Today, we are excited to feature an insightful conversation with Waliullah Bhuiyan, the founder of Light of Hope (LoH), a Bangladesh-based education conglomerate. Waliullah isn't your typical education entrepreneur, he's on a mission to reimagine learning for the 21st century. He and his team have turned LoH into a fascinating education conglomerate of interconnected ventures on the back of an ambitious thesis: preparing children for the future with enduring and timeless skills imperative for a successful career and meaningful life.
In this exclusive interview, Waliullah pulls back the curtain on LoH's journey from its early days as a scrappy startup to its current status as an education conglomerate with interconnected ventures like Goofi, Kids Time, ToguMogu, and Teachers Time. We talk about the challenges of building a company in an ambiguous market, the importance of culture and talent, the strategic rationale behind LoH's unique conglomerate structure, and ideas for building a truly enduring company.
As you read on, you'll learn:
If you're a founder, an investor, an education innovator, or simply someone who cares about the future of learning, this is a must-read. Waliullah's story and insights offer a masterclass in turning a vision into reality and building an enduring company that makes a meaningful difference in the world.
Part 1: Current Focus and Organizational Changes
Mohammad Ruhul Kader: What are you busy with?
Waliullah Bhuiyan: For the last three months, I've been busy hiring team members across different positions and onboarding, aligning, and enabling them in their roles.
I've also stepped down from my day-to-day Chief Executive role. My co-founder Momel has taken over the position. My role has shifted to more of a big-picture focus. I've moved away from execution. My plan is to focus on global expansion, which I plan to start working on early next year.
Ruhul: This is very interesting. What has changed over the last few years that has necessitated this hiring?
Waliullah: Since COVID-19, we’ve not hired for important positions since we've had to change our business and operations multiple times. We had to transform our offline operations into online and then back to a hybrid model.
We wanted to hire after reaching a certain certainty about our direction as a company as well as the direction of the market. We think that time has come. We have reached a certain stability as a company, and the broader business environment has also reached a certain level. So we are now making these important recruitments.
The other aspect is that I'm approaching 40. I will be 40 next year. When I started, I had an ambition that I would go into retirement or semi-retirement by 50. By 40, I want to completely hand over the Bangladesh operation to our local team and shift my focus to global expansion. That means I have to hire aggressively.
For many of us, we spend a large portion of our time working and that too for other people. If we do not enjoy that work then life can become very challenging.
Part 2: New Role and Business Pillars
Ruhul: I want to learn more about your new role as the "bigger picture guy". You have transitioned from your active executive role and now have taken on this bigger-picture role. Can you tell us more about this role? What does it entail?
Waliullah: When I first started, my goal was to build the best product, be it physical or digital. I was very much focused on that. In the second phase, my focus was on marketing and branding. I spent a lot of daily hours in these two areas for the last 6-7 years.
I think we have come to a place today where it is now a game of scale, efficiency, and multipliers. At this stage, since our businesses are interconnected and complementary to each other, new businesses and opportunities emerge. I felt that if I look at the LoH ecosystem from above, I might find even bigger opportunities than my existing ones.
We are now working on four business pillars:
1. Accumulating Parents and children data
2. Building the largest supply chain/distribution network for kids' products
3. Building the largest network of schools and educational institutions
4. Creating the most amazing IPs, characters, and all
Our next growth will come from these four business pillars, and I want to contribute more to these pillars. This also means if I want to do this, I have to start working with the Government and big players who already have a presence in this ecosystem, and we have to go through them, which demands my attention. I can't hire someone and task them with building these partnerships.
This is a relatively new industry in Bangladesh. So it is sometimes a challenge to have someone with a similar kind of experience. So it needs to be me. I have to step out of the office, go and meet these people, which demands a lot of time.
Part 3: Hiring Process and Philosophy
Ruhul: How do you hire? What is your process of who to hire and who not to hire?
Waliullah: I am not an expert in hiring. What I have tried this time, since this is the first time I am hiring for senior leadership positions, is sharing our vision, mission, and our plans for the next 10 years. I felt that since we are hiring for leadership positions for the first time and many people don't know about LoH's work, if we hire through mainstream hiring platforms, we wouldn't be able to attract the right people.
From my experience, I learned that people who have alignment with our mission, who are not merely working with us for money, are the best candidates for us even if they lack in skills. I hired almost all of our early employees as well. Many of them are with us to this day, and they run the organization. When we hired them, many of them were students. They stayed with us all these years because they love the work we are doing. So it has been an important lesson for me. In the past, we hired very skilled people who don't love our work or don't have the right heart for our cause, and they don't stay around.
For anyone we wanted to hire, I pitched them that this is what we want to do, this is our mission and vision, and this is what we stand for. Then I wanted to see whether a person felt ownership and dedication to our cause and mission, whether someone loves the work we are doing. Then I try to see whether they have relevant skills, and then I check for cultural fit because if I hire someone who comes with a very different cultural orientation, they wouldn't be able to work with our people, and it would create organizational discord and huge challenges for us. I look for these alignments.
I think I am not a good reader of people. As a consequence, I think I don't always hire the right candidate. I did make mistakes in the past, and I had to suffer for that. Hiring mistakes are costly. By the time you learn a hire is not working, it takes 3-6 months. By that time, you have already invested so much in the person. And when you have to fire such a resource, you have to start again from zero, which can be quite expensive.
Ruhul: From your experience, what are some common mistakes people make when it comes to hiring? Any insights for founders who aren't particularly skilled at managing people and hiring?
Waliullah: When founders hire in the early days, they look for their mirror image, which has a high chance of being counterproductive. This is counterproductive because then you have another person like you who doesn't add any additional value to the organization. Instead of that, if you hire someone with complementary skills who aligns with your culture and values, it can be super helpful. I think it is very important not to hire your mirror image.
The second realization is that cultural fit is more important than skills. Many people, particularly in fast-growing companies, wouldn't agree with this because growth and scale are important to them, and they look for people who are seriously skilled and can make things quickly. This usually creates a ton of friction and creates a toxic culture. People ignore it because they prioritize growth and scale.
We are building slowly because we believe having a strong foundation is important, and foundations are built on two things: a very good product and a good team who commit to dedicating a long time of their life to building the company. You can't build a lasting enterprise with a toxic culture. Since I don't have investors who are pushing me for growth, I could take it slow for foundation building.
I think you should prioritize cultural fit and values alignment over everything else. My philosophy is I will hire a rather semi-skilled person; they will learn and grow, and it will perhaps slow us down, but it will not jeopardize my organizational culture.
Being able to say anytime in your journey that I am the happiest person on earth tells a lot about you. [….] A happy person can do interesting and good work which an unhappy person can't. Because it is hard to get something good from an unhappy person because the person is so unhappy. I think happiness is important.
Part 4: Evolution of Vision and Business
Ruhul: We first had a conversation in 2016. How has your vision and clarity about vision evolved over these years? How much has your work evolved during this period?
Waliullah: By 2020, before COVID, we knew what we needed to do to achieve our ambition. We knew that we had to find ways to take Goofi to 30 million children using different mediums such as books, TV programs, and so on. Only then would we be accessible to everyone because not everyone would be able to buy our books. We had clarity on the content and IP front.
Kids Time grew to 8 outlets by the time COVID hit. We knew that we would eventually have to go franchising. Again, we had clarity that if we wanted to take Kids Time to every upazila in Bangladesh, we would have to use a franchise model.
Teachers Time had its own clarity regarding what we wanted to do. But we lost almost three years' worth of progress to COVID. These three years, we just tried to change the model and survive. Today, we are resuming many initiatives to where they were in 2020.
But COVID brought some surprisingly good changes and opportunities for us as well. For instance, we would have never thought that 5-6 year old children would learn drawing, crafting or math online. Now we think online can really help us to scale and reach people from all over the country. Our thinking before was if we wanted to reach students in Bandarban, we would need to open a center there. But that has changed, and in terms of accessibility, our options have increased.
In 2020, Goofi was a very new brand. We launched Goofi in 2019, and we participated in the Ekushey Book Fair 2020 with just a few books. We didn't know how Goofi would evolve. During COVID, we invested a lot in content. It has helped our growth a lot. If COVID didn't happen, we might not have produced so much content.
Coming back to the key question of vision, our vision has not changed. We now have greater clarity about our work, and we are more confident about our work compared to four years back.
In 2020, our product ecosystem was not clearly visible. We had some ideas about what we wanted to do. We knew the products and initiatives we wanted to build. But most of our brands were in the early stages. Goofi was just launched.
Over the last four years, that has changed. Today, our ecosystem of products and services is much more mature. There is a clear direction.
We currently have developed enough products, courses for both students and teachers, and enough content; these can carry us for many years. By simply selling these products, we can really grow big.
It is now all about efficiency and scale. We have an overall idea about the end game in Bangladesh in terms of how far we might be able to go and how big opportunities are for each of our brands. How long it will take us to capture this market is the question, and that depends on how good my team is.
Part 5: Organizational and Product Evolution
Ruhul: Since we are talking about the evolution of LoH, can you give us an overview of your evolution across three separate threads: one, how much has your organization evolved; two, how much have your products evolved; and finally, how much has your ecosystem evolved? You had five ventures in 2017; how has that ecosystem of ventures changed over this period of time?
Waliullah: As I was telling you, Goofi was a much younger brand, just getting started, and we had just one or two books. We are now positioning Goofi as a media franchise. In 2018, Goofi was a book publishing brand with just a few books published under its name. Today, it is a complete media franchise similar to Disney, which has many characters and media franchises. Goofi is now moving in that direction. I can probably call it the first kids' media franchise in Bangladesh. Nobody is even close to what we are doing. Our characters are already earning money. Every time I go to a school and do a show, somebody else is paying for it.
Kids Time was the most reputed one and pulled in the most amount of revenue in 2018.
Content-wise, we now have around 40 hours of content with Duronto TV. We own the digital rights to this content, which means we have the biggest library of digital kids' content after Sisimpur. We can go to others such as streaming platforms tomorrow with this content library, but we are not doing it. We are building the library. We started with books. We then moved into audiovisual, which is TV production. We are now doing audiobooks. Some of our books are already available on Amazon. Some of our contents are now available in some apps. Our content is being converted into multiple mediums and is being distributed.
For Kids Time, we now have a presence both online and offline. We are also now exploring franchising. We opened our franchise a few months back, and we already have a few in the pipeline.
Kids Time before and after COVID, one major difference is our courses. We have brought two international franchises: Singapore Math and Joy School English, an American franchise. Bringing two of the best products to the Bangladesh market, which we didn't do before. Bringing in international products and putting them with our own products is a good strategic change. That has improved Kids Time as a product and brand.
Teachers’ Time didn't change much. However, we are now moving towards skills development instead of remaining confined within the teachers and parents training. Going forward, we will include Teachers Time within our skill development component.
These are transformations in terms of products and brands.
In terms of team, we have not grown much in headcount. We are still a team of 60 people. Our team size has not changed much in these years. What changed, however, is that we have hired a senior leadership team in the last few months.
In terms of organization, since we have made these leadership hires, we now have all these separate departments. In 2018, we didn't have separate departments for many functions. Now we have. We now have almost all the departments that you need to run a proper organization. We are building all the departments that an FMCG company usually has. In terms of organizational structure, we are trying to follow more of an established company model like MNC or FMCG, not a typical startup model. Names of our departments are also like formal, typical departments.
One interesting thing we are doing now is that we are designing our marketing team as an independent agency. Since we have two companies: ToguMogu and LoH, and LoH has several separate brands, we tell our marketing team that you treat all these brands as your client and operate accordingly.
Since I believe my growth is intricately dependent on partnerships, I am putting a lot of effort into creating long-lasting partnerships. This is now an organization-wide strategy across LoH. We are pushing a mindset across the organization so that we approach all our relationships as partnerships.
We now encourage our teams to treat our vendors as partners. The idea is that if our partners grow, we will grow. In this case, our organizational ethos has gone through a transformation. In 2018, we wanted to build everything in-house. It was a closed model. Part of the reason we did it was that I had several bad experiences with outsourcing. I would work with partners and wouldn't get the best outcome. For instance, I realized early on that if we didn't write the Goofi books in-house, we wouldn't be able to produce such high-quality books. So we made everything in-house from writing to design to everything else. That's why we could build such high-quality content. We couldn't publish such high-quality books otherwise.
Since we now have the product range, collaboration is much easier for us. I can give back. Partnership works where both partners believe they have something valuable to share between themselves. If a partnership is lopsided, it doesn't work. In 2018, I was mostly going to other people to ask. I was not openly asking in most instances, but I knew that I had more to receive from a partner than I had to offer.
Today, I know in the domain we work, nobody can offer greater value than us to a potential partner. Anyone trying to build a children-focused brand, I don't think they can find a more trusted partner than us in the market. That's my power that I can leverage today while I am talking about partnership. We have now quite large deals in our pipeline with some large brands. In 2018, we didn't have this brand reputation or trust in the market.
Part 6: Scale of Ventures
Ruhul: Can you give us a sense of the scale of each of your ventures?
Waliullah: Goofi as a brand now reaches 2.5 million kids across Bangladesh through different channels, such as TV, books, content, etc. We may not make any money from many of these efforts because children are consuming our content for free. However, we can assume that roughly 10% Bangladeshi children now access Goofi content.
From Kids Time, we have over 5000 graduates who have completed our courses.
From Teachers Time, we have provided parenting courses to over 100,000 parents and trained 30,000 teachers.
We have created over 630 libraries across Bangladesh under our Porua Project, which is our impact project. Roughly 250,000 children have access to books through these libraries.
We have created over 500 employment opportunities across our ventures in different positions.
We currently do a million dollar worth of turnover annually, which is quite a small number. This also means that we have been able to impact a large number of children very efficiently. It also means our model can be highly scalable with relatively lean operation.
It has been my interest to understand how far we can scale using a lean model. Now we have an understanding of how scale will work in our domain. For the next several years, our goal is to strengthen our business verticals.
We also have an understanding of our impact vertical. The kind of company we are, I have come to realize that there will be five types of work that will not make us any money and there will be two verticals that will. But all seven verticals together will help children prepare for the future.
Part 7: The Ecosystem Approach
Ruhul: You talked about LoH being an ecosystem of education ventures and initiatives. Albeit, many of your initiatives are interconnected with and complement each other. Can you please expand on this idea of ecosystem?
Waliullah: We thought about various options to reach children. We could build apps or digital platforms and so on. But we realized that building an app wouldn't solve my problem. Instead, we wanted to build touch points across the daily lifestyle of a kid. There are touchpoints at home when the kid is with parents such as books, toys, TV, and mobile phones when he reaches a certain age. Then when a kid starts school, he has other touchpoints such as teachers, friends, etc.
We thought if we truly want to change the lives of these kids, we have to create an ecosystem through which we can connect these kids at all these touchpoints. So we created content, we created books, we created characters, we created schools to teach creativity and problem-solving that traditional schools don't offer.
Then we thought kids spend the most time in school with teachers and if we could train teachers, it can be a game-changer for us, so we created Teachers Time to educate teachers, and then we want schools to use our books and content gradually through various partnerships.
I created this ecosystem in 2017 in my head that this is what I have to do to make sure that a kid goes through our training for 4-5 years. Since we train parents and teachers, kids get this environment at home and school. Now if the kid comes to Kids Time, it adds even more value. Now if a kid stays within our learning ecosystem for 4-5 years, he would gain all these skills.
However, there are certain limitations to these touchpoints. We can scale this to 2-3 lakh students but not to 2-3 crore students. In the manner I can serve 2-3 lakh, I can't give the same care and attention to 2-3 crore students. That's why we have to use different channels to reach 3 crore students. That's where TV, our libraries, and teachers' training come into play. Each of these channels help us to reach new kids. So I had a sense of why we needed to build this ecosystem. That's why I could write about it in 2017.
Ruhul: How do your ecosystems and the four pillars that you mentioned connect with each other?
Waliullah: ToguMogu is a separate company that we have pulled into our LoH universe. Our parent and children data comes from ToguMogu. ToguMogu serves parents with different products and services from pregnancy to when their child is ready to go to school. Through its app, we can offer and launch services at a fast pace. When we talk about our 4 business pillars, data is one of them. The data allows us to offer customized solutions to parents according to their needs.
The second vertical is retail presence, where we are looking to expand with our Goofi products. The goal is to build the largest distribution network for kids. This is where Goofi comes in. We are building the largest distribution network for children products where we can gradually distribute other brand’s products too.
IP is also a ‘Goofi play’ with its characters and contents. Kids Time is a part of educational institutions. We view Kids Time centers and franchises as our institution partners. Now everyone comes to us when they want to reach parents and kids. We are also adding these learning centers to ToguMogu where people can find these centers.
LoH has two things: IP and retail, and ToguMogu has two things on its app. If we talk about partnerships with schools, LoH is doing that part of the work.
Part 8: The Conglomerate Approach
Ruhul: LoH is a conglomerate of education ventures. Conglomerates are not common in startups. People tend to say you should focus on one thing and do it as best as you can. While I used to believe that idea of focus just a while ago, I no longer hold that view. I think conglomerates are a far superior model in terms of risk management, learning, capital efficiency, and so on. But this is not a mainstream sentiment in the startup scene. Tell us what you were thinking when you first decided to launch multiple products under LoH. Similarly, what have you learned over these years from running a conglomerate?
Waliullah: It took me seven years to prove that my model works. I had to endure a lot of various arguments and comments about why I was doing it wrong and so on. In the last seven years, I have seen many high-flying startups, including edtech, come and go. Whereas despite not raising any external investment and not launching any product that has a huge market demand, we have survived and we are getting mature as an organization.
In Bangladesh, my experience is that you have to build a conglomerate. I don't see any successful company that is not. In impact-focused ventures, BRAC is a massive conglomerate. Grameen is a massive conglomerate. Similarly, all the successful commercial ventures are massive conglomerates.
We have built a diversified business. We have built a strong distribution network, which is allowing us to build extensive partnerships with other companies. I think we have made the right call by deciding to build like a conglomerate. We couldn't claim this in 2017 when we were building this inter-connected conglomerate, because it was all an idea back then.
We survived COVID-19 because we had diversified revenue streams from multiple ventures. If we had only one venture, Light of Hope wouldn't be here today. I am happy that we made that decision in the early days.
But this was not easy. We had to endure a ton of pain. Paying attention to every small thing separately. It has also slowed us down in a way. For instance, if we were doing Kids Time alone, we would perhaps have 100 Kids Time centers and do many multiples of what revenue we are doing now. Or if we were building Goofi alone, we would be in a different place.
But we thought that if we built these ventures and built the foundation, it would give us immense benefits and the next challenge would be to scale each business. But we had to prove that the conglomerate model would work.
We also wanted to figure out whether certain ventures have a big enough market to operate separately. We now know the scale of all these ventures. We now see each of our ventures has the potential to have multiple ventures within each of them.
Part 09: LoH Culture Code
Ruhul: We talked about the importance of culture and culture fit when it comes to hiring. Can you talk about the culture of LoH?
Waliullah: We work around kids, learning, and family. Our principle around work is “family first, work next”, which is not something a lot of organizations would endorse. But we say this. We are flexible with parents when there is a family issue. We have maternity and paternity leave policies. We have gender and child safety policies.
We are trying to build an organization that has a family kind of vibe, not a very commercial corporate culture. We're asking people to spend quality time with their kids, but if we don't provide our employees the same opportunity, it would be hypocrisy.
Another philosophy is that people often say customer first. I say customer second, first is our people. Your employees come first, then your customers come. Because if you take care of your employees, they will take care of your customers and vice versa.
During our hiring process, we don't hire solely for skills. Rather, we put greater weight on honesty, transparency, and similar character traits. It is okay to make mistakes but you have to be honest and open to learning. We don't tolerate dishonesty across our operations.
Finally, meritocracy. We are not a meritocratic society. However, as an organization, we are trying to prepare our children for the future and bring the best out of them. In that context, if I don't practice a meritocratic culture in my organization where I empower people who do well regardless of their age, then I am not practicing what I am trying to do as an organization.
Meritocracy is important to me. We try to promote it in our culture. We have many people in our organization who perhaps don't have a higher education degree but are earning more money than someone with a better degree. Because meritocracy is the ultimate metric and merit doesn't come from where you received your degree.
I told my new leadership who are now hiring for their teams that they should only hire A players. What is the definition of an A player: one has to have some skills, must be aligned with our culture, and must have passion for the work we are doing. We worked with B players before for various reasons. We no longer want to go back there.
Part 10: International Expansion
Ruhul: You mentioned international expansion. Can you expand a bit on it in terms of whether you have a certain focus regarding it and when you plan to do it?
Waliullah: When we first started working on Goofi Toys, I wanted to work on toys that you can't make in China any cheaper than us. We had to figure out what these categories of toys were. We tentatively realized that we could do it only with handmade, eco-friendly toys that would be equally expensive to make in China as well. We wanted to make this category of toys in Bangladesh.
From the beginning, we knew that a big market for our toy venture was global. Vietnam exports nearly 1 billion dollars worth of toys per year. If Vietnam could do it, why not Bangladesh? We have done it in Garments on the back of affordable labor. And the kind of toy I'm speaking of is mainly handmade toys that you can't make using machines. These are very popular in Western markets and are considered more top-notch than Lego and similar alternatives. So our initial plan is to export our handmade toy products in white label since we have manufacturing hubs. Afterward, we gradually plan to take the brand to these markets. This is about our physical products.
Our books are already on Amazon and similar marketplaces. We have Bangla-speaking markets such as West Bengal, and we are exploring how we can sell our books to these markets.
In terms of Kids Time, we had parents from some 7-8 countries taking our online courses during COVID. We knew from that experience that there is a demand for Kids Time Courses globally. After-school programs like Kids Time are quite expensive in markets like the US. Compared to that, we can offer these courses, including Bangla language courses for Bangla speaking communities, at a very affordable price. So our target with Kids Time is to target these Bangla-speaking communities and then gradually move up in the market.
Finally, we plan to translate our content and materials into other languages.
When we started LoH, our inspiration came from a global report that predicted that 70% of the children will find themselves in a new world of work by the time they enter the job market. We are talking about 2017. I calculated during that period that roughly 70% of the world's population speaks in seven languages. It means if we can translate our materials into these seven languages, it should allow us to reach a vast majority of the world's children. We have not, however, started working on this because translating a book from one language to another is quite an expensive and challenging task. Moreover, you need someone who understands literature, translation, and books. However, I am hopeful that in the manner the large language models are progressing, we will have a model by 2025 that will be able to do high-quality translation in different languages. We have the drawings and other materials, so we will be able to easily escalate these developments.
Part 11: Obviously Awesome
Ruhul: What makes LoH different from other education services companies?
Waliullah: We are really in want of a category for us. We call ourselves an education company because it offers a good analogy. I always give the analogy that if Disney's mission was to prepare kids for the future with the right skills, what would we have called Disney? That is what we want to build.
Accuratly telling what we do has been a challenge for us since 2017. We have been looking for a category. The problem we are looking to solve is how we can prepare kids with skills for the future.
Every other education company focuses on the curriculum that is being taught in school. We are perhaps the only company that is focused on skills that kids need to have to be future-ready. We don't focus on the curriculum of today.
We have built an entire ecosystem around teaching these skills—creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving, and values. We have created a parallel but complementary education system where we teach kids what traditional schools can't teach because of their various limitations.
When a regular education company publishes books, they do it on the traditional curriculum. The same is true for the companies that make courses, they do it on existing school curriculum subjects.
We perhaps use the same approach such as publishing books, making online courses, and training teachers and parents, but we don't do the same thing. No edtech company provides teacher training to help teachers get better. This is a fundamental difference.
When you call someone an education company, you essentially mean an institution dealing with schooling, a curriculum, and so on, whereas we are not anything like that. When we limit ourselves to a mere education company definition, I feel like we are not doing justice to our initiative. This positioning sometimes limits our potential.
Ruhul: I think this is a challenge for you. You are essentially much more than a traditional education company. We need a qualifier to describe you as a company. I think that is also a major differentiator for you from other education players in that you are not an education company in the traditional sense. You say you prepare kids with future skills. Can you explain how you do that? What is your philosophy for that and how that philosophy is used across your products and organizations, i.e. how do you use that philosophy when you design a book or a course or something else?
Waliullah: The first thing we bring is how children learn anything new. Kids have a natural way of learning, which is how kids learn. A baby tries to understand a thing by touching and holding it first.
We now offer Singapore Math through Kids Time which we brought under a franchisee partnership. The reason we brought it is because they have a unique approach to teaching math. They call it the CPA method — concrete, pictorial, abstract. An example of that is that to teach kids five, you will first show them five apples, this is a concrete example. You are showing a physical element to teach them. The next step is pictorial, which is photos of five apples. These photos are in the book, the kid will see the photos and count them with their finger and learn. That is pictorial. The third is abstract, which means you can represent these five apples with a sign of five. That is called abstract. Now Singapore uses this model for their whole math education till the 12th grade.
There is a story behind the origin of Singapore math. In the 80s, Singapore had a terrible standing in the global PISA ranking, which ranks countries for math and science subjects. Singapore doesn't have a ton of natural resources. They decided that if they wanted to globally compete they had to get better at math and science.
Over the next months and years, they invited math, science, and early childhood development experts from all over the world and they developed their current math curriculum. They gradually expanded it to class 12 and implemented it in all their schools and colleges. After that when students started to graduate after five years, they started to get better results. Over the next 20 years, Singapore became number one in global math ranking from 40 and they are still in number 01/02 ranking globally. When this happened, Singapore suddenly came into public discussions.
Since we claim we prepare kids for the future with future-ready skills and teach kids skills like problem-solving, I have been studying this subject for a long time. These are not one skill, these are a combination of many skills. You can break down these skills and find many different shades such as logical reasoning, mathematical reasoning, analytical skills, etc. Now, to get good at problem-solving, you have to be very good at math. It means I have to teach my kid math well. This is how I came across Singapore Math.
Going back to our core thesis, no matter what subject we teach, the first thing we have to address is how a kid learns — the natural way of learning for a kid. This is essential no matter what subject we are teaching.
The second aspect is making learning joyful. I have to make learning fun and engaging so that kids find learning whatever the subject is taught fun and joyful. There should be fun materials in what and how we teach. Is it fun and interesting enough? Are kids willingly attracted to the materials even when nobody is forcing them to do it?
If you look, our course names are drawing course, crafting course, story-making course. We call these courses by these names to make them relatable to parents. A better name for our drawing course would have been Creativity Through Drawing. A better name for a crafting course would have been Learning Problem-Solving Through Crafting.
Kids love drawing, crafting, and storytelling and parents can relate to these activities. That is why we have named our courses in these names.
But when we develop the curriculum for courses we use these activities as tools. For instance, how we could use crafting as a tool to teach problem-solving. How we could use art as a tool for creativity and imagination. This is the second principle.
The third principle, which we don't use everywhere, is bringing in likable characters to provide that message. The four characters we have at Goofi are representations of our four skills: Adi represents creativity, Bluetooth represents problem-solving, Tia represents emotional intelligence and Sofia represents moral values. It means we have created these characters per our skills and teaching needs.
Our fourth principle is universality. We try to use universal stories and context instead of local context. When we create a book or a toy, we start with the idea that we are making it for the global market. It means we keep cultural nuances to a minimum so that these materials are relevant to people from anywhere in the world. We use universal understanding and context unless we are talking about history.
Let me summarize, our first principle is understanding how children learn and use that to design everything. If you see our books, toys, and everything else that we do, we follow this principle.
Second, make it fun, interesting, and engaging for kids. Whether kids will find the content naturally attractive.
Third, is it delivered through likable characters that kids can relate to where applicable? Fourth, is there universality in the content?
We follow these principles when we develop any content, product, or materials for kids at LoH.
In all our initiatives, our goal is to create evergreen content that doesn't go out of fashion in a month or so. This is why I say that if we don't make anything for the next ten years, we should be okay as a company. We have enough products to sell for the next ten years. Because we have created books and content that we can sell for the next ten years without adding anything new to the collection.
We know our end goals. For instance, in books, we want 250 books to cover all the skills to prepare kids for the future. Similarly, at Goofi and our other ventures, we have ideas about what we want to achieve and we know how to get there.
Part 12: The Biggest Opportunity
Ruhul: Where do you see the biggest opportunities for growth and innovation in the education space?**
Waliullah: With proper branding and marketing, we can become a globally recognized brand within a short time. That is the biggest opportunity. As an opportunity, what is out there is a much bigger opportunity for us. If we could truly build a brand in the skills domain that would be huge for us.
Honestly, there are no other strongly recognized companies like us globally. That's where I see the biggest opportunity—we can take that place.
There are edtech companies that are addressing sporadic skills challenges such as coding for kids. However, not many companies take a holistic approach to preparing kids for the future that we are doing.
Each of our brands has the potential to go global. If Kumon can scale globally, Kids Time has the same potential. If Sesame Street and Disney can do that, Goofi has the same opportunity to go global.
Part 12: Building Enduring Solutions
Ruhul: I see a bias towards endurance in everything you do. When you mentioned courses and content, you said you want to create evergreen content and create universal content. This is interesting in a world where everything is changing. How do you do this?
Waliullah: Nothing is actually changing. Tools are changing on the surface but the world is always the same. Children used to love storytelling 10,000 years ago, they love stories today.
The fundamentals of the world and how the world works remain the same. The tools and the way of delivery might have changed.
Marketing has changed. But the psychology of selling a product has not changed. If you can make products that address the fundamental needs of people, they will remain relevant forever. Stories will remain relevant no matter what year we live.
I gave a speech a while ago on how we build our characters. My take is we relate with many of these characters such as Batman. We see ourselves in these characters in the sense that we want to act freely like these characters. For instance, in the case of Batman, many people feel society has done injustice to them. Often they feel they want to take matters into their own hands. That's why they relate to these characters. This relevance is what is important. As long as human civilization exists, a large portion of humans will feel society has done injustice to them because we don't live in a utopia. It means stories like Batman will remain relevant for a long time. Batman started as a comic. It is now available in other mediums. The same is true for our evolving characters at Goofi.
I don't think technology will change anything fundamental about human beings. Since we are working on the fundamental skill sets of children—we are not saying you need to learn coding or this or that, those skills may change, but creativity, problem-solving, and emotional intelligence, these skills will remain relevant for years to come. These things will not change. In fact, the need for these skills will grow even more in the coming years.
Robots and AI will do a lot of things but human-to-human interactions, and emotional intelligence, will remain important. Since I'm working with fundamental skills that were also taught to children 100/1000 years ago, perhaps using different mediums, I believe they will remain relevant 100 years from now as well. 50 years from now if LoH stays in business and none of us the founders are alive and our people at that time can evolve to adopt the medium of the time, we will remain relevant.
This is what gives me satisfaction that our work has durability and will continue regardless of whether we founders exist or not. Facebook feels threatened every day. So they are constantly worried about what will happen to them when a new technology comes along. Because it is genuinely challenging to build something fundamental. But for us that challenge is not that high. Stories will always remain relevant.
Ruhul: I completely agree. Stories and knowledge are incredibly anti-fragile and long-lasting. If we consider, we can't find any organization or state from 3000 years back that exists today but we can find books and stories that were created 3000 years back and continue to exist.
Waliullah: One of the most enduring things on earth is religion. Everything goes around but religion. You will see many changes but religion is and will always be relevant to the vast majority of people.
I was researching the oldest companies in the world and I came across this Japanese company that builds temples.
You build a successful venture when you have a team of at least two people where one is a big picture guy with a knack for building products who understands human psychology working with another person who is an implementation guy, loves numbers, can push people to chase numbers. Having this combination in the founding team is important.
Ruhul: That's super fascinating. One of the things that fascinates me is things that last. Our tagline at Future Startup is research and insights for building enduring enterprises. This is a kind of antithesis to the dominant belief in startups where you are essentially looking to build what is hot and will sell.
Waliullah: This is very sad.
Ruhul: Very sad. What have been some of the biggest challenges in building LoH
Waliullah: Getting the right people. It has been the biggest challenge and will be the biggest challenge. You can solve the other challenges if you have the right people. If we want to expand internationally, the key challenge for us is finding the people who can crack these markets.
Ruhul: What is the vision for the company for the next 3-5 years and long-term in 20 years?
Waliullah: In the next five years, we want to expand all over Bangladesh. We want to be everywhere. We want to directly or indirectly contribute to preparing every kid with the skills for the future. Directly means with our products and solutions. Indirectly means, we may collaborate and partner with others. We may train teachers at scale and make our materials available in all these schools and as a result, kids are indirectly being able to access our materials.
The next thing we want to achieve is convincing the rest of the ecosystem and the stakeholders that preparing kids with future skills is important and they should also participate in this process.
This is an ambitious goal. We can't do it alone. We need participation from the government, and from the private and development sectors to achieve this goal. We can achieve this if we can make sure more people participate in this process. Media and online platforms are another area where we have opportunities that we want to explore.
If I talk about 20 years, I will be 60 by that time and I would like not to stay involved in day-to-day operations. Perhaps I’ll be working to replicate the successful Bangladesh model in other countries. Since profit maximization is not our goal, it means we can take our work to many places at lower cost in partnership with the government and others. Perhaps only 10% will be my direct paying customers, the rest 90% can still have my products through these collaborations without paying me directly.
If I sum it up, we would love to build an enduring organization in 20 years, something like Disney. We would love to have a second generation of leaders who are leading the company. If we could have a second generation of trusted leaders, I believe that would be my success. The mission we are in can't be achieved in one or two generations.
Part 13: Lessons In Building Ventures
Ruhul: When LoH started, you started in a rather ambiguous market. You had to figure out a lot of things for the first time. What advice will you give to someone who is working to address an equally ambiguous and ambitious problem today?
Waliullah: I think identifying the problem and the challenge itself shapes the founder. The problem someone is solving indicates who this founder is as a person. If you are working to solve some massive challenge such as reversing climate change, understanding the problem is incredibly critical.
When you are working on a particular solution to address a certain big challenge, there is no guarantee that your first solution will work. It means you may need to change your solution or strategy or approach. What is important is that the problem is big and important enough that you will remain committed to addressing it no matter how long it takes and how hard you have to try.
As you were referring to our 2018 conversation, we are still trying to solve the same problem. We have not changed the problem statement. However, our solution has evolved. That is the first point: whether I love the problem and sufficiently want to solve it. Whether I am ready to sacrifice to solve the problem. You need a certain level of stubbornness and love for the cause if you want to do well in solving a critical challenge. If the problem is big, the solution is going to take a lot of work and a long time. You have to be ready for that.
Ruhul: How has your thinking about entrepreneurship evolved?
Waliullah: I think two types of people do this. One is an entrepreneur. The only job of an entrepreneur is to solve a problem. Nothing else. And there are business people who will build business and oftentimes that business will not solve any problem.
We have mixed up who is an entrepreneur and who is a businessman. We treat the both as the same but they are not. This is an evolution in my thinking. This is a distinction that I use with people. When I use this lens I see, we have very few entrepreneurs in our country. What we have are mostly businessmen.
The second realization after looking at our ecosystem today is that we have not progressed much as an ecosystem. We remain stuck in around 2015. Things are the same as they were in 2015. I think we're quite confused as an ecosystem, which is a reflection of where we want to go as a nation. We lack conviction and run after whatever way the wind blows.
In terms of venture building, in the early days, I thought a big part of my job was building and selling products. However, I have realized that a big portion of a founder's time goes into building and running the team and maintaining collaboration with other partners. Oftentimes you can't spend a lot of time building a product, rather you end up spending a lot of time on people.
The other realization is that you build a successful venture when you have a team of at least two people where one is a big picture guy with a knack for building products who understands human psychology working with another person who is an implementation guy, loves numbers, can push people to chase numbers. Having this combination in the founding team is important. The problem is that among our founders at LoH the second person is missing. Momel is trying but he is more like me and is deep into tech.
The other thing is funding shouldn't be everything in venture building. Raising money is not enough to build a business. You can't build a business just because you raised some money. Rather a business is built by the people. Investing in the right people will make your venture successful. This is another major realization.
Ruhul: How do you work as a founder?
Waliullah: Your early days as a founder are not the same as your later years. In the early days, I was more into firefighting. At my current stage, I spend most of my days working with the team, helping them grow, and understand different aspects of our business and vision.
I also spend more time on building and managing partnerships. You might have noticed that I've become more vocal about the ecosystem and venture building on social media. I am trying to give more to other founders and trying to build community.
I am also spending more resources on building our brand. We didn’t focus much on it in the past. We are now changing that. A good amount of my time I now spend in these areas.
I also invest time to think about my impact as an individual apart from my company. From that standpoint, I am trying to help more founders because I view it as my contribution. These are some areas I spend my time on these days. I am looking at the bigger picture more and more these days.
Ruhul: Life is short. It ends before we realize it. You are approaching 40, which is an important milestone. What do you think about life in that context that we are here for a short while?
Waliullah: From a philosophical perspective, we are trying to keep ourselves busy by doing things that we love to do. We might say that we are giving all that we have to a cause or something but it is also that we are doing something because we enjoy doing it. In that sense, I am also being very selfish because I'm working for a cause because I enjoy it.
I sometimes think that if I die tomorrow, would I think my life was wasted? Often the answer is that I might feel I could have done much more, regret not doing enough but I would not complain that I had not enjoyed my work.
Throughout the journey of LoH, we have faced many challenges but I never entertained the idea that I should quit because I have always found our work highly meaningful.
Being able to say anytime in your journey that I am the happiest person on earth tells a lot about you. I am getting to a healthier place in my life. Insha'Allah, if this trajectory continues, I will be able to do more interesting and productive work in the coming days.
A happy person can do interesting and good work which an unhappy person can't. Because it is hard to get something good from an unhappy person because the person is so unhappy. I think happiness is important. For many of us, we spend a large portion of our time working and that too for other people. If we do not enjoy that work then life can become very challenging.
Ruhul: That is such a profound realization. I think this is a good place to end this conversation. This was a very enlightening conversation for me. Thank you so much for being generous with your time and insights.
Waliullah: Thank you, Ruhul. I always enjoy speaking with you. Your questions make me think.
