ARJUN MOHAN: Edtech suddenly became everyone's favourite whipping child

Behind the fall of the edtech sector is a string of factors, like drop in demand due to reopening of offline classes, failure of start-up founders to adapt to the post-Covid market requirements, mounting losses, etc. In fact, the fall of edtech unicorn Byju's from grace happened during this period. Arjun Mohan, who has worked extensively in the edtech sector, fears that all the negative narrative around it might affect the perception about online education, one reason why he decided to write a book about the sector

-  Vinita Bhatia

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?