need an immutable audit trail for agents, and what happens when a 10-person company starts running 1,000 autonomous agents.

Watch this episode to to understand the business and tech of AI infrastructure.

00:00 Is AI Infra in a Bubble?
03:08 The Missing Path to Profits
06:06 What Actually is AI Infrastructure?
08:41 Why Cloud Never Got Cheaper
11:42 The Cloud Lock-In Trap
15:21 Inference Providers Will Consolidate
19:58 AI Has a Python Problem
25:50 Rust + WASM is the Future of AI Security
27:08 From Dynamo to Cassandra to Hedvig
29:27 Why Avinash Started Welleptic
32:43 Solving Data and Compute Sovereignty
36:53 AI Needs an Audit Ledger
39:17 Why Avinash Started Hedvig
40:15 Building for the Multi-Cloud World
41:50 $52M Raised, Only 15 Engineers
43:01 Why Infrastructure Takes Time to Sell
44:52 The $225M Acquisition
46:00 What Makes a Good Deal?
50:07 How Hedvig Grew to $15M+ ARR
57:44 How Welleptic Makes Money
01:00:43 When 10 Employees Run 1,000 Agents

-------------
India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it.
This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India.
What is Neon Fund?
We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before.
Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon.
-------------
Check us out on:
Website: https://neon.fund/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/
Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww

Connect with Siddhartha on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/
Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7
-------------
This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice.

Send us Fan Mail

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 the right solution for managing the infrastructure.

Kandan and Randolph have spent decades operating large-scale telecom and cloud infrastructure, in a world where pagers used to run lives of people managing it. With MantisGrid they have come together to build 'The' model for AI infrastructure.

Watch the episode to understand why making AI infrastructure autonomous is so important, why LLMs are not the answer, and what it takes to build the systems that will keep millions of agents running.

00:00 — Invisible Infrastructure Behind AI
01:05 — The Pager Nightmare
04:01 — The GPU Problem Nobody's Solving
05:38 — The Cloud Infrastructure Story
07:53 — Why Just Watching Isn't Enough
09:35 — Building the Waymo of AI Infrastructure
15:00 — How an Autonomous AI Infra System Works
20:35 — What Happens to DevOps?
22:46 — Why LLMs Shouldn’t Run Production
29:14 — The Path to a Billion Dollars
32:06 — The Problem Hyperscalers Can’t Solve
37:03 — Earning Trust to Run Infrastructure
39:55 — When Agents Start Managing Agents

-------------
India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it.
This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India.
What is Neon Fund?
We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before.
Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon.
-------------
Check us out on:
Website: https://neon.fund/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/
Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww

Connect with Siddhartha on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/
Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7
-------------
This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice.

Send us Fan Mail

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 500 as customers with an 85% competitive win rate.

Prukalpa explains how context for agents requires knowledge, expertise, and norms, why Gartner’s “context is king” made the category hot but also created confusion in the market, and why companies now treat context as strategic IP.

00:00 Context Is King
03:20 From Data To Agents
05:00 Scaling To 200 Customers
06:37 Product Market Fit Truths
11:19 Landing The First Customers
18:44 Data Teams Couldn’t Trust Their Data
21:07 Building the Enterprise Brain
26:19 Problem With Horizontal Products
30:21 Why CIOs Buy Context Now
34:59 Positioning in a New Category
36:33 Context as a Business Asset
37:20 The Shared Enterprise Brain
40:50 Shaping the Category
41:22 What is AI Native?
43:21 Self Improving Company
46:50 Team Patterns of Frontier Companies
48:42 Judgment and Taste Matter More Now
50:04 Atlan AI Experiments
50:59 Building Investor Network
55:14 Waterbridge to Peak XV to Insight
59:37 Don’t Rush to Find PMF
01:01:57 Everyone Must Build
01:06:17 Real Bottleneck to Scale Isn't Sales

-------------
India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it.
This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India.
What is Neon Fund?
We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before.
Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon.
-------------
Check us out on:
Website: https://neon.fund/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/
Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww

Connect with Siddhartha on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/
Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7
-------------
This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice.

Send us Fan Mail

“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 death" for startups, why customers don’t always tell founders the truth, why developers hate security tools and why security is the ultimate bottleneck to AI’s growth.

This conversation is as much about enterprise security as it is about a founder’s conviction and refusing to give up on a dream.
-------------
India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it.
This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India.
What is Neon Fund?
We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before.
Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon.
-------------
Check us out on:
Website: https://neon.fund/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/
Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww

Connect with Siddhartha on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/
Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7
-------------
This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice.

Send us Fan Mail

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 ~$500B in administrative “work tax,” and how language models and agentic software can automate much of that work, make healthcare feel like a Waymo, and give healthcare professionals more time to focus on actual care.

Watch this episode to learn what it takes to build and win in a massive, inefficient market.

00:00 - Heat-Seeking Missiles for Pain
01:30 - Speed Above Everything
03:11 - The $5 Trillion Healthcare Problem
03:56 - Epic Wasn't Built for AI
06:13 - The $500 Billion Admin Leak
07:24 - Why Healthcare Moves Slowly
10:14 - Why Hospitals Are Hard to Sell To
12:09 - The Real Opportunity Is Labour
13:41 - Point Solution or Platform?
15:16 - One Customer Pays $100 Million
22:46 - More Bad Days Than Good Days
25:18 - AI Changed the Healthcare Game
28:40 - Incentives Matter More Than Technology
30:24 - Healthcare's App Store Moment
32:20 - Why $100 Billion Isn't Big Enough
36:19 - Who Takes the Blame When AI Gets It Wrong?
38:32 - The Waymo Moment for Healthcare
39:46 - How the Best Startups Hire
42:12 - Customer Obsession Beats Everything
43:52 - Stop Paying the AI Experiment Tax
51:10 - Insurance Companies Are Terrific Enemies
55:34 - The Hidden Opportunities in Healthcare
59:35 - How to Win AI Talent War

-------------
India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it.
This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India.
What is Neon Fund?
We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before.
Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon.
-------------
Check us out on:
Website: https://neon.fund/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/
Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww

Connect with Siddhartha on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/
Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7
-------------
This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice.

Send us Fan Mail

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, why lazy marketing is dead and why AI services can be more defensible than AI products.

He also shares hard-won lessons from upGrad, from expanding into too many markets at once, to hiring far too fast, to discovering that a highly valuable brand can be worth nothing to a customer.

00:00 Founding UpGrad
02:55 Why We Bet on LLMs
06:35 The GEO Moat
10:18 Inside the LLM
12:07 Why Services Won Early
13:35 Building an AI Research Lab
18:46 Why India Sells Differently
22:11 From Consultant to Founder
26:50 The Early Hiring Lessons
26:55 International Expansion Mistakes
27:47 The EdTech Boom and Bust
31:12 How We Found Product-Market Fit
32:59 Supply Before Demand
34:58 Differentiation Is Not Enough
36:29 Borrowing Trust to Scale
38:01 Why Offline Still Matters
40:55 Why Cambridge Lost to MICA
45:33 Raising the First Big Round
46:42 The Pain of Starting Again
48:31 The Future of AI + Education

-------------
India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it.
This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India.
What is Neon Fund?
We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before.
Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon.
-------------
Check us out on:
Website: https://neon.fund/
Instagram: / theneonshoww
LinkedIn: / beneon
Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww

Connect with Siddhartha on:
LinkedIn: / siddharthaahluwalia
Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7
-------------
This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice.

Send us Fan Mail

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 far more than technical skills. Krishna shares how Indian founders have come a long way and now build like they know no fear. We then explore how OpenAI and Anthropic have changed what it takes to build startups, and what founder traits are needed to create outlier companies in this era.

Watch this episode to understand the new definition of startup speed and what to build when frontier labs can build entire product categories themselves.

01:00 From 2x Founder to AI Investor
03:37 Why Bet on the US-India Corridor
07:07 Can Indian Founders Build Giants?
10:13 What Makes Krishna Bet on a Founder?
12:33 The Founder Traits That Matter in AI
14:18 Why Speed Is the New GTM
17:52 The New AI Founder
19:13 How Krishna Builds Conviction
23:26 Why Elevation Bet on Portkey
28:20 How Elevation Evaluates AI Startups
31:17 The AI Security Opportunity
32:04 Your PMF Can Die in a Quarter
32:57 Why Open Source Still Matters
34:11 India's Infrastructure Advantage
36:51 Where the Next AI Opportunities Are
41:35 What Matters Beyond Revenue
43:36 Why India + US Is a Powerful Combination
44:59 What Cohesity Taught Him About Scale
47:13 Selling Data to Broke Professors
50:18 Why Two Weeks in SF Won't Work
52:06 Fundraising Trap Founders Miss
56:47 Outliers Aren't Well-Rounded
58:49 "We're Wrong More Than We're Right"

-------------
India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it.
This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India.
What is Neon Fund?
We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before.
Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon.
-------------
Check us out on:
Website: https://neon.fund/
Instagram: / theneonshoww
LinkedIn: / beneon
Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww

Connect with Siddhartha on:
LinkedIn: / siddharthaahluwalia
Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7
-------------
This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice.

Send us Fan Mail

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 people and culture are harder than changing the product, why today's AI winners could disappear as the technology stack changes, and why he thinks we are still in the first innings of AI.

This conversation is as much about AI as it is about a founder's drive to win.

Chapter Markers

00:00 ChatGPT Made Our $850M Startup Irrelevant
00:38 From SaaS to AI Agents
04:30 Growing Fast, But Also Dying
07:36 Why VCs Bet $200M+ on Observe
09:26 FOMO Made Me a Founder
13:30 We Had Users, But No Buyers
15:27 Why BPOs Were the Wrong Market
17:26 “I’ll Never Sell in India”
22:30 YC Made Me Think Bigger
27:22 From $1M to $50M ARR
30:13 Building AI Before ChatGPT
31:11 The Birth of Observe 2.0
32:18 When ChatGPT Changed Everything
33:15 When AI Agents Take Over
34:58 Rebuilding a $50M ARR Product
35:47 When Co-Founders Leave
38:50 Will AI Actually Kill Support Jobs?
43:51 “AI ARR Is Not Real”
45:45 Most Pre-AI Companies Are Bloated
47:34 Learning GTM by Doing It
51:24 Changing Product Is The Easy Part
58:29 Why Voice AI Is Just the Beginning
01:01:25 The Founder Playbook
01:04:10 What Makes a Great Product?
01:05:37 “I’m Here to Win”

-------------
India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it.
This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India.
What is Neon Fund?
We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before.
Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon.
-------------
Check us out on:
Website: https://neon.fund/
Instagram: / theneonshoww
LinkedIn: / beneon
Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww

Connect with Siddhartha on:
LinkedIn: / siddharthaahluwalia
Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7
-------------
This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice.

Send us Fan Mail

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 maintaining context across long conversations is one of the hardest unsolved problems.

Apart from the cutting edge tech, this conversation explores Karan’s journey from researcher to founder, building Cartesia with a five-person founding team, raising capital, and realizing why first-time founders waste years focusing on things that ultimately don’t matter.

If you want a glimpse into the future of AI, watch this episode.

00:00 Trailer
01:35 From DPS to Stanford to Cartesia
02:35 From Counter-Strike to AI
04:28 Another Research Paper Wasn’t Enough
06:48 The Story Behind “Cartesia”
07:17 Building a Company With Five Technical Founders
09:55 From Research Project to Startup
13:54 Cartesia’s Audacious Vision for 2035
15:07 What It Takes to Build an AI Model Company
18:55 Why Faster AI Doesn’t Have to Be Worse
24:12 AI Still Has a Memory Problem
27:14 Why Context Builds Trust
27:50 Will AI Replace Entire Account Teams?
29:16 Hold Music Is Now a Salesman
30:30 Designing AI That Feels Personal
31:31 Building With Cartesia
34:48 Voice AI’s Enemy #1: Latency
38:50 Why AI Labs See the Future First
41:32 Finding Product Market Fit
45:34 Great Products Don’t Need Much Marketing
48:12 Very Few Things Matter
52:26 How Big Can Voice AI Get
55:53 Fundraising And Mission
58:15 What Cartesia Is Ultimately Building
-------------
India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it.
This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the centre of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India.

What is Neon Fund?
We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before.
Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon.
-------------
Check us out on:
Website: https://neon.fund/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/
Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww

Connect with Siddhartha on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/
Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7
-------------
This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice.

Send us Fan Mail

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 its network of more than four million vetted engineers and domain experts powers the post-training and evaluation work behind the frontier labs, and the company crossed roughly 300 million dollars in revenue while staying profitable, at a 2.2 billion dollar valuation.

Vijay Krishnan is the co-founder and CTO. He was an NLP researcher at Stanford back when almost no one believed that predicting the next word could ever turn into reasoning, and he explains why running a modern model company without human-in-the-loop data is like entering a race with three tyres instead of four. He walks through how a model is actually taught to use software like Salesforce, why coding became the beachhead for every lab, and what changed for Turing the moment Scale AI was absorbed into Meta.

The conversation then turns to the question every founder is now asked in the room. What is your moat against Claude? Vijay's answer is to go deeper than the frontier labs can reach, into the outcome you own and the context that lives inside an enterprise.

If you are excited about how AI actually gets built, who really trains the models, and how to build a company that survives the labs, this episode is for you.

00:00 - Trailer
02:20 - The Indian company quietly behind OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic
04:50 - How Turing went from a talent platform to a unicorn to an AI research partner
08:20 - The bet nobody understood
11:50 - Why a model company without human data is "racing on three tyres"
15:50 - Why coding became the beachhead for every frontier lab
19:50 - What changed for Turing the day Meta bought Scale AI
23:50 - "What is your moat against Claude?"
29:50 - Will AI create more lawyers, not fewer?
34:50 - The teams where engineers haven't written code in six months
39:50 - 16% of the Philippines' GDP is under threat from AI?
43:50 - How you actually teach a model to use Salesforce
49:50 - How robots are taught real-world work
54:50 - Why million-dollar researcher packages are breaking startup hiring
59:50 - The one kind of AI company that gets stronger as the models improve
1:04:50 - Product vs. services, and the trap that quietly kills AI startups

-------------
India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it.
This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the centre of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India.

What is Neon Fund?
We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before.
Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon.
-------------
Check us out on:
Website: https://neon.fund/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/
Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww

Connect with Siddhartha on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/
Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7
-------------
This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice.

Send us Fan Mail

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 a company.

He built it the hard way. He left a senior banking career at Deutsche Bank and Kotak, walked away from a full salary into a negative net worth, and took no salary in the first year so every rupee could go into building revenue. The firm's first working machine was an old computer he won at a Deutsche Bank auction.

His most contrarian view is about how ordinary Indians treat the markets. He believes trading is a zero-sum game, and the data backs him. A SEBI study found that 93 per cent of individual F&O traders lost money over three years, worth more than ₹1.8 lakh crore, with only about one per cent earning a meaningful profit. Rohit made money on seven of ten trades and still ended underwater because the three losses wiped out all seven gains, so he closed his demat account entirely. He reads the AI boom the same way, as a bubble much like the dot-com era where a rare Amazon survives, and points to Byju's as a reminder of what happens when growth runs ahead of discipline.

What the rich do differently is stay patient. They spend on their needs and rarely on their wants, and their real goal is to stay rich across generations rather than to get rich quickly. His own line for it is that wealth is a gift given by the impatient to the patient. He is equally clear that this is India's century, that the country has just crossed the income level where consumption compounds, and that the next ten years may be its best for anyone who starts investing early. He lays it all out in his book, Unlocking Wealth: Secrets to Getting Rich at Any Age.

If you are excited about how India's richest families think about money and where India's next decade is headed, this episode is for you.

00:00 - Trailer
01:50 - The personal CFO for India's richest families
03:50 - Quitting a full salary for a negative net worth
05:20 - The old computer he won at a Deutsche Bank auction
06:50 - The first clients and the two crore bar he borrowed from Merrill
09:20 - How many dollar-millionaires India really has
11:50 - The income level where a country's wealth suddenly compounds
14:20 - What is really driving India's wealth creation
16:50 - How old-money families decide who controls the wealth
19:50 - The tech gap that changed who leads a family office
22:50 - Is the AI boom just the dotcom bubble again
26:50 - Why he is telling family offices to sit out AI for now
30:50 - The asset classes the ultra-rich actually hold
33:50 - Why the rich are moving money beyond India
37:50 - The one thing the ultra-rich do that the 99% do not
41:50 - His relationship with wealth, and needs versus wants
44:50 - Advice to first-generation founders who just got rich
48:50 - Why this is India's century and its best decade
52:50 - 93% lose money trading, and the demat account he closed
55:50 - The book he wrote for every young Indian
57:50 - Rapid fire: the best investment he has ever made
-------------
India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it.
This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the centre of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India.

What is Neon Fund?
We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before.
Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon.
-------------
Check us out on:
Website: https://neon.fund/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/
Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww

Connect with Siddhartha on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/
Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7
-------------
This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice.

Send us Fan Mail

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 Yuan as the company raced Microsoft into the AI era.

In this conversation, Mahesh takes apart the three decisions that put Zoom ahead. Eric refused to charge for AI Companion because he believed everyone in the world should have AI, he publicly promised to never train models on customer data; and he built a model-agnostic layer instead of betting the company on any single lab. Zoom shipped weeks before Microsoft Copilot. Mahesh also shares the operating habits that made it possible, from the five-part rule Eric demands on every decision to the radical transparency that turned his own team into owners.

He is just as direct about the question every founder now asks: whether OpenAI or Anthropic will simply take their market. He answers that the model companies cannot see the hundreds of custom applications running quietly inside every enterprise, so the durable business is the one that owns the messy, multi-party workflows they will never touch. On the wider fear that AI will kill SaaS, he thinks the shift is real but that Silicon Valley badly overestimates how fast it arrives, which leaves a huge opening for founders willing to go out and become the educators their market trusts.

He closes on what he has learned selling three companies, why the best ones are bought and never sold, and the community of Indian origin founders he now runs that grew from three hundred people to more than two thousand in a single year.

If you are excited about building enduring AI and software companies, this episode is for you.

00:00 - Trailer
01:27 - The three time founder who keeps destroying complexity
03:08 - Two billion people learning English with no teacher
04:45 - Building conversational AI before anyone knew what AI was
07:21 - How Zoom came to acquire Solvvy
11:08 - Working with Eric Yuan, a true force of nature
13:43 - The three bold AI bets that beat Microsoft to market
15:09 - Why Eric made Zoom's AI free and refused to touch your data
17:29 - The five part rule Eric demands on every decision
21:25 - Radical transparency: share everything except one thing
23:32 - What Mahesh would build differently today
29:05 - The moat question: how do you survive OpenAI and Anthropic
35:33 - What Claude and OpenAI can never see inside a company
41:01 - Will AI kill SaaS? And why Silicon Valley is too early
42:25 - Become the educator: the biggest opening for founders
45:39 - The Indian founder community that 10x'd in a year
52:43 - Where the founder DNA actually came from
1:00:42 - Why he has no regrets building Solvvy too early
1:01:57 - What actually gets a startup acquired
1:05:14 - Why you keep the acquisition circle very tight
1:07:47 - The real job in enterprise sales: get your buyer promoted
-------------
India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it.
This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the centre of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India.

What is Neon Fund?
We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before.
Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon.
-------------
Check us out on:
Website: https://neon.fund/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/
Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww

Connect with Siddhartha on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/
Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7
-------------
This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice.

Send us Fan Mail

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 management, Krisp in voice AI, and Synthpop in healthcare.

Arun Penmetsa is a Partner at the firm. He built enterprise software at Oracle and Google before moving into venture, and he now leads Storm's work in AI, security, and digital health. In this conversation, he is unusually specific about how the decisions actually get made. He meets ten to twelve founders every week; the entire partnership makes only six to eight investments a year, and the single filter he trusts most is urgency. If a buyer can comfortably wait six to twelve months, the pain is not real, and the company is already in trouble.

Arun is direct about the question every AI founder now gets asked, which is whether OpenAI or Anthropic will simply take their market. He answers that the foundation model companies will own a handful of core verticals and leave the rest, so the durable business is the one that owns the full stack between the model and the interface and delivers a real outcome inside law, healthcare, construction, or a market as unglamorous as convenience retail.

He also lays out where he is placing his next bets, from physical AI and humanoid robots that can retool an assembly line on the fly to vertical companies like Tote that rebuild the software running gas stations and corner stores, where a single day of downtime can cost an owner tens of thousands of dollars.
If you are excited about building enduring B2B and AI companies, this episode is for you.

00:00 - Trailer
01:21 - The 26-year-old B2B fund behind AirGapp, Marketo and Tekion
02:47 - The patterns Storm has seen repeat across 200 investments
05:37 - What actually drove seven clean exits
06:37 - The airgap story: the agentless bet that Zscaler bought
13:10 - The one signal Arun trusts more than pedigree
14:37 - Where the moats survive once the models get this good
18:01 - Why Storm backed Atomicwork against ServiceNow
20:00 - Two weeks to decide: how the fastest deals happen
25:27 - The cold email that gets a venture partner to reply
28:52 - The funnel: 500 founders a year, 6 to 8 checks
35:31 - Why Stanford on the resume buys you nothing here
38:13 - The pattern behind every 4 billion dollar outcome
40:44 - The question every AI founder gets: can OpenAI replace you
46:16 - The mistakes that killed companies Arun believed in
50:14 - The million-dollar wall every B2B founder hits
53:30 - Why buyers have already decided before they call you
58:12 - AI agents that stay on a one-hour insurance call
1:08:33 - Physical AI: assembly lines that rebuild themselves
1:12:39 - Tote: the fuel pump they built to win gas stations
-------------
India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it.
This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the centre of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India.

What is Neon Fund?
We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before.
Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon.
-------------
Check us out on:
Website: https://neon.fund/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/
Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww

Connect with Siddhartha on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/
Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7
-------------
This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice.

Send us Fan Mail