Hi there: I'm Ruhul and this is Future Startup Weekly, a newsletter about entrepreneurship, expertise, and doing good work. Please let us know if you enjoy the newsletter and have any feedback for us to improve. You can read past issues here and subscribe here.
This week’s edition features:
An Announcement. Our popular workshop Product Management for Non-Technical People (PMNP) has returned for a second run. PMNP is an exclusive 2-hour workshop on Product Management for non-technical people. We’re hosting the second edition on 23 December 2023, which will be conducted by Khondoker Mashuk, Sr. Vice President, Product, and Business Intelligence, GoZayaan. Registratuions are open. You can learn more and register here.
On to the updates.
I don’t have a reflection to share today per se. Instead, I’m sharing a few of my favorite quotes from Will and Ariel Durant’s classic The Lessons of History, which I’m currently re-reading.
“Society is founded not on the ideals but on the nature of man,”
“A knowledge of history may teach us that civilization is a co-operative product, that nearly all peoples have contributed to it; it is our common heritage and debt; and the civilized soul will reveal itself in treating every man or woman, however lowly, as a representative of one of these creative and contributory groups.”
“No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for these are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.”
“By and large the poor have the same impulses as the rich, with only less opportunity or skill to implement them.”
“Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme form of liberty.”
“Nothing is clearer in history than the adoption by successful rebels of the methods they were accustomed to condemn in the forces they deposed.”
“Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically”
“He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow, and in much wisdom is much grief.”
“History is so indifferently rich that a case for almost any conclusion from it can be made by a selection of instances.”
“In the last 3,421 years of recorded history only 268 have seen no war.”
“Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice.”
“It is not the race that makes the civilization, it is the civilization that makes the people: circumstances geographical, economic, and political create a culture, and the culture creates a human type.”
“We must operate with partial knowledge, and be provisionally content with probabilities.”
“The conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it—perhaps as much more valuable as roots are more vital than grafts.”
“Animals eat one another without qualm; civilized men consume one another by due process of law. Co-operation”
1. The 5-year Journey of iFarmer: Imagining the Future of Farming in Bangladesh
iFarmer Co-founder and CEO Fahad Ifaz reflects on iFarmer's journey, highlighting a mission-critical approach that sustained the company through ups and downs, and shares his entrepreneurial lessons from building in Bangladesh's crucial yet underrated agricultural sector on the eve of iFarmer's 5th anniversary.
2. Interactive Cares Raises Investment From Accelerating Asia
Interactive Cares, the Dhaka-based ed-tech startup focused on creating employability for millions of youths in Bangladesh, announced that it has been selected for the 9th Cohort of Accelerating Asia's flagship accelerator program. As part of the program, Accelerating Asia participates in Interactive Cares' ongoing seed round, investing $100,000 in the company, with the potential for follow-on funding of up to $250,000.
A history of one of the most important local conglomerates in Bangladesh—its origin and journey to where it is today.
4. 07 Habits of Effective Team Meetings
While productive meetings are concise and focused, delivering essential information without unnecessarily consuming valuable employee time, an ineffective team meeting squanders productive hours. A successful meeting is characterized by a clear objective, rather than a routine gathering for general updates.
6. Partner Content: Rokomari Launches eBook, Sees Phenomenal Growth
Rokomari, the country's largest book-focused e-commerce company, has launched an e-book app/platform integrated into its existing app and website. Customers can now buy, download, and read e-books using the Rokomari app and website. As soon as an e-book is purchased online, it will be downloaded to the e-book library of your account. You can then access it anytime, from anywhere. The company says it already has a collection of over 7,000 e-books in its library, which is growing daily.
Learn more about our partner program here.
That's all for this week.
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Thank you for reading.
Ruhul
On behalf of Team FS
