There’s a story I never tell at conferences. About why I really started building companies. Not the sanitized version about “seeing market opportunity” or “digital transformation in emerging markets.” The real reason. The embarrassing one. The one that makes sense of every crazy decision I made not just for over seven years of building Pathao, but all my life even to this date.
I started because I had something to prove. To everyone who made me feel small. To the voice in my head that whispered I wasn’t good enough. To a world that seemed designed to keep people like me on the sidelines.
The bullying started early. Maybe it was because I was skinny, maybe because I was weird about computers when that wasn’t cool yet. Maybe because I came from Kamalapur, a working-class neighborhood known for it’s slums. In a country obsessed with where you came from, I came from nowhere special.
The image issues followed. Not just in my head - they were written across my face in acne scars, in my awkward height, in clothes that never quite fit right. I was the kid who spent lunch periods alone, who got picked last for teams, who learned to disappear when groups formed naturally around cooler, more confident people.
The Weight of Proving Yourself
When Reid Hoffman talks about LinkedIn’s early days, he describes the relentless drive to build something that mattered. When Brian Chesky recalls Airbnb’s early struggles, he talks about the need to prove critics wrong. There’s always a chip somewhere. Something that makes you willing to bet everything on an idea most people think is stupid.
Mine was carved deep by years of feeling invisible.
At university, I watched classmates get talk confidently about their futures in corner offices, about the MNC jobs that were basically inheritance. Meanwhile, I was building WordPress themes in my tiny furniture-less apartment, making a few thousand taka here and there, trying to convince myself it was entrepreneurship and not survival.
The traditional path felt suffocating. All the MNC jobs looked identical - cubicles, hierarchies, someone else’s vision executed by replaceable people. I couldn’t imagine doing that for forty years. But more than that, I couldn’t imagine staying invisible for forty years.
Every time someone asked what my parents did, every time I had to explain why I didn’t have internships lined up, every time I felt the subtle distance that opened up when people realized I wasn’t from their world - it added weight to this growing need to prove them all wrong.
When Survival Becomes Strategy
The funny thing about having a chip on your shoulder is it makes you take risks other people won’t. When you’ve got nothing to lose, you’re free to do anything. When you already feel like a failure, actual failure doesn’t scare you as much.
That’s how Pathao really started. Not with a grand vision to revolutionize transportation in Bangladesh. With a desperate need to build something - anything - that would make me matter.
The first version wasn’t even ride-sharing. It was instant delivery. Totally different business. We’d promise to deliver anything across Dhaka in 60 minutes. Completely insane promise. We had no infrastructure, no fleet, just three guys with bicycles and a lot of audacity.
But here’s what nobody teaches you about startups: sometimes the stupidest ideas work because nobody else is stupid enough to try them.
We were following Facebook sellers around the city, begging them to let us deliver their packages. Some days I personally carried parcels across Dhaka, sweating through my shirt on crowded buses, just to keep our promise. It wasn’t scalable. It wasn’t elegant. It was desperation disguised as entrepreneurship.
But it worked. Because when you’ve got everything to prove and nothing to lose, you do things other people won’t do.
The Cultural Clash
Building a startup in Bangladesh meant fighting two battles simultaneously. The external one against competitors, regulations, and market physics. The internal one against cultural expectations.
In Dhaka, success has a very specific shape. You get a good job. You get married. You buy land. You have children. You provide stability. Entrepreneurship wasn’t even on the menu. It was what unemployed people called themselves to avoid admitting they were unemployed.
My mother would get phone calls from relatives. “When is Elius getting a real job?” They weren’t being cruel. They genuinely couldn’t understand why someone would choose uncertainty over security. Why someone would turn down a guaranteed salary to chase something that probably wouldn’t work.
Every family gathering became an interrogation. Every conversation with my father’s friends became a defense of my choices. The chip on my shoulder got heavier. Not lighter.
But it also got sharper.
What Airbnb and Pathao Had in Common
Brian Chesky talks about the moment he realized Airbnb was going to work. Not when they raised funding or hit a million users. When a host in New York told him the platform had changed her life. That she could stay in the apartment she loved because Airbnb helped her afford rent.
For us, that moment came when I met a driver named Salam. He’d been unemployed for eight months. The ready made garments factory he worked with had shut down. He couldn’t pay for his daughter’s tuition. He was borrowing money from relatives just to buy rice.
When he heard about Pathao he borrowed a bike from his brother. Within two weeks, he was making more money than he’d ever made in garments.
I talked to the drivers during those days riding on the backs of Pathao and pretending to just be an operations employee. I was collecting complaints so I could fix those issues. Salam had no complaints.
“You saved my family,” he insisted I sit down and have tea with him. For an hour all he sang were praises of the product and company we built, while I knew that the app was crashing every day.
That’s when I understood what I’d actually been building. Not just a transportation app. Not just a way to prove myself. A machine that created dignity for people who’d been told they didn’t matter.
The Trap of External Validation
Success brings its own problems. Pathao grew. We raised money. I started getting invited to conferences. Forbes put me on their 30 Under 30 list. Suddenly I was the poster boy for Bangladeshi entrepreneurship.
But the chip never went away. It just shape-shifted.
Now instead of proving I was good enough to start something, I had to prove I was good enough to scale it. Instead of proving we could survive, I had to prove we could dominate. The goalpost kept moving, and the voice kept demanding more proof.
This is the trap every founder with a chip falls into. External validation never fills the internal hole. Netflix didn’t stop at DVDs because Reed Hastings wanted to prove he could build the ultimate entertainment company. Amazon didn’t diversify beyond books because Jeff Bezos wanted to prove he could build the everything store. Spotify didn’t just want to beat iTunes - they wanted to prove music streaming could be bigger than the entire music industry.
When your motivation comes from needing to prove something, there’s never enough proof.
The Price of the Chip
The chip that drives you to start can destroy you if you don’t learn to manage it. I’ve watched founders burn out their teams, alienate their investors, and sabotage their own companies because they couldn’t stop fighting battles that existed mostly in their heads.
During Pathao’s hardest period - when we had to lay off half of our team, when investors were pulling out, when I was barely sleeping - I realized something terrifying. I had built my identity entirely around this company. When the company stumbled, I didn’t know who I was.
The breakdown wasn’t just professional. It was existential. Without Pathao succeeding, without the validation of growth metrics and press coverage, I felt like I was disappearing again. Back to being the invisible kid from Kamalapur who didn’t matter.
That’s when I learned the most important lesson of my entrepreneurial life: you can’t build sustainable companies on unsustainable motivations.
What I Wish I’d Known Earlier
If I could go back and talk to that kid in his tiny apartment/makeshift office, building themes and dreaming of something bigger, I’d tell him this: the chip on your shoulder can be rocket fuel, but it’s also toxic waste. Use it to launch, but don’t let it poison what you’re building.
Build because you love the problem, not because you hate feeling small. Build because you see a future worth creating, not because you want to escape a past that hurt you. Build because you want to serve people, not because you want people to notice you.
The most successful founders I know eventually make this transition. The chips on your shoulder becomes chips on your pocket.
Elon Musk might have started SpaceX to prove the impossible was possible, but he’s scaling it to make humanity a multi-planetary species. Brian Chesky might have started Airbnb to pay his rent, but he built it to help anyone belong anywhere.
The chip gets you started. Purpose keeps you going.
The View from Here
I took those lessons and built my second company - Wind. A new company, a new industry, a new set of impossible problems to solve. But this time, the motivation was different. It was no longer desperate. Built it properly, in an industry I deeply researched, scaled it smartly, then exited within three years of launch.
The chip is still there. It probably always will be. But now it’s a tool, not a master. I use it when I need extra fuel for hard decisions or sleepless nights. But I don’t let it drive the strategy or define the culture.
Because I’ve learned something the hard way: companies built on insecurity create insecure cultures. Companies built on fear create fearful cultures. Companies built on the need to prove something create cultures where people are afraid to be wrong, afraid to take risks, afraid to tell the truth.
The best companies - the ones that actually change the world - are built by people who’ve transformed their chips into compassion. Their need to prove something into a desire to solve something. Their hunger for validation into hunger for impact.