The Neon Show

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 syste...

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 onl...

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 co...

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...

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...

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 d...

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 mov...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...