In Business Deep Dive/Brand Story, we take a deep dive into how Dhaka-based Edtech startup Lead Academy has developed a unique model for delivering high quality online education.
In The Art of Enterprise, we have Kamal Uddin Gazi Jishan, Co-founder of Accounting and Finance outsourcing firm Qormotho talk about his personal journey to building a global career and then a global business, his insights on delegation, attitude, humility, authenticity, what he calls "farming versus hunting" in business development, and much more. A packed conversation with unparalleled insights.
In Brand Story, we published a partner piece that looks at the benefits and challenges of implementing AI in your business.
In Insight, we use BeshiDeshi case study to understand what it takes to build a sustainable and growing business in challenging verticals. And we highlight the fact that often most important business strategies that work are boring in nature. The rule remains the same, you set a goal and doggedly pursue it with everything you have.
Finally, in Business Deep Dive, we have a long profile on bKash. bKash is a fascinating company—Bangladesh's largest MFS provider and its first tech unicorn. However, the most important factors about the company are often ones that get overlooked—its extraordinary discipline in avoiding distractions while remaining doggedly focused on its core mission, and its flawless execution prowess. bKash exemplifies quiet execution at its finest.
Links to everything are below.
Bangladesh faces a pressing challenge: an education system struggling to keep pace with the demands of a rapidly evolving global economy. With a population of over 170 million, 70% of whom reside in rural areas, the country grapples with a significant gap between academic training and industry needs, a lack of structured technology education, and limited opportunities for underserved groups, including people with disabilities.
Enter Lead Academy, a Dhaka-based edtech startup that has emerged as an important player, addressing some of these systemic challenges with a unique model that prioritizes quality, accessibility, and impact. Founded by Ashfaq Zaman, a UK-educated education enthusiast, and Sharif Ahmed, a software engineer turned entrepreneur, Lead Academy blends high quality and industry-aligned curricula, cutting-edge technology, and a deep commitment to inclusivity to deliver quality at scale.
Kamal Uddin Gazi Jishan is the co-founder of Qormotho Limited, a finance and accounting outsourcing company that has built a fascinating global business from Bangladesh within a short time. Before Qormotho, Jishan built an impressive international career. In this conversation, we talk about Mr. Jishan’s journey, his decision to leave a seven-figure salary to go full-time with Qormotho, discuss the art of managing remote teams, building trust, creating systems when traditional management fails, and his lessons from building an international career and building a global service company. We examine Qormotho’s growth and its plans to position Bangladesh as a premier destination for finance and accounting outsourcing. Mr. Jishan shares insights on delegation, attitude, humility, authenticity, and what he calls "farming versus hunting" in business development. There are deeper philosophical threads throughout. We talk about the importance of being relevant in your field, the power of listening, and his framework for building successful partnerships. Enjoy!
The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionized how businesses operate, offering unprecedented opportunities for growth and innovation. As companies seek to remain competitive in a rapidly evolving market, integrating AI into their operations has become more of a necessity than a luxury.
AI offers the potential to streamline processes, personalize customer experiences, and unlock new insights from data. But while the advantages are numerous, the implementation can be fraught with complexity and ethical considerations.
In this article, we delve into the intricacies of AI in the business landscape to help you understand both the transformative potential and the challenges it presents.
BeshiDeshi was founded by Zeeshan Khurshed Mazumder in 2018 as an ecommerce platform to bridge the gap between Bangladeshi artisans and market, promoting "Made in Bangladesh" products. When we first covered BeshiDeshi in 2019, it was a fledgling e-commerce platform with 350 artisans and 12,000 products. As it grew, the company saw that quality product images are a challenge for many of these artisans. After trying a few approaches, it introduced a mobile photography training course, teaching artisans to capture professional product images using their phones. Today, almost all of its product photos are taken by mobile phones by the artisans.
A few years into the business, the company realized that artisans have to design and make products that are in demand and match the current design trends to attract customers and gain popularity. Thus it launched a design consultation and course to teach design thinking to artisans so that they can align their crafts with market trends.
In 2020, when COVID-19 pandemic brought the world to a standstill, the company found out that access to finance is a huge challenge for artisans. To address the challenge, it quickly launched a financing program supporting artisans with working capital. An initiative that has since evolved and expanded into an inventory investment program connecting retail and institutional investors with artisans.
BeshiDeshi has since evolved into a comprehensive ecosystem addressing many of the challenges artisans face in Bangladesh. Today, the company has more than 4,000 craftspeople and over 30,000 products on its platform and has become an important player in Bangladesh's artisanal economy.
BeshiDeshi’s journey offers excellent lessons on how to navigate complex markets, maintain quality across a distributed production network, achieve operational efficiency, and more importantly, it shows what it means to do things that don’t scale.
bKash is a fascinating company for many reasons beyond the obvious. It is Bangladesh's largest MFS provider, has transformed the country's financial services landscape, and become its first tech unicorn. However, as we have noted in these pages before, these well-known factors obscure what truly makes bKash such a formidable player in Bangladesh's financial services sector.
The most important factors about the company are the ones often overlooked—its extraordinary discipline in avoiding distractions while remaining doggedly focused on its core mission, and its flawless execution prowess. bKash exemplifies quiet execution at its finest.
Founded in 2010 and launched in 2011, bKash has emerged as Bangladesh’s dominant mobile financial service (MFS) provider while many competitors have come and gone. Many of these rivals launched with much hype about building "super apps" and all that.
bKash, while has a realistic potential to become a superapp in Bangladesh, never toyed with these distractions. Instead, it concentrated on the task at hand, methodically building its core services. And this dogged focus has delivered a resounding win for the company.
