The Neon Show
Hi, I am your host Siddhartha! I have been an entrepreneur from 2012-2017 building two products AddoDoc and Babygogo. After selling my company to SHEROES, I and my partner Nansi decided to start up again. But we felt unequipped in our skillset in 2018 to build a large company. We had known 0-1 journey from our startups but lacked the experience of building 1-10 journeys. Hence was born the Neon Show (Earlier 100x Entrepreneur) to learn from founders and investors, the mindset to scale yourself and your company. This quest still keeps us excited even after 5 years and doing 200+ episodes. We we
All episodes(49)
- StandardSummaries onlyAnthropic & OpenAI Have Changed What Moving Fast Means | Krishna M, Elevation Capital
Published Aug 22, 2026
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
- StandardSummaries onlyChatGPT Killed My $50M ARR Business Overnight | Swapnil Jain Observe Al
Published Aug 14, 2026
Swapnil Jain Observe AlObserve 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 cultu
- StandardSummaries onlyThe Al Lab Founder Who Sees The Future First | Karan Goel, Founder & CEO of Cartesia
Published Aug 7, 2026
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
- StandardSummaries onlyIs Your Startup Model Proof? Vijay Krishnan Turing Founder & CTO On What Startups Should Build to Win
Published Jul 31, 2026
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
- StandardSummaries onlyHow 1% Stay Rich - What India's Richest Families Do With Their Money That 99% Don't | Rohit Sarin, Client Associates
Published Jul 28, 2026
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 co
- StandardSummaries onlyWhy Even With Great Products AI Startups Lose with 3x Founder Mahesh Ram, ex-Zoom AI
Published Jul 24, 2026
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
- StandardSummaries onlyThe #1 Mistake Killing B2B Startups | Arun Penmetsa, Storm Ventures
Published Jul 21, 2026
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,
- StandardSummaries onlyGaurav Jain on Building $500M Fund, Missing Ramp and Backing Irrational Founders
Published Jul 17, 2026
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 y
- StandardSummaries onlyAnd How Matic Sold 6000 Robots with Zero Marketing | Navneet Dalal & Mehul Nariyawala
Published Jul 14, 2026
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,
- StandardSummaries onlyHow to Solve AI's Biggest Problem | Atin Sanyal, Galileo
Published Jul 9, 2026
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
- StandardSummaries onlyBeating SBI, 1% NPAs & India's Massive Loan Gap I Victor Senpaty Co-Founder Propelld
Published Jul 7, 2026
Who is funding the students that India's banks won't touch?Propelld is one of India's largest education-focused lenders, giving loans to roughly 1.5 lakh students every year — matching SBI — with a team a fraction of the size and no branch network. In a single financial year it now disburses more education loans than SBI did in six years of its history.Victor started Propelld in 2016 with a thesis born out of a Milton Friedman paper: a good student should never have to walk away from a good oppo
- StandardSummaries onlyLessons From India's First Unicorn Founder on Building Large Businesses | Naveen Tewari
Published Jul 3, 2026
Naveen TewariMost 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, bui
- StandardSummaries onlyHow to Beat a Competitor With 100x Your Funding | Palash Soni, GoldCast Founder
Published Jun 30, 2026
How do you get an inbound from OpenAI and Anthropic?Goldcast is the video content platform behind companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, GitHub, Uber and Airbnb, before it was 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
- StandardSummaries onlyHow 3 Friends From Coimbatore Ended Up Running American TV | The Untold Amagi Story
Published Jun 26, 2026
The Untold Amagi StoryWho 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
- StandardSummaries onlyHow A 23-Year-Old Solo Founder Is Disrupting India's On-Demand Labor Market | Anjali Sardana, Pronto
Published Jun 23, 2026
Why did global VCs invest $60M into India's most operationally heavy marketplace problem?The early bet was undoubtedly on the founder, Anjali Sardana.A 23 year old biology 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 Ind
- StandardSummaries onlyWhy Coding is the Fastest Path to AGI | Turing CEO Jonathan Siddharth
Published Jun 18, 2026
Who is teaching the world's most powerful AI models to think?Turing is one of the largest data partners to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Nvidia. At a $2.2 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
- StandardSummaries onlyQuestions Every Founder Must Answer Before Taking an Acquisition Offer | Shashank Saxena, VNDLY & Pantomath
Published Jun 11, 2026
Most AI failures won't come from a bad model. They'll come from bad data.Shashank Saxena spent most of his career on the buying side of enterprise technology before founding 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 A
- StandardSummaries only94% CAGR: What the Inference Boom means for your AI costs | Vamshi Ambati
Published Jun 9, 2026
Vamshi AmbatiVamshi 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
- StandardSummaries onlyThis Startup Can End China’s Grip on Global EV Supply Chain | Bhaktha, Chara Tech
Published Jun 3, 2026
China processes nearly 90% of the world's rare earths.Rare earths are hidden inside everything from EVs and smartphones to fighter jets, making them one of the most critical 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
- StandardSummaries onlyWhat if AI has Immunity like Humans? Ft. Animesh Koratana, PlayerZero
Published May 20, 2026
Animesh KoratanaWill 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 t
- StandardSummaries onlyWhy Your AI is Still a Demo: Lessons from Braintrust’s Field CTO
Published May 15, 2026
85% of AI teams will hit a serious production failure this year. The only thing separating them from the 15% who don't? Evals.After nearly two decades of building AI systems at 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 th
- StandardSummaries onlyThe Art of Enterprise Sale: Selling Startups to Giants with Poojan Kumar
Published May 10, 2026
Poojan KumarWhat does it take to build a company that industry giants want to buy?Poojan Kumar built and exited two enterprise infrastructure companies, PernixData to Nutanix and Clumio to Commvault.He began his career at Oracle, where he wrote the original code for Exadata and helped scale it into a billion-dollar product line. But his real founder journey began when he left the corporate world to chase what he calls the “Discontinuity Thesis.”At PernixData, that discontinuity was the shift from hard disks
- StandardSummaries onlyVignesh Kumar on Why Healthcare is Moving Faster in 2026 than the Entire Last 10 Years of SaaS
Published Apr 30, 2026
Healthcare has never moved this fast.Pharma giants are no longer just buying software. They are writing $50 million checks for access to a single foundational model. Systems of record are being replaced, and the shift is unfolding fastest in a place most people did not expect: healthcare.Vignesh Kumar, Partner at Sierra Ventures, has spent 13 years at the center of this enterprise shift. He has sourced and invested early in companies across Enterprise AI, including two unicorns, Phenom and Reify
- StandardSummaries onlyCan the Indian Market Alone Take You to $100M ARR? | Aneesh Reddy, Capillary Tech
Published Apr 23, 2026
Are recessions actually the best time to start your company? Aneesh Reddy, the founder of Capillary Technologies, believes that economic downturns are the ultimate filter for identifying products that have a "right to exist”,which is only earned when a product solves a deep, non-negotiable pain point for the customer. This idea has shaped Capillary’s journey that led to a 4500 Crore IPO, 250 million consumers and 100,000+ stores worldwide.We explore the internal culture at Capillary that has not
- StandardSummaries onlyThe Internet Is Getting a Billion New Users. None Are Human | Sudheesh Nair, Thoughtspot, Nutanix & Tinyfish
Published Apr 16, 2026
From employee #16 to $1B ARR at Nutanix, then scaling ThoughtSpot to $150M ARR and a $4B+ valuation now building for a world where agents will drive the internet.Sudheesh Nair joins the Neon Show.The internet as we see it today was optimized around human strengths and weaknesses, using algorithms to monetize our greed and fear. But as agents take up more of the internet, that playbook starts to break. We are moving from a web of discovery to an outcome-driven internet, where agents care only abo
- StandardSummaries onlyWhy $1T Construction still runs on Spreadsheets (And How AI Fixes It) | Sneha & Graham, Merlin AI
Published Apr 9, 2026
Can AI Rebuild the $1 Trillion Construction Industry?Construction is one of the largest industries in the world, yet most projects still run on Excel sheets, fragmented tools, and disconnected workflows.Sneha Kumari (Co-founder, Merlin) and Graham Blake (CPO, Merlin) break down why construction has remained one of the least digitized industries and why that is finally starting to change.We explore why traditional ERP systems like NetSuite or Dynamics fail construction companies, how Merlin is re
- StandardSummaries onlyWhy Signing a Fortune 500 Customer Too Early Can Kill You | Manish Jindal, Cloudflare & Arize
Published Apr 2, 2026
What if the biggest mistake you can make as a founder is signing Apple as your first customer?Manish Jindal spent 10 years at Cloudflare as employee #45, helping take the company from $10 million revenue to a $60 billion public company. Manish breaks down the Cloudflare playbook: why they intentionally said “no” to Fortune 500 companies early on to protect their product, and how a single phone call from a CIO birthed their entire enterprise motion.Throughout his career, Manish has joined compani
- StandardSummaries onlyInvestor who hasn't Changed His Thesis in 5 Funds & Saw the AI Wave Before ChatGPT | Ashmeet Sidana, Engineering Capital
Published Mar 26, 2026
What does it look like to run the same playbook across five venture funds?That is the bet Ashmeet Sidana has made at Engineering Capital. From Fund One to Fund Five, he has written the first check into founders solving problems with Technical insight.His portfolio includes Rubrik, now a public company, SignalFx which was acquired by Splunk for $1 billion, and CodeRabbit, last valued at $550 million. Ashmeet runs Engineering Capital as a solo GP and the fund has been oversubscribed since Fund One
- StandardSummaries onlyHow 24,000 companies keep their AI from Breaking in Production | Rohit Agarwal, Portkey
Published Mar 19, 2026
Over 1 Trillion AI tokens pass through Portkey every single day.Every AI product eventually runs into the same problem. The prototype works, but once it goes live the system has to manage multiple models, rising token costs, unpredictable latency, and infrastructure that was never built for AI workloads.That is the problem Rohit Agarwal is solving with Portkey, an AI gateway that sits between applications and the models, whether that’s GPT-4, Claude, or Gemini.With 24,000 companies routing their
- StandardSummaries onlyThe $600B Grocery Market Is Obsessed With Speed — FirstClub Is Betting on Quality | Ayyappan
Published Mar 12, 2026
Is the best grocery platform one that decides what it WON’T sell?That is the bet Ayyappan is making with FirstClub. Fewer products. Stricter rules. While most quick commerce apps are trying to deliver orders faster, he is asking a different question. What if consumers need not “faster or cheaper”, but a retail platform where they can trust every item listed on it?A place where you do not have to read every label, check multiple reviews, or wonder if the top result is there because a brand paid f
- StandardSummaries onlyThe First AI Market With 8 Billion Potential Users | Sudarshan kamath, Smallest AI
Published Mar 6, 2026
Will smaller AI models win over large language models?Sudarshan Kamath grew up in Mumbai, taught himself AI before most Indian companies were even hiring for it, and bought the domain "smallest.ai" for $100 in 2022, two years before the company existed. Today, he runs Smallest AI, a startup focused on real time voice AI.He started with self-driving cars, training large models and compressing them to run on vehicle hardware in real time. That's where he first saw what small models could do: a hun
- StandardSummaries onlyAI Needs to Know Why You Took THAT decision | Ashu Garg, Investor at Foundation Capital
Published Feb 27, 2026
What if AI can learn the “why” behind decision making of humans?Ashu Garg and Jaya Gupta recently wrote one of the most discussed articles on AI this year. Their idea drew public responses from Dharmesh Shah, Aaron Levie, and Arvind Jain.Enterprise software has always captured what happened. It records the order, the ticket, and the approval. But it has never captured why it happened. It does not store the reasoning, the exception, or the past decisions that shaped the outcome. Ashu argues that
- StandardSummaries onlyHow AI Will Finally Deliver the Promise SaaS Made | Samay Kohli: From Robots to Digital Workers
Published Feb 21, 2026
Samay Kohli spent 12 years at GreyOrange, scaling it to over $100 million in revenue and a $3 billion valuation at its peak, making it one of the world’s largest warehouse robotics companies. Two years ago, he started again with Budy, this time in the US senior care industry.In this industry, decisions are emotional, sales cycles can run for years, and multiple stakeholders are involved. While the market sits at the intersection of real estate, healthcare, and hospitality, most sales still depen
- StandardSummaries onlyWhat Top 1% Investors Look For in AI Startups | Umesh Padval, Seligman Ventures, Ex- Bessemer
Published Feb 13, 2026
Do startup valuations today make sense?Umesh Padval, an early investor in Cohere, now valued at about $7 billion shares why Cohere stood out at the time of his investment. He shares what he saw early that made him believe this was not just another AI model company.Umesh is the Founding Managing Partner, Seligman Ventures and previously at Thomvest and Bessemer Venture Partners. He brings experience from investing across multiple tech cycles, from chips to cloud to AI. Umesh talks about how deals
- StandardSummaries onlyWhen Founders Should Quit Their Startups with Matt MacInnis | COO Rippling
Published Feb 7, 2026
Matt MacInnis spent 6 years as COO at Rippling and now leads as CPO. He joined Rippling in 2019, when there were only 70 people, and has led the company across multiple stages.Before that, Matt was a founder for 9 years, building Inkling after 7 years at Apple. These three chapters of his career shape this conversation. We focus on how to build and operate teams as a company scales. Matt explains how he thinks about speed versus real progress, and which parts of building a company should move fa
- StandardSummaries onlyHow Buyers Discover Startups, From a 10-Year Founder Journey to an EXIT | Ankur Rawal & Vishwa Krishnakumar
Published Jan 30, 2026
This is a special episode from the Neon Fund.In 2025, the US saw $1.8 trillion worth of M&A deals, around 25× more than India. But India’s startup ecosystem is much younger, which makes every acquisition a playbook for founders on process, pricing leverage, and stakeholder management.Neon backed Zenduty in 2020, when the founders had been bootstrapping profitably for two years and were already growing at a pace many VC-backed startups aspire to.Today, founders Ankur Rawal and Vishwa Krishnakumar
- StandardSummaries onlyFrom Startup to US IPO in 5 Years: Kanwal Rekhi’s Historic IPO of Excelan
Published Jan 22, 2026
Kanwal Rekhi first came to the US in the 1960s. He took his company public on Nasdaq in 1987. As a young Indian in the US, he was laid off from his first three jobs. That experience pushed him towards entrepreneurship. At the time, Indians were known and hired for technical and mathematical skills, not as founders building companies on US soil.But Kanwal and his co-founders decided to bet on themselves. They faced rejection from nearly 50 investors before one VC agreed to invest $2 million for 5
- StandardSummaries onlyWhat Went Wrong Before iD Fresh Worked | For the First Time Co-Founders Tell Their Story
Published Jan 15, 2026
Where did the journey of iD Fresh start?It began when a 19-year-old Abdul Nazer decided to run away from home to Bangalore with ₹100 in his pocket. He did any job that came his way: cook, cleaner, conductor and sold anything he could, from clothes and vegetables to spices and peanuts. Along the way, he brought his three brothers to Bangalore.Even with huge losses in business, they never stopped looking for new opportunities. Their first real glimpse of success came from a tea stall run out of a
- StandardSummaries onlyWhat Best Founders & Investors Said in 2025?
Published Dec 29, 2025
Best of 3500 Minutes in 45 Minutes2025 was a great year for The Neon Show. 60 episodes, 72 guests, and thousands of minutes of insightful conversations on everything around building a business.You’ll hear perspectives from Founders scaling companies across the world, sharing the real challenges behind building high-growth startups; Investors on how they spot opportunities and make bold bets; and Ecosystem leaders who have navigated multiple cycles and understand what truly lasts.This episode is
- StandardSummaries onlyHow Ratan Tata’s Leadership Shaped One of India’s Oldest and Biggest Conglomerates | Harish Bhat
Published Dec 26, 2025
Harish BhatHarish Bhat spent 38 years with the Tata Group, working across businesses that reach millions of Indians every day, including Titan, Tanishq, and Tata Tea.He joins Neon Show for a 3rd time and reflects on what it meant to build inside a 150+ year-old institution. The conversation begins in 1991, the year Ratan Tata took over as Chairman, a role he would hold for 21 years. Harish explains how Ratan Tata prepared Tata Sons at a time when the Indian economy was opening up and competition was changi
- StandardSummaries onlyWhat It Takes to Build a Company: Life, Risks, and Lessons From Two Founders | Arpita & Ananda
Published Dec 18, 2025
Founders are often seen as superhumans. In this new series, we look at the humans behind the superhuman journey. The thrill of building, the guilt of missing out, the learnings, the failures, and why they still do it and would do it all over again.Arpita is a second-time founder, now building Mysa. Her first startup, Mech Mocha, was acquired by Flipkart. Ananda is the Co-Founder and CTO of Astra Security. They are building in two different spaces, finance and cybersecurity, but the journeys are
- StandardSummaries onlyHow Betting on Myself Led Me from Analyst to CEO? Roopa Kudva, Ex-CEO CRISIL for 8 Years
Published Dec 11, 2025
In 1992, Roopa Kudva walked into CRISIL’s CEO Pradeep Shah’s office without an appointment, starting her 23-year career there. She spent over two decades at CRISIL, rising from analyst to CEO. Roopa has spent over 3 decades in leadership roles in India and has witnessed three key phases in India’s growth: the closed economy in the 80s, the post-liberalisation era, and the rise of tech entrepreneurs.She shares bold decisions that defined her journey. Like when she proposed to the then CRISIL CEO
- StandardSummaries onlyWhere Founders Take “Figuring Out” as Seriously as Building ft. South Park Commons |Aditya & Prateek
Published Dec 4, 2025
South Park CommonsMost conversations in startups begin at zero: what’s the idea, who’s the customer, how big is the market. But the stage before that, when you know you’re ready to be a founder yet the direction is still completely undefined. That strange, uncomfortable, high-potential zone Aditya Agarwal calls “minus one.”In this episode, Aditya and Prateek Mehta breaks down what happens in this “figuring out” stage. The questions people avoid, the habits that matter, and why some of the best companies begin lon
- StandardSummaries onlyHow Startups Can Sell to Big Companies Ft. Karthik Chakkarapani, Zuora
Published Nov 27, 2025
Karthik ChakkarapaniIf you’re a startup selling to enterprises, understanding how a CIO discovers and evaluates you can change everything. Most founders believe that cold emails and polished decks drive attention, but Karthik Chakkarapani, CIO of Zuora shares that nearly 80% of the startups he evaluates are found through outbound - while researching solutions, through peers, or even on LinkedIn. For many startups, this alone can reshape how they think about go-to-market.How does an enterprise decide whether to buy
- StandardSummaries onlyHow AI Will Disrupt India’s IT Services Industry And Its 1.5M Engineers/Year | Bhaskar Ghosh, 8VC
Published Nov 20, 2025
After 20+ years at some of the most important Silicon Valley tech companies like Yahoo, LinkedIn, Oracle, Informix and NerdWallet, Bhaskar today leads investment of enterprise infrastructure companies at 8 VC.Bhaskar Ghosh spent 20+ years at some of the most important Silicon Valley tech companies before moving into venture capital as a Partner at 8VC.After completing his PhD in computer science from Yale, he worked across Yahoo, LinkedIn, Oracle, Informix and NerdWallet. He brings this experien
- StandardSummaries onlyHow a 45 Year Old VC Firm Decides to Invest or Pass? | Somesh Dash, Partner at IVP
Published Nov 17, 2025
130 IPOs from over 400 startups. IVP is now in its 18th fund, with companies like Perplexity, Glean, Slack, Figma, Twitter, Uber, and Abridge in its portfolio. Somesh Dash, general partner at the 45-year-old firm, has been part of IVP for more than 20 years.We start with something we are both passionate about, building in the US-India corridor. Somesh talks about the group of people who put the silicon in Silicon Valley, the immigrants. From Andy Grove to Elon Musk to Chennai-born Aravind Sriniv
- StandardSummaries only4x Founder Shreesha Ramdas on What to Do Before You Build Your Startup
Published Nov 13, 2025
When Shreesha Ramdas left Medallia after a $6.5B acquisition he decided it was time to reinvent.At his 4th startup Lumber, before writing a single line of code, he hired a sales person and ran 200+ interviews across the industry to understand the real pain points. The interviews gave Shreesha the insight that though payments were a problem, it was neither big enough nor urgent. But it was very difficult to hire workers, and even more difficult to retain skilled craft workers. In the U.S alone 41
- StandardSummaries onlyThe Founder Who Mastered Timing Ft Sachin Aggarwal | Stackgen
Published Nov 11, 2025
Sachin AggarwalYou rarely meet someone who has built and sold five companies. Sachin Aggarwal is now building his sixth, Stackgen. The depth of lessons from someone who has been through that journey five times and still chooses to build again is simply unmatched. Even after five successful exits, he still builds like a first-time founder. He studies every new domain from scratch, speaks to 60 or 70 people before committing to an idea, and surrounds himself with people who are smarter than him. What stood out m
- StandardSummaries onlyLearn from Silicon Valley’s Best Companies (Hubspot, Google & Salesforce) w/Avanish Sahai
Published Nov 6, 2025
India is the 2nd largest startup ecosystem now. But, can it be at par with Silicon Valley?With 37 years of experience in the valley, Avanish sahai believes it can. But what made Silicon Valley the ultimate startup ecosystem? It was investors, universities and an environment where people dreamed to come live and work. And, in the last 25 years India has been going through the same transformation. And the changes are nothing short of admirable.Avanish started his career from a Mckinsey office in 1