Welcome to another late edition of Future Startup Letter, our weekly newsletter featuring interesting reads from past weeks and links from our favorite publications and writers online.
Today’s edition features six articles from Future Startup.
Three articles focus on important policy and structural issues critical for the growth of the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Bangladesh. The central argument is that the dominant discussion around entrepreneurship and startups in Bangladesh continues to focus on hot but shallow issues. More important issues that can truly move the ball hardly receive meaningful attention. That needs to change if we want a vibrant ecosystem.
In the other three stories, we shift gears to focus on operators, companies, and emerging businesses.
A fascinating long-form profile goes deep into the making of rising business strategy consultant Mark Anupom Mollick and his consulting firm, iDEAN Consulting.
In a piece on receivable-based financing, we look into a new instrument and model to address the persistent SME financing gap in Bangladesh.
Finally, a deep dive into the software and technology services company Audacity Ventures explores how culture not only shapes a company's internal functioning but also its ability to deliver top-notch services, build an enduring competitive edge, and respond more effectively to changing market realities.
All links are below. Happy making!
“Startups don’t grow in a vacuum. They grow in economies. The health of a startup ecosystem is a function of the broader normative and economic reality it inhabits. The norm of the society toward business, the quality of the talent pool, the depth of local capital markets, the openness of the regulatory environment, the ease of doing business, the presence of global companies that train people and create networks, the ease of moving money across borders, the attractiveness of the market to international investors, and the degree to which the country is integrated into regional and global trade flows. These things significantly dictate how well a market performs.
Bangladesh’s startup ecosystem is weak partly because Bangladesh’s broader economy has structural constraints that have never been seriously addressed in the context of entrepreneurship.
This is the framing shift we need. Startups are not a sector that can operate in a silo. They are a reflection of an economy.”
“That was about BSIC and what we hope the firm will eventually deliver. But the concern we keep coming back to isn't about any risk inside BSIC. It is about what BSIC's existence means for the private venture capital ecosystem that Bangladesh actually needs to build. That is more of a policy question.
Simply put, what Bangladesh's local startup capital problem ultimately needs is a functioning private venture capital industry: multiple independent firms, professional managers with carried interest structures, a demonstration effect from successful exits, and private institutional capital forming habits of investing in high-growth startup companies.
That ecosystem, once built, sustains itself without mandates or government direction.”
“When the announcement of Jiji acquiring Bikroy came out last week, the coverage framed it as a global operator buying Bangladesh’s largest classified marketplace startup. While the news is accurate, that framing leaves out more important details. The fact that Bikroy was the largest classified marketplace in Bangladesh is correct, but it was not a locally founded company. Similarly, when you track the ownership chain of every major acquisition in Bangladesh's startup scene over the last several years, Daraz, Foodpanda, and now Bikroy, not one of the acquired companies was built by Bangladeshi founders.
One way to explain these acquisitions is that global operators don’t essentially value or see what local founders are building in Bangladesh. Instead, global operators are willing to buy other global operators' operations in Bangladesh when the price is right and the strategic fit is clear. This is basically global capital being redistributed between global operators in a market that happens to be Bangladesh. That is a meaningfully different thing.
We have not seen any similar acquisition stories or interest when it comes to local startups. It can be that many of the leading local players don’t want to get acquired. It can also be that there have been discussions or ongoing discussions about which we don’t know.”
“Each chapter of Philip Kotler's introductory marketing textbook, one of the bestselling business textbooks in history, comes with a long, detailed case study of a real company. Each case comes with specific numbers, strategic dilemmas, and questions that require actual thinking to answer. Each case takes about twenty minutes to go through, but when the exam is in two days, and the cases rarely make it to the question paper, students learn quickly that skipping them costs nothing. And most MBA students tend to skip them.
Sometime around 2013, Mark Anupom Mollick was sitting in a classroom at the Institute of Business Administration (IBA) at Dhaka University, one of the most competitive MBA programs in Bangladesh, reading every one of those cases, word by word, with a highlighter.
His motivation was more than preparing for the exam. He was planning to start a business on weekends and wanted to learn how other companies had solved the problem of turning a stranger into a repeat customer.
He still has that Kotler book.
In that classroom, Anupom, in a way, was trying to build an applied theory of business that would help explain why a customer chooses one company over another, what makes a funnel work or fail, why some businesses compound and others plateau, and what it actually takes to build an organization that grows consistently rather than by accident. He was, without realizing it, developing the unique insight that would underpin iDEAN Consulting, the strategy consulting firm he would eventually start.”
“A distributor we spoke with some time ago ran an FMCG territory outside Dhaka. He handled several well-known brands, had a team of six, a delivery van, and retail relationships built over eleven years.
Each cycle, he told us, the math works out on paper. The orders come in, the goods go out, the payments arrive. On paper, he is profitable. In reality, however, there are about ten days each month when he is simultaneously owed money by thirty retailers, owes money to two suppliers, and has almost nothing liquid.
He manages it by calling in favors, delaying one payment to cover another, running a kind of frantic, informal finance operation in his head. He doesn’t have any visible struggle, but a constant working capital gap. Which also means he just permanently operates below what he could do with adequate working capital.
In many ways, he doesn’t need a loan to fix this. A more appropriate solution for him would be a way to convert the money he is already owed, those thirty trade payables from thirty retailers, real obligations backed by goods already delivered, into cash today. He has the asset. He just can't access it.
This is the core idea behind receivable-based financing that several fintech upstarts are experimenting with in Dhaka. And we feel that it can be an effective answer to the growing SME working capital gap we have seen in years of covering this sector.
A trade receivable, the right to collect a specific payment from a specific buyer within a specific timeframe, backed by evidence of a real commercial transaction, is a real asset. It can be sold, discounted, or used as the basis for advancing capital.
When that happens at scale, the working capital that is perpetually frozen or locked/trapped in trade credit across millions of small business relationships becomes liquid and can help meaningfully address the SME financing gap. The economic consequence of that liquidity can be transformational for the SMEs and our economy.”
“Culture is one of the most discussed and least understood subjects in business. Everyone has heard the aphorism: Culture eats strategy for breakfast. Most founders and operators will tell you, sincerely, that they believe culture is critical. The evidence is everywhere: people perform better in high-trust environments, organizations with genuine accountability tend to outlast those without, and the way a company treats its people shows up eventually in how those people treat customers. These are not new insights.
And yet building a genuinely functioning culture is one of the hardest things a company can actually do. The gap between knowing and doing is usually wide. In the culture discussion, it is even wider. Companies confuse articulating values with practicing them. They launch culture initiatives the way they launch products, with energy at the start and diminishing attention thereafter. They hire for culture fit without ever defining what that means in practice. They treat culture as something separate from operations rather than understanding that it is the operating system through which everything else runs.
Culture is usually treated as something that lives in a document rather than in the specific decisions people make on a Tuesday afternoon when a deadline is tight and the client is unhappy. Culture does not actually govern behavior when things get difficult.
That is where culture either holds or proves to be mere decoration.
What Audacity has done, imperfectly but persistently, Siddiq would be the first to say so, is close that gap enough that the culture is legible in how the company actually operates, not just in how it describes itself.”
