Unacademy CEO Gaurav Munjal announces no appraisal for employees while wearing a $400 Burberry t-shirt

Imagine you have been working at a unicorn startup, eagerly anticipating your appraisals, only to be abruptly informed that there will be none.

In a similar development, Edtech unicorn Unacademy's CEO Gaurav Munjal appeared at the company’s virtual town hall last week wearing a $400 Burberry T-shirt and announced that there would be no appraisals this year. 

He said that the company had not met their growth targets and therefore would not be holding appraisals for the workforce.

“I think 2023 was an average year for us. But 2024, if not great, was above average. But we did not hit our growth goals. The good part is that the burn is extremely low now, and we have a huge runway. And I kept saying that we don’t have a survival risk,” Gaurav Munjal said in the town hall.

"...But i urge all of you to look at the bigger picture, we are the one who are still standing while our competitors going down one by one and edtech has been a tough market...we all just to need to survive this phase," he said.

“It’s been tough, and that’s why I have one bad news that we won’t be able to do any appraisals this year,” said Munjal.

“I know I said that we will do appraisals two, three weeks ago, but when we started the process, we realised that we made a mistake.”

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Unacademy CEO shares news of no appraisal year while wearing a $400 tshirt
by u/Beneficial-Ad-9123 in StartUpIndia

Netizens reaction

A Reddit user named "Beneficial-Ad-9123" shared a snippet from Unacademy’s town hall, stating "This is Burberry Black Parker tshirt with embroidered logo. Yeah agreed that one shouldn't go after their personal stuff. But it is what it is."

“These CEO's won't lower their own standard of living but rather stop appraisals for the people who are running their businesses,” a user wrote.

“This is the same guy who used to travel in private jets and said it is justified because his time is just that valuable,” another recalled.

"Interesting to see when things are going well these guys talk about how they were so innovative, how they spotted an opportunity n blah. But when things go bad it’s always “Tough Market”, no ownership of wrong decisions they made," a third wrote.

"If ed tech was lucrative, Reliance would have been there already," a fourth wrote.