Open source is under attack, AI code is more hackable and the things a founder can control now are very very few.

Varun Badhwar is a 3x security founder, his last startup was acquired by Palo Alto networks where he grew the business from $5M ARR to $100M ARR. Now he is building Endor Labs to add controlled chaos to world of AI written code.

Varun explains how nation-state actors are exploiting defenseless open-source repositories, how AI agents invent open-source libraries, why super intelligent models write super dangerous code and how we live in strange AI world where no one is control.

Watch this episode to learn about the business and tech of securing billions (and billions lines of code).

00:00 Army Kid Turned Serial Founder
02:28 Bored at Salesforce, Built CipherCloud
05:13 Nothing Prepares You to Be CEO
08:02 $12M Raised, $250M Exit
09:47 “You’re My Biggest Competitor”.
12:40 Did RedLock Sell Too Cheap?
15:06 Why Leave Palo Alto?
18:37 Securing Code From Prompt to Deploy
20:36 Why AI Writes Hackable Code
24:41 Your Moat Can Vanish in 90 Days
29:58 Darth Vader in the Office
31:04 Things Founders Can Control
33:13 Win Customers Before First Sales Call
34:53 My Research is My Distribution
39:53 Without Trust Your Sales Funnel is Leaky
44:33 A Security Bug Can Wipe $40B Overnight
46:06 $9K Fix for a $90K Problem
49:05 War Between Engineering and Security
51:15 Hire Salespeople in Pairs
55:35 Inventing Cars vs Going Electric
58:30 100x Code, 100x Vulnerabilities?
01:02:04 Don't Build in the Bubble
01:03:02 Claude Isn't Done Until Endor Says So
01:04:25 AI Agents Make Up Libraries
01:06:09 Your Job Is to Be Bought
01:09:00 Why 90% of Startup Acquisitions Fail
01:11:42 Why Palo Alto Wins at M&A
01:14:10 Rapid Fire: AI Tools, GTM Hacks and More

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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: instagram.com/theneonshoww/
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/neon-fund
Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww

Connect with Siddhartha on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/
Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7
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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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Why would a top AI leader leave Meta at the peak of the AI boom?

Manohar Paluri is the co-founder and CTO of Warp Sciences. Before that, he spent years at Meta, where he worked closely with Yann LeCun. He started his career as an intern, and his alma mater includes IIIT Hyderabad, SRI and Georgia Tech.

In this episode Manohar explains why the magical personal assistants are just the trailer for AI, why physical intelligence is the hardest bottleneck in tech, the truth behind open-weights vs. closed models, and why he wants to build scientific superintelligence when he could have worked on anything.

If you are interested in solving the hardest problems, watch this episode.

00:00 Why Leave "Center of the Universe"?
00:57 Frontier Models and Plane Wi-Fi
03:40 AI Has Conquered Bits Not Atoms(Yet)
07:13 Why Real World Is AI's Hardest Loop
11:29 AI Assistants Are Just the Trailer
14:01 Will Frontier Eat All Software?
17:43 Open Source Isn't Truly Open?
26:28 What If Hardware Gets 10x Better?
29:58 Is Sovereign AI Needed?
38:04 Why Zuckerberg, Sundar and Elon Launch on X
42:07 Perception Drive Reality Until It Doesn’t
43:20 Spot, Learn, Leap, Build
47:46 What Yann LeCun Taught Him
50:56 Zuckerberg and $1B Instagram Bet
54:51 Finding The Bottleneck is The Hack
57:40 The Super Hard Problem To Solve
01:03:30 How to Accelerate Scientific Discovery
01:05:44 Can You Make the Elephants Dance?
01:11:10 Silicon Valley Is a Mumbai Local Train
01:14:55 The World Will Beat Pessimism Into You
01:19:14 How to Keep Going When Things Get Hard
01:23:45 Macro Optimist and Micro Pessimist

-------------
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: instagram.com/theneonshoww/
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/neon-fund
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

Send us Fan Mail

We live in strange times where AI is turning every problem into a coding problem but no one is reading the code solving those problems.

On this episode of the Neon show, we have Harjot, Co-Founder & CEO CodeRabbit. Harjot explains why they didn’t go after code generation, the infinite demand for software that is coming, why Jira and Linear are being bypassed, and why he calls today's fundraising market the weirdest he has seen.

We also explore CodeRabbit’s $8M open-source investment, the company’s $1.5B valuation, what successful agents will look like, and why founders need to learn to kill their ideas.

Watch this episode to learn about the future of software engineering and how to ride a tech wave.

00:00 Why Coding Space Exploded
00:37 From Copilot to Claude Code
01:55 Why CodeRabbit Ignored Code Generation
04:23 Is Code Review a $250B Market?
06:24 When Claude Code Fights CodeRabbit
07:16 Developers Are Now Reviewers
10:54 Clones, Rivals and the Benchmark Problem
13:08 The Weirdest Fundraising Market Ever
17:04 Seats, Margins and the Amazon Prime Problem
21:24 Finding Co-Founder in Family
24:16 Why GitHub Can't Go Away
25:59 Will AI Agents Replace Figma?
29:12 Why Adding More Engineers Creates Chaos
30:38 The Early Decisions That Worked
31:18 Sandboxes in 2023 and Skipping MCP
32:32 The $8M Open-Source Bet
33:11 From Free Users to a Paid Business
35:50 Punjab, Alcatel-Lucent and Silicon Valley
39:08 Building, Selling, and Exiting First Startup
43:50 Right Product, Wrong Timing
45:06 You Can't Create a Wave
49:38 Does Vibe Coding Need Code Review?
51:33 Every Problem Becomes a Coding Problem
53:50 Where Founders Should Build Next
56:29 The Market for Agent Change Management
59:55 Code Review, Security, and What Comes Next
-------------
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: instagram.com/theneonshoww/
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/neon-fund
Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww

Connect 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