It is hard to summarize today’s newsletter. We feature three fascinating interviews:
To top it off, we have excellent reading recs to help you have a wonderful week.
All links are below.
In 2019, BeshiDeshi was a promising, if modest, e-commerce site. Today, it stands transformed—an integrated, comprehensive ecosystem quietly shifting the landscape of Bangladesh’s artisan economy, connecting thousands of craftspeople to national and international markets.
The company’s founder, Zeeshan Khurshed Mazumder, has navigated the complex logistics of handmade goods, balanced competitive pricing against fair artisan compensation, and built a resilient enterprise through constant evolution and dogged execution of the fundamentals. His pragmatic observations on building successful businesses in difficult markets offer insights that resonate far beyond the craft sector.
Here are eight essential takeaways from my conversation with Zeeshan into his philosophy and the evolution of BeshiDeshi.
Sabidin Ibrahim is a journalist by profession, currently working as a Senior Sub-editor at the leading Bengali daily, The Daily Bonik Barta. However, I have known him since my university days at Dhaka University. He was a mentor and a fellow reader to me and many of us in those days. Future Startup was just getting started. I myself was seeking direction for my intellectual interests. His thoughts and ideas were a significant personal influence on me at that time.
Beyond his professional identity as a journalist, he is an author, an organizer, and someone with a deep interest in developing young people. A keen observer of society and human nature, he has authored and translated a total of about seven books.
Although he studied English literature at Dhaka University, he maintains diverse interests that span philosophy, politics, history, psychology, and more.
Personally, our reading lists have much in common. For example, he has translated Japanese Haiku Zen poetry, which was published by the Bangla Academy several years ago. I love Japanese thinking and Eastern philosophies. He also translated one of my favorite books, Seneca's "The Shortness of Life," a book I re-read often when I feel a bit lost. Similarly, he translated another favorite of mine, "The Art of War."
I've been thinking of having a conversation with Sabidin for a long time. As I finally get the opportunity, we discuss a long list of questions. His upbringing, his journey to what he is doing today, the origin of his worldview, his framework for thinking and looking at the world, where his interest in and ideas about knowledge, society, and the state come from, and much more.
The pandemic exposed a critical flaw in Bangladesh’s EdTech boom: while students could learn online, they couldn’t effectively practice for the high-pressure exams that define their academic futures. Now, QZTest, a flagship venture of ed-tech startup HulkenStein, is launching a platform to fix that.
Positioning itself as Bangladesh's first all-in-one online exam platform, QZTest aims to transform the way students prepare, practice, and perform in online exams across all levels — from school to university to national competitive tests. The platform says it already has over 100,000 users and a database of one million verified questions during its beta phase, a head start that can give it significant leverage.
Marc Thiry is the Director of Operations at GoZayaan, one of the most fascinating travel tech companies in Bangladesh. Before joining GoZayaan, Marc built a diverse career spanning multiple countries and sectors. He began at Jumia, a Rocket Internet company in Africa, where he mastered the fundamentals of operational management. He then moved to France to join Mano, an e-commerce startup, where he saw the company scale from a small team to an organization of hundreds. His journey eventually brought him to Bangladesh, where he honed his expertise at Sundora, a beauty and cosmetics company, and Maya, a healthcare startup, before landing at GoZayaan.
In this conversation, we explore Marc's journey to where he is today, his work as Director of Operations at GoZayaan, how operations work at an online travel agency, the science and art of running excellent operations, and the lessons he's gathered from working and living across continents.
We unpack what operations mean for a company and what operational excellence looks like in practice. When we discuss operations, it often carries some ambiguity. Of course, operations vary significantly from company to company and industry to industry. Yet as an essential function for nearly every organization, there are fundamental principles that need to be understood if you want to run an effective operation. Similarly, there should be best practices, a sort of art and science of running excellent operations. In this conversation, we have tried to surface these in a manner that offers concrete, actionable insights into what good operational management feels like in its texture and details.
If you are a founder or operator looking to elevate your craft, this is an essential read that can help you take your game up a notch.
Md Sajedur Rahman is a Director of Star Tech Ltd, where he has helped the company build its e-commerce business from scratch into the dominant player in the IT products e-commerce vertical in Bangladesh.
Mr. Sajed, a software engineer by training, joined Star Tech in 2017. At that time, Star Tech had an almost non-existent e-commerce operation run by a team of a total of two people: one uploading products to its website and another replying to Facebook messages, both working out of a small room inside a warehouse at the company’s multi-plan center outlet.
After joining the company, Sajed developed all aspects of its strategic e-commerce plan. He combined Star Tech's existing expertise in sales, marketing, technology, and management to deliver a superior brand and shopping experience to its customers online.
Often, when large and successful companies enter a new market, particularly in tech, they stumble. One way of looking at the challenge is through the idea of the innovator's dilemma. I have written and talked about the phenomenon quite a bit. I have seen it many times in the broader tech industry in Bangladesh. I have seen it happen in e-commerce as well, several times, where large, successful companies started an e-commerce business only to find themselves in a difficult position. To that end, Star Tech is quite an anomaly. The company has not only built a dominant e-commerce business, but it has built an e-commerce platform that has quietly become a research and reference point for customers when they deliberate on their tech and IT products purchasing. That’s no small feat, and I always wanted to understand how Star Tech has managed to do it.
In this interview with Mr. Sajed, we wanted to do exactly that—understand how Star Tech has built a dominant e-commerce business and how it navigated the challenges of the innovator’s dilemma. We talked about the early days of Star Tech’s e-commerce operation, the evolution of the business, strategies that worked, the state of its operation today, operational dynamics, and future plans. We also discussed how Mr. Sajed operates, stays productive, and leads.
1. Book: Playing Ball on Running Water: The Japanese Way to Building a Better Life by David K. Reynolds
I’m a psychology buff and have done a fair amount of reading across different schools of psychology ideas. When I came across the above book, this was my first introduction to Morita Therapy. While I have some reading on Zen and Japanese culture, I was not aware of a particular Japanese approach to psychotherapy. And this book blew my mind. I would say it is one of the best practical psychology books I have read in a while. The idea is simple—the solution to all our ailments lies in taking action. The three core ideas of Morita therapy are: acceptance of our feelings as they are, finding purpose in life, and doing things that need to be done. Unlike many schools of psychotherapy, Moritists discourage over analyzing of our neurotic problems and instead, emphasize, we accept whatever feelings that arise, live in the moment, meaning do the things that we need to do at this moment, and through living in the present find our purpose in life.
Most important things in life are simple. So are the most important ideas. Wake up early. Take care of your health. Don’t put things off for tomorrow. But simple don’t make them easy to implement. This book, while explaining a simple idea of dealing with our neurosis, offers quite an effective strategy to put that simple idea into practice.
2. Cultivating depth and stillness in research
“A consistent challenge in my development as a researcher has been: how to cultivate deep, stable concentration in the face of complex, ill-structured creative problems?
In roles oriented around operation and execution, I benefited enormously from standard “productivity” advice. Task managers and time-planning tools were essential. But now, task managers and calendars only help with the least important pieces of my work.”
I think this is a common challenge knowledge workers face across the spectrum. Without good self-knowledge, strict self-discipline, and meaningful structure, it is hard to make progress in works that take a long-time to produce meaningful outcomes. I found this piece very useful to that end.
