Hi there, I'm Ruhul, and this is Future Startup Letter (formerly FS Weekly), a weekly newsletter about business, entrepreneurship, expertise, and doing good work.
Today’s episode features:
In the Reading Recs:
We’re hosting a workshop on Narrative Building in the Age of AI on 26 August. If you want to join, you can learn more and register here.
As my friend Mahadi Hasan Sagor puts it: “Your brand has two versions: the brand you think you are, and the brand people find when they search for you online.” Unfortunately, they’re not always the same
A potential customer might Google your brand, read a review, find an old article, browse an online discussion, or ask ChatGPT/LLM what it knows about you. Together, these touchpoints shape how people perceive your brand, and increasingly, that perception can matter more than your latest campaign.
This is why modern brand building needs to move beyond campaign-focused operations alone. Storytelling, paid and earned media, SEO, reviews, social conversations, and AI visibility can no longer operate as separate activities. They need to work together to build one coherent brand narrative.
In this workshop, we’ll explore how brands can deliberately build credibility and a narrative across online channels that people can discover, understand, and trust.
Learn more and register here: https://futurestartup.com/2026/08/14/workshop-brand-narrative-building-in-the-age-of-ai/
Now on to today’s update. Enjoy!
“GrowthX is iDEAN Consulting’s three-month business growth program for entrepreneurs who want to move beyond tactical marketing and build a more systematic approach to growth. The program combines online sessions, in-person workshops, business-growth frameworks, and hands-on application to help entrepreneurs diagnose the structural problems inside their businesses and build systems for sustainable growth. It is one of the newest components of iDEAN Consulting’s growing business strategy and education platform in Bangladesh.” Read the article here.
Startup Bangladesh Limited has launched a Tk400 crore Fund of Funds to attract more local and international venture capital into Bangladesh’s startup ecosystem. Unlike Startup Bangladesh’s existing venture capital arm, which invests directly in startups, the Fund of Funds will invest through selected local and global venture capital fund managers. Those funds will then invest in Bangladeshi startups, with the Fund of Funds requiring a 1:1 matching allocation toward Bangladesh. Read more.
Atiqur Rahman Sarker Sohel is the founder and Managing Director of Filament Engineering Ltd (Muspana). Under his leadership, Muspana has become the country's only manufacturer of round conical electric poles, a pioneer in intelligent street lighting, and one of the top two or three names in public sector solar, and a diversified conglomerate with businesses across manufacturing, import, and public sector work. In this fascinating interview, we talk about his personal journey, Muspana, how he approaches the act of company building, his lessons from his journey, and much more. Read the full interview.
Bangladesh's conglomerates have an opportunity to become much more active participants in the country's startup ecosystem. One way to do that is through corporate venture capital: investing in promising startups, forming strategic partnerships with them, and giving entrepreneurial companies access to the capital, distribution, market knowledge, and networks that large businesses already possess. For many Bangladeshi conglomerates, this would represent a different way of entering emerging markets. Instead of building every new business internally, they could make minority investments in startups, learn from them, support their growth, and retain the option to deepen the relationship later. Read the article.
5. Building a Global Food-Tech QSR Waffle Chain: The Waffle Up Strategy
Waffle Up is a Bangladesh-built food-tech QSR brand with ambitions to become a global waffle chain. Founded by Salman Goni and legally anchored in Singapore, the company runs much of its product development, technology, and operational infrastructure from Bangladesh while using Singapore as its global brand base.
The model is unusual. Rather than scaling like a traditional restaurant chain through heavy investment in real estate and central kitchens, Waffle Up is building a technology and operations system around its outlets. It uses standardized recipes and equipment, a warehouse-to-outlet supply model, centralized data infrastructure, and direct customer relationships to create what Goni describes as a "virtual global brand." Read the full article here.
“Pick a Friday, Saturday, or Sunday that you have a lot of free time. Email or call five people (e.g., friend, coworker, fellow athlete, professor, boyfriend, parent) and give them permission to make demands of your time. Tell them, “Please ask me to do something this Saturday that would genuinely help you.” You can tell them it’s for class if they think it’s weird. Don’t coordinate and don’t let them know you have four other people to help that day. Don’t place any limits on the time they can demand of you for that one day. All five activities must be scheduled for the same day. Now decide what to do. Whom did you disappoint? Why? Whose interests counted? Could everyone be satisfied? Did you treat everyone equally? Should you have?”
“The usefulness of domain knowledge suggests that human expertise will continue to be useful even as models get stronger. For many tasks, the human is the bottleneck, not the model, because the difficult part is in communicating to the model exactly what kind of solution the human wants. The information is “in the model” already, but it takes a very smart human to pull it out.”
“Expertise shows up in simple problems, because simple problems expose fundamentals. In programming we are working on top of layers of abstraction. Abstractions can be good when you know how they work and you use them but otherwise they are some artificial limit. An abstraction is designed for a use case in mind. When it does not work the truth is not that it cannot be done, but it’s to break through the layer. Discover how to achieve the goal from basic principles. It’s like saying a program cannot be smaller because of the compiler. The compiler is just a word. The truth is what did the compiler put into the program.”
