Brijesh Aggarwal

About

The thesis behind it is a simple one that he has been circling for years: we are who we surround ourselves with.

Further reading: Brijesh Aggarwal on biography.wiki

Education

Aggarwal's interest in mathematics and finance led him to mechanical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, and afterwards to the Chartered Financial Analyst designation. The engineering-into-finance route is common enough in India to be almost a genre, but his came with an unusual prologue: immediately after high school he completed a research programme at the University of California's robotics lab.

That early exposure shaped how he thought about what he wanted to build, and he later returned to the University of California, Berkeley for a post-graduate degree in finance.

Investment banking

Aggarwal spent more than fifteen years in investment banking, including over eight years at Goldman Sachs in New York.

Alongside that work he taught financial modelling and certification courses to more than a thousand students as adjunct faculty for an education start-up in India — the first real indication of where he would eventually end up. Teaching a technical subject to a large number of students exposes very quickly which parts of a discipline are genuinely hard and which parts are only badly explained, and that distinction sits underneath most of what Pericles now does.

Pericles Academy

Pericles Academy provides Ivy League mentorship to students internationally, pairing high school students with Ivy League students and graduates across different specialisations.

The founding observation is that most children are never taught how to learn. They are handed syllabi, told what to memorise, and pushed toward outcomes before they have found anything they actually care about. Pericles inverts that order. It starts by helping a young student work out where their curiosity actually lives, and only then supplies the thinking habits, the method and the confidence to pursue it.

Mentorship is the mechanism because the gap it closes is not primarily one of information. A motivated sixteen-year-old can find the syllabus. What is harder to find is somebody a few years ahead who has already made the decisions in front of them, and who can say what mattered and what did not.

What comes next

Response to Pericles has run well beyond what Aggarwal expected, particularly across India and the Middle East, and it has sharpened his ambition rather than satisfied it. He believes both regions can set a considerably higher bar for scientific inquiry, research and entrepreneurship — and that raising it starts with how children are taught to think at twelve, not at twenty. He is building further programmes aimed squarely at that.

Outside work

Aggarwal is a PADI certified scuba diver and an ISSA certified fitness instructor, and a self-proclaimed star baker. He is a heavy reader, with a bias toward historical non-fiction, biography and business; among his favourites are Sapiens, Poor Charlie's Almanack, The Joys of Compounding, The Prize, Hamilton, Titan and Ron Chernow's biographies more generally.

He hikes, plays and watches tennis, and has travelled across the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, Hungary, Switzerland, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Sri Lanka, India and the United States. He is drawn to restaurants, comedy shows, Broadway and musicals.

When he winds down it is usually to jazz — Yanni, Malte Marten and Dhafer Youssef among the musicians he returns to — and to cooking a hearty meal for his parents.

Links

Professional Profiles

• LinkedIn
• Brijesh Aggarwal on biography.wiki

Pericles Academy

• Pericles Academy
• Pericles Academy on Instagram

Contact

Enquiries: inbox@brijesh-aggarwal.com

FAQ

What does Brijesh Aggarwal do?

Brijesh Aggarwal works as a Entrepreneur and Founder, Pericles Academy.

Where is Brijesh Aggarwal located?

Brijesh Aggarwal is based in India.

How can I contact Brijesh Aggarwal?

You can contact Brijesh Aggarwal via email at inbox@brijesh-aggarwal.com, or connect on LinkedIn.