Future Startup

In 2002, Wahid Choudhury was a Bangladeshi physicist with an unfinished PhD, four years of software experience at a London startup, and a problem his wife didn't exactly agree with: he wanted to move back to Dhaka.

This case is built on our conversation with Brain Station Founder Raisul Kabir and is part of our case library. This particular case is part of the organization design sequence. From 2006 to 2012, Brain Station 23 had zero dedicated sales staff. Raisul Kabir, Founder and CEO of Brain Station, ran the entire sales operation personally. Around 2012-2013, the company decided it needed to build a sales operation and made its first sales hires. However, the hires didn't work.

I recently restarted going to the gym after a long break. I wasn't completely sedentary before. I do short runs, some push-ups, and small movements here and there. But structured, regular exercise had been out of my life for quite some time. So I have been trying to get back to the gym. When I finally managed to restart after several false attempts, I knew I had to start slow. Build gradually and avoid hurting myself before finding my rhythm.

Welcome to another late edition of Future Startup Letter, our weekly newsletter featuring interesting reads from past weeks and links from our favorite publications and writers online. Today’s edition features six articles from Future Startup. Three articles focus on important policy and structural issues critical for the growth of the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Bangladesh.

MyAI, a newly founded organization focused on building AI fluency across Bangladesh's corporate sector, held the country's first in-person AI Mastery Summit for senior professionals on June 19th at Renaissance Dhaka Gulshan Hotel, under the banner "Leading Bangladesh's AI Future." More than 100 senior managers and executives from banking, FMCG, pharmaceuticals, insurance, and RMG attended, many representing multinational companies operating in Bangladesh.

Consider one of the common but consequential decisions every guardian faces in the private tutoring market. A tutor has applied. His profile says he's a third-year student at BUET. His photo looks fine. He seems to have the right subjects. The guardian shortlists him, they speak on the phone once, and he arrives on a Wednesday evening. She lets him into the house. Her child sits with him for two hours in the study room.

Almost every conversation about Dhaka’s startup scene these days quickly gravitates toward the familiar repertoire of complaints: founders wasting investor money, a discount frenzy that destroys unit economics, fraud, and a persistent shortage of quality talent. These are from the people who are critical of the current state of startups in the country. Industry insiders, however, view the challenge differently.

We have covered Audacity Ventures a fair bit over the years — an interview with co-founder and director Abu Bakkar Siddiq from a few years back, and a recent long-form profile of the company. The more time we spend with the business, the more interesting it gets.

On June 4, 2026, Khondoker Rashed Maqsood resigned as chairman of the Bangladesh Securities and Exchange Commission. All four commissioners resigned the same day. The BSEC building was emptied of its entire leadership in a single afternoon. Within hours, the Ministry of Finance issued a new set of appointments under Section 5(2) of the Bangladesh Securities and Exchange Commission Act, 1993. Masud Khan took over as chairman for a four-year term.

A distributor we spoke with some time ago ran an FMCG territory outside Dhaka. He handled several well-known brands, had a team of six, a delivery van, and retail relationships built over eleven years. Each cycle, he told us, the math works out on paper. The orders come in, the goods go out, the payments arrive. On paper, he is profitable.