The Neon Show

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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