The Neon Show
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Description
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.
337 Episodes
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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...
Switzerland has quietly built one of the world’s most stable and trusted startup ecosystems. Thomas Dübendorfer, founder and president of SICTIC, Switzerland’s largest angel investing network with over 500 members and more than 400 startups joins Neon show. Thomas talks about how Switzerland’s startup scene has changed over the past decade from a cautious investor community to one that now has 58 unicorns across sectors like fintech, AI, crypto, and deeptech. He explains what Switzerlan...
Ever received a push notification on your phone? There’s a good chance it came through MoEngage. Raviteja Dodda, founder of MoEngage, shares the story of building a SaaS company from India that now sends 80 billion messages to 2 billion users across 1,200 brands. A decade-long journey of MoEngage from its early years to becoming a category leader in customer engagement. He shares how the company grew by focusing on Indian customers as the strongest validation of product-market fit...
This episode with Prof. Arun Kumar is a look at the Indian economy beyond headlines and GDP numbers. We discuss the paradox behind India’s growth story: when GDP rises, does it really reach the people? We explore how poverty in India has officially fallen from 27% to 5.3% in just over a decade, yet real wages have been shrinking, especially for rural workers. If fewer people are poor on paper, but incomes aren’t rising, what’s actually driving this improvement? We talk about how the s...
“When I saw Google change the destiny of the planet, I could not imagine doing anything else but working with brilliant entrepreneurs.” -Asha Jadeja Motwani and her husband, Rajeev Motwani, the Silicon Valley legend of technical startups, are together the founding stakeholders of Google. In the late 1990s, they came to the United States as most Indians, as students. From being part of Google’s early days to their journey as investors and now, extending that into an active participation in Ame...
Cybercrime is predicted to drain the world of $10.5 trillion annually by 2025, making it one of the greatest threats to modern business. Shikhil Sharma, co-founder & CEO of Astra Security, is building one of today’s most trusted pentesting platforms. Just last year, Astra uncovered over 2 million vulnerabilities across customer systems, preventing more than $69 million in potential losses Shikhil shares why Astra was built as a product- and marketing-first company, how storytelling helped...
“Push something a millimetre in the private sector, you make an inch of progress. In the public sector, it’s a mile of progress.” Subroto Bagchi started his career as a clerk in the Odisha government in 1976, leaving postgraduate studies. Today, eight years after serving at the rank of cabinet minister in the same government, he has certainly changed countless lives, not nameless faces. In this conversation, he passionately shares stories of young men and women from Odisha who overcame gener...
Ashu Garg has backed companies like Databricks, Turing, Cohesity, Jasper, and Eightfold.ai as General Partner at Foundation Capital. Over the years, he’s seen multiple waves of innovation but in his words, nothing in the last 45 years comes close to the transformation AI is bringing right now. Ashu discusses how the next wave of AI products will be driven by combining reasoning with reinforcement learning, and cautions every startup building on top of foundation models: that their vendors wil...
A full founder’s arc: starting small, building global SaaS companies from Hyderabad, taking one to IPO, another to a billion-dollar exit, and then choosing to begin again (and again). Kiran Darisi began at Zoho, founding team member of Freshworks at 25, and stayed twelve years till the company went public. Today he is building Atomicwork, reinventing service management in the AI era. Sreedhar Peddineni started with Host Analytics back when SaaS was still called application service provi...
A 14-year journey from bootstrap to scale. Exotel’s story is one of India’s most remarkable SaaS journeys. Shivakumar Ganesan, started Exotel in 2011, bootstrapping it from the ground up. In 2012, he raised a seed round of ₹2.5 crore, but for the next eight years, the company grew without any external funding. Then came COVID and revenue went from $10M to $5M and what followed were bold strategic moves. 3 funding rounds, 2 major acquisitions, and the decision to stay focused on the Indian mar...
The software that powers 25% of India’s e-commerce transactions, processes a billion orders each year, and in 2025 alone fulfilled 20 million quick-commerce orders: Unicommerce sits at the core of India’s digital retail ecosystem. It is one of the few SaaS companies from India to go public, doing so after nearly a decade of steady growth without fresh primary capital until its IPO in 2024. In this episode of The Neon Show, we sit down with Kapil Makhija, CEO of Unicommerce, the company ...
The 21st century has shattered old assumptions about diplomacy. Relationships between nations are no longer guided by ideology or morality, but driven by pragmatism and national interest. This week, former diplomat Rajiv Sikri who served 36 years in the Indian Foreign Service, offers a deep dive into how global power dynamics are shifting. We discuss why the United States still remains the only true great power, yet its tariff policies are reshaping global trade and forcing countries li...
Ashok Atluri founded Zen Technologies in 1993, bootstrapping from Hyderabad at a time when India was importing 70% of its defence equipment and private players contributed just 5% of procurements. It took Zen five years to win its first contract from the Indian Army in 1998. Today, the company builds simulators and anti-drone systems, and has grown its market cap from ₹40 crore to over ₹13,000 crore. Ashok shares that India needs to make it easier for private, self-funded R&D companies to...
From idea to IPO and beyond. What does it take to back a company for nearly two decades? There are no written rules to navigate one of the most important relationships in a startup. One between a founder and an investor. This episode is an inside look at how one of India’s longest founder-investor relationships was built and tested, between Yashish Dahiya (Policybazaar) and Sanjeev Bikhchandani (Info Edge). In 2008, a ₹20 crore cheque was signed for 49 percent of the company, based sole...
1The global strategy consulting market stands at $39.5 billion, with Asia commanding $9.1 billion. India contributes just $1.09 billion. This is despite having the talent; Indians run global back-offices for McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Deloitte, and other consultancies. Yet, India continues to outsource strategy to the Big 4. Sanjeev Sanyal, PM Modi’s Economic Advisor joins us to break this down. We discuss the factors helping and hindering India’s growth opportunities. Sanjeev has long worked on imp...
This episode is not just about Kerala; it is about how a state with limited land, strict environmental regulations, and a long history of outmigration is approaching investment and growth. Kerala is a small, densely populated state with limited land to spare, not the typical site for industrial expansion. Yet it’s taking a distinct approach to building a knowledge based economy. P. Rajeev (Minister for Industries, Law and Coir, Govt of Kerala) joins us to break this down. We discuss how Ker...
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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 ✨