240: The man who sold his company to Jio for Rs. 700 Cr Aakrit Vaish Unstarted

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 Follow Z47 Website - Instagram - LinkedIn -

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240: The man who sold his company to Jio for Rs. 700 Cr Aakrit Vaish Unstarted is an episode from Matrix Moments by Matrix Partners India.

This episode is 45:16 long.

This episode was published on Apr 30, 2026.

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