The Neon Show

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 works00:00 From ISRO to Silicon Valley04:06 From Operator to Investor05:58 The Early Sequoia Bet08:07 From $300M to $15B Funds12:24 Access Matters More Than Capital15:02 Building Redwood Collective19:10 Trillion-Dollar IPOs27:24 How Silicon Valley’s Mafias Compound31:30 How VC Returns Changed34:02 The Disappearing Middle Class36:14 Why People Are Leaving California37:36 Why Big Funds Can’t Make Small Bets39:30 Why Unicorns Aren’t Enough Anymore40:18 What Happens After the IPO43:02 VC Firms Becoming Financial Giants?45:56 Why He Ignores IRR49:25 Is AI a Commodity?53:10 Next Generation of VC Funds59:00 Inside the Roll-Up Strategy01:02:36 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/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

Avinash Lakshman, the engineer behind Amazon Dynamo, Apache Cassandra, and Hedvig, explores the infrastructure shaping autonomous AI. He discusses why open-weight models could commoditize LLMs, inference consolidation, Python’s data-center problem, Rust and WASM security, sovereign multi-cloud compute, immutable audit trails, and how a tiny team can build systems for thousands of AI agents.

AI’s agentic future depends on infrastructure that can keep up. Kandan and Randolph explore why fragile GPU clusters, pager-driven operations, and passive observability are no longer enough. They unpack MantisGrid’s vision for autonomous remediation, explain why general-purpose LLMs should not control production, and discuss trust, human oversight, multi-cloud complexity, and agents managing other agents.

Prukalpa Sankar, co-founder of enterprise AI company Atlan, explores why context is becoming AI’s missing layer. She discusses building a shared enterprise brain, turning scattered knowledge into strategic IP, and why CIOs are investing now. The conversation also covers truth-based product-market fit, AI-native organizations, human judgment, Atlan’s global growth, and scaling from India.

Nikhil Gupta, founder and CEO of ArmorCode, is an enterprise cybersecurity veteran who turned decades of experience into a fast-growing company. He shares why he studied 7,000 security firms, how pandemic-era toilet paper sparked a new venture, and why three early customers can mislead startups. They also explore developer-friendly security, honest customer feedback, enterprise sales, and AI’s security bottleneck.

Tanay Tandon, co-founder and CEO of healthcare AI company Commure, explores the enormous inefficiencies hiding inside American healthcare. They discuss the $500 billion administrative burden, AI-native software, selling into hospitals, and why labor is the real market. Tandon also shares his vision for seamless, Waymo-like care, startup hiring, customer obsession, and why even a $100 billion company may not be enough.

Phalgun Kompalli, serial entrepreneur who co-founded upGrad and now builds Bodhium/Bless Labs to help brands be found by LLMs. He discusses why visibility to large language models matters, the GEO thesis predicting discovery will shift to LLMs, why services can win before products, and lessons from scaling upGrad like hiring, rapid expansion, and earning real brand trust.

Krishna Mehra, AI partner at Elevation Capital and former founder/CTO with product stints at Meta and Cohesity. He discusses how OpenAI and Anthropic rewrote startup speed. Talks about why India–US founder teams win, which founder traits matter now, and where infrastructure and vertical AI bets are most promising.

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 Markers00:00 ChatGPT Made Our $850M Startup Irrelevant00:38 From SaaS to AI Agents04:30 Growing Fast, But Also Dying07:36 Why VCs Bet $200M+ on Observe09:26 FOMO Made Me a Founder13:30 We Had Users, But No Buyers15:27 Why BPOs Were the Wrong Market17:26 “I’ll Never Sell in India”22:30 YC Made Me Think Bigger27:22 From $1M to $50M ARR30:13 Building AI Before ChatGPT31:11 The Birth of Observe 2.032:18 When ChatGPT Changed Everything33:15 When AI Agents Take Over34:58 Rebuilding a $50M ARR Product35:47 When Co-Founders Leave38:50 Will AI Actually Kill Support Jobs?43:51 “AI ARR Is Not Real”45:45 Most Pre-AI Companies Are Bloated47:34 Learning GTM by Doing It51:24 Changing Product Is The Easy Part58:29 Why Voice AI Is Just the Beginning01:01:25 The Founder Playbook01:04:10 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/TheNeonShowwConnect 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 Trailer01:35 From DPS to Stanford to Cartesia02:35 From Counter-Strike to AI04:28 Another Research Paper Wasn’t Enough06:48 The Story Behind “Cartesia”07:17 Building a Company With Five Technical Founders09:55 From Research Project to Startup13:54 Cartesia’s Audacious Vision for 203515:07 What It Takes to Build an AI Model Company18:55 Why Faster AI Doesn’t Have to Be Worse24:12 AI Still Has a Memory Problem27:14 Why Context Builds Trust27:50 Will AI Replace Entire Account Teams?29:16 Hold Music Is Now a Salesman30:30 Designing AI That Feels Personal31:31 Building With Cartesia34:48 Voice AI’s Enemy #1: Latency38:50 Why AI Labs See the Future First41:32 Finding Product Market Fit45:34 Great Products Don’t Need Much Marketing48:12 Very Few Things Matter52:26 How Big Can Voice AI Get55:53 Fundraising And Mission58:15 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/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