Huawei origin story, an interview with Kaz Software founder and CEO, a story on how Brain Station 23 built a national level e-ticketing platform in 8 weeks, an analysis on recent bank deposit protection ordinance, and our eclectic weekly reading suggestions.
All links are below.
Most business success stories celebrate ambition and brilliant planning. Huawei's origin story is different—it's about what happens when survival necessity forces you to execute in ways no rational player would attempt.
In 1987, a 43-year-old former military engineer named Ren Zhengfei founded Huawei with the equivalent of $5,000. By 1996, the company had become China's designated "national champion" in telecommunications, trusted to build the People's Liberation Army's first national telecommunications network. Today, Huawei is one of the world's largest telecommunications equipment manufacturers. It operates in over 170 countries and generates annual revenues close to $100 billion.
What's remarkable isn't just the growth trajectory—it's how the company's constraints forced strategic choices that looked irrational at the time but proved decisive. This is a story about how desperation, when channeled correctly, creates competitive advantage.
Imagine being handed a project with a ticking clock: eight weeks to build an e-ticketing platform for the Bangladesh Premier League (BPL) 2025, a 40-day, 24-event, and 46-match cricket extravaganza drawing millions of fans.
The system needs to handle 25,000 average tickets per day, validate them at chaotic stadium gates across 3 venues (Dhaka, Chittagong, and Sylhet) throughout the entire tournament, and stop black-market sales—all with spotty internet and a tentative idea of what to build.
Most companies would balk. Multiple vendors had already declined. Brain Station 23, Bangladesh’s home-grown global software firm, said, “Let’s do it.”
As Raisul Islam, who leads a 190-person business unit at Brain Station 23, puts it, “No one else was willing to take it on. We thought, ‘Inshallah, we can do this.’” His reasoning mixed professional calculation with national pride.
This is the story of how the Brain Station 23 team pulled it off, told step by step, with lessons that resonate far beyond tech. It’s about solving messy problems under pressure, leveraging experience, and delivering value when it matters most.
In a recent, expansive conversation with Future Startup, journalist and writer Sabidin Ibrahim offered a glimpse into the intellectual foundations and lived realities that shaped his worldview. The interview, spanning his formative years in Cumilla to his interesting student life at Dhaka University, serves both as a personal reflection as well as a sociological critique of institutional decay and shifting cultural values in Bangladesh.
Here are 8 takeaways from our introspective conversation with Sabidin Ibrahim.
The ordinance's very competence highlights what it avoids. Every provision is defensible; every mechanism is sound; every protection is properly calibrated. What it lacks is any engagement with the political economy that created the crisis it purports to address.
Consider what the ordinance accomplishes: it ensures that when a bank fails, small depositors receive compensation quickly. This is valuable.
Now consider what Bangladesh actually faces: Bangladesh's distressed loans have exploded to Tk 7.56 lakh crore (approximately $63 billion), accounting for 45% of outstanding loans by December 2024. The banking sector's capital adequacy ratio has collapsed to 3.08%, the lowest in South Asia and far below the regulatory minimum of 10%. Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and India maintain ratios of 20.6%, 18.4%, and 16.7% respectively.
The ordinance protects depositors after extraction has occurred. It does nothing to prevent extraction in the first place.
This is the fundamental inadequacy: it treats the symptom while ignoring the disease.
As Bangladesh prepares for the polls in early 2026, a coalition of civic groups is trying something ambitious: building serious conversation and consensus on economic reforms before the election campaign begins in earnest and serious policy discussions take a back seat.
The Economic Reform Summit, scheduled for Oct. 27-28 at the Lakeshore Hotel in Dhaka, represents an unusual effort to build consensus on issues from investment barriers to youth unemployment — subjects that typically get buried under campaign rhetoric.
Organized by Voice for Reform, a civic advocacy group, along with the Bangladesh Research and Innovation Network, Innovision Consulting, the Citizen Coalition, and the FinTech Society of Bangladesh, the summit aims to bring together politicians, economists, business leaders, and policymakers to discuss reforms on issues that have constrained Bangladesh's development for years.
The initiative comes at a delicate moment. Bangladesh, a nation of 180 million that has long punched below its economic weight, faces growing pressure to diversify beyond its garment export base while creating jobs for a young population. Its graduation from least-developed country status, set for 2026, will strip away trade preferences, creating new challenges for its export sectors. The country's infrastructure deficit — from power generation to port capacity — constrains growth.
Wahid Choudhury is the founder and CEO of Kaz Software, a Dhaka-based software outsourcing company serving clients across the world. Founded in 2004, Kaz has become one of the most fascinating companies in its vertical, that often gets credited for consistently producing leaders for Bangladesh's tech industry.
In this second part of our conversation (read part one here), we go deeper into the history, operational dynamics and the making of Kaz. Most of all, we try to understand how Kaz has become the company it is today, what makes it tick, and what we can learn from its journey.
I. Book: The Mindbody Prescription: Healing the Body, Healing the Pain by John E. Sarno
A very useful book if you’re suffering from any kind of chronic pain. Due to our lifestyle, various types of chronic pains are a common tribulation that modern humans suffer from. Medication, surgery, and various traditional treatment methods usually don’t work for most people in a sustainable manner. Sanro introduced a theory called Tension Myositis Syndrome (TMS). His core argument is that most of these pains are psychosomatic in nature and as such requires treatment that addresses the underlying psychological issues. The book has been described as life changing by many people. When I read it for the first time for a pain related issue several years ago, I found it immediately effective. I’m rereading it as I struggle again with knee and leg pain after resuming my evening runs. I can't recommend it enough.
II. Creative destruction, Bangladeshi style
“The 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics went to three scholars – Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt. Their work explored an old idea with new relevance: creative destruction. Innovation and progress often require dismantling entrenched systems. Who wins and who loses in that process determines whether societies flourish or fracture. It's a theme that resonates far beyond markets – and nowhere more powerfully today than in Bangladesh, where a political regime collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions,” writes Economist Zahid Hussain in TBS.
III. Writers who operate.
“Occasionally folks tell me that I should “write full time.” I’ve thought about this a lot, and have rejected that option because I believe that writers who operate (e.g. write concurrently with holding a non-writing industry role) are best positioned to keep writing valuable work that advances the industry.”
This was part of my thinking when I started Future Startup. I love the intellectual rigor of thinking, studying, and writing but at the same time, I want to build things. I wanted to do something at the intersection of the both. But it is hard. This is a good read. The author is a software engineer.
