In this segment of the My First Million podcast, Sam Parr talks with a guest about Byju's, the Indian ed‑tech giant valued at about $8 billion. The conversation traces Byju's founder from a small‑town test‑prep teacher who filled stadiums with students, to the creator of a massive video‑based learning platform that rivals Khan Academy but operates for profit. They discuss the company’s reported financials—valuation, revenue (over $100 million), and the erroneous claim of only five employees—highlighting the discrepancy in public data. A key criticism raised is the very low course‑completion rate (under 15 %). The guests attribute Byju's explosive growth to two Indian‑specific factors: a cultural reverence for education that drives families to spend heavily on learning, and a huge, rapidly expanding middle class that provides a massive user base. They compare the model to the U.S. market, noting that while free platforms like Khan Academy are popular, a paid, high‑engagement version could potentially succeed in America. The dialogue is informal, interspersed with repeated phrases, and mixes enthusiasm for Byju's success with skepticism about its retention and applicability abroad.
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doing that.
So I'm basically putting together a report of the coolest companies in India that don't have analogs here. Um, like for example, there's this company called BYJU. Have you ever heard of BYJU? BYJU.
BYJU.
Yeah, this guy basically started off as a teacher and he would teach like essentially test prep.
Oh, you freaking love this.
I think I've told you about this before, but basically this—
yeah, you, you, you like, you say that's your dream is to be—
yeah, this, this guy, he started off as a small teacher in a town basically and was doing test prep and then sort of got bigger and bigger and bigger. People wanted to learn from him to the point where he was selling out stadiums of people coming to watch him teach math. And, uh, that was when I saw the picture of the stadium, I thought, this is remarkable. Then, uh, he turned it into an online learning platform, basically a video-based teaching platform, sort of like Khan Academy, but for profit, and it's an $8 billion company now. And this guy, Byju's, sort of one of the youngest billionaires in India. He's a teacher turned billionaire, which is very rare. And, you know, cool product, cool company. And there's actually a company in this YC batch that's trying— that's the former first instructor of Byju's. He's like, I was the face of Byju's, because he was in all the videos, and he left to start his own thing. He's like, you know, here's the dirty secret about Byju's thing. It has very low retention. Great at making money, great at getting people to sign up, but less than 15% of people stick with the course as it goes along. We're doing this other way and we're gonna win. And they're in this batch as well.
So that's interesting. So I would love to ask you questions about that. First, I wanna tell you that I'm looking at their Wikipedia. It says they do, they're worth $8 billion. They do $80 million in US dollars in sales. And then it says they only have 5 employees.
Yeah, that's wrong. And also they do more, they do more revenue. Recently they were over 100 million. I think the last, like, I read something where they were, where they were doing over 100 million.
But so why is this—
no way they have 5 employees.
That'd be amazing. Why is this big in India but not America? Is because Indians love math and science.
I mean, yes, education is like, you know, God in India. Like, you, you can be dirt poor in a village, but you'll do anything to educate your kids. And, you know, even these are Indian people in America, you probably have noticed, are like, you know, their parents are pretty strict about education. You got to get good grades, all that stuff. And so Indians are willing to pay anything for education, and they don't really pay anything for anything else. So, you know, entertainment is usually lower on the list, although Bollywood does well. But like, on a per capita basis, where you're going to spend your money, education is sort of number one for Indians. So that's the first part. Second part is they have such a huge population, so you can take a really small amount of money from such a huge number of people and build a very big company. So that's the second part.
How much bigger is, uh, India than America in population? 3 times?
So yes, uh, 4 times, I think. It's like 1— I think it's, I think it's over 1 billion, and US at 300 million, I believe. Um, so it'd be like about 4 times. And, um, and of course not all those people have smartphones, not all those people have money, but like, you know, it's India has like sort of the largest growing middle class. So that's some of the reason why this works, is because people are willing to pay for education, and there's so many people that if you take a few bucks from each, and everybody's willing to pay for this 'cause it's education, that adds up. But, you know, $8 billion is sort of out— it is outpacing their revenue growth, right? So I think part of it is the story of what this becomes, and their sort of defensibility. That's probably why they're valued so much higher than their revenue would suggest.
Do you think that that can be popular in America?
I think so. Like, I think Khan Academy is fairly popular and it's mostly in America.
No money though.
It's just, yeah, it's a nonprofit and they don't pour money into growth like these guys do. I'm sure these guys are aggressively trying to grow and using their payback to sort of fund more growth. But yeah, I do think like something like this can work here. But you know, we'll see. There might be other reasons why it doesn't.
