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 about the destination, not the journey.

As an operator who has scaled companies, Sudheesh believes sales is a noble profession where there is no middle ground. You are either a hero or a zero. Sales is not a function at the edge of the company, it is the primary job of every employee in a company. When that happens, teams stop acting like mercenaries chasing targets and start behaving like missionaries focused on customer outcomes.

Beyond agents, we also discuss building companies and whether there are right or wrong reasons to start. Sudheesh’s view is simple. There are no right or wrong reasons, but you have to be brutally honest with yourself about why you are doing it.

This episode is one hour of clear thinking on agents, sales, and the realities of company building.

00:00 – Trailer
01:49 – What % of the internet is agents today?
10:25 – How far are we from trillions of agents?
12:47 – Why isn’t the internet ready for agents?
18:31 – Consumer is a tough game
19:49 – Selling to enterprises = high value / low risk
22:14 – A noble profession with only heroes or zeroes
24:41 – Only 3 reasons why people buy anything
26:14 – How we got Fortune 500 customers in just 18 months
27:28 – The wrong reasons to start a company
31:05 – Cursor vs Claude vs Codex
34:30 – Do investors prefer failed founders over first-time founders?
35:06 – 3 reasons why an enterprise will sign your startup
39:52 – PMF has to be proven every day
41:21 – What’s the play b/w OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic?
45:12 – Drivers vs passengers in companies
47:17 – The muscles you build as an operator
50:45 – Hire one person when you actually need four
51:41 – Why is marketing the most in-demand skill?
53:50 – Nutanix: from 0 to $1B ARR in 26 quarters
54:55 – The hardest choice Nutanix made
59:25 – Talent is universal. Opportunities are not
01:04:08 – Selling is everyone’s job
01:05:58 – Passion comes from value creation

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

India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it.
This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India.

What is Neon Fund?
We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before.

Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon.

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

Check us out on:
Website: https://neon.fund/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/
Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww

Connect with Siddhartha on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/
Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7

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

This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice.

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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 rethinking enterprise software for builders, and why AI may finally make it possible to coordinate the massive complexity behind modern construction projects.

Sneha also shares her journey from industry operator to first-time founder, how Merlin found early product-market fit, the power of word-of-mouth growth in construction, and what it takes to build a vertical SaaS company in a “non-sexy” but trillion-dollar industry.

If you're curious about how AI can transform deep, complex industries this conversation is for you.

00:00 – Trailer
00:40 – Merlin x Neon
02:07 – Software for construction
04:37 – What convinced Graham to join
06:25 – Founder insights that discovered the pain points
08:43 – The team behind Merlin
10:15 – Challenges of building tech in construction
11:51 – Biggest pain points for Merlin’s customers
17:16 – Does ERP need a revolution?
17:55 – Merlin’s end-to-end ERP approach
20:39 – Why customers aren’t happy with existing solutions
24:36 – Why an AI-native approach makes sense
28:23 – What % of construction budget goes to tech
30:37 – How Y Combinator changed a first-time founder
31:50 – The role Neon played in Merlin
33:34 – Current players that excite the founders
36:43 – What it takes for Merlin to reach $10M ARR
39:57 – How to build with zero sales constraints
43:06 – Why become a founder?
45:56 – Build only for an industry you truly understand
47:41 – Why construction over manufacturing
48:38 – When customer called previous software a “black box”

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

India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it.
This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India.

What is Neon Fund?
We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before.
Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon.

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

Check us out on:
Website: https://neon.fund/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/
Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww

Connect with Siddhartha on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/
Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7

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

This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice.

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What 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 companies that already showed early product–market fit in large markets, allowing him to spend a decade helping scale them. Now as the President at Arize, he is building the “plumbing” that allows giants like Walmart and Uber to move from building AI agents to real-world production.

We discuss why “boring” infrastructure is a more durable bet than flashy AI apps, and why owning the data remains the ultimate competitive edge. Manish also shares insights on building Go-To-Market (GTM) teams in the Cloudflare era and how that strategy has shifted in the AI era.

If you are a founder or leader trying to scale a startup, this episode with Manish Jindal is for you.

00:00 – Trailer
01:00 – How Manish chose companies with early PMF
03:45 – Founder’s belief is most important
04:35 – Entering dev tooling when it wasn't popular
08:20 – Never leave a Co. you believe in for wrong reasons
09:45 – The “boring” industries that do well in Long run
12:40 – It’s easy to build an agent, but hard to scale one
15:06 – Why infra won’t be winner-take-all
18:02 – The keepers of data will win
20:20 – From million to billion in Cloudflare’s journey
21:32 – The “holy sh*t” moment happens fast for Cloudflare
24:30 – The CIO call that led to Cloudflare’s enterprise plan
27:04 – $50M and $100M ARR path of Cloudflare
28:33 – Build enterprise motion slowly or aggressively?
29:51 – Why Cloudflare didn’t want Apple as customer
32:10 – Early PMF at Splunk, Cloudflare, and Arize
35:40 – Choosing only decade-long stints
39:01 – Why Manish didn’t start his own company
43:37 – How GTM has changed in the AI world
54:25 – What agents need to work well in production
01:00:51 – Which enterprise use cases qualify for AI?
01:03:52 – What went wrong with Air Canada Agent?
01:04:52 – How customers are discovered
01:09:01 – Claude & Cursor are the most powerful agents today
01:10:55 – How Manish chooses companies to invest in
01:15:15 – Why acquisitions will become the Norm
01:18:35 – Technology is not a moat anymore

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

India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it.
This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India.

What is Neon Fund?
We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before.

Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon.

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

Check us out on:
Website: https://neon.fund/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/
Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww

Connect with Siddhartha on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/
Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7

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

This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice.

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What does it 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.

Ashmeet says that the most common way technical founders fail is by “playing house.” Founders who build beautifully organized systems and clean processes, but don’t obsessively seek product market fit. His view is that founders should ruthlessly prioritize finding PMF above everything else.

Ashmeet is an investor who has seen enough cycles to know what actually compounds, and is still early-stage enough to care about the details that most people have moved past.

00:00 – Trailer
01:15 – Where does Engineering Capital place its bets?
10:07 – How the VC landscape has evolved
11:20 – Are technical founders the norm in AI?
16:23 – Why the name Engineering Capital?
16:50 – What every VC looks for in a founder
21:34 – Why Founders Choose Your Term Sheet
26:26 – Rule of 1-2 in-person meetings daily with founders
31:42 – Does AI give younger founders an edge?
32:59 – Founders must ruthlessly prioritize
35:58 – The trap of “playing house”
37:40 – PMF can change overnight, Ex: Facebook
40:13 – 1 in 10 companies fail due to lack of PMF
43:17 – The most valuable skill a founder can have
44:19 – Why have a Chief Engineer at a VC firm?
45:44 – The job of every CEO is to learn
46:09 – Solo founders are much riskier
48:15 – An accidental entry into VC
49:52 – Solo GP: risks and rewards
53:34 – $250M across funds
54:43 – Why solo GPs work better in the US
58:25 – Where Ashmeet’s portfolio companies are located
01:00:57 – Be very careful of vanity metrics
01:02:15 – Vibe coding will change the face of software
01:03:36 – Don’t chase trends in how companies are built
01:05:58 – $100M ARR is the outcome of a strong package
01:06:35 – How affordable is Bay Area for young founders?
01:11:32 – AlexNet, not ChatGPT, was the real AI inflection point
01:12:57 – US Public Companies Are Down 50% in 40 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/TheNeonShoww

Connect with Siddhartha on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/
Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7

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

This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice.

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Over 500 billion 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 AI through Portkey, Rohit sits on ground-level data on how AI is actually being used in production. Which models enterprises are betting on. Where costs are quietly climbing. How usage patterns shift as companies move from pilots to real products.

When AI spend surpasses cloud spend, and Rohit believes it will, the infrastructure running underneath it becomes one of the most important bets in tech. This episode explores what it takes to run AI systems at that scale.

00:00 – Trailer
01:05 – 500 billion AI tokens every day
04:05 – First to call an "AI gateway"
07:26 – Where did the Gateway insight come from?
12:08 – How Portkey is winning this space
13:05 – Picking the right gambles over wrong ones
14:16 – What are LLM endpoints?
15:21 – AI will 100% surpass cloud spend
19:00 – Hype is coming from people still in Q&A mode
19:33 – AI employees over humans in customer support?
23:00 – For AI startups, traffic > revenue
24:43 – The bubble is in valuations, not utility
26:05 – How Rohit built his personal automations
28:38 – Costliest model is most used now
33:21 – What's going right and wrong for AI companies
37:49 – Hiring a VP of sales after $15M is possible today
39:57 – What edge does Claude have over other models?
43:35 – Founders need a "why me vs. why Anthropic" story
52:56 – What if Anthropic or AWS builds a gateway?
55:41 – Predictions for the next 12 months
59:40 – How big is the opportunity in Agents?
01:00:48 – Startups now have to prove it's not a weekend project
01:01:54 – Is Build v/s Buy no longer a Debate?
01:03:50 – What would Rohit build if starting up today?
01:05:58 – How Portkey is different from an API gateway
01:08:26 – MCP / tool calling enables agentic workflows
01:12:00 – Portkey's Community-driven early GTM
01:13:34 – Startups have only 2 reasons for Open core

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

India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it.
This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India.

What is Neon Fund?
We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before.

Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon.

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

Check us out on:
Website: https://neon.fund/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/
Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww

Connect with Siddhartha on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/
Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7

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

This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice.

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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 for it. FirstClub is trying to solve a harder problem. It is trying to define what “quality” means for everyday products we consume, starting with groceries.

India has received the highest quick commerce funding of any country in the world, at $9.24B over the last 10 years. Yet only 1% of Indians use quick commerce services today. With a large market still open for expansion and the possibility of better unit economics over time, FirstClub is building a countertrend to the hype around Indian quick commerce.

Ayyappan brings eleven years of experience at Flipkart, and has also served as SVP at Myntra and CEO of Cleartrip. This episode is the story till here and the plans ahead for Firstclub.

00:00 – Trailer
01:01 – The Costco of Indian quick commerce
04:32 – Building a counter-trend company
06:15 – What consumers say v/s what they actually want
09:37 – The only retail platform to Ban 200 ingredients
12:34 – Why can’t the big players solve this?
13:21 – A simple rule of thumb for food
16:03 – Brand stories from FirstClub
19:20 – Is the problem access or income?
21:29 – Who are the 20 million FirstClub consumers?
24:14 – Only 1% of India uses quick commerce
26:04 – What does “quality” mean in grocery?
32:34 – How will FirstClub monetize without brand sponsorships?
34:53 – Do consumers behave differently across categories?
39:30 – Why is Myntra so powerful in fashion?
42:24 – What Myntra taught Ayyapan that Flipkart didn’t?
43:53 – Unlearning to build for Quick commerce
48:25 – Why Indian consumers are very experimental today
50:59 – Is India one country when it comes to quality?
52:43 – If Ayyappan was a product, what would he be?
54:47 – The hardest belief to defend while building FirstClub
56:26 – Akshayakalpa & The Whole Truth
57:48 – Not niche, but premium

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

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/TheNeonShoww

Connect with Nansi on:

LinkedIn: https://in.linkedin.com/in/nansi-mishra
X: 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.

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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 hundredth of the size, almost no loss in accuracy.

Two years later he put in his own $150K, got some GPUs, and started training. Eighteen months later he had a seed round, a Series A, a seven-figure enterprise deal, and a $150M acquisition offer he turned down.

Most of the data that goes into large models is noise. Strip it out, train small, and you get a model that matches a giant at a fraction of the size and runs in real time. That insight is what Smallest AI is built on.

00:00 – Trailer
00:51 – Sudarshan's journey before Smallest AI
05:00 – Arjun Jain & Yann LeCun
08:20 – Why build in voice AI in 2024?
15:09 – Why move the company from India to the US?
17:25 – Hiring talent via LinkedIn and X
18:49 – What large US funds actually bring to startups
21:03 – Raising a seed round with zero revenue
26:06 – Strong intros from US VCs
28:23 – What the first enterprise customer teaches you
31:50 – Raising Series A with Seligman Ventures
32:19 – The $150M acquisition offer
34:32 – When should founders sell secondaries?
36:24 – Who are Smallest AI's customers?
38:28 – What are state space models?
40:16 – Are GEPA models closer to AGI?
41:23 – Growing 10× in three months
48:03 – This is not a winner-takes-all market
49:32 – Why this is a trillion-dollar market
50:08 – Why large AI labs are not building in voice
51:26 – What it takes to reach $100M ARR
54:21 – The biggest goal for 2026
57:11 – Voice costs 1000× more than text
01:02:04 – How Smallest AI cracked large enterprises

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

India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it.
This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India.

What is Neon Fund?
We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before.
Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon.

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

Check us out on:
Website: https://neon.fund/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/
Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww

Connect with Siddhartha on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/
Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7

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

This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice.

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What 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 this missing layer is the biggest opportunity in enterprise AI right now, and that the startups that capture it will be the biggest winners in AI.

In this episode, we go deeper into what context graphs really are, how they get built, why startups have an edge over incumbents, and how close we are to seeing this work in practice.

00:00 – Trailer
00:42 – What are context graphs?
03:57 – Why agents haven’t lived up to the hype?
07:03 – The “why” of Decision Making
10:47 – How agents will store data for context graphs
13:17 – What will be possible for Digital twins?
17:32 – Can context graphs reveal a company’s moat?
19:48 – Guardrails on Access for agents
24:47 – Managing agents vs being managed by agents
28:46 – Will winners be vertical or horizontal players?
32:20 – The future is agent swarms
35:54 – Finding PMF is what makes a great CEO
39:34 – What will set apart successful enterprises of 2030
42:10 – Where Foundation Capital is investing
44:05 – Why AI won’t be winner-takes-all
47:03 – Where will the context graph reside?
50:56 – Will systems of record be replaced?
53:22 – Human in the loop → hands-off execution
55:57 – A reality check on where we are today
58:24 – Where startups will win in orchestration

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

India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it.
This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India.

What is Neon Fund?
We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before.

Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon.

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

Check us out on:
Website: https://neon.fund/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/
Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww

Connect with Siddhartha on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/
Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7

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

This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice.

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