Byju's Stadium-Scale Evolution

A story about how an Indian teacher grew from teaching test prep in small towns to building an $8 billion online education company.

"This guy started off as a teacher in a small town doing test prep. He got bigger and bigger to the point where he was selling out stadiums of people coming to watch him teach math. When I saw the picture of the stadium, I thought this was remarkable.

He then turned it into an online learning platform - basically a video-based teaching platform, sort of like Khan Academy but for profit. It's now an $8 billion company and Byju is one of the youngest billionaires in India. He's a teacher turned billionaire, which is very rare.

Interestingly, there's a company in this YC batch started by Byju's former first instructor. He says the dirty secret about Byju's is that it has very low retention - great at making money and getting people to sign up, but less than 15% of people stick with the course as it goes along.

The company works particularly well in India because education is like god there - you can be dirt poor in a village but you'll do anything to educate your kids. Indians are willing to pay anything for education. Plus with India's huge population, you can take a really small amount of money from a huge number of people and build a very big company."