Hello there, hope you are doing well in a rapidly changing and increasingly turbulent world. As usual, this is the FS Weekly Letter, where we talk about entrepreneurship, technology, business expertise, and more. You can read our previous letters here and subscribe here if someone forwarded this to you.
We sent the last letter at the end of week 16th. We are at the beginning of week 20th now. In a month, we’ll reach 50% of 2026. The time truly goes by fast.
Over the last two weeks, we published several fascinating pieces. An in-depth brief on the EV market in Bangladesh goes straight into the trajectory, shape, and structure of an emerging industry.
Taking on an ongoing debate in Dhaka’s startup scene, we plunged straight into the Startup vs SME definition debate in Dhaka and came out with a thesis of our own. We usually try to resist our tendencies to indulge in endless debates, but this one felt necessary. We are convinced about our arguments, but we prefer to operate with a flexible conviction in our ideas. If you have better ideas, please shoot our ways.
We published a long and textured conversation with Chamak founder Debasish Chakraborty a while back. And in the tradition of bringing concentrated lessons from our long-form interviews, we followed up with a takeaways piece compiling the top ten lessons from the interview. The piece covers excellent ideas such as revenue as a discipline, affordable loss, and many more.
In another useful lesson piece, we published an excerpt from our upcoming book on Startise titled Lessons from Startise.
In a contribution piece, former Pathao founder Hussain M Elisu writes about the challenges of the supperapp model and why it fails to work in markets like Bangladesh.
We published two long profiles on two fascinating companies we covered before. In a profile on Caretutors, we explore how the company is reimagining tutoring in Bangladesh and, in the process, presents a new learning model.
In another profile, we go deep into the halal investment and SME financing platform Biniyog, exploring the origin, thesis, and market position, and more of the company.
While each of these stories comes with unique insights and lessons, a common thread that runs through all of them is how new markets emerge and evolve, and what it means for builders, operators, and policymakers.
Happy building!
Links to all pieces are below.
1. Bangladesh's Electric Vehicle Market: Structure, Forces, and the Future
3. Ten Takeaways From Our Conversation with Debasish Chakraborty, Founder of Chamak
4. A Few Lessons from Startise
5. Hussain M Elius: The Super App Problem
7. Four Years, 125 Crore, and a Structural Bet: The Biniyog.io Story
