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Hasnaeen Rizvi Rahman is a first-generation entrepreneur at 25 years of age. He is the Founder and CEO of Astha IT which was founded in 2008 and is headquartered in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Astha IT is a custom software development company that specializes in building massively scalable systems. The company helps governments, large-scale enterprises, and start-ups to build successful products that users love. Its clients are spread across four continents across many different industries. Astha IT has a subsidiary company in Sweden that acts as its EU base.
Astha IT is one of the very few companies in the country to have built a massively scalable application platform as a service (aPaaS), powered by a set of distributedly running microservices on the cloud, that allow customers to develop, run, and manage applications without the complexity of building and maintaining the infrastructure typically associated with developing and launching an app.
Intending to translate a client's idea into a scalable technology solution, the company looks beyond traditional delivery paradigms to connect multiple dimensions of software development to give an all-digital world.
It provides off-the-charts custom software development services in a broad range of categories like web, mobile, desktop, blockchain, AI, big data, etc. Astha IT helps midsize and large-scale organizations to digitize and automate their business functions with powerful back-office solutions such as ERP, CRM, HR, BI tools, etc. It builds super-fast, beautifully designed websites for businesses using the latest technologies such as Gatsby and WordPress.
The company has received awards from the government of Bangladesh for being the top software exporting company in 2013, 2014, and 2020.
Hasnaeen Rizvi Rahman was born into a working-class family in the peaceful 80s in Dhaka. His early childhood passion included drawing, sketching, playing chess, and reading. He grew up to be an avid reader with a personal library of 3000+ books.
With a quest of diving deep into the world of technologies, he built numerous software tools just out of sheer curiosity like the basic turn-based games, music players, video recorders, management tools, database applications, AI bots, physics simulations, etc.
Rahman has published two international research papers on Fuzzy Logic and Vision Systems of a Mobile Robot, later on, IEEE. As a final year thesis project in graduation, he built a functional autonomous land-rover vehicle (a mobile robot). He got his first job in a Dutch-based offshore software company.
Later he pursued a master's degree in Sweden's Chalmers University with a full scholarship. In 2008, with the foundation of Asha IT, he became the first-gen entrepreneur.
Rahman has also joined the board as a partner in an American cloud computing company called SaaS Ventures, which produced for big names like Bizgenics Foundation, MIT, and the United States government.
Talking about his journey as a successful CEO, Rahman says, "I had no past experiences. When I want to do something, I don't quit and this is my personal philosophy that helped survive and thrive".
Today's fast pace of innovation necessitates a leader who can wade through the technology with a focus on how it can be used to solve real business problems faced by the organization. In the words of Rahman, the following are some attributes that every tech leader should possess:
Speaking about the impact of disruptive technologies Rahman says, "When I founded my company, there were a lot of budding agencies (small bootstrapped businesses), but now there are several budding start-ups. The entire dynamics are different now. AI, cloud, etc have brought a paradigm shift in the tech world. Innovations are easier and assisted now. Things that we could dream of 15 years ago are all achievable". He wonders how different the industry is today.
To cope up with modern developments, innovation of products or solutions are important. Following are the ways through which Rahman facilitates innovation in the products.
1. Ideation through intuition
2. Market validation through surveys and other methods
3. Building a prototype and validating further
4. Choosing the right tech and team to build the final product
5. Identifying the proper marketing and sales channels to promote it.
It is not easy to start a company and become a successful entrepreneur. Rahman being the first-gen entrepreneur has faced critical challenges during the initial phase of his journey. On that note he mentions, "I had no money and therefore borrowed BDT 300K from my father to start the company. I had the experience of managing an organization. I had no partners to share my thoughts and brainstorm on challenges" talking about his challenges
Rahman believes that the future of the company seems to be good, but the future of the industry is better. He has plans to roll out new products in time to come and introduce new lines of businesses within the umbrella. Giving an example he mentions about one of his products (Chakri app) that got featured in the media recently.
Rahman says that every emerging business leader must have knowledge, courage, honesty, and passion. Combining all these features will result in success is what he preaches to young budding stars.
