Raisul Kabir doesn’t need an introduction to Future Startup readers. We have featured Mr. Raisul and his company, Brain Station 23, many times over the years. For those who are new to his work, Mr. Raisul is the founder and CEO of Brain Station 23, one of the largest and most interesting software services companies in Dhaka with clients worldwide. We last interviewed Mr. Raisul in 2019. At the time, Brain Station 23 was a 185-person company. Today, Brain Station 23 is a behemoth of nearly a 1000-people. It is one of the largest, if not the largest, software services companies in Dhaka and is growing at a rapid pace.
Scale is a challenge that most companies struggle to achieve and then navigate. Consequently, many promising companies plateau after a certain size. Others drop out of the race after failing to scale. As the saying goes, if you aren’t growing, you are dying. Nature doesn’t like stasis. To that end, understanding growth and scale is an existential question for most businesses with some ambition. In this interview with Mr. Raisul we have tried to do exactly that. We asked Mr. Raisul what has contributed to the growth of Brain Station 23—going from a 185-person company to nearly a 1000-person company in a span of a few years. Scale usually happens in stages—going from zero to one, from there to medium size company and to a large scale business. Each stage has its own challenges. And what works in one stage usually doesn't work in the next. You have to unlearn your own limiting beliefs and have to imagine and adopt a strategy that suits your emerging challenges.
The challenges of scaling are many. As the company grows, so does complexity. How do you simplify it by using structure? Second, scaling people: to scale an organization, you need to scale the people. How do you scale people to grow to the challenges at hand? The third challenge is scaling the culture: ensuring cultural integrity is maintained as the organization scales.
In this wonderful conversation, Mr. Raisul discusses how Brain Station 23 has figured out ways to navigate these challenges to scale. We discuss some of the key levers that have contributed to the growth of Brain Station 23: partnership, hiring a CFO, figuring out the structure, dedicated people, solving the science of B2B sales, a collective why that everyone believes in, consistent investment in people, and relentless focus on customer service and execution.
We discuss the importance of partnership for growth, the challenges of making a partnership work, and examine how to scale people and culture so things don’t fall apart when an organization scales. We talk about how to use structure to manage the growing complexity as an organization scales, why the right structure is the key to meaningful scale, and how Brain Station 23 has evolved its organizational structure over the years. We reflect on how our limiting belief becomes a bottleneck to our growth and how growth begins when we learn to believe that something is possible and pursue that thing with conviction. In short, we use the journey of Brain Station 23 from a 185-person team to nearly a 1000-person company to unpack the mysteries and secrets of growth and scale.
This is an essential read for entrepreneurs, operators, and intellectually curious people who want to understand how organizations grow and scale and transform. I hope you’ll enjoy reading the interview as much as we enjoyed doing it. Happy building!
Ruhul Kader: Thank you for agreeing to this interview. I deeply appreciate you being generous with your time and insight. We last interviewed you in 2019. Brain Station 23 was a 185-person company at that time. Today, you are a nearly 1000-people company. Tell us about this journey—going from 185 to nearly a 1000 people. What are some things that have contributed to this growth?
Raisul Kabir: Let me start by going a little back to our journey. We started solely focusing on software outsourcing—developing software for others. At some point, around 2012, I noticed we weren't growing much, at least not in the way I envisioned. It felt like we had "missed the bus" in software outsourcing. I felt that other countries had surpassed us and captured the market, leaving no room for growth or opportunities for us to do anything significant.
I also felt that perhaps I wasn't performing as well as I should be.
Following that realization, I began persistently requesting my friend, Mizan (Mizanur Rahman, now CTO of Brain Station 23), to join us, urging him to work together. I requested him to merge his company with ours. After much discussion, at some point we finally merged.
Before he joined, we were four partners. But I was the only working partner—handling the execution—while the other partners were involved in advisory capacities. When Mizan joined as an executive partner, that truly helped us.
We were roughly 60-70 people at that time. I was handling sales and marketing alone. I was able to manage it to some extent. But we were struggling to break out the plateau. When we brought Mizan as a partner, we worked together. He also started in sales and marketing. This had a huge impact on our growth, suddenly unlocking huge opportunities for us. That was one stepping stone.
However, the journey was not easy.
In fact, initially, there was some friction when Mizan joined. He was a solopreneur of his company. I had been operating and managing Brain Station 23 essentially as a solopreneur. When he joined as a partner, me accepting his input as a partner, and him accepting mine, became a challenge. Suddenly, we found ourselves in a new dynamic we didn’t know how to deal with. It caused some friction at first.
At one point, the partnership actually broke. He left because he wasn't feeling good about it. We then talked, reconciled, and worked together to bring him back. And this time we made sure we don’t repeat the same mistakes.
Partnership is always difficult. It requires continuous work—it's kind of like a marriage. Sometimes the partner is upset, sometimes I am upset. We have to work together to address the issues. There will be frictions and disagreements, but when trust exists, you can work it out. Partnership is not easy, but if you can make it work, it can be truly transformational and can create significant growth. You can make the pie bigger.
When organizations become large, complexities multiply. Reporting structures become complex and getting things done becomes complex and labored. Proper structure and clarity of structure simplifies things. It provides clarity.
Before Mizan joined, we were struggling to scale beyond a certain size. His contribution became evident at some point as we started working together and the company started to grow. After Mizan joined, the company started growing, moving from roughly 60-70 people, reaching over 200 people. At one point, Mizan alone was handling about 60% to 70% of our total revenue generation through sales and marketing. Mizan has been instrumental in the company's growth. We wouldn't have been able to achieve it without his active involvement in the partnership. That was the partnership, which played a huge role in our transformation as a company.
Another extremely important factor was having amazing colleagues—like Hasan, Fakhrul Bhai, Rana, and many others—who loved the company and sacrificed so much for it. Our people started taking ownership and responsibility, allowing us to build a larger team. That truly helped us.
Organizational structure is a crucial factor when you are pursuing scale. As the organization grows, structure becomes a make or break factor. When we were five or ten people, I was playing the roles of CEO, Project Manager (PM), and the architect all at the same time. When we became a 30 people team, PMs were given responsibility.
However, these transitions were not smooth either. For instance, people were given PM responsibility, but the training for those roles wasn't clearly defined. Instead, there was more coaching. I would teach them things I had learned, like how to solve problems. I took the Project Management Professional (PMP) certification and learned how to solve different issues. Most of the problems we encounter in project management are addressed in the PMP knowledge base. I didn't take the latest PMP version, which I believe is version 7, but the version before that—likely version 6—was excellent, and I am certified in it. I noticed that all problems, both usual and unusual, were solved in great depth. I trained and coached the project managers on these things.
At a certain point, assuming an average PM can manage seven or eight people, if I managed seven PMs or tech leads, it becomes 50-60 people, and another partner managed seven PMs, we could collectively manage 120-150 people. However, once we exceeded 120-150, managing that growth with just two partners became impractical. At that juncture, we adjusted the structure and introduced functional managers—managers of managers.
We structured functional managers based on similar technologies, as we are mostly technology-focused. For instance, we have projects in PHP, Java, .NET, and mobile applications. The head of mobile manages the mobile projects, the head of Java manages the Java projects, and so forth—implementing the concept of "managers of managers" and establishing this functional manager structure.
However, sales and customer relationships still needed to be addressed. From 2006 to 2012, we had no dedicated sales or marketing staff. I handled all sales and marketing myself. Around 2012/2013, we began onboarding our first sales personnel. Until then we never had dedicated sales people.
As we started building out sales operations, I observed a basic difference between sales and marketing—a simple concept many don't grasp. Sales involves generating an opportunity and then closing that opportunity. But the thing is that sales is a complex science. It doesn't work the way most of us intuitively think. For instance, you must gain the customer's respect if you want to close meaningful sales. And sales has its own set of known sciences that we didn't know. Consequently, even after hiring sales staff around 2012 or 2013, we found out it wasn’t working well. Rather, Mizan or I still ended up having to do the sales ourselves.
Then we brought Ferdous Bhai as a partner. Ferdous bhai had good relations and a reputation in the industry. He knew people in places. As I mentioned, sales has a science. But sales can feel like an art, almost like magic, until you break it down and know the details and the science behind it. When you haven't broken it down into simple pieces and don't understand the science, it can feel quite complex and you operate blindly and quite ineffectively. When you break it down, you understand the science behind it. But we didn't know any better.
So, Ferdous Bhai joined as a partner, which contributed to a new phase of growth, meaning I, Mizan, and Ferdous Bhai were handling sales, along with sales and account management.
During this period, a company offered to acquire us. We started exploring the offer out of curiosity, not necessarily because we were looking to sell. When that company reached out to check whether we were open to acquisition, I was like we could explore. My partners told me that if they acquired the company, they might let me go and replace me with their own CEO. I was like I want to replace myself. If a better CEO came along, I would welcome being replaced, if it is good for the company, and what's good for the company is good for me as a shareholder.
In these M&A deals, companies usually involve consultants who come with a lot of relevant knowledge. As we were exploring, something interesting happened. I started reading various books and articles recommended by a consultant. I came across an Infosys article that discussed the concept of Strategic Business Units (SBUs) — when and how they introduced SBUs in the company as the organization was growing and became too complex, causing friction and challenges. SBUs came to solve that challenge. While that M&A didn’t materialize, I learned something important from that experience.
Structure is very important for growth. Changing and evolving your structure is also very important. If you lack the proper structure and cannot make people accountable, you cannot achieve your goals.
When you start putting structure together, it creates other second order benefits. For instance, you might think that a person in your organization is not ready for a certain responsibility. But when you need to put that person to a certain position for the sake of your structure to work, it causes many positive outcomes. Because people usually rise to their responsibility. When you place a person in a position of responsibility, they often become ready for that position and start delivering high-quality work. They grow and rise to the occasion.
From there, we created SBUs— a significant structural change. SBUs are autonomous business units with P&L (profit and loss) responsibility with the company.
So, at one point, I was a manager. Then we introduced functional heads as managers of managers. I was managing the functional heads. Then we introduced SBUs, where SBU heads would manage the managers of managers.
Critically, these managers were not hired externally. They were existing people in the company taking on greater responsibility, including Profit and Loss (P&L) responsibility. We were empowering the existing people and giving them responsibilities. They didn't have structured readiness or training to take on P&L responsibility beforehand, but when the responsibility was assigned, they automatically became ready, as I mentioned earlier.
Until now, we didn't have a structured approach where we analyzed the needed skill sets for a structure and then provided specific, structured training or coaching based on that analysis. What we did was more ad-hoc, doing something when it was needed.
To be clear, we continuously invest in training and development of our people. We probably have one of the highest training investments among software companies, consistently allocating significant resources for it since the beginning.
We allocated time and resources but still it was not very intentional if you consider it in regard to our need for SBU structure.
However, even without a highly structured approach to training or perfect skills, when you give a person responsibility, they grow and take the responsibility—this is something that I have found fascinating. This is one aspect.
In parallel, another development occurred. When the organization was small, I didn't necessarily distinguish between finance and accounting. In fact, I didn't understand the difference.
I knew I needed planning to ensure we could pay salaries each month. I didn't know that this planning was the finance department's responsibility. I personally handled this financial planning, estimating current and future monthly and yearly income to determine how many people we could afford to hire.
We have continuously hired new people since we started 2006. We regularly hire junior developers, coach and train them. In the early days, sometimes I did it myself, sometimes I delegated the responsibility. In 2006, when we were just four people—we had people working on billable customer projects, and fresh hires being trained without working on any paid project.
I recall hiring someone in around 2007 who could barely do anything. I was also a junior then. I didn't know how to do proper hiring interviews. He was so weak at basics that he couldn't do proper indentation. We trained him for four months until he was fully ready. After preparing him, when he was deployed to a client project, he informed me he was joining another company the next day. It was such a frustrating experience. Despite these experiences, we have always continued investing in people. That is part of the lesson in investing in people.
Coming back to financial planning, I used to determine how many people we could hire based on the P&L generated by current work. Based on monthly income. It was mostly guess work—I have these many projects this month, which would generate this amount and with that amount, I could hire these many additional juniors. I handled these financial planning tasks myself.
When BD Venture invested in us, they said we needed a company secretary. I wasn't sure what a company secretary was. I initially told them we don't need one. That I could manage it myself. They convinced me the company needed a secretary. Shawkat bhai was the MD of BD Venture at the time. He interviewed and hired a highly knowledgeable company secretary and finance person for us.
He had extensive knowledge. For example, he would point out that there might be VAT applicable on a particular expense that I was not aware of. I would say that it doesn't make sense to add VAT on something like it. You know, there are these weird rules that don't make sense, such as the expense limits on food for employees. That there is a limit on how much you can spend on food for your employees. I was quite surprised. Why can't I spend on food for my staff? If I questioned a rule, he would pull up the rulebook, highlighted in yellow, within five minutes to show me: "See, this rule states this." In this case, employee food expenses fall under entertainment expenses, which has a legal limit. Software companies often exceed this limit due to high food costs, making the excess expenditure subject to penalty. This was information I wasn't aware of.
This fact that you learn “something is possible" is an important factor for our growth. It played a role in the growth of Brain Station 23. Until then I didn't believe that it was possible. I thought we missed the opportunity and there was not much left to do. That belief also limited my efforts. When I learned and believed in the alternative, it also changed our approach to our work.
Anyway, after a while I came to realize we were not doing finance right. Moreover, I realized although this person was the company secretary and finance manager, and also had so much knowledge, I struggled to manage him or even define his tasks. This was a person who was looking after our finances but I couldn't figure out what task I might assign him because I didn't fully understand that world.
That’s how I realized we needed a CFO. But CFOs are very expensive. And I can't afford a CFO.
I started telling friends that I was struggling and needed a part-time CFO because I don't know how to manage finance people. Because I don't know what questions to ask. I don't know what he is supposed to do and what needs to happen.
I was sharing this with my friends. During a friends' gathering, I explained my problems to my friend Raj—that I didn't know how to manage the finance person or assign tasks. After listening to me, he offered to help, agreeing to dedicate half-day a week, Fridays, to this. For three years, he came once a week, and I saw a transformation. I started to see our company become much better. Until then, finances were a struggle. Understanding profit and loss of the project was more of a guess work. Most companies in Bangladesh struggle to calculate project P&L month by month because it requires both project management and financial knowledge. I had thoughts on how to do it. But I couldn't maintain it because I am not an organized person and I was doing many other things. Moreover, maintaining these processes consistently was an organizational weakness for us.
When my friend started managing things and producing monthly P&L and project P&L statements, our lives changed. It gave continuous visibility. Previously, money would come in and go out. Although we never failed to pay salaries in 19 years of our journey by the grace of Almighty, we sometimes struggled with cash flow. It was more like a hand to mouth situation. We were earning money every month and then spending it.
After our part time CFO started working, things gradually improved. At some point, managing part-time became difficult. He was also planning to leave his banking job. After much request, spanning about two years, he finally joined as full-time CFO after three years of doing it part-time. It changed Brain Station completely. We started operating differently. So that was also something that helped significantly.
Having a CFO is critical. Finance is the business. Having leadership, proper alignment and structure is important. You have amazing people but the structure is not strong, then it becomes difficult to grow.
I was recently reading Working Backward, the book about operational dynamics of Amazon written by two former Amazon senior leaders. The book discusses how structure becomes a challenge as a company scales. The authors discussed a concept that Amazon used called single responsibility team or something like that where a team has a single direction and focus and a single responsibility leader where the responsible person has all the necessary power to execute within the team.
When organizations become large, complexities multiply. Reporting structures become complex and getting things done becomes complex and labored. Proper structure and clarity of structure simplifies things. It provides clarity. Understanding that failures are not always personal failures of an individual, sometimes, it can be a failure of the structure and the complexity of interdependence of things. A good structure allows you to gain visibility of these things.
However, while having a structure is useful, it is not an easy problem to solve. These challenges are complex and involve complex dilemmas. What do I mean by dilemma? If I talk about one of our current dilemmas, you would get a sense.
Currently, our marketing and sales teams are centralized, but our Strategic Business Units (SBUs) are decentralized. An SBU might focus on FinTech and require specialized marketing. Another SBU specializes in e-commerce, in which we are globally recognized as number one for enterprise e-commerce, might need specialized marketing. These SBUs have separate needs for marketing. But the marketing team is centralized. If the Marketing Team is centralized, where should they focus—FinTech or e-commerce?
In another instance, delivery focus of a task requires particular coaching focused on delivery, whereas the reporting structure provides different coaching, leading to conflict. Different teams' priorities can be different and lead to complexities.
Larger organizations are not always exactly like trees. They are more like a matrix. In such an organizational setup, a person might have two bosses—one focusing on the subject matter or functional, the other on delivery—making things complex and confusing. This continuous structural complexity and dilemma are not just a phenomenon in Bangladesh, but a global one.
I was reading a book written by McKinsey partners, CEO Excellence, which mentioned projects costing five times the budget but still failing to deliver, purely due to structural complexity. I can relate to these issues. I wouldn't recommend that book for smaller companies, as its complexity relates mostly to organizations with 100+ people. Anyways, these complexities will always exist, and the structure must evolve continuously, updated and monitored.
This brings to mind the book The Firm, about McKinsey. It is said about McKinsey that around 1960/70, their partner would go to organizations with a book and present it. The name of the book is Strategy and Structure. The myth is that they basically charged for implementing the book, something like that. The idea is that if your strategy lacks a proper supporting structure, the strategy itself is impossible to execute.
The other factor I want to mention is knowing that it is possible. What do I mean?
At one point, I truly thought that scaling/growing software development business wouldn't be possible because other countries had already dominated the space. I had a rather limiting belief that it was impossible. That there was not much left to do in the software industry.
Then, around 2014 or 2015, Khalid Quader Bhai from Brummer and Partners contacted me after seeing a news article about us in The Daily Star. When I went to meet him, he said they wanted to invest in the Brain Station. As the discussion began, I asked whether they would invest in Biponee, our ecommerce business. He said no, ecommerce is more like a startup. We are private equity, we don't invest in startups. We want to invest in Brain Station 23. I was like why would you invest in Brain Station? It does not have much prospect and so on. He said, we invested in a company in another market which was a 1000 people company at the time of investment and it grew quite big. He mentioned a possibility to reach 10,000 people eventually. I was quite surprised. I still didn't imagine at that time the existence of a market large enough for that scale. Until then, I hadn't realized the market was that big.
He asked me to make an investment plan. I didn't know much about these things then. We were so small and they were so big. I eventually prepared a plan and shared it with them. He said they don't invest below ten million, but for us they would invest one million dollars. He asked me to prepare a proposal for that amount instead.
Now I was struggling to prepare a plan for one million dollars. What would I do with that money? I have to create returns with it. I eventually prepared one and shared it. He then delegated one of his colleagues to work with us. When I met her, she said the return on investment (ROI) wasn't strong enough. She said private equity typically requires a minimum ROI of something like 25% or 35%, and my plan wasn't even close to that minimum threshold. She asked me to work on it. But I was not able to make a convincing plan. Then it fell apart.
Although it didn’t work out, the interesting realization for me was that it is possible to build a large company in this space. The conversation made me realize that something much bigger was possible, challenging my previous belief that scaling was impossible.
This fact that you learn “something is possible" is an important factor for our growth. It played a role in the growth of Brain Station 23. Until then I didn't believe that it was possible. I thought we missed the opportunity and there was not much left to do. That belief also limited my efforts. When I learned and believed in the alternative, it also changed our approach to our work.
That was a very helpful turning point. I realized I should focus on Brain Station 23. Until then I was thinking that the ship had sailed, the train had left the station, I needed to find other opportunities. We were focusing on ecommerce instead of Brain Station 23. While this new realization was not the main reason behind shutting down Biponee, there were other factors that we discussed before, but the fact that we could focus on Brain Station and grow it, this realization came because of this.
We were growing organically. After this point, we started to pay more attention. So this was a turning point.
That's about growth.
Next is empathy—the ability to understand and acknowledge the other person's perspective. A person has the ability to understand the other person's perspective. When empathy is present, even with friction, you can work things out.
Ruhul: One of the best things about conversation with you is that you bring the texture of things. This doesn't always happen. People usually talk about big ideas in a broad sense that rarely give a detailed view into how things really happen—messy, complex, and often not straightforward. You go into the messy part, show how things are done in practice, concrete, specific experiences. It is very experiential and helpful to people who want to put things to work. In short, what I wanted to say is that this answer covers the first question in beautiful detail. However, I would like to delve into some points. I was taking notes. In 2012, you felt you had missed the bus. The conversation with Brummer and Partners helped you realize that there still was a massive opportunity. You mentioned several crucial elements: Partnership—Mizan Bhai, Ferdous Bhai, CFO Raj bhai, and the sacrifices of your team. Then Structure—starting with you, then functional managers, and finally SBUs. Then the introduction of the CFO to formalize the finance responsibility. I think your point about the importance of believing that something is doable is something that we often miss. As you said, your realization that scaling is possible played a role in the growth. I think this is very important. We need to learn that something is possible, that a bigger dream is reachable to pursue that dream with conviction. Do you have any observations about this factor why our belief is such a bottleneck for our growth and why we often fail to realize it? How much of a bottleneck this is for which many companies struggle to grow?
Raisul: This is a very good question and I think it also connects with the point we discussed before about building out our structure. If I take a detour to offer a background. We have been very lucky, Alhamdulillah, from the very beginning. Simon Sinek talks about this idea of the power of why. That it starts with a Why—your purpose. For us, we started with the purpose that we want to create employment and earn foreign currency. This has always guided our decisions and approach to work. We have made sacrifices as a team. I have made sacrifices myself. Our colleagues and leaders also believed in this purpose, worked exceptionally hard, and made significant sacrifices.
A good thing happened when BD Venture came in as our first investor, it gave clarity about a few things. We realized that since there should be an exit at a certain point for BD Venture and the employees who made sacrifices should receive a reward for their dedication, at a certain point we would go into listing.
The company is continuously growing, we have a purpose for which we are working, but at the same, it has to make sense for the people who are working. We introduced an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) at some point. This reward structure helps fulfill the purpose, which was always our dream: eventually becoming a listed company and creating wealth.
However, we lacked a big ambition in terms of what was truly possible to do. When we modeled our growth trajectory in an excel file, we saw that it was possible to create a 15,000 people company, reaching around $900 million or maybe $1 billion revenue by 2030. We could see it in the excel and we could sense that it was possible to do it. But we needed an organization that could chase that goal.
Around this time, we read a book called Traction and started following a process called Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS). When implementing that process, we worked on setting a goal like this that we wanted to reach $1 billion revenue. But when our scaling up coach Manoj Chugani came to help us, he said can we set up an even bigger target, something more exciting. He suggested we target something more exciting. We used a reference to Sadhguru, whose target is to impact 1 billion people worldwide. Our coach suggested we may set a target to create an impact on a million people's lives. He noted we have an interesting culture. We have an excellent organization and dedicated people. We have a sustainable company. The company has a vision that is people oriented. When we are bestowed with such luck, then why don't we aim for an even bigger impact?
To that end, we have defined a goal that we want to create a direct impact in the lives of one million people.
What do we mean by direct impact? We decided to define our goal not just as an indirect impact—like the MyGP application which we built, which has 30 to 40 million users. In a sense, we are indirectly creating an impact on the lives of these 30-40 million people. But we wanted to create a direct impact. We realized we have some ways to do it. Over the years, we have figured out a few things about building organizations. We have learned about how to run an organization, how to work with people, how to work with finance and so on. We have gained experience across the entire startup lifecycle, from ideation to raising investment, executing the journey, scaling a service organization, and even selling a startup. We have leaders doing advanced work in technology areas like software architecture and cloud.
We thought we could create an Advanced Academy based on this experience where we can share these learnings. From that point, we thought we could train people on these skills—not just fresh graduates—but first-level leaders, second-level leaders, and so on. That’s one aspect. We aim to use this Advanced Academy to impact many lives.
Additionally, we want to create a Venture Studio to help early stage companies. We have found that there is not enough good support available to build mid-sized organizations in Bangladesh. To that end, we want to create a venture studio type model where we can share our lessons in building an organization to help these companies.
We understand that we can't achieve everything with Brain Station 23 because Brain Station has a particular direction and focus. If we get involved in many different companies, it should allow us to create far greater impact.
Our current vision is creating a direct impact on the lives of one billion people. We are not yet sure how this vision will change us. We will figure it out as we go along. Maybe it is possible to design a better vision. However, this is what we are working on now. We had one before. We now have another.
A bold vision is extremely useful. A grand vision provides direction during challenging times, especially when leading people through painful journeys. It gives people something more than just money to focus on—a purpose that unites them. People feel we are building something bigger than ourselves.
Humans are meaning-making beings. We ask these questions from time to time, why am I doing what I am doing. Having a worthwhile vision helps answer these questions.
Partnership has to be fair. This is not only about partnership. Fairness is a crucial factor in any relationship or engagement. If a partner thinks he is dealt an unfair hand, that partnership would not work.
Ruhul: This is a very important point. We talked about purpose in our first or second conversation with you where you mentioned how having a vision helped Brain Station 23 in the early days, which was very clarifying. Let me ask another question: You emphasized partnership heavily. When you brought in Mizan Bhai, then Ferdous Bhai, and subsequently the CFO, it changed the company. You partly credited partnership for your growth. How should we think about partnership? Partnership is rarely easy. It doesn't always work out positively, and sometimes companies shut down due to partners. Based on your experience, what common mistakes do people make, what challenges exist when forming a partnership, and what should one think about and do to make a partnership productive and successful?
Raisul: I believe a person's ethical standards, integrity, and empathy are very important in making a partnership work. When a person is ethically right and has empathy, any problem can be solved. If there are issues with integrity and empathy, making a partnership work can be a challenge.
I was the only executive partner in the early years of Brain Station. So I didn't have much disagreement with my other partners. As other working partners joined, we now have a lot of disagreements. In fact, we encourage healthy disagreement at the company. My partners challenge my position—not in a negative way. In fact, I often go with their views when it comes to many decisions. And when I put forward a view, I explain the reasoning clearly. This is important. We can do it for reasons I mentioned earlier.
To that end, I think, when choosing a partner, both you and the prospective partner must have high integrity and empathy. Integrity means being honest and keeping your word. If a partner has integrity and keeps their word, this ensures a sustainable partnership. If a partner has a history of lacking integrity or commitment—for example, constantly failing to keep their promises—working out the partnership becomes extremely challenging and impractical because you cannot trust the person.
Next is empathy—the ability to understand and acknowledge the other person's perspective. A person has the ability to understand the other person's perspective. When empathy is present, even with friction, you can work things out.
Integrity is harder to verify. For me, Alhamdulillah, I never had these challenges. The good news is most people have better integrity. So usually you don't face a lot of challenges there. That said, to stay on the safe side, you may conduct background checks or ask previous colleagues if the person had commitment or integrity issues, looking for major signs. Of course, we all have some moral failings. So a person may make minor mistakes. What you need to do is look for major signs. This is one factor.
The other factor, as I mentioned, is empathy, which means when I explain something the other person can understand it. Whether a person can see the other side of the story. While empathy is difficult to identify, you can still identify it.
There are other factors. Books like The Five Dysfunctions of a Team covers many of those factors quite well. You have to have trust. You have to be willing to be vulnerable that would allow others to be vulnerable. Books like The Five Dysfunctions of a Team explain how to develop these qualities. When you have these qualities, you can solve other problems.
However, high integrity doesn't always guarantee empathy. I've seen partners who have high integrity but cannot explain or understand another person's perspective, which makes things difficult. If you can't communicate with a partner and understand each other well, you can't make a partnership work. I saw this kind of person where it is hard to work things out and communicate, where a person doesn’t consider the views of the other person. I specifically focus on these two elements because—Integrity and Empathy—the other issues are manageable when you have these two in place.
To that end, if you want to make a partnership work, the first factor is choosing the right partner. The second is working with them, which relies on those above qualities. And books like the Five Dysfunctions of a Team mostly cover these issues.
The third aspect is the partnership structure. Partnership has to be fair. This is not only about partnership. Fairness is a crucial factor in any relationship or engagement. If a partner thinks he is dealt an unfair hand, that partnership would not work.
Regarding fairness in shareholding structure, I recommend the book Slicing Pie by Mike Moyer. This book provides a detailed and beautiful framework for structuring business partnerships and shareholding, ensuring everyone feels the process is fair. I found this book to be a solid base when starting out. However, that said, it is not like I worked reading and following this book. However, the book offers an excellent foundation if someone is just starting out.
Rhythm means there is a tempo and dance in the way you execute. You get complex and challenging things done but it feels natural. There is a coherence in how you operate and execute. You are operating in a flow where things don't feel like constant fire fight.
Ruhul: Now, the remaining points relate to scaling. Let’s start with structure. You scaled in stages—you started, tried functional managers when the company grew to a certain size, when that stopped working you introduced SBUs. What I gather from your discussion, the central challenge of scaling is three-fold. First, structure: as the company grows, complexity increases. How do you simplify it by using structure? Second, scaling people: to scale an organization, you need to scale the people. You mentioned that giving someone responsibility helps them grow, but this isn't always true for every organization. I was telling you this earlier that I was speaking with some of your people and I found that they own the organization, its values and vision, something that I find quite rare. The third challenge is scaling the culture: ensuring cultural integrity is maintained as the organization scales. Tell us how you approached these different aspects.
Raisul: These elements all have underlying systems. We are a top partner for all major global cloud providers in Bangladesh.
When working with these cloud providers, I noticed that Amazon's people show better customer care for their customers and partners than everyone else. Amazon people would do anything for customers and partners. They provide excellent support. I always wondered how they do that? How do they care for partners and customers so much?
I found out that Amazon is a highly value driven organization. They have a very strong culture. Not that others are not. But Amazon people strongly embody their culture. I always felt culture is very important. However, I don't think I've done a very good job here. We have done an okay job.
This is where the next point comes, which is, running a great organization requires an operating system. And I didn't know how to run a great organization.
Shahed bhai, who lives in New York, recommended two books: Traction and Scaling Up. I read both books. I read the Scaling Up first. That book emphasizes that to properly run, scale up, and create value in a company—where the company has proper people, proper process, and can run without the founder—you need four components:
Strategy: a winning strategy and a step by step process to create it.
People: having the right people in the right roles.
Execution: the company must have a proper execution rhythm.
Cash: maintaining good cash flow and having a better cash management process.
Each of these four pillars has three or four sub-components. The first pillar is the scaling people, which has four sub-components, including a functional accountability chart, which defines the functions necessary to run the company, who is accountable for the functions, and tracking their energy and performance. Other sub-components include process accountability chart, which defines the processes to run a company and who is accountable to run the processes. Then comes attracting, hiring, keeping, growing, and educating the right people, which we often see as an art/magic, but there is a science to all these things. Then comes management and coaching. These are some of the components of people, strategy, and execution.
Although reading the book helped me understand what we needed, implementing it felt impossible. I understood I needed to do certain things but I also felt I needed someone who could help me to do it. I realized I needed an experienced person—a coach.
Mike Kazi implemented the Scaling Up process first in Bangladesh. But I felt I had limited resources, so I couldn't go there on day one. Moreover, since we were starting from zero, starting with a comprehensive robust framework felt too daunting.
I found a simpler version of this: the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), US. Traction, the book I mentioned earlier, is their book. After reading Traction, I found it manageable. The scaling up process had 16-17 components, which I found quite challenging to implement at our scale. Traction has fewer components—six—and it proceeds step-by-step, making it easier to start. We thought we could start with this one. We contacted them, and they assigned us a coach, Haraya Rosario, probably from Vietnam.
Haraya was an amazing coach. She runs a 500-people company herself. She understood our challenges really well. She could summarize a ten-minute problem description of mine into three precise words, beautifully capturing the essence. Haraya coached us for the first two years, and through this, we introduced the crucial execution component: Rhythm. Rhythm means there is a tempo and dance in the way you execute. You get complex and challenging things done but it feels natural. There is a coherence in how you operate and execute. You are operating in a flow where things don't feel like constant fire fight. Now achieving this rhythm is not an easy task. It takes work. How do you do that? One of the ways to establish a rhythm is having a two-day yearly session where we set the year's targets. That was one aspect.
Additionally, Haraya also helped us define our company values. We often think about values without thinking it through. There is a science to defining values. She gathered five or six leaders of Brain Station 23 and asked each of us to think of three of our best people—people we admire—and write down their names. Then, we listed the characteristics we admired about those three people, perhaps 10-15 characteristics per person. She then asked us to prioritize and consolidate our individual lists. She then asked to combine and prioritize those characteristics into a master list to come up with the final values.
Finally, she asked us all to create an acronym so people could easily remember the values, which was quite challenging. Shajib, one of our leaders and our HR head, came up with a great acronym, OwnPATH, encompassing: Ownership, Passion & Commitment, Agility & Excellence, Team Spirit, and Honesty. This made the values easy to remember.
I think this gives you a sense of how we approached scaling our culture and people.
Ruhul: This is excellent. I think this is a good place to end today’s conversation. This has been an enlightening conversation. Thank you so much.
Raisul: Thank you for doing this. Let’s catch up again later.
Note: This is part one of our conversation with Mr. Raisul. Come back later next week for part two.
