The Feedback Culture
Radical candor sounds nice until you have to shoot down your cofounder's idea in front of the whole team. Building a culture where hard conversations happen early and often.
There is a book that every founder in Silicon Valley eventually reads. It’s called Radical Candor, written by Kim Scott, a former Google and Apple executive who spent years thinking about why some managers build extraordinary teams and others build ordinary ones. Her answer is deceptively simple: care personally, challenge directly. Say the hard thing, say it to the person’s face, say it because you actually give a damn about them. The framework is clean. The logic is airtight. In a conference room in San Francisco, surrounded by people who went to the same schools and speak the same professional language and share a cultural assumption that feedback is a gift, it probably works beautifully.
Then you try it in Dhaka.
The Room That Didn’t Want to Hear It
We had a product manager in the early Pathao days who was sharp. Quick-thinking, technically literate, genuinely passionate about what we were building. I liked him. The team liked him. He showed up early. He stayed late. He volunteered for everything.
He was also, quietly, killing the team around him.
Not through malice, but through certainty. He was the kind of person who had an answer for everything before you’d finished the question. When someone proposed a different approach, he’d pause just long enough to make it look like he was considering it, then explain, with complete calm and absolute confidence, why his original idea was still correct. Feedback bounced off him like raindrops off a car roof.
I saw the friction it was creating. I watched two engineers stop raising objections in his sprint reviews. I noticed that one of our best product designers had started going quiet in meetings where she used to be the loudest voice in the room.
For two months, I said nothing directly. I had pulled him aside and hinted. I had framed things as “team dynamics.” I had used every diplomatic trick I knew. Nothing landed. Because nothing I said was clear enough to be heard.
When I finally sat down and told him exactly what the problem was, specifically and without cushioning, he went silent. Then he argued. Then he came back the next day having processed it. And then, slowly, he started to change.
The conversation I should have had in week two happened in month three. We lost sixty days of team performance because I didn’t want to make it uncomfortable.
Why Bangladesh Makes This Harder
In Bangladesh, feedback is personal. That is not a criticism of Bangladeshi culture. It is just the truth of how most of us grew up. In school, a teacher correcting you in front of the class was not considered coaching. It was humiliation. At home, criticism from an elder landed as judgment, not guidance. In the workplace, a manager pointing out a flaw in your work is often interpreted as a verdict on your worth as a person, not an observation about a specific decision.
This is compounded by hierarchy. Bangladesh runs on it. There is a deeply embedded assumption that seniority is tied to correctness. A junior employee challenging their manager’s thinking isn’t seen as intellectual courage. It reads as insubordination, or at the very least, bad manners. And ego, once engaged, becomes load-bearing. People would rather be wrong quietly than right in a way that publicly embarrasses someone above them.
In Silicon Valley, the cultural assumption is that ideas are separate from identity. You can attack the idea without attacking the person. That separation is almost entirely a learned, cultural construct. It didn’t arrive naturally. It was built, deliberately, over decades of tech culture that incentivized shipping over ego, iteration over perfection.
We didn’t have that foundation in Dhaka. We had to build it from scratch, in the middle of trying to build a company.
No Feedback Loop, No Growth
Here is the thing, though. The cultural difficulty of giving and receiving feedback doesn’t make feedback optional. It makes it more expensive when it’s missing.
A startup without honest feedback loops is not a startup. It is a slow-motion disaster that hasn’t announced itself yet. Bad product decisions don’t get caught early. Poor performers don’t get corrected. Good people watch problems fester and start quietly updating their CVs. The team dynamics that should be your competitive advantage become the thing that slows you down.
At Pathao, we learned this the hard way in multiple directions. There were times when we moved forward with a feature that three engineers already knew was wrong but didn’t feel safe saying so directly. There were product bets we doubled down on because no one wanted to be the person who told leadership the data was pointing somewhere else. There were managers who were creating quiet toxicity in their teams, and we didn’t find out until two or three people had already left.
Netflix built one of the most aggressively feedback-dense cultures in tech history. Their foundational belief was simple: if you only hire adults and treat them like adults, they can handle hearing the truth. Every project got a post-mortem. Every manager was rated by their direct reports. Silence was not considered polite. It was considered wasteful. Amazon went even further, structuring meetings so that memos were read in silence first, forcing real engagement with ideas before any social dynamics could take over. The goal in both cases was identical: strip out the noise so that the signal gets through cleanly.
We couldn’t copy those playbooks wholesale. But the underlying logic was undeniable. Fast companies need fast feedback. And the only way feedback is fast is if giving it and receiving it doesn’t require an act of personal courage every single time.
Building the Habit, Not Just the Speech
What actually changed things at Pathao wasn’t a policy. It was a set of repeated behaviors that slowly rewired what people expected from each other.
We started treating public praise as specific rather than general. “Good job” means nothing. “The way you restructured that driver payment flow cut our support tickets by 18% in two weeks” means everything. Specific praise sets a standard. It tells the team what excellence actually looks like, which makes it easier to name what falls short of it.
We started making feedback a two-way street in one-on-ones. Not just me evaluating someone, but explicitly asking: what am I doing that makes your job harder? At first the answers were polite and empty. Then, slowly, they got real. Someone told me I was making too many decisions in sprint reviews without hearing the team first. They were right. I changed it. And because I changed it visibly, other people started believing the feedback was real, that it actually went somewhere.
We also started normalizing mistakes in group settings, not with shame, but with storytelling. When something went wrong on a feature launch or an ops decision, we’d debrief it publicly, not to assign blame, but to extract the lesson before it calcified into unspoken fear. It felt uncomfortable the first few times. Then it started to feel normal. And when it felt normal, people stopped hiding problems.
The Actual Cost of Avoiding the Conversation
There is a version of kindness that is really just cowardice dressed up in good intentions. Avoiding a hard conversation because you don’t want to upset someone is not protecting them. It is protecting yourself from discomfort while letting them continue in the wrong direction. By the time you finally say something, the gap between where they are and where they need to be is so wide that the conversation lands as a verdict rather than a course correction.
Startups grow people or they lose people. There is no third option. The engineers, product managers, operations leads who joined Pathao in its first two years had more professional growth packed into twenty-four months than most people get in a decade of corporate employment. Not because we had the best training programs. Because we had the kind of environment where things moved fast enough that feedback had to be real, had to be quick, and had to be absorbed immediately or it was useless.
That environment didn’t happen by accident. It had to be built. It had to be modeled by leadership first. And it started, every single time, with someone willing to have the conversation that nobody else wanted to have.
The hardest one, the one that feels like it might break something, is usually the one that was already three months overdue.