We have been talking about the emergent nature of entrepreneurship in this series of origin story cases of some of the most fascinating Bangladeshi companies.
Today, we’re sharing a short video from a brilliant interview we published a while back with Astha IT Founder and Managing Director Hasnaeen Rizvi Rahman. In the interview, he explained how Astha IT started out of quite a serendipitous event and his willingness to make a leap of faith.
If you pay close attention, the pattern continues from our previous stories, including the one we published last week on Kaz Software, which suggests that founding a company occurs at the intersection of a multitude of forces, many of which are emergent in nature.
But why is this important information? Why do we need to understand this phenomenon?
There are several reasons.
Frsit, I wrote in the introduction of The Origin of Kaz why this is critical to understand:
“One common error we make when it comes to understanding entrepreneurship is that we try to rationalize a process which is emergent and organic in nature. An emergent phenomenon is something that follows an unpredictable process that you can’t explain logically.
To understand an emergent phenomenon you have to understand the fact that a complex system has many different components and drivers that can’t be understood by understanding the trajectory of one single component of the system.
In my reading, entrepreneurship is an emergent phenomenon that is hard to explain. While we can get an intuitive understanding of how venture building works that can be useful, in order to make this understanding helpful, we have to accept the fact that what we have is a map and territory will always come with more nuances and details that the map can’t contain.”
More importantly, this understanding of entrepreneurship can tamper our expectations about entrepreneurship—that we would prepare some meticulous plan and reach a successful venture at the end of that plot—and thus prepare us for a real entrepreneurial journey which is usually more fluid, comes with greater uncertainty and unknowns and takes longer than we usually expect.
Take the example of Astha IT. The entire phenomenon happened almost serendipitously. The founder Hasnaeen Rahman went to Sweden to pursue higher studies. Upon arrival, he found the studies boring and wanted to quit. But he was not planning to start a company. He was looking for a way out. That’s how he landed on this freelancing project that eventually led to the founding of Astha IT. More details in the video below.
There are several takeaways here.
One, active planning of the trajectory of an entire venture is not necessary for entrepreneurial success. Most successful companies follow a rather emergent path. This is important to understand the fact that in order to build a successful business you often don’t need a grand plan. Planning often is not the first step to entrepreneurship.
However, this comes with a nuance, which is that everyone wouldn’t choose a similar path—of starting a company—if they were put in the same situation as Mr. Hasnaeen. Only a small subset of people would consider starting an outsourcing company in such a situation. You can get a clue of this in other parts of our interview with Mr. Hasnaeen (read it here). He has always been a doer and entrepreneurial type. He always wanted to build something. The company he started his career at, Kaz Software, was an entrepreneurial company. So he was already bitten by the entrepreneurship bug and perhaps was subconsciously looking to start his own business.
This where the second takeaway is important, founding companies take a certain kind of courage, which you may call irrational optimism. This is also something that we see in the story of Astha IT.
Finally, once you enter the game, you must have a strong will to succeed. You are willing to do anything and everything to make it work. We see this more than once in the case of Astha IT (more in the full interview) and it is true for most successful companies.
These are some of my takeaways from this short video, and you might come up with your own lessons.
Please watch the short conversation above. You can also read an edited English transcript of the conversation below.
Ruhul: You mentioned wanting to work at EA Sports during your NSU days, which partially answers my next question. But I'd like to explore further: When you were young, what did you want to do? What was your ambition? You were a very good student. You could have pursued academia, secured a prestigious job, or moved to America. How did you end up choosing entrepreneurship?
Hasnaeen: I experienced some internal conflict. I've always been entrepreneurial and independent-minded, following my own understanding and principles since childhood. I always thought I'd start a company someday. However, as a first-generation entrepreneur with no family background in business, I had no idea how to proceed.
In the 90s, the early days of my fascination with software, when news broke that Bill Gates had become the world's richest person through software, it challenged my assumptions about wealth creation. Traditionally, real estate moguls, oil barons, or arms dealers were the wealthiest. The idea that someone could achieve such success through software was revolutionary and inspiring. Though I dreamed of owning a software company someday, I lacked direction and guidance. Maybe this uncertainty led me to consider corporate careers at companies like Google or EA Sports. That I would become a big engineer first. Although this desire to do something like that came later.
I made two attempts at starting software companies while at NSU - around 2002 and 2004. The first was Andromeda Software, started with friends but without formal registration. It failed due to my inexperience, particularly in leadership and people management. We had a website and all. But I was naive, there was a lot of immaturity.
I tried again in 2004 with slightly more maturity, but learned that building businesses with friends is challenging. Personal dynamics often interfere, leading to conflicts. This second attempt also failed.
After graduating from North South in late 2004, I took my first job as a software engineer at Metatude, a Dutch offshore development company in Dhaka, starting at 15,000 Taka salary in 2005. I'm proud to say my technical interview success rate remains 100% - I've gotten every job I've interviewed for, including a lecturer position at Northern University that I interviewed for concurrently with Metatude.
After a year at Metatude, I joined Kaz Software, which had an incredible pool of talent—many became entrepreneurs or industry leaders later. Around my third year working, I faced peer pressure as friends pursued masters degrees abroad. They encouraged me to follow my EA Sports dream by studying overseas.
By then, I'd lost interest in further academic study and didn't want to take the GRE or TOEFL. Through research, I discovered Sweden didn't require these tests and offered tuition-free education. In 2007, I went to Sweden for my masters—a decision that became another life-changing moment, you'll realize why.
The experience in Sweden was challenging for several reasons. First, with eight years of software development experience since 1999, studying basic concepts like data structures again at university was frustrating. The masters program wasn't particularly advanced,just more focused coursework. I struggled with returning to assignments, lectures, and presentations. I became very depressed.
Financial pressure added to my stress. I'd been earning 65,000 Taka monthly in 2007—a significant amount then—and my family felt the loss of this income when I left for higher studies. The harsh Swedish cold and fasting during Ramadan in Nordic summer, with its 20-hour days, further complicated things. It was very difficult. With all these going on, I couldn't focus.
These challenges led to a mental breakdown, and I dropped out of Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg. Instead, I returned to what I loved—coding. I worked remotely in Sweden for various companies, earning enough to cover my expenses.
While doing this, Allah brought a tremendous opportunity to me. A Swedish company offered me $2,000 monthly to build some CRM products. I was overjoyed and thinking what I could do. Using what I call "Bangali buddhi" (Bengali ingenuity), I proposed to my employer completing the year-long project in six months if they'd let me work from Bangladesh.
The Swedish people, known for their trust and down-to-earth nature, agreed. They said, okay, go, let's see what magic you do. My "magic" was outsourcing I. returned to Bangladesh, hired two friends, and completed the project in just four months. When my impressed employer asked how I'd managed this, I explained the outsourcing approach and proposed starting a company to handle all their work. They agreed, and that's how Astha IT began in 2007.
I was naive about business then and could have negotiated better terms, but my conviction and passion drove me forward. I felt strongly about preserving and growing this opportunity. The following years, the business expanded organically from one client to another, from project to project, from one resource to another. Somehow it worked out. That's how our company evolved into what it is today.
Read the full interview here.
