Z47 Moments

<div> <p><br>India's AI moment is louder than its rank. 100M+ ChatGPT users. #2 globally in usage. Still 76th in the world on per capita penetration. So what's actually happening on the ground?</p><p>In this episode of Z47 Moments, Vikram Vaidyanathan and Ashwin Raguraman (Head of AI, walk through The India AI Edge: a three-month primary research effort by Z47, OpenAI, and Zinnov. The report draws on first-party ChatGPT data from OpenAI and interviews with 100+ CXOs across India's largest enterprises, traditional businesses, and emerging companies.</p><p>They unpack:</p></div><ul> <li> <br>Why India's AI map looks nothing like its tech map: Delhi #1 in GDP penetration, Ahmedabad in the top 5 for coding, Assam 3x the national average on education usage</li> <li>The flip nobody saw coming: in mid-2024, Gen Z (18–24) overtook 25–34 as India's dominant AI cohort, and now drives nearly half of all ChatGPT messages</li> <li>Work-to-non-work: how India went from 60% work usage to 65% non-work usage in a year,  and what that says about penetration </li> <li>The four enterprise adoption archetypes: Tinkerer, Democratizer, Transformer, Enforcer, and why ~1 in 4 Indian enterprises is stuck in the wrong one </li> <li>The trillion-dollar gap to Viksit Bharat, and the specific role AI would have to play to close it </li> <li>The four pillars India needs to scale: compute (200–250 MW today → 7 GW needed by 2030), talent, data (and the "data colony" question), and the companies actually being built</li> </ul><div> <p><br>To read the full report, go to: </p><p>The India AI Edge Website: <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/safety/go/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fz47%2Ecom%2Fhow-india-uses-ai&amp;urlhash=nKau&amp;mt=0XlfOWJdis-i2Y5QcXdFen3qCkii5K3GWavGZs56xFvxWH_o8N9ZFR0zKDGJ-3xBS18kQKf-pnTGcMZMM8NIacj_pkkFnJ4ija6xYyP0JewTd02r9POi4gW9cWvphL-wt3WaDCv09PixWGaJ4w_uuZ8EZ9trBvLg&amp;isSdui=true"><strong><a href="https://z47.com/how-india-uses-ai">https://z47.com/how-india-uses-ai</a></strong></a><br>Link to report: <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/safety/go/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Eai-edge%2Ez47%2Ecom%2FThe-India-AI-Report%2Epdf&amp;urlhash=SB-S&amp;mt=v4WSvj3o53Xuo9OVdtxt9mnlwf91QolJ9YE5Dx9EYzEUlUA_kbfXqRoplGPtnMA3qoRw3_qE5CGbGVSSmtER4O9n4am_4qyJaD9kw6mpFGguEnAyi54nPFgc041BGJWjh9JvuFXET0dr6XAFDPMc9xJpDOqyELXC&amp;isSdui=true"><strong><a href="https://www.ai-edge.z47.com/The-India-AI-Report.pdf">https://www.ai-edge.z47.com/The-India-AI-Report.pdf</a></strong></a><strong><br><br>Chapters<br><br></strong>00:00 — Cold Open: The Stats That Set the Frame<br>00:49 — Inside the Report: 100M Users, 100+ CXOs, OpenAI Data<br>02:14 — How AI Is Redrawing India's Map<br>04:59 — The Gen Z Takeover<br>11:24 — Work to Non-Work: India's Usage Flip<br>15:01 — Enterprise AI: The Four Archetypes<br>25:27 — The Enforcer Trap (And How to Escape It)<br>33:21 — Can AI Close India's Trillion-Dollar Gap?<br>37:22 — Compute, Talent, Data, Companies: The Four Pillars<br>47:15 — India's AI Ecosystem &amp; Closing</p></div>

<div> <p>What do you do when the resume is perfect but the work isn't yours yet?<br>Utkarsh Gupta grew up in the Dainik Jagran family in Kanpur, a thirty-person joint family, a media legacy, and a grandfather who once left an entire newspaper page blank during the Emergency and went to jail for it. </p><p>By thirty-two, Utkarsh had built his own answer: Comet, the Indian sneaker brand that put a mango shoe and a rubber-ducky shoe into the world before it ever touched a marketplace.</p><p>In this episode, Avnish Bajaj and Utkarsh sit with the questions most founders never say out loud:</p><p>Was the MBA real, or was I procrastinating? </p><p>1. How do you build your own legacy when one's already been handed to you? </p><p>2. How do you tell persistence apart from stubbornness when the first launch sells two pairs? </p><p>3. When everyone says list on Myntra, why wait two and a half years?</p><p>A masterclass in brand building, told as a confession.</p><p>Chapters</p><p>0:00 Introduction<br>0:50 Growing up in Kanpur's joint family<br>1:13 How Dainik Jagran started on a cycle in 1940<br>2:09 Why he left a media dynasty to build his own thing<br>4:47 Doon School changed everything at age 11<br>6:20 Grandfather's lesson: don't be afraid to scale<br>11:50 How Chicago's sneaker culture sparked Comet<br>13:31 Creating your own surface area of luck<br>14:55 Finding co-founder Dushyant<br>23:24 The 4-pillar brand strategy that built Comet<br>27:09 Why they waited 2.5 years before joining Myntra<br>28:55 The Mango shoe sold 2 units in 4 days — they persisted anyway<br>31:40 3 metrics every founder should track<br>41:46 Building the sole from scratch (4-5 moulds, 6 months)<br>43:02 Creasing problem: sourced a secret material from Korea<br>46:12 Instagram → Stores → Myntra: the distribution sequence<br>49:43 Exclusive reveal: the Rubber Ducky drop (May)</p></div>

<div> <p>Do you need an original idea to start a company? Do you need to be a consumer of your category? Do you need the "right" co-founders?<br>Manish Taneja was none of those things. He grew up in Faridabad a self-described "frog of his own well." He went to IIT and "felt very small." He became a banker, then an investor, then started a beauty company with two other male engineers, with no female co-founder, and no personal stake in the category. He still built Purplle into one of India's largest beauty platforms.<br>In this episode of Unstarted, Avnish Bajaj and Manish sit down to work through the questions that every founder without a clear edge asks themselves:</p><p>1. Do you need an original idea, or is it okay to be a "copycat entrepreneur"?  When VCs tell you your team is missing something </p><p>2. Do you fix the weakness or back your strength? – How do you find a wedge in a category where everyone else has more money, more experience, and more insider knowledge? </p><p>3. What do you do when your ego won't let you leave — and is that the thing keeping you in the game? </p><p>4. How do you build responsibly without losing your edge?</p><p>Manish's answer to all of it, in the end, comes down to two lines: back your strengths, and build responsibly. This conversation is about how he got there.</p><p>Chapters</p><p>00:00 The $100 million mistake<br>01:55 Faridabad, the frog in the well<br>03:03 Feeling small at IIT, and the speech that changed everything<br>05:31 Lehman, Avendus, and the long apprenticeship<br>08:52 "I was the original copycat entrepreneur"<br>12:58 The feedback from Matrix: no woman co-founder<br>14:54 Why beauty, and why now<br>17:52 Dabau early: the rosemary water playbook<br>22:00 How Purplle won Kerala (and met the priests)<br>26:02 The internal compass, and saying no to Thrasios<br>28:53 Why your ego won't let you leave<br>30:36 Why he built in Bombay<br>33:17 The IPO question<br>35:49 Build responsibly</p></div>

<div> <p>What do you do with the regret of being right too early?</p><p>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."</p><p>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:</p><p>1. How do you know whether you're early, late, or correctly timed?<br>2. Why do you keep going when the rational move is to stop?<br>3. When the world eventually proves you right, what do you do with the grief?<br>4. In AI today, what does it actually mean to be in the 99th percentile — globally, not locally?<br>5. How does a high-agency founder stay ahead when the tools keep rewriting the job?<br>6. What Aakrit lands on: market timing matters, but identity matters more. <br>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.</p><p>Chapters</p><p>00:00 Why Did You Let ChatGPT Happen?<br>02:30 Welcome to Unstarted — Introducing Aakrit Vaish<br>04:00 Growing Up in Juhu — Normal Mumbai Business Family<br>06:30 UIUC, PayPal Mafia &amp; Moving to Silicon Valley<br>09:00 Why He Came Back to India at 27<br>11:00 What Was Haptic? India's First AI Chatbot Company<br>14:00 The Alexa Moment That Started It All (London 2012)<br>18:00 How Founders Can Know If They Are Too Early or Too Late<br>23:00 2016 — He Knew It Was Too Early. He Kept Going Anyway<br>27:30 Fear of Failure vs Fear of Not Trying Hard Enough<br>31:00 The Pull vs Push Test — The Clearest PMF Signal<br>35:00 Why He Sold Haptic to Reliance<br>38:30 ChatGPT Launched. His First Reaction Was Personal<br>43:00 "Should That Have Been Me?" — The Honest Answer<br>47:00 From Reliance to India AI Mission to Activate VC<br>51:00 How to Know Which Problem Is Worth Solving With AI<br>55:30 99th Percentile or Nothing — The New Bar for AI Founders<br>59:00 Why AI in India Is the Most Ignored Opportunity<br>1:03:00 Anthropic vs OpenAI — Two Different Strategies Explained<br>1:07:00 Voice AI, FinTech &amp; How GDP Will Actually Grow<br>1:11:00  The K-Shift — GDP Growth at the Cost of Inequality</p><p>Follow Z47</p><p>Website - <a href="https://www.z47.com/">https://www.z47.com/</a><br>Instagram - <a href="https://www.instagram.com/z47.vc/">https://www.instagram.com/z47.vc/</a><br>LinkedIn - <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/z47-vc/">https://www.linkedin.com/company/z47-vc/</a></p></div>

<div> <p>What happens when you spend 13 years building something, and for most of those years, the people around you think it's not going to work out?<br>Jaydeep Barman left a gilded career at McKinsey's London office to bet on a single roll shop in Pune. What followed was a decade-plus journey through India's costliest real estate market, the invention of an entirely new category (cloud kitchens — before anyone called it that), and the slow, painful work of staying in the game while companies that started years after him became unicorns overnight.</p><p>In this conversation, Avnish and Jaydeep wrestle with:</p><p>1. How do you find the one insight nobody else has, and trust it when the world disagrees?</p><p>2. What do you do when your investors mentally write you off?</p><p>3. Why does every real innovation at Rebel come from the moments they were closest to shutting down?</p><p>4. How do you build a team that stays for 13 years, through the pain, the doubt, and the long wait?</p><p>5. This is a conversation about what it actually costs to stay in the arena longer than everyone expects you to, and what that buys you that nothing else can.</p><p>Chapters: </p><p>00:00 The reality of startup comparison &amp; investor pressure<br>01:30 Why we didn’t pivot to food delivery (despite the hype)<br>02:30 From McKinsey to starting a food business<br>04:10 The first roll shop: how Fasos began<br>09:00 Learning the business &amp; why curiosity matters most<br>11:20 Insight v/s timing: finding your “right to win”<br>13:40 Building a cloud kitchen breakthrough<br>17:30 Founder mentality vs CV mentality<br>20:00 Hiring, ownership &amp; building real culture<br>24:50 Performance vs culture: who stays, who leaves<br>27:20 Rock bottom moments: running out of money &amp; pushing through</p><p>Follow Z47</p><p>Website - <a href="https://www.z47.com/">https://www.z47.com/</a><br>Instagram - <a href="https://www.instagram.com/z47.vc/">https://www.instagram.com/z47.vc/</a><br>LinkedIn - <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/z47-vc/">https://www.linkedin.com/company/z47-vc/</a></p></div>