This week, we feature a deep dive into TikTok’s journey, eventual growth, and lessons for builders, a business deep dive into AkijBashir Group’s entry into the cable market, its strategic reasoning, and the future of the cable market in Bangladesh, a reflection on the critical importance of partnership, partnership failure, and how to make partnerships work, and more.
All links are below.
In September 2016, a small team at ByteDance launched a short-video app in China. Within a year, it had 100 million users and over a billion daily video views. By 2024, its international version, TikTok, had become one of the most downloaded apps in history, fundamentally reshaping how billions of people consume content. But the journey was anything but easy.
When ByteDance launched the app that would become Douyin in September 2016, the initial user base was so low that when they removed staff accounts to get a more accurate picture, active user stats dropped by half.
One employee recalled it as a "bleak time" and said that she "didn't know what to do." For the first half-year after launch, app performance was poor. The team half-expected ByteDance to kill their project. When TikTok launched internationally in September 2017, the response was similarly underwhelming.
The story of TikTok offers useful lessons for anyone building products in competitive markets, about the power of algorithmic infrastructure, the strategic use of capital, knowing when to persist versus when to pivot, and why the best technology doesn't always win without the resources and organizational conviction to prove it at scale.
On January 8, AkijBashir Group officially entered Bangladesh's cable manufacturing sector, launching the country's first three-layer insulated electrical wire at a ceremony in Dhaka. The Tk300 crore investment, executed through the acquisition of Eminence Electric Wire & Cables Limited's near-complete manufacturing facility, marks a calculated bet on safety innovation in a market where over 120 competitors largely compete on price.
The venture fits within a deliberate portfolio strategy of the group. The group already generates over 60 percent of its revenue from building materials, steel, tiles, sanitaryware, and boards. Adding cables enables the company to position itself as a comprehensive construction materials supplier, creating cross-selling opportunities with contractors and developers who prefer consolidated procurement.
The timing makes sense as well. Bangladesh's infrastructure boom continues despite recent economic headwinds, with ongoing electrification and construction projects driving cable demand.
Cable is a fascinating industry and has gone through a phenomenal transformation over the last decade in Bangladesh. To understand what AkijBashir's entry truly means and why the sector is gaining attention requires examining the broader dynamics shaping Bangladesh's cable sector.
Bangladesh's online learning industry has seen meaningful growth in recent years. With a population of over 170 million people, of which a large portion is under the age of 26, a growing penetration of the internet and mobile phones, and the government's focus on digitization, there has been a meaningful growth in the use of technology in education.
Behind this impressive growth, however, lies a less glamorous reality.
As EdTech companies scale, they're discovering that rapid growth without operational infrastructure creates its own crisis. As platforms scale from thousands to hundreds of thousands of users, many are discovering that manual processes adequate for 500 students become catastrophically inefficient at 50,000.
Partnership is critical for meaningful success in any field. As I have written before, history is littered with stories of the vital importance of collaboration in producing success across various fields, from science to music, sports, literature, and many others. The upsides of a meaningful partnership are many and well-documented.
At the same time, partnership is not easy either. It comes with the territory. Every strength comes with its corresponding weakness. As a partnership can make your business, it can also break it. In fact, partnership failure is one of the major causes of business failures. While entrepreneurs obsess over market fit, fundraising, and growth metrics, the real threat often lurks within the founding team itself.
This is particularly true in Bangladesh, where cultural norms around conflict avoidance and unspoken expectations create a tricky landscape for business partnerships.
Over the years, I have seen many promising ventures fail largely due to partnership failure. As we discussed at the beginning of this article, a meaningful partnership is essential for building a successful business. At the same time, if the partnership goes wrong, it can kill the most promising venture.
This makes understanding the dynamics of partnerships and how to make partnerships work an indispensable skill. And what better way is there to learn about something than from someone who has been there and done it?
To that end, I asked Raisul Kabir bhai, one of my favorite humans and the CEO of Brain Station 23, in a recent interview, how he thinks about partnership and his experience of building effective partnerships at Brain Station 23.
LEAD Academy, a Dhaka-based skills and career-focused edtech startup, has launched a Post Graduate Diploma in Applied Human Resource Management (PGD-AHRM), a practitioner-led program designed to bridge the gap between academic HR training and the strategic, compliance-heavy realities of modern corporate practice.
The evolution of HR from administrative support to a strategic business function has created new demands for professional capability. Organizations now expect HR teams to contribute meaningfully to business strategy, navigate complex compliance environments, leverage data for decision-making, and design systems that drive organizational performance.
LEAD Academy's PGD-AHRM addresses these demands through an applied learning model that treats HR work as what it truly is: a discipline requiring both technical expertise and strategic thinking.
Delivered by senior HR executives from leading organizations, the program emphasizes real-world HR practices, case-based learning, documentation, policy development, and strategic execution aligned with organizational objectives, rather than traditional theory-heavy instruction.
