“When I saw the first mail from the guys at LEAD, I said we might go into deal mode with this. We normally develop that kind of confidence only after one round of meeting with the pipeline companies. And remember that we are also very selective – we only evaluate one or two deals in parallel at a point in time. We had spent a long time in education till then, and this seemed to be the right kind of entrepreneur and experience. The mail itself displayed a certain decisiveness in its tonality, along with execution capacity.”
“It is a close relationship. We have seen them build out a high performance driven culture focused on integrity and educational excellence from close quarters and often been part of team meetings and town halls with their teams.”
“Their revisions of business plans have been upwards, always, and that is an interesting fact pattern.
As an example, their original ambition is now revised to impacting 8 million students by 2025. They are also very nimble at responding to challenges. Their business model gave them the unique situation of being able to plan by academic year. This means that if you miss a year’s target it is difficult to recover halfway through the year. But it also means you learn to plan for the whole year in advance.
They got really good at it fairly quickly. They set up a SWOT team to plan for the next year while not disturbing the current year’s education.”