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

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

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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

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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

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From a boutique industry of ~20 firms to today where there are specialised funds for every stage, geography and category, Venture Capital has changed radically.

On this episode we have Nakul Mandan from Audacious Ventures. Nakul came to Silicon Valley at 28 expecting to be fired. He left Lightspeed in 2020, spent 14 months raising a $90M first fund in the middle of a pandemic, then watched ChatGPT changing the game entirely during his first two years of investing.

In this episode, Nakul shares how his thinking evolved from being thesis-driven to people-driven, why he believes only five thousand people shape Silicon Valley, why there is always a younger, hungrier investor coming for you and how to invest millions of dollars in 20 year old founders.

Watch this episode to understand the new Venture Capital and how it's operating in the hyper-speed AI world.

00:00 The Most Intense VC in Silicon Valley
02:30 5,000 People Run Silicon Valley
05:44 The Drive Behind the Intensity
09:13 Why You Never Arrive in Silicon Valley
11:17 Sourcing, Picking, Winning, Helping
14:37 The Ego-Bruising Reality of Fundraising
19:55 Bull Runs, Crashes, and ChatGPT
22:44 Slowing Down Deployment
24:21 Why $1B AI Companies Can Still Be Cheap
27:38 How AWS, YC, and AngelList Changed Venture
32:30 The Freedom (and Pressure) of Building Audacious
39:27 Making VC Math Work
43:06 Defining the Improbable Outcome
45:29 The 5 Traits of Exceptional Founders
48:16 When You’re on the Fence, Lean In
50:51 The Audacious Unfair Advantage
56:40 The Power Law of People
58:07 Finding Exceptional 21-Year-Old Founders
01:03:30 Backing WorkOS and Multiverse
01:10:39 Passing on Figma
01:20:24 Bubbles, Time Diversity and Staying Power
01:23:14 Why Ambitious Founders Move to Bay Area

-------------
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: / theneonshoww
LinkedIn: https://www.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

Tim Guleri has spent 25 years in venture capital. Before that, he built companies with $3.8B in combined exits. And before that, he was a Punjabi guy selling Bibles door to door in the US.

In this episode, we go deep into AI, venture capital, fundraising, SaaS, Silicon Valley and how great investors actually make decisions.

We discuss the Gatorade Rule for equity, why Airtable sold for 2x, why 9–5 fails in Silicon Valley, why revenue durability matters more than hyperspeed growth, why Tim still operates at 120% all the time, how Sierra selects 30 companies out of 30,000, and how he missed Salesforce.

Listen to this conversation to learn what it takes to win gold in the Olympics of tech.

00:00 Selling Bibles to $3.8B in Exits
01:03 Operating with Only One Gear
03:02 The Founder LOVE Framework
05:17 Four Audiences Every Founder Must Win
07:24 My $100B Mistake: Salesforce
10:42 Avoid Building Companies with 'Stretch Marks'
13:10 The Gatorade Theory of Startup Funding
15:46 Don’t Chase the Next Anthropic
18:22 Raising Sierra’s 14th Fund
19:31 Is AI Really Killing SaaS?
24:30 Golden Age of Indian Entrepreneurs
29:36 How Sierra Selects 30 Out of 30,000
32:11 "We Are Street Fighters"
35:34 Why Real Work Happens After Hours
35:57 Why He Refused to Retire After a $3B Exit
37:24 What 25 Years in Venture Teaches You
40:28 Silicon Valley Has an IPO Problem
44:00 How a VC Firm Survives for 100 Years
46:07 Is 3x Growth Still Enough?
50:49 Why Party Rounds Ruin Startups
56:32 Investing in Pre-Revenue Startups
59:10 Why Great VCs Need Killer Instinct
01:04:55 How Sierra Moves Fast
-------------
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: / theneonshoww
LinkedIn: https://www.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

Now, everyone’s talking about building AI harnesses and context layers. Kashish has been building these for years and Hightouch has now reached a stage where they are challenging giants like Adobe and Salesforce while crossing $100M in revenue.

In this episode we discussed how and why LLMs like ChatGPT and Gemini are failing marketing teams at enterprises, why marketing is a coding problem, what makes a harness “ thick”, why it’s a CEO’s job to be Chief Pipeline Generator in early years, controversial decisions that worked perfectly for Hightouch and why now is the time for 100x Marketer.

Listen to the episode to look into the future of marketing

00:00 Quitting VC to become a Founder
01:35 Travel Startup with Terrible Margins
03:25 From Slack Agents to Customer Data
04:31 Saving a Bank $6M on "Unmarketing"
05:45 Why Make Composable CDP?
07:53 Why Every Other CDP Was Broken
11:33 Where Hightouch Creates Real ROI
12:48 Agents That Surface Revenue
16:47 Inside a Multi-Million Dollar Enterprise Rollout
21:41 Will AI Replace Marketers?
25:18 Why Skipped SMBs for Fortune 500
26:54 The Rippling Model of Running a Startup
27:48 Going Multi-Product Early
29:38 The 100x Marketer
33:03 Unstructured Data, Lead Lists & Synthetic Signals
34:49 How AI Launches Ads in New Markets
36:13 Does Marketing Success Guarantee Revenue?
38:07 What Is a "Marketing Harness"?
40:52 Thick Harness vs. Thin Harness
45:10 How Hightouch Fits Into the Enterprise Stack
46:54 Controversial Founder Decisions
49:15 Building the Company of Tomorrow
52:07 AI, GTM and Sales
-------------
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/
https: https://www.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

How do investors(LPs) invest in investors(VCs) when the world is changing so fast?

Vishal Verma has invested in 20+ VC(Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, General Catalyst) funds and has seen 4 market cycles. Vishal has spent decades investing in and alongside some of the biggest venture funds in Silicon Valley.

In this episode, we cover the less talked about side of venture ecosystem: LPs, family offices, access, co-investments, fund cycles and how VC has changed.

We also discuss Anthropic, SpaceX, trillion-dollar IPOs, the shrinking Silicon Valley middle class, why large VC funds can no longer make small bets, roll-up strategies and what Vishal has learned from investing through multiple market cycles.

Watch this episode to learn how venture ecosystem works

00:00 From ISRO to Silicon Valley
04:06 From Operator to Investor
05:58 The Early Sequoia Bet
08:07 From $300M to $15B Funds
12:24 Access Matters More Than Capital
15:02 Building Redwood Collective
19:10 Trillion-Dollar IPOs
27:24 How Silicon Valley’s Mafias Compound
31:30 How VC Returns Changed
34:02 The Disappearing Middle Class
36:14 Why People Are Leaving California
37:36 Why Big Funds Can’t Make Small Bets
39:30 Why Unicorns Aren’t Enough Anymore
40:18 What Happens After the IPO
43:02 VC Firms Becoming Financial Giants?
45:56 Why He Ignores IRR
49:25 Is AI a Commodity?
53:10 Next Generation of VC Funds
59:00 Inside the Roll-Up Strategy
01:02:36 Surviving Four Market Cycles

-------------
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.

Send us Fan Mail

What if we are looking at the wrong layer?

Avinash helped build Dynamo at Amazon, created Cassandra at Facebook, two of the most widely used distributed systems in the industry. Later he founded Hedvig, which was acquired for $225M with a team of under 15 engineers. Now with Weilliptic he is building the infrastructure layer for a world run by autonomous AI agents.

In this episode Avinash explains why he believes open-weight models will win, why LLMs will become commodities, why Python will become a serious problem for data-centers as millions of agents come online, why enterprises will need an immutable audit trail for agents, and what happens when a 10-person company starts running 1,000 autonomous agents.

Watch this episode to to understand the business and tech of AI infrastructure.

00:00 Is AI Infra in a Bubble?
03:08 The Missing Path to Profits
06:06 What Actually is AI Infrastructure?
08:41 Why Cloud Never Got Cheaper
11:42 The Cloud Lock-In Trap
15:21 Inference Providers Will Consolidate
19:58 AI Has a Python Problem
25:50 Rust + WASM is the Future of AI Security
27:08 From Dynamo to Cassandra to Hedvig
29:27 Why Avinash Started Welleptic
32:43 Solving Data and Compute Sovereignty
36:53 AI Needs an Audit Ledger
39:17 Why Avinash Started Hedvig
40:15 Building for the Multi-Cloud World
41:50 $52M Raised, Only 15 Engineers
43:01 Why Infrastructure Takes Time to Sell
44:52 The $225M Acquisition
46:00 What Makes a Good Deal?
50:07 How Hedvig Grew to $15M+ ARR
57:44 How Welleptic Makes Money
01:00:43 When 10 Employees Run 1,000 Agents

-------------
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.

Send us Fan Mail