Today, we have the pleasure of featuring an interview with Fahad Ibna Wahab, Founder and Managing Director of Patrons Venture Limited. Fahad is a serial entrepreneur with a portfolio of fascinating successful ventures, including CoSpace (co-working spaces), GRID (a modern furniture company), Movians (a video production studio), and several other ventures.
Fahad has been in this business of entrepreneurship for a very long time and has a rare story of multiple failures and successes. He has seen all sides of venture building in Bangladesh. He started his entrepreneurial journey right after college, started multiple companies, failed at multiple companies, and then built a brilliant group of successful companies. Our conversation covers:
Fahad's candid reflections on failures and triumphs provide invaluable lessons for aspiring and seasoned entrepreneurs alike. This interview is a must-read for anyone seeking inspiration, practical advice, and a deeper understanding of the entrepreneurial journey. Happy building!
Ruhul: Thank you Fahad bhai for agreeing to this interview. We can start by talking about your background and the early days of your entrepreneurial journey. How did you come to start companies? When did you first think about becoming an entrepreneur and what was the motivation behind that?
Fahad: Thank you so much for inviting me. When I first came to Dhaka in 2013, I was just 18 years old. I had just finished college. Like thousands of other young people my age, I came to Dhaka with the ambition of getting into a public university.
Then I talked to a few people who were already studying in Dhaka, and I saw the whole path—how many years I'd need to graduate and how many years I'd need to find a job. I didn't have that much time, as I only had money to survive for 3 months. I felt like it was too long for me. Part of the reason might be that I came from a background where my father was a businessman. He struggled a lot to get to where he was, but he managed to succeed. He's one of my biggest inspirations.
I perhaps thought my father came from a rural village to our hometown and created his business, so why can't I come from a small city and, now that I'm in the capital, take advantage of the opportunities here and build my own business? That's where it all started. I think the entrepreneurial spirit is in my genes, and I got it from my father, who taught me a lot.
I started right after I came to Dhaka. I started a bike messenger company, which failed after a while. After a few years, I started an agency and a bike-sharing company. As you know, we were one of the earliest ride-sharing companies in Dhaka. I was very involved in the on-demand economy.
Afterward, as time went by, I met a lot of people and more opportunities came my way. In between this time, CoSpace, the co-working space, happened, which was my second solo venture. Previously, I took investments in my bike messenger/logistics company and also the ride-sharing company. However, Movians, the video production company, I started because I had the skill set. I could create videos, so I started a video production company. Movians originally started as a side business.
As you can see, I have started so many different things, which might seem a little bit here and there, but ultimately, it has worked out.
Ruhul: That's an excellent start. We will get to CoSpace and other ventures of Patrons. Before that, Tell us about your early life and upbringing. You talked about your father being a businessman and your most important inspiration. Tell us about your early years, about your father, and the lessons you learned from your father.
Fahad: I understood the influence of my father on me a lot later. For a long time, I couldn’t figure out the source of my entrepreneurial mindset. I thought about many different aspects. After a long search, I realized that it had to do with how I was raised by my father.
My father has multiple small businesses just like I have multiple small businesses today. He always tried to accommodate new technology. When mobile phones and computers came on the market in the 90s, I remember my father bought a computer in 2001. There were very few computers in my hometown in those days. I got to use a computer when I was in grade two or three. My father was always an early adopter. When the fax machine, photocopier, printer, and internet came in, he was always one of the first to adapt them.
I saw my father always wanted to do something new. He never stopped and never stuck to one thing; he was always exploring. I think that's where his motivation for business came from, and that's where my own motivation for business comes from, too.
Growing up, my father always wanted me to get involved in the business. Of course, he encouraged me to study, but he never discouraged me from earning money. He encouraged me to earn money. I worked from a very young age, working in my father's business and earning money. I first earned money in class five or six. Throughout that time, I was always doing something and my father always encouraged me. That training of my father has perhaps shaped my thinking about work and the world.
Ruhul: Can you talk about your early education, school days, and so on? As you said, you started earning money from class five, which is something very interesting. Parents in our society often discourage kids from pursuing money at young ages. There is a subtle intention that kids should not learn about money until they mature. There are different mentalities, but the dominant one is that if kids learn about money early, it might derail them. In that sense, your experience is very interesting. What was your childhood like? Any interesting recollections?
Fahad: I was born and raised in a small town called Sarishabari, Jamalpur in the north. I did my schooling there. We had a really good batch I would say. All my friends are doing fantastic—some of them are doing PhDs and all of them are successful in their careers. Fortunately or unfortunately, I'm the only one in business. So I grew up with a group of people who were ambitious and ethical. I'm proud of the group of people I grew up with because they were extremely ethical. When you're a kid, people don't normally teach these things. They say, "Don't do bad stuff," but what is "bad stuff"? That's important. I think that was one of the main benefits I got from my school friends.
My school was amazing. After school, I moved to Mymensingh and did my college for two years, and then I shifted to Dhaka.
Ruhul: So you came to Dhaka in 2013 and started your first company. If I remember correctly, it was a logistics company.
Fahad: Yes, the first one was called Rapidmail. I later changed the name to Joldi. I changed the name of that company twice.
Ruhul: Tell us more about that. We can start there and tie that with your multiple initiatives, and then how that journey culminated into Patrons. You came to Dhaka, thought, "okay, logistics looks interesting, we can start a logistics company," and unleashed all these other initiatives eventually.
Fahad: At first, when I started the bike messenger thing, I never wanted to be an entrepreneur, by the way. I always wanted to be a filmmaker. My passion and goal was to be a filmmaker and then a traveler.
I even started my undergraduate at Green University in film and media. So that was always my plan. But there's a catch, which is you need money to survive and stay in Dhaka. Although my father was really successful in his business, his business started to struggle and his financial condition took a hit during the period of 2010-2013.
When I came to Dhaka, I came with a certain amount of money, enough to survive for two to three months, and then I would need more. I knew it would be extremely difficult for my father to support me financially and also because I was already 18, I thought I should support myself.
So I had to think about how I could earn money. As I told you earlier, because I was trained to earn money from a young age, that training came in handy here as well.
I looked for opportunities. Of course, Facebook was one of the biggest places where I looked. I was in a group called BDCyclist. I saw people were trying to do bike messenger things, so I started the same thing—why can't I deliver parcels with my bicycle?
Initially, I started doing it as a freelance thing. As it grew, I thought it could become a business. I started taking in orders and distributing them to other messengers. Unintentionally, a small business started. But as I was just 18, I couldn't manage it and the business failed.
But one thing I did: I never stopped. When I had to shut down Rapidmail, I said, "What's next? What can I do to earn money?" I had this urge that I couldn't go back. I had no other way out. By that time, the university admission test period had ended and that door was no longer available. I didn't sit for any exam. The only option for me was to go forward. When that business failed, I started again with a new name, SmileX. That also failed. I started again with a new name, Joldi, and that failed as well.
I tried a lot those days. I worked long hours. I still remember delivering parcels every single day with my colleagues. Sometimes no matter how hard you try things fall apart.
But I never stopped. I failed in the morning, and in the afternoon, I was running around, going to places and seeking what I could do next.
People always tried to support me.
I was always looking for opportunities. I never managed this many businesses at once at any time before. I never thought of managing these many businesses at once. Right now, the situation is different. I didn’t intentionally start five or six businesses. Somehow it became these many businesses, and now I have to manage all of them. The businesses started, and I have to manage them. I cannot quit. I cannot say, "Hey boss, two months' notice, I'm quitting now." No, I have to manage this.
Going back to the early days, I always wanted to earn a proper living for myself. I had this motivation that I have to provide for my family. I have to provide them a good future so that the financial crisis my father and mother saw, they never have to see it again. That was the biggest motivation, and, thank God, my father trained me to earn money, it came in handy.
Ruhul: You started this multiple iteration of the bike messenger company, but it did not work. What happened after that?
Fahad: When it failed, I actually worked for three companies within one year—three internships in three companies. I worked in a retail store chain for four months, helping them digitize all their stores. I worked in Magnito Digital as an intern for a few months, and also in an e-commerce company in their operations, learning about e-commerce. Through that experience, I gathered some knowledge, and then I started the video production company, Movians, which I still have. It's my oldest venture.
I didn't start it as a business, but when you do an internship, you don't earn much money.
I needed to earn a living, that's why I thought I needed to do something on the side. For all three companies I worked for, I used to take photos, and videos, and edit them because I had that knowledge. So I thought I could use this knowledge to create a video production company. That's how I started Movians back in 2015, right after I left the job.
After I started Movians, the opportunity came to start a ride-sharing company in early 2016, so we started the ride-sharing company. In 2015, I started the video production company and we started the ride-sharing company in 2016 because it looked fascinating—you could move people around. I went to India and saw Uber and Ola. I knew that this was going to work in Bangladesh. That's why we started MUV in early 2016.
Ruhul: Movians started to make some money and it eventually became a stable company. But MUV, the ride-sharing company that you started, did not work out. What happened after that? Tell us about this period.
Fahad: In MUV, I was fully focused. There was nothing else. Movians I kind of paused a bit because with MUV my ambition was big. This was the first time I was working on a product that was used by the mass market. It was a retail product. We had 700,000 users, and 30,000 bikers back then. We were one of the top in the market for a certain period. I was 100% focused on MUV because I wanted to make it successful. I wanted to make it big. So I paused Movians and fully focused on MUV.
Of course, as I talked before about why MUV failed, our timing was wrong. Had we started two years earlier or two years later, we could have managed to make it work. But we were in that specific moment when, right after we started, 20 other players entered the same market. I think we were at the wrong time. It could also be that our timing was right but we were too slow.
Ruhul: You eventually had to shut down the business. What happened after that?
Fahad: In 2019, we decided to pivot. I didn't want to let go of my fellow teammates. I had fantastic people in our operations, tech, and marketing. I was thinking about how I could keep this fantastic team I created. When I was doing MUV, I was young and my teammates were young, we grew together. We created something fantastic together. Unfortunately, it failed and I had to let go of many people. But there was always a core team I wanted to keep.
So I sort of shifted the teams at MUV into two separate companies. I shifted the tech people into an enterprise software business. We have since created a few enterprise software solutions for pharmaceutical distribution companies. And I shifted my operations people into a logistics business, which is still there.
By the way, the software business and logistics business are still there. From the logistics business, we provide delivery people and vehicles to companies like Shwapno, supermarkets, and e-commerce stores.
These are small businesses, but they're working. I just wanted to keep my team, that's why I started these two businesses. And with my marketing team at MUV, I restarted Movians on a small scale.
I still remember that even after MUV stopped, everything closed down, and I never stopped coming to the office. I came every single day, even if there was no work. I sat in front of my computer, I talked to people, I always showed up. We also had a pretty big office in Banani. I soon realized that I didn't have the budget to keep the office. Then I thought, "Why not sublet one or two rooms?" I posted a Facebook post, "we have an office space, and I can rent out fully furnished desks." I had 12 desks at first, and within 7 days, they were all booked. I was happy that I could offset my cost. I didn't realize that I sowed the seed for a new business.
As an experiment to compensate for my cost, I started a page, rented out space, and then people started calling me for space. Fahad, you started a co-working space, do you have space?" I was like, "I'm just subletting my space, it's not like I started something." In response, some of these people were like, "You can start something, and we will take the space." I said, "Okay, sure, why not." And then I started looking for a space. That’s how I took our first 6,500-square-foot branch and opened CoSpace.
I still think I was stupid enough to rent such a huge space with such a high rent and such a high investment. But somehow I took it, and people started coming in, and somehow it happened. I don't know how. I didn't plan it out to be honest. I just went there and took the place. The landlord was amazing—he helped me a lot throughout my journey. Somehow I managed to make it work. I didn't even have to spend much money. My fellow friends helped me a lot. I got AC for long-term investment from a friend, and I got interior support from a store that didn't know me but gave it to me on credit—"Pay me in 12 months, no problem." I got chairs and tables with such a low investment. I don't know how it happened, but it's interesting now that I look back.
Somehow everything came together at the exact right moment, the exact right time. I didn't mean to start a business, but the business started happening, and now I have to manage it. So I started managing it, and of course, you know what happened later, in March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic started. So I was like, "Extremely screwed. I was like what have I done? How can I pay almost five, six lakhs taka every month in rent?" That's how it all started. All of these started accidentally, I guess.
Ruhul: What happened after that? You started CoSpace, COVID happened, and you still kept going. Can you talk about that and then connect the GRID story to that?
Fahad: When COVID happened, I said to myself I did enough for the past few years, this is the end of me. I still remember the last day when I looked around my small personal office, not the CoSpace one, but my own office where I used to sit since 2015, and said to myself, "Maybe this is the last day here."
I took a last long look around my office and went back to my hometown. Everything closed down. I didn't know what would happen. I didn't have the money to pay for all the stuff. The first few weeks were intense because we didn't know that it was going to last for so long. There was rent time and salary time. I paid whatever I could with whatever I had. Also, the Movians was extremely affected as well. So I had to make the painful decision of letting go of a few of my people.
Interestingly, one business started to pick up during COVID, our delivery/logistics support business. Remember we were doing the grocery delivery business with small businesses? I didn't even look into it until that point and almost forgot that it existed.
When COVID-19 started, the demand for this service boomed. Everyone was calling me that they needed delivery people, they needed bikes because people had to do grocery delivery. Even to this day, we are the exclusive delivery partner of Shwapno. All the people you see delivering groceries are our people. That business flourished as COVID started.
Movians was down, CoSpace was down. But the delivery and software businesses started paying the bills. We had created a field force management software. When COVID started, companies started to realize the need for it because they couldn't do the office work. They had to manage it remotely. So they started using our software. These two businesses suddenly boomed and saved the company.
I almost lost hope. I was thinking perhaps I shouldn't have started CoSpace. Perhaps it was the wrong decision. I wrote recently that what seems like a mistake now can be the best decision in a few years.
I didn't want to let go of the space. Although it was too expensive for me, I thought why not see how far I can go. Of course, my landlord helped. They didn't push me for the rent when they saw that I couldn't afford the office. Without their help, I wouldn't have survived.
When the lockdown eased, people started coming to CoSpace because they were letting go of their big offices and wanted an alternative. They were letting go of their big workforce, maybe a 20-person team that came down to 5 people. So they let go of their office and instead decided to use a coworking space. As a result, CoSpace became a default choice for many and we started getting a lot of clients.
Those three to five months were intense. I almost quit. I almost let go. If I had let go, CoSpace wouldn't be here. But I didn’t quit. Right now, we have more than 20,000 square feet of managed office space under CoSpace. Somehow we survived, and it happened.
Ruhul: That's fascinating. I will come back to a reflective understanding of doing all these things. Before that, let's get to how GRID Furniture came into this story.
Fahad: That's also an interesting story. I also didn't start GRID with some grand plan. It wasn't my childhood passion to start a furniture company.
When I started CoSpace, I bought a lot of chairs— some 200 chairs and built a lot of tables. So I posted all the stories on my social media. We used to purchase raw materials to cut down the costs. I didn't give any work to contractors. I used to do everything myself, going to the wood market to buy wood and process it.
I remember towards the end of 2020, a friend of mine called and said "You bought this many chairs, I need 13 chairs, could you please give me 13 chairs?" I was like I know a few people, I could share the numbers with you, you could buy it from them and you would just need to assemble it. Simple, very easy. But she said, "I don't want to take all this hassle. Instead, you purchase it and give it to me." I said, "Sure, I would purchase it and give it to you." So I purchased it and once I gave it to her, she said she needed an invoice. I was like, "I cannot create an invoice in the CoSpace name." I had an intern back then, and I asked him to create an invoice and share it with me. When he asked what name the invoice should be, I told him to find a name, a domain, whatever, and just put it in and send the invoice. I told him “it's for a friend, so it's not like I'm making any money.”
When he brought the invoice to me, in the invoice, I saw the name GRID. That's how GRID started. That guy gave me a few options, and I liked the name GRID, he also said 99grid.com was available. I told him to go ahead and buy it.
I'm talking about that one 24-hour time period: she called, I purchased the products and sent them in the afternoon. Then we sent the invoice to her. While doing all these things, I thought if she purchased it, perhaps other people wanted the same service. So in the afternoon, I captured a photo of the chairs and tables and posted on my social media stories that I have a few of the chairs left, if anyone wants to buy, text me. Soon, people started texting me and that evening, we got three pre-orders. I then thought about how I could automate taking orders.
A friend suggested, "You can start a website, you can start an e-commerce site." So I went to Shopify and created a website and made it live within 11 p.m., and GRID was born. We launched the website within 3 hours. I developed the Shopify website by myself, posted two products, and it became a business. At 11:00 a.m., a business idea came up, at 11 p.m., the business was live, and we already sold and had four orders that day. That's how GRID started, and see how far we have come since that day.
Ruhul: There are so many different ways to go with this story of your journey from the beginning to where you are today. One of the things I remember about you is that you have been extremely resilient in dealing with difficulties and failures. We have covered hundreds of founders over the last 10 years, companies fail all the time. We covered a ton of ride-hailing companies. We had a report on the ride-hailing market-map which we published in 2019 or 2020, and almost none of the companies exist today. Interestingly, many of the founders of those companies don't exist as well because I can't reach them or they're doing something else or not in the country. One thing I have always admired about you is that you have been consistently trying things out. As you indicated, I think you got lucky because you tried, not because those things happened accidentally. You have kept at it. As you said, you went to the office when in fact nothing was happening, you tried, reached out to people, and tried again. The question I want to ask is what were you thinking when your first venture failed?
Fahad: I still remember when I first failed, I cried a lot. I felt like a loser. When you are young, you have such high hopes. Everything will work out exactly the way you think. When things go right, you think, "I'm going to conquer the world. I'm going to do this and that business and grow big." One day, reality hits in. Things don't go as planned. You figure out you are in a very bad position from where you started.
For me, I was in debt of BDT 15,000 after my first venture failed. I was devastated about how I could repay that. That was such a big amount of money for me back then. I cried a lot, and then I figured out I had no other option than to find a way. I had to find a way.
I think my perspective was different—I had to do something. The ambition I had was I wanted a smooth and happy life for my family and myself as well as for my future family. I had zero options. I couldn't take the longer route. I couldn't take the university route and job route. I thought I failed at something, I will try and find a way out.
Well, I'm forgetting one thing, it's my grandfather who put a seed in my brain, I think he put the same seed in my father's brain as well, which is a simple philosophy that if you don't try, you will never know what's going to come. And if you do good work, it will definitely give you a result. Perhaps you won't get the result today, tomorrow, or in a week but someday you will definitely get your results.
I didn't have any other option other than working hard. I don't think I even thought that much about it after a while. I just continued working. I trained my brain in a way that I have to work, and I have to do this.
I think part of the motivation came from my passion for making movies—I wanted to make so much money that I could make my movie someday. That perhaps drove me in those days. I don't remember many things from those days. I should have written a journal. However, I think there were many different forces at work.
And yes, I have to mention one thing, my friends, motivated and supported me a lot. They always admired me, and also my family always supported me. Whenever I was struggling, not doing well, and didn't have any place to stay, my friend gave me a place to stay. I didn't have an office, my friend gave me an office. I didn't have a laptop, my friend gave me a laptop. I mean, they just did it. However, one thing I want to point out here is that they didn't do it automatically, I asked for help and they helped me.
People usually don't ask. I asked. There's no shame in asking friends and family for things. And now I'm in a position to give them even more.
Whenever I needed help, I asked everyone. Even today, whenever I need something, I ask people. It's not a crime to ask people for help, and people didn't let me down. If you ask properly, people will try to help you as much as they can. Because of my friends and all these people who came forward to help, even though I failed, I was truly motivated to go forward because I knew these 10/20 people were going to support me if I failed again. I think that was a huge motivation as well.
Ruhul: That's powerful. Being able to ask for help is a superpower. If you're trying to build a company, it's so difficult. You need so many different kinds of support from so many different kinds of people. Unless you have that courage and the willingness to ask, it's impossible to do it. One question there is that you came to Dhaka right after college, how did you build this network of friends and the well-wishers who eventually came to help you? I think that's very important because a lot of people miss that out — building friendships. Culturally, I think we have this issue with asking people, we shy away from asking others. That's probably a cultural issue. That's predominantly how people operate. How did you learn or realize at some point that you have to claim in life what you need or want? Otherwise, nobody's going to hand it to you.
Fahad: You have to knock on that door first. If you need shelter, you cannot expect someone to shelter you. You have to go to the shelter knock on the door and request, "Can I stay?"
I did that when I didn't have a shelter. When I didn't have a place to stay, I reached out to a friend. I still remember I went to my phonebook, it starts with A. I thought if I call 10 people, I'm going to find a place to stay. So I called the first person, Arko/Aviji, and told him that I was in a bad situation, I didn't have any money and didn't have any place to stay from tonight, whether I could stay at his place. What he told me was surprising: he said, "I literally rented a place, but I don't stay there, it's a completely empty room, I rented it for two months, you can just go there and stay." I was like, "What the hell just happened?" If I didn't make that call, how could I even know one of my friends had a place to stay?
I stayed there for two months, and then things improved, and I started earning money, and I just extended there. So you have to reach out and ask around.
Your first question was how I built this network of friends. If you remember in 2011/12, there was no Facebook news feed or bottomless scrolling, but Facebook groups were powerful and we used to gather there and communicate. It was more like forums. I was connected with three specific groups: BD Cyclist, Cinema People, and Travelers of Bangladesh (ToB). I loved riding bicycles, that's why I was connected with BD Cyclist. Cinema People because I love movies and want to make movies someday. These three groups were active in their specific communities. I was also on Somewhere-in-blog.
I was living in Mymensingh and was in college. I had a Nokia e71 Symbian phone and used to do Facebooking from there.
BDCyclist, Cinema People, and Travelers of Bangladesh, these three groups created so many people from their area. I was very active in these three groups. I used to regularly attend BDcyclist events. I created the BDcyclist Mymensingh community. They had this online event where you have to ride a certain kilometer within a certain day, and I became number four there, and the second was Mozammel bhai, who now leads the bKash tech team, and the third was Drabid Alam, who is Head of We Are X.
There were so many people from Dhaka who got to know me that there is a kid from Mymensing who is very active. It was a small community, very active. So I came to meet and know a lot of people. When I came to Dhaka, I already had a certain community who knew me. So I had this community from TOB, BDCyclist, and Cinema Peoples. I went to their meetups, programs, and events, and eventually made friends, and eventually, a few of them became my lifelong friends.
Ruhul: That's super interesting. Coming back to your journey, your first failure happened with the logistic company SmileX, and then you launched MUV, which I think was backed by a couple of external investors as well. When MUV failed, what happened? What were you thinking? Because you started with such a high ambition. I attended one of your meetings at the MUV office once, and it was a beautiful office and the energy was high. You were planning a lot of things. I think we also did a couple of features on MUV. When it failed, what was your reaction? How did you manage that failure since you raised money? How did you deal with your relationships? Tell us about that experience.
Fahad: Absolutely. It's really interesting. I think everyone has the same feelings. When Rapidmail failed, the feelings I had, the same feelings came back when MUV Asia failed. The feelings were the same.
When I was winning, getting there, doing a lot of rides, and having a lot of users, the energy was high. I was daydreaming about so many things—this is going to be so big. We're going to do so many things. Everything is going to work out. We're going to become one of the biggest super apps in Bangladesh. We'll have this and that, and so on. I dreamed of myself in that position. I mean, everyone has dreams. Although perhaps we don’t always talk about it, we all dream. That's why we're entrepreneurs. We're dreamers. We dream of having a big office, a big team, and millions of users using our service.
Then reality hits in. 20 other companies came in. Uber, Pathao, Obhai, and Shohoz, three of the companies with more than 100 crore in funding entered your vertical at the same time where we just raised around 8 to 10 crore taka, just a million dollars. Even with a million, we're like it's such a big amount. We thought we were going to do so many crazy things because there was no competition in the market and we were already ahead of the smaller companies in the market.
At the end of the day, I figured out that eventually, we have to shut down. All the high ambitions eventually had to die. It's like burying my child. It was extremely, extremely difficult. I was extremely depressed.
Fortunately, I have good friends who always show up whenever I need them. These friends are entrepreneur friends with their businesses. When I had good times, I supported them. When it was my turn with bad times, they supported me. I have this inner circle to whom I can go and cry and say, "This is not working." It's not a one-day or one-off thing. Every day, I meet with these people and say, "This is not working out." These people kept me alive in those days.
I spent in this trench of despair for a while. However, because I started a few new things—Movians, CoSpace, and all these small things, my brain got occupied, which saved me from a major mental breakdown. I didn't become depressed for a prolonged period. I got busy with these different small initiatives that helped keep my depression under control.
MUV Asia and the ride-sharing business was one of the biggest challenges I took in my life. I took the business somewhere. When I saw I was winning and then I had to climb down again, that was extremely, extremely difficult. I think this is where most of the people die, and most of the entrepreneurship journeys and dreams end. You tried so hard. You came so close to your dream, and the next morning, all of it was gone. It is hard to take. Most people can’t take it.
I was going to events when I was at my peak, I was happy and showing everyone we were doing this and that. But when I was dying, I started to have this identity crisis, people knew I was dying. I couldn't even show up to events because what could I say, "I have a failing company." I think this is where I saw many of my fellow entrepreneur mates give up.
Fortunately, I had my inner circle who always supported me, and fortunately, I had opportunities to pursue.
And about the investment, I had some of the best partners/investors anyone can get. They supported me throughout the journey. They knew the risk involved with the investment and the high-risk market they were getting into. They took it, I mean, the way any investor should take it that this is an investment that didn't work out. They didn't prolong the whole thing. They gave me the space to transition into the other businesses. MUV was there and when we started closing it down, I slowly started doing other things. So they always supported me. My main partner always supported me even in my new businesses. He supported me with a lot of things, even though we burned a lot of money in the ride-sharing business. But he said that it was a learning experience. It was expensive learning, but it was worth it. Not everything is going to work out at the end of the day. We tried, we tried our level best. Perhaps the time wasn't in our favor. It ended in a good way eventually.
Ruhul: One final retrospective question. You have tried multiple companies that did work out, and you have started multiple companies that are doing fantastic today. You have seen both sides of building companies—why some companies work and others don’t. You try, you do everything right, and still, companies fail. As you said, in terms of MUV, it was more about the market. There were too many competitors. The market was not ready for that many competitors, or perhaps many other factors were involved. If you look back, what are some of the things that you think went wrong in the companies that failed, and what are some of the things that you did right in the companies that are doing well? Your experience puts you in such a privileged position.
Fahad: There could be many different things why some companies fail and others succeed. It can vary from case to case. My first company, RapidMail, was early to market. When I started bike messenger and instant parcel delivery, we were early to the market. The demand was not there. People didn’t know they needed this service. Today, however, we have a lot of delivery companies. We are using it. E-commerce courier is a big thing. Although there have been lots of ups and downs in this market, we now have stable companies. I started it back in 2013/14/15, these three years I only focused on that thing. But I was too early.
One difference between my current businesses and my earlier logistics and ride-sharing businesses would be that logistics and ride-sharing take a long time to build. Whereas we made the mistake of planning short-term. We planned short-term, like one year, two years, three years. We didn't plan for 10 years. No one plans for 10/12 years. I wish I had known that Japanese philosophy back then—short-term is 12 years, long-term is 50 years or 100 years.
We didn't plan for a decade. Had I planned for a decade, it might have worked. I started in 2013, now it's 2024, 11 years, I never planned for 11 years. Those two businesses are for the long-term. I wish I knew this long-term game. Of course, I was young. I didn't have that much patience to plan for 10 years. I wanted success in a year or two. I think that was the biggest mistake. We didn't plan for the long term.
For CoSpace and GRID, these are mostly, I would say, small businesses. These are pure businesses. These are not investment-driven companies that you need to grow big. Since they are self-sufficient, when the ball starts rolling, they eventually get bigger and bigger with the profit they're making.
These are profitable ventures. All the businesses I'm running now are self-sufficient and profitable. If I could go back to those days, I would have wanted to plan for a longer-term and larger vision.
Ruhul: That's a very interesting observation. Usually, when we're thinking about the dynamics of failures and success, we're thinking in terms of many different parameters than thinking about, okay, perhaps it was about how long I wanted to stay in the game. In fact, in terms of success, I think that's one of the more fundamental determinants: how long you want to play a particular game. If you keep playing, you eventually get to a point where you win. Coming to today, with some of your companies, you have turned into not exactly a holding company but more like an internal incubator/accelerator model under the name Patrons Venture Limited. Tell us more about it. What is the model, how does it work, and about the philosophy behind it?
Fahad: Absolutely. Interestingly, when I started CoSpace, I already had Movians, our video production company. I was running two businesses.
When MUV failed, as I shared earlier, it eventually led to several smaller businesses. I thought, why not make a company under which I can do multiple businesses, an abstract name that we don’t put on any one specific business so that I don't have to register every business I start? That's how, with my fellow friends' help, I registered Patrons Venture Limited. We didn’t have cCoSpace at the time. CoSpace started after that.
We started a few small ideas under it. We still have an office management solution product with a front desk and full office management solution. We are currently using it inside CoSpace, but it could be a very good SaaS for office management and guest management. We never launched it publicly. We also created some small software, a corporate gift management solution, and some other small stuff under it as well.
This holding company situation was never my plan. After I started GRID in 2020, I figured out that we have grown a unique culture in the company where we have a central team that looks after accounts, marketing, and tech. These three teams are central and common for all the companies and the operation is separate for each company. CoSpace has a separate operation, GRID has a separate operation, logistics has a separate operation, and enterprise software operation is separate, but all of them are connected to the accounts, marketing, and tech business. These are the central part of the operation.
This has created some unforeseen advantages. Since we already have an agency and a marketing team, whenever we wanted to start a new business we could create a brand fast. We could figure out the initial things that you need to start something fast. We can build a website fast with our marketing team and tech team. Since our finances are centralized, the accounts can figure out how best to fund a new initiative. This structure has allowed us to start a business and run it pretty fast.
However, as you mentioned, I feel like this has become a venture studio kind of thing where we successfully started several ventures that are doing pretty well.
Maybe we can do some small, small businesses in the future with external founders where we can support them with all the support they need for which we have already built structures.
Ruhul: I think this is an interesting model. One upside is the resource-sharing part that you mentioned. You have central tech, and the accounts and other teams that all other companies share. I think it helps reduce the costs and make the tech and other parts more efficient than if you would do it independently. There might be downsides as well, such as things slowing down. Anyway, my question is, what are some of the benefits of a structure where you operate as a venture studio model or a holding company model? You have multiple companies under one company, and then you're supporting them. What are some cultural, strategic, and other advantages of this model?
Fahad: I think the venture studio model has been around for a very long time. We are just giving it a fancy name. All the groups of companies are venture studios. I think the large companies in Bangladesh and around the world have been doing it for a very long time. They're just, I would say, not into very fancy business, you know, manufacturing, service, etc.
With all of them, if you see, the strategy is the same. They have a central management team, and the operation is separated. A few of my mentors are from a group of companies and MDs of a group of companies. Whenever I'm stuck at something, I go to these people who have like 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 employees. One company is bigger than our whole startup ecosystem. They have 12 companies, and 10,000 people work at just one company. Even their small company has 1,000 to 2,000 people.
When I see their strategy, they have the same strategy, and it's not very difficult to learn from their culture and how they created it.
They think long-term. When I think about the venture studio kind of thing, all these groups of companies have these central teams: legal, accounting, and IT who overlook all the companies from the head office.
I think this works.
My problem is whenever I think of something, I like to implement it. What people didn't tell me before is that starting is extremely easy, but managing is also going to be part of my job. I have to manage these businesses as well. I cannot quit. So I love to start. That's one of my problems. Whenever I have an idea, I just do it. I say, "Okay, whatever happens in the future, I'm going to do it. I'm going to start the website. I'm going to start the page. I'm going to start calling people for sales. I'm going to do the first few sales." This whole building a new business, I love. But managing them is extremely difficult.
I feel like the venture studio model works when you have people who can manage those individual businesses because, for me, I feel like managing day-to-day operations and managing these challenges, is taking a lot of my time.
If I had the opportunity, I would have preferred to work with business owners, and founders, giving them the ideas and opportunities and they manage the business. I just help them grow. I think I might be more effective in doing that than actually going into audit reports and other operational nitty-gritty. Maybe I'm not very effective in these areas, but I'm very effective in starting businesses, and growing a business. That's why you see I started a lot of businesses. Now I'm bound to manage them, unfortunately. That's why I'm managing them. I don't love managing them. That's a small secret about me.
Ruhul: I think your point, particularly about conglomerates, the group of companies that we have, is accurate. I also believe that's a superior model of operation to the predominant startup model where many startups prefer focusing on one single product, doing a single thing. I used to believe that focusing on one single product or one single business perhaps is the superior model, but now I think it is not. Conglomerates are a much more long-lasting, much more interesting, and much more effective model than doing one thing.
Fahad: I'll just add a small line to it because I agree with what you said. I'll tell you how CoSpace started because I told you it needed quite a bit of investment. Where did that investment come from? It came from Movians, the video production company I built. We used to make videos. It has some kind of savings and a consistent cash flow. So Movians supported CoSpace. CoSpace started. During COVID, the other two businesses supported CoSpace as well. When Movians didn't have money during COVID, CoSpace supported Movian because it had space. It gave its office for free. When GRID started, it didn't have money to take a showroom, so CoSpace gave it free space for a few months. GRID's first showroom was inside CoSpace. When GRID grew big, it started supporting CoSpace as well.
It creates a whole ecosystem of supporting each other because we have multiple businesses that have cash flow. When one goes down, another actually supports it. We have a lot of intra-company short-term loans, short-term support, and short-term investments, and all these companies have separate accounts. But they all support each other. CoSpace can take a loan from GRID for its new branch and pay it back over the year.
A group of companies do the same thing. One business that grows really big supports small businesses. These small businesses grow big, then they support the other businesses. I think this can actually work for a lot of people, for sure.
Ruhul: It's a much more resilient model because, as you said, not only do they support each other, but it's also excellent for diversification because if something does not work, something else comes in and saves you for that time being, as you said. Another interesting point I see is the learning that you get from trying so many different things. So although these are very disconnected companies from the outside, internally, I think there are many similarities where one company can learn from another. GRID is doing some strategy that perhaps Movians can use or CoSpace can use. Teams can share insights and lessons. Learning-wise, I think it's a far superior model.
Fahad: I agree. They can also share information. They can also share clientele. When a clientele comes in, they can share the clientele. So it creates the opportunity of cross-selling. So it also creates a sales funnel.
Ruhul: As you said, you have to really manage all the different businesses, and it must be demanding because you have only so many hours in a day. Have you thought of or tried assigning independent CEOs to different companies or some sort of co-founder models that many groups of companies try?
Fahad: What we will do is when we have enough capacity, enough money, and enough stability in the business, we will eventually hire a CEO for each business.
The co-founder model or the equity model works when your growth is driven by funding. When you are driven by revenue and profit, and your growth is slow and steady, you need people with expertise and experience to run the business, survive, and stay for the long term.
If these businesses stay long-term, they are eventually going to grow. You don't have to rush. You need a CEO who will manage the business in their own way, just like how all the groups of companies do it. They put CEOs for each of their businesses. Eventually, I think our future will be something like this.
I was looking into the venture studio thing around the world. I feel like this might be one of the sectors I might look into in the future because I also feel exhausted. I mean, running the businesses, as I told you, even if you hire a CEO, you cannot hire one on day one, you can only hire a CEO when the business is stable and has enough money to afford a CEO. Moreover, only a CEO is not going to be enough. The CEO will need a team. The business needs to afford the whole team. Initially, our team has to do it.
But if this can be done in a way where from the very start, I take in a partner or a co-founder and I start the business with him or her and one or two people, and I just help them to grow. That might be one of the ways we can try as we move forward.
We already have a small cluster of businesses—four, or five businesses that are stable, alhamdulillah. We can afford to add two or three businesses just the way I'm doing Niyog. The small cluster is funding the new businesses.
We have the bandwidth to fund maybe one or two businesses in the coming years. I was thinking about that as I am having this conversation with you. Something like that might work will help me to leave the operation side to someone who truly understands the operation so that I can pay attention to new things in the future, which I love - building businesses. Maybe I can focus truly on that.
Ruhul: I want to talk briefly about GRID today, and perhaps we'll be able to cover other businesses some other day. You started GRID in early 2021. One of your friends called you, "I need some furniture for my father's office, and can you help me with that?" You decided to help. One thing led to another and overnight it became a separate company. What happened after that? As we discussed, by the end of the day, you had three new customers for the leftovers of that furniture, and you're thinking, oh my god, now I have a new business, perhaps. What exactly were you thinking? Tell us about your thinking of the thesis of the company, how that crystallized, and how everything came together.
Fahad: Absolutely. Initially, starting the business took a day, I mean, from 11 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. We had our website up and running. We even took our first four sales through the website. We started the website and we created the invoice through the website. It took about 12 hours to start the whole business, and we had our first revenue because, of course, it was a different thing.
But I still didn't know that I was not just starting an e-commerce, I was starting a brand. When it finally got started, one day, the next day, we got a few sales, and people started talking about it. I started sharing about it with my friends. We did some photographs because we had a marketing team and made it beautiful, etc.
Slowly people started ordering. Around this time the second COVID-19 lockdown started. People were working from home. If you want to work from home, you need a chair and a table. But since stores were closed and people were not going out much, they needed an online option. We became that option. We started exactly when people needed it.
That was one of the things that worked for us. We started when people needed the chairs and tables, but couldn't buy them from regular shops because shops were closed. Sometimes I call myself lucky. Unintentionally, we started at the luckiest time.
Then a few months passed, and one day I walked into my office, and it was full of furniture, and piles of stock, people were working, and I realized now I had a business that I needed to manage.
I told you, starting is fun. Managing is extremely difficult. I worked day and night. I worked late every single night for five months. It's a new business. It's a physical product. You have to touch it. You have to feel it. You have to pack it. It's a big product. It's huge. It's heavy. And somehow we figured out the business.
Eventually, I realized that we were building a brand in a market where affordable furniture doesn't have a brand name. Whenever someone starts an office, they have two options: one is to go for expensive brands, the high-end ones, or they have to buy it from non-brand local stores. Nothing in between. Maybe they buy it from interior studios, vendors, or contractors, which doesn't always come with a warranty or guarantee of a good product. We are exactly in the middle ground.
We are now a workspace furniture brand. I saw that there was an opportunity to build a brand in that space. The opportunity is extremely big.
When I got into the market, when I saw factories, when I saw the furniture industry, it was unimaginably big. And when you see big opportunities, you see big visions. So I started dreaming big. I'm talking about the first year. So jumping into the business, doing a lot, a lot of ads, starting a lot of things, and then, of course, after a few months, reality kicked in when I figured out this was not something that I could build overnight. This is not something I could grow overnight because the furniture industry is a physical product. You need a huge investment. You need a huge manpower. You need a huge amount of labor to manage it.
On top of that, I had four other businesses to manage. I was already struggling with operations and everything. I thought of setting up big factories. I planned to create an IKEA version of workspace furniture in Bangladesh. The market is still very big, and GRID can still go there, but it will take time, and it will take experienced management.
Here's the thing, in tech, it's changing, it's ever-evolving every day. But we can learn many of them online. All the information you need is on the screen. But the furniture, it's not on the screen. You have to touch it, you have to feel it, you have to see it, you have to go through thousands of different materials. You have to learn it step by step, day by day. Finding the right people, right vendors, and right products is extremely difficult. You have to go there physically to find it.
I actually tried to find the right partner for the operation part, especially someone who has experience in the furniture market, and who can support me in growth because I was really struggling with the operation, manufacturing, and production. I had to learn a lot of things. But that didn't work out, to be honest. I couldn't find a proper partner.
However, I feel this is a long game. I am planning for a very long run. I feel GRID will eventually grow big. Maybe it will need a few more years for some experienced people to come in and take it to a different level further.
Ruhul: Definitely. Can you talk about the company today? How big is the company? How big is the team? Who are the customers? How does the operation work? Give us an overview of the company.
Fahad: At GRID, we are now a team of about 25 full-time people right now. Most of our clients are professionals who need workspace furniture for their home, and also students, and gamers. One of the biggest customers, of course, are companies who actually need it for their office.
We recently started doing the whole turnkey solution where we do the whole office interior along with all the chairs and tables.
In terms of operation, we have our warehouse. We have a small factory in Dhaka, and we have just one showroom, a display center I would say, where we display our products. We mostly sell through our online platform, which is our website.
We have big plans, but I feel like I need to learn a lot before diving even bigger because when your business is small, it's easier to manage. When it starts growing big, it gets pretty difficult to manage.
I feel like I would only go big when GRID has the right management, then we can dive deeper and go bigger. That's what we're working for.
In chairs, it's mostly imported from China. However, the market is so big, that we can even create a factory of chairs in Bangladesh. We have several companies that make chairs, but for ergonomic chairs, we still don't have any full-fledged factory. We would like to look into that in the future.
Our tables and products that are created with steel and MDF are 100% made locally at our factory and our vendors' factories. The chairs are imported. We import the accessories and then assemble them here. All of them are imported fully from outside Bangladesh. For some products, such as the height-adjustable standing desk, we import the components and then assemble them here. But all the tables, sofas, storage units, all the other things, we make it here in Bangladesh.
Ruhul: One final question for today to close it up. If you look back to your journey over time, what are some of the lessons that stand out for you?
Fahad: One of the main lessons that I would give to my younger self is to train myself to become a little more patient.
I don't know why, maybe we were trained to think short-term. We have this tendency to seek to get rich quickly. We have to do it within a year, two years, five years, four years, etc. But it takes at least 10 to 12 years to get somewhere. Even if I wanted to become a filmmaker, it would have taken 10 to 12 years to become a filmmaker.
Trying to think a little bit long-term is super useful. So sometimes it's useful to untrain our brain and rewire our tendencies.
Second, entrepreneurs have a bad habit of thinking about ideas and thinking about their business 24/7. While this habit is really good for your business, it is bad for your personal life.
I always wanted to travel. I was in the Travelers of Bangladesh group. I was into not just traveling, I was into adventure. I wanted to ride 200 kilometers a day. I wanted to climb Mount Everest and things like that.
When I started earning money and started traveling, I realized I was always thinking about business. I couldn't stop thinking about ideas. I couldn't stop thinking about all these things not related to me. So it's important to learn how to untrain your brain when it's needed so that you don't think about business all the time, so that you can enjoy your life as well.
It's not always about entrepreneurship and business, it's also about life.
The third thing is the money part. We don't think about money when we start building a business. We think about, okay, if this business grows big, I'm going to become a millionaire. We don't think if this business doesn't work, what's going to happen to us? This happened to me in RapidMail and MUV. I thought about if this business goes big, I got my calculator out and started calculating the worth of my equity. I have this much equity, I'm going to make this much money.
But it doesn't work like that. Talking about money, thinking about money, and having money is extremely important for anyone who is doing business. Even if one of your businesses doesn't generate money, you should have other businesses that generate money so you don't have to worry about money all the time.
We should train people—from kids to old guys—to make money. I didn’t know this when we started. Money is extremely important in your life and you should operate accordingly.
Fourth, you think you have time, but unfortunately, you don't have time. We should live with urgency. You may think you will do something next year, but next year might not come or by the time you finally manage to do that thing, you have already passed the vital years of your life. This happens to us.
Similarly, I think time is a paradox as well. Life can be very long when you are having a bad time. I feel like there is a reason behind this. When you are having a bad time, maybe God created time in a way that it feels long so that you have a long time to solve your problem.
When you are happy, there is nothing to solve, so time goes fast. When you're at a bad time, you feel like you have time, but time is running out, so you have to work hard to solve whatever is your problem. You cannot just think ‘I'm going to solve it later. Because if you put things off, one day you will realize you are already 30 and you will panic.
Finally, another thing I would do differently if I could go back in time is solve problems immediately. Whenever a problem arises in my personal life or my professional life, there are times when I put things off for tomorrow to fix it later. But it's much better to fix a problem now, then it doesn't become bigger.
That being said, I'm not in a position to talk philosophy now. I am just getting started. But these are some of the lessons I have learned over the years.
Ruhul: I think these are very useful frameworks, a useful way of looking at life. I completely agree with you in terms of having a sense of urgency in whatever we are trying to do because, of course, as you said, in every way possible, life is really short. If you think you have unlimited time, you don't have unlimited time. Even if you live to 70, which is our current life expectancy, it's not a long time. By the time you realize what life is, you're 30. That's one way of looking at life, of course, and also, at the same time, we don't have a guarantee that we'll live tomorrow. So that's profound. I think this is a good place for today to end our conversation. I have a long list of reflection questions which I ask at the end of all other questions. Hopefully, next week, I will request a time and sit down again to talk more about GRID, CoSpace, and other ventures.
Fahad: Absolutely. Nice talking to you. Thank you so much.