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 we...
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Nov 13, 2026 · 52:52
Every company wants AI agents that do real work. But the hard part is getting agents into the tools where work actually happens: Slack, Gmail, Salesforce and 1,000 other tools…
Nov 6, 2026 · 1:06:29
If data is gold then what are Databases? Rajkumar Sen built Arcion Labs on an H-1B, nearly shut multiple times and then sold to Databricks. In this conversation Raj shares behind…
Oct 29, 2026 · 1:17:02
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…
Oct 23, 2026 · 1:25:23
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…
Oct 15, 2026 · 1:01:48
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…
Oct 9, 2026 · 1:25:49
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…
Oct 1, 2026 · 1:10:09
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…
Sep 25, 2026 · 56:15
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…
Sep 22, 2026 · 1:05:40
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)…
Sep 18, 2026 · 1:05:35
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.…
Sep 15, 2026 · 42:45
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…
Sep 10, 2026 · 1:09:02
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…
Sep 8, 2026 · 50:20
“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…
Sep 3, 2026 · 1:02:48
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…
Aug 27, 2026 · 50:20
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…
Aug 22, 2026 · 59:22
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…
Aug 14, 2026 · 1:07:32
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…
Aug 7, 2026 · 58:53
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…
Jul 31, 2026 · 1:18:41
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…
Jul 28, 2026 · 54:20
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…
Jul 24, 2026 · 1:11:32
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…
Jul 21, 2026 · 1:16:57
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…
Jul 17, 2026 · 58:43
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…
Jul 14, 2026 · 1:07:04
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…
Jul 9, 2026 · 1:09:52
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…
Jul 7, 2026 · 55:03
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 —…
Jul 3, 2026 · 1:02:53
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…
Jun 30, 2026 · 1:20:37
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…
Jun 26, 2026 · 1:22:37
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…
Jun 23, 2026 · 1:08:19
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…
Jun 18, 2026 · 1:10:48
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…
Jun 11, 2026 · 1:31:43
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…
Jun 9, 2026 · 51:56
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…
Jun 3, 2026 · 1:07:39
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…
May 20, 2026 · 39:28
Will your software soon be a living organism with its own immune system? Animesh Koratana, founder of PlayerZero, started his software career long before he founded the company.…
May 15, 2026 · 46:30
85% of AI teams will hit a serious production failure this year. The only thing separating them from the 15% who don't? Evals. After nearly two decades of building AI systems at…
May 11, 2026 · 39:39
What does it take to build a company that industry giants want to buy? Poojan Kumar built and exited two enterprise infrastructure companies, PernixData to Nutanix and Clumio to…
Apr 30, 2026 · 39:54
Healthcare has never moved this fast. Pharma giants are no longer just buying software. They are writing $50 million checks for access to a single foundational model. Systems of…
Apr 23, 2026 · 1:20:00
Are recessions actually the best time to start your company? Aneesh Reddy, the founder of Capillary Technologies, believes that economic downturns are the ultimate filter for…
Apr 16, 2026 · 1:09:54
From employee #16 to $1B ARR at Nutanix, then scaling ThoughtSpot to $150M ARR and a $4B+ valuation now building for a world where agents will drive the internet. Sudheesh Nair…
Apr 9, 2026 · 47:04
Can AI Rebuild the $1 Trillion Construction Industry? Construction is one of the largest industries in the world, yet most projects still run on Excel sheets, fragmented tools,…
Apr 2, 2026 · 1:20:01
What if the biggest mistake you can make as a founder is signing Apple as your first customer? Manish Jindal spent 10 years at Cloudflare as employee #45, helping take the…
Mar 26, 2026 · 1:22:51
What does it look like to run the same playbook across five venture funds? That is the bet Ashmeet Sidana has made at Engineering Capital. From Fund One to Fund Five, he has…
Mar 19, 2026 · 1:18:44
Over 1 Trillion AI tokens pass through Portkey every single day. Every AI product eventually runs into the same problem. The prototype works, but once it goes live the system has…
Mar 12, 2026 · 59:55
Is the best grocery platform one that decides what it WON’T sell? That is the bet Ayyappan is making with FirstClub. Fewer products. Stricter rules. While most quick commerce…
Mar 6, 2026 · 1:09:25
Will smaller AI models win over large language models? Sudarshan Kamath grew up in Mumbai, taught himself AI before most Indian companies were even hiring for it, and bought the…
Feb 27, 2026 · 49:25
What if AI can learn the “why” behind decision making of humans? Ashu Garg and Jaya Gupta recently wrote one of the most discussed articles on AI this year. Their idea drew…
Feb 21, 2026 · 1:04:50
Samay Kohli spent 12 years at GreyOrange, scaling it to over $100 million in revenue and a $3 billion valuation at its peak, making it one of the world’s largest warehouse…
Feb 13, 2026 · 51:57
Do startup valuations today make sense? Umesh Padval, an early investor in Cohere, now valued at about $7 billion shares why Cohere stood out at the time of his investment. He…
Feb 7, 2026 · 1:20:33
Matt MacInnis spent 6 years as COO at Rippling and now leads as CPO. He joined Rippling in 2019, when there were only 70 people, and has led the company across multiple stages.…
Jan 30, 2026 · 1:03:45
This is a special episode from the Neon Fund. In 2025, the US saw $1.8 trillion worth of M&A deals, around 25× more than India. But India’s startup ecosystem is much younger,…
Jan 22, 2026 · 1:18:15
Kanwal Rekhi first came to the US in the 1960s. He took his company public on Nasdaq in 1987. As a young Indian in the US, he was laid off from his first three jobs. That…
Jan 15, 2026 · 54:41
Where did the journey of iD Fresh start? It began when a 19-year-old Abdul Nazer decided to run away from home to Bangalore with ₹100 in his pocket. He did any job that came his…
Dec 29, 2025 · 49:57
Best of 3500 Minutes in 45 Minutes 2025 was a great year for The Neon Show. 60 episodes, 72 guests, and thousands of minutes of insightful conversations on everything around…
Dec 26, 2025 · 1:02:35
Harish Bhat spent 38 years with the Tata Group, working across businesses that reach millions of Indians every day, including Titan, Tanishq, and Tata Tea. He joins Neon Show for…
Dec 18, 2025 · 1:07:53
Founders are often seen as superhumans. In this new series, we look at the humans behind the superhuman journey. The thrill of building, the guilt of missing out, the learnings,…
Dec 11, 2025 · 1:12:06
In 1992, Roopa Kudva walked into CRISIL’s CEO Pradeep Shah’s office without an appointment, starting her 23-year career there. She spent over two decades at CRISIL, rising from…
Dec 4, 2025 · 53:51
Most conversations in startups begin at zero: what’s the idea, who’s the customer, how big is the market. But the stage before that, when you know you’re ready to be a founder…
Nov 27, 2025 · 1:02:00
If you’re a startup selling to enterprises, understanding how a CIO discovers and evaluates you can change everything. Most founders believe that cold emails and polished decks…
Nov 20, 2025 · 1:12:56
After 20+ years at some of the most important Silicon Valley tech companies like Yahoo, LinkedIn, Oracle, Informix and NerdWallet, Bhaskar today leads investment of enterprise…
Nov 17, 2025 · 1:14:33
130 IPOs from over 400 startups. IVP is now in its 18th fund, with companies like Perplexity, Glean, Slack, Figma, Twitter, Uber, and Abridge in its portfolio. Somesh Dash,…
Nov 13, 2025 · 56:40
When Shreesha Ramdas left Medallia after a $6.5B acquisition he decided it was time to reinvent. At his 4th startup Lumber, before writing a single line of code, he hired a sales…
Nov 11, 2025 · 56:47
You rarely meet someone who has built and sold five companies. Sachin Aggarwal is now building his sixth, Stackgen. The depth of lessons from someone who has been through that…
Nov 6, 2025 · 54:28
India is the 2nd largest startup ecosystem now. But, can it be at par with Silicon Valley? With 37 years of experience in the valley, Avanish sahai believes it can. But what made…
Nov 4, 2025 · 1:13:58
What makes a great venture capitalist — luck, timing, or the ability to see what others miss? Brij Bhushan (Prime Venture Partners) and Pratik Poddar (Nexus Venture Partners)…
Oct 30, 2025 · 40:51
When RateGain went public, it made history as India’s first SaaS listing Founder Bhanu Chopra talks about what went into that call, how investors saw it, and what it revealed…
Oct 27, 2025 · 1:17:19
How do the best CEOs think, prepare, and leave a lasting legacy? Shiv Shivakumar, former CEO of PepsiCo and Nokia reflects on decades of leading some of the most iconic…
Oct 23, 2025 · 1:09:28
From a last-minute YC application to a $5 billion Company built on deep technical insight. In this episode, Viral Bajaria, Co-Founder and CTO of 6sense, takes us back to the very…
Oct 21, 2025 · 1:04:13
How do you know whether an iOS app you have built has potential to be big? Getting an email from Steve Jobs is probably a strong indicator. Ashish Toshniwal, founder of 10Kr and…
Oct 16, 2025 · 1:03:57
Jay Vijayan, founder of Tekion, and Tesla’s former CIO, has one of the most remarkable careers in technology and automotive. Jay joined as CIO when Tesla had almost no revenue…
Oct 13, 2025 · 30:31
Switzerland has quietly built one of the world’s most stable and trusted startup ecosystems. Thomas Dübendorfer, founder and president of SICTIC, Switzerland’s largest angel…
Oct 10, 2025 · 1:20:13
Ever received a push notification on your phone? There’s a good chance it came through MoEngage. Raviteja Dodda, founder of MoEngage, shares the story of building a SaaS company…
Oct 6, 2025 · 55:37
This episode with Prof. Arun Kumar is a look at the Indian economy beyond headlines and GDP numbers. We discuss the paradox behind India’s growth story: when GDP rises, does it…
Oct 2, 2025 · 30:56
“When I saw Google change the destiny of the planet, I could not imagine doing anything else but working with brilliant entrepreneurs.” -Asha Jadeja Motwani and her husband,…
Sep 29, 2025 · 57:33
Cybercrime is predicted to drain the world of $10.5 trillion annually by 2025, making it one of the greatest threats to modern business. Shikhil Sharma, co-founder & CEO of Astra…
Sep 25, 2025 · 1:02:19
“Push something a millimetre in the private sector, you make an inch of progress. In the public sector, it’s a mile of progress.” Subroto Bagchi started his career as a clerk in…
Sep 18, 2025 · 50:53
Ashu Garg has backed companies like Databricks, Turing, Cohesity, Jasper, and Eightfold.ai as General Partner at Foundation Capital. Over the years, he’s seen multiple waves of…
Sep 13, 2025 · 1:25:12
A full founder’s arc: starting small, building global SaaS companies from Hyderabad, taking one to IPO, another to a billion-dollar exit, and then choosing to begin again (and…
Sep 5, 2025 · 1:01:22
A 14-year journey from bootstrap to scale. Exotel’s story is one of India’s most remarkable SaaS journeys. Shivakumar Ganesan, started Exotel in 2011, bootstrapping it from the…
Aug 29, 2025 · 1:20:00
The software that powers 25% of India’s e-commerce transactions, processes a billion orders each year, and in 2025 alone fulfilled 20 million quick-commerce orders: Unicommerce…
Aug 22, 2025 · 1:09:10
The 21st century has shattered old assumptions about diplomacy. Relationships between nations are no longer guided by ideology or morality, but driven by pragmatism and national…
Aug 15, 2025 · 54:22
Ashok Atluri founded Zen Technologies in 1993, bootstrapping from Hyderabad at a time when India was importing 70% of its defence equipment and private players contributed just…
Aug 4, 2025 · 52:35
From idea to IPO and beyond. What does it take to back a company for nearly two decades? There are no written rules to navigate one of the most important relationships in a…
Jul 25, 2025 · 1:00:27
The global strategy consulting market stands at $39.5 billion, with Asia commanding $9.1 billion. India contributes just $1.09 billion. This is despite having the talent; Indians…
Jul 18, 2025 · 53:29
This episode is not just about Kerala; it is about how a state with limited land, strict environmental regulations, and a long history of outmigration is approaching investment…
Jul 11, 2025 · 1:04:49
AI is changing how companies build and scale. But most pitch decks haven’t caught up. Karthik Chakkarapani, CIO of Zuora, has heard plenty of startup pitches but only a few stand…
Jul 4, 2025 · 1:09:14
Three failed startups. One of India’s biggest B2B exits. Then returning 75% of investor money in the next venture. An entrepreneur who’s lived that arc is bound to have insights…
Jun 27, 2025 · 1:10:07
50% of products and features built are never used. To build the right product, every founder must answer two questions: Are you solving a real problem? And are you solving it the…
Jun 20, 2025 · 1:26:29
Geopolitics is now measured in Nanometers. Anything with a battery or a plug has a semiconductor inside. But these chips aren’t just tech anymore, they’re shaping who becomes the…
Jun 13, 2025 · 1:16:22
There are No Checklists or Frameworks on HOW TO BE A VC? So how do you even know if it’s the right path for you? Unlike most jobs, venture capital comes with an extremely long…
Jun 6, 2025 · 1:24:21
Vertical SaaS customers don’t buy software for 10 months, they buy it for 10 years. That’s the opportunity and the challenge. Switching costs are high, which makes it hard to get…
May 30, 2025 · 1:02:55
Recko's acquisition by Stripe is one of India's biggest B2B exits. It's a great headline. But headlines don't tell the full story. They capture one final outcome not the numerous…
May 23, 2025 · 51:34
The dollar will lose its status as the world’s reserve currency & the greatest wealth transfer in history is already underway - warns the founder of one of India’s…
May 16, 2025 · 55:15
Venture capital is much fancied today. Is this job which looks like cutting cheques for products and founders you like, for everyone? As for any work, there are traits you should…
May 11, 2025 · 38:28
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” In this episode of The Neon Show, Vishwa (Co-founder of ZenDuty) is joined by Rahul Sasi (Co-founder of…
Apr 28, 2025 · 1:28:32
In this episode, we sit down with two exceptional founders. One who is going after the biggest category, and one who created a new category and became its leading player. Vijay…
Apr 18, 2025 · 47:55
CRM is a category often equated with its market leader, Salesforce. Hence, companies and investors question the viability of building a business in this space. Nilesh Patel,…
Apr 11, 2025 · 51:54
Meet Sharad Sanghi who built India’s first data center, he spent 25 years building Netmagic, India’s largest data center company. He came to India in 1995, worked at VSNL as the…
Apr 4, 2025 · 51:33
In this episode of The Neon Show, we bring you into the room with someone who’s spent over a decade backing India’s most ambitious companies. We're joined by Prayank Swaroop,…
Mar 28, 2025 · 1:13:18
Is it time for investors to move beyond the valley when analyzing India? Dev Khare, Partner at Lightspeed agrees. He shares with us an interesting view on two funding models: The…
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