What if the biggest mistake you can make as a founder is signing Apple as your first customer?

Manish Jindal spent 10 years at Cloudflare as employee #45, helping take the company from $10 million revenue to a $60 billion public company. Manish breaks down the Cloudflare playbook: why they intentionally said “no” to Fortune 500 companies early on to protect their product, and how a single phone call from a CIO birthed their entire enterprise motion.

Throughout his career, Manish has joined companies that already showed early product–market fit in large markets, allowing him to spend a decade helping scale them. Now as the President at Arize, he is building the “plumbing” that allows giants like Walmart and Uber to move from building AI agents to real-world production.

We discuss why “boring” infrastructure is a more durable bet than flashy AI apps, and why owning the data remains the ultimate competitive edge. Manish also shares insights on building Go-To-Market (GTM) teams in the Cloudflare era and how that strategy has shifted in the AI era.

If you are a founder or leader trying to scale a startup, this episode with Manish Jindal is for you.

00:00 – Trailer
01:00 – How Manish chose companies with early PMF
03:45 – Founder’s belief is most important
04:35 – Entering dev tooling when it wasn't popular
08:20 – Never leave a Co. you believe in for wrong reasons
09:45 – The “boring” industries that do well in Long run
12:40 – It’s easy to build an agent, but hard to scale one
15:06 – Why infra won’t be winner-take-all
18:02 – The keepers of data will win
20:20 – From million to billion in Cloudflare’s journey
21:32 – The “holy sh*t” moment happens fast for Cloudflare
24:30 – The CIO call that led to Cloudflare’s enterprise plan
27:04 – $50M and $100M ARR path of Cloudflare
28:33 – Build enterprise motion slowly or aggressively?
29:51 – Why Cloudflare didn’t want Apple as customer
32:10 – Early PMF at Splunk, Cloudflare, and Arize
35:40 – Choosing only decade-long stints
39:01 – Why Manish didn’t start his own company
43:37 – How GTM has changed in the AI world
54:25 – What agents need to work well in production
01:00:51 – Which enterprise use cases qualify for AI?
01:03:52 – What went wrong with Air Canada Agent?
01:04:52 – How customers are discovered
01:09:01 – Claude & Cursor are the most powerful agents today
01:10:55 – How Manish chooses companies to invest in
01:15:15 – Why acquisitions will become the Norm
01:18:35 – Technology is not a moat anymore

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India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it.
This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India.

What is Neon Fund?
We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before.

Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon.

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Check us out on:
Website: https://neon.fund/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/
Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww

Connect with Siddhartha on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/
Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7

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This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice.

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What does it look like to run the same playbook across five venture funds?

That is the bet Ashmeet Sidana has made at Engineering Capital. From Fund One to Fund Five, he has written the first check into founders solving problems with Technical insight.

His portfolio includes Rubrik, now a public company, SignalFx which was acquired by Splunk for $1 billion, and CodeRabbit, last valued at $550 million. Ashmeet runs Engineering Capital as a solo GP and the fund has been oversubscribed since Fund One.

Ashmeet says that the most common way technical founders fail is by “playing house.” Founders who build beautifully organized systems and clean processes, but don’t obsessively seek product market fit. His view is that founders should ruthlessly prioritize finding PMF above everything else.

Ashmeet is an investor who has seen enough cycles to know what actually compounds, and is still early-stage enough to care about the details that most people have moved past.

00:00 – Trailer

01:15 – Where does Engineering Capital place its bets?

10:07 – How the VC landscape has evolved

11:20 – Are technical founders the norm in AI?

16:23 – Why the name Engineering Capital?

16:50 – What every VC looks for in a founder

21:34 – Why Founders Choose Your Term Sheet

26:26 – Rule of 1-2 in-person meetings daily with founders

31:42 – Does AI give younger founders an edge?

32:59 – Founders must ruthlessly prioritize

35:58 – The trap of “playing house”

37:40 – PMF can change overnight, Ex: Facebook

40:13 – 1 in 10 companies fail due to lack of PMF

43:17 – The most valuable skill a founder can have

44:19 – Why have a Chief Engineer at a VC firm?

45:44 – The job of every CEO is to learn

46:09 – Solo founders are much riskier

48:15 – An accidental entry into VC

49:52 – Solo GP: risks and rewards

53:34 – $250M across funds

54:43 – Why solo GPs work better in the US

58:25 – Where Ashmeet’s portfolio companies are located

01:00:57 – Be very careful of vanity metrics

01:02:15 – Vibe coding will change the face of software

01:03:36 – Don’t chase trends in how companies are built

01:05:58 – $100M ARR is the outcome of a strong package

01:06:35 – How affordable is Bay Area for young founders?

01:11:32 – AlexNet, not ChatGPT, was the real AI inflection point

01:12:57 – US Public Companies Are Down 50% in 40 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/TheNeonShoww

Connect with Siddhartha on:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/

Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7

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

This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice.

Send us Fan Mail

Over 1 Trillion AI tokens pass through Portkey every single day.

Every AI product eventually runs into the same problem. The prototype works, but once it goes live the system has to manage multiple models, rising token costs, unpredictable latency, and infrastructure that was never built for AI workloads.

That is the problem Rohit Agarwal is solving with Portkey, an AI gateway that sits between applications and the models, whether that’s GPT-4, Claude, or Gemini.

With 24,000 companies routing their AI through Portkey, Rohit sits on ground-level data on how AI is actually being used in production. Which models enterprises are betting on. Where costs are quietly climbing. How usage patterns shift as companies move from pilots to real products.

When AI spend surpasses cloud spend, and Rohit believes it will, the infrastructure running underneath it becomes one of the most important bets in tech. This episode explores what it takes to run AI systems at that scale.

00:00 – Trailer
01:05 – 500 billion AI tokens every day
04:05 – First to call an "AI gateway"
07:26 – Where did the Gateway insight come from?
12:08 – How Portkey is winning this space
13:05 – Picking the right gambles over wrong ones
14:16 – What are LLM endpoints?
15:21 – AI will 100% surpass cloud spend
19:00 – Hype is coming from people still in Q&A mode
19:33 – AI employees over humans in customer support?
23:00 – For AI startups, traffic > revenue
24:43 – The bubble is in valuations, not utility
26:05 – How Rohit built his personal automations
28:38 – Costliest model is most used now
33:21 – What's going right and wrong for AI companies
37:49 – Hiring a VP of sales after $15M is possible today
39:57 – What edge does Claude have over other models?
43:35 – Founders need a "why me vs. why Anthropic" story
52:56 – What if Anthropic or AWS builds a gateway?
55:41 – Predictions for the next 12 months
59:40 – How big is the opportunity in Agents?
01:00:48 – Startups now have to prove it's not a weekend project
01:01:54 – Is Build v/s Buy no longer a Debate?
01:03:50 – What would Rohit build if starting up today?
01:05:58 – How Portkey is different from an API gateway
01:08:26 – MCP / tool calling enables agentic workflows
01:12:00 – Portkey's Community-driven early GTM
01:13:34 – Startups have only 2 reasons for Open core

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

India’s talent has built the world’s tech—now it’s time to lead it.
This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India.

What is Neon Fund?
We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before.

Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon.

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

Check us out on:
Website: https://neon.fund/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/
Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShoww

Connect with Siddhartha on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/
Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7

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

This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice.

Send us Fan Mail