Podcasts about Siddhartha

Reflections on the meaning of rohatsu and what was happening for Siddhartha in the week leading up to his awakening. (Koun Franz; December 3, 2024)You can support Thousand Harbours Zen and learn more about our practice by visiting thousandharbourszen.com; talks are also available on the Thousand Harbours Zen YouTube Channel.Post-production by Tod Nyokai

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 marketing00:00 Quitting VC to become a Founder01:35 Travel Startup with Terrible Margins03:25 From Slack Agents to Customer Data04:31 Saving a Bank $6M on "Unmarketing"05:45 Why Make Composable CDP?07:53 Why Every Other CDP Was Broken11:33 Where Hightouch Creates Real ROI12:48 Agents That Surface Revenue16:47 Inside a Multi-Million Dollar Enterprise Rollout21:41 Will AI Replace Marketers?25:18 Why Skipped SMBs for Fortune 50026:54 The Rippling Model of Running a Startup27:48 Going Multi-Product Early29:38 The 100x Marketer33:03 Unstructured Data, Lead Lists & Synthetic Signals34:49 How AI Launches Ads in New Markets36:13 Does Marketing Success Guarantee Revenue?38:07 What Is a "Marketing Harness"?40:52 Thick Harness vs. Thin Harness45:10 How Hightouch Fits Into the Enterprise Stack46:54 Controversial Founder Decisions49:15 Building the Company of Tomorrow52:07 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-fundTwitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShowwConnect 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 works00:00 From ISRO to Silicon Valley04:06 From Operator to Investor05:58 The Early Sequoia Bet08:07 From $300M to $15B Funds12:24 Access Matters More Than Capital15:02 Building Redwood Collective19:10 Trillion-Dollar IPOs27:24 How Silicon Valley's Mafias Compound31:30 How VC Returns Changed34:02 The Disappearing Middle Class36:14 Why People Are Leaving California37:36 Why Big Funds Can't Make Small Bets39:30 Why Unicorns Aren't Enough Anymore40:18 What Happens After the IPO43:02 VC Firms Becoming Financial Giants?45:56 Why He Ignores IRR49:25 Is AI a Commodity?53:10 Next Generation of VC Funds59:00 Inside the Roll-Up Strategy01:02:36 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/TheNeonShowwConnect 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 Profits06:06 What Actually is AI Infrastructure?08:41 Why Cloud Never Got Cheaper11:42 The Cloud Lock-In Trap15:21 Inference Providers Will Consolidate19:58 AI Has a Python Problem25:50 Rust + WASM is the Future of AI Security27:08 From Dynamo to Cassandra to Hedvig29:27 Why Avinash Started Welleptic32:43 Solving Data and Compute Sovereignty36:53 AI Needs an Audit Ledger39:17 Why Avinash Started Hedvig40:15 Building for the Multi-Cloud World41:50 $52M Raised, Only 15 Engineers43:01 Why Infrastructure Takes Time to Sell44:52 The $225M Acquisition46:00 What Makes a Good Deal?50:07 How Hedvig Grew to $15M+ ARR57:44 How Welleptic Makes Money01:00:43 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/TheNeonShowwConnect 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

"Siddhartha" by Hermann Hesse is a profound exploration of self-discovery and spiritual enlightenment, following the journey of a young man named Siddhartha as he seeks to understand the true nature of life and existence. This timeless narrative delves into themes of inner peace, the quest for knowledge, and the balance between material wealth and spiritual fulfillment. Its philosophical insights resonate deeply in today's world, where many continue to grapple with questions of purpose and identity. Hesse's lyrical prose and the universal quest for meaning ensure that "Siddhartha" remains a relevant and inspiring read, inviting listeners to reflect on their own paths toward enlightenment.

We don't want the industry to fall apart, that's why we started this company.6 months ago, everyone was talking about model deployment. Now everyone has moved on to agentic AI deployment and autonomous agent swarms. But all of this is running on an infrastructure that itself is not automated.And this underlying infrastructure has massive GPU cluster systems. If even one GPU fails the whole training workload fails. You can't have 100,000 employees managing 100,000 GPUs. But LLMs are not the right solution for managing the infrastructure.Kandan and Randolph have spent decades operating large-scale telecom and cloud infrastructure, in a world where pagers used to run lives of people managing it. With MantisGrid they have come together to build 'The' model for AI infrastructure.Watch the episode to understand why making AI infrastructure autonomous is so important, why LLMs are not the answer, and what it takes to build the systems that will keep millions of agents running.00:00 — Invisible Infrastructure Behind AI01:05 — The Pager Nightmare04:01 — The GPU Problem Nobody's Solving05:38 — The Cloud Infrastructure Story07:53 — Why Just Watching Isn't Enough09:35 — Building the Waymo of AI Infrastructure15:00 — How an Autonomous AI Infra System Works20:35 — What Happens to DevOps?22:46 — Why LLMs Shouldn't Run Production29:14 — The Path to a Billion Dollars32:06 — The Problem Hyperscalers Can't Solve37:03 — Earning Trust to Run Infrastructure39:55 — When Agents Start Managing 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/TheNeonShowwConnect 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

Pour répondre à nos besoins, nous allons nous doter d'un plan avec des objectifs. Ce qui est séduisant dans un objectif que nous visons, c'est sa pureté. À ce moment précis, tout est encore statique. Ça nous semble alors si simple et linéaire. Il est facile de se promettre à soi-même que peu importe ce qui va survenir, on va s'en tenir à ce qui est convenu. C'est ce qui m'est arrivé au moment d'enregistrer l'épisode 201, en début d'année, où je me suis conçu mon propre plan de développement. Un de mes objectifs portait sur la musculation. Selon ce plan, je dois tenir un journal de bord. À chaque trimestre, je fais état de mes réflexions en concevant un épisode de balado. Pour ce troisième trimestre (juillet, août, septembre), je souhaite aborder les difficultés à maintenir intactes nos intentions de départ. Bien que je poursuive les activités physiques comme prévu, ma démarche a perdu beaucoup de sa pureté en cours de route. J'ai eu plusieurs écarts alimentaires durant l'été. En forçant, je me suis aussi blessé. En voulant réaliser un objectif, on en vient à salir l'image idéalisée qu'on avait au départ. Il y a progrès, mais ça se fait un peu tout croche, sans jamais être en plein contrôle. Pour appuyer ma réflexion, j'ai décidé de me référer au récit de Siddhartha, publié en 1922 par Hermann Hesse. L'auteur lui-même traversait une profonde crise existentielle au moment de l'écriture de ce livre. D'habitude, quand il est question de quête spirituelle, c'est souvent un bel éloge à la pureté. Avec la quête de Siddhartha, j'y vois plutôt l'inverse. Pour parvenir à sa vérité, Siddhartha ne suit pas un chemin propre : il se perd, ternit l'image idéalisée qu'il avait de lui-même et c'est justement de cette chute (non maîtrisée, non voulue) qu'émerge une sagesse qu'aucune discipline n'aurait pu lui donner. De cette lecture, j'en ai retiré 4 leçons transférables à ma propre démarche: Leçon #1 : Ne suis pas un chemin de vérité qui n'est pas encore ta vérité Leçon #2 : Se salir pour ne plus craindre de se salir Leçon #3 : La vie, c'est court, mais c'est long des petits bouts Leçon #4 : Les relations n'ont jamais rien de pur Par cet épisode, mon objectif est de rejoindre tous ceux qui souhaitent se développer et qui doivent composer avec des doutes profonds durant leur parcours. Cette citation, attribuée à André Malraux, témoigne bien de la complexité de ce défi : La sagesse est plus vulnérable que la beauté ; car la sagesse est un art impur. Ordre du jour 0m23: Introduction 24m53: Présentation du livre et sa critique 31m04: Leçon #1 : Ne suis pas un chemin de vérité qui n'est pas encore ta vérité 35m35: Leçon #2 : Se salir pour ne plus craindre de se salir 41m29: Leçon #3 : La vie, c'est court, mais c'est long des petits bouts 46m37: Leçon #4 : Les relations n'ont jamais rien de pur 55m15: Réflexions personnelles Pour encore plus de détails, consulte la page web de l'épisode.

Context has become one of the busiest categories in AI. Every CIO now wants context Engine. Every legacy data catalog and knowledge graph platform has started calling itslef a "context platform”.  At the same time reports say that 60% of CEOs say they've got $0 benefit from AI.To understand the nuances, on this episode we have Prukalpa, Founder of Atlan. Atlan started solving this problem back in 2020, long before it became the hottest category. And today it counts 20% of the Fortune 500 as customers with an 85% competitive win rate.Prukalpa explains how context for agents requires knowledge, expertise, and norms, why Gartner's “context is king” made the category hot but also created confusion in the market, and why companies now treat context as strategic IP.00:00 Context Is King03:20 From Data To Agents05:00 Scaling To 200 Customers06:37 Product Market Fit Truths11:19 Landing The First Customers18:44 Data Teams Couldn't Trust Their Data21:07 Building the Enterprise Brain26:19 Problem With Horizontal Products30:21 Why CIOs Buy Context Now34:59 Positioning in a New Category36:33 Context as a Business Asset37:20 The Shared Enterprise Brain40:50 Shaping the Category41:22 What is AI Native?43:21 Self Improving Company46:50 Team Patterns of Frontier Companies48:42 Judgment and Taste Matter More Now50:04 Atlan AI Experiments50:59 Building Investor Network55:14 Waterbridge to Peak XV to Insight59:37 Don't Rush to Find PMF01:01:57 Everyone Must Build01:06:17 Real Bottleneck to Scale Isn't 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/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShowwConnect 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

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“You have to take crazy risks” Nikhil Gupta got fired at 42, made his first VC pitch in 2000, got the idea for ArmorCode while buying toilet paper during the pandemic and received his first VC cheque in 2020.Today ArmorCode has raised $81M, grown 100% year-over-year, and counts some of the world's largest enterprises as customers.Nikhil Gupta, Founder & CEO of ArmorCode, shares why he studied 7,000 security companies before starting up, why 3 early customers can be the "kiss of death" for startups, why customers don't always tell founders the truth, why developers hate security tools and why security is the ultimate bottleneck to AI's growth.This conversation is as much about enterprise security as it is about a founder's conviction and refusing to give up on a dream.-------------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/TheNeonShowwConnect 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 is happiness when there's so much hate and misery? Hate as in hate, but also hate as in anger, irritation, disparagement, aversion? And misery as in desperation? And what if these states are contagious? If my response to external hate is to volley right back, aren't I just perpetuating sorrow? If my response to my own tight heart is to hate myself (or even to quietly chastise, or despair), same question.But then what's the “happiness” shift? It has to be to care about those in misery, and to love those who hate. Including ourselves. The more misery and hate I see, the more I think Dr. King and Mother Teresa and Gandhi and Siddhartha were right: hate never ceases by hate, but by love alone is healed – and they must have meant love, full stop, not just for the good guys. 

How do you fix a $5 Trillion Industry which wastes $500 Billion on mouse clicks every year?By not considering even a $100 Billion company a success. By hiring people who are heat-seeking missiles for pain. By questioning every default. By solving hard problems, then choosing even harder ones. By moving with an urgency that surprises everyone but you.In this episode, Tanay Tandon, Co-Founder & CEO, Commure explains why US healthcare is a massive but inefficient market, which pays ~$500B in administrative “work tax,” and how language models and agentic software can automate much of that work, make healthcare feel like a Waymo, and give healthcare professionals more time to focus on actual care.Watch this episode to learn what it takes to build and win in a massive, inefficient market. 00:00 - Heat-Seeking Missiles for Pain01:30 - Speed Above Everything03:11 - The $5 Trillion Healthcare Problem03:56 - Epic Wasn't Built for AI06:13 - The $500 Billion Admin Leak07:24 - Why Healthcare Moves Slowly10:14 - Why Hospitals Are Hard to Sell To12:09 - The Real Opportunity Is Labour13:41 - Point Solution or Platform?15:16 - One Customer Pays $100 Million22:46 - More Bad Days Than Good Days25:18 - AI Changed the Healthcare Game28:40 - Incentives Matter More Than Technology30:24 - Healthcare's App Store Moment32:20 - Why $100 Billion Isn't Big Enough36:19 - Who Takes the Blame When AI Gets It Wrong?38:32 - The Waymo Moment for Healthcare39:46 - How the Best Startups Hire42:12 - Customer Obsession Beats Everything43:52 - Stop Paying the AI Experiment Tax51:10 - Insurance Companies Are Terrific Enemies55:34 - The Hidden Opportunities in Healthcare59:35 - How to Win AI Talent War-------------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/TheNeonShowwConnect 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

In this episode, Siddhartha Borah, cofounder and CTO of Brackett AI, joins us at Heavybit DevGuild. Siddhartha explains how Brackett is building agents that can learn complex business work — especially in areas like supply chain and operations, where the real context often lives in people's heads rather than documentation. We talk about teaching agents by doing the work, turning messy human knowledge into reliable workflows, agent-in-the-loop systems, memory, knowledge graphs, and why the last mile of enterprise automation is so hard.Links:• Siddhartha Borah's LinkedIn• Brackett AI• Heavybit DevGuild 00:00 Intro00:30 What Brackett AI is building01:40 Learning work that was never written down03:30 Turning human context into repeatable workflows05:20 Why real-world agents fail without hidden context08:00 Teaching agents by doing the work09:50 Handling edge cases and human handoff11:30 Memory, knowledge graphs, and “déjà vu” for agents14:00 Where to learn more

Episode #599: “I've been blessed to be on a spiritual journey for well over the last 50 years,” says psychiatrist Raman Khosla, reflecting on the lifelong search that eventually led him to S.N. Goenka's Vipassana tradition. In this, the first in a series of ongoing conversation with Insight Myanmar, he traces the influences that shaped his quest to understand suffering and the mind. Khosla credits his parents with creating a deeply spiritual home grounded in the Bhagavad Gita's teachings on devotion, selfless action, ethics, and compassion. His fascination with the causes of suffering and inner transformation began in childhood. He recalls asking why a classmate was sad, noticing that physical pain changed while sitting quietly during family yoga sessions, and questioning why religious chants described moral transformation without explaining how it could be achieved. As a teenager, an underlying dissatisfaction persisted despite an outwardly fortunate life. Reading about the Buddha, Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, and encountering dedicated religious figures strengthened his conviction that genuine inner freedom must be possible. He explored numerous traditions, learning from Osho Rajneesh, the Ramakrishna Mission, the Bihar School of Yoga, and especially Jiddu Krishnamurti. While each offered valuable insights, none fully answered his central question: how can profound psychological transformation actually be realized? Believing the mind to be the most important subject of study, Khosla pursued medicine and psychiatry, hoping science and spirituality would illuminate the same mystery. During postgraduate training, however, he concluded that while Western psychiatry effectively treated mental illness, it offered far less guidance for cultivating humanity's highest mental potential. Ajahn Sumedho's Chitta Viveka further convinced him that the Buddha's teachings described a lived reality rather than an abstract philosophy. Everything changed in 1987 when Khosla attended his first ten-day Goenka Vipassana course. He describes it as “the biggest single life-changing event of my life,” transforming the study of the mind from an intellectual pursuit into direct experience. Although he immediately wanted to dedicate himself fully to the practice, Goenka advised him first to complete his psychiatric training and allow the transition to unfold naturally, setting the stage for the next chapter of his journey.

When brands can't figure out how LLMs are ranking them, what do they do?upGrad raised close to $800M, made year long online degrees mainstream in India when everyone said it wasn't possible, and in the process became a trusted brand in Indian education.Phalgun Kompalli is the co-founder of upGrad. Now, on his second founder journey, he is helping brands become visible to AI.In this episode, Phalgun shares why he chose to build an AI company, how Bodhium Labs helps brands influence LLMs, why lazy marketing is dead and why AI services can be more defensible than AI products.He also shares hard-won lessons from upGrad, from expanding into too many markets at once, to hiring far too fast, to discovering that a highly valuable brand can be worth nothing to a customer.00:00 Founding UpGrad02:55 Why We Bet on LLMs06:35 The GEO Moat10:18 Inside the LLM12:07 Why Services Won Early13:35 Building an AI Research Lab18:46 Why India Sells Differently22:11 From Consultant to Founder26:50 The Early Hiring Lessons26:55 International Expansion Mistakes27:47 The EdTech Boom and Bust31:12 How We Found Product-Market Fit32:59 Supply Before Demand34:58 Differentiation Is Not Enough36:29 Borrowing Trust to Scale38:01 Why Offline Still Matters40:55 Why Cambridge Lost to MICA45:33 Raising the First Big Round46:42 The Pain of Starting Again48:31 The Future of AI + Education-------------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:   / beneon  Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShowwConnect 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

Mike chats with S. Shakthidharan (or Shakthi) about Hilda Rosner's translation of Siddhartha, Herman Hesse's classic novel of self-discovery and enlightenment. S. Shakthidharan was born in Sri Lanka and raised in Sydney, Australia, where he currently lives. His plays include Counting and Cracking (with Eamon Flack) and The Wrong Gods. Shakthidharan is the recipient of the Green Room Award for Outstanding New Australian Writing (2024) and the Victorian Premier's Literary Award and Prize for Drama (2020), among other honors.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

When frontier labs can build everything, when moving fast doesn't mean what it used to, and when what was impossible can now be done in days, what do you build and how do you build it?Krishna M is an AI Partner at Elevation Capital. He has seen the 0-to-1 journey twice as a founder and has also experienced what large-scale building looks like at tech giants like Meta and Cohesity.In this episode, we discuss why a founder's fearlessness and ambition will define the destiny of the company far more than technical skills. Krishna shares how Indian founders have come a long way and now build like they know no fear. We then explore how OpenAI and Anthropic have changed what it takes to build startups, and what founder traits are needed to create outlier companies in this era.Watch this episode to understand the new definition of startup speed and what to build when frontier labs can build entire product categories themselves.01:00 From 2x Founder to AI Investor03:37 Why Bet on the US-India Corridor07:07 Can Indian Founders Build Giants?10:13 What Makes Krishna Bet on a Founder?12:33 The Founder Traits That Matter in AI14:18 Why Speed Is the New GTM17:52 The New AI Founder19:13 How Krishna Builds Conviction23:26 Why Elevation Bet on Portkey28:20 How Elevation Evaluates AI Startups31:17 The AI Security Opportunity32:04 Your PMF Can Die in a Quarter32:57 Why Open Source Still Matters34:11 India's Infrastructure Advantage36:51 Where the Next AI Opportunities Are41:35 What Matters Beyond Revenue43:36 Why India + US Is a Powerful Combination44:59 What Cohesity Taught Him About Scale47:13 Selling Data to Broke Professors50:18 Why Two Weeks in SF Won't Work52:06 Fundraising Trap Founders Miss56:47 Outliers Aren't Well-Rounded58:49 "We're Wrong More Than We're Right"-------------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:   / beneon  Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShowwConnect 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

Observe AI raised $125M from SoftBank at an $850M valuation, went on to cross $50M ARR, and worked with some of the world's largest enterprises. But after 10 months everything changed.From a growth stage startup, Observe became an early stage startup, not because they did anything wrong, but because world changed forever very fast.In this episode, Swapnil, Founder & CEO of Observe AI candidly shares what it takes to rebuild a company after you have already built it, why changing people and culture are harder than changing the product, why today's AI winners could disappear as the technology stack changes, and why he thinks we are still in the first innings of AI.This conversation is as much about AI as it is about a founder's drive to win.Chapter Markers00:00 ChatGPT Made Our $850M Startup Irrelevant00:38 From SaaS to AI Agents04:30 Growing Fast, But Also Dying07:36 Why VCs Bet $200M+ on Observe09:26 FOMO Made Me a Founder13:30 We Had Users, But No Buyers15:27 Why BPOs Were the Wrong Market17:26 “I'll Never Sell in India”22:30 YC Made Me Think Bigger27:22 From $1M to $50M ARR30:13 Building AI Before ChatGPT31:11 The Birth of Observe 2.032:18 When ChatGPT Changed Everything33:15 When AI Agents Take Over34:58 Rebuilding a $50M ARR Product35:47 When Co-Founders Leave38:50 Will AI Actually Kill Support Jobs?43:51 “AI ARR Is Not Real”45:45 Most Pre-AI Companies Are Bloated47:34 Learning GTM by Doing It51:24 Changing Product Is The Easy Part58:29 Why Voice AI Is Just the Beginning01:01:25 The Founder Playbook01:04:10 What Makes a Great Product?01:05:37 “I'm Here to Win”-------------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:   / beneon  Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShowwConnect 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

Karan is the co-founder and CEO of Cartesia, an AI model lab building the next generation of real-time voice intelligence.In this episode, Karan explains what all goes into building an AI Lab company; from massive datasets to pre-training to post-training to inference engines, plus a heavy dose of relentless evaluation, and obsession with every layer of the stack. We also discuss why existing AI benchmarks are not very helpful, why latency is voice AI's biggest enemy, and why maintaining context across long conversations is one of the hardest unsolved problems.Apart from the cutting edge tech, this conversation explores Karan's journey from researcher to founder, building Cartesia with a five-person founding team, raising capital, and realizing why first-time founders waste years focusing on things that ultimately don't matter.If you want a glimpse into the future of AI, watch this episode.00:00 Trailer01:35 From DPS to Stanford to Cartesia02:35 From Counter-Strike to AI04:28 Another Research Paper Wasn't Enough06:48 The Story Behind “Cartesia”07:17 Building a Company With Five Technical Founders09:55 From Research Project to Startup13:54 Cartesia's Audacious Vision for 203515:07 What It Takes to Build an AI Model Company18:55 Why Faster AI Doesn't Have to Be Worse24:12 AI Still Has a Memory Problem27:14 Why Context Builds Trust27:50 Will AI Replace Entire Account Teams?29:16 Hold Music Is Now a Salesman30:30 Designing AI That Feels Personal31:31 Building With Cartesia34:48 Voice AI's Enemy #1: Latency38:50 Why AI Labs See the Future First41:32 Finding Product Market Fit45:34 Great Products Don't Need Much Marketing48:12 Very Few Things Matter52:26 How Big Can Voice AI Get55:53 Fundraising And Mission58:15 What Cartesia Is Ultimately Building-------------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 centre 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/TheNeonShowwConnect 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

If you enjoy this episode, we're sure you will enjoy more content like this on The Occult Rejects.  In fact, we have curated playlists on occult topics like grimoires, esoteric concepts and phenomena, occult history, analyzing true crime and cults with an occult lens, Para politics, and occultism in music. Whether you enjoy consuming your content visually or via audio, we've got you covered - and it will always be provided free of charge.  So, if you enjoy what we do and want to support our work of providing accessible, free content on various platforms, please consider making a donation to the links provided below.  Thank you and enjoy the episode!Links For The Occult Rejectshttps://linktr.ee/theoccultrejectsOccult Research Institutehttps://www.occultresearchinstitute.org/Substackhttps://substack.com/@theoccultrejects?r=7auau0&utm_campaign=profile&utm_medium=profile-pageCash Apphttps://cash.app/$theoccultrejectsVenmo@TheOccultRejectsBuy Me A Coffeebuymeacoffee.com/TheOccultRejectsPatreonhttps://www.patreon.com/TheOccultRejectsBibliographyCore Eye Anatomy, Retina, Optic Nerve, and Visual PathwaysBelliveau, A. P., & Somani, A. N. “Pupillary Light Reflex.” StatPearls. Treasure Island, FL: StatPearls Publishing, updated 2023.Cleveland Clinic. “Optic Nerve: What It Is, Function, Anatomy & Conditions.” Cleveland Clinic, updated 2024.Gupta, M., & Ireland, A. C. “Neuroanatomy, Visual Pathway.” StatPearls. Treasure Island, FL: StatPearls Publishing, updated 2022.Kolb, H. “Simple Anatomy of the Retina.” Webvision: The Organization of the Retina and Visual System. University of Utah / NCBI Bookshelf.Purves, D., Augustine, G. J., Fitzpatrick, D., et al., eds. Neuroscience. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates.Szabadi, E. “Functional Organization of the Sympathetic Pathways Controlling the Pupil: Light-Inhibited and Light-Stimulated Pathways.” Frontiers in Neurology 9, 2018.University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. “Ocular Motor System.” Neuroscience Online.Pupillometry, Cognitive Load, Attention, and Mental EffortBeatty, Jackson. “Task-Evoked Pupillary Responses, Processing Load, and the Structure of Processing Resources.” Psychological Bulletin 91, no. 2, 1982: 276–292.Beatty, Jackson, and Brennis Lucero-Wagoner. “The Pupillary System.” In Handbook of Psychophysiology, edited by John T. Cacioppo, Louis G. Tassinary, and Gary G. Berntson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.Kahneman, Daniel, and Jackson Beatty. “Pupil Diameter and Load on Memory.” Science 154, no. 3756, 1966: 1583–1585.Kahneman, Daniel. Attention and Effort. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973.Laeng, Bruno, Sylvain Sirois, and Gustaf Gredebäck. “Pupillometry: A Window to the Preconscious?” Perspectives on Psychological Science 7, no. 1, 2012: 18–27.Mathôt, Sebastiaan. “Pupillometry: Psychology, Physiology, and Function.” Journal of Cognition 1, no. 1, 2018.Piquado, Tepring, David Isaacowitz, and Arthur Wingfield. “Pupillometry as a Measure of Cognitive Effort in Younger and Older Adults.” Psychophysiology 47, no. 3, 2010: 560–569.Zekveld, Adriana A., Sophia E. Kramer, and Tammo Houtgast. “The Pupil Dilation Response to Auditory Stimuli: Current State of Knowledge.” Trends in Hearing 22, 2018.Emotion, Attraction, Arousal, and the PupilBradley, Margaret M., Laura Miccoli, Miguel A. Escrig, and Peter J. Lang. “The Pupil as a Measure of Emotional Arousal and Autonomic Activation.” Psychophysiology 45, no. 4, 2008: 602–607.de Winter, Joost C. F., et al. “Replicating Five Pupillometry Studies of Eckhard Hess.” International Journal of Psychophysiology 165, 2021: 145–161.Hess, Eckhard H. “Attitude and Pupil Size.” Scientific American 212, no. 4, 1965: 46–54.Hess, Eckhard H., and James M. Polt. “Pupil Size as Related to Interest Value of Visual Stimuli.” Science 132, no. 3423, 1960: 349–350.Lang, Peter J., Margaret M. Bradley, and Bruce N. Cuthbert. International Affective Picture System (IAPS): Affective Ratings of Pictures and Instruction Manual. Gainesville: University of Florida, 2008.Pan, J., et al. “The Effects of Emotional Arousal on Pupil Size Depend on Background Luminance and Stimulus Type.” Scientific Reports 14, 2024.Locus Coeruleus, Norepinephrine, Salience, and AttentionAston-Jones, Gary, and Jonathan D. Cohen. “An Integrative Theory of Locus Coeruleus–Norepinephrine Function: Adaptive Gain and Optimal Performance.” Annual Review of Neuroscience 28, 2005: 403–450.Joshi, Siddhartha, Yin Li, Ram M. Kalwani, and Joshua I. Gold. “Relationships Between Pupil Diameter and Neuronal Activity in the Locus Coeruleus, Colliculi, and Cingulate Cortex.” Neuron 89, no. 1, 2016: 221–234.Murphy, Peter R., Ian H. Robertson, James H. Balsters, and Redmond G. O'Connell. “Pupillometry and P3 Index the Locus Coeruleus–Noradrenergic Arousal Function in Humans.” Psychophysiology 48, no. 11, 2011: 1532–1543.Sara, Susan J. “The Locus Coeruleus and Noradrenergic Modulation of Cognition.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 10, 2009: 211–223.Uddin, Lucina Q. “Salience Processing and Insular Cortical Function and Dysfunction.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 16, 2015: 55–61.Memory, Emotion, Initiation, and Ritual EncodingCahill, Larry, and James L. McGaugh. “Mechanisms of Emotional Arousal and Lasting Declarative Memory.” Trends in Neurosciences 21, no. 7, 1998: 294–299.McGaugh, James L. “Memory—A Century of Consolidation.” Science 287, no. 5451, 2000: 248–251.McGaugh, James L. “The Amygdala Modulates the Consolidation of Memories of Emotionally Arousing Experiences.” Annual Review of Neuroscience 27, 2004: 1–28.Seligman, Rebecca, and Laurence J. Kirmayer. “Dissociative Experience and Cultural Neuroscience: Narrative, Metaphor and Mechanism.” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 32, 2008: 31–64.Seligman, Rebecca, Ryan A. Brown, and Laurence J. Kirmayer. “Theory and Method at the Intersection of Anthropology and Cultural Neuroscience.” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 5, no. 2–3, 2010: 130–139.Whitehouse, Harvey. Arguments and Icons: Divergent Modes of Religiosity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.Whitehouse, Harvey. Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2004.Ritual, Synchrony, Social Bonding, and Embodied MeaningHobson, Nicholas M., Juliana Schroeder, Jane L. Risen, Dimitris Xygalatas, and Michael I. Norton. “The Psychology of Rituals: An Integrative Review and Process-Based Framework.” Personality and Social Psychology Review 22, no. 3, 2018: 260–284.Jackson, Joshua Conrad, Brock Bastian, and others. “Synchrony and Physiological Arousal Increase Cohesion and Cooperation in Large Naturalistic Groups.” Scientific Reports 8, 2018.McCauley, Robert N., and E. Thomas Lawson. Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.Rappaport, Roy A. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine, 1969.Xygalatas, Dimitris. Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living. New York: Little, Brown Spark, 2022.Xygalatas, Dimitris, et al. “Extreme Rituals Promote Prosociality.” Psychological Science 24, no. 8, 2013: 1602–1605.Meditation, Prayer, Trance, and AbsorptionFox, Kieran C. R., Matthew L. Dixon, Savannah Nijeboer, et al. “Functional Neuroanatomy of Meditation: A Review and Meta-Analysis of 78 Functional Neuroimaging Investigations.” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 65, 2016: 208–228.Jerath, Ravinder, John W. Crawford, Vernon A. Barnes, and Kyler Harden. “Self-Regulation of Breathing as a Primary Treatment for Anxiety.” Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback 40, 2015: 107–115.Lutz, Antoine, John D. Dunne, and Richard J. Davidson. “Meditation and the Neuroscience of Consciousness.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness, edited by Philip David Zelazo, Morris Moscovitch, and Evan Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.Tellegen, Auke, and Gilbert Atkinson. “Openness to Absorbing and Self-Altering Experiences (‘Absorption'), a Trait Related to Hypnotic Susceptibility.” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 83, no. 3, 1974: 268–277.Vago, David R., and David A. Silbersweig. “Self-Awareness, Self-Regulation, and Self-Transcendence: A Framework for Understanding the Neurobiological Mechanisms of Mindfulness.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 6, 2012.Darkness, Sensory Deprivation, Ganzfeld, and Visual InstabilityCaputo, Giovanni B. “Strange-Face-in-the-Mirror Illusion.” Perception 39, no. 7, 2010: 1007–1008.Caputo, Giovanni B. “Visual Perception During Mirror-Gazing at One's Own Face in Patients with Depression.” The Scientific World Journal, 2014.Caputo, Giovanni B. “Strange-Face Illusions During Eye-to-Eye Gazing in Dyads.” Imagination, Cognition and Personality 38, no. 1, 2018: 51–77.Metzger, Wolfgang. “Optische Untersuchungen am Ganzfeld.” Psychologische Forschung 13, 1930: 6–29.Shenyan, O., et al. “Visual Hallucinations Induced by Ganzflicker and Ganzfeld Differ in Frequency, Complexity, and Content.” Scientific Reports 14, 2024.Wackermann, Jiří, Peter Pütz, and Carsten Allefeld. “Ganzfeld-Induced Hallucinatory Experience, Its Phenomenology and Cerebral Electrophysiology.” Cortex 44, no. 10, 2008: 1364–1378.Zuckerman, Marvin, and Nathan Cohen. “Sources of Reports of Visual and Auditory Sensations in Perceptual-Isolation Experiments.” Psychological Bulletin 61, no. 1, 19Also want to remind people about the website, if you're into reading we have tons of information by multiple contributors, and we got t-shirts up on the site if you're interested. Fun fact, the art is all based on the eyeball. 

What if the company quietly making OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Meta's models smarter was founded in India?Turing is one of the companies shaping how AI is advancing. It started in 2018 as a talent platform that found the top 1% of the world's engineers, became a unicorn in 2021, and then made a bet almost nobody understood at the time. In early 2022, long before ChatGPT existed, Turing began helping OpenAI improve its models by feeding human expertise directly into training. Today its network of more than four million vetted engineers and domain experts powers the post-training and evaluation work behind the frontier labs, and the company crossed roughly 300 million dollars in revenue while staying profitable, at a 2.2 billion dollar valuation.Vijay Krishnan is the co-founder and CTO. He was an NLP researcher at Stanford back when almost no one believed that predicting the next word could ever turn into reasoning, and he explains why running a modern model company without human-in-the-loop data is like entering a race with three tyres instead of four. He walks through how a model is actually taught to use software like Salesforce, why coding became the beachhead for every lab, and what changed for Turing the moment Scale AI was absorbed into Meta.The conversation then turns to the question every founder is now asked in the room. What is your moat against Claude? Vijay's answer is to go deeper than the frontier labs can reach, into the outcome you own and the context that lives inside an enterprise.If you are excited about how AI actually gets built, who really trains the models, and how to build a company that survives the labs, this episode is for you.00:00 - Trailer02:20 - The Indian company quietly behind OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic04:50 - How Turing went from a talent platform to a unicorn to an AI research partner08:20 - The bet nobody understood11:50 - Why a model company without human data is "racing on three tyres"15:50 - Why coding became the beachhead for every frontier lab19:50 - What changed for Turing the day Meta bought Scale AI23:50 - "What is your moat against Claude?"29:50 - Will AI create more lawyers, not fewer?34:50 - The teams where engineers haven't written code in six months39:50 - 16% of the Philippines' GDP is under threat from AI?43:50 - How you actually teach a model to use Salesforce49:50 - How robots are taught real-world work54:50 - Why million-dollar researcher packages are breaking startup hiring59:50 - The one kind of AI company that gets stronger as the models improve1:04:50 - Product vs. services, and the trap that quietly kills AI startups-------------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 centre 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/TheNeonShowwConnect 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 India's wealthiest families actually manage their money, and why does the man who looks after roughly ₹50,000 crore of it own zero stocks himself?Rohit Sarin is the co-founder of Client Associates, which he started in 2002 as India's first multi-family office and has grown into the largest in the country, managing around ₹50,000 crore for more than 1,100 wealthy families. The firm acts as a personal CFO for a family's entire wealth, doing for a household what a finance chief does for a company.He built it the hard way. He left a senior banking career at Deutsche Bank and Kotak, walked away from a full salary into a negative net worth, and took no salary in the first year so every rupee could go into building revenue. The firm's first working machine was an old computer he won at a Deutsche Bank auction.His most contrarian view is about how ordinary Indians treat the markets. He believes trading is a zero-sum game, and the data backs him. A SEBI study found that 93 per cent of individual F&O traders lost money over three years, worth more than ₹1.8 lakh crore, with only about one per cent earning a meaningful profit. Rohit made money on seven of ten trades and still ended underwater because the three losses wiped out all seven gains, so he closed his demat account entirely. He reads the AI boom the same way, as a bubble much like the dot-com era where a rare Amazon survives, and points to Byju's as a reminder of what happens when growth runs ahead of discipline.What the rich do differently is stay patient. They spend on their needs and rarely on their wants, and their real goal is to stay rich across generations rather than to get rich quickly. His own line for it is that wealth is a gift given by the impatient to the patient. He is equally clear that this is India's century, that the country has just crossed the income level where consumption compounds, and that the next ten years may be its best for anyone who starts investing early. He lays it all out in his book, Unlocking Wealth: Secrets to Getting Rich at Any Age.If you are excited about how India's richest families think about money and where India's next decade is headed, this episode is for you.00:00 - Trailer01:50 - The personal CFO for India's richest families03:50 - Quitting a full salary for a negative net worth05:20 - The old computer he won at a Deutsche Bank auction06:50 - The first clients and the two crore bar he borrowed from Merrill09:20 - How many dollar-millionaires India really has11:50 - The income level where a country's wealth suddenly compounds14:20 - What is really driving India's wealth creation16:50 - How old-money families decide who controls the wealth19:50 - The tech gap that changed who leads a family office22:50 - Is the AI boom just the dotcom bubble again26:50 - Why he is telling family offices to sit out AI for now30:50 - The asset classes the ultra-rich actually hold33:50 - Why the rich are moving money beyond India37:50 - The one thing the ultra-rich do that the 99% do not41:50 - His relationship with wealth, and needs versus wants44:50 - Advice to first-generation founders who just got rich48:50 - Why this is India's century and its best decade52:50 - 93% lose money trading, and the demat account he closed55:50 - The book he wrote for every young Indian57:50 - Rapid fire: the best investment he has ever made-------------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 centre 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/TheNeonShowwConnect 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 does a founder learn from watching the CEO of a 32 billion dollar company make his biggest AI bets from the inside?Mahesh Ram has built and sold three companies. Thomson Reuters acquired his first, GlobalEnglish went to Pearson after teaching English to more than ten million people at companies like IBM and HP, and Solvvy, one of the first conversational AI companies, was bought by Zoom in 2022. He then spent two and a half years heading AI products at Zoom, sitting beside founder Eric Yuan as the company raced Microsoft into the AI era.In this conversation, Mahesh takes apart the three decisions that put Zoom ahead. Eric refused to charge for AI Companion because he believed everyone in the world should have AI, he publicly promised to never train models on customer data; and he built a model-agnostic layer instead of betting the company on any single lab. Zoom shipped weeks before Microsoft Copilot. Mahesh also shares the operating habits that made it possible, from the five-part rule Eric demands on every decision to the radical transparency that turned his own team into owners.He is just as direct about the question every founder now asks: whether OpenAI or Anthropic will simply take their market. He answers that the model companies cannot see the hundreds of custom applications running quietly inside every enterprise, so the durable business is the one that owns the messy, multi-party workflows they will never touch. On the wider fear that AI will kill SaaS, he thinks the shift is real but that Silicon Valley badly overestimates how fast it arrives, which leaves a huge opening for founders willing to go out and become the educators their market trusts.He closes on what he has learned selling three companies, why the best ones are bought and never sold, and the community of Indian origin founders he now runs that grew from three hundred people to more than two thousand in a single year.If you are excited about building enduring AI and software companies, this episode is for you.00:00 - Trailer01:27 - The three time founder who keeps destroying complexity03:08 - Two billion people learning English with no teacher04:45 - Building conversational AI before anyone knew what AI was07:21 - How Zoom came to acquire Solvvy11:08 - Working with Eric Yuan, a true force of nature13:43 - The three bold AI bets that beat Microsoft to market15:09 - Why Eric made Zoom's AI free and refused to touch your data17:29 - The five part rule Eric demands on every decision21:25 - Radical transparency: share everything except one thing23:32 - What Mahesh would build differently today29:05 - The moat question: how do you survive OpenAI and Anthropic35:33 - What Claude and OpenAI can never see inside a company41:01 - Will AI kill SaaS? And why Silicon Valley is too early42:25 - Become the educator: the biggest opening for founders45:39 - The Indian founder community that 10x'd in a year52:43 - Where the founder DNA actually came from1:00:42 - Why he has no regrets building Solvvy too early1:01:57 - What actually gets a startup acquired1:05:14 - Why you keep the acquisition circle very tight1:07:47 - The real job in enterprise sales: get your buyer promoted-------------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 centre 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/TheNeonShowwConnect 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

Can the biggest AI labs simply walk into any market and replace the software companies already sitting there?Storm Ventures has spent 26 years building an answer for B2B founders. The firm has made close to 200 investments, backed 11 unicorns, and produced some of the cleanest enterprise exits in Silicon Valley, from AirGap Networks selling to Zscaler to earlier winners like Marketo and MobileIron. Its portfolio today runs from Tekion in automotive retail to Atomicwork in IT service management, Krisp in voice AI, and Synthpop in healthcare.Arun Penmetsa is a Partner at the firm. He built enterprise software at Oracle and Google before moving into venture, and he now leads Storm's work in AI, security, and digital health. In this conversation, he is unusually specific about how the decisions actually get made. He meets ten to twelve founders every week; the entire partnership makes only six to eight investments a year, and the single filter he trusts most is urgency. If a buyer can comfortably wait six to twelve months, the pain is not real, and the company is already in trouble.Arun is direct about the question every AI founder now gets asked, which is whether OpenAI or Anthropic will simply take their market. He answers that the foundation model companies will own a handful of core verticals and leave the rest, so the durable business is the one that owns the full stack between the model and the interface and delivers a real outcome inside law, healthcare, construction, or a market as unglamorous as convenience retail. He also lays out where he is placing his next bets, from physical AI and humanoid robots that can retool an assembly line on the fly to vertical companies like Tote that rebuild the software running gas stations and corner stores, where a single day of downtime can cost an owner tens of thousands of dollars. If you are excited about building enduring B2B and AI companies, this episode is for you.00:00 - Trailer01:21 - The 26-year-old B2B fund behind AirGapp, Marketo and Tekion02:47 - The patterns Storm has seen repeat across 200 investments05:37 - What actually drove seven clean exits06:37 - The airgap story: the agentless bet that Zscaler bought13:10 - The one signal Arun trusts more than pedigree14:37 - Where the moats survive once the models get this good18:01 - Why Storm backed Atomicwork against ServiceNow20:00 - Two weeks to decide: how the fastest deals happen25:27 - The cold email that gets a venture partner to reply28:52 - The funnel: 500 founders a year, 6 to 8 checks35:31 - Why Stanford on the resume buys you nothing here38:13 - The pattern behind every 4 billion dollar outcome40:44 - The question every AI founder gets: can OpenAI replace you46:16 - The mistakes that killed companies Arun believed in50:14 - The million-dollar wall every B2B founder hits53:30 - Why buyers have already decided before they call you58:12 - AI agents that stay on a one-hour insurance call1:08:33 - Physical AI: assembly lines that rebuild themselves1:12:39 - Tote: the fuel pump they built to win gas stations-------------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 centre 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/TheNeonShowwConnect 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 does it take to write the very first check into a company that has almost nothing to show yet, sometimes not even a finished idea?Afore Capital helped invent the pre-seed category. When Gaurav Jain and Anamitra Banerji started the firm ten years ago, "pre-seed" was almost a slight, a label for founders who couldn't raise a proper seed round. They set out to build the world's largest pre-seed fund anyway, closing $47 million on a $40 million target, and every fund since has closed above plan. Afore now runs more than $500 million across four funds, with top-quartile DPI on the first three. The idea has become so mainstream that when Sequoia launched its latest fund, it said, "I guess we're pre-seed investors too."The real substance of the conversation is how Gaurav thinks. He is clear about what matters most in venture, and the order tends to surprise people. Being in the very best companies matters more than anything else, ownership comes after that, and the entry price that so many investors fixate on matters least, because fifty per cent of zero is still zero. He is also convinced that the genuine bottleneck is talent. There is a great deal of money in the world and very few people who can build something truly large, which is why at the earliest stage founders tend to choose their investors as much as investors choose them. You give a founder a million dollars with no collateral, and then you still have to convince them to take it. A pre-seed pitch, he says, is almost entirely storytelling with very little data behind it.If you want to understand how the earliest checks actually get written, and what it really costs to say no, this episode is worth your time.00:00 - Trailer01:00 - From Dehradun to Google to starting Afore02:08 - The Waterloo co-op that talked him out of every job03:18 - Back when "pre-seed" was an insult05:44 - When Sequoia said "I guess we're pre-seed investors too"07:26 - Afore's three products, and the experiments that failed09:01 - Hightouch was a travel company when they invested11:02 - Goldcast: no visa, no money, funded anyway12:07 - The through line is always the team14:44 - The Ramp miss17:24 - "Founders pick us more than we pick them"18:45 - The constraint isn't capital, it's talent22:24 - The Solana miss, when it was still Loom Protocol24:46 - Ramp's Super Bowl ad, the buses, his wife's business25:32 - What he looks for in founders28:50 - Coachability, happy ears, and the Mom Test31:28 - The biggest mistake: falling in love with the idea35:04 - The three things that matter, and "50% of zero is still zero"39:25 - "100% storytelling, 0% data"41:25 - Investing in India, and the fear of being dumb capital44:41 - "Sign the deal before Monday"47:26 - One engineer now does the job of 2051:43 - Raising from LPs, the undiscussed part of VC-------------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/TheNeonShowwConnect 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

This week we tried unsuccessfully to put a bucket hat on a moose (three people were killed) all in order to create a Canadian/Manc symbol powerful enough to lure in Commonwealth comic queen, Allyson June Smith. Hailing from the land of Mounties and saying ‘eh?', Allyson now resides in Manchester, a base from which she has built one of the busiest and most eclectic careers in comedy. As well as serving up scoopfuls of her nervelessly candid humour through her own stand-up shows, she's also toured the country as a warm up act (laugh lubricant?) for some of the biggest names in the funny business. She's also all over the media landscape like bear on hiker, appearing regularly on tv, radio and her two own excellent podcasts - Women Talking Bollocks (funny) and Horror Motel (terrifying). In a chat where Giles struggles to conceal the fact that the only Canadian he truly trusts is Celine Dion, we skate through everything from the pressures of comedy content creation to the subtleties of winning over different kinds of audience - all before she disappears back on the road for Allyson Wonderland, her current UK tour. Follow Allyson on InstagramThis episode is proudly dedicated to Joan Rivers.  /////Timestamps 03:35 - From Acting Dreams to Stand-Up Comedy 06:42 - Glasses On or Off? 14:02 - The Secret Society of Stand-Up 20:58 - Cultural Influences: Growing Up Canadian 24:24 - North vs South: Finding Your Comedy Audience 26:20 - What Actually Makes Something Funny? 31:01 - The Power of Humour in Dark Times 36:06 - Two Very Different Podcasts 41:07 - Horror Films and Comedy: More in Common Than You Think Allyson's book recommendations are: Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse /////

What does it actually take to build a robot that cleans your home when everyone before has failed?Matic is a home robot that sweeps and mops your floors, navigating entirely with cameras, no LIDAR. It shipped its first unit in 2024 and has since sold 6,000 units at ~2,000 a month, almost entirely by word of mouth. And is now the largest consumer robotics company shipping in the United States.Navneet Dalal (a computer-vision pioneer who co-invented HOG) and Mehul Nariyawala met building Flutter, a gesture-recognition app that became #1 in 72 countries and was acquired by Google, where they then worked on Nest cameras and shipped one of the first deep learning algorithms in the wild. Matic is the company they decided would be their last: they wrote "Not For Sale" on the wall on day one and built it to last 20 to 30 years.Their bet was deliberately contrarian. They chose the "unsexy" floor-cleaning market, a category with a net promoter score of -1 that people keep buying anyway (21 million robot vacuums sold in 2024), because entering an existing market beats creating a new one and because it's the foundation for true indoor autonomy. Then they put roughly $35 million of their own money in, about 70% of their net worth, with no plan B.Along the way they lay out a full worldview: why robotics is 100x harder than software (the demo is only the first 20% of the work); why humanoids doing your chores are still 5 to 20 years away (the data problem), why no consumer hardware sells above $2,000; and the skin-in-the-game philosophy captured by his late father's advice: "Sell your home if you have to, but keep the company alive."If you're excited about how home robots actually get built and what it really takes to bet everything on hard tech, this episode is for you.00:00 - Trailer01:08 - When they quit Google to start Matic03:30 - Solving home cleaning with cameras only — no LIDAR04:46 - The $35M bet: funding Matic themselves07:36 - What a "level 5" robot in your home really means08:00 - Why they started with floor cleaning — on purpose09:45 - The rule: never create a new market with your first product10:02 - iPod, iPhone, Tesla — all entered existing markets11:38 - Why new hardware gives you only one shot13:02 - "Make something people NEED, not want"16:25 - Why the demo is only 20% of robotics18:50 - Teaching a robot like raising a child21:30 - How far are humanoids from real homes?22:22 - The data problem: "500 years of driving data a day"22:56 - 90% in the lab, 60% in the real world26:49 - Why no consumer device sells above $2,00027:38 - Would you buy a $10,000 humanoid — for what?28:47 - "History rhymes": General Magic to the iPhone29:38 - Earning trust after 20 years of broken robot promises30:31 - Shipping the first robot30:45 - 6,000 units, all word of mouth, zero marketing31:10 - Why they're US-only for now 31:50 - The investors: Sutter Hill to the Collison brothers33:20 - Two companies, both acquired by Google35:00 - The Flutter story: #1 app in 72 countries35:25 - Why nobody believed machine learning worked in 201138:40 - Microsoft Kinect: 8 million units in 60 days40:30 - The Google acquisition — and the $35M number44:40 - The near-death moment: switching to NVIDIA53:10 - iRobot's bankruptcy and what it means for Matic53:55 - The real scale of robotics: 21M robot vacuums a year57:45 - Putting 70% of their net worth on the line58:40 - His father's advice: "sell your home, keep the company"-------------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:   / beneon  Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShowwConnect 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

One of my favorite passages in Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha is his reflection that he had to become a fool before he could truly awaken. It echoes the Prodigal Son and countless myths and fairy tales that suggest we often have to lose our way before we can genuinely find ourselves.In this episode, I explore why failure, despair, and disillusionment so often become the soil from which wisdom grows, while wrestling with a paradox I can't quite resolve. Our mistakes inevitably leave scars—not only on ourselves but sometimes on the people we love. While I believe redemption and transformation are possible, I don't think the pain we cause can simply be justified because something good eventually came from it.Drawing on Hesse, Carl Jung, and my own work as a therapist, this episode reflects on responsibility, grace, and the difficult question of how we can acknowledge the necessity of failure without ever glorifying it.

How do you know whether an AI agent is doing its job or quietly failing in production?Galileo is building the trust layer for AI. Its evaluation and observability platform is how enterprises measure whether the output of an LLM or an agent is good or bad.Galileo started before "LLM" was even a word. When Atin showed his prototype to Stanford's Chris Ré, his own first question was "what is a language model?" Today its customers include Reddit, Airbnb, P&G, Comcast, and six of the Fortune 50. Atin spent a decade in big tech before co-founding Galileo with Vikram Chatterji in early 2021. He worked on the knowledge graphs behind Siri at Apple, then became one of the leads and architects of Michelangelo, Uber's AI platform, that hosts thousands of models across pricing, ETA, and demand.That Uber experience taught him the lesson the whole company is built on; that in AI, observability and evaluation are the real bottleneck, and bad data is catastrophic.As ChatGPT turned every AI output into something a user sees directly, the measurement problem went from academic to mission-critical. So Atin made a contrarian bet: instead of using giant LLMs to judge other LLMs, Galileo built Luna, small 1-3B parameter models that run evals at breakthrough latencies of 100 milliseconds and below.If you are excited about how AI actually gets shipped, trusted, and controlled inside real enterprises, this episode is for you.00:00 - Trailer01:14 - From India to Apple, Uber, and Galileo01:34 - Where the name "Galileo" came from02:38 - Building Siri's early knowledge graphs at Apple03:29 - Becoming an architect of Uber's Michelangelo05:15 - Why every AI output is now mission-critical06:45 - How Atin and Vikram zeroed in on Galileo07:42 - "What is a language model?"09:38 - Building the world's first feature store at Uber11:27 - Language models and tokens, explained simply14:19 - Where the observability insight came from15:53 - Quantifying uncertainty and hallucinations16:36 - The first customers and first use case19:15 - How the product evolved from a data scientist tool23:18 - Why ChatGPT changed everything for Galileo23:57 - The enterprise AI adoption curve, 2021 to 202626:35 - Why they built the Luna model28:32 - Turning LLM "writers" into "calculators"28:51 - Attacking the latency problem31:48 - Luna: the modeling and infrastructure innovation33:09 - What evals are, and why they blew up34:26 - The case for small language models36:58 - What "general reasoning" really means40:39 - AI usage is exploding — and why that matters43:08 - Online vs offline: the "it worked on my machine" problem44:33 - The evals flywheel and evals-driven development46:56 - Galileo in a nutshell47:39 - What real agents in production look like today49:30 - A sales intelligence platform, powered by Galileo50:47 - The agent control product52:12 - Building GTM as a hardcore engineer from India54:43 - Garbage in, garbage out: nailing the ICP55:42 - How the pitch changed from customer 1 to 2057:27 - Why Atin switched from CTO to CPO-------------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/TheNeonShowwConnect 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

J'ai le plaisir de recevoir Maud Caillaux, fondatrice de Green-Got. À seulement 25 ans, elle a choisi de repenser notre rapport à la banque en créant une alternative qui met la finance au service de la transition écologique, tout en rendant l'argent plus accessible et plus compréhensible pour toutes et tous.Comment le patriarcat se manifeste-t-il dans le système financier ? Pourquoi les femmes sont-elles encore tenues à l'écart des décisions financières ? Comment reprendre le pouvoir sur son argent sans être experte en finance ? Et si l'éducation financière était aussi une question d'émancipation ?Dans cet épisode en partenariat avec Green-Got, nous parlons de ce que notre argent raconte de nos choix, de nos peurs et de notre liberté. Nous explorons les mécanismes invisibles qui entretiennent les inégalités, mais aussi les gestes simples qui permettent de reprendre confiance et d'agir. Une conversation qui invite à regarder ses finances autrement et à comprendre que l'argent n'est pas une fin en soi, mais un outil au service de la vie que l'on souhaite construire.Je vous souhaite une très bonne écoute !Recommandation :À lire : Siddhartha, un roman philosophique de Hermann Hesse—Pour découvrir les coulisses du podcast : https://www.instagram.com/inpowerpodcast/Pour en savoir plus sur Maud Caillaux : https://www.linkedin.com/in/maud-caillaux/Pour en savoir plus sur Green-Got : https://green-got.com/?_InPower=Pour suivre mes aventures au quotidien : https://www.instagram.com/louiseaubery/Si cet épisode vous a plu, vous aimerez sûrement celui-ci :https://shows.acast.com/inpower/episodes/largent-doit-etre-au-coeur-de-la-question-feministe-avec-lesChapitrage : 00:00:00 - Maud Caillaux00:01:00 - Pourquoi les banques nous manipulent ?00:08:19 - Comment reprendre le pouvoir sur son argent ?00:10:10 - Gérer son argent en 3 étapes00:13:00 - Comment s'enrichir comme les hommes ?00:20:00 - Reprendre le contrôle de son argent00:24:00 - La règle du 50/30/2000:34:00 - Ce que révèle chaque paiement en carte00:35:50 - Créer son épargne de sécurité00:40:00 - Mr Beast, Maud en parle00:49:00 - Pourquoi l'ambition féminine financière dérange ?00:54:00 - L'argent, un levier d'émancipation00:58:00 - Décorréler sa valeur de ses revenus01:06:00 - Tout ce que l'on croit à tort01:10:00 - Comment le patriarcat se manifeste-t-il dans le système financier ?01:12:00 - Greenwashing : comment ne plus se faire avoir ?01:14:00 - Bien gérer son argent, c'est surtout ça01:18:00 - La question (très) intéressante d'une abonnée Hébergé par Acast. Visitez acast.com/privacy pour plus d'informations.

Who is funding the students that India's banks won't touch?Propelld is one of India's largest education-focused lenders, giving loans to roughly 1.5 lakh students every year — matching SBI — with a team a fraction of the size and no branch network. In a single financial year it now disburses more education loans than SBI did in six years of its history.Victor started Propelld in 2016 with a thesis born out of a Milton Friedman paper: a good student should never have to walk away from a good opportunity just because they don't have the money. Propelld hit its stride by going exactly where traditional lenders refuse to — 70% of its borrowers come from tier-3 cities, a segment banks treat as too risky.Instead of chasing the safe 1% of students at IITs and IIMs, Victor made a bet most lenders never make. He built the ability to underwrite the end-use itself — a "Crystal score" for institutes and courses that measures employability and real ROI. The result: NPAs held at ~1%, roughly one-tenth of what banks see the moment they step outside tier-1.Victor has a clear view of where lending goes next. In a post-LLM world, risk, distribution, and fulfillment get radically more efficient — one person already drives ₹50 crore of disbursal a year, and OPEX is projected to fall toward 2% at ₹6,000 crore AUM. His ranking never changes: NPAs first, unit economics second, growth third.If you are excited about how AI is rebuilding lending — and who gets to dream bigger because of it — this episode is for you.00:00 - Trailer00:50 - The two numbers that tell Propelld's story01:55 - Why 70% of borrowers come from tier-3 cities02:21 - How NPAs stay at 1%02:52 - Why education is a great asset class04:04 - Building a "Crystal score" for institutes and courses05:31 - End-use control: why an education loan isn't a personal loan06:27 - Why banks only lend to IITs and IIMs08:36 - Measuring employability to underwrite the end-use10:23 - 10 years at the intersection of fintech and edtech11:46 - Why education financing is only ~5% penetrated17:53 - Do India's graduate really not get a job?21:12 - The 8% data point, and quantifying ROI22:24 - The social mobility no one can price25:39 - From IIT Madras and a global bank to building Propelld27:41 - How the post-LLM world rewires lending30:26 - How fast an institute gets onboarded and a loan disbursed32:12 - Profitable at a ₹1 lakh ticket size34:13 - The financials: doubling revenue, holding costs flat to FY3037:19 - Lending as an ecosystem enabler, not just a loan39:33 - The most valuable courses in a post-LLM world41:40 - The bet on arts graduates as coding gets commoditized43:32 - The Milton Friedman paper that started it all46:53 - 100 investors, and the few who said yes48:33 - Co-founding with school friends since class 650:24 - Settling disagreements over food and Hampi trips51:31 - The most common mistake fintech founders make52:51 - The one metric that ranks above everything: NPAs-------------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/TheNeonShowwConnect 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

In this imaginative talk, which begins with an evocation of how unbelievably fortunate we are to be able to practice together in community, Candradasa speaks to one of the four lineages of our sangha as drawn out by Urgyen Sangharakshita, Triratna's founder. He evokes the lineage of practice as a continuous chain of human inspiration and curiosity – from ancient peoples around the fire, to Siddhartha on the cusp of personal failure under the bodhi tree, to Sangharakshita in India, and finally to the current generation of practitioners who must embody and transmit the Dharma. This talk was given in March 2026 as part of the 'Live United' retreat, bringing together members of the Order holding positions of responsibility in Canada and the U.S. with visiting guests from Europe who also hold major responsibilities in Triratna. Aryaloka Buddhist Center, 2026. *** Help us keep FBA Podcasts free for everyone! Donate now Subscribe to the FBA podcast: A full, curated, quality Dharma talk, every week. Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube  

Most founders build one unicorn. Naveen Tewari built two.InMobi started with a simple bet: mobile would become the world's most important computing platform, and advertising could make it free for everyone. Every Indian VC said no. Naveen flew to San Francisco on a maxed-out credit card and returned with a $7 million round from Kleiner Perkins and Ram Shriram. Later came a $200 million investment from Masayoshi Son. Overnight, InMobi became India's first unicorn. Then he did it again.Glance, built quietly inside InMobi over three years, is now one of the fastest-growing consumer apps in the US, with more than 10 million monthly active users in the US.The thesis behind both companies is the same. The world's most powerful technologies, first mobile and now AI, only reach masses when someone figures out how to pay for them. Naveen believes advertising is that mechanism, and that InMobi is uniquely positioned to subsidise AI access at population scale, just as it helped subsidise mobile a decade ago.If you want to understand how one founder from India has quietly helped shape two technology eras, this episode is for you.00:00 - Trailer00:57 - Why Naveen became a founder03:26 - How co-founders met and came together11:33 - The pivot from mKhoj to InMobi15:02 - Can AI be subsidised for mass consumption?16:12 - Expanding globally before the US18:29 - Which industries can delay entry to US market?20:53 - What is Glance?23:55 - Incubated within InMobi for 2 years25:17 - What changes when you face failure in public?29:10 - How the SoftBank round changed InMobi32:53 - Maxing out credit cards to pay bills38:18 - $7Million Kleiner Perkins & Ram Shriram round43:07 - Hypergrowth journey: Series A to Series C45:41 - $200 million funding from Masa53:31 - Change of VC ecosystem in India54:34 - How building for B2B differs from B2C58:50 - How AI is changing InMobi and Glance-------------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/TheNeonShowwConnect 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 you get an inbound from OpenAI and Anthropic?Goldcast is the video content platform behind companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, GitHub, Uber and Airbnb, before it was acquired by Cvent in a nearly $300 million deal earlier this year.Palash Soni (Co-Founder and CEO, Goldcast) joins the Neon Show.Goldcast entered one of the most overfunded categories in SaaS. Hopin alone had raised more than $1 billion. This is the story of the decisions that helped Goldcast survive the category and ultimately become one of the biggest MarTech acquisition stories of the last few years.Enterprise customers are won long before they ever sign a contract. We trace that idea through Goldcast's journey, from landing Drift as its first marquee customer and reaching its first $1 million in ARR, to the relationships that quietly compounded over the years and eventually led to an inbound from the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic.We discuss how retention has always been MarTech's biggest challenge and why AI doesn't fundamentally change that. And why acquisition, not an IPO, is the most realistic outcome for most companies in the category.This episode is about winning in a market everyone had written off, and the decisions that turned Goldcast into one of the few companies left standing.00:00 - Trailer00:36 - How Palash caught the startup bug05:51 - Meeting the co-founders08:50 - Fundraising has never been easy for Goldcast10:36 - How we got a term sheet in 2 days12:43 - We quit HBS and they became our first customer18:47 - Customers told us our product looked ugly19:50 - How Drift founder changed the course of Goldcast21:44 - When competitors raised $250 million23:31 - How Goldcast got high-profile angel investors30:33 - The elevator pitch of Goldcast31:06 - When companies in your space are crashing32:36 - Was virtual events even a valid space after COVID?43:15 - How Goldcast won OpenAI44:38 - What led to the acquisition53:33 - One thing Palash would change about the last 5 years56:58 - Founders should define company values58:48 - Why we had an unusually large post-sales team01:01:09 - Retention in MarTech has always been subpar01:04:36 - Is acquisition the only path for a MarTech company?01:09:16 - How Goldcast got great logos01:11:01 - How the three co-founders split roles01:12:05 - If not acquisition, then what?01:14:20 - How founders move to higher ACVs01:16:21 - The ethos of the founding team01:17:25 - The book that changed me-------------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/TheNeonShowwConnect 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

Cette semaine, on se retrouve pour le 11ᵉ épisode de ÇA DÉPEND avec Albert Moukheiber. J'ai le plaisir de le recevoir à nouveau pour explorer le sujet de l'optimisation et notre quête permanente de progression.S'optimiser rend-il vraiment plus heureux ?Peut-on être ambitieux et en paix ?Pourquoi cherche-t-on toujours à devenir une meilleure version de soi-même ?Et comment trouver l'équilibre entre évoluer et se mettre trop de pression ?Dans cet épisode, on parle de cette envie de tout améliorer, de l'illusion d'une “meilleure version de soi” à atteindre et des coûts cachés de cette quête permanente. On explore la fatigue de l'amélioration, la pression de performance, la difficulté à accepter l'imprévu et ces moments où vouloir trop contrôler peut finalement devenir contre-productif. Une conversation pour réfléchir à notre rapport au progrès, à l'ambition et à ce qui nous rend réellement heureux.N'hésitez pas à nous dire en commentaire si vous aimeriez découvrir un épisode sur les systèmes dynamiques complexes !Je vous souhaite une très bonne écoute !______Livre recommandé : Siddhartha, un roman philosophique de Hermann Hesse Pour découvrir les coulisses du podcast : https://www.instagram.com/inpowerpodcast/Pour suivre Albert Moukheiber : https://www.instagram.com/albert.moukheiber/?hl=frEt pour suivre mes aventures au quotidien : https://www.instagram.com/louiseaubery/Si tu as aimé cet épisode tu aimeras sûrement celui-là : https://shows.acast.com/inpower/episodes/albert-moukheiber00:00:00 - Intro00:01:07 - S'optimiser rend-il vraiment plus heureux ?00:13:20 - Peut-on vraiment arrêter de progresser ?00:16:30 - Comment trouver son équilibre ?00:18:30 - Qu'est-ce que la fatigue décisionnelle ?00:24:52 - Peut-on être ambitieux et en paix ? Hébergé par Acast. Visitez acast.com/privacy pour plus d'informations.

Y la presencia, esa cualidad rara de estar realmente en el lugar donde estás, no se compra, ni se aprende en libros, ni se logra con ejercicios espirituales. Se elige, una y otra vez, cada día, contra una tendencia que tenemos casi todos a estar mentalmente en otra parte.

Who is teaching the world's most powerful AI models to think?Turing is one of the largest data partners to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Nvidia. At a $2.2 billion valuation it has become one of the most important infrastructure layers in the AGI race.Jonathan Siddharth started Turing in 2018 with a thesis that talent matching is a trillion-dollar problem. Turing reached unicorn status in 2021. Then, in 2022, as the foundation model race accelerated, OpenAI approached Turing to provide coding data for ChatGPT.Jonathan recognised that frontier AI labs faced an enormous bottleneck: high-quality training data and human intelligence at scale. Instead of remaining just a talent marketplace, he made a bet that most unicorn CEOs never make. He built a second business on top of the first and leaned back into his AI research roots.Jonathan has a clear view of what needs to happen before we get to super intelligence. The four keys to unlocking AGI: coding, reasoning, tool use, and multimodality. He believes we solve for those four, and AI can do almost anything a human can do in front of a computer. If you are excited about where the AGI race is heading this episode is for you00:00 - Trailer01:06 - What Turing does05:55 - Why OpenAI reached out to Turing8:28 - How GPT-3 became ChatGPT17:54 - How ImageNet breakthrough changed the world21:12 - The largest provider of coding data to AI labs24:34 - Four keys to super intelligence28:45 - Every human will run multiple companies in 10 years32:27 - Can agents have self-improvement loops?34:36 - The future of software engineering36:26 - Agents should create, humans should steer39:46 - Is the line between products and services companies blurring?40:42 - How an agent can handle hiring end-to-end43:36 - Every human can now write software45:22 - Will workflow SaaS disappear?47:46 - No fine-tuning vs fine-tuning camps51:49 - A case study in compute constraints57:06 - Why the world needs so much compute1:01:26 - Where Jonathan would invest today1:03:16 - Where cybersecurity is heading1:08:31 - How the world will look in 10 years-------------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/TheNeonShowwConnect 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

Most AI failures won't come from a bad model. They'll come from bad data.Shashank Saxena spent most of his career on the buying side of enterprise technology before founding VNDLY which was acquired by Workday for $510 million. He then joined Sierra as a Managing Partner before going full time as Co-founder and CEO of Pantomath, a data operations center for enterprises that are betting their future on AI agents.We discuss why data quality is becoming one of the biggest challenges in enterprise AI. An AI agent fed bad data for 12 hours doesn't go rogue. It just makes 12 hours of wrong decisions: rejecting insurance claims, issuing credit cards, or drilling in the wrong location. As more business decisions are delegated to AI systems, companies will need far greater visibility into what is happening across their data infrastructure.Shashank also shares the decisions that led to VNDLY's acquisition, the advice he'd give founders evaluating acquisition offers today, and why a Michael Jordan analogy continues to motivate him as a second-time founder.If you're building enterprise software, selling to large companies, or trying to figure out whether experience is an asset or a liability in the AI era, this episode is for you.0:00 - Trailer01:00 - How Shashank became a second-time founder07:20 - Where Pantomath sits in the data stack10:55 - How a broken Tableau report turns mission-critical with AI12:55 - Who Pantomath sells to15:35 - Solving for a problem that doesn't exist yet19:03 - How have founder expectations changed today?20:31 - Series B companies pre- and post-AI21:26 - The Michael Jordan example23:57 - How a repeat founder chooses investors25:10 - What value Snowflake adds as a strategic investor27:05 - Data is not an open category today28:34 - The astounding Databricks outcome29:08 - The reality of the $100 million ARR number31:48 - Will non-human workers 100x in the next few years?36:00 - How to protect data in motion37:26 - How comfortable are we giving full access to agents?39:47 - Where is automation fastest today?42:09 - Why entrepreneurs tend to like uncertainty43:28 - Why Shashank chose to be a founder45:48 - A customer-driven $510M acquisition48:32 - Employees vs contractors in any organization51:22 - Building from Ohio vs the Bay Area53:14 - Learnings from selling to enterprises56:31 - How Shashank raised from Tier 1 US VCs59:19 - Heads down or network as a founder?1:02:47 - First-time vs second-time founder edge in AI1:06:22 - Hiring as a repeat founder1:08:08 - How enterprise sales has changed1:10:52 - How do you sell for a problem that isn't visible today?1:12:58 - Best piece of advice1:16:27 - The only advice for a founder considering M&A1:21:06 - Position yourself to be capable of taking risks1:24:51 - What matters to an enterprise buyer?-------------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/TheNeonShowwConnect 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

Hoy en Ya Párate...La notita Bonita con Claudia Chávez desde Guadalajara.. El Dilema de Rudy desde Monterrey… Siddhartha nos acompañó para hablar de su nueva música... Diego Cárdenas con “El Top” … “El club de los ex”... Operación dejando a la bendi… “Scrolleando”... .. y Lo que no sabías que sabías…

Vamshi Ambati has spent more than two decades in AI, through the symbolic era, statistical era, and the neural wave we're experiencing today. A CMU PhD, founder of LatentStructure and Predera (which was acquired), now an investor at Virama Ventures, he's one of the sharper voices on what's actually happening under the hood of the AI boom.We discuss a simple question: Who wins when models become cheaper and more abundant? And try to answer this by looking at how inference spend v/s compute spend is shifting, and why inference may become the biggest infrastructure opportunity of the next decade.Vamshi explains what actually goes into the cost of a token, why AI is simultaneously getting cheaper and more expensive, and why the inference market alone could reach $1.3 trillion by 2030. If you're building in AI or someone who wants a clear mental model of where this industry is headed, this conversation is for you. 00:00 - Trailer0:45 - How an AI researcher thinks after 20 years05:53 - Where enterprise AI adoption is headed08:35 - Drawing parallels between cloud and AI11:20 - If building is cheap, what's valuable?13:37 - Can computing get cheaper?16:41 - What is inference, really?22:22 - Why coding and customer support got eaten first?26:48 - Which technologies are overvalued and undervalued?29:56 - An accidental entrepreneur's journey33:15 - Why is healthcare slow to adopt technology?38:59 - Landing Walmart as a customer42:36 - Should founders build in services if product isn't visible?43:47 - Is Palantir a product company or a services company?44:15 - How to win as a forward-deployed company46:23 - What it takes to land large enterprise customers49:20 - Building sales muscles as a technical founder-------------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/TheNeonShowwConnect 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

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Will your software soon be a living organism with its own immune system?Animesh Koratana, founder of PlayerZero, started his software career long before he founded the company. Growing up in Atlanta, he spent his childhood inside his father's software business, watching engineers sitting through the unglamorous work of QA and keeping systems alive after launch. He saw early that writing software was only half the problem. Maintaining it was the real battle.Years later at Stanford, he witnessed the birth of GPT-2 and Codex, the very foundation of GitHub Copilot. While much of the world focused on how AI would help engineers write software faster, he became obsessed with a different question: What happens when companies are flooded with AI-generated code that no single engineer fully understands?With PlayerZero, Animesh is building toward what he calls self-healing software: systems that behave less like static machines and more like living organisms with their own immune systems.At the center of that vision are “Context Graphs” which captures the "institutional memory" of a company: the deep knowledge held by a senior engineer who has spent years understanding how complex software breaks, the failure modes it develops, and the decisions behind fixing it.If you are building software today and wondering how reliability, debugging, and ownership will work when machines write most of the code, this episode is for you.0:00 — Trailer0:45 — Building Self-Healing Code2:03 — First Exposure to LLMs Through GPT-23:45 — What Is PlayerZero?5:42 — Institutional Memory of a Senior Engineer7:10 — How Context Is Built10:06 — The Viral “Context Graph” Piece16:24 — The Outcome PlayerZero Delivers19:59 — When the Agent Tells the Human What to Do23:43 — Who Is PlayerZero Selling To?26:56 — Why Software Should Be Treated Like Biology28:54 — The PlayerZero Customer Pitch30:37 — Can Software Really Have an Immune System?35:15 — How Animesh Chose His Investors36:55 — What's Next for PlayerZero?-------------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/TheNeonShowwConnect 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

In today's podcast Paul has a conversation with Siddhartha (Sid) Jha of Arbol. Arbol provides various types of climate risk insurance alternatives and data analytics to help farmers and agribusinesses manage climate and other risks. They continue to research additional risk management products that can help farmers.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 systems that behave predictably, improve continuously, and earn user trust over time. As traditional monitoring breaks down in a probabilistic world, observability now requires learning how an AI system reasons, not just how it performs. This leads to a new paradigm where agents are no longer just executing tasks, but also analyzing and debugging other agents.The episode also traces the evolution of machine learning itself. From feature engineering to deep learning to transformers , each leap increased capability and reduced control. Evaluation is now where control sits.Ameya is clear on one point. Moving fast with weak evaluations feels like velocity, but it compounds into technical debt, unpredictable failures, and ultimately a loss of user trust. The teams that win are the ones that invest early in rigor, especially in understanding context, which is quickly becoming the hardest and most critical layer in AI systems.If you are a founder or engineer moving beyond the demo phase and trying to build durable, high-quality AI systems, this episode will change how you think about shipping.0:00 — Trailer00:55 — What's Braintrust?05:01 — What agents are shipping today07:54 — What evals look like in practice for Notion & Zapier09:44 — Evals vs Classic monitoring11:33 — Who is the Field CTO?16:35 — What goes wrong when agents fail18:26 — Agents analyzing other agents24:17 — Evals are existential in vibecoding25:52 — Ship fast with weak evals or slow with strong evals?25:41 — What makes enterprises trust an LLM?29:25 — Do AI startups know how good their product is?30:23 — 3 ML systems: Microsoft, Dropbox, Meta36:30 — How the 2017 transformer paper changed everything38:20 — All algorithms are predicting the next word43:40 — What LLMs will do in 1 year-------------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/TheNeonShowwConnect 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 does it take to build a company that industry giants want to buy?Poojan Kumar built and exited two enterprise infrastructure companies, PernixData to Nutanix and Clumio to Commvault.He began his career at Oracle, where he wrote the original code for Exadata and helped scale it into a billion-dollar product line. But his real founder journey began when he left the corporate world to chase what he calls the “Discontinuity Thesis.”At PernixData, that discontinuity was the shift from hard disks to flash storage. The company scaled to $25 million in revenue before being acquired by Nutanix. At Clumio, the discontinuity was public cloud. Clumio went on to raise $186 million to build a cloud-native backup and cyber resilience platform before being acquired by Commvault, where Poojan now serves as GM of the business line.If you want to understand how enduring enterprise companies are actually built and acquired this episode is for you.0:00 - Trailer0:48 - 25 Years in Enterprise03:02 - Founders Should Look for Discontinuity04:25 - $25M ARR, $60M Funding & an Exit in 6 Years06:28 - The Thesis Behind Clumio's Acquisition07:36 - The Landscape of Data Backup09:08 - What Should Founders in Security & Data Build?11:48 - Cloud vs AI: The New Data & Storage Stack13:59 - The Unanswered Questions Enterprises Have Today16:38 - How Infra Changed Between Pernix, Clumio & Today18:31 - Scaling to $25M Before Acquisition, Twice20:43 - Why is AI Adoption Bottom-Up, Not Top-Down?21:26 - Claude vs Codex vs Copilot22:34 - When Cloud Outgrew the Backup Playbook25:41 - Are Fragmented Clouds Silent Killers?28:06 - Fundraising Takes You from Point A to Point B32:29 - Selling to Commvault vs Nutanix34:33 - What Leads to an 8-Figure Exit?36:55 - How a Technical Founder Excelled at 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/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShowwConnect 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

In this episode, we sit with Verse Twelve of the Tao Te Ching (Stephen Mitchell translation). We explore the paradox of modern excess: how a world designed to stimulate our senses often leaves us numb, and how the "Master" navigates this noise without withdrawing from it.Colors blind the eye.Sounds deafen the ear.Flavors numb the taste.Thoughts weaken the mind.Desires wither the heart.The Master observes the worldbut trusts his inner vision.He allows things to come and go.His heart is open as the sky.The Irony of Excess: Lao Tzu isn't arguing against beauty or sensory experience; he is diagnosing overexposure. When we drown our senses in constant "signal," we lose the ability to actually perceive the world.Mental Static vs. Thinking: We often mistake a "chronic mental overcrowding" for productive thought. True thinking is a precision instrument, but it becomes dull when forced to process an endless churn of reactions and anxieties.The Wanting Machine: Constant appetite and the accumulation of desires don't expand the heart—they wither it, making our internal world smaller and more reactive.The Master's Orientation: Living "in the world but not of it." The goal isn't to hide in a cave, but to keep one ear tuned to something quieter while allowing the stream of life to move through us without grasping at it."We've taken the most ancient of human senses and drowned it in signal.""Silence stopped feeling like quiet and started feeling like deprivation.""The mind... starts mistaking noise for signal.""His heart is open—not like a wound, but like space."What would it feel like to be genuinely nourished by less?Consider being more selective this week. Instead of a dozen half-attended conversations or a hundred scrolled images, try to find one thing—a meal, a walk, a single page of a book—and give it your full, un-fragmented presence.Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (for further reflection on the journey toward inner vision)The Way of Zen by Alan WattsBill Evans - Alone (for a musical companion to quiet reflection)Thank you for listening to The Coffee Buzz. Find a chair, pour another cup, and we'll see you next time.

Have we got what it takes to wake up? Sanghagita follows Siddhartha Gautama's extraordinary quest to its turning point. In him we meet a seeker who turns down power, prestige and leadership, turning his back on the received wisdom of harsh asceticism, choosing instead something far more radical: to meditate alone in the comfortable shade of a beautiful tree. Here he meets Māra: tempter, accuser, embodiment of fear, desire, and doubt, unleashing everything he has to prevent Siddhartha's awakening. This talk was given at Sheffield Buddhist Centre, 2026. *** Help us keep FBA Podcasts free for everyone! Donate now: https://freebuddhistaudio.com/donate Subscribe to our Dharmabytes podcast: Bite-sized clips - Buddhist inspiration three times a week. Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dharmabytes-from-free-buddhist-audio/id416832097 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4UHPDj01UH6ptj8FObwBfB

If you want to support our podcast please visit this link. Thank you! Welcome to a new episode of The Way Out Is In: The Zen Art of Living, a podcast series mirroring Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh's deep teachings of Buddhist philosophy: a simple yet profound methodology for dealing with our suffering, and for creating more happiness and joy in our lives. The third in a series of six episodes recorded during the In the Footsteps of the Buddha pilgrimage, this instalment was made in Rajgir, India, in February 2026. In it, Zen Buddhist monk Brother Phap Huu and leadership coach Jo Confino are again joined by Dharma teacher Shantum Seth to discuss the foundational initial teachings of the Buddha: the Four Noble Truths, the Noble Eightfold Path, Non-Self, and the Fire Sermon. Together, they also share personal experiences of encountering the Buddha’s teachings, practicing Thich Nhat Hanh's wisdom in daily life, highlighting the transformative power of mindfulness, community, the realization of non-self, and more. About the pilgrimage: In 1988, Shantum Seth was invited by Thich Nhat Hanh (Thay) to organize a pilgrimage to the sacred sites associated with the Buddha's life across India. Subsequently, Thay encouraged Shantum to continue guiding such journeys each year, offering pilgrimage itself as a mindfulness practice—one that the Buddha had suggested. Shantum has been leading these transformative journeys ever since, offering people from around the world the opportunity to follow In the Footsteps of the Buddha with awareness and insight. After 15 years at the United Nations, Shantum left to volunteer with the Ahimsa Trust, which represents Thay's work in India and promotes the practice of “peace in oneself and peace in the world”. Through Buddhapath, his expression of Right Livelihood, Shantum continues to guide pilgrimages and share the wisdom and culture of the places he visits in India and across Buddhist Asia, cultivating community through these deeply meaningful journeys.To learn more about upcoming pilgrimages, visit www.buddhapath.com, or follow Shantum on Facebook and Instagram at @eleven_directions. Shantum Seth, an ordained Dharmacharya (Dharma teacher) in the Buddhist Mindfulness lineage of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, teaches in India and across the world. A co-founder of Ahimsa Trust, he has been a student of Thich Nhat Hanh's teachings for the past 35 years, and, since 1988, has led pilgrimages and other multi-faith, educational, cultural, spiritual, and transformative journeys across diverse regions of India and Asia. He is actively involved in educational, social, and ecological programmes, including work on cultivating mindfulness in society, including with educators, the Indian Central Reserve Police Force, and the corporate sector. Across various Indian sanghas, Dharmacharya Shantum is the primary teacher of different practices of mindfulness from Thich Nhat Hanh's tradition. Co-produced by the Plum Village App:https://plumvillage.app/ And Global Optimism:https://globaloptimism.com/With support from the Thich Nhat Hanh Foundation:https://thichnhathanhfoundation.org/ Recordist: Ann Nguyenhttps://ann.earthSound editor: Joe Holtawayhttps://joeholtaway.comPublisher: Anca RusuProducer: Clay Carnillhttps://claycarnill.comExecutive Producer: Catalin Zorzini List of resources The Way Out Is In: ‘In the Footsteps of the Buddha (2/6) | Enlightenment under the Bodhi Tree (Episode #103)'https://plumvillage.org/podcast/in-the-footsteps-of-the-buddha-2-6-enlightenment-under-the-bodhi-tree-episode-103 The Way Out Is In: ‘In the Footsteps of the Buddha (1/6) | The Buddha: Down to Earth (Episode #102)'https://plumvillage.org/podcast/in-the-footsteps-of-the-buddha-1-6-the-buddha-down-to-earth-episode-102Interbeinghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbeing Plum Village Traditionhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plum_Village_Tradition Old Path White Cloudshttps://www.parallax.org/product/old-path-white-clouds Sister Chan Khonghttps://plumvillage.org/about/sister-chan-khong Rajgirhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajgir Bodhi treehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodhi_tree Sujatahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sujata_(milkmaid) Magadhahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magadha Poem: ‘Please Call Me By My True Names'https://www.parallax.org/mindfulnessbell/article/poem-please-call-me-by-my-true-names Dharma Talks: ‘Redefining the Four Noble Truths'https://plumvillage.org/library/dharma-talks/redefining-the-four-noble-truths Vinayahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinaya Dharma Talks: ‘The Noble Eightfold Path'https://plumvillage.org/library/dharma-talks/the-noble-eightfold-path Duhkhahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Du%E1%B8%A5kha Dignagahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dign%C4%81ga The Anattalakkhaṇa Sutta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anattalakkha%E1%B9%87a_Sutta The Way Out Is In: ‘The Three Jewels (Episode #89)'https://plumvillage.org/podcast/the-three-jewels-episode-89 Kosala Kingdomhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosala_kingdom Kashyapahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashyapa Kalachakrahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalachakra Joan Halifaxhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Halifax Quotes “Suffering is all around us. Hell is in the here and now. We have to collectively have the determination, as the Buddha did, not to deprive ourselves from food, from nutriment, but to understand the sources of our suffering – as well as the sources of the path of liberation.” “The teaching of the Four Noble Truths is the understanding of suffering. We all have suffering. This is the shared experience of us all. We are all equal because we all suffer. In spite of status, class – whatever labels humanity may have for one another – suffering is a truth that none of us can ignore or can escape.” “We only have so much time on this planet. But there’s so much we can direct our attention towards. What are the seeds we are watering every day? The diligence of watering our consciousness and the seeds that become the action.” “We have to see the Buddha a little bit like a doctor. We have to see suffering as a disease, a universal disease. You might think it’s very obvious that we all suffer, that we all get angry, that we are all separated from the ones we love, that we have sickness and old age. But it wasn’t a universal idea. Some people said, ‘This life is bliss.' So when we start with the primacy of suffering, that in itself is a revolutionary moment.” “As somebody who really is imbued with the Buddha’s teachings, I feel that all human beings experience suffering. And that in itself is revolutionary, saying, ‘This is where it starts.' Because a lot of it is about escaping from the present, escaping from this world. Most teachings are around something which will come hereafter – but the Buddha is saying, ‘Come back to now; feel, understand your mind, see that your mind is creating your reality.'” “Thich Nhat Hanh always emphasized that people talk about Buddhism being about suffering. But he said, ‘No, it’s the third noble truth. It is about the releasing of suffering and the transforming of suffering into joy and happiness. That’s very important; don’t get stuck in the suffering. That’s why the first noble truth is a noble truth, because you use the suffering as a compost for happiness.” “Siddhartha touched the reality that life and death are just a game of hide and seek. They are just labels.” “Acceptance, and being with all the conditions in the present moment, is a superpower. You cannot escape the present moments – except by being in your suffering and your wishful thinking. But once you arrive in the here and now, and you embrace these realities, you are free.” “This is because that is. This is not because that is not.” “‘Thay, what happens when I die?' Thay said, ‘I haven’t died yet, I don’t know. But what I can tell you is what happens when we are very much alive.' Let’s come back to that present moment, to that insight.” “Thay spoke so eloquently of the second teaching, the Anattalakkhaṇa Sutta; the sutra on non-self. Under the tree, the Buddha looked at the Bodhi leaf and said, ‘Ah, in that leaf is the sunshine, the earth, the rain, the seed, everything. And if you take one of those elements out of that leaf, the leaf won’t exist as we know it now.' And that was his deep realization.” “One Buddha is not enough.” “The Buddha is the sangha.” “I’d been a political activist looking for a way of being peace, not fighting for peace. I had a lot of anger in me and I really felt I touched peace for the first time in that walking meditation – as a visceral experience, not as an idea, not as the concept of wanting peace, but as something that I could embody.”

If you want to support our podcast please visit this link. Thank you! Welcome to a new episode of The Way Out Is In: The Zen Art of Living, a podcast series mirroring Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh's deep teachings of Buddhist philosophy: a simple yet profound methodology for dealing with our suffering, and for creating more happiness and joy in our lives. The second in a series of six episodes recorded during the In the Footsteps of the Buddha pilgrimage, this instalment was made in Bodh Gaya, India, in February 2026. In it, Zen Buddhist monk Brother Phap Huu and leadership coach Jo Confino are joined again by Dharma teacher Shantum Seth to discuss the journey of the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, before he reached enlightenment under the Bodhi Tree in Bodh Gaya. It covers Siddhartha’s early life, the various ascetic practices he tried, his finding of the middle way between extreme asceticism and hedonism and going through various stages of meditation and insight, to becoming the awakened one, and his first teaching. Together, the three participants further reflect on the relevance of the Buddha’s journey to their own spiritual practices; the challenges of maintaining mindfulness and presence in the modern world; the importance of the sangha in the Buddhist tradition; and how the Buddha’s teachings emphasize the interconnectedness of all things. About the pilgrimage: In 1988, Shantum Seth was invited by Thich Nhat Hanh (Thay) to organize a pilgrimage to the sacred sites associated with the Buddha's life across India. Subsequently, Thay encouraged Shantum to continue guiding such journeys each year, offering pilgrimage itself as a mindfulness practice—one that the Buddha had suggested. Shantum has been leading these transformative journeys ever since, offering people from around the world the opportunity to follow In the Footsteps of the Buddha with awareness and insight. After 15 years at the United Nations, Shantum left to volunteer with the Ahimsa Trust, which represents Thay's work in India and promotes the practice of “peace in oneself and peace in the world”. Through Buddhapath, his expression of Right Livelihood, Shantum continues to guide pilgrimages and share the wisdom and culture of the places he visits in India and across Buddhist Asia, cultivating community through these deeply meaningful journeys.To learn more about upcoming pilgrimages, visit www.buddhapath.com, or follow Shantum on Facebook and Instagram at @eleven_directions. Shantum Seth, an ordained Dharmacharya (Dharma teacher) in the Buddhist Mindfulness lineage of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, teaches in India and across the world. A co-founder of Ahimsa Trust, he has been a student of Thich Nhat Hanh's teachings for the past 35 years, and, since 1988, has led pilgrimages and other multi-faith, educational, cultural, spiritual, and transformative journeys across diverse regions of India and Asia. He is actively involved in educational, social, and ecological programmes, including work on cultivating mindfulness in society, including with educators, the Indian Central Reserve Police Force, and the corporate sector. Across various Indian sanghas, Dharmacharya Shantum is the primary teacher of different practices of mindfulness from Thich Nhat Hanh's tradition. Co-produced by the Plum Village App:https://plumvillage.app/  And Global Optimism:https://globaloptimism.com/With support from the Thich Nhat Hanh Foundation:https://thichnhathanhfoundation.org/ Recording by Ann Nguyenhttps://ann.earthSound editing by Joe Holtawayhttps://joeholtaway.comPublishing by Anca RusuProduced by Clay Carnillhttps://claycarnill.comExecutive Producer: Catalin Zorzini List of resources Interbeinghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbeing Plum Village Traditionhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plum_Village_Tradition Old Path White Cloudshttps://www.parallax.org/product/old-path-white-clouds Kaundinyahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaundinya Sister Chan Khonghttps://plumvillage.org/about/sister-chan-khong Bodhi treehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodhi_tree Bodh Gayahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodh_Gaya Sujatahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sujata_(milkmaid) Mahavirahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahavira Kumbh Melahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kumbh_Mela Maulana Azadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maulana_Azad Dalithttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalit Dharma Talks: ‘Redefining the Four Noble Truths'https://plumvillage.org/library/dharma-talks/redefining-the-four-noble-truths Dharma Talks: ‘The Noble Eightfold Path'https://plumvillage.org/library/dharma-talks/the-noble-eightfold-path Quotes “We think we’re practicing for ourselves only, but there are invisible connections that we may not see. So your own practice, your own transformation, your decision-making can shift a whole lineage that precedes you. Without even doing much. It’s just some decisions; it’s almost like the turning of the dharma wheel, something in our whole lineage. And it’s true for a lot of my Western monastics; they might be the first in their whole ancestral lineage to be on the path of love and understanding. So you’re not doing this for yourself only, you’re doing this for your whole lineage.” “Everyone on this pilgrimage, in this room right now, sitting, I invite you to plant that seed to see that this journey is not yours alone. There’s a deep interbeing and it’s a weaving of past, present, and future.” “I got involved in activist politics, organizing big demonstrations, going to jail, organizing in a big way. But then I burnt out and found that I was very angry. And that anger was actually infusing my action, and I realized I was also part of the problem. So I had to find a way of being peace, not just fighting for peace.” “In the Indic civilizational system, at least in some traditions, and especially in the Brahmanical system – I don’t call it Hinduism – we have four stages of life. The first is what we call brahmacharya: the celibate life, when you’re a student. The second stage is the grahasthi, where you become a family person and have children and build up the family. And the third is vanaprastha: sort of a forest dwelling, but more like social work; your children are getting married and you get involved more in society, like a philanthropist. And the fourth stage is sannyas, where you actually leave the family, break your ties, and become, in effect, dead to the family and take the path of a monastic. So the Buddha is saying, ‘You don’t need to wait till you’re an older person. Start now. Don’t waste your life. The path of awakening can be walked when you’re young, too.'” “Having children is courageous; you’re taking on responsibility for future generations, and that's not easy. I feel that’s why we need a sangha of parents, friends. They say it takes a village, but it takes the global humanity, eight billion people, to create a civilizational shift. And that’s what we’re trying to do, to make the world a better place.” “Courage is a moment-to-moment act. It’s not just a moment; it’s each day we get up and say, ‘Okay, it’s a blessing we have this life for these 24 hours. Can I, in some way, make it better? Can I not make it worse? Can I enhance the life of people around me and keep being mindful?' The word ‘Buddha' just means to be awake. So how can we really be awake? We can be awake by being mindful: being attentive, breathing in, breathing out. That’s a moment of awakening, to be present. The Buddha became a full-time Buddha, but we can do it moment-to-moment, as little, part-time Buddhas. I think all of us can touch it – and that requires courage, too, to be diligent in our practice; it’s very easy to get distracted so we need to watch our mental state of irritation, anger, jealousy, whatever comes up. I have eyes to see – wow, that’s a miracle. That’s, again, a type of awakening. So I think this path is the path of courage.” “You can share the same bed with someone, but if you don’t share an aspiration, it can cause immense suffering.” “The problem with the middle path is that it’s not a single line. It is an appropriate response to a particular situation. The middle part requires attentiveness, mindfulness, moment-to-moment. You might think drinking water is an appropriate action, but if you’ve had a stomach operation, drinking water might kill you. So something simple like that has to be appropriately done; the middle way is appropriate to time and place.” “We can’t start off on the middle path. We have to understand our suffering deeply in order to know the middle path, to know the two extremes in order to find that path.” “That’s why retreats are so important: we step away from the world to realize what our deepest aspiration is. And then we can go back with a new set of eyes.”

Welcome to a new episode of The Way Out Is In: The Zen Art of Living, a podcast series mirroring Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh's deep teachings of Buddhist philosophy: a simple yet profound methodology for dealing with our suffering, and for creating more happiness and joy in our lives. The first of a series of six episodes recorded during the pilgrimage ‘In the Footsteps of the Buddha’, this instalment was made in Varanasi, India, in February 2026. In this opening episode, Zen Buddhist monk Brother Phap Huu and leadership coach Jo Confino are joined by Dharma teacher Shantum Seth to discuss the importance of understanding the Buddha as a fully human being; a boat journey on the sacred Ganges river at sunrise, from which it was possible to witness cremation and devotion; teachings on death and impermanence as daily practice; the importance of living in the present moment; and much more.The speakers also share personal experiences and reflections on their spiritual journeys, the role played by the community, and the continuation of the Buddha’s teachings through their own lives and practice.About the pilgrimage: In 1988, Shantum Seth was invited by Thich Nhat Hanh (Thay) to organize a pilgrimage to the sacred sites associated with the Buddha's life across India. Subsequently, Thay encouraged Shantum to continue guiding such journeys each year, offering pilgrimage itself as a mindfulness practice—one that the Buddha had suggested. Shantum has been leading these transformative journeys ever since, offering people from around the world the opportunity to follow In the Footsteps of the Buddha with awareness and insight. After 15 years at the United Nations, Shantum left to volunteer with the Ahimsa Trust, which represents Thay's work in India and promotes the practice of “peace in oneself and peace in the world”. Through Buddhapath, his expression of Right Livelihood, Shantum continues to guide pilgrimages and share the wisdom and culture of the places he visits in India and across Buddhist Asia, cultivating community through these deeply meaningful journeys.To learn more about upcoming pilgrimages, visit www.buddhapath.com, or follow Shantum on Facebook and Instagram at @eleven_directions. Shantum Seth, an ordained Dharmacharya (Dharma teacher) in the Buddhist Mindfulness lineage of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, teaches in India and across the world. A co-founder of Ahimsa Trust, he has been a student of Thich Nhat Hanh's teachings for the past 35 years, and, since 1988, has led pilgrimages and other multi-faith, educational, cultural, spiritual, and transformative journeys across diverse regions of India and Asia. He is actively involved in educational, social, and ecological programmes, including work on cultivating mindfulness in society, including with educators, the Indian Central Reserve Police Force, and the corporate sector. Across various Indian sanghas, Dharmacharya Shantum is the primary teacher of different practices of mindfulness from Thich Nhat Hanh's tradition. List of resources The Way Out Is In: ‘Ancient Path for Modern Times: Active Nonviolence (Episode #70)'https://plumvillage.org/podcast/ancient-path-for-modern-times-active-nonviolence-episode-70 Interbeinghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbeing Plum Village Traditionhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plum_Village_Tradition ‘The Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings'https://plumvillage.org/mindfulness/the-14-mindfulness-trainings Sarnathhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarnath Dharadunhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dehradun_district Bodh Gayahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodh_Gaya Rajgirhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajgir Old Path White Cloudshttps://www.parallax.org/product/old-path-white-clouds Federico Fellinihttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federico_Fellini Ghathttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghat Alara Kalama https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%80%E1%B8%B7%C4%81ra_K%C4%81l%C4%81ma Jack Kornfieldhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Kornfield Upanishadshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upanishads Sister Chan Khonghttps://plumvillage.org/about/sister-chan-khong Bodhi treehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodhi_tree Mokshahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moksha Rishi Joan Halifaxhttps://www.joanhalifax.org/ Daily Contemplations on Impermanence & Interbeinghttps://plumvillage.org/daily-contemplations-on-impermanence-interbeing#the-five-remembrances Sutras: ‘Discourse on Knowing the Better Way to Live Alone'https://plumvillage.org/library/sutras/discourse-on-knowing-the-better-way-to-live-alone Sutrashttps://plumvillage.org/genre/sutras Leila Sethhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leila_Seth On Balancehttps://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1754796.On_Balance_an_Autobiography Quotes “Every step is a miracle. Every breath is an offering.” “The transformation is both individual and collective – and not just right now; it is something which seeps into our understanding and informs our life. The real journey begins when you get home. When you see your familiar surroundings with these pilgrimage lenses, those are very, very important moments. When you see your familiar surroundings slightly differently, and you see what brings you suffering, what brings you joy, what brings a sense of ease, then you can tweak your life.” “Siddhartha always says, ‘I’m on this path not for power, not for leadership, but to find liberation within us.' And that means we have to be ready to let go of all of the ideology that we have received from our ancestors, not from just us, but from the lineage of our whole ancestors and society.” “We can be free amidst the suffering. We can still find our calm, our peace with every storm that arises, that manifests. We find a way to understand it, to embrace it even, because we see that that storm is a part of us.” “In the Mahaparinirvāṇa Sutta, the Buddha said, ‘Go to the places where I was born, died, where the first teachings were given, where I awakened.' But I think he’s saying, ‘Leave your familiar surroundings and explore, and you’ll find different seeds in your consciousness being touched, which are not touched when you go every day to work or in your familiar surroundings.' And that is the learning of yourself. It’s an interior journey on this exterior part.” “In India, your path to God is through your guru – but in the Buddha Dharma, the guru shows you the path, and you walk it. In the classic example of the Buddha pointing to the moon, he says, ‘Don’t get caught looking at my finger; look at the moon.'” “Somebody once asked Thay, ‘What happens when we die?' He said, ‘I don’t know, but I can tell you what happens when we’re alive.'” “The only ingredient that you have any control about for the future is the present. We can only act in the present. As you know, the past is gone, the future is an idea – but all these situations that arise in our lives, how do we respond appropriately? With ethics, with a sense of calm, with a sense of love, how can we respond appropriately to each situation? Because that is the ingredient for the future.” “The Buddha is saying, ‘Stay open, stay alive. This is the most precious moment. This is a gift. And when we die, we’ll have no control over it.'” “In Indian philosophy, we don't have only yes or no. We say, yes, no, neither yes or no, both yes and no. So it’s the idea that I am the same person, I’m a different person, I’m neither the same or a different person, and both the same person and the different person. That’s the Buddha Dharma’s understanding of continuity, birth and death, and in that we don’t get caught.” “Awakening is a collective awakening.” “The Buddha was teaching us how to be a human being, how to take both the joy and the happiness of being a human being, but also to understand the suffering of a human being, and then take suffering as a noble truth. But it’s a noble truth only because we can transform it – otherwise it’s just plain old suffering. Use suffering as the compost for liberation. Looking at the cause, knowing the path to overcome suffering. And that’s key in Buddha. Otherwise, death is suffering, loss is suffering. The Buddha is saying, ‘Take that and look at it deeply, transform it, and live your life today as if it’s your last moment, your first moment, your present moment, our present moment.'” “Secular in India means different from secular in the West. Secular in India means respecting all religions. It doesn’t mean non-religious. I was brought up in a household like that, where we had Hindu icons, Christian icons, Islamic icons, everything. And we would go to midnight mass or go to a mosque or go to a temple, but we were not religious. It was just respecting people like that. And we had friends from every religion.”