One of FamousEntrepreneurs In India Byju Raveendran Born in Azhikode, Kerala. He did his schooling from a Malayalam-medium
school where his parents were also the teachers. He had an extreme interest in
sports, and he used to play up to six different sports at the school level.
But, studies were invariably a priority for him. As a child also, he loved
Mathematics which led him to develop his own ways of remembering formulas,
creating sequences, and solving questions, that made him cover up the syllabus
quickly and efficiently as well. As time passes and being a bright student, he
successfully became an engineer and got a job in an IT firm that required him
to travel abroad for a significant part of the year.
It was 2003 when Byju Raveendran came to Bangalore for his holiday, and he visited
his friends who were preparing for the CAT exam. He taught them some different
and distinct ways in which they can approach questions and can use time more
efficiently.
For fun, Byju himself gave the exam and
unexpectedly scored 100 percentile. His friends were impressed and happy for
him, but he took it as a lucky break. To retest his skills and check whether he
truly did well in the last one, he decided to appear in the exam again.
Surprisingly, he scored 100 percentile, once more.
After the CAT incident, his friends kept on insisting
him to coach students preparing for competitive exams as his methods and
applications were unconventional from what was already present. Byju thought about it, and after some
thoughts, he decided to play his role as a teacher. He took a break from his
job and began teaching some students in his first classroom that was originally
a terrace of his friend's house.
He was never behind the money and decided to
allow free trial classes of seven days to students and charged them only if
they were satisfied with the quality of teaching. In no time, students began to
increase in number, which led him to rent a classroom space where he can
accommodate everyone. Very quickly, the number of students under him increased
to 20000 across the country, and Byju had to travel to more than seven cities
in a week to teach them all.
Gradually, it was getting challenging for him to
maintain the hectic schedule so he decided to record his lectures and share it
to the places where he could not manage to reach and shortly more than 25
cities had access to his classes.
In 2010, Byju was proposed with the idea to
provide his classes online so that millions of students could also avail and
join his quality teaching. At that time internet was not a ready to available
commodity in India but Byju still went ahead with it and formed ‘Think and
Learn Pvt. Ltd.’.
Then in 2015, a startup company created and
launched the app called, ‘BYJU’s- The
Learning App’. Within three months of its launch, the app had more than 55
lacs downloads, and over 2.5 lacs paid subscribers.
Also, Byju's
startup became the first in Asia to pull investments from Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s
organisation- The Chan-Zukerberg initiative, and this happened in 2016. He
become a successful Entrepreneur in India.
An international achievement for the company also
came in 2017 when it was included as a case study at Harvard University. Along
with that, his company gets in Shahrukh Khan as its brand ambassador, and in
2019 it was announced as the official sponsor of the Indian Cricket Team’s
jersey as well.
Byju Raveendran has very inspiring story. He brought up an educational betterment of a
country and pushing India towards its Digital Path!
