Be a cockroach

Everyone wants to be a unicorn. The ones still alive chose to be cockroaches.

A Russian investor walked into our Gulshan office in 2018. He had heard about Pathao from someone in Singapore and showed up with no small talk and a lot of questions. He looked around the room, the red helmets on the shelf, the dashboards, the ops team shouting into headsets, and listened to our pitch.

We told him the story we told everyone that year. Super-app thesis. Fastest-growing platform in Bangladesh. Gojek-backed. Targeting a Series B. I believed every word of it.

He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “You are trying to be a unicorn. In this market, that is a very dangerous bet. You should think about being a cockroach instead.”

He explained it. A cockroach grows slowly and deliberately. It watches its costs. It earns more from customers than it spends to serve them. It does not need a next round to survive. It is not glamorous, he said, but it is alive when everything else is dead.

I pushed back. We were in a winner-take-all market. Shohoz was burning cash to take our drivers. If we slowed down, we would lose the category we had built from scratch. The cockroach model was for companies that had already won. We were still in the fight.

He listened, nodded politely, and did not invest.

At the time, I thought he had misread the market. He was right, and I was wrong, and it took us a near-death experience to understand it. The lesson is simple, and I wish I had taken his advice in 2018 instead of arguing with him: be a cockroach from day one. It would have saved us a lot of pain.

The Spending Disease

There is a specific intoxication that comes after your first real fundraise. I caught it badly.

After the Gojek round landed, the roadmap got ambitious, the hiring plan doubled, and someone suggested sponsoring the Bangladesh Premier League. I said yes. We put Mashrafe Bin Mortaza in a Pathao jersey and our logo on billboards from Motijheel to Mirpur. The brand exploded. We became a household name in six months. We were also burning cash by the crore with no real plan for what happened if the next round did not come.

That is the spending disease. The logic feels rational. Growth requires spending, investors expect growth, so investors expect spending. What you miss, inside that logic, is the assumption buried at the end of it. That the next investor will be there when you need them.

In 2019, that assumption died. Uber went public and lost money on day one. The public markets looked at a decade of losses and said no. Private investors said the same thing overnight. The forty million dollars we had built our roadmap around went quiet, then silent. We were left staring at two months of runway with nowhere to go.

To survive, we cut two hundred people. Half the company. I stood in front of the room and said the words. Their performance was fine. The market had moved and we had not moved with it. Then we went through every product line and every cost, killed anything that did not pay for itself, froze hiring, cut marketing to near zero. Within three months, core operations were cash-flow positive.

We had become, painfully and too late, a cockroach.

The Two Animals

In the sleepless months after the layoffs, I started reading about other companies. Not the ones in the headlines. The ones that had quietly done the thing the Russian had told me to do.

There is a company called Mailchimp. Two founders in Atlanta, nowhere near Silicon Valley, started it in 2001 selling email software to small businesses. They never raised a single dollar of venture capital. They grew slowly, reinvested their profits, watched their costs, and stayed boring for twenty years while the unicorns around them raised and crashed and raised again. In 2021 they sold to Intuit for twelve billion dollars. The largest exit by a bootstrapped company in history, built by people who never once walked into a room to beg for the money to make payroll. I read that and felt something between admiration and grief.

Then there was the other kind. A checkout startup called Fast, founded in 2019, backed by Stripe, the kind of pedigree that opens every door. They raised more than a hundred and twenty million dollars, hired hundreds of people, paid a band to play a party. In 2021 they generated six hundred thousand dollars in revenue for the whole year, against a burn of ten million dollars a month. When funding tightened, the next round did not come. In six days, Fast went from half a billion dollars to nothing. Four hundred and fifty people lost their jobs in an afternoon. The company had ignored its burn because it assumed the money would always be there.

I knew that assumption. I had signed term sheets on the back of it. The only difference between Fast and Pathao was that we were forced to confront the math a year before our money ran out, and they confronted it the week theirs did.

The pattern is not about geography. Amazon was the most aggressive growth company of its generation, and it was religious about cash flow from the start. Bezos reinvested everything, but he understood the economics of every business before he poured fuel on it. The companies that survive their growth phase are building toward a real engine the whole time. The ones that die are building toward the next fundraise and calling it a strategy.

A unicorn is a bet that the money will always be there. A cockroach is a bet on yourself.

The Bangladesh Tax

In a market with deep capital, you can sometimes get away with the first bet. When a startup runs out of money in the US, options exist. A strategic buyer appears. A new investor bridges. Sometimes you go public on growth metrics alone. The ecosystem has enough depth that there are usually paths.

In Bangladesh, when a startup runs out of money, there are almost none. The public market is too shallow for a tech IPO. Strategic acquirers at scale do not exist here. The local investor community is small and risk-averse. Foreign capital arrives late, conditional on proof a company still burning cash cannot provide.

I think of this as the Bangladesh Tax. Every time you build a company here that depends on outside capital to survive, you pay it.

We were not the only ones who learned this the hard way. Shohoz came after us in 2018 paying drivers more than they collected from passengers, losing money on every ride to buy the market. When the freeze came, they scaled their ride-sharing business back to almost nothing. HungryNaki, a food delivery player with real traction, shut down entirely. The market did not kill these companies. The assumption that the next round would come killed them.

Start Here Instead

If I could go back to 2016, I would give myself one rule: build like the next round is never coming, from day one. That does not mean staying small. It means a few specific habits, learned the expensive way.

Treat every product as its own P&L with a path to positive unit economics before you launch the next one. Set a profitability timeline before you set a growth target, and ask one question of any new bet: at what volume does this break even, and how long to get there with the resources we will actually commit? If the honest answer is “only with another raise,” the answer is no.

Build your financial model around your next fundraise failing. Every year, assume it will. What would you need to already be doing to survive that? Build toward that answer. It makes you disciplined, and it makes investors trust you more, because they can tell the difference between a company that needs them to live and one that is choosing to grow faster with their help.

The cockroach is not a consolation prize. It is a strategy. The companies that build with capital discipline from the start get to choose their next move. The ones that build on the assumption of endless fundraising end up in a room like ours in 2019, out of time and out of options. We survived because we eventually made the hard call. Most companies do not get a second chance to make it.

Be a cockroach from day one. Life is easier if you are.