Podcast
The Neon Show
Hosted by Siddhartha Ahluwalia · EN
Hi, I am your host Siddhartha! I have been an entrepreneur from 2012-2017 building two products AddoDoc and Babygogo. After selling my company to SHEROES, I and my partner Nansi decided to start up again. But we felt unequipped in our skillset in 2018 to build a large company. We had known 0-1 journey from our startups but lacked the experience of building 1-10 journeys.
Hence was born the Neon Show (Earlier 100x Entrepreneur) to learn from founders and investors, the mindset to scale yourself and your company. This quest still keeps us excited even after 5 years and doing 200+ episodes.
We welcome you to our journey to understand what goes behind building a super successful company. Every episode is done with a very selfish motive, that I and Nansi should come out as a better entrepreneur and professional after absorbing the learnings.
52episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Lessons From India's First Unicorn Founder on Building Large Businesses | Naveen Tewari
Jul 301:02:53Tap to summarizeMost founders build one unicorn. Naveen Tewari built two.InMobi started with a simple bet: mobile would become the world's most important computing platform, and advertising could make it free for everyone. Every Indian VC said no. Naveen flew to San Francisco on a maxed-out credit card and returned with a $7 million round from Kleiner Perkins and Ram Shriram. Later came a $200 million investment from Masayoshi Son. Overnight, InMobi became India's first unicorn. Then he did it again.Glance, built quietly inside InMobi over three years, is now one of the fastest-growing consumer apps in the US, with more than 10 million monthly active users in the US.The thesis behind both companies is the same. The world's most powerful technologies, first mobile and now AI, only reach masses when someone figures out how to pay for them. Naveen believes advertising is that mechanism, and that InMobi is uniquely positioned to subsidise AI access at population scale, just as it helped subsidise mobile a decade ago.If you want to understand how one founder from India has quietly helped shape two technology eras, this episode is for you.00:00 - Trailer00:57 - Why Naveen became a founder03:26 - How co-founders met and came together11:33 - The pivot from mKhoj to InMobi15:02 - Can AI be subsidised for mass consumption?16:12 - Expanding globally before the US18:29 - Which industries can delay entry to US market?20:53 - What is Glance?23:55 - Incubated within InMobi for 2 years25:17 - What changes when you face failure in public?29:10 - How the SoftBank round changed InMobi32:53 - Maxing out credit cards to pay bills38:18 - $7Million Kleiner Perkins & Ram Shriram round43:07 - Hypergrowth journey: Series A to Series C45:41 - $200 million funding from Masa53:31 - Change of VC ecosystem in India54:34 - How building for B2B differs from B2C58:50 - How AI is changing InMobi and Glance-------------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/TheNeonShowwConnect 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
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How to Beat a Competitor With 100x Your Funding | Palash Soni, GoldCast Founder
Jun 3001:20:37Tap to summarizeHow do you get an inbound from OpenAI and Anthropic?Goldcast is the video content platform behind companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, GitHub, Uber and Airbnb, before it was acquired by Cvent in a nearly $300 million deal earlier this year.Palash Soni (Co-Founder and CEO, Goldcast) joins the Neon Show.Goldcast entered one of the most overfunded categories in SaaS. Hopin alone had raised more than $1 billion. This is the story of the decisions that helped Goldcast survive the category and ultimately become one of the biggest MarTech acquisition stories of the last few years.Enterprise customers are won long before they ever sign a contract. We trace that idea through Goldcast's journey, from landing Drift as its first marquee customer and reaching its first $1 million in ARR, to the relationships that quietly compounded over the years and eventually led to an inbound from the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic.We discuss how retention has always been MarTech's biggest challenge and why AI doesn't fundamentally change that. And why acquisition, not an IPO, is the most realistic outcome for most companies in the category.This episode is about winning in a market everyone had written off, and the decisions that turned Goldcast into one of the few companies left standing.00:00 - Trailer00:36 - How Palash caught the startup bug05:51 - Meeting the co-founders08:50 - Fundraising has never been easy for Goldcast10:36 - How we got a term sheet in 2 days12:43 - We quit HBS and they became our first customer18:47 - Customers told us our product looked ugly19:50 - How Drift founder changed the course of Goldcast21:44 - When competitors raised $250 million23:31 - How Goldcast got high-profile angel investors30:33 - The elevator pitch of Goldcast31:06 - When companies in your space are crashing32:36 - Was virtual events even a valid space after COVID?43:15 - How Goldcast won OpenAI44:38 - What led to the acquisition53:33 - One thing Palash would change about the last 5 years56:58 - Founders should define company values58:48 - Why we had an unusually large post-sales team01:01:09 - Retention in MarTech has always been subpar01:04:36 - Is acquisition the only path for a MarTech company?01:09:16 - How Goldcast got great logos01:11:01 - How the three co-founders split roles01:12:05 - If not acquisition, then what?01:14:20 - How founders move to higher ACVs01:16:21 - The ethos of the founding team01:17:25 - The book that changed me-------------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/TheNeonShowwConnect 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
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How 3 Friends From Coimbatore Ended Up Running American TV | The Untold Amagi Story
Jun 2601:22:37Tap to summarizeWho powers the cloud infrastructure behind NBC, Warner Bros. Discovery, Olympics, and the Super Bowl?Amagi, built out of an office on Bannerghatta Road in Bengaluru. What started there grew into a company that went public at an $825 million valuation and today has a market cap of over $1.3 billion, earns 73% of its revenue from the US, and proved that world-class enterprise technology can be built in India and sold to the world.Co-founders Srividhya Srinivasan and Baskar Subramanian take us back to the days after selling their first startup to a NASDAQ-listed chipmaker, when they landed on an idea almost nobody in India's broadcast industry believed in: regionalizing satellite TV ads.That business grew to ₹180 crore in revenue. Then the founders made a bold call: "Enough of this hardware mess. We'll host only on the cloud." It meant shutting down an 8 year old profitable business to back a cloud platform that was barely making a few crores. That decision transformed Amagi into the company it is today.18 years later, Amagi went public, as a strong example of building a truly global enterprise software company from India. But the IPO itself was far from an obvious decision. The founders share why going public was the right choice despite not needing capital.This episode will tell you how category-defining companies are built.00:00 - Trailer01:00 - How three college kids became founders04:55 - The startup idea validated by a palmist07:10 - How founders split roles (w/o designations)11:04 - What Amagi 2.0 does14:29 - Bannerghatta Road runs Olympics for the US15:54 - Only 10% of TV networks are on the cloud16:50 - Why shut down a profitable business?21:25 - Why one co-founder moved to the US28:06 - Did Amagi really need the IPO?31:10 - What is Amagi 2.0?36:04 - Selling to the US: then vs. now40:44 - How NBC signed with Amagi43:56 - How intent is measured through contracts46:58 - 5 major decisions that changed Amagi52:08 - How AI is changing Amagi57:45 - Being the CTO of a public company1:02:57 - US vs India Market: US is fast to experiment1:04:48 - Enterprises Need Human Touch1:11:12 - Cloud and TV: No one Believed1:13:34 - What will Happen to Hollywood-------------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/TheNeonShowwConnect with Nansi on:LinkedIn: https://in.linkedin.com/in/nansi-mishraX: https://x.com/nansi_mishra-------------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
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How A 23-Year-Old Solo Founder Is Disrupting India's On-Demand Labor Market | Anjali Sardana, Pronto
Jun 2301:08:19Tap to summarizeWhy did global VCs invest $60M into India's most operationally heavy marketplace problem?The early bet was undoubtedly on the founder, Anjali Sardana.A 23 year old biology graduate from Georgetown University who is today the solo founder of Pronto. The company founded on 2nd April 2024 is at a $200 Million valuation, just a year later and they are growing at god-speed. What began in a single hub in Sector 56, Gurgaon is today 22,000 bookings a day, 5,000+ professionals, and operations across India's biggest cities.But Pronto was never just about convenience. It was built on a belief that India’s home services market is broken not just for customers, but even more so for workers. No income stability. No safety net. No formal identity in the system. Not many individual investors write a $20M cheque. Lachy Groom did, alongside General Catalyst and Gladebrook. One year in, Pronto’s growth explains the conviction. This episode is the story of the chaos, the urgency and the belief behind one of India's fastest moving startups.00:00 — Trailer01:32 — What is Pronto?03:16 — Hiring the first 30 pros in a single day06:13 — Delivering uniforms in 48 hours08:02 — Hustling to make the first payroll09:23 — The first home office11:28 — Why the customer app is only a nice-to-have17:18 — How pros are trained21:11 — How Gurgaon, Mumbai & Bangalore behave differently29:17 — TAM expands based on ease of access34:58 — Mission is bringing dignity to formal labour42:27 — Pronto's 30-year vision42:48 — How US investors see Indian startups44:37 — How a ₹400 headhunter brought the first hire47:05 — Final round interview for Pronto's chief of staff49:29 — How Anjali hires missionaries54:31 — One thing Anjali would always do as founder58:29 — One thing she's most proud of59:29 — One value Pronto would never compromise on1:01:44 — A company with urgency as core value1:03:55 — What needs to change in India for Pronto to succeed?1:05:18 — How to build a win-win-win business1:07:40 — Why was this problem not solved yet?1:09:02 — If Pronto fails, what would be the reason?1:10:05 — How Anjali spends a day as a solo founder1:15:30 — One lesson learned the hard way-------------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/neon-fund/X: https://x.com/TheNeonShowwConnect with Nansi on:LinkedIn: https://in.linkedin.com/in/nansi-mishraX: https://x.com/nansi_mishra-------------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
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Why Coding is the Fastest Path to AGI | Turing CEO Jonathan Siddharth
Jun 1801:10:48Tap to summarizeWho is teaching the world's most powerful AI models to think?Turing is one of the largest data partners to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Nvidia. At a $2.2 billion valuation it has become one of the most important infrastructure layers in the AGI race.Jonathan Siddharth started Turing in 2018 with a thesis that talent matching is a trillion-dollar problem. Turing reached unicorn status in 2021. Then, in 2022, as the foundation model race accelerated, OpenAI approached Turing to provide coding data for ChatGPT.Jonathan recognised that frontier AI labs faced an enormous bottleneck: high-quality training data and human intelligence at scale. Instead of remaining just a talent marketplace, he made a bet that most unicorn CEOs never make. He built a second business on top of the first and leaned back into his AI research roots.Jonathan has a clear view of what needs to happen before we get to super intelligence. The four keys to unlocking AGI: coding, reasoning, tool use, and multimodality. He believes we solve for those four, and AI can do almost anything a human can do in front of a computer. If you are excited about where the AGI race is heading this episode is for you00:00 - Trailer01:06 - What Turing does05:55 - Why OpenAI reached out to Turing8:28 - How GPT-3 became ChatGPT17:54 - How ImageNet breakthrough changed the world21:12 - The largest provider of coding data to AI labs24:34 - Four keys to super intelligence28:45 - Every human will run multiple companies in 10 years32:27 - Can agents have self-improvement loops?34:36 - The future of software engineering36:26 - Agents should create, humans should steer39:46 - Is the line between products and services companies blurring?40:42 - How an agent can handle hiring end-to-end43:36 - Every human can now write software45:22 - Will workflow SaaS disappear?47:46 - No fine-tuning vs fine-tuning camps51:49 - A case study in compute constraints57:06 - Why the world needs so much compute1:01:26 - Where Jonathan would invest today1:03:16 - Where cybersecurity is heading1:08:31 - How the world will look in 10 years-------------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/TheNeonShowwConnect 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
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Questions Every Founder Must Answer Before Taking an Acquisition Offer | Shashank Saxena, VNDLY & Pantomath
Jun 1101:31:43Tap to summarizeMost AI failures won't come from a bad model. They'll come from bad data.Shashank Saxena spent most of his career on the buying side of enterprise technology before founding VNDLY which was acquired by Workday for $510 million. He then joined Sierra as a Managing Partner before going full time as Co-founder and CEO of Pantomath, a data operations center for enterprises that are betting their future on AI agents.We discuss why data quality is becoming one of the biggest challenges in enterprise AI. An AI agent fed bad data for 12 hours doesn't go rogue. It just makes 12 hours of wrong decisions: rejecting insurance claims, issuing credit cards, or drilling in the wrong location. As more business decisions are delegated to AI systems, companies will need far greater visibility into what is happening across their data infrastructure.Shashank also shares the decisions that led to VNDLY's acquisition, the advice he'd give founders evaluating acquisition offers today, and why a Michael Jordan analogy continues to motivate him as a second-time founder.If you're building enterprise software, selling to large companies, or trying to figure out whether experience is an asset or a liability in the AI era, this episode is for you.0:00 - Trailer01:00 - How Shashank became a second-time founder07:20 - Where Pantomath sits in the data stack10:55 - How a broken Tableau report turns mission-critical with AI12:55 - Who Pantomath sells to15:35 - Solving for a problem that doesn't exist yet19:03 - How have founder expectations changed today?20:31 - Series B companies pre- and post-AI21:26 - The Michael Jordan example23:57 - How a repeat founder chooses investors25:10 - What value Snowflake adds as a strategic investor27:05 - Data is not an open category today28:34 - The astounding Databricks outcome29:08 - The reality of the $100 million ARR number31:48 - Will non-human workers 100x in the next few years?36:00 - How to protect data in motion37:26 - How comfortable are we giving full access to agents?39:47 - Where is automation fastest today?42:09 - Why entrepreneurs tend to like uncertainty43:28 - Why Shashank chose to be a founder45:48 - A customer-driven $510M acquisition48:32 - Employees vs contractors in any organization51:22 - Building from Ohio vs the Bay Area53:14 - Learnings from selling to enterprises56:31 - How Shashank raised from Tier 1 US VCs59:19 - Heads down or network as a founder?1:02:47 - First-time vs second-time founder edge in AI1:06:22 - Hiring as a repeat founder1:08:08 - How enterprise sales has changed1:10:52 - How do you sell for a problem that isn't visible today?1:12:58 - Best piece of advice1:16:27 - The only advice for a founder considering M&A1:21:06 - Position yourself to be capable of taking risks1:24:51 - What matters to an enterprise buyer?-------------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/TheNeonShowwConnect 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
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94% CAGR: What the Inference Boom means for your AI costs | Vamshi Ambati
Jun 900:51:56Tap to summarizeVamshi Ambati has spent more than two decades in AI, through the symbolic era, statistical era, and the neural wave we're experiencing today. A CMU PhD, founder of LatentStructure and Predera (which was acquired), now an investor at Virama Ventures, he's one of the sharper voices on what's actually happening under the hood of the AI boom.We discuss a simple question: Who wins when models become cheaper and more abundant? And try to answer this by looking at how inference spend v/s compute spend is shifting, and why inference may become the biggest infrastructure opportunity of the next decade.Vamshi explains what actually goes into the cost of a token, why AI is simultaneously getting cheaper and more expensive, and why the inference market alone could reach $1.3 trillion by 2030. If you're building in AI or someone who wants a clear mental model of where this industry is headed, this conversation is for you. 00:00 - Trailer0:45 - How an AI researcher thinks after 20 years05:53 - Where enterprise AI adoption is headed08:35 - Drawing parallels between cloud and AI11:20 - If building is cheap, what's valuable?13:37 - Can computing get cheaper?16:41 - What is inference, really?22:22 - Why coding and customer support got eaten first?26:48 - Which technologies are overvalued and undervalued?29:56 - An accidental entrepreneur's journey33:15 - Why is healthcare slow to adopt technology?38:59 - Landing Walmart as a customer42:36 - Should founders build in services if product isn't visible?43:47 - Is Palantir a product company or a services company?44:15 - How to win as a forward-deployed company46:23 - What it takes to land large enterprise customers49:20 - Building sales muscles as a technical founder-------------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/TheNeonShowwConnect 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
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This Startup Can End China’s Grip on Global EV Supply Chain | Bhaktha, Chara Tech
Jun 301:07:39Tap to summarizeChina processes nearly 90% of the world's rare earths.Rare earths are hidden inside everything from EVs and smartphones to fighter jets, making them one of the most critical materials powering the modern economy.When China restricted rare earth exports in April 2025, the world saw the huge risk of depending on a supply chain controlled by a single country. For Bhaktha Keshavachar, however, it was validation of a bet he had made 6 years earlier.After exiting Ezetap, Bhaktha founded Chara Tech to create electric motors that don't need rare earth magnets at all. The journey was anything but easy. Six years of R&D. Investors who didn't understand the problem. Customers who weren't convinced. And a motor technology that engineers had known about for over 200 years but never successfully commercialized at scale.Today, Chara is shipping hundreds of motors, signing major customers, and finding itself at the center of a global geopolitical shift. Bhaktha explains how software became the breakthrough that made rare-earth-free motors practical and what it takes to build a deep tech company long before the market believes the problem exists.If you are interested in building deep tech for the world, this episode is for you.0:00 - Trailer01:10 - When China bans rare earth exports04:15 - How today’s rare earth shortage is like 1970s oil embargo05:26 - Are rare earths really rare?07:23 - Why China has a monopoly11:43 - 3 reasons why Chara was founded15:11 - How Chara made a 200-year-old technology practical16:45 - How software protects deep tech startups18:53 - The conviction to build deep tech in 201621:52 - Why electricity is still the biggest opportunity26:59 - 4+1 technologies every country should possess28:17 - The story of 6 years in R&D33:16 - The response from early customers36:10 - How China’s ban changed Chara’s journey39:30 - Why Growth-stage fundraising for DeepTech is Hard44:28 - What India needs to win in deep tech52:53 - 3 things needed for a deep tech startup55:10 - Why the wealthy should invest in deep tech58:00 - Where Chara is today01:03:47 - Why Intel lost the race it was winning-------------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/neon-fund/X: https://x.com/TheNeonShowwConnect with Nansi on:LinkedIn: https://in.linkedin.com/in/nansi-mishraX: https://x.com/nansi_mishra-------------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
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What if AI has Immunity like Humans? Ft. Animesh Koratana, PlayerZero
May 2000:39:28Tap to summarizeWill 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. Growing up in Atlanta, he spent his childhood inside his father’s software business, watching engineers sitting through the unglamorous work of QA and keeping systems alive after launch. He saw early that writing software was only half the problem. Maintaining it was the real battle.Years later at Stanford, he witnessed the birth of GPT-2 and Codex, the very foundation of GitHub Copilot. While much of the world focused on how AI would help engineers write software faster, he became obsessed with a different question: What happens when companies are flooded with AI-generated code that no single engineer fully understands?With PlayerZero, Animesh is building toward what he calls self-healing software: systems that behave less like static machines and more like living organisms with their own immune systems.At the center of that vision are “Context Graphs” which captures the "institutional memory" of a company: the deep knowledge held by a senior engineer who has spent years understanding how complex software breaks, the failure modes it develops, and the decisions behind fixing it.If you are building software today and wondering how reliability, debugging, and ownership will work when machines write most of the code, this episode is for you.0:00 — Trailer0:45 — Building Self-Healing Code2:03 — First Exposure to LLMs Through GPT-23:45 — What Is PlayerZero?5:42 — Institutional Memory of a Senior Engineer7:10 — How Context Is Built10:06 — The Viral “Context Graph” Piece16:24 — The Outcome PlayerZero Delivers19:59 — When the Agent Tells the Human What to Do23:43 — Who Is PlayerZero Selling To?26:56 — Why Software Should Be Treated Like Biology28:54 — The PlayerZero Customer Pitch30:37 — Can Software Really Have an Immune System?35:15 — How Animesh Chose His Investors36:55 — What’s Next for PlayerZero?-------------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/TheNeonShowwConnect 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
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Why Your AI is Still a Demo: Lessons from Braintrust’s Field CTO
May 1500:46:30Tap to summarize85% 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 Microsoft, Facebook, and Dropbox, Ameya Bhatawdekar is now Field CTO at Braintrust, the AI observability platform used by Airtable, Notion, Stripe, Dropbox, Vercel, Cloudflare, Lovable, and Replit.We discuss a shift that most teams underestimate. The winners in AI are not just shipping faster. They are building systems that behave predictably, improve continuously, and earn user trust over time. As traditional monitoring breaks down in a probabilistic world, observability now requires learning how an AI system reasons, not just how it performs. This leads to a new paradigm where agents are no longer just executing tasks, but also analyzing and debugging other agents.The episode also traces the evolution of machine learning itself. From feature engineering to deep learning to transformers , each leap increased capability and reduced control. Evaluation is now where control sits.Ameya is clear on one point. Moving fast with weak evaluations feels like velocity, but it compounds into technical debt, unpredictable failures, and ultimately a loss of user trust. The teams that win are the ones that invest early in rigor, especially in understanding context, which is quickly becoming the hardest and most critical layer in AI systems.If you are a founder or engineer moving beyond the demo phase and trying to build durable, high-quality AI systems, this episode will change how you think about shipping.0:00 — Trailer00:55 — What’s Braintrust?05:01 — What agents are shipping today07:54 — What evals look like in practice for Notion & Zapier09:44 — Evals vs Classic monitoring11:33 — Who is the Field CTO?16:35 — What goes wrong when agents fail18:26 — Agents analyzing other agents24:17 — Evals are existential in vibecoding25:52 — Ship fast with weak evals or slow with strong evals?25:41 — What makes enterprises trust an LLM?29:25 — Do AI startups know how good their product is?30:23 — 3 ML systems: Microsoft, Dropbox, Meta36:30 — How the 2017 transformer paper changed everything38:20 — All algorithms are predicting the next word43:40 — What LLMs will do in 1 year-------------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/TheNeonShowwConnect 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
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