This week’s FS Weekly covers:
- The Art of Enterprise: Mamun Rashid
- Founder Story: Abdul Gaffar Sadi
- Business Deep Dive:
- Profile on a New Cohort of Fintech Startups
- Pathao’s Fintech Ambition
- Insight: Eleven Lessons from Doist Founder Amir Salihefendic
- Book Notes: 34 Business and Management Books
- Recommendations
- Why Stripe failed in India
- The joy of business experimentation
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On to the updates
The Art of Enterprise
In this fascinating interview from our archive, former Managing Partner of PricewaterhouseCoopers(PwC) Bangladesh Mamun Rashid shares about his early life and work. Learn about his upbringing, trials, and tribulations he has had to face throughout his career, his thoughts on the state and the future of the financial industry in Bangladesh, his management and leadership philosophy, and how to grow an organization, and explore the importance of gratitude and creating value for others.
Founder Story
Founder at Work: Abdul Gaffar Sadi, Co-founder, and CEO, Drutoloan
Hear Abdul Gaffar Sadi talk about everything Drutoloan, SME financing and fintech, and entrepreneurship. Learn the origin of Drutoloan, the connection between optimism and entrepreneurship, the current state and evolution of Drutoloan, the operations and distribution strategy of Drutoloan, the market and the market dynamics for SME-focused fintech startups, the ambition of Drutoloan, the ups and downs of a founder’s journey, and much more.
Business Deep Dive
Making Markets: A Bunch of Fintech Startups Help Create a New Investment Landscape in Bangladesh
Learn how a small cohort of fintech startups are looking to change the investment landscape in Bangladesh. By leveraging technology and innovative business models, these companies are creating new investment opportunities and are shaping a new investment landscape in Bangladesh.
Pathao Raises New Investment, Pathao’s Fintech Ambition
Pathao announced that it has raised $12 million in a new pre-series B funding round. Pathao says the round comes as its strategic shift towards fintech gathers pace. Pathao claims that it has built a profitable and financially robust business over the past two years. Learn how the company plans to use that strength and the newly raised capital to “holistically serve its customers with fintech offerings”.
Insight
There are two types of mindsets: creation and consumption mindset. We live in a world where it is all about consumption. We are constantly consuming information and rarely get time to create. Doist Founder Amir Salihefendic suggests young people should focus on creating and building things instead of passively consuming them. He recommends constantly creating projects, building things, and launching them to become better at your craft. Learn 11 fascinating lessons from Doist Founder Amir on venture building, craft, productivity, ambition, and more.
Book Notes
34 Essential Business and Management Books
This list of 34 influential business books spans a wide range of topics, from strategy and entrepreneurship to marketing, management, and personal development. These are some of the best works in their fields and have shaped how we think about business, entrepreneurship, and strategy at Future Startup.
Recommendation
Why couldn’t Stripe become the Stripe of India?
The innovator’s dilemma is often the most important challenge for successful tech companies to overcome to succeed in new markets.
“Stripe had local engineering talent that could build the payment products locally, but they didn’t have autonomy. “Central teams in San Francisco worked on core tech required for products needed for, say, auditing funds coming in or making refunds. It created too much dependency,” says the second former Stripe executive quoted in Arundhati’s story from July 2022.
Stripe followed this approach because it wanted to drag and drop new payment methods into the countries it entered. In doing so, it missed the country that was on the cusp of changing the way people made digital payments.
“Our point of contention was that we want enough resources to build everything at once, but the leadership at HQ’s point was that we can’t allocate 30 resources without knowing what the returns on that are going to be,” a former executive from Stripe India says in the story.
Stripe went down this loop of “get revenue to get resources, but get resources to get revenue”.
Chicken and egg.
“For a local startup, a US$2–5 billion opportunity is good enough to chase. But for a US$100 billion-company like Stripe, it needs at least a US$10 billion opportunity to make it worth the while,” a payments company CEO says in the same story.
And perhaps that’s the biggest reason why Stripe couldn’t become the Stripe of India.
The Joy of Business Experimentation
“There’s a particular type of joy that comes from running companies that you fully control, and this year, I got a taste of what that felt like.
The joy comes from the following things:
- You get to pick who you work with. If you are wise, you will pick only those who are competent, who have excellent character, and who you enjoy associating with.
- More importantly, you can cut out from your life people who you do not want to associate with. This reads like an unalloyed good, but it really isn’t: there are tradeoffs. About which, more in a bit.
- Given the above two things, you can go into the world together and prove that certain ideas you’ve noticed actually works. And since this is business that we’re talking about, you can do this in a way that makes everyone wealthy.”
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