Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],

Leaders are alchemic beings—they have to change with the times. As the demand for their product or service changes, they have to change their tune about what they’d set out to do. One would think that a decade into business operations, revising or even overhauling that narrative wouldn’t be easy.

But then, not everyone is Byju Raveendran.

Dressed in his patent black shirt and blue jeans, Raveendran has spent the better part of the last decade fighting against the physical classroom monopoly. His team of tens of thousands of sales agents have fanned out across the country—and beyond it—to convince parents that physical classrooms and teachers lack the kind of personalised service their kids need. Product after product coming out of the Byju’s stables convinced students that tech would paper over all the gaps in the sub-standard teaching-learning process of most Indian schools. And there was always Shah Rukh Khan to drive these messages home.

So imagine my surprise when Byju’s latest announcement wasn’t about a new app, or an acquisition. Instead, the company is coolly going back on a decade’s worth of messaging on edtech.

By the end of 2022, Byju’s will have 500 physical learning centers across 200 Indian cities. And it has earmarked a reported US$200 million for this.

Which brings us to the crux of this edition: Can we call Byju’s an edtech company anymore?

Raveendran’s world

It’s 2009. Raveendran is on stage, lecturing an auditorium full of CAT aspirants. His main teaching tools are a mike, a marker, and the silvery projection of his notes on the backdrop. The ‘tech’ is minimal.

Raveendran’s next jump is from an auditorium to a stadium. He is clearly an effective teacher, and gifted at getting students to ace an exam paper. Still, the only tech is a multiscreen set up so that the 25,000-odd students can follow his quick explanations.

There’s a reason I slid down this time warp. Stay with me.

By 2017, something has shifted within Raveendran, as he’s laying the foundation for the Byju empire. He has a new muse—technology. He and his team of loyalists take all their lessons online (or, at least, to a screen).

And Raveendran starts building a new narrative.

For learning, he says,

About the business of learning, he says,

Raveendran rounds off each presentation with a peppering of charts—on smartphone usage, on internet penetration, on the abysmal quality of schools.