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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