Byju Raveendran’s upbringing was remarkably unremarkable—only two things stood out

In 'The Learning Trap', Pradip K. Saha anaylses the rise of Edtech giant Byju's and its charismatic founder, Byju Raveendran.

File photo of Byju's founder Byju Raveendran | Commons

Byju Raveendran (we will refer to him from now on just as Raveendran, even though that is really his father’s name in order to avoid confusion with the eponymous company) was born in 1980 to two teachers who lived in the coastal village of Azhikode, around 7 km north of Kannur in North Kerala – an idyllic place where the Valapattanam River meets the Arabian Sea.

He studied in the local government school where his parents, Raveendran and Shobhanavalli, taught physics and maths, respectively, and where the language of instruction was Malayalam. After finishing eighth grade, Raveendran moved to S.N. College, Kannur, for a pre-university course. Growing up in an average Malayali household in a nondescript village, Raveendran’s upbringing was remarkably unremarkable. Only two things stood out from those days. First, his habit of questioning everything under the sun and trying to find the answers to all his questions through maths – he would count everything that was possibly countable.

‘I remember sitting in a train and predicting its speed by counting the number of electric poles we had crossed in a certain time,’ he told interviewers during a 2016 case study by Harvard Business School. Second was his love for sports. From the very beginning, Raveendran was an outdoorsy child. He preferred the sports ground to the classroom and bunked classes so much that teachers often complained to their colleagues, his parents. To their credit, they never stopped him from playing around.

He played every sport – table tennis, cricket, football, you name it – that the school had to offer and learnt many life skills while doing so. One example Raveendran often gives is that he learnt spoken English by listening to sports commentary on the radio. He is a naturally speedy talker (as most speakers of the polysyllabic Malayalam tend to be) but his rapid-fire delivery of English was probably influenced by this as well.

Sports also taught him, in his own words, teamwork, concentration, controlled aggression, and the ability to stay calm and perform under pressure. He never worried about his studies or grades. It helped that Raveendran was a good student even if not the most punctual. Like most middle-class people growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, Raveendran had two choices of profession to pursue after school. He could either be a doctor or an engineer. His parents wanted him to be a doctor, but Raveendran chose engineering because of how little time medical students were left with to do anything else, and he knew he couldn’t not play sports. He studied mechanical engineering at Government Engineering College, Kannur, graduated in 2000 and joined a shipping firm as a service engineer in 2001.

His life changed two years later. While he was spending a vacation back home, a bunch of friends got in touch and sought Raveendran’s help in preparing for the Common Admissions Test (CAT), the entrance exams for the elite Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs). These friends convinced him to take the test as well. Four out of the twelve friends cleared CAT that year, and Raveendran, as the story goes, scored a perfect 100 percentile, got calls from IIMs, cracked interviews, received joining offers, declined them, and went back to work as a service engineer with the UKbased shipping company, Pan Ocean.

This, he often says, was because he never wanted to do an MBA and wrote the test for fun. He did this again in 2005 – scored a perfect 100 percentile in CAT and once again declined joining offers from IIMs. This story has been repeated so many times that it has become part of the Byju’s legend. Everyone knows it but no one can check for veracity. I tried to verify Raveendran’s CAT results for weeks before giving up.

This excerpt from Pradip K. Saha’s ‘The Learning Trap: How Byju’s Took Indian Edtech for a Ride’, has been published with permission from Juggernaut Books.