The Neon Show

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.

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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.

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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.

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How do India's wealthiest families actually manage their money, and why does the man who looks after roughly ₹50,000 crore of it own zero stocks himself?

Rohit Sarin is the co-founder of Client Associates, which he started in 2002 as India's first multi-family office and has grown into the largest in the country, managing around ₹50,000 crore for more than 1,100 wealthy families. The firm acts as a personal CFO for a family's entire wealth, doing for a household what a finance chief does for a company.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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What does a founder learn from watching the CEO of a 32 billion dollar company make his biggest AI bets from the inside?

Mahesh Ram has built and sold three companies. Thomson Reuters acquired his first, GlobalEnglish went to Pearson after teaching English to more than ten million people at companies like IBM and HP, and Solvvy, one of the first conversational AI companies, was bought by Zoom in 2022. He then spent two and a half years heading AI products at Zoom, sitting beside founder Eric Yuan as the company raced Microsoft into the AI era.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Can the biggest AI labs simply walk into any market and replace the software companies already sitting there?

Storm Ventures has spent 26 years building an answer for B2B founders. The firm has made close to 200 investments, backed 11 unicorns, and produced some of the cleanest enterprise exits in Silicon Valley, from AirGap Networks selling to Zscaler to earlier winners like Marketo and MobileIron. Its portfolio today runs from Tekion in automotive retail to Atomicwork in IT service management, Krisp in voice AI, and Synthpop in healthcare.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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 decade ago, when Gaurav started Afore Capital, pre-seed wasn't even a recognized category. Today, pre-seed is what some of the world's most ambitious startups raise as their very first institutional capital.

When Gaurav Jain and Anamitra Banerji started the firm ten years ago, "pre-seed" was almost a slight, a label for founders who couldn't raise a proper seed round. They set out to build the world's largest pre-seed fund anyway, closing $47 million on a $40 million target, and every fund since has closed above plan. Afore now runs more than $500 million across four funds. 

In this conversation Gaurav shares his journey from Dehradun to Silicon Valley and every lesson learned about backing great startups. Like how being in the very best companies matters more than anything else. He is also convinced that the genuine bottleneck is talent. There is a great deal of money in the world and very few people who can build something truly large, which is why at the earliest stage founders tend to choose their investors as much as investors choose them.

If you want to understand how the earliest checks actually get written, and what it really costs to say no, this episode is worth your time.

00:00 - Trailer
01:00 - From Dehradun to Google to starting Afore
02:08 - The Waterloo co-op that talked him out of every job
03:18 - Back when "pre-seed" was an insult
05:44 - When Sequoia said "I guess we're pre-seed investors too"
07:26 - Afore's three products, and the experiments that failed
09:01 - Hightouch was a travel company when they invested
11:02 - Goldcast: no visa, no money, funded anyway
12:07 - The through line is always the team
14:44 - The Ramp miss
17:24 - "Founders pick us more than we pick them"
18:45 - The constraint isn't capital, it's talent
22:24 - The Solana miss, when it was still Loom Protocol
24:46 - Ramp's Super Bowl ad, the buses, his wife's business
25:32 - What he looks for in founders
28:50 - Coachability, happy ears, and the Mom Test
31:28 - The biggest mistake: falling in love with the idea
35:04 - The three things that matter, and "50% of zero is still zero"
39:25 - "100% storytelling, 0% data"
41:25 - Investing in India, and the fear of being dumb capital
44:41 - "Sign the deal before Monday"
47:26 - One engineer now does the job of 20
51:43 - Raising from LPs, the undiscussed part of VC
-------------
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.

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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 has since sold 6,000 units at ~2,000 a month, almost entirely by word of mouth. And is now the largest consumer robotics company shipping in the United States.

Navneet Dalal (a computer-vision pioneer who co-invented HOG) and Mehul Nariyawala met building Flutter, a gesture-recognition app that became #1 in 72 countries and was acquired by Google, where they then worked on Nest cameras and shipped one of the first deep learning algorithms in the wild. Matic is the company they decided would be their last: they wrote "Not For Sale" on the wall on day one and built it to last 20 to 30 years.

Their bet was deliberately contrarian. They chose the "unsexy" floor-cleaning market, a category with a net promoter score of -1 that people keep buying anyway (21 million robot vacuums sold in 2024), because entering an existing market beats creating a new one and because it's the foundation for true indoor autonomy. Then they put roughly $35 million of their own money in, about 70% of their net worth, with no plan B.

Along the way they lay out a full worldview: why robotics is 100x harder than software (the demo is only the first 20% of the work); why humanoids doing your chores are still 5 to 20 years away (the data problem), why no consumer hardware sells above $2,000; and the skin-in-the-game philosophy captured by his late father's advice: "Sell your home if you have to, but keep the company alive."

If you're excited about how home robots actually get built and what it really takes to bet everything on hard tech, this episode is for you.


00:00 - Trailer
01:08 - When they quit Google to start Matic
03:30 - Solving home cleaning with cameras only — no LIDAR
04:46 - The $35M bet: funding Matic themselves
07:36 - What a "level 5" robot in your home really means
08:00 - Why they started with floor cleaning — on purpose
09:45 - The rule: never create a new market with your first product
10:02 - iPod, iPhone, Tesla — all entered existing markets
11:38 - Why new hardware gives you only one shot
13:02 - "Make something people NEED, not want"
16:25 - Why the demo is only 20% of robotics
18:50 - Teaching a robot like raising a child
21:30 - How far are humanoids from real homes?
22:22 - The data problem: "500 years of driving data a day"
22:56 - 90% in the lab, 60% in the real world
26:49 - Why no consumer device sells above $2,000
27:38 - Would you buy a $10,000 humanoid — for what?
28:47 - "History rhymes": General Magic to the iPhone
29:38 - Earning trust after 20 years of broken robot promises
30:31 - Shipping the first robot
30:45 - 6,000 units, all word of mouth, zero marketing
31:10 - Why they're US-only for now 
31:50 - The investors: Sutter Hill to the Collison brothers
33:20 - Two companies, both acquired by Google
35:00 - The Flutter story: #1 app in 72 countries
35:25 - Why nobody believed machine learning worked in 2011
38:40 - Microsoft Kinect: 8 million units in 60 days
40:30 - The Google acquisition — and the $35M number
44:40 - The near-death moment: switching to NVIDIA
53:10 - iRobot's bankruptcy and what it means for Matic
53:55 - The real scale of robotics: 21M robot vacuums a year
57:45 - Putting 70% of their net worth on the line
58:40 - His father's advice: "sell your home, keep the company"
-------------
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.

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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 agent is good or bad.

Galileo started before "LLM" was even a word. When Atin showed his prototype to Stanford's Chris Ré, his own first question was "what is a language model?" Today its customers include Reddit, Airbnb, P&G, Comcast, and six of the Fortune 50. 

Atin spent a decade in big tech before co-founding Galileo with Vikram Chatterji in early 2021. He worked on the knowledge graphs behind Siri at Apple, then became one of the leads and architects of Michelangelo, Uber's AI platform, that hosts thousands of models across pricing, ETA, and demand.

That Uber experience taught him the lesson the whole company is built on; that in AI, observability and evaluation are the real bottleneck, and bad data is catastrophic.

As ChatGPT turned every AI output into something a user sees directly, the measurement problem went from academic to mission-critical. So Atin made a contrarian bet: instead of using giant LLMs to judge other LLMs, Galileo built Luna, small 1-3B parameter models that run evals at breakthrough latencies of 100 milliseconds and below.

If you are excited about how AI actually gets shipped, trusted, and controlled inside real enterprises, this episode is for you.

00:00 - Trailer
01:14 - From India to Apple, Uber, and Galileo
01:34 - Where the name "Galileo" came from
02:38 - Building Siri's early knowledge graphs at Apple
03:29 - Becoming an architect of Uber's Michelangelo
05:15 - Why every AI output is now mission-critical
06:45 - How Atin and Vikram zeroed in on Galileo
07:42 - "What is a language model?"
09:38 - Building the world's first feature store at Uber
11:27 - Language models and tokens, explained simply
14:19 - Where the observability insight came from
15:53 - Quantifying uncertainty and hallucinations
16:36 - The first customers and first use case
19:15 - How the product evolved from a data scientist tool
23:18 - Why ChatGPT changed everything for Galileo
23:57 - The enterprise AI adoption curve, 2021 to 2026
26:35 - Why they built the Luna model
28:32 - Turning LLM "writers" into "calculators"
28:51 - Attacking the latency problem
31:48 - Luna: the modeling and infrastructure innovation
33:09 - What evals are, and why they blew up
34:26 - The case for small language models
36:58 - What "general reasoning" really means
40:39 - AI usage is exploding — and why that matters
43:08 - Online vs offline: the "it worked on my machine" problem
44:33 - The evals flywheel and evals-driven development
46:56 - Galileo in a nutshell
47:39 - What real agents in production look like today
49:30 - A sales intelligence platform, powered by Galileo
50:47 - The agent control product
52:12 - Building GTM as a hardcore engineer from India
54:43 - Garbage in, garbage out: nailing the ICP
55:42 - How the pitch changed from customer 1 to 20
57:27 - Why Atin switched from CTO to CPO

-------------
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