This week’s edition features:
All in all, 2024 was a good year for Future Startup. We have taken several new initiatives that we hope to double down on this year. We see an excellent opportunity to expand our work and impact in 2025, and we are super excited about that.
We take our responsibility to study and write about Bangladesh's entrepreneurship, business, and technology scene seriously. I can say that we aim to take this responsibility even more seriously in 2025.
The key lesson for me from 2024 is that if you understand what it means to work hard and work hard on your goals, you will make progress. Your efforts will bear fruit. In order to do that, you have to start with working on yourself—organizing your inner world. You have to learn to manage your lows. You have to learn to deal with your pessimism and negativity and fear and neurosis if you are someone like me. You have to learn to push yourself, lift yourself up when you are down, and find ways to stop self-sabotage. You have to learn to deal with anxiety and stress. You have to learn to deal with any addiction you might have and the temptation to give in to any negative behavior when you are down. You have to find ways to reduce the time you spend in moods that are not productive for your ambition.
All in all, you have to develop your negative capability where you are skilled at dealing with rejections, pain, sadness, and other negative feelings and situations and still function.
Once you have sorted out your internal landscape, it gets much easier to put effort into things that matter. And as you direct your efforts to whatever goal you are trying to achieve, it will happen. I learned this firsthand in 2024. In 2025, I want to put this lesson to work.
Over the last several years, iFarmer has been working with a growing number of banks and NBFI to help them successfully lend to smallholder farmers across Bangladesh, enabling farmers to access formal institutional financing and financial institutions to explore a highly potential large market that they failed to serve before properly. In the process, iFarmer is transforming the agriculture financing landscape in Bangladesh. iFarmer started by enabling retail investors to invest in farm assets. While it always wanted to work with traditional financial institutions, it was a domain with its complexities and challenges. Naturally, convincing financial institutions to lend to smallholder farmers was not easy in the early years. However, through consistent efforts, the company has managed to make an impact that is slowly but surely changing the overall access to finance landscape for farmers in Bangladesh.
Rokomari was launched in 2012 with some 10,000 books, a handful of publishers, a small team, and an ambitious mission to make books accessible to readers across Bangladesh. The company spent the first decade of its journey focused on selling books and building a trusted ecommerce brand on the back of a customer-first approach and efficient operation. The obsession has delivered a resounding win. Rokomari has built a brand reputation synonymous with quality, reliability, and trust.
As time passed, it became evident that customers' trust in Rokomari extended beyond books. They wanted more—more categories and services from the platform they relied on. Moreover, the ecommerce market in Bangladesh went through significant changes during this period.
Listening to these demands and observing market trends, Rokomari embarked on a journey early this year to transform itself from a bookstore into a comprehensive "everything store", adding 300+ new categories across electronics, home and kitchen appliances, fashion and apparel, stationery and office supplies, health and personal care, toys and games, and more.
In many ways, this expansion comes as a natural move for the company, an evolution driven by customer needs, technological innovation, and a deep understanding of the market.
The move also carries important strategic ramifications for Rokomari, expanding its market and opportunities, and strengthening its competitive moats while creating new operational and competitive challenges.
The government's semiconductor ambitions are admirable, but success will require patience, a long-term orientation, pragmatism, and a clear-eyed understanding of the industry's formidable barriers to entry.
Bangladesh's policy establishment often operates on whims and assumptions. Policies and decisions are made with little empirical basis. In the past, this approach hasn't brought any good for the country. It would be wise if the taskforce remain conscious of these tendencies in our policymaking establishment and remember that in the chip business, a more thoughtful and patient approach based on empirical evidence may be the surest path to success.
1. An Unreasonable Amount of Time
“The pianist whose fingers seem supernaturally nimble, the presenter whose message seems viscerally compelling, and the artist whose paintings seem impossibly realistic all wield the same magic: they’ve invested more time than you’d expect.
It can be difficult, psychologically, to commit yourself to spend an extreme amount of time and attention towards a goal, no matter how worthwhile. Doing impossible things feels, well, impossible.
That’s why, generally, the approach is to start small, then increment. Do something, so you can change it. Get your reps in. Evolve your complex system from a simple one that works.
Eventually, years in, this will culminate in overnight success. You’ll have achieved something that seems magical – impossible, even.
It just takes some time.”
“The week before Nile was born I was wondering that he will be part of a generation that will grow up with AI assistants that patiently answer every curious 'why.' I was plenty curious as a child and while there were teachers who were very much willing to quench my inquisitive nature, I also knew there were plenty more who would get annoyed sooner than I could get all my answers. The ability to keep asking "whys" from early childhood may have profoundly positive implications in children across the world. In fact, I think it is certainly possible that by the time my son turns 16, he may have a more profound grasp of the world than I'll have at 50.
You may wonder wouldn't I too get back to asking my "whys" now that I have incredibly smart AIs ready to have conversation with me. Remember, for people in my (and older) generation, we need to unlearn our learned inhibition of asking "whys".”
3. Bangladesh in 2024: The most influential ten
“Netra News is marking its fifth birthday with a list of ten Bangladeshi individuals and groups who have been the most influential in 2024. These are not the best or most important people, nor have they exclusively made positive or productive contributions. For better and worse, 2024 has been an historic year for Bangladesh. These are the people who influenced the way in which the year would play out. As Netra News looks ahead to its first year of being able to operate openly in Bangladesh, here is a look back at the last year through the people who shaped it.”
4. Leveling Up
“Whenever I walk down to the sea here, as I often do, I’m comforted not by its permanence but by its restlessness. Gravity contains it in the bowl between continents, but it conveys both peace and power by singing in its chains (per Dylan Thomas) and, on occasion, by claiming the land as its own.
At a dinner party once, all of us gathered around the table, when it was my turn to describe my life in twenty words or less, I offered a rough sequence of places I’d called home since birth: Maine, Seattle, Maine, Cape Cod, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Antarctica, New Zealand, Maine. With the exception of my years in college, I’ve always lived within a mile or three of the ocean. That proximity to restlessness is important to me.
Humans are desperately social creatures, but I think we’re equally attached to geography, each in our own way. We want to be loved, but we also want to be found, forever moving in self-conscious relation to place - Where am I? - and to each other - What am I to you?. Both questions are really asking Am I home? and Am I safe?.”
You can also read the reading list published every week separately here.
