By the time Raisul Kabir co-founded Brain Station 23 in 2006, he had already started one company, walked away from a 30% stake in it, and built a freelance income that paid him more than most fresh graduates in Dhaka could expect to earn. Brain Station 23 wasn't his first attempt at entrepreneurship. It was closer to his third, and the path to it ran through two companies he didn't start, one he did, and a habit of taking whatever meaningful, paying opportunity showed up next.
He was, by his own description, an unremarkable student for most of his early school years: "not a particularly good student, more of a mediocre student, the average type", until a teacher named Akter Sir, in class eight, broke the pattern by making him work, giving him problems daily, taking them back the next day, and only pointing him toward a solutions manual when he was truly stuck. Raisul credits this as the moment he learned "the idea of trying and taking responsibility," and traces his improved academic performance directly to it.
He eventually got into Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) to study electrical and electronic engineering (EEE), fulfilling his grandmother's wish, after an unusually hard three months of prep after HSC. However, the degree he earned and the career he built rarely overlapped.
He had been coding since 2000, before he'd even been admitted to BUET. First, building a portal for a company called DPath, doing web design for another called Western Network, both for free, both before he owned a computer of his own (his uncle eventually gave him one, since his parents, both teachers, couldn't afford it).
Once at BUET, he tutored other students for income, a standard practice among undergrad students in Bangladesh, earning nearly BDT 15,000 a month, until he grew dissatisfied with the work and quit, because he didn't feel he was actually helping the students improve.
In 2001, he took his first paid programming job at Sonar Courier, for a monthly salary of BDT 2,000. Albeit a sharp pay cut from tutoring, taken anyway. A year later, he moved to Paradigm (now Paradigm Group), where he did the coding and programming in exchange for a 30% share of whatever a project earned, while other partners handled design and marketing. This paid considerably better, BDT 20,000 to 30,000 a month on average.
The arrangement was doing well enough that Raisul proposed turning it into a separate company. In 2003, while still an undergraduate, he co-founded Paradigm NeoMedia, a web design and IT solutions firm, alongside a designer he describes as probably the best in Dhaka at the time, Tanvir bhai. It didn't go the way he wanted. "I always wanted to grow fast and employ a lot of people," he says, "but at Paradigm, we were not growing." The specific problem, as he diagnosed it, was structural to the business itself: "It is very difficult to make money from doing web design business." In 2005, still a BUET student, he decided to leave, giving up his 30% stake in the company he'd helped start, with no apparent negotiation or attempt to extract value from it on the way out.
He did not found a new company. He started freelancing through a marketplace called getafreelancer.com, and discovered it paid better than either of the two jobs and one company that preceded it: "I started to earn a hell lot of money."
This detail matters for understanding what came next because it establishes that by 2005, Raisul already had a reliable fallback: freelance work he knew he could return to, sitting quietly beneath every subsequent decision he made.
Brain Station 23 itself started as a part-time engagement, not a plan. Raisul was working part-time at Latitude 23, a Dhaka 3D visualization firm founded by several BUET alumni, building their internal office management software. Latitude 23 then handed him something larger: a flash-development project for a foreign client, his to manage. He hired ten contractors, delivered the project in three months, and satisfied both the client and Latitude 23 in the process. That successful delivery led to other events.
Latitude 23, happy with the outcome and apparently already fielding inbound interest from other foreign clients who wanted software support, asked Raisul whether he'd be interested in a formal partnership, starting a software company together. His response: "I thought why not."
However, that response does not fully explain how uncertain the decision was for him at the time. He was studying EEE, a field with strong job prospects and salaries in Bangladesh in 2005, a field he says he'd been passionate about since childhood. Software, and specifically the nascent idea of an outsourcing company, was a much less obvious bet. Computer science, in his words, "was not a big thing yet."
Latitude 23 team, on a trip to India, brought him back a biography of Narayana Murthy, the Infosys founder, at the time already running a company with more than 56,000 employees. He enjoyed the book, and it gave him a frame for what the decision in front of him could mean beyond his own career: "These people are earning foreign currency and also creating huge employment opportunities for the country."
He connects this directly to his own sense of obligation: "I thought I got all the chances in life, I went to the best school and best university, I have some responsibility to my country. After much thought, I decided to move ahead with Latitude and give up my (potential future) EEE career."
He still wasn't fully sure, so he sought out a second opinion from Omar Al Zabir, a school friend who'd been coding since childhood (literally writing programs on paper before he had access to a computer, then walking them over to his older brother's machine to type in and test). “We were not in touch for a couple of years in between,” so Omar's reaction was skeptical: "You studied EEE, what do you know about computers, how are you going to do business." Raisul's answer was modest and specific — some PHP, ASP, CSS, HTML — enough that Omar, rather than discouraging him further, offered him a part-time role at his own company, Pageflakes, a fast-growing, VC-backed startup at the time. Raisul took it.
The following year, mid-2006 to mid-2007, Raisul spent running two part-time engagements simultaneously: building Brain Station 23 with Latitude 23 as 50% partner, and working part-time for Pageflakes.
He drew no salary from Brain Station 23 during this period. Pageflakes paid him well enough that he didn't need to. The two halves of his attention weren't equally weighted in the way a tidy founding narrative might suggest. For a full year, the more prestigious, better-funded, VC-backed company was the one paying him, while the company that would become his life's work was the unpaid side project.
The split resolved itself by external force rather than internal decision. In 2007, political instability in Bangladesh led Pageflakes to relocate to Malaysia. Omar asked Raisul to join them, and, in Raisul's account, the company wanted to go further than that and acqui-hire Brain Station 23 outright. Raisul said no to both. He turned full-time to Brain Station 23 and began drawing a salary of BDT 10,000 a month, at a moment when Pageflakes was reportedly offering him many times more, the clearest example of what the decision actually cost him in the near term.
Brain Station 23 started in 2006 with four people. Two of them had paid work lined up from day one, earning BDT 10,000 to 12,000 each; the other two did not, and were hired anyway, on the strength of the profit generated by the first two.
"Whenever we had extra money, we hired more people," Raisul says, describing a hiring rhythm dictated entirely by current cash flow, with no model or projection behind it beyond the immediate number in hand.
The original stated goal was to create employment for five hundred people within two years. It wasn't hit. The company kept growing anyway, on the same incremental, profit-funded basis, without taking outside capital for its first decade.
A note on what to watch for in this case
The single most calibration-worthy detail in this case is the shape of the year Raisul spent working for two companies at once, one paid and one not, with the unpaid one being the one that became Brain Station 23.
A founding narrative told backward from a successful outcome tends to flatten this kind of ambiguity. It becomes "he started Brain Station 23 in 2006," a clean date, rather than what it actually was: roughly twelve months in which the more reasonable, better-funded, available option (full-time at a VC-backed startup under someone he admired) sat directly alongside the option that turned out, in hindsight, to be the right one.
Raisul's own account doesn't claim he saw which one would win. He kept both running until an external event, Pageflakes' relocation, forced the choice.
The second pattern worth holding onto is the idea of taking risks. Certainly, starting a business is risky. In terms of Brain Station 23, certainly, there were risks. Dedicating yourself to building something from scratch is always an uncertain bet, more on the side of failure. But we have seen that founders usually calibrate these risks, which can be hard to understand from the outside. Many founders understand the inherent risk and usually have at least a psychological logic behind their leap. They understand that if it doesn’t work, they have fallback options that lower the felt cost of every decision.
Raisul frames himself as someone who doesn't feel comfortable taking big risks, and his own explanation for why he was willing to give up his EEE career and his 30% Paradigm stake rests on the same logic each time: a known, working alternative (tutoring, freelancing on getafreelancer.com) sitting one step behind him, ready to be picked back up if the current bet failed. "I knew if it did not work, I could go back to freelancing and get my family going," he says of the Brain Station decision specifically.
As in the earlier Kaz Software case, the risk being taken here looks larger from the outside, in hindsight, than it was understood to be by the person taking it at the time, worth comparing directly against how Wahid Choudhury described his own "quite safe entry" into starting Kaz on the back of an already-secured six-month contract.
One caveat, however, is that many of the assumptions that founders make are easy for them to make because they generally come with high risk tolerance. No one would pick a non-existent venture paying little salary over a high-paying job at a venture-backed company. Similarly, assuming I will be able to find a job or figure out an income source if this venture doesn’t work, also means you need to have an unreasonable amount of optimism and confidence. It also means that you are entering the idea that this thing might actually fail, and still going ahead to do it. These decisions are not straightforward. And as you can see in the case of Raisul and Wahid, it also comes from the culmination of our personal journey.
A third detail, easy to read past, is that Raisul didn't quit Paradigm NeoMedia because the company failed outright. He quit because he diagnosed a structural ceiling in the business model itself, "it is very difficult to make money from doing web design business", and chose to abandon equity in an existing, functioning company rather than try to fix or pivot it.
The final takeaway is, of course, the most important one: everything follows a trajectory, usually starting a company is a circuitous journey. The decision to start Brain Station 23 a year later is, in that light, not really a single decision at all. It's the second half of a single underlying judgment about what kind of work was actually fundable at scale, made once in 2005 (leaving web design) and confirmed again in 2006 (entering outsourcing instead). Interestingly, this pattern recurs several times throughout the journey of Brain Station 23 as well.
You can read our other cases in this sequence, which we are calling How Businesses Get Started here. Our coverage of Brain Station 23 here.
