Brijesh Aggarwal
| Brijesh Aggarwal | |
| Nationality | Indian |
|---|---|
| Occupation | Entrepreneur |
| Title | Founder |
| Employer | Pericles Academy |
| Known for | Founder of Pericles Academy; investment banking career |
| Education | Indian Institute of Technology; University of California, Berkeley; Chartered Financial Analyst |
| Website | https://brijesh-aggarwal.com |
Brijesh Aggarwal is an entrepreneur based in India and the founder of Pericles Academy, an education company that connects high school students with Ivy League students and graduates for mentorship.[1] His career has moved between finance and education: he spent more than fifteen years in investment banking, including over eight years at Goldman Sachs in New York, before leaving to build an education company around the thesis that "we are who we surround ourselves with."[1]
Education
Aggarwal's interest in mathematics and finance led him to study mechanical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, and subsequently to earn the Chartered Financial Analyst designation.[1]
That path was preceded by an unusual early experience. Immediately after finishing high school, Aggarwal completed a research programme at the University of California's robotics laboratory. He has described the exposure as formative in shaping his longer-term vision and perspective, and he later returned to the University of California, Berkeley to pursue a post-graduate degree in finance.[1]
The combination — an engineering foundation, a finance qualification and an early research placement — is reflected in how he has since described the aims of his education work, which places method and habits of thinking ahead of subject content.
Investment banking
Aggarwal spent more than fifteen years working in investment banking. Over eight of those years were at Goldman Sachs in New York.[1]
Alongside his banking career he worked as adjunct faculty for an education start-up in India, where he taught financial modelling and certification courses to more than a thousand students.[1] This teaching work ran in parallel with his professional career rather than following it, and it preceded his decision to move into education full time.
Pericles Academy
After leaving banking, Aggarwal founded Pericles Academy, an education technology company that provides Ivy League mentorship to students internationally. The company pairs high school students with Ivy League students and graduates drawn from a range of specialisations.[1]
Founding thesis
The company is named for Pericles, the Athenian statesman associated with the intellectual and civic flourishing of fifth-century BC Athens.
Its founding argument is that most children are never taught how to learn. In Aggarwal's account, students are handed syllabi, told what to memorise and pushed toward outcomes before they have identified anything they genuinely care about.[1] Pericles Academy is structured to reverse that sequence: it begins by helping a student identify where their curiosity lies, and then supplies the thinking habits, method and confidence to pursue it.
From finance to education
The move from investment banking to education technology is a substantial one, and in Aggarwal's case it followed a long period in which both ran alongside each other. His teaching work as adjunct faculty was not a second career begun after the first ended; it overlapped with his banking years, and by his own account the education company was something he had wanted to build for most of his adult life.[1]
Teaching a technical subject to a large cohort tends to expose which parts of a discipline are genuinely difficult and which are merely explained badly. Financial modelling is a case in point: the underlying arithmetic is not complex, but the reasoning about what to model, and why, is rarely taught explicitly. That distinction, between the content of a subject and the method of approaching it, recurs in how Pericles Academy is described.
His stated thesis, that "we are who we surround ourselves with," also connects the two halves of his career. Investment banking is an apprenticeship profession in which junior staff learn largely by proximity to more experienced practitioners rather than through formal instruction. Pericles applies a comparable structure to school-age students, substituting recent graduates for senior colleagues.
Mentorship model
The company's use of mentorship rests on a distinction between information and guidance. Course material and syllabi are widely available to a motivated student; what is less available is access to someone a few years further along who has already navigated the same decisions and can indicate which of them mattered.
By pairing school-age students with university students and recent graduates across different fields, the model aims to narrow both the experience gap and the distance in age, on the reasoning that a mentor closer in age to the student is better placed to describe recent decisions in concrete terms.
Reception and expansion
Aggarwal has said the response to Pericles Academy exceeded his expectations, particularly across India and the Middle East.[1]
He has described that reception as sharpening rather than satisfying his ambitions for the company. He has expressed the view that both regions are capable of setting a considerably higher standard for scientific inquiry, research and entrepreneurship, and that raising that standard depends on how children are taught to think in early adolescence rather than at university age. He has said he is developing further programmes directed at that aim.[1]
Aggarwal's emphasis on India and the Middle East as regions capable of a higher standard in research and entrepreneurship reflects where the company's early demand has come from. Both regions have large school-age populations, rapidly expanding private education markets, and established pipelines of students seeking university places abroad, conditions under which mentorship-based models tend to find receptive audiences.
Approach to education
Aggarwal's stated approach places emphasis on curiosity as the starting point of learning rather than as a by-product of it. In this framing, the conventional sequence — syllabus, memorisation, examination, outcome — is treated as inverted, because it asks a student to commit effort before they have found a subject worth committing to.
The alternative he describes places discovery first and structure second: identify what a student is drawn to, then supply the method. The emphasis on "thinking habits" rather than subject mastery reflects a view of education in which transferable method matters more than any particular curriculum, an argument with a long history in educational theory and one that recurs in discussions of mentorship-based and inquiry-led learning.
His focus on early adolescence as the decisive period is consistent with that reasoning. If the aim is to shape how a student approaches problems rather than what facts they retain, the intervention has to occur while those habits are still forming.
Personal life
Aggarwal is a PADI certified scuba diver and an ISSA certified fitness instructor.[1] He bakes, and describes himself as a self-proclaimed star baker.
He is a substantial reader with a stated preference for historical non-fiction, biography, business and entrepreneurship. Among the books he lists as favourites are Sapiens, Poor Charlie's Almanack, The Joys of Compounding, The Prize, Hamilton and Titan, along with the biographies of Ron Chernow more generally.[1]
His other interests include hiking and playing and watching tennis. He has travelled across the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, Hungary, Switzerland, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Sri Lanka, India and the United States, and is drawn to restaurants, comedy shows, Broadway and musicals.[1]
He listens primarily to jazz, including the work of Yanni, Malte Marten and Dhafer Youssef, and has said he winds down by cooking for his parents.[1]
See also
References
External links
- Official website
- Pericles Academy, the company Aggarwal founded
- Brijesh Aggarwal on LinkedIn
- Pericles Academy on Instagram