The Neon Show
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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.
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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 Kr...
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 mil...
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 ...
Best of 3500 Minutes in 45 Minutes 2025 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 episo...
Harish 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 ch...
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 ...
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 C...
Most 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 begi...
If 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 whe...
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 exp...
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 Sr...
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....
You 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. W...
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 Mckinse...
What makes a great venture capitalist — luck, timing, or the ability to see what others miss? Brij Bhushan (Prime Venture Partners) and Pratik Poddar (Nexus Venture Partners) talk about the long game of venture capital; the waiting, the lessons hidden in mistakes, and the emotional ride of backing founders through years of uncertainty. With Pratik, we dive into some of the biggest names in the Nexus portfolio: his first meeting with Rapido’s founder before he even joined Nexus, the Meesho pit...
When RateGain went public, it made history as India’s first SaaS listing Founder Bhanu Chopra talks about what went into that call, how investors saw it, and what it revealed about the Indian capital market. He shares how RateGain built its global presence before turning to India, and why he bet big on a $250 million acquisition. Today, travel is changing faster than ever with travellers planning differently, hotels pricing dynamically, and APAC leading the global recovery. Bhanu breaks dow...
How do the best CEOs think, prepare, and leave a lasting legacy? Shiv Shivakumar, former CEO of PepsiCo and Nokia reflects on decades of leading some of the most iconic companies. He shares insights on what makes a great leader, from the mindset required to the qualities that define people with a fighter’s instinct. Shiv explains why commitment and curiosity often matter more than degrees or pedigrees, and why only about 7% of those who aspire to be CEOs actually become one. He also dis...
From a last-minute YC application to a $5 billion Company built on deep technical insight. In this episode, Viral Bajaria, Co-Founder and CTO of 6sense, takes us back to the very beginning. He recounts his early days at Hulu, where managing massive data systems during the Super Bowl taught him how data could drive real business decisions. Joining one of Y Combinator’s early batches, Viral recalls being interviewed by Sam Altman and Garry Tan, and how the team quit their jobs after getting in,...
How do you know whether an iOS app you have built has potential to be big? Getting an email from Steve Jobs is probably a strong indicator. Ashish Toshniwal, founder of 10Kr and YML (Y Media Labs), started by trying a bit of everything: classifieds, Groupons, and Facebook apps. That email made him quit his job, but as Ashish says, it took him and YML 14 years to become an overnight success. YML helped businesses go mobile-first long before it became a buzzword, with over 45 Fortune 500 client...
Jay Vijayan, founder of Tekion, and Tesla’s former CIO, has one of the most remarkable careers in technology and automotive. Jay joined as CIO when Tesla had almost no revenue and stayed through its growth to $5 billion ARR and $35 billion market cap. Elon Musk brought him in to build Tesla’s own ERP system at a time when most companies would have chosen ready-made solutions like SAP or Oracle. Today, Jay leads Tekion, a company valued at over $4 billion that has raised more than $640 million...
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the episode ends abruptly. is the file corrupted:?
Weirdest episode so far. Siddharth was very patient and asked good questions. The entrepreneur himself wasn't very open and sounded egotistic. Being a user of healthifyme myself disappointed. Was hoping to hear more from the entrepreneur and more expressive answers. :(
Awesome
audio quality is not upto the mark for this particular episode.. you guys should try to refine audio before publishing
Great insights .... thanks again Can you also discuss with VC on “ how one can become VC ?. Also what are process / registration to be done .
amazing sir
thanks for this amzing podcast show
amazing..its totally amazing,helping me a lot
fabulous podcasts..very useful..kindly add the different segments and their timing at the cover photo/description ...for reference you can check play to potential
Agree completely with you Nimish. The narrative on how brands are built will be completely different from now.
High speed internet will be disrupting the Marketing game for all consumer based start-ups in India within 4-5 years. Excited to see how it unfolds ✨