What do you do with the regret of being right too early?

Aakrit Vaish started Haptik in 2013: an AI chatbot company nine years before ChatGPT. By 2016 he knew the market wasn't ready. He kept going anyway. In 2019 he sold to Reliance Jio. In November 2022, he watched the world finally catch up to the thesis he'd carried for a decade and for a few weeks, sat with the sentence: "This should have been me."

Today he's co-founder of Activate, an AI-native VC firm running with two partners, one employee and seven agents, and an advisor on the India AI Mission. In this episode, Avnish Bajaj sits down with a founder who has rejected him more than once, and asks the questions most founders quietly carry:

1. How do you know whether you're early, late, or correctly timed?
2. Why do you keep going when the rational move is to stop?
3. When the world eventually proves you right, what do you do with the grief?
4. In AI today, what does it actually mean to be in the 99th percentile — globally, not locally?
5. How does a high-agency founder stay ahead when the tools keep rewriting the job?
6. What Aakrit lands on: market timing matters, but identity matters more.
7. Mission over everything else. And the only advice he gives, seven times a day, to anyone who'll listen: have agency. Build. Don't wait.

Chapters

00:00 Why Did You Let ChatGPT Happen?
02:30 Welcome to Unstarted — Introducing Aakrit Vaish
04:00 Growing Up in Juhu — Normal Mumbai Business Family
06:30 UIUC, PayPal Mafia & Moving to Silicon Valley
09:00 Why He Came Back to India at 27
11:00 What Was Haptic? India's First AI Chatbot Company
14:00 The Alexa Moment That Started It All (London 2012)
18:00 How Founders Can Know If They Are Too Early or Too Late
23:00 2016 — He Knew It Was Too Early. He Kept Going Anyway
27:30 Fear of Failure vs Fear of Not Trying Hard Enough
31:00 The Pull vs Push Test — The Clearest PMF Signal
35:00 Why He Sold Haptic to Reliance
38:30 ChatGPT Launched. His First Reaction Was Personal
43:00 "Should That Have Been Me?" — The Honest Answer
47:00 From Reliance to India AI Mission to Activate VC
51:00 How to Know Which Problem Is Worth Solving With AI
55:30 99th Percentile or Nothing — The New Bar for AI Founders
59:00 Why AI in India Is the Most Ignored Opportunity
1:03:00 Anthropic vs OpenAI — Two Different Strategies Explained
1:07:00 Voice AI, FinTech & How GDP Will Actually Grow
1:11:00 The K-Shift — GDP Growth at the Cost of Inequality

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