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 depend on manual follow-ups and scattered tools.

Budy builds digital workers for sales teams: AI teammates that handle follow-ups, scheduling, and lead management across CRMs, calendars, and inboxes. Instead of adding another layer of software, Budy went zero UI-UX and focused on enabling sales teams in an industry with 99% inbound leads to manage their cold leads better.

Today, Samay joins Siddhartha (Partner at Neon Fund, and a proud investor in Budy) and shares his journey from building robots to building digital teammates for a very non-traditional industry.

00:00 – Trailer
01:00 – What Budy is building for senior care
05:15 – Real Estate × Healthcare × Hospitality
06:25 – Zero UI UX technology
10:09 – AI teammates not assistants
12:03 – How sales teams operated before Budy
12:51 – A ninety nine percent inbound industry
13:45 – The real cost of senior care homes
15:35 – Can a CRM alone solve this
17:55 – Direct benefits of a digital worker
20:49 – Two founder archetypes
22:06 – Can lights out operations become real
24:49 – What Samay underestimated about the market
25:58 – The largest players in the industry
29:07 – Treat your customer’s company like your own
30:52 – Entrepreneurship as a profession
35:36 – Unlearnings as a second time founder
37:30 – What digital workers actually are
39:47 – The original promise of SaaS
42:04 – The next decade of digital workers
45:25 – Digital workers that read best selling books
47:26 – Will Claude build CRMs
49:38 – Business etiquette across the world
55:18 – How a second time founder chooses investors
01:01:00 – Why every team member should track the P and L
01:02:14 – How Samay’s view on growth evolved

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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.

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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

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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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Do startup valuations today make sense?

Umesh Padval, an early investor in Cohere, now valued at about $7 billion shares why Cohere stood out at the time of his investment. He shares what he saw early that made him believe this was not just another AI model company.

Umesh is the Founding Managing Partner, Seligman Ventures and previously at Thomvest and Bessemer Venture Partners. He brings experience from investing across multiple tech cycles, from chips to cloud to AI. Umesh talks about how deals are really done in venture capital and what he looks for when everything feels noisy and crowded in AI.

He also shares why many strong companies are choosing to stay private and what has changed in the IPO market. Public markets now demand cash flow and durability, not just fast growth.

Umesh talks about why open source has become a powerful sales funnel for modern AI companies. Developers become the first users, and community adoption turns into long-term enterprise revenue.

After four decades in Silicon Valley and 20 years as a VC, Umesh shares what keeps him in building and investing.

0:00 – How big is the scope for investing in AI startups?
04:04 – Do unit economics justify large AI valuations?
06:00 – Thomvest’s LLM investment thesis (Cohere case study)
09:18 – Are CTO roles changing in AI
11:21 – Traits of the best AI founding teams
13:40 – Timeline to find the best founders
16:52 – Partnership with Jyoti Bansal
19:07 – Where is the IPO market headed?
23:40 – Salesforce–Clari acquisition
25:18 – Is profitability a prerequisite to go public?
26:00 – Can the India–US corridor beat US–Israel?
28:53 – Umesh’s investment philosophy
31:08 – Open source as a sales funnel
33:38 – IIT → Stanford → Startups
41:45 – The only CEO with 60 direct reports
43:43 – Why Jensen never does 1-on-1s?
48:23 – What ultimately drives Umesh Padval?

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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.

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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

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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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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 move fast and which should move slowly. He shares how he decided when to introduce processes at Rippling, when to keep things informal, and how to recognize when a process that once helped the company had started to slow it down.

We discuss how his role changed as Rippling grew from around 70 people to 100, then to 500, and now to thousands. He explains what he paid attention to at each stage and which metrics he deliberately did not obsess over.

These are practical lessons for founders, from the earliest days of a startup to the challenges of scaling a large organization.

0:00 - Trailer
01:11 – One thing people get wrong about building a business?
04:01 – Great founders find markets that already exist
06:36 – What does a “death march” mean at Apple?
10:11 – How to build a good team in early-stage startup?
12:33 – Learnings from Apple to Inkling
18:11 – Processes to set up in startups
25:20 – Humans always optimize for comfort (and why that’s bad instinct)
33:09 – Why success teaches you more than failure
36:01 – How should processes change as company scales?
42:11 – How is AI changing the software industry?
54:03 – If Matt were starting up today, how would he do it?
57:07 – How would Next-gen PM roles look like?
01:01:51 – Matt shares about Rippling CEO Parker
01:04:32 – Founder instinct vs Data
01:06:06 – Over-optimizing for employee comfort
01:07:27 – If building a startup feels comfortable, it’s probably dead
01:08:36 – One thing only CEO’s should do forever
01:11:15 – One piece of startup advice Matt doesn’t trust

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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: 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

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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.

Send us a text