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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
394 episodes
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 ...
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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 r...
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 C...
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...
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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. ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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...
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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-traini...
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...
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 Ind...
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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 aft...
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 un...
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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 dec...
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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 ...
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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 ag...
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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 bra...
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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