The Neon Show

Siddhartha Ahluwalia
  • 4.9 (7)
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Updated Weekly

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. 

  1. 3h ago

    “Yes.” Building Claude Code for Marketing | Kashish, Hightouch

    Now, everyone’s talking about building AI harnesses and context layers. Kashish has been building these for years and Hightouch has now reached a stage where they are challenging giants like Adobe and Salesforce while crossing $100M in revenue. In this episode we discussed how and why LLMs like ChatGPT and Gemini are failing marketing teams at enterprises, why marketing is a coding problem, what makes a harness “ thick”, why it’s a CEO’s job to be Chief Pipeline Generator in early years, controversial decisions that worked perfectly for Hightouch and why now is the time for 100x Marketer. Listen to the episode to look into the future of marketing 00:00 Quitting VC to become a Founder 01:35 Travel Startup with Terrible Margins 03:25 From Slack Agents to Customer Data 04:31 Saving a Bank $6M on "Unmarketing" 05:45 Why Make Composable CDP? 07:53 Why Every Other CDP Was Broken 11:33 Where Hightouch Creates Real ROI 12:48 Agents That Surface Revenue 16:47 Inside a Multi-Million Dollar Enterprise Rollout 21:41 Will AI Replace Marketers? 25:18 Why Skipped SMBs for Fortune 500 26:54 The Rippling Model of Running a Startup 27:48 Going Multi-Product Early 29:38 The 100x Marketer 33:03 Unstructured Data, Lead Lists & Synthetic Signals 34:49 How AI Launches Ads in New Markets 36:13 Does Marketing Success Guarantee Revenue? 38:07 What Is a "Marketing Harness"? 40:52 Thick Harness vs. Thin Harness 45:10 How Hightouch Fits Into the Enterprise Stack 46:54 Controversial Founder Decisions 49:15 Building the Company of Tomorrow 52:07 AI, GTM and Sales ------------- India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it. This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India. What is Neon Fund? We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before. Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon. ------------- Check us out on: Website: https://neon.fund/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/ https: https://www.linkedin.com/company/neon-fund Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww Connect with Siddhartha on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/ Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7 ------------- This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice. Send us Fan Mail

    “Yes.” Building Claude Code for Marketing | Kashish, Hightouch

  2. 3d ago

    Anthropic, Sequoia Investor: 55x Returns in 18 Months, Is Anthropic Worth Trillions? | Vishal Verma

    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

    Anthropic, Sequoia Investor: 55x Returns in 18 Months, Is Anthropic Worth Trillions? | Vishal Verma

  3. Sep 18

    Why OpenAI Has No Moat & LLM Prices Will Collapse | Avinash Lakshman, Weilliptic

    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

    Why OpenAI Has No Moat & LLM Prices Will Collapse | Avinash Lakshman, Weilliptic

  4. Sep 15

    The Big Problem with GPUs and How To Solve It | Randolph and Kandan, MantisGrid AI

    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

    The Big Problem with GPUs and How To Solve It | Randolph and Kandan, MantisGrid AI

  5. Sep 10

    Why The Next $100B AI Opportunity Is Context Engine| Prukalpa Sankar, Atlan

    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

    Why The Next $100B AI Opportunity Is Context Engine| Prukalpa Sankar, Atlan

  6. Sep 8

    The Unusual Strategy That Helps ArmorCode Grow 100% YOY | Nikhil Gupta

    “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

    The Unusual Strategy That Helps ArmorCode Grow 100% YOY | Nikhil Gupta

  7. Sep 3

    Why Even a $100 Billion Company Wouldn't Be Big Enough | Tanay Tandon

    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

    Why Even a $100 Billion Company Wouldn't Be Big Enough | Tanay Tandon

  8. Aug 27

    The AI Moat Everyone is Ignoring | Phalgun Kompalli, Founder UpGrad and Bodhium Labs

    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

    The AI Moat Everyone is Ignoring | Phalgun Kompalli, Founder UpGrad and Bodhium Labs
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4.9
out of 5
7 Ratings

About

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. 

Information

  • Creator
    Siddhartha Ahluwalia
  • Years Active
    2019 - 2026
  • Episodes
    396
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 The Neon Show
  • Show Website
    The Neon Show

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