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.

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