Dhananjoy Biswas, known as DJ, is the founder of Re:tune, a platform for anyone to build AI applications, and of Re:cruit, which trains and mentors engineers in Bangladesh and places them at Silicon Valley startups, mostly Y Combinator companies. He came up through ICPC competitive programming, was on the founding team of Backpack, a Y Combinator-backed startup in Bangladesh, and worked at Google in Switzerland. The episode notes say he came back to Bangladesh within three months of joining Google.
In this episode Ahmed Fahad and DJ go through each of those chapters, and through the philosophy that ties them together. The conversation moves between Bangla and English; as DJ puts it, when the talk turns to work his brain switches to English.
Google and Backpack
DJ describes Google as fun, with amazing food, but as one of some 40,000 people the work didn't feel meaningful to him. At Backpack he could see the impact of everything he did. Backpack's vision was "anyone can get anything from anywhere": it connected travelers flying from one country with shoppers in another, saving them 20 to 30 percent on shipping. When the pandemic stopped flights, there were still shoppers but no travelers, and operations stopped for months.
Why join a startup
His case for joining an early startup is not money or a big exit. It is that a startup compresses a decade of career learning into a year or two, and that it is a thankless job: you join to make an impact, not to be thanked.
Re:cruit
After Backpack he consulted for startups, paid in US dollars. He then taught his wife to code; within a year she was a senior engineer at a Y Combinator startup. That became the model for Re:cruit:
- Applicants do a two-week "qualifier" of real, intense work rather than a test.
- The training is as much about communication, ownership and culture as it is about code.
- The aim is an engineer earning $5,000 a month within a year. Founders pay from $4,000 a month.
- Most new clients come from testimonials that founders post on Bookface, Y Combinator's internal social network. DJ calls it a trust business.
Re:tune
Re:tune started as one of those two-week projects, built by an engineer on trial. It drew around 10,000 sign-ups, launched with a lifetime deal on a software marketplace, and at the time of this episode (November 2023) had made around $750K in sales. The episode notes put it at more than 8 crore taka in two months. DJ credits the speed to his team's experience shipping products with more than two dozen Y Combinator startups through Re:cruit.
What's next: DJ and his wife, his co-founder, are full-time on Re:tune. She is taking over Re:cruit and working on turning it into an accredited university for top engineers and founders.
His advice for building a product
- Ship early. Ship something embarrassing; your users will tell you what to do.
- Don't get attached. The product will change as you learn by doing.
- It will be fine. Whatever happens, you collect failures, and the alternative is scarier.
And, in his words: "my only advice would be do not take my advice."
What the conversation covers
- DJ's background and ICPC
- What drives him
- Working at Backpack, and at Google
- Why join a startup, and accelerated learning
- The pandemic, consulting and money
- Re:cruit, Y Combinator and Bookface
- Trust, mentorship and failure
- Building and launching Re:tune
- Advice for product builders