Daily Newsings: 23 June 2025
The fall of Byju's
Daily Newsings are musings on the daily news
Hey everyone, I took a break from Daily Newsings for the past few weeks. I've been managing a couple of new commitments, and I'm not sure how much time I can commit to writing Newsings. I ask for your continued patience as I figure out a system that I feel is sustainable over a long period of time.
The Hindustan Times today ran an article that talks about Byju's -- the firm that was once mighty in the ed-tech industry, but now is reduced to rubble. Byju's was once valued at 22 Billion US Dollars. It had 60,000 employees and millions of paying users. But a few weeks back, the Byju's app was delisted from Google's Playstore because of unpaid dues to Amazon Web Services.
The story of Byju's is a stark reminder of some of the ugly idolatries existing in the world.
First of all, Byju's convinced investors to invest millions and billions of dollars because of the fact that India has a large market for ed-tech. Indians prize academic success because they view it as a means for social mobility. The desire for academic success and social mobility through academic success itself isn't wrong. But when academic success is being seen as salvific for the family or community, that is a form of idolatry. Where there is false worship, there is slavery. Thousands of people in India were exploited. Their desires for academic success and their anxieties about their children's education was exploited by Byju's sales teams. Even families that could not afford a subscription or their electronic devices were manipulated to take loans.
Byju Raveendran, the founder of Byju's initially began as a tutor. He discovered the joy of teaching his friends. But somewhere along the line, growing the company, increasing subscriber counts and raising funding became priorities over teaching. This is modern capitalism at its absolute worst. Everything had to be scaled. Everything had to grow. In Byju's case, the need to grow was to keep investors happy. But why were the investors even in the picture? Because the company wanted to grow in the first place. The old cliché is that growth for the sake of growth is the motto of cancer cells. Such growth is never healthy. Idolatry to money enslaved Byju's so that they lost the joy that comes from teaching, they were forced to keep increasing their subscriber count even when that was actively harming people.
Such cancerous growth affects not just Byju's, but a large number of companies out there. Why do software companies often need to lay off thousands of employees on a regular basis? Because they hire thousands of people with money they don't own yet with the hope that they would get such money in the future. And in the end when they don't, the grunt force is left high and dry.
The point is not that capitalism is inherently evil, although one could make a number of arguments against the system as a whole. The point is false worship always leads to ruin. One could argue it is good to raise capital to create value for society -- where businesses take loans not to increase their revenue or make more money, but to serve their clients better. But such a vision of business requires one to not be enslaved to the idols of money, power and fame.
Byju's today is a ruin. May it serve as a cautionary tale for all those who prostrate themselves at the altar of money and business growth. False worship always leads to slavery. Eventually, if not immediately, it all comes crashing down.