Building Trust and Resilience: A Q&A with Moyn Islam, CEO and Co-Founder of BE

I co-founded BE in 2018 with the aim of building a company around education, personal development and access to practical digital skills. Today, BE is a global affiliate marketing and customer-acquisition platform that connects customers with education-focused digital products, tools and learning experiences.

As CEO, much of my focus is now on the long term: building a strong organisation, developing people, improving the customer experience and making sure the business continues to create genuine value as it grows.

In the early days, we paid close attention to what people were actually using, where they were seeing value and what they were telling others about. That helped shape both the product and the way we grew. Word of mouth and community played an important role because people tend to trust recommendations from people they already know.

I also don’t think product-market fit is a permanent state. What worked five years ago won’t necessarily work today. Customer expectations change, technology moves forward and your business has to keep responding to that.

What matters is being clear about what you know, honest about what you don’t, and willing to adjust when new information changes the picture. I’ve made decisions that looked completely right at the time and later needed to be reconsidered. That’s part of building a company.

Experience has taught me that good leadership isn’t about being right all the time. It’s about making the best decision you can with the information available, paying attention to what happens next, and having enough humility to change course when the evidence tells you to.

Over time, I’ve come to believe even more strongly that leadership is about helping people progress. The goal isn’t to have every decision come back to you. It’s to develop people who feel trusted, capable and confident enough to lead within their own areas.

I also place a lot of value on resilience and curiosity. Our business operates across different cultures and markets, and the environment around us is changing constantly. I would much rather have someone who is willing to question, learn and adapt than someone who assumes they already have all the answers.

And I think people need to know that the company sees them as people, not simply as output. Ambition and wellbeing aren’t opposites. In my experience, you build stronger companies when you take both seriously.

It’s relatively easy to talk about culture when the company is performing well. You learn much more about a culture when someone makes a mistake, challenges a decision or has a difficult period.

People watch how leaders respond in those moments. If you say you want people to take initiative but punish every mistake, they will stop taking initiative. If you say you value honesty but react badly whenever someone disagrees with you, people will eventually tell you what they think you want to hear.

For me, a healthy culture isn’t one where everyone agrees. It’s one where people can be honest, take responsibility and challenge each other without losing respect for one another.