HSBC Writes Down Byju's, Once $22B Indian Edtech Giant, to Zero | Hacker News Reader

HSBC Writes Down Byju's, Once $22B Indian Edtech Giant, to Zero

indiadispatch.com

36 pointsjmsflknr16 comments

One of the most predatory and litigious startups around, happy to see it dead.

Huh, I was just happy to see HSBC lose billions.

I wish more news outlets would write news like this. So much value-less fluff now a days, all to improve a "time spent on page" metric, which they hope might possibly translate into more $ads.

The problem is, you need a lot of prior knowledge to make any sense of it. What has happened to cause the value of Byju to fall? What does Byju even do? I read the "article" and have no clue.

It feels more like a private tweet than an article.

For anyone else curious, Byju is an online EdTech who also paired with a offline tutoring business paying $1B (600MM cash and rest in stocks). Unfortunately, they failed to become profitable and folded.

Though, I am very curious, how they fail to generate any revenue from their offline wing(Aakash), as private tutoring centers(or local term: coaching centers?) are immensely popular in South Asia and it always baffled my mind that, children and young adult has to attend school as well as these centers to excel in class. Sometimes, the same people teaching in school has these tutoring business after school and it is a common practice to seek these kinds of things.

There's a Byju tag right below the news piece. If you click on it, it'll lead to a timeline providing you with more context.

Where did all that money go though?

I doubt it went to the business.

Some of it went to paying cash for other businesses

https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/05/byjus-acquires-indian-tuto...

The same place it goes for every other such startup. They spent $1 to earn $0.50, and eventually the money ran out.

messi

$22B to $0 for what should have been a high margin business is bad. What’s the story here?

High margin why?

Their online pre-recorded courses cost 1000s of dollars.

I can imagine that's never going to work.

Very few people can afford it, and those who can afford want more, e.g. Q&A, graded assignments etc. It's almost never a "record these once and we are done" thing.

One very concise answer is market for Byju's paid online education is about 2 order of magnitude smaller than projected to investors.

It is for simple reason that paying capacity of average Indian customers is much lower than west and ton of cheaper options are already available for this kind of thing.

Detailed reasons are of course bad management, underhanded sales tactics, burnout, online vs classroom education, scaling too fast etc..etc.

How much value did the founder extract along the way? Forbes reports he still has a large, but now worthless, stake in the company.

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