When Mir Shahrukh Islam started Bondstein Technologies as a university student in 2015, the company was tracking cars. Today, it connects entire factories. The journey from a 15-person team focused on vehicle tracking to an 80-person operation providing service across IoT, AI, and intelligent systems offers a masterclass in how small companies grow.
Building a company is hard. That part we all know. But that hard comes in stages. Going from zero to one is one kind of hard—you are striving and struggling to ensure your survival. Once a company passes that stage, then comes a different kind of hard: scaling successfully. Most companies die in the process of going from zero to one. Some people estimate the failure rate of early-stage companies at over 95%. Out of the small minority that survives, most never find meaningful scale, living in a perpetual plateau.
Both of these journeys, bringing an idea into existence and transforming a small business into an organization that scales, are different and come with their own distinct challenges.
In a recent conversation with Future Startup, Shahrukh shared his lessons and insights about building a business from scratch that has grown revenue 15 times over while navigating the challenges of building in a difficult market. One of our key takeaways from the interview is that transforming an organization from an early-stage company to a scalable organization takes a different order of thinking and comes with different sets of challenges. The interview is a fascinating read in its entirety.
In this article, we pull out 7 key takeaways from the conversation on growth, scale, and building consequential organizations for your quick consumption. For more details and fascinating nuggets of insight, read the entire interview here.
Most startups die trying to find their first customers. The ones that survive often plateau, unable to break through to a meaningful scale. Bondstein's story explains why: the thinking that gets you from zero to one won't get you from one to ten.
In the early days, Bondstein was scrappy, doing whatever it took to win clients. But as the company grew, the company had to rebuild almost everything. The team structure. The pricing model. Even the way it thought about its product. The company reorganized into strategic business units, each with its own profit-and-loss owner, made changes in its pricing strategy and made changes across its operational approach.
The lesson here is uncomfortable but true: what makes you successful at one stage can hold you back at the next. You have to be willing to dismantle the machine while it's still running.
Bondstein's approach to product design starts with a simple question: How are customers actually capturing value from our system? Not how we designed it to work. Not what we think they need. But what they're really doing with it.
This distinction matters. When Bondstein talked to logistics companies, it discovered drivers were deviating from routes. So it built route deviation alerts. Then it learned about driver fatigue causing accidents, which led to its Drive Mark feature. It found out rental vehicle owners needed a portable tracker, so it made one. Eventually, it even started tracking water vessels—barges moving goods across rivers—monitoring loading times and idle periods.
None of these features came from a product roadmap dreamed up in a conference room. They emerged from watching how people used the system and listening to what broke in the real world. This kind of attention creates products that fit into people's actual workflows instead of forcing them to adapt.
Most companies in the vehicle tracking business buy hardware from China and focus on software. Bondstein does everything. It designs hardware. It builds software. It manufactures devices. It runs the cloud infrastructure. It handles installation and ongoing service.
Shahrukh admits this was "a very tough call." It would have been easier to outsource. But building the entire stack gave Bondstein complete control over quality and the ability to innovate at every layer. When Bondstein wanted to partner with Eicher-Volvo and Bajaj as their telematics provider, it could make guarantees about reliability because it owned every piece.
There's a trade-off, of course. Vertical integration is expensive and operationally complex. But in markets where trust and reliability matter more than speed to market, owning the full stack can be the difference between being a vendor and being indispensable. At the same time, Bondstein maintains a flexible approach where customers can take only software solutions of its vehicle tracking service while using third party hardware solutions.
When asked about mistakes to avoid, Shahrukh didn't talk about market timing or product-market fit. He talked about something simpler: never cut corners on quality, even when it's tempting. Never sacrifice integrity for short-term gain.
This sounds like generic business advice until you see how it plays out. The insight here is about patience. In a market where everyone is racing to grow faster, Shahrukh aims to build something more durable: a reputation that precedes him. Most of Bondstein's new business comes from referrals. That only happens when you consistently deliver on promises over years, not quarters.
Building a team is one of the hardest parts of running a company, and Shahrukh has learned to prioritize what can't be taught. He looks for people with "hunger"—a genuine willingness to grow and solve problems creatively. Skills can be taught. Drive cannot.
This doesn't mean hiring people who work the longest hours. It means finding people who lean into challenges instead of away from them. People who, when faced with a problem, will find a way around it even if it means learning something entirely new. Shahrukh himself exemplifies this: an engineer by training, he taught himself finance well enough to lead the company's valuation process during fundraising.
The practical implication is that hiring decisions should weight attitude over credentials more than most companies do. A motivated person with an average resume will outperform a credentialed person without hunger almost every time.
When Bondstein raised money from corporations like Runner, Bangladesh's largest automobile manufacturer, it wasn't because the company needed capital. The company was already profitable and growing. It needed strategic access.
Runner had been a Bondstein client for over a year before becoming an investor. They knew the technology worked. And for Bondstein, having the largest auto manufacturer in the country as a partner meant access to distribution channels and manufacturing relationships it couldn't have built alone.
This approach to fundraising flips the conventional startup playbook. Instead of pitching investors before proving product-market fit, Shahrukh turned customers into investors after proving value. The money came with something more valuable: validation and strategic alignment. It's a model that works particularly well for companies in industries where partnerships matter more than pure capital.
Ask Shahrukh how he handles the daily challenges of running a company, and he'll tell you about maintaining a steady line. Don't get too excited on good days. Don't get too frustrated on bad days. If you're emotionally reactive, your whole organization will start chasing short-term wins instead of building something sustainable.
The bigger insight is about what kind of game you're playing. If you're optimizing for headlines or valuation bumps, volatility can work in your favor. But if you're building a business that needs to function reliably for decades, steadiness matters more than spikes. Shahrukh seems to understand that the companies that survive long enough to become institutions are usually run by people who can see past the drama of any given week.
Coda
Building a company is hard. That part we all know. But that hard comes in stages. Going from zero to one is one kind of hard—you are striving and struggling to ensure your survival. Once a company passes that stage, then comes a different kind of hard-scaling successfully. Most companies die in the process of going from zero to one. Some people put the number of failures of early-stage companies at over 95%. Out of the small minority that survives, most never find meaningful scale, living in a perpetual plateau.
Both of these journeys, bringing an idea into existence and transforming a small business into an organization that scales, are different and come with their own distinct challenges.
One of my takeaways from this interview with Shahrukh bhai is that transforming an organization from an early-stage company to a scalable organization takes a different order of thinking, and the conversation shows that journey with fascinating details and textures.
