The billion-dollar company that's just getting started

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Speaker A: Various 18 Kia ora koutou kato welcome to business Is Boring. Crimson Education is an extraordinary company. News came out that it's operating at a $300 million run rate and was recently valued at over a billion. The company helps students gain admission to top universities no matter where they come from. And their founder, uh, Jamie Beaton, knows as much about gaining access and excelling in these environments as anyone on Earth. He's been accepted into more than 25 of the world's best universities and graduated with degrees from Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, Yale, Tsinghua, Upen and more. Crimson is now building a global school that's changing how students learn and progress. It's a huge opportunity and perhaps one of the most underappreciated stories in the New Zealand ecosystem. Joining now to talk through the journey is founder, uh, CEO Jamie Beaton Timakwe. Thank you for being here.

Speaker D: It's my pleasure.

Speaker A: Hey, so yeah, let's go back to the beginning of the Crimson story. You began at like 17. What sparked the idea? Uh, and tell us about like, yeah, getting into 25 universities out of high school.

Speaker D: So education's always been massive in my family. Um, my granddad dropped out of high school early and moved to New Zealand, and he, uh, worked in the merchant navy for a long time. Um, when he came to New Zealand, his message to my mum was, education's everything. You gotta take it seriously. So she applied as an out of zone applicant to Eggs Epsom Girls Grammar and was able to have an amazing education there. Went to the University of Auckland and. And then I guess when it was my turn, my mom told me, actually, education for you, uh, is really the gateway forward. And so from a young age, I loved academics. It wasn't until I was about 13, I was on the train out from GI out to school, and there was a boy next to me called Ben Kornfeld who had gotten into Yale, and he was 18, American, Kiwi guy. And he said, you really should think about these global schools. And so that really changed the trajectory of my own learning journey. And from 13 to 18, I really made it my mission to get, get into these top schools. So the process basically involves academics, extracurriculars, leadership, essays. So I made that my mission for four years, got into this whole variety of schools. Um, and really the adventure began. And in the first kind of couple of weeks post the admissions results, I had all these students asking me from my school, other schools, hey, first of all, why are you even thinking about these schools? Why would you want to go in the first place? And secondly, how do you get in? And that really birthed the idea of Crimson in those early days, because I had about eight months between high school ending and Harvard beginning. Um, so that really was the genesis of Crimson.

Speaker A: That's wild. Hey. Cause, like, those are such storied names and institutions, and they feel not only like, you know, they're far away, obviously, physically, but far away in terms of, like, do you need to have, um, you know, intergenerational wealth behind you? Do you need to, um, do you need to be like a star college football player or something? You know, like, what do you need to do to get into these? And so even to have the idea that, that it could be accessible or attainable to you, it's so, um, alien, right?

Speaker D: 100%. In our family, none of us had ever lived, worked in the US we had no one at all that we knew actually over there. In fact, when I got to Harvard, there was only one Kiwi I knew on school, which was this guy called Steven Mackereth. He was two years older than me, and he is so off the planet smart in math and physics that when I chat with him post three sentences, I can't really Follow you know, what he's saying when he gets technical. So I was thinking, man, if he's the only guy that I know over here, you know, I'm really shooting the dark, I guess. Um, the reality today, though is if you earn less than 380,000 kiwi dollars a year as a family, which is almost the entire country, it's free to go to Harvard if you get in for the undergraduate degree. Because there is an arms race at these universities for young talent. So we have these amazing students across the country, like Cohen Hamana from, you know, for example, Rotorua, who got into Harvard. And, you know, these students typically are paying less than the cost of a local New Zealand university. Now, if, uh, you come from a higher income family, you might pay the full tuition and that's when you're paying those higher fee prices. Um, but it is scaled based on income. And fundamentally that financial aid system makes it very affordable. But it is a bit of a stereotype from, you know, shows like Gossip Girl that the people that go to, for example, Yale as some sort of blue, blue blood Manhattan family, um, but actually they've become very globalised.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: Ah. And it's, you know, the absolute tourism, right, that talent is distributed, uh, evenly, but opportunity and access is not. And I don't know if many people would know that as a person who's not an American, that you would qualify for that, uh, lower income fee, uh, forgiveness. Right.

Speaker D: I would say in the last 12 years, the culture has changed dramatically in New Zealand. When we first began Crimson, there were very few Kiwis applying for academics systematically. Now, all across the country, across all of our major cities, you know, rural communities, you know, there are students applying to these schools. Um, one of our young scholars, Jade Skeets, was in Keri Keri doing the NCA and she got intrigued by these schools and she joined our online school, Crimson Global Academy. And after three years, she applied to Princeton and gained admission for computer science. And she's now a rising sophomore, which means she's in her second year there now. And from my understanding, she's the first in Keri Keri to get into Princeton, you know, uh, in the history. So, um, that's a good example of this phenomena. But I would say there is ambition spreading across the country and Even platforms like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube are democratizing this. So a student in Rotorua can follow a streamer on NYU's campus and get the vibe. So I would say that, um, information is diffusing really fast. And fortunately, you know, the ambition acceleration in the last decade has been pretty epic to witness.

Speaker A: So if someone does, you know, a student does go, hey, man, maybe I could have global ambitions. How do they work with you? And what kind of form do the services take for, I guess, kind of like the major offering of what Crimson does with the placement work.

Speaker D: So the flagship is we look at a student's academics, extracurriculars, leadership, what they have so far, and maybe they don't. They come to us when they're 14, they're not sure what they want to study, maybe they're choosing what curriculum, something like this. And we'll look at what they have at the moment and then what that ambition may look like. Many students come to us with a very foggy idea of this, but they have this burning fire inside them. They want to give it a crack. They're not sure if that means going to a Stanford or, you know, what exactly that entails, but they come and chat with us from there. We can give them various assessments, uh, academic assessments, get a sense of, you know, what, they're particularly strong in the sporting field, and begin developing a game plan for how we can elevate their candidacy over time. Often that then involves, you know, four years of intensive academics. It's competitions, it's research papers, it's launching a club, maybe creating a podcast like our Student Adi and Pakaranga. After all of those years, you then apply to these universities. Typically, you know, it could be 12, 13 US schools, maybe five UK schools, some Aussie schools, and then you get those offers. So, for example, that boy Artie, who created a podcast called the Economics Review, where he interviewed about 100 faculty that loved economics around the world. He, uh, got into Yale, Stanford and Wharton, and he's now rocking it at Stanford. Um, pretty epic. So it's often about a four year journey with us. Um, and it's a combination of mentors, both here in New Zealand, but actually many from around the world. So you're often speaking to folks in the US or for example, in Singapore as part of the SWAT team, helping you get to that ambition, that kind

Speaker A: of like, um, coaching or preparatory services to get into, uh, top institutions has been quite established in those markets. Right. For years. Tell us about, like, your approach to your, you know, really democratizing it and opening it up around the world and in markets like this, where we haven't been used to it, it feels like quite an alien concept, maybe, but it is really well established, you know, in the U.S. right.

Speaker D: So it's really funny, um, when I first began Crimson, uh, a legendary investor of ours, the late Julian Robertson, encouraged me to go off to China and I visited these companies over there, like New Oriental and Tele Education. And I went to go visit, you know, for example, some of their exec team. And I'd gone to these massive buildings in the middle of Beijing and Shanghai and see these, you know, huge organizations, um, and, you know, to give you a sense of the scale, at the peak, these companies reached 30, 40 billion valuations, um, impacting, you know, millions of students across the world and, you know, really ushering in an age of study abroad for Chinese students. Now, when we first began Crimson, there were many countries which were as foreign in applying to schools as New Zealand. We went to places like, you know, Vietnam or Brazil, you know, Russia, even Kazakhstan. And we began with those types of places where there was a bit of a knowledge gap as our product got more sophisticated. We then moved into markets like Singapore, Korea, China. And then actually about eight years ago, we, uh, set up shop in the US Originally in California. And today Crimson is the largest provider of college admissions counseling within North America for American kids, which is pretty entertaining and also the, um, most popular in these foreign countries as well. And really the differentiation is on a couple of areas. The first is we've taken a very, I, uh, would say performance, um, driven approach to this. So the same way you might train for professional sports, we train our students, uh, in a very high stakes way over four years with, you know, SWAT teams of mentors, hundreds of hours, amazing resources, content, insights. And so there's an element of sophistication that hasn't existed before in the industry. Kind of based on my own high school journey a little bit. The second piece is bringing technology and data to, to, to bear. This was a brick and mortar offline industry. Maybe a mom who got into UCLA helping a bunch of friends in their neighborhood. And we've brought a lot of sophistication similar to maybe Bloomberg helping financial analysts, uh, on Wall Street. And I would say the third dynamic is that these schools have become far more competitive. And so NYU, when I first began Crimson, admitted 40% of students. Now that's down to 5% for NYU Stern. And that surge in applicants means that the bar is going up. And so you need to kind of often begin earlier. And Crimson's really set up for that success. So we've been able to really, uh, I guess take this college admissions market by storm. And it's funny because New Zealand is one of the most relaxed education environments. But as we expanded. We were in places like Seoul which are very high intensity and actually harder to get in than from America. So by the time we entered the US market, we actually had a really sophisticated coaching engine, software platform and that's helped us to rock the market, which honestly surprised me because I would have thought some Americans would have cracked this a long time ago.

Speaker A: Yes. So maybe in America they're working more off networks and old boy networks, whatever. While here you're working off a meritocracy.

Speaker D: Yeah. Hardworking hustlers smash through those walls. That's right.

Speaker A: And tell us about like the trajectory change that this can unlock. Right. Because I mean it's a serious investment if someone's going from 14 to 18 and doing this kind of approach. But what have you seen have been like the trajectory changes for people's lives by attending these universities.

Speaker D: So first of all, on a personal note, before I headed to the States, I thought entrepreneurship meant unemployment. I thought I don't know what Wall street was as a concept and had no idea. I took a level economics when I was 17 and I got intrigued by this world. Began reading online. Within 18 months at Harvard, you know, I was um, being mentored by Larry Summers, who's the former president and now is on the board of OpenAI. I uh, landed a job at Tiger with the late Julian Robertson and I was exposed to this crazy ambitious world. I was able to raise capital for Crimson, elevate my ambitions from a New Zealand coaching company to something totally global. And um, that all happened really quick for our students. Um, some of these stories are really uh, nuts. So for example Zhong from Pakaranga, he uh, went through to Caltech, now he's at Tesla, got into mit. Or for example you know, take someone like Feng Zhou. Grew up in China, um, came through uh, to Rangitota College, was Ducks here, got into Harvard, Stanford, Goldman Sachs. Nancy Lu, she um, went off to Harvard, Kennedy School, came back, she's in the national government now. Um, you know, uh, on the, for example academic side, Seyoun young boy in uh, Australia, he was considering staying locally in unsw. He then went off to Princeton. Now he's at uh, MIT Computer Science PhD, the most challenging PhD in the world for computer science. Um, so this really unlocks the ability to parachute into the world's most fastest growing economy in these hubs like Silicon Valley and Wall street, get into the kind of companies like Facebook, Meta, Google, McKinsey, receive that world class training and um, then be able to really compete uh, on the world's Biggest stage. So I would say it's like a teleportation chamber of opportunity. Um, and, um, you know, ideally, uh, the world didn't have this dynamic where going to the universities is the gatekeeper to many of these opportunities. But for a Kiwi, there's no faster way to drop into Silicon Valley than through a Stanford or through a UC Berkeley.

Speaker A: Yeah, and it's like that Sugar Mountain idea, right? Like, if you want to go to opportunities, go to the place where the greatest concentration of talent, experience, awareness, you know, people's paying attention to it, is happening. And you know, if you can excel on that bigger stage, that's going to be a lot better than being excellent in a place that no one even thinks about. Right.

Speaker D: Although, you know, on the flip side, many of our young Kiwis who head abroad, you know, they really are excited to come back and help build New Zealand. Many have aspirations to build companies here, um, you know, support nonprofits. Um, some of them want to go into government. You know, many of our, uh, young, um, Tiara, uh, Kupe scholars from the Mori community, for example, want to come back and serve, you know, uh, in the government. And so there's actually a lot of this talent that is charging up to, you know, it's almost like Dragon Ball Z, Super Saiyan evolution, ready to come back and bring what they know, you know, their knowledge back home. So I would say, um, uh, that is really exciting because I actually think as a remote country like New Zealand, if we're very inward focused and you know, we rely on local organizations to train everyone, local universities, local schools, it's very tough to really compete in a global landscape. Like, you need the folks that go and work in OpenAI or learn from Elon Musk at Tesla, who then pick up those skills and they create the next, you know, halters or the next. They create the next, you know, pushpays or whatever, um, and um, you know, the 10x that we need to really grow the economy. So I do think, um, that learning loop where you go global and come back is critical.

Speaker A: There's, you know, that nice idea in startups, you know, eat your own dog food. Right? And uh, your version of eating your own dog food has been going to applying, attending and graduating from a string of the world's best universities. Tell us about that process. And like, what have you learned by attending? Um, you know, I have to look at it. Cause they're so Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, Yale, uh, Tsinghua, ah, Upenn, you know, and more institutions. Right? Like, what have you learned about what it takes to access the calibre of people there, the different experiences you have across these schools.

Speaker D: So I guess firstly when it comes to eating your own dog food, my equivalent is, uh, appetizer, main dessert, uh, you know, and then doing it several times over. Um, and I guess part of the fun of Crimson is I've been able to do something that I just genuinely love, you know, from a young age. Education really was, uh, super exciting to me. You know, new knowledge, new ideas, new concepts. And so I guess by going through these different universities, um, I've had a lot of different things. The first thing is practically, you know, I began crimson as a 17 year old. My experience was working at a Porto's in Mission Bay, flipping burgers, then interning for the Ice House. And, um, then I basically got into this. So going to Stanford Business School gave me a really great toolkit for managing scale in Crimson. I'm leveling up as a CEO. Um, going to law school at Yale helped me figure out, you know, how to navigate the legal complexity of so many different, you know, geographies, jurisdictions, ip, employment law, M and A contracts, et cetera. Doing my DPhil at Oxford, which is their PhD, helped me develop the pedagogy for Crimson Global Academy, which became our, uh, global online school. So many of the first programs, the first five that I did, actually served a very practical purpose in helping me build milestones for Crimson. I'd say the latest, uh, degrees have been much more of a, um, fun filled rodeo. From military studies to healthcare policy to global affairs and M, I would say for Crimson students, it means that I can actually share real specific insights about what these cultures are like, what they're looking for. I can connect them to men, mentors that have come from these school communities. I'm part of all of these alumni networks. And when a family asks, for example, hey, I'm in Xi' an in China, uh, America looks really unsafe right now. You know, what is it like to actually be at Stanford? I'm not answering this. Theoretically, based on an experience 20 years ago, actually I can share what it was like when I was on campus, you know, a couple of weeks back. So it really gives a level of precision to our guidance and an authenticity. And we've been able to attract really the world's best team of college admissions counselors. And I think part of it is because, you know, Feng Jo and I, we take on students, you know, I probably spent 10,000 plus hours coaching students one on one. And um, that fuels, um, Our culture

Speaker A: and that kind of, you know, the person who you sat on the train beside who said, or the bus beside who said, um, you know, maybe you could have this bigger view and ambition like that idea. If you see it, you can be it. Like you've been to all these places you show. It's possible, uh, even though, you know, as an outside observer it may seem kind of impossible to be able to do a doctorate at the same time as scaling a company that's huge with operations and so many markets and the like. So that's kind of wild. Like, how do you, how do you actually kind of like manage all of that?

Speaker D: Okay, so, um, uh, in undergrad I would say it was quite brutal. So I was working um, almost full time for Tiger Management as an investor. I was scaling Crimson and I was cranking out classes at Harvard to typically I was doing six classes a semester rather than four and a lot of the more advanced graduate classes. So my sleep was not the uh, best. You know, I was cranking through, you know, four, five, six hour nights. Um, I was doing a lot of delivery, uh, food and um, you know, I think uh, those years are pretty intense. Um, I would say once I sort of got a bit more sink and balance in my life, um, and I got a bit more used to delegating and sort of managing different things, I was able to find a more stable equilibrium. I would say Stanford Business School was still pretty intense because I was on campus in California for a lot of those classes. While I had to be, you know, also driving Crimson really hard. In recent years, as Crimson has scaled, we have got an amazing executive team, country managers around the world. You know, we're nearly 900 full time staff, uh, now, uh, globally, just over now I think. And um, uh, that means that, you know, if I'm for example, taking an online military studies, uh, lecture, um, it isn't going to lead the whole house to burn down. And so I would say over time I've found that balance. And you know, these days I probably spend 10% of my time on academic fun, um, and then 90%, uh, grinding hard on my Crimson adventures.

Speaker A: And is it invigorating to kind of have three dreams running at once, right, like scaling a startup, being a, ah, hedge fund, uh, you know, active in the hedge fund world and studying at Harvard. Like sounds like, kind of like, you know, don't just pick one, run all three.

Speaker D: Super. Uh, and um, you know, I think there are so many exciting things you could do in the world that you know, uh, time is the greatest constraint. You know, there are so many fun, exciting challenges. And this is true for, you know, all of our students. Like they've got to make hard calls, what they commit to. Um, but certainly, you know, when I was going through, um, these, for example, you know, the first um, stock that I jumped into at Tiger, there'd been this documentary, Blackfish, which had really scathed the company SeaWorld. And I had this view that actually speaking, um, to a lot of these animal scientists, uh, um, the documentary was a little bit exaggerated and actually probably the company would do quite well. And so I, you know, found myself interviewing execs from SeaWorld and visiting all these theme parks and learning about, you know, um, you know, uh, the science behind this. And you know, we bought the stock. That kind of experience was, you know, a baptism by fire and you know, uh, zoology and you know, economics and finance and public relations. And so I did find the stock investing journey so fascinating. There's also a psychological element to what does everyone else perceive about a certain company and then what does it take to actually build a world class enduring company? So that was amazing. And I think it gave me a perspective on how to build a good, a good business, which I'm always aspiring to do at Crimson. I'm thinking about, you know, how can you truly uh, build something enduring that um, really stands the test of time. Um, but I would say being able to bounce between them was very, very fun. Of course at a certain point though, you know, you've got to commit, dig in and compound. And you know, uh, any entrepreneurial journey, I tell my students this. Choose what you build well, because even if it goes well, in fact you're going to be doing it for at least 10 years, typically, uh, maybe even longer, 20. And many of these huge success stories like Nvidia, it isn't a five year journey, it's like a 30 year journey. And so if that's going to be a third of your working life, you better love it. Or, you know, a half of your working life, you better love it. So, um, I do think that you can experiment for a while, but then, you know, at some stage you got to commit.

Speaker A: It's really interesting what you say there about that. Um, you know, being able to hold a position that's contrary to the market. On SeaWorld, for example, and you know, Nvidia, they were very much in their own world with when they decided to double down on AI and move from um, games. Right. Games graphics, uh, focus. And that idea of being like non consensus and right. And being comfortable in being non consensus is so powerful. If you want to get a kind of, you know, you definitely want to be right as well. It's non consensus. But if you want to make something that's, like, really significant, how have you found that in the context of the Crimson journey? Because I think reflection for me would be that I don't think people have, like, properly understood the scale of the ambition, the scale of the revenue, um, you know, what kind of, like, impact it's having. Uh, and, you know, when people have seen the valuations, people have maybe questioned it or the like, how have you found that? And, you know, was there something that you learned through that time in hedge fund management and being comfortable being non consensus?

Speaker D: I mean, um, Vivek Ramaswamy in the US is an interesting quote, which is to build a billion dollar company, you have to be non consensus and then write, um. And I think the reality is there would be no Crimson if this was all obvious at the start. Um, for me, when I went through high school, I saw this interesting system where I viewed education as being so incredibly high stakes, so high leverage. But, you know, there are very few folks that kind of understood this gateway to these universities. And, um, that makes sense because they haven't been to them, they haven't sort of lived that experience. And so they have this perception about it. And so, you know, I'm frankly very grateful for the fact that it was misunderstood, because that was actually what gave us the opportunity to rise and build this on the world stage. As far as, you know, controversy and being doubted and everything. Certainly, um, for the first five years in our journey, you know, at parts, it was painful, to be honest. Uh, I'm a very proud Kiwi. And, um, you know, I think, uh, when you're fighting with, you know, formidable Chinese competitors, Russian competitors, trying to run you out of the market, um, you know, uh, having your home team cheering you on is nice. And I think at points in the journey when it was, um, a little bit, you know, dark in terms of the local, um, perception of Crimson, um, I think that was painful psychologically. But I think ultimately I was very convicted based on the students that I was working with, the experience that they were having. Take this boy, Samil. He went from Hamilton. We taught him computer science. He got into five Ivies, got into Stanford. Um, he raised millions for his Y Combinator company. Um, he's now at JP Morgan doing investment banking. And seeing his journey up close, hundreds of hours with him, you know, I just shrug it off. Because ultimately I know the impact that it's having on these students and that gave me resilience during those darker times. And we also had a great culture around us of folks that had experienced international education. It had transformed their lives. And so I think, um, you know, uh, we were, we were really fueled up by that. So I think it actually made us stronger in those early years. And Crimson has a very high, uh, retention of our folks. Um, think about Penny. You know, she was with us as a chief people officer for nearly four years. She came back to scale Crimson Global Academy working. We have many of these Crimson lifers that um, really believe in the culture because they've seen this firsthand and they've seen that inflection and perception as well. Um, and so, uh, I think it builds a great culture and it isn't necessarily just, um, let's say criticism or critique. It's also just any startup you're running against, uh, almost impossible odds. The chance that you can kind of break out, get to your series B, C, build a global company, crack into the U.S. all this stuff, very difficult. And so you have to have a level of delusional self belief to keep pushing. Um, and I think, you know, you know, I see that in my mum, for example, uh, with her own entrepreneurial journey and um, you know, that, that fuel is important.

Speaker A: And the wild thing is, you know, we'll take a break and then come back in a moment to chat through what could even be the bigger part of the business, like what you mentioned there with what you're building with Penny. Ah, Barton with the Crimson Global Academy. You know, we've talked so far about the um, you know, admissions support, uh, program which is the biggest part of your revenue today. Right. But perhaps this education piece could be the biggest part of the company. So let's take a quick little break and come back in a moment to talk about Crimson Global Academy.

Speaker B: This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales using automation, analytics and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more@accenture.com Spotify this episode is brought to you by Welch's Fruit Snacks. Back to school season can be tough on parents, but choosing a snack you and your kids can both get behind doesn't have to be. Stock up On Welch's Fruit Snacks made with whole fruit and now made with no artificial dyes. It's a snack kids already love and one you can feel good about giving them. Go back to school with Welch's Fruit Snacks now made with no artificial dyes.

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Speaker A: Hey, so yep. Tell us about what's going on with Crimson Global Academy. So at Worker previously we helped a bit with the initial kind of brand of that and I remember kind of looking into it and going, whoa. There isn't a global high school brand in the way that, you know, Harvard's a global um, higher education brand. Right. Yet there's people all over the world who want to be in the um, the top level of these things. There's these massive trends around online learning and you know, uh, distance learning and, and all of these kind of elements. AI enabled education just felt like this huge opportunity and then seeing how you've built it recently, um, is so interesting. So yeah, tell us what the vision is there and what stage you're at at the moment.

Speaker D: So let's start with a physical school today. Let's say you've got a school in Keri Keri, like my student Jade. The reality is that school's gotta hire teachers that live near that school. It's got to offer extracurriculars on site that they can actually source locally. If they wanna give career guidance, they typically have to find people living nearby to come and chat to the kids. That is ultimately super constrained in today's world. What it leads to is guidance counseling. That's super local at least and often very out of sync with what's happening on the world stage. Um, when it comes to teachers, it's hard to source the world's best teachers in a certain area. And actually even beyond necessarily the quality of the teacher, um, even just the availability, there's often chronic shortages there. Then when it comes to extracurriculars, you're often having every school reinvent certain wheels. Enter Crimson Global Academy. Now a, uh, student can be in any school, uh, and they can tap into our full suite of subjects across the A levels. Which is a world class curriculum, the American high school diploma, the ap, the advanced placement. And they can take anything from law to machine learning, computer science, um, in their school at any speed they like. And typically in high school you're constrained based on your age. If you're a good student, you just artificially are slowed down based on your age. In this, you can rip through school any pace. Like for example Tristan Pang, who finished A level math when he was 13. When it comes to teachers, we source teachers who are the best from all around the world. They can be living in Waiki island, they can be living in Spain, we don't care as long as they love their students and they've got world class, uh, academic skills to guide our students. Now when it comes to extracurriculars, our students can tap into work experience programs with companies like Ferrari where they can be sitting in New Zealand and learning about mechanical engineering as part of a Ferrari case team, um, through Crimson. Or when it comes to research in New Zealand, the idea of doing research in high school is just not a thing. Uh, in America and California, most kids are doing multiple research papers when they're in high school. If they're applying for a Caltech or a Stanford. Through Crimson Global Academy, you can work with Ivy League professors, you can complete research papers. So essentially the point is, wherever you are in the world, whether it be in New Zealand or Manhattan, you can have this truly world class education off a global standard across all the various domains. And physical, uh, presence is no longer a barrier. Now for a parent, it's actually very painful. Let's say you've got a fast paced career in a certain city, you're tethered to a certain school, um, and you can't move even if you know your career calls you otherwise. So a lot of families make big sacrifices to be in a certain location for five years or 13 years. And this also liberates that as well. So what is CGA today? We've got about 3,000 students across the world. We have the most, uh, rigorous accreditation called the Western association of Schools and Colleges. We're actually the only school in New Zealand school to get that, uh, took three years. Bit of a pain, but fantastic. Um, we have a thousand full time students that use our school as their full school. And now we've got all these Kiwis across the country that uh, have used our school to get into the world's best universities, but also local options too. And the key thing is with Crimson Global Academy, our students aren't just focused on you know, the Harvards and the Yales. This is for any Kiwi who wants an ambitious education that is really able to take them anywhere from local universities to actually jumping straight into building a company, whatever. So that's really the vision for UM CJ we've been executing on um, it's been led by an amazing principal, Mark Phillips and formerly John Morris. Um, uh, and he's now an advisor to us. He um, was the Auckland grammar headmaster for 20 years. And also Tomi Hirohoshi who's the head of the Stanford online high school. And he really has built the world's number one online high school by academics. So it's a Rockstar Avengers like team of educators with a really inspired vision to help young Kiwis and students around the world reaching that world class high school experience.

Speaker A: I was really interested to see recently that after you know, starting this as a purely online kind of approach with I believe some kind of in person meetups as um, people would like them to have actually seen you purchase a school, a campus and um, broaden out the offering there. Tell us about that meld of you know, traditional kind of learning approaches in a physical environment and, and what you're doing uh, with the online approach.

Speaker D: So with Crimson Global Academy the way it was initially conceived is students would be at physical schools anywhere and we would plug in and help solve those problems. Extra subjects, faster learning, extra activities like research. As I mentioned during COVID there were many students coming to us full time. And then we rapidly realized that you know, full time learners were a really important segment. And in our school we've got a whole variety of folks from world class athletes and need flexibility as they perform on the world stage or competitive academics, uh, who are so far ahead of their school they need that cune curated environment. We've got folks living in rural farms around New Zealand and we provide all of their schooling for them. So full time has emerged as a very powerful category. Um, now Crimson's got offices in 20 plus countries so we've been doing these meetups where students come in across Tokyo or across Sydney and they do for example career sessions or they do just social getups or they go play laser tag or whatever which um, is really important. They do extracurriculars like Model UN or debating the Physical School. Uh, a couple of reasons. The first thing is there is a um, group of learners who really learn best in a physical environment. Um, online requires motivation. It requires um, you know, social dynamics outside of school to be very strong. So the physical school means we can actually begin um, you know, supporting um, students that need that environment with the benefits of online, all fully integrated. So rather than coordinating between our school and you know, a normal offline school, we have that full stack amazing world class education, you know, right here, you know, 50 meters from the beach. So pretty awesome. Um, and um, you know, we thought it was a great opportunity, particularly for New Zealand. And, and generally what I do, um, both as a patriotic Kiwi and also, um, as it's a place we know best, is a lot of our more radical experiments. We tend to um, you know, first test the New Zealand. And so when it came to ideating Crimson Global Academy, when it came to for example launching our research offering, we often start with our Kiwis, um, and see how it works and then scale globally. And so the ambition really is to um, have ah, our Crimson age school serve as a rollout, ah, blueprint for these campuses around the world. Uh, and the school's already almost full. Um, and it's really exciting actually seeing the culture in that environment.

Speaker A: How cool. And like piloting it here and then taking it world part. Like what do you see as the future of education as we've got this magic moment right with all of the confluence of these incredible megatrends around, being able to be anywhere around AI supported education. Like nowadays when I try and help my kids with their science homework, it very quickly gets above what I understand. And ChatGPT is helping both of us. You know, like it's absolutely phenomenal. The tools that are at handwrite. Where do you see things going over the next five to 10 years and what role is Crimson going to play in it?

Speaker D: So I guess firstly, um, AI is dramatically leveling up our students across the world who are really engaged learners because it lets you rip through content at a much faster pace. To give you a funny example, recently I was doing some exams at Cambridge and you know, uh, I probably shouldn't say this, but these classes were supposed to be a year long. Now because I was really hectic with my um, academic adventures and you know, uh, building Crimson and stuff like this, um, I had to study in a very compressed format for these exams. Now I was able to use GPT to help me summarize 600 plus readings. Um, I was able to use it to, you know, grade my mock essays that I was writing and condense that learning process from what would be months into about, you know, 12 days. Now our students practically, what this means is they're gonna be able to get through five years of high School material in two years. If they wanna start learning about product design when they're 16, they can. And we have all of these students building companies on lovable and stuff, um, when they're in high school. So, long story short, this is gonna be one of the true accelerators of human potential. And also it collapses distance as well. You don't have to be sitting next to Stanford in a research lab to learn about some of these things. You don't need to use, um, for example, a certain relationship on campus at Yale to figure out how to use Python or something like this. So, um, I guess going back to my high school adventures, my mom, um, sacrificed a lot to get me a whole lot of tutors. Math, English, biology, chemistry, physics. To have this sort of curated learning experience GPT cuts the price of that down dramatically. So it's amazing for access and equity as well. Um, I'm really excited about it. And we're rolling out these GPT, um, and AI capabilities across all of our learning suite. My co founder Fengjou, did, um, AI machine learning at Stanford. And we have, um, been hiring aggressively in our engineering team. So we've got AI tutors within our IB unit. We have, you know, AI tutors within Crimson Global Academy. We've got AI coaches helping you think about career pathways within Crimson. It's honestly super exciting. And education's never seen anything like this in my lifetime.

Speaker A: It's so exciting, right? And when you hear about some schools that are like, proudly saying, none of our kids can use AI, you're like, oh, boy. Like, that's like saying, do math without a calculator. You're like, why? Why would you, you know why, hamstring yourself from the greatest, um, enabler of human potential, right?

Speaker D: It is a delicate balance because practically the lived experience of a typical teacher today is the kid rolls into the NCA class, they have their internal assessment and boom, GPT generates it, they submit it. The kid didn't learn anything. The teacher can't detect its AI. And it really destroys the whole integrity of the process. So when used correctly, uh, when used as a source of curiosity, a, uh, tutoring mechanism, you know, an accelerator of human potential. It's powerful. But actually the baseline effect right now is probably learning loss, frankly, with Kiwis using this thing to skip the learning process. And that has to be mitigated rapidly because the same way there was massive Covid learning loss, there will be AI learning loss too, from basically a generation of Kiwis that are using this tool right now. Now, the good thing is there's a rapid response. We're moving from uh, flawed internals that really have been broken for a long time to now, um, rigorous exams. And at Cambridge it was pen and paper in person exams they moved back to. So as long as we have a system that's built for the AI era, it will be in a massive accelerator and we want our students to have these AI skills because the productivity of someone with full AI suites, my 20 year old students, they're super fast with building websites, doing analysis, conducting research, learning. Um, honestly it's nuts. So I think um, we need to foster Kiwis with this, otherwise they're not competitive. But um, we immediately the urgency is stop handbrake the kind of um, homework at home type thing through GPT.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: Tell us about the Business Navigators program that you have started teaching at University of Auckland as that's a really cool kind of like 360 full circle kind of moment, right, to come back and bring some of these principles that you have experienced and been part of at the world's top institutions into the local context.

Speaker D: So I guess the first thing is, you know, as Kiwis, we always have this fear that we're gonna lose our Kiwis abroad and never see them and lose that experience. The ultimate learning loop for our country is Kiwis. Level up, get global experience and they come and supercharge our country. Now I see this with many of my Crimson students heading back. Coming back to our early conversation with Ben Kornfeld, you know, on the train next to me, told me about Yale. It changed the trajectory of my life with this course, Business Navigators. What I've been uh, looking to do is to bring a variety of amazing entrepreneurs and so far we've had Rod Drury of Zero, um, we had Andrew Fraser, president of Halter, um, a couple nights ago at the university and really inspire these University of Auckland students in the very first year. The first experience at university is as a Kiwi. You can build a billion dollar company on the world stage. You can run through wars, you can launch rockets. Whatever it takes can be done right here. There's the capital for you, there's the expertise, there's the willpower. Don't believe this, you know, BS that like the system's broken and you know you can't be successful and the world stacked against you. Actually you have agency, you have willpower. This can be done. And so, you know, by taking our uh, students through this course, they're hearing from five folks that have built billion dollar companies that Are Kiwis how to do it. And so it's very practical. It isn't theoretical concepts about, you know, the efficient market hypothesis, it's how you make your first hire, how you raise capital, how you build your product and the practical, juicy stuff that people are often, um, annoyed they're not learning at university. So the university has been incredibly open minded and excited about this. You know, shout out to Susan Watson, the dean that really pioneered this learning course. We have 65 students in the class who are pumped. You know, when our uh, students or um, when our guest speakers get to ask any questions, we have 50 hands shooting up straight away. There is true energy in that room. And honestly it's very exciting. The last thing I'd say on this is, I do think for a long time we've sort of been fed this um, delusion. Actually it was true for a while, but now it is a delusion that there's not enough capital in New Zealand to build companies. In fact, right now we are entrepreneur constrained and talent constrained. We're not capital constrained. Icehouse, movac, all of these funds have massive dry powder ready to go. They need more young Kiwis with that delusional optimism to run through walls and build these things. And so my aspiration really here with this course is to ignite a wave of young Kiwi founders who can be the next Craigs Halter and build these amazing companies. Um, and so that's really the aim of the game.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's so important. And there's a few people who are really driving this beautifully. Like, so Peter Beck with his kind of thing, he often says that his mission is to help people think in bigger terms at a couple of zeros, like totally like order of magnitude up their ambition. And then you have like what Zuru's doing and it's on such a global stage and a lot of the people who work there are coming out of that company with this like limitless kind of, um, view of what they can achieve. And the success of, you know, the Halters and the Crimsons and these companies helps to do that. It is so powerful. But like, if you haven't lived at a large scale, it's actually quite hard to even imagine it. Right. Like, so how do you go about helping to, is it just by making it closer to people or showing or how do you help people lift up that ambition?

Speaker D: So in my first year at Harvard, I took this class, uh, called Innovation and Entrepreneurship. And we learned about these cases of great US companies and we learned the basics of finance, marketing strategy, all these pieces. So what we've done is we've built rigorous cases on all these Kiwi companies that we're teaching. So we've got a, ah, detailed case on Xero, on Halter, how they were created, the challenges, capital raising dynamics, competitors, all this stuff. So the students go through rigorous learning about the actual, the business itself and all the concepts they need to understand it. They learn the story of that company in great detail. Then they have the guest speaker, typically the founder or a key executive who comes in and then answers the Q and A. All the unfiltered questions you'd want to ask this person from, you know, what's it like to be, you know, up all hours of the night solving a problem on a farm? To, you know, um, you know, how do you raise that seed? How does, how does a 21 year old, you know, raise seed capital? And that smashes through that doubt. Um, and so, you know, take the, take the Holter example which we taught this week. Craig began halter at 21 years old at the University of Auckland. He grew up on a farm, had an engineering background and he rolls in. Andrew Fraser, University of Auckland graduate, came through and with this almost all Kiwi team they've built a billion US dollar company on the world stage that is super inspiring for our Kiwis. And you could see the kids eyes popping, you know, as we went through the case there was just light bulb moments all across the room and that's sort of the ignition we need. The other thing that I would say is, you know, through Crimson, one of my joys is I meet kids from basically every country in the world. Different cultures, different attitudes. Now I do think that Kiwis can make ultimate entrepreneurs because we are incredibly resourceful and we're actually very, um, I think we've got a good leadership foundation because we're very empathetic and we build great community and we're also very frugal and scrappy. So when we're given capital, we're used to doing things on a shoestring. And so we are very resourceful. Um, but our downside is that lack of ambition, that lack of will to win and competitive spirit that for example, these crazy Americans have in Silicon Valley. If we combine the Peter Beck ambition with our core Kiwi traits, we will be unstoppable. And I think that's really what we're trying to foster. And there's a lot of great folks in the entrepreneur community trying to unleash this together. And so I think um, you know, it's coming.

Speaker A: That's so cool. I mean, I love that Harvard Business School type case studies, but for things that are tangible and then the people walk out of the page and into the room and, you know, it's just there. Like, yeah, that's. That's so very cool. As a final couple of thoughts, um, you know, like, what would your advice be for people who do want to, um, you know, you spend a lot of time, you know, literally advising people to help, you know, achieve their dreams. You know, what's your advice for people who do want to lift up that ambition and get to the biggest stages?

Speaker D: So, in short, a lot of my breakthrough moments in life have come through conversations with mentors that have shown me the path ahead. Um, often you're not really pioneering a brand new piece. You're finding that person who gives you that insight into just that next chapter. So the first thing is you need to go and find folks that have done things vaguely related to your ambition and have those conversations begin to unlock that vision. It could be launching an HR company. You know, it could be, for example, building a first house. You want to have those conversations about, you know, what it actually takes. Then you want to start thinking very practically, okay, what do I need? The capital, the people, the resources. You know, really operational. The other thing I'd say is a lot of time in entrepreneurship, no one has any idea. You just need to take a punt and make a decision and move, move, move, move, move. So I think people get paralyzed by ambiguity. Um, but it's very liberating to know. Actually. There's often no right answer. The price of your product at the beginning, it's a guess. You know, the price of your company. When you raise your seed round, it's a guess. You know, the terms for your first employee, it's kind of a guess, too. All of these things just require you just saying, I'm going to give it a crack, put out a number, rock and roll, get moving. And so I would say, um, you know, that there's that urgency you need, for sure. Um, so there are a couple of things that I would recommend. Um, the other thing I just say is for kids, you know, um, we need the students to be taking education seriously beyond just learning academic content. If you go through high school and you're fired up and you're pushing through academics, extracurriculars, leadership, sports, you're building those communication skills, you're managing a billion things, you know, you're actually having to worry about, you know, do I Pass this exam or not, that trains you to be able to handle the pressure of a company because it is intense. Running one of these businesses, especially if you go venture capital backed or anything, a small business owner running a cafe, it's probably more stressful frankly. So you want to have that system that trains young people to be able to compete and thrive. You actually don't want to make it so super chill and easy and fluffy in school because you're not used to the pressure that will hit you in the face when you're 18 or 21 or 22. And so actually when you think about a system, people have this counterintuitive idea that you've got to make school really relaxed and that's good for your life. It's actually the reverse. And if it was the opposite, I would be fine with that. But I see the systems. I see California, I see Singapore, I see China, I see New Zealand, Australia and sort of what works? And the short answer is more ambition, more intensity, uh, a more clarity, more goal orientation is required at this stage in New Zealand.

Speaker A: That's super interesting in the context of the recent changes around ncea, what are your thoughts on that? As I think the goal there is to bring back some of that clarity and ambition and pressure. Right.

Speaker D: Yeah. So I would say with nca, you know, it was built with great intentions, but the problem with this is ultimately a, uh, lot of students get through with only internal assessments, often marked by their teachers, a lot of resubmissions, and you can essentially get university entrance or at least finish high school without really sitting many competitive exams that are rigorous and difficult. And so students go to school and they can really chill because there's no real need to do much to get through these standards, um, the best systems. And let m me give you an example. In the first two months at University of Auckland in biology, if you're trying to get into medicine, you often cover more content than kids cover in two or three years in high school. And that doesn't really make much sense. Why is it that an 18 year old now at university can magically handle all this content that you couldn't handle when you were 17 and a half? It's very arbitrary. So the first thing as NSA was too relaxed, too chill, too many internal assessments which just don't work with GPT anymore. The other thing is the grading system is like hieroglyphics. Achieve mirror excellence. It's like I look at these transcripts, I see them all around the world. NCA is the most confusing transcript I've ever seen in any country. It is nuts. And so if you're trying to get into a place like a Stanford, you're not making it easy for this Kiwi kid to get over there. Um, so I would say there are a couple of the major challenges with education. We don't need to rebuild the rocket ship. There are many great math curriculums, science curriculums, English curriculums. We need our own history, we need our own culture in the curriculum, but we don't need to pioneer new math stuff. So I think, um, at least the new shifts have a, uh, move towards a more exam based, rigorous structure with more transparency. So you don't need to be like an NCA expert to detect what this merit and PE means.

Speaker A: Yeah, it is. As a parent, it is, um, you're like, oh, you got merit, Is that good? Oh, is achieved. Achieved doesn't sound very good. Oh, that's a pass. Okay. It sounds pretty minimum. Uh, you know, like it is, it is quite hard to, um, get your head around. And it's like a final thought, like, what will success be for you personally and for Cripmson? As you know, you've made an enormous amount of progress in quite a short time. Um, but you know, there's a whole, you've got 3,000 students for the global academy. There's a lot of students in the world who could be moving to the style of learning. Right? Like, it feels like the scale of this opportunity is kind of weirdly big.

Speaker D: I mean, our mission is to build the world's, uh, the world's education system for the 22nd century. So really the aspiration is to be the system that is helping Kiwi kids and also global students all over the globe, um, all over the world with their education process. So this involves coaching, schooling, it involves support for five year olds, it involves young professionals, this full learning network. And the idea is basically wherever you are in the world, wherever you're born, whatever your parents do, um, you have this system, you can jump into it. Actually, only merit determines how hard you go, how fast you run. Now, of course there are many frictions. You know, how you finance this, who can access it, all the different stages. But our aspiration, starting with the world's most competitive universities, is we'd build the most rigorous training system and then we can take it to a wide variety of learners. So we have many initiatives, um, uh, cooking up right here in New Zealand right now, for example, for a much broader cross section of learners than we've traditionally engaged with. So I guess watch this space.

Speaker A: Yeah. Cool. Well it's been so cool to see what you've made happen so far and can't wait to see where you take it next. Thanks so much for sharing the story so far today. Jamie Beaton thank you.

Speaker D: Appreciate it.

Speaker A: Awesome. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you to everyone who helps make this happen like our producer Thea Herbutler. Thank you for listening and having us along with you. If you do like what we do, please do rate and leave a review. It really does help.

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