Byju’s has come under intense scrutiny recently from the public, its own users, regulators and government bodies. CEO and co-founder, Byju Raveendran in an interview with FE’s Salman SH and Rishi Raj, shares how the company has been managing expectations from regulators and how it’s resolving ethical questions raised against its business practices. Excerpts:


We understand that some of your courses are paid upfront for up to two to three years in one transaction and some of the users might choose to pay this as an EMI. How are you recognising these transactions in your books?

Wherever there is a services component or a (live) streaming component, it gets recognised in the same year in our books. Revenue from sales of products is recognised upfront and revenue from services are getting recognised across the consumption years. Now, in businesses like Akash and Whitehatjr, which is which were not accounted for in FY21, because it’s live classes and revenue from these businesses gets recognised based on the duration of the course.


Are you considering hiring a head of financial strategy or a CFO to ensure that delays in filing results don’t happen in the future?

There are multiple reasons for the delay, but we are already in the process to hire a person for heading our finance operations. We have already hired Amazon AWS CFO, who is playing a key role in our acquisitions and managing our subsidiaries. We will also hire a global CFO who will assist in taking the company public. Strengthening the finance function and controls is something which we’ve already started doing.


You have made several acquisitions in the past two years and diversified into various other courses. And there have been several layoffs reported. Do you think the idea of diversifying was good or was it, in hindsight, a mistake?

On layoffs, we have let go of a few people and that number is around 500 on a base of 50,000 employees that we have currently. That is just 1% of our total employee size that was let go. Our normal attrition on a month-on-month basis itself will be higher than that. Over the last 5-6 months, we have optimised functions or roles which were redundant across different acquisitions. In the last two years, on the growth versus profitability matrix, we were over-indexing on growth. Now, we are equally focussing on both.


Do you plan to raise any funding in the current environment? Also, your proposed IPO was supposed to happen in the US market, but with Sebi relaxing listing norms, is India now favourable?

On cash balance, we are very well capitalised. We have much more than billion dollars in cash. On the proposed IPO, like every company globally, we have also pushed it to a future date because of global turmoil. We have deferred the IPO by at least 9-12 months and we’ll wait-and-watch in terms of how the macros improving or changing, and then we’ll decide. Both a US listing and an Indian listing are still open for us.

Also Read: Byju’s posts Rs 4.5k-cr loss in FY21 


Recently, there have been reports of Byju’s sales team being under a lot of stress to sell courses and loans to even students and parents who are from impoverished backgrounds. How do you kind of plan to fix these issues and the public image fall out with these complaints?

Since we have 50,000 people, there will always be a few people who will try short-circuiting the process, but it’s not a systemic issue. Complaints regarding aggressive sales, misselling and reports on sales team attrition have been debunked by our incoming investors. In the incidents (regarding work culture) there is scope for improvement in the sales culture. It’s not that the entire Byju’s team has been impacted by this culture.