Arjun Mohan, India CEO of edtech company Byju's, tells Vinita Bhatia how the edtech sector, one of the best performers during Covid-19 pandemic, fell out of favour with customers and investors and ended up in losses
Why did you choose to get into a mentorship role post upGrad? I got the opportunity to work with more prominent edtech start-ups, including Byju’s and Vedantu, which needed help as, currently, things are not great for the sector. It basically started as a project for profit and loss optimisation.
For instance, I worked with Byju’s on ways to make its many subsidiaries’ cash flow positive and independent. However, I got a lot more involved because there was a leadership gap in the company.
Since you were trying to keep the subsidiaries in the black, were you the one who gave the idea of putting Great Learning and Epic on the block?
I am obviously helping Byju Raveendran in many of these things, but the idea is finally his. I will not claim ownership of any of these, but it is a self-evident thing for him to do because Byju’s had lots of liabilities that could not be paid out with the cash flow it was generating.
In fact, many companies have now moved into the positive territory of cash flow, but paying so much money is not possible for these companies in a short period. So, it was a foregone conclusion that Raveendran would have to sell a few of these.
While Byju’s had accumulated much debt and financial liabilities, Vedantu had to balance its expansion plans to avoid getting into the same dilemma as Byju’s. How did you modulate your learnings and apply them to these edtech companies?
This story is from the November 2023 edition of Outlook Business.
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This story is from the November 2023 edition of Outlook Business.
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