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 — Trailer
0:45 — Building Self-Healing Code
2:03 — First Exposure to LLMs Through GPT-2
3:45 — What Is PlayerZero?
5:42 — Institutional Memory of a Senior Engineer
7:10 — How Context Is Built
10:06 — The Viral “Context Graph” Piece
16:24 — The Outcome PlayerZero Delivers
19:59 — When the Agent Tells the Human What to Do
23:43 — Who Is PlayerZero Selling To?
26:56 — Why Software Should Be Treated Like Biology
28:54 — The PlayerZero Customer Pitch
30:37 — Can Software Really Have an Immune System?
35:15 — How Animesh Chose His Investors
36:55 — What’s Next for PlayerZero?

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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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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 — Trailer
00:55 — What’s Braintrust?
05:01 — What agents are shipping today
07:54 — What evals look like in practice for Notion & Zapier
09:44 — Evals vs Classic monitoring
11:33 — Who is the Field CTO?
16:35 — What goes wrong when agents fail
18:26 — Agents analyzing other agents
24:17 — Evals are existential in vibecoding
25:52 — 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, Meta
36:30 — How the 2017 transformer paper changed everything
38:20 — All algorithms are predicting the next word
43:40 — What LLMs will do in 1 year

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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 - Trailer
0:48 - 25 Years in Enterprise
03:02 - Founders Should Look for Discontinuity
04:25 - $25M ARR, $60M Funding & an Exit in 6 Years
06:28 - The Thesis Behind Clumio's Acquisition
07:36 - The Landscape of Data Backup
09:08 - What Should Founders in Security & Data Build?
11:48 - Cloud vs AI: The New Data & Storage Stack
13:59 - The Unanswered Questions Enterprises Have Today
16:38 - How Infra Changed Between Pernix, Clumio & Today
18:31 - Scaling to $25M Before Acquisition, Twice
20:43 - Why is AI Adoption Bottom-Up, Not Top-Down?
21:26 - Claude vs Codex vs Copilot
22:34 - When Cloud Outgrew the Backup Playbook
25:41 - Are Fragmented Clouds Silent Killers?
28:06 - Fundraising Takes You from Point A to Point B
32:29 - Selling to Commvault vs Nutanix
34:33 - 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/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