Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],

I’m back after a very, very short trip to the ASU+GSV Summit on education in San Diego. Between several swigs of coffee, someone told me that the 13-year-old summit is the “Coachella” of education conferences. If that’s true, I have a good sense of who the headline act was.

GSV partner Deborah Quazzo (L) in conversation with Byju’s co-founders Divya Gokulnath (M) and Byju Raveendran (R)

As Byju’s co-founders Byju Raveendran and Divya Gokulnath glided from one keynote event to another, there was a palpable excitement about Byju’s, the international brand. Murmurs about “the first trillion-dollar edtech” were hard to miss. Questions about impact, sales strategies, loan frauds were decidedly muted.

The insatiable appetite for the “Byju’s story” is a reflection of what’s truly possible in the tech age of education: a global edtech company, zoomed into local needs and wants, zooming out to create a global empire. Raveendran’s own US$400 million bet on his company, say experts and detractors, is a big push towards this goal. “We will all fail if Byju’s doesn’t have a successful IPO,” an investment professional told me, referring to the whole edtech sector.

Yikes and yay.

But this got me thinking, and I went looking for foreign edtechs who were interested in flipping the script. After all, if India is now the hottest, richest, most exciting edtech market (sorry, China), then it stands to reason that everyone wants a share of that pie.

As I learnt over the course of a week, though, there’s a formidable muscle that Indian edtechs have built. It’s like their own special superpower. 

To others looking in, it’s kryptonite.

Can you guess what I’m talking about?

Burning Man

Staying with the motif of music festivals, the way Indian edtechs spend on acquiring customers reminds me of Burning Man—the annual cult-ish art and music festival which ends with the burning of a large effigy. 

Now, Burning Man is literally about sticking it to “the Man”, a very literal expression of counterculture resistance. And Indian edtechs are, of course, on the opposite end of that spectrum. For them, each dollar burned on acquisition, sales, and marketing takes them one step closer to surviving the hectic capitalist race of their own creation. It’s not exactly a zero-sum game yet, but it’s graphically close to being one.

This week, Entrackr reported that Doubtnut, a self-proclaimed “product” company, spent close to Rs 52 to earn just one rupee of operating profit in the year ended March 2021.