In our recent interview with Wahid Choudhury, founder and CEO of Kaz Software, we explored his personal journey from a self-described "failtoosh" student to building one of Bangladesh's most respected software outsourcing companies. More importantly, we discussed how Kaz has become known as a leader factory—consistently producing entrepreneurs and industry leaders who have gone on to build their own companies and shape Bangladesh's tech industry.
The conversation offers rare insights into what makes consequential founders and organizations. Wahid's story reveals how childhood experiences, educational environments, and organizational culture combine to produce independent thinkers and successful ventures. Here are 15 key takeaways from our conversation.
Wahid's experience at University Laboratory School shaped his approach to life and business. He describes his school years candidly: "I almost didn't have to study at all. I didn't fail any class in school, but you could say I was the absolute last person in my class. I had fun. My school life was very beautiful."
What made this school special was the absence of pressure. Teachers gave minimal homework. There was no rigid structure. This freedom allowed Wahid and his classmates to develop a distinct quality: "I can think outside the box about any problem," he says. "I see this not just in myself, but also in many of my friends from my school too. Wherever they have gone, they have become thought leaders."
The lesson here is meaningful. In Bangladesh's education system, which Wahid describes as having "a defect—it puts a lot of stress on students," we rarely see environments that prioritize exploration over grades. Yet this relaxed environment at University Laboratory School produced leaders across fields.
Despite being consistently last in his class, Wahid was intellectually active. "I had a lot of free time, and I really liked to read books, so I read countless books," he explains. "I was lucky from a very young age—my siblings, my father, my mother, everyone reads books. We had a lot of books at home. Plus, the British Council was just five minutes from our school and I was a member of the British Council."
This reading habit shaped his outlook on life in ways that formal education couldn't. "I learned about many realities that many schoolchildren probably don't get to know. This was definitely a positive."
The insight applies to how we evaluate talent. We often focus on test scores and grades while ignoring intellectual curiosity and self-directed learning. Yet these qualities predict long-term success better than academic performance.
Throughout his life, Wahid made major decisions that surprised people around him: choosing Physics at Dhaka University, convincing a King's College professor to accept him for a PhD without a Master's degree, dropping out of that PhD program to pursue software, returning to Bangladesh from London, and starting Kaz.
"The confidence to make these kinds of decisions, I think, came from my school experience," he reflects. "We had opportunities to decide many things ourselves. No one told us to do this or that."
His father also played a role: "What we got from my father was the principles and believing in yourself. My father was an independent-minded person. He thought what he thought, and he did it. I learned that from my father—an independent mindset. Not depending on anyone. I will decide my own destiny."
For entrepreneurs, this capacity for independent judgment is essential. You need to make decisions with incomplete information, often against conventional wisdom, and trust your own assessment of situations.
At Kaz, Wahid implemented a counterintuitive policy: no one can see anyone else's computer screen. The office seating is designed so people can only approach colleagues from the front.
"The reason behind this was we wanted to communicate that we don't care what you are doing on your screen at this moment—you are on Facebook, watching videos, or coding," Wahid explains. "Because in the end, we have a trusting relationship, and we have trust that you will deliver the task."
He contrasts this with the common approach: "The complaint I hear a lot from my colleagues outside of Kaz is that, 'Yes, the team is performing well, but you have to monitor the team closely, otherwise there will be problems.' I think it is the other way around. I think if you can give trust and flexibility, the team will make sure to meet deadlines and deliver better products."
His 20 years of experience validates this approach. "If you get trust from somebody, if you are happy with somebody, you will give your best to return that happiness. When we are trusted with responsibility, we try to grow to honor that trust."
Kaz's hiring process focuses on two core qualities: problem-solving skills and collaboration ability. "You can be a very good developer but you can't work in a team," Wahid notes. "We've seen very good developers who struggle to work on a team. They're single-person players. They have a role in the world, but the kind of software projects we do need team and team collaboration."
The process is deliberately informal. "We joke that we don't ask someone, 'What are the types of computers?' questions like that, questions that one can memorize or you can just ask Google."
Instead, they ask candidates about projects they've built independently. "We ask about that project, and how they did it. Whenever you're talking about a project, you're talking about problems: 'How did you do that?' Questions like that allow us to see how a person deals with problems. We try to understand the thought process of a person, how they think, and how they solve problems."
For collaboration assessment, they create debates: "In the technical world, some things are obvious about which there is general consensus. We would try to create a quite obvious debate about one of these things. One of us who is taking the interview would say, 'No, this cannot happen,' about one such thing."
They observe how candidates respond. "When someone accepts such a claim without putting forward an argument, that's scary. It means they will never debate; they will accept whatever a senior or someone with power says, and the solution won't be good."
Wahid is modest about his role in Kaz's culture: "At this moment, in Kaz's culture, my contribution, I'd say, is 10%. 90% is actually from our previous team leads, wing leads and the current wing leads—their personal flavors."
This isn't false modesty. He deliberately designed the organization to allow each team and wing to develop its own character. "Something we say is that each of our teams and wings should have a flavor of their own. All of them shouldn't become the same... Kaz actually, within one company, is several smaller companies, each running with its own policy, each has its own flavor, slightly different from others."
The core values remain consistent, but implementation varies. This decentralization allows the culture to evolve organically rather than being imposed from above.
The through-line in Wahid's story is that the right environment allows people to develop their unique capabilities. This happened at University Laboratory School, in his family, and now at Kaz.
"What I feel is that because of such an environment of Kaz, people get that opportunity to think outside the box and explore their curiosities, as we had in school. People can grow in their own way," he explains.
He connects Kaz's culture directly to his school experience: "Going back to your question, I now feel that it could be that my school life and experience of my formative years might have carried over and influenced me to make the decision that we need an environment where people are relaxed."
The result is visible in Kaz alumni who have started their own companies and become industry leaders. "From Kaz, definitely, our alumni have done very well," Wahid says. "The reason our alumni so far have done so well could be because of the combination of these two: our hiring and our environment."
Wahid's approach to entrepreneurship contradicts Silicon Valley mythology: "You are used to speaking with very driven startup founders. They want to be the Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos of the world. People who know me, if you ask around, the biggest complaint about me is that 'bhai, you have no ambition.' Life to me kind of flows and I just flow with it."
He describes himself as driven by creative ambition rather than business metrics. Recently, he designed Kaz's lunch space himself rather than accepting the architect's budget-constrained proposal. "Everyone has issues—this is mine. I'm giving you a warning beforehand."
Kaz started not from grand ambition but from circumstance. A Silicon Valley company wanted to hire him, but he didn't want to move to America. "I suggested to them that why don't I form a company, hire a team around me, and do their work from Bangladesh. That's how Kaz started in June 2004. It was a quite safe entry into this because we had a project."
The business grew organically—clients referred other clients, their CTO started another company and became a client. "This is how we have grown."
This "wu wei" approach—flowing with opportunities rather than forcing growth—removes the pressure that makes most startups fail.
Wahid's plan for scaling Kaz resists conventional wisdom: "Our preference is a divided structure. We are very much against a centralized structure. I don't want a centralized structure."
His reasoning: "I don't think a massive company can be very happy. A massive company can't be very happy with very structured rules because there would be so many rules. It's better to have small parts, each running with its policy. That's probably a better strategy."
This approach solves a fundamental problem of growth. Most companies add bureaucracy as they scale, which kills the entrepreneurial energy that made them successful. Kaz's solution is to grow by dividing into independent units that share core values but maintain autonomy.
One of Kaz's core principles is "happiness first." Wahid explains the logic: "We spend a significant time of our life at work and give the most valuable period of our life to work when we are most active. It is not like we have several lives and we give one from those to work. We have only one life and we give the most important time of that life to work and the workplace. So it better be happy."
This isn't soft thinking—it's strategic. "We stuck on to that from day one and thankfully, people who joined us believed in that messaging."
He connects this back to his school experience: "Maybe one is hiring. In our hiring process, we are always looking for people who match this principle. The reason our alumni so far have done so well could be because of the combination of these two: our hiring and our environment."
This conversation with Wahid Choudhury offers a different model for building consequential enterprises. Instead of aggressive growth targets and rigid structures, he advocates for trust, freedom, and organic development. Instead of micromanagement, he creates environments where talented people can thrive.
The approach requires courage. It's easier to implement rules than trust people. It's easier to monitor employees than give them freedom. It's easier to chase ambitious targets than let your business evolve naturally.
But for founders serious about building organizations that produce leaders and have lasting impact, Wahid's experience points to a viable alternative. Create space for independence. Trust your team. Build a culture that makes people happy to come to work. Hire for problem-solving and collaboration. Take the long view.
The results speak for themselves. Kaz has not only built a successful business but has contributed to Bangladesh's tech ecosystem by developing people who go on to start their own companies and lead other organizations. This is the mark of a truly consequential enterprise.
As we navigate the challenges of building startups and technology companies in Bangladesh, we would do well to study organizations like Kaz that have found a sustainable path—one that balances business success with human development, structure with freedom, and ambition with happiness.
