Amazon Show’s Real-Life ‘Physics-Wallah’ is a College Dropout Who Built $100 Mn Startup

Alakh Pandey is the founder of PhysicsWallah, an ed-tech startup that joined the list of unicorns in India this year.

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Born in Uttar Pradesh, Alakh faced several hardships while growing up.

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When in class 8, he started conducting tuition classes for younger children to support his family.

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But this made him fall in love with teaching.

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Later, he dropped out of engineering college and worked in a coaching institute for a monthly salary of Rs 5,000.

He was widely appreciated among the students for his unique and engaging style of teaching, wherein also incorporated his love for theatre.

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Meanwhile, he launched his YouTube channel — “Physics Wallah” — in 2016.

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The channel offers educational content and guidance to students to crack several competitive exams like IIT JEE, NEET, etc.

With an aim to provide quality education at affordable rates, in 2017, he gave up coaching to focus on making content for the channel full-time.

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His practical approach and easy explanation of theories made him popular with students.

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Alakh’s YouTube channel eventually became popular garnering around 4,000 subscribers in 2017 to around 2 million in 2019.

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He even rejected offers he received from other edtech platforms in order to build his own, making them affordable and accessible for a large number of students.

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Currently, with a workforce of over 19,000, which includes teachers, associate professors, subject matter experts, and techies, the company is fast growing.

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Amazon is now gearing up to release a mini-series based on Pandey’s journey, named after his revolutionary edtech startup PhysicsWallah.

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