S3 | E1 - Jamie Beaton (Crimson Education) on scaling a global education empire, the future of universities, and AI’s role in learning

0:00 David Booth: You're listening to a dayone.fm show.

0:04 Jamie Beaton: The angel pitch, which was to build the world's biggest college counseling company, helping ambitious kids getting into these top universities, is largely what we've stuck to. And now we've got students like Zhong, who went from Pakuranga to Caltech to NASA and Tesla.

0:18 David Booth: Is there a reckoning coming for the long tail of higher education?

0:22 Jamie Beaton: Often most kids are, you know, meandering in a valley of confusion, and we try and remove that, you know, uncertainty.

0:27 David Booth: Internally, you're 500, 600 people now.

0:30 Jamie Beaton: You found a mode in the weeds every day And I think most Kiwis, if they spend time abroad, you know, they want to maintain a New Zealand connection. They want to bring the fire back to New Zealand. They want to make it a better country. Like, that's what most Kiwis want to do.

0:42 Speaker C: Welcome back to Diaspora.nz, where we're on a mission to seek out and profile the hidden gems, the best founders, operators, researchers, and emerging leaders of the great Kiwi expat community. Today we're chatting with Jamie Beaton. Founder and CEO of Crimson Education. His journey is nothing short of extraordinary. An applied math undergrad degree from Harvard, 4 master's degrees, a JD in laws from Yale, a PhD from Oxford, and a Rhodes Scholarship. He, he once went viral for what many called the most absurd education history of all time. But that's not even his main thing. Today we're talking about Crimson Education, now 10 years into its journey, helping ambitious students from around the world get into top universities. And how that core mission has expanded into a global education platform. We explore the breadth and depth of the Crimson family, talking about Crimson Global Academy, their online high school, talking about their study resource platform, Revision Village. We talk about the democratization of elite education with Jamie sharing stories of students from places like Kirikiri or Mount Maunganui making it into Princeton, Harvard, or Caltech. We go deep on the business side, how he's scaled to over 800 staff, the acquisitions they've made, and what's coming next after their recent Series D. And we discuss a little bit about the future of higher education globally, which education institutions, which universities are set to thrive, which have seen better days, and how AI is revolutionizing learning. Jamie splits his time between New York, Singapore, and still maintains strong ties to New Zealand. So this conversation offers a truly global perspective on education's future. This is the diaspora.nz podcast, and here's my conversation with Jamie Beaton. Jamie Beeson.

2:22 Jamie Beaton: Great to see you, David.

2:23 David Booth: What a pleasure to have you in here. Your journey is nothing short of extraordinary. I wanted to read this piece out. While building Crimson, Jamie got an applied math undergrad degree from Harvard, 4 master's degrees, a JD in law from Yale, a PhD in Oxford, a Rhodes Scholarship. You went viral for having what many called the most absurd education history of all time. I love that one. I figured you're like a Pokémon master, you gotta catch all the IVs. What's going on here? What are you up to? Give us the download. Where is Jamie today?

2:48 Jamie Beaton: So I'm 10 years into building Crimson, and when I first set out to launch Crimson, my goal was to help ambitious Kiwis to get into the world's best schools. As the journey evolved and our mission got bigger and bigger, we've continued to launch new parts of Crimson, and also as a leader, I've been trying to level up in different ways. I started with business school, law school, and actually a lot of these different programs I've been on have given me, you know, new angles into the world of Crimson. At this point, I have to say though, this is mainly for fun, love of learning. Probably 5 degrees ago, it stopped being purely only for my Crimson needs.

3:18 David Booth: Yes, at some point you'd say this man has to just love, he's in it for the joy of it. Also as an example of what you set out to build, I actually recall it was probably about 10 years ago when you were first getting started.

3:29 Speaker C: That's right.

3:29 David Booth: You were pitching that original vision, it's the, you're helping ambitious Kiwis make a dent on the world stage, get into the institutions they aspire to. I remember thinking like, this is noble, this is awesome, this didn't really feel much like a startup, but yet here we are 10 years later years later and you built a machine that's huge. Tell us, did you expect this? Did it play out as planned? Or if you reflect on the first angel pitch you ever gave, how have you sort of grown into that reality?

3:55 Jamie Beaton: Great question. I actually think the angel pitch, which was to build the world's biggest college counseling company, helping ambitious kids getting into these top universities, is largely what we've stuck to. What's changed is as we hit or got close to that mission, we added new units like our online high school, like our online study resource platform, Revision Village. But the core of our mission has actually stayed extremely tight to that initial pitch, I would say. As far as has it played out the way I thought it would, you know, certain things have been totally different, other things have been very straight down the center. I think one thing that I was convicted in in that first pitch though was I'd seen these huge companies in China that deeply valued education, a cultural phenomenon of students that wanted to get into these top schools. And it seemed inevitable that that same passion for top universities would be spreading around the world. The world would only get more aspirational. And we've kind of seen that play out. So now today with Crimson offices from Korea to London to Vietnam, there's a global aspirational love of these top universities that kids are wanting to work hard for. And that's really driven Crimson's growth internationally.

4:57 David Booth: Have you seen that, I mean, you're quite right to call that in some countries, have you seen that spread sort of more broadly? It seems like the world is getting smaller, anybody can work from anywhere. And that there is a real trend where people who might have once gone to, aspired to the top local or national university has now aspired to the top global university. Has New Zealand been behind the curve on that one or where are we?

5:20 Jamie Beaton: I mean, that's exactly right. So I mean, what's happening is in every country, previously the smartest kids or the most ambitious kids in high school or the top athletes might stay on a local university scholarship. But today there's more funding than ever for these top schools. More and more universities have financial aid programs, big scholarships. And so there's this global mobility really in education that's super exciting. So as long as you have the hustle in high school, to put in the work, a lot of these institutions want you. And that's really, you know, driven this. And New Zealand certainly has been a key beneficiary of this. Of course, Crimson's been operating in New Zealand for 10 years now. So we've sent hundreds of Kiwis to these top schools. And now we've got students like Zhong, who went from Pakuranga to Caltech to NASA and Tesla. Or folks like, you know, for example, Sayun, who went from Australia to Princeton to Citadel. And, you know, there are so many of these crazy success stories.

6:12 Speaker C: So—

6:12 Jamie Beaton: I would say it's great as a Kiwi, selfishly, that we started in New Zealand.

6:16 David Booth: Yeah, I'm excited to hear more about some of the network that have come through it. I'm sure you've kept tabs on them as they go. Tell me about how it actually works though, because we're going to get into some of the— I want to trace the thread through from a little bit earlier on the journey, how it's evolved, a few of the different acquisitions have plugged in, into the sort of the broader outlook on the industries. I think it's a fascinating vantage point that you have. Yeah, how does it actually work? What is the core of the Crimson offering? Obviously starting a couple of years out before you want to get into the college of your choice, there's a lot of things you should be doing to get your CV in order, your academic extracurricular pursuits in order. What is the core thing that you're paying for and participating in?

6:54 Jamie Beaton: Yeah, great question. So the typical student is applying to the US and the UK. To get into a great US university like a Harvard or a Yale, you need to do academics, extracurriculars, leadership, essays, interviews. A student's got to do 5 different major competitions. They need 3 different references. They're going to write about 30 essays in that final year, and all their academics count from age 14 to 18. They've got to take a standardized test, the SAT. So all of that goes into this application, which then gets submitted to a wide range of schools. A typical student today applies to about 13, 14 universities. So when they come to Crimson, you know, what do they get? They get access to a counselor, somebody like me, that's been through the application journey firsthand. I can help them figure out how they can best enhance their profile, what they should spend time on in high school, what activities to do. They're going to have a network of usually 4 or 5 different tutors. Could be a debate coach, could be a mod UN coach, could be a tutor for their A-levels, and then access to our Crimson app, which is a software platform with lots of interesting data analytics on your admissions odds to various schools, resources for what competitions you can do over the summer, and a lot of parent reporting as well. So mum and dad can sort of follow along on the journey. And we'll work with you typically for about 3, 4 years. Training you up and then sending you off to one of these great universities.

8:07 David Booth: The story sort of goes, or the, or the, as the journey evolves, I think that as you're involved in these kids' lives earlier and earlier, more opportunities to provide more to them. So Revision Village, I believe, came about as you were just looking for ways to, to plug in, to give more to people pre-Crimson, off sort of further upstream. Another was the CGA, the Crimson Global Academy. I'm fascinated when you think about, um, one of those I mentioned, I believe, was acquired, and it was sort of an existing asset. You said this makes more sense to exist within our family. Another was built internally, it was an opportunity identified. What's the difference between those two and why would you buy versus why would you build an asset from a business point of view as well as a product experience point of view?

8:48 Jamie Beaton: So generally at Crimson, the earlier we can start with a student, the more we can inspire them, the more we can train them up, the more we can boost their academics, but also help build out their resume and extracurriculars. So we're always looking at opportunities to go younger. A good example would be Crimson Rise, which is for 10 to 14-year-olds, kind of before the high school journey begins. CGA, or our online high school Crimson Global Academy, and Revision Village are a little bit different. I'll start with Revision Village. So Revision Village is, it was acquired from these talented Aussie guys from the Gold Coast. They were math teachers and they'd built this platform to help IB kids get better at math, which is typically the hardest subject in the International Baccalaureate. Now I had this weird experience where I was speaking to my students in Hong Kong and China and they kept mentioning this website, Revision Village, Revision Village, Revision Village. And I almost went down this wild goose chase, you know, speaking to different IB students in all these different crimson countries. Hey, what do you use to learn the IB? And they kept saying the name of this, you know, website. And it was a kind of kooky WordPress website, but it had gone totally viral for the quality of its videos and resources. So we looked at this and we thought, this could be really interesting. So we spoke to the folks, acquired Revision Village, and then we actually took it from math to all the main IB subjects. So from 1 to 8 different subjects. We added an AI tutor, we added different tools for teachers, and that platform today has become the most popular study resource across all the major IB subjects. So we have tens of thousands of subscribers that use the platform to boost those IB scores, and it really helps Crimson because if a student can improve their IB score by 2 points, that will give us, you know, a lot more universities we can help them get into. So that's a really good example of a, you know, low-cost or free learning resource for many students, that helps bring more students into the world of Crimson. Moving to Crimson Global Academy, the story there really starts with a boy called Sameel. He grew up in Hamilton and he was at Hamilton Boys' High School, an NCA school. And we saw in the student the potential to really take a lot of extra subjects, get into these crazy universities. We saw that he had a lot of untapped math skill. And so we recommended him this pretty ridiculous high school course load, 6 extra A-levels, which is like almost triple a regular course load 'cause he had his full school NCA than all these subjects on top. Now, he used probably 20 different tutors teaching him all these different subjects online over the course of 2 years to learn all these subjects. And seeing this, I realized actually there are a lot of kids sitting in traditional high schools that have untapped potential, that are kind of wasting time and they could be doing more, they could be going deeper, et cetera. Then at Stanford, I came across the Stanford Online High School, which was a school that Elon Musk had a child in. And I started studying it actually. And I was very fascinated. 800 kids in the school, all online. I'd never seen an online high school before. I saw this concept and I thought, actually, our Kiwi kids and Crimson kids around the world could really benefit from this. So that led us to launch Crimson Global Academy. So that was internally built because the philosophy was very core to our ideology at Crimson. It had the same core capabilities of online delivery, teacher recruitment, quality control, content development. Revision Village, it was a brand new thing, e-commerce, lower price point, asynchronous delivery, a lot of things that meant it wasn't in our wheelhouse. We'd actually tried things like that before and we'd failed. And so I thought buying it was a much safer play and then we could actually invest more in it. And we've done a lot with it post-acquisition. But yeah, at Crimson we're very open to buying or building and we are pretty adaptable. But the closer it is to our core college admissions wheelhouse, we usually build that internally.

12:05 David Booth: Yeah, I've got a sort of a visual image of a funnel here, I suppose. And the, as you say, so the closer something is to the core of the admissions business, the more likely it is to be something that exists in your core customer journey that you're gonna build internally. The more it's sort of a content content asset in this case, or a, um, like, I love the framing of the low-cost accessible revision support. Um, there's so many threads I want to pull here. I'm going to stick on the business piece of it. When you think about, um, the, the moving pieces today of Crimson, um, to reflect on, you've, you've sort of talked us through the external experience and of the journey. Internally, you're 500, 600 people now across the board, across, around the world. How do you think about the leadership of, of these, you know, teams and setting each up internally for success? Are you, are you founder mode in the weeds every day, or are you, yeah, hiring good people, handing off into the divisions and sort of leading them from more of a distance?

12:59 Jamie Beaton: It's a great question. First of all, I should say when I saw that founder mode thing go viral, I felt some sort of great relief. I see, I saw this and I thought, okay, I really resonate with this because I think for Crimson, I usually snap between delegation, hiring, you know, empowering a leader. When there's a problem, going like really deep into it, talking to students, talking to customers, talking to parents, going down to the most junior staff. And so I think at Crimson, I like to make sure that I'm never like flying in the sky, but also I'm not so in the weeds that I'm missing strategy. So to answer your question, these days at Crimson, we've got 800 full-time staff. We've got CEOs of most of our key business units. We've got a leader for our college admissions business, our online high school revision village, NumberWorks. And so what this means is that I can actually spend a lot of time helping them thrive in their role, and also looking at what comes next. And then, you know, double-clicking on to what units need more help to hit the next growth milestone. So I would say it's evolved. For probably the first 5 to 6 years of Crimson, I was deep in the college admissions founder mode on every aspect of the business, opening up the markets myself, flying around the world doing nothing but college admissions. These days, I probably spend my time across the whole group a bit more, and I'm thinking about what comes next and, you know, capital allocation.

14:12 Speaker C: Mm-hmm.

14:12 David Booth: That makes a lot of sense. And then some of them, uh, there'll be more sort of expansion opportunities and new market growth and things going on as well. You say online high school, and I think it's fascinating. There's an area that I, and I think many parents, have followed very closely for the past 3 or 4 or 5 years. Anybody who tried to parent during the, the pandemic, for a start, um, saw that your online education was clearly the future. I built a big online education business during the same, the same era. And then it seems like now everything is kind of pivoting back in person, and a lot of the A lot of people are realizing that the going over the top or all in on virtual only, or missing the opportunities to build in-person relationships and to sort of experience schooling early. I suppose in high school it's a little bit better, you're a little bit further down the journey. And also your CGI students are getting a bit of both, right? But I'd be really curious how you see like the geographic nature of that business evolving and how many of the nodes will be in New Zealand versus the US versus where else around the world.

15:09 Jamie Beaton: Great question. So just this weekend on Sunday, we had a great event here in Manhattan with hundreds of parents coming out, Crimson parents. And actually one of my students surprised me. Her name was Jade Skeets and she was an early student from Crimson Global Academy, grew up in Kerikeri. She used our school initially part-time. She was at Kerikeri High, an NCA school. She was finding it pretty slow. She hopped into our school part-time, found that pretty exciting. And then she moved full-time for 3 years. She got into Princeton, she got into Columbia for computer science. So now she's a freshman at Princeton. For students like Jade, the full-time online works really well. But I would say she's very self-motivated and there were certain things that she really wanted to get out of high school. For 70% of our learners, it's part-time. So they go to a physical high school, they use our school alongside it to take more advanced math, more challenging law, subjects they couldn't take, curriculum that they can't access through their high school. So a lot of the time it's about supplementing and enabling that physical environment to be even stronger. Mm-hmm. And actually giving students the academic challenge they're craving from that physical school. Even for our full-time students, there's lots of social meetups and events and extracurriculars, and they're spending a lot of their time doing sports, community meetups in different cities around the world. But I would say, you know, everyone needs intense physical interaction regardless of what your learning mode is. And I definitely find this, and even in the degrees that I've done, the purely online ones, I just feel far less of a connection than, you know, the Stanford MBA experience or something deeply in person.

16:29 David Booth: There's something you said there that's possibly the most important bit of it all, which is the self-motivation. And if somebody is motivated to learn a subject, they're curious to pursue it themselves, then the world is their oyster. If they're not, then it doesn't matter what, you know, prestige institution you're part of. How does somebody get self-motivated? What have you seen that really lights the fire under people to drive them like that? Or do they have to come into Crimson with that ambition pre-packaged?

16:54 Jamie Beaton: So I would say the vast majority of students that come to Crimson don't yet have that spark. You know, burning. They have a curiosity. They have an idea, but they might not have that fire yet. Some of them do. You meet these guys at 12, 13, and you just know they're going to, you know, tear up on the world stage. But a lot of students, it's about actually helping them find that fire. And, you know, how do you do that? I guess in the traditional high school experience, you don't usually understand how these classroom subjects leads to my wild goal for a career in the future. Take entrepreneurship. Lots of young kids today want to be entrepreneurs. They don't understand how doing math in high school or going to English literature and learning Shakespeare connects to my goal of running a future Tesla, right? So there's not a connectivity there and they don't feel inspired. I think what Crimson often does quite quickly is we help the student figure out what swim lanes they want to focus on academically they really get excited by, what subjects they enjoy, what extracurriculars they want to do, how that actually links to a university and then to a career goal. Mm-hmm. That will help them be the best version of themselves. So if you, for example, want to work at, want to work on Wall Street at a quant hedge fund like Citadel, like my student Sayun, and we can explain actually if you can take your math, do Math Olympiad, do these value investing competitions at Wharton, then you can get into a school like Princeton, that path's going to be very possible and very hard to unlock in another direction. So it isn't rocket science, but your typical high school student around the world has no idea what they want to do in the future. And they've spent probably less than 5 hours in their whole life in high school doing career strategy or future direction guidance. And so it's parents maybe throwing in ideas, but often most kids are meandering in a valley of confusion and we try and remove that uncertainty.

18:33 David Booth: Yes, career strategy is a good way of putting it. And you're right that most 10 to 15-year-olds sitting there learning math are struggling to figure out how it connects to the, the dropout story of Mark Zuckerberg they watched on The Social Network, whatever it might be.

18:49 Jamie Beaton: Exactly.

18:50 David Booth: But there is also, I mean, there's something on the other side here, which is a lot of like the paths that are charted through these institutions are often very played out based on what's worked in the past. And I'd be really curious about one of the critiques I've heard and also had of sort of the higher education process, I think, is that by now it's such a well-charted, such a well-playbooked process to get in that And I help people plan and plan ahead of that for many years. It's almost this idea that the hoops that you have to jump through are so pre-prepared, so pre-planned. I love this quote actually, I found it about somebody who'd spent some time on the Yale admissions committee. And he wrote that by the time that somebody who had 6 or 7 extracurriculars and great grades was still in trouble because they needed to have 10 to 12 extracurriculars or what you'd seen around you with these people who were obviously very intelligent, obviously very good, but they'd been trained to identify the right hoops to jump through in life, not the, you know, the right sort of greenfield creative opportunities to come up with. I'd be curious about like, to what extent does the past and what's worked in the past for us doing exactly what's right to get into the right institution really sort of correlate in the future of sort of pushing people, prompting people to think about, you know, their—

20:04 Jamie Beaton: Yeah.

20:05 David Booth: Entrepreneurial career from first principles and what they're going to build together. Like, do you agree that, yeah, the admissions process itself is sort of pushing students into a particular direction or a particular mode of thought that may or may not be what they need in life? How do you correlate the two?

20:21 Jamie Beaton: So Crimson doesn't exist necessarily to help anyone with any ambition go down any path. What we've identified is a really high probability swim lane for success. So If a student is interested in academics and they want to be wildly successful, this is a pathway that with almost certainty will deliver them that objective if they put in the work and put in the process. So is there ways to be successful in other ways? Could you do a trade apprentice? Could you skip university as a whole and be an entrepreneur without that? Absolutely. Crimson's built to give you that high probability pathway to these careers that are usually very hard to unlock. Let's take an example of a student who wants to work at Blackstone. If you want to go to a top private equity fund like Blackstone, and you grew up in New Zealand, almost the only way to get there is through one of these top universities. Now, is that good? It's probably not good. It's probably bad.

21:07 David Booth: Mm-hmm.

21:07 Jamie Beaton: But as a Kiwi, if you want to make that career path happen, then you need the support. And your high school's not going to train you on all the steps. They don't know how recruiting works at these firms. And so, what you'll find is the kids getting those roles are often from very privileged families that have great networks and get all the information and they know what they need to do. But for the most people in the world, especially outside of America, They have no idea. And if they don't have that support, they're not going to be able to even compete in the arena. They're going to have no shot. So I would say Crimson isn't the magic solution for everyone, but it's a very systematic way for most of the world's talent to at least have a very fair shot at competing in these opportunities. Now, as far as the— I think, is it Alan Dershowitz? It's the Yale professor. That's a great book. I think it's like Intelligent Sheep or something like that.

21:51 David Booth: Yeah, exactly. Solitude and Leadership is the book.— is the piece.

21:55 Jamie Beaton: Yeah.

21:55 David Booth: It's fantastic.

21:56 Jamie Beaton: Yeah, it's a great piece and also a great book. So I guess how I think about the admissions process is in some countries like China and India, getting into top universities is based on a single exam. So you just grind for basically 15 years, 13 years, set an exam, very stressful, that's it. What I like about US admissions is there's a lot of creativity in what you want to focus on. If you want to focus on art history, if you want to focus on entrepreneurship, if you want to focus on For example, building a Minecraft server and making revenue from your Minecraft server, all those things can be put on the application. It's a very broad canvas. Now, there are some fundamentals you can't skip, academics, right? So I would argue for most high schoolers, focusing on academics is a good and worthwhile thing. And I would say if you think about New Zealand, the admissions process is very easy to get into local universities and it doesn't incentivize a kid to try that hard in high school. Nah. So most high school kids cruise in the last couple years And I would say a reality where everyone's hustling hard in high school, they're doing sports, community service, leadership, they're running campaigns, they're trying academics. That's a better reality than people just chilling in those formative years because you go into your early 20s without feeling that burn that, you know, a lot of folks have to figure out later on in life. So long story short, do I think the admissions process is perfect? No. Do I think it's better than most other countries? Yes. And is this a good pathway for most students to go down? Yes as well. But it isn't the only way to be successful. And most folks that become wildly successful probably didn't do this. But if you're a single individual, this is still your best probability shot, in my opinion.

23:23 David Booth: Yeah. A couple of really good insights there with the idea that in those formative years, having something that's aspirational, that's motivating, that's ambitious, that will really drive you down any path.

23:32 Speaker C: Yeah.

23:32 David Booth: And that path could be elite sports, it could be elite education, it could be—

23:36 Jamie Beaton: Momentum.

23:36 David Booth: A burning passion you have for a bit. But in the absence of having the capacity for elite sports or sort of the spark for a single thing you want to be curious about and pursue, I think you're right to say like this is this is a path. And I've often found that, you know, the things that I've achieved that have worked have, you know, come across while pursuing or aspiring to something else. It's the feeling of drive or the feeling of motivation I have that will sort of open your mind or prepare you to be open to opportunities.

24:04 Speaker C: Yeah.

24:04 David Booth: That are adjacent to that. So I really like that. When I think about the admissions process itself, I mean, there's a lot of work that goes into it. There's 30-something essays, there's all, all sort of that preparation. One, I'd be really curious about the, um, the way that this has evolved, particularly the last couple of years. Now, when ChatGPT launched, uh, end of 2022, there was a lot of sort of combination of doom and gloom, and this is the end of Waze, this is all of the students starting to generate their essays and to use tooling to, to, you know, supplement their work. There was on one side of it, uh, the colleges crying foul and saying they're cheating, on the other side of it saying, well, actually, no, they're using technology creatively. This is like the calculator all over again. I'm curious about how AI is changing this application landscape, specifically preparation. When you think about tutoring, when you think about the possibilities of being opening up through having a, you know, private Albert Einstein on your shoulder teaching you physics, must have influenced how you think about revision. Um, what's changed in the past year or two in particular that makes you more excited about the future or has changed the way that you're building your business?

25:12 Jamie Beaton: So if you think about teaching a while ago, you might go to a physical high school and you see your teachers for certain hours in the day or even 1 or 2 hours a day. When you're stuck after school with a problem, you've got to wait to maybe the next school day or even 2 days later to ask your question, very slow feedback. The next iteration is, okay, you've got a one-on-one tutor. Maybe they come to your house, maybe you go to theirs, but it takes a bit of time to go there. Next up, you've got online tutoring, one-on-one online tutoring. Suddenly, same day, I can speak to someone online who's an expert in any field that I want and get an answer quickly, but it still takes a bit of time, bit of admin, et cetera. They don't know you, they don't know the context. Now with GPT tools, most questions, I'd say more than 95% of high school students' questions can be answered instantly by GPT, which means that the feedback loop gets cut down by at least 10x on even one-on-one tutoring. Wow. Which is pretty amazing. So think about essay writing. A lot of the time I tell students that the thing that differentiates a great English writer and an average one is just how many essays they wrote and how much feedback they got on the essays. In many high schools, it takes a month to get feedback back from your English teacher. But with GPT, you can get feedback on your essay in seconds. It's actually probably better than your average English teacher. So I think it is revolutionary. Recently when I was at Princeton, when I was stuck in these quant finance math classes, I would use GPT as my tutor for a lot of different questions, ask it, and I would learn all kinds of things, you know, when I'd say miss a lecture or, you know, had a challenging problem to work through. So it's certainly a game changer. As far as the downsides though, I do think we're seeing a wave of kids across the world using GPT to write their English essays and, you know, not as a learning supplement, but as the producer of work.

26:46 David Booth: Mm-hmm.

26:46 Jamie Beaton: And I think that's obviously dangerous because you basically could have high school students that go through all of high school And if they're just submitting work online, they're not actually doing any actual work themselves. And of course, that's a huge miss. So I think in the future there'll be a lot more live assessment in high school. There'll be more live assessment. You know, recently I began a program in the UK and they've moved the exams to pen and paper in person, which I think is pretty cool. But they're doing that in response to AI messing with their ability to do online proctored exams.

27:13 David Booth: Mm-hmm.

27:13 Jamie Beaton: Or even online exams in general. So I think it's an amazing tool when used well, but currently we're in this tipping point where most high schools have got no plagiarism tools, most universities have no plagiarism tools off scale, and they need to fix that quickly because it hurts the students and also, of course, the university's credibility. Two of these guys going through their degrees and high school without that support. But I'd say net-net, I mean, it's an incredible force. And the cost of private tutoring one-on-one across every subject could be $40,000 a year in some countries. But with GPT, that comes way down, which is obviously a game changer.

27:46 David Booth: Yeah. Yeah, it's a technology tool ultimately. It's like fire. You can use it to cook your food or burn things down.

27:51 Jamie Beaton: Or be an arsonist.

27:53 David Booth: Yeah, exactly. It'll be an arsonist. It's a little bit like that earlier push on the sparks of motivation. Like if somebody is self-motivated, they're going to use tools around them to pursue their own goals. If they're not, they're going to use tools around them to take shortcuts. So to me it does, it comes back to the how do you get people curious to, you know, to achieve something or to learn something in the first place. And certainly, you know, it seems like a lot more opportunity opening up. You've spoken a few times about lowering costs, about— I love the idea of if somebody wanted to get into Blackstone or if somebody wants to get into an elite, whatever it might be offshore, there just aren't opportunities for that for the vast majority. I know another critique of Crimson, which I actually don't think this one's necessarily fairly founded, is the idea that, I mean, it's an expensive program. Not only that, but the universities that people get into are notoriously expensive. If you can pay $300,000, $400,000 US, you know, for a 4-year degree at an elite institution over here. One, your critique would be, well, this is for people who can afford to pay for it. This is people who many years before the application process even kicks off, you have the parents with the means to put their kids through it. How have you encountered that and how have you offset that? I'm sure you've got 100 examples, but specifically, like, how does this benefit sort of the broader spectrum of society.

29:10 Jamie Beaton: Yeah, so I'll give you a couple of examples. Um, in New Zealand, uh, we have a student, Sam Taylor, grew up from up in Whanganui, young Māori boy, came through Crimson, got into Harvard, received a financial aid package that made it cheaper to go to Harvard than the University of Auckland. Um, Khaled Hamana, a young Māori boy from Rotorua, he wanted to go to the States through life sciences, again got into Harvard, full scholarship, cheaper than going to any university in the country.

29:36 David Booth: What are the scholarships specifically available? Does Rhodes often go to the US, UK?

29:42 Jamie Beaton: This is financial aid.

29:43 David Booth: Oh, so financial aid is coming from the college themselves to the student. It's not scholarship provided by a third party necessarily.

29:50 Jamie Beaton: That's right. So this is a key thing that I think is warped from like Gossip Girl or something. So there's the idea that NYU or Princeton costs $80,000 a year and everyone's gotta pay that. At Harvard, two-thirds of students at Harvard are on financial aid. Off that, one-third pay nothing to go there. So one of the great things that's happened since I launched Crimson is many more of the top universities have what we call need-blind financial aid, which means when you apply for the university, they don't care if you can pay the full rate or nothing. They admit you based on your meritocratic skill. And then they look at, okay, how much funding do they have to give you so you can make it financially affordable? The universities are actually highly incentivized to go on this talent arms race to find the best kids anywhere in the country. That's one of the services Crimson basically is indirectly providing this network by sourcing kids from all around the world, bringing them to these top universities. So, you know, of course there are some families that are, you know, a New York 3-generation family who's been to Columbia 3 times and pays the full fee. But a huge portion of Crimson students, it's the first time they've gone to America, the first time they've gone to the UK, they need funding to be able to afford it or financial aid.

30:52 David Booth: Mm-hmm.

30:53 Jamie Beaton: And actually what we are doing is helping them figure out a affordable path to go from Pakuranga to Caltech or Hamilton to Harvard. And that's pretty exciting. And just like what you said, a lot of folks, they're super informed, but they think Ivy League school, super expensive, no way to do it. And that's one of the big psychological errors that we try and fix so that kids know actually they've got a shot, they can compete. More generally, Crimson's got a huge scholarship program, the biggest in our industry. Mm-hmm. We help more than 100 kids a year pro bono. And then of course, millions of students use our online resources. Many students I meet in New York City on these campuses come to me and say, hey, you know, I didn't use Crimson on a paid basis, but your resources were amazing. They helped me get into NYU. So that's really, you know, exciting, for example, too.

31:39 David Booth: There'd be an alumni program now where some of the people who have had success would be able to pay it forward and, you know, help support others coming through, I'm sure.

31:46 Speaker C: Yeah, definitely.

31:47 David Booth: It's much more common among sort of the US endowments model where they'll hit the most successful graduates of their various institutions for sponsorship or scholarship or donation.

31:57 Jamie Beaton: They're very good at that.

31:58 Speaker C: Yes.

31:59 Jamie Beaton: The US is ridiculously good at it. Yeah, I am—

32:01 David Booth: You'll see, I mean, you're only 10 years in, but as this journey unfolds and many of the early success stories start to unfold, I'm sure you'll see something similar, if not already.

32:09 Jamie Beaton: Yeah, yeah. We definitely have grateful Crimson parents that sponsor some students to go through the program. And we've certainly seen some early alums achieving amazing things. I think about one of our students, Brendan, He went from Australia to Harvard. He was at Blackstone temporarily. He launched a company called Fig and he sold it to Amazon in his mid-20s. Pretty impressive stuff. And so, you know, he's not even 30 and he's already had his first big win on the entrepreneurial scoreboard. And, you know, someone like that is an incredible mentor for the next generation.

32:38 David Booth: You said something that was really interesting. It's not just the students that want to get into the top institutions, it's the top institutions that actually want to build out a —base of students, a pipeline of students who are beyond perhaps the standard model of applicant, let's say. Have you considered, I mean, do you work actively with those universities? And if so, is there an alignment of incentives problem where you are representing the student and what's best for the student themselves and which institution is best for them? I imagine if you were, it's almost a little bit like recruiting and the recruiter will work on behalf of a company and they'll try and find the best candidate for the company even if it's not in the candidate's best interests. How do you sort of think about the serving two customers there and resolving that conflict of interest?

33:21 Jamie Beaton: So we focus purely on the student and the parent and what's best for them as a unit.

33:26 Speaker C: Yeah.

33:27 Jamie Beaton: We help them get into the school that best suits them, negotiate the best package for them, and that's our full focus. The universities benefit, of course, from our work around the world promoting the schools, the opportunities, the scholarships, helping to level up the human capital of these students so that they actually land on campus, they're more more equipped to succeed, helping them get more applicants. So Crimson plays a really valuable role in the university's recruiting process. A lot of universities don't have the desire to send their admissions offices to far-flung parts of the world to try and, you know, find students applying or explain their complicated process. A lot of the time they can't even go into too much detail about their process because they don't want to be stoking the flames of competition. You know, they don't want to go to Vietnam and tell everyone, hey, you need 15 AP exams to actually get in from this country or something. Yeah. And so Crimson plays this important, you know, arm's length role in the process. But yeah, we focus on students and parents, and that's a really important driver of our success. The students know that we're purely focused on them and getting results for them.

34:24 David Booth: Yeah, yeah. So there's no working on behalf of a particular college trying to fill out their specific application part, even though I think probably the middle of the bell curve of colleges in the US would actually really like that service. You're looking for more applications, particularly where, as we started out, a more global application pool, but for a more selective sort of top tier. I'd be really curious about what that says for the college model generally. And I have absolutely no fear for the Stanfords and Harvards of this world. People are going to be applying to go to those institutions based on the raw prestige and the density of talent that comes along with it. Absolutely. The middle to lower end of the spectrum of colleges in the US seems like there is an industry which is not necessarily serving its customer terribly well. Yeah, there's still a very expensive product. A lot of the data in this country in particular, we're sitting here in New York, shows that people who took on a lot of student debt over the past decade—

35:21 Jamie Beaton: Yep.

35:22 David Booth: Have not necessarily ended up better off for doing so. A lot of the colleges that charge them a lot of money and stacked up a lot of student loans along the way have sort of become fat and bloated of sort of the administrative overhead, the cost disease, Baumol's cost disease, has continued to drive prices up in the space. If you connect this together with a conversation about AI and the dropping cost of tutoring and the understanding what's actually needed in the world to succeed, what happens in the next, who knows, 10 years? Is there a reckoning coming for the long tail of higher education? What happens next?

35:56 Jamie Beaton: So firstly, I would say a huge amount of the world's universities today shouldn't really exist anymore. And the reason for that is they've got no competitive advantage. They sit in a country and they've only succeeded because they physically are close to a bunch of students. But in a world of online access and global mobility, if they have no competitive advantage and they don't have a particularly good commerce program or a particularly good AI program, they're just a physical building with teachers who aren't necessarily best in class. Without any particular magic or alumni community, those universities will get smoked over time. Why would you, you know, if you're a student in Wellington and you could take part in a Johns Hopkins online, you know, medical undergrad degree with some in person, some online, and they had a remote lab, for example, in Wellington, but you took a lot of the core classes from the world's best faculty in Baltimore, Maryland, why wouldn't you do that? Mm-hmm. So I think what you'll definitely see, and you're already seeing, is bankruptcies of huge amounts of the weaker universities that don't really have a competitive value prop. The same way e-commerce has decimated a lot of physical store chains around the world that only existed because they were close to other people. And you get the mega brands that emerge. The same phenomenon is happening in colleges in general where more of the long tail will be lost and colleges will have to be hyper-specialized to succeed. So certain schools like Babson that have built up a cult following around entrepreneurship, that's great. But the school that's just sort of mediocre at everything and is also high cost will get smoked. Yeah. The other two things is there are a lot of universities that I would say are fake Ivy League pretenders where the Ivy League costs $80K USD, but actually a lot of kids don't pay that because of the financial aid we talked about earlier.

37:31 David Booth: Yeah.

37:31 Jamie Beaton: But they still charge the same crazy price with much worse outcomes. They look similar because they've got a fancy building, they've got a nice lawn, they've got some nice brochures, but the outcomes, faculty results are far worse. Those schools are getting smoked because you can't pretend to be something you're not for too long.

37:46 David Booth: Mm-hmm.

37:47 Jamie Beaton: Now, of course, as there's more and more demand for the top schools, you see the spillover where a school like NYU, when I first began Crimson, I would say it was a match school for many. It wasn't considered extremely selective, but now it's considered extremely selective for most of the world. Wow. It's very tough to get into. So you're seeing more of the top schools in the top 50, top 70 get hyper-selective, but the long tail, the thousands of US colleges, and then the tens of thousands of universities around the world, Many of those will get smoked. And then to your point on student loans, it's actually probably one of the most horrific things I think in American society is that there was these huge scaled for-profit university companies, many of them funded by student loans, where a student often from a disadvantaged background will go, they'll get funding from the government, they'll enroll in this expensive degree that costs way more than it should. The degree is a commerce degree and the degree tells you that all the graduates get in business jobs. Many of them are just going to Starbucks as a barista— and Starbucks is a business, so they count it as a business. And you saw Obama crack down in a big way on many of these guys. And they had billions and billions and billions of dollars of value on the stock market. And a lot of these companies got smoked, as they should have. And they were probably the worst offenders.

38:55 Speaker C: Mm-hmm.

38:56 Jamie Beaton: So I would say there is definitely a quality reckoning happening where the strongest schools that add huge value to their graduates, like a Stanford or something, are accumulating more market power, more and more applications, more and more demand. Applicants have gone up by 5 times in the last 30 years to these schools. And then the long tail are getting smoked.

39:13 David Booth: There's a lot of people getting smoked. I mean, it's the free market doing its thing in a way. And you're right to call it out. There's productive beneficial for most. The problems come where there is, I think in the US in the specific case of the debt that you might take on to go to these institutions is not even forgivable in bankruptcy. There's a lot of people who are carrying that through.

39:31 Jamie Beaton: It's crazy, yeah.

39:32 David Booth: And one thing that comes to mind is again, like, The elite institutions, the ones you're talking about, they're the ones that the world are aspiring to come to, but they aren't necessarily increasing their admissions count. A lot of them are capped in the number of people they'll bring through, even though they don't necessarily need to be. There's a sort of view that I believe was first very popular during the pandemic that while everybody was sitting and learning from home, and in theory, the number of people, Stanford, Harvard, could have taken 10 times more students in the year of 2020 or 2021. They obviously didn't. They sort of have maintained a specific roll count and a specific sort of student admission count. The cynical view of that would be that they're doing it to preserve the eliteness or not to dilute the brand further across a larger pool. The practical view might be more constrained by physical numbers that you can teach. But at this point you say, well, if the mid to long tail of institutions is going to get smoked, the elite ones are going to be fine and going to have even more applications than ever, but people can't go through that. So how do you sort of resolve that for the people who don't, who might be very ambitious, might be very talented, shouldn't get into the local university, shouldn't bother with the local mid-tier university, but they can't get into the elite one? What is the sort of the path for them?

40:48 Jamie Beaton: The first thing that I would say, and I think Obama did this as well during his presidency, is there needs to be huge information transparency around university graduate debt levels, salary levels, completion rates, turnover rates, et cetera. A lot of universities have survived because they're able to convince students that they're much better than they are. But if you have a full transparency into the data, you can't hide. If your university doesn't graduate good people or, you know, if everyone's dropping out, the market will discover that quickly. You'll get a bad reputation, you'll go out of business. So what's happening is Boston University, again, used to be considered more like a safety school. Now it's highly selective. And more and more schools, it used to be the top 30, now it's top 50, top 80, it'll keep going down and more of those schools will be considered like world-class. And a university that fights hard to be ranked 70th in the world will be of great significance and a lot of people will want to go there. Then there'll be low-cost opportunities that pop up, more community colleges, online community college programs, online university programs that are very vocational focused. Future evolutions of General Assembly, for example, in the coding bootcamp land, So I would say what you need is you need the reckoning actually to purge all of these bad universities. And then you want more online scale for many of the good ones. And certainly certain schools like Harvard, they will basically prestige maximize. They're not gonna try and, they're not gonna increase the undergraduate role. And they could like 50x if they wanted to with the endowment they have. But the whole virtuous loop of the top university is based on the fact that it's highly selective. And probably one of the most powerful signals they give its graduates is just the admissions office selecting the student because that is the signal that then fuels Blackstone and McKinsey to then chase the students. It fuels Y Combinator to throw capital at these guys. And so if you broaden the pool of students getting in, you actually hurt one of the most economically valuable functions the university plays, which is like a sorting function. And so they won't do that. They might have some online programs. Yeah. But they won't increase the undergraduate size. But that's fine because you can have the 100th ranked school have more students. And think about University of Toronto. Today it takes, I think it's got 70,000 students, I think. It's like more than 10 times the size of Harvard. So you can have a couple of schools that want to do the Harvard thing, but you can have other schools that have 100,000 students and are really good too. And so, you know, the market hopefully should adjust for that too. And, you know, you see also it's a global landscape. So kids can go to Canada, Kids can go to Australia, kids can go to Singapore, there are plenty of good schools. I would say there are probably 500 good universities in the world, but there are thousands and thousands and thousands of ones that probably aren't so helpful.

43:24 David Booth: Yep, yep, makes a lot of sense. So tell me, shifting into your journey a little bit more, because I think there's some really fascinating insights, all of these entwined, but your journey has been a very international one, the journeys of your students that follow through have been very international. When do you recall the moment that you said, I've got to go to America, I've got to study in these places? How do you think about the right time to get out? You look at some, you know, Laura Deeming went to MIT when she was 14. You look at some examples of people who might sort of stay at home all the way through undergrad and then try to get into Stanford postgrad MBA, whatever. When is the right time to get international experience? And I know why I think, but I'd love to hear your take on, on like, why is the international piece so important for young Kiwis?

44:06 Jamie Beaton: Great question. So I would say in general, the more self-disciplined you are, the longer you can stay in your home country. But if you're the kind of person who's very affected by your environment, and if the people around you aren't so ambitious, you've got to go faster. So basically, if you're the kind of student who your whole school can be chilling and age 13 to 18 you're grinding in your room doing academics and you're fine with that, you can stay in high school. But if you're the kind of person where if all your friends are out, you know, relaxing during high school, that will influence you to calm down, then you should go, you should go sooner. So long story short, for most students, undergrad is the best time to go. Undergrad's formative, it's before your career begins, it sets your social networks, it gives you insights into main skills, different career pathways. Undergrad's usually best. Some students should go during high school, but that's usually quite expensive and there isn't as much funding and financial aid and scholarships. So I would say my default is undergrad. Postgrad is a lot worse than undergrad because a lot of the time the undergrad degree is the most pivotal for kind of getting a lot of this stuff started. So your postgrad is useful, but I would say it's distinctively not as useful as undergrad. So that's where I'd recommend most students focus. And you see this in that there are some universities that have all kinds of postgrad programs, many of the graduates actually don't do that well. The undergrad ones are the ones that really create the fire in people's careers.

45:20 Speaker C: Yeah.

45:21 Jamie Beaton: And then I would say for Kiwis, everyone, we just need to create a more aspirational culture in the schools and make sure that students are really motivated to finish high school. There are horrible stats. For example, I think the bottom 40 schools in New Zealand, only 3% of the graduates go to university. The harrowing stats. Even the top 40 schools, I think only 80% go to university. Now we need to make sure the university is actually teaching things that are valuable. But on the whole, we can't have huge portions of society not being able to access these opportunities. So I would say you don't need to have this kind of Harvard dream for every kid at New Zealand high school. But you do need them to finish Year 13 math to a good level, finish maybe a bit of computer science, finish English to a high level so they can really be effective. Because I think if you drop out when you're 15, 16, you're going to have big problems. And so that's where I would obsess over. I also think that having some paths for acceleration— recently I've heard of horrible things where there are public schools across New Zealand that are removing their accelerated tracks and they're not enabling kids to be streamed at different levels.

46:20 David Booth: Yep.

46:20 Jamie Beaton: And so everyone's just thrown together. And that's usually a bad recipe for everyone, you know?

46:25 Speaker C: Yep.

46:26 Jamie Beaton: Yeah.

46:26 David Booth: How do you think about sort of the New Zealand undergrad regime? And in particular, I mean, if I recall my university days, I had a lot of fun in Otago. I would not call it an aspirational environment. Yeah, I agree. To your point about like, that you are the product of your environment, I think perhaps was unique in being motivated to go and build businesses and do things while studying. But the vast majority of people weren't. They were just there for a good time. There's this idea of sort of, it's almost finishing school that comes after. It's that sweet spot between high school, you've stepped out of home, you're out in the world, and you're sort of building your character and building yourself before the workforce. And I wonder if you were put in charge, you're now the Minister of Education in New Zealand, what can you do without just sending people off around the world?

47:07 Speaker C: Totally.

47:07 David Booth: Though that may be the answer for some of them. What can we do for the sort of the core of the undergrad ecosystem in New Zealand?

47:14 Jamie Beaton: Yeah, so I think in New Zealand, you have a lot of universities that need to build a core capability that are currently trying to do a bit of everything. So I would, rather than having all these different engineering colleges or doing engineering, I'd rather focus resources as a country on 2 or 3 of the best ones and make sure that we're actually, I'd actually use government funding to bring in Carnegie Mellon faculty, bring in some top talent from offshore. I'd build some exchange programs with some of the world's top universities. I'd have some exchanges where there's online courses being delivered from—

47:41 David Booth: Yep.

47:41 Jamie Beaton: Carnegie Mellon, UC Berkeley engineering back to, for example, New Zealand, I would cut departments that aren't really, that are resource strains, and I would use that capital to make some of the best departments even better, world-class. I'd rather—

47:54 David Booth: You said specific functionality, so say campuses, like Christchurch is renowned for being an engineering campus, Otago is renowned for being a medical campus. So you'd say pick the one, and it's almost within the University of New Zealand framework, you could have the specific campus that would have the world-class, access to the faculty, international and local.

48:14 Jamie Beaton: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. So I would make sure that I'm really headhunting some top professors. I think you only need 5 or 10 amazing faculty to transform a university. So I think you bring in some of those guys into each school. You stop investing in a bunch of the unproductive departments and you focus fire on the things that really help Kiwis. I'd rather we have 10 domains where the New Zealand universities are the best in the world, or at least top, say, 30 in the world, than hundreds that are mediocre. Because at least then some Kiwis can stay locally and thrive, other Kiwis can go offshore, but you don't have sort of mediocrity across a whole set of departments. That's not good for anybody.

48:51 David Booth: Yep.

48:52 Jamie Beaton: The other thing that I would do is I would actually increase the entry standards for certain degrees. And then I would, because what you have is this horrible problem where the standards are low to get into university, so kids in high school don't try very hard. And it's like a doom loop where the kids don't have strong academic credentials, they go to university, universities got to soften their standards. You actually need to create some programs at the universities in New Zealand that are selective and aspirational and ambitious so that many Kiwis will actually work harder in high school to get in.

49:17 David Booth: Yep.

49:17 Jamie Beaton: Many high school students, they're pushed by incentives, right? And if you make it so easy, people won't try in high school. And you see that, you know, everyone knows year 12, year 13 is very chill for many Kiwis. So I would play with the entry standards there. I would also introduce a Singapore-style government funding mechanism where students can go offshore for their degree as long as they come back and work in New Zealand for a number of years. And you could calibrate that based on the cost of the degree. That's been very effective for Singapore. Many Singaporeans go to the world's best schools, they come back to Singapore, and then they thrive within the economy. And then also, Singapore's got some powerhouse local universities, NUS, NTU, two universities that are amazing. We don't need to make 40 great universities in New Zealand, we just need one or two that are truly world-class. Mm-hmm. But currently, I would say there's too much mediocrity across many of them. And there isn't that fire to be world-class and competitive. So there are a couple of things that I would do on the higher education side.

50:09 David Booth: Yeah, you're right. There's different approaches to trying to solve what some people see as equality or one would be equality of access, which would say let's make this accessible to more people, which would say let's broaden the platform or even lower the floor for what it takes to get in. And I think one of the things that I'm seeing across the board Singapore, it doesn't matter which industry, doesn't matter who it is, like the elite New Zealanders are thinking about like, how do we raise the ceiling?

50:33 Jamie Beaton: How do we think—

50:33 David Booth: Yeah, totally. How do we get our most ambitious people? How do we get our highest achieving people and lift the bounds of what's possible? Singapore example is a really good one. And to sort of highlight that, the specific example would be, you know, here are two, you know, one or two or three excellent options locally, but you can also take the equivalent government funding that you would've had if you went through that system. Totally. You can take that to go behind your education at Stanford, Harvard, whatever the institution you might be able to get into. What's the mechanism there that if you don't come back within a period of time, you're paying it back as a loan, but if you do come back in a period of time, it's forgiven, or is it interest-free, or what's the mechanism specifically?

51:08 Jamie Beaton: Exactly, so in Singapore right now, if you stay within your home country, it's forgiven as long as you work for a period of time in an eligible job. So the student would go overseas, they would get their education, they'd come back, bring the skills back to New Zealand, and they don't have to necessarily do it straight away. So it doesn't need to be like right after they graduate. Maybe you want 2 years or 4 years in Silicon Valley or something, but they come back and they get that loan forgiven or they can get that loan with a favorable interest rate. So that's how you'd structure it. And obviously you want to make sure that it's a net win for taxpayers, right? You don't want to be subsidizing high-income people to go to top universities. Yeah. At the cost of the great majority of New Zealanders. But the way Singapore structured it is it's a really strong net economic gain, because you bring talent back to the country, having leveled them up with global skills, global ambition. Yep. They come back to build your country stronger. That's very inspiring. And I think most Kiwis, if they spend time abroad, you know, they want to maintain a New Zealand connection. They want to bring the fire back to New Zealand, and they want to make it a better country. Like, that's what most Kiwis want to do. So I would say we shouldn't be that terrified that a Kiwi will go offshore. And then run away forever. Now currently we frankly do have an issue, I think, with New Zealand and Australia. We are losing a lot of folks to Australia. But I think no one ever survives by trapping their people in their home country and limiting choice, right? That's always a terrible strategy.

52:24 David Booth: You're pitching my diaspora back to me. You're right, I used to talk about, imagine that you have a large family and you tell them all, I want you to stay at home. I don't want you to leave the home. I want you to stay here and do work here. Because God, if you go out into the world and learn things, you might stay there. If you love something, you've got to let it go.

52:43 Jamie Beaton: Yeah.

52:43 David Booth: And we've also got to encourage people to go overseas. We're going to help stay in touch with them when they're over here. You're a perfect example of this, so I'm excited to be here in New York with you. The personal journey you've been on throughout this, you've acquired business mentors, you've acquired investors among all sorts of very interesting groups of people, board members. John Key's on the board today. Um, tell me, I'd love to hear like how, who have been the strongest influences in your professional life? Who have you sort of intentionally set out to learn from, and how do you go about building those relationships and benefiting the most from those relationships?

53:19 Jamie Beaton: Um, so the most influential mentor besides my mum would be, uh, the late Julian Robertson. So, um, Julian, founder of Tiger Management, a big Kiwi supporter I met him when I was 18 interviewing for his Robertson Scholarship. I then met up with him in New York and he put me through his Tiger test for hiring and he ended up hiring me to work at Tiger investing in Crimson's seed round. And he really encouraged me to dream sky high. I was ambitious, but he had that resolute conviction that we could make it happen at Crimson. And he really got behind me, opened up his network to me. But more than anything, showed me what leadership was like. Julian inspired a kind of cult following, competitive but high-integrity, high-performance culture within Tiger that led to the creation of many of the world's best hedge funds like Tiger Global or Viking and things like this that spun out of his—

54:11 David Booth: The Tiger Clubs.

54:11 Jamie Beaton: Exactly, the Tiger Clubs, that's right. And seeing him in action even in his 80s and seeing his competitive spirit, his fire, his passion for life, inspiring. And so I think, So for many of Crimson's formative years, I was working at Tiger and then building Crimson, getting lessons from Julian, being introduced to all kinds of fascinating people. He led our seed A and then co-led the B with Tiger Global and was just incredibly inspirational in all these areas of life from family, relationships, all the way to business. So I would say he was the single most influential by a wide margin. Next up, I'd actually talk about a fellow called Jason Linger. He's an Aussie guy who was one of the most senior folks at Seek, the multi-billion dollar job marketplace. He was actually put on our board from Tiger Global as part of their round. And I mean, we'd just raised $30 mil from Tiger Global, a bunch of early 20s kids. He had a tall order. Came on the board, he was sort of the responsible man in the room helping us level up and figure out what we were doing. We had these wild goals to build Crimson everywhere, go in 20 countries in 2 years, expand everywhere. And he both cheered us on but also brought rationality, experience, war stories to us. He told me, Jamie, when you go into China, you're going to get your pants ripped off, you're going to get your face ripped off. And he still let me do it.

55:34 David Booth: Yeah.

55:34 Jamie Beaton: And I did. I did get my face ripped off, but I at least learned faster because of his lessons. So Jason helped us level up as a company and helped me with a lot of executive hiring. You know, he's been an amazing mentor over the years. So I would say those two stand out as two really amazing business mentors, one Aussie and, you know, Julian.

55:52 David Booth: That's fantastic. When you think about leveling up as a person, as an individual, what have you had to unlearn? I've had to unlearn a lot of my, you know, desire to do everything myself and learn a lot of sort of better delegation, better management, better sort of collaboration. As I've sort of gone to the world. How about yourself?

56:10 Jamie Beaton: I had to do a lot of unlearning and I would say leadership did not come very naturally to me. I don't think I was much of a leader in high school and it was definitely a work in progress and still very much is. I think a couple of things, one is knowing when to just get out of the room and let your folks create and build and be entrepreneurial without you necessarily there. I think sometimes in building a company, you want to lead from the front and you want to do everything lead the charge. But when you've got talented people with the entrepreneurial spark and they're the local operators and they know the market well, getting behind them, cheering them on, and showing you trust them is very powerful. So that's one thing that I think I learned early. I think the second thing would be just time and time again, betting on someone with a steep learning curve is better than someone with tenured experience. As a young founder, it was always so attractive to find the guy from, I don't know, Microsoft or some company, and you know, they seem so tenured and experienced, the magic guy that'll solve all of our problems. Yeah. But they usually always struggle. And then it's typically the folks with the fastest learning curve who want to roll up their sleeves that have built immense value with us at Crimson. And so I think betting on that sharp learning curve again and again is important. And then finally, I would just say the importance of working with great high-integrity people. Often this comes from when we're doing business in places like China or Russia or India or something like this. There are a lot of times where we've been looking at a company to acquire and we just get an uncomfortable feeling about maybe who we're getting into business with and— Mm-hmm. You know, what the vibes are and we avoid that. And in the small instances where I've gone forward with a deal where I didn't quite feel comfortable, it's, you know, usually always a dumpster fire. And, you know, ultimately building a business is a people-driven phenomenon and you want to build with people that you trust, that you can build and compound with, and it's great for your culture. And so I guess I've really become, you know, almost like a culture fanatic, I would say, in the last 5 years of Crimson. Whether in the first 5 years I was probably a bit more, you know, robotic in my approach.

57:57 David Booth: Mm. Yeah, and build your instinct, train your gut and trust it when you do.

58:03 Jamie Beaton: Yep.

58:03 David Booth: Tell me, I mean, final question perhaps, and a great place to wind up. Well, it's twofold. Usually I ask people, and I love to ask people like, how can the diaspora support you? Like what are the upcoming asks for talent, for anything that we could be bending the world into your benefit?

58:20 Jamie Beaton: Oh wow, that's an amazing question. We're going in an interesting, we just closed a Series D round. We're pretty excited about this because it gives us a lot of opportunity to go super fast behind Crimson Global Academy, roll out our charter schools, do some more acquisitions, scale our Vision Village. And we're in this phase now, we've got significant revenue, we've just hired a CFO. And so I think folks that have gone on this like CFO through a listing or CFO through this next phase of scale adventure and have seen this path we're about to walk on, those operators are amazing. So the more reps we can have, you know, they're amazing Kiwis that have been senior execs at Pandora or Equinox or Google and stuff. And those war stories are always really helpful. Maybe they're not always exactly relevant to Crimson, but there's always something we can learn from them. And then I think that also just camaraderie and excitement of the Kiwi community around the world as you go through the different challenges, huge as well. So yeah, I'd say that's probably what's on my mind right now.

59:16 David Booth: So more conversations with more leaders, people who've been that journey before, particularly the financial components of the journey, the CFO components of the journey.

59:24 Jamie Beaton: That's right, yeah.

59:24 David Booth: Fantastic.

59:25 Jamie Beaton: Public company reporting. Things like that.

59:26 David Booth: We can get some ideas for you on that for sure. And then final, this is not one I get to ask everybody, but in your case I do. What's your advice, or for the ambitious youngsters out there, aside from just like applying to be in Crimson, that's the gimme answer, but like what should they be thinking about right now if they want to be really making a dent in the world 5, 10 years into the future?

59:44 Jamie Beaton: One comment that I'd make, what I've seen recently, I think when I began Crimson, entrepreneurship was, it wasn't as broadly loved, I would say, by high school students and university students as it is now. I think in the last 5, 8 years, entrepreneurship has become this almost cult-like obsession. This is the number one thing people want to do at a lot of these campuses. What I've seen during that trend is there are a lot of folks that say they want to be entrepreneurs and they want to come out of college and launch the company straight away. And they aren't actually focused on any one space. I would say they're more mercenary in that anything that makes money they'll try and do, or anything they think will work, they'll try to do. They also might often hop on the hype trains. It could be an AI hype train, a crypto hype train, whatever. I've seen actually now a number of students do that, struggle for literally 3, 4 years without product market fit in a space they don't really like. They raise some capital and it's almost like golden handcuffs where they're building in the space and they just, it's not really good for their, you know, mental state and, you know, their momentum frankly. So I would say my advice for young founders is you've got a lot of time to pull the trigger on this. If you wanna go now, go now. And I think, you know, you run at it. But taking a couple years to build some heavy duty work experience in some high growth companies and getting some rips on the board in different industries. So you've got a wider aperture in the world. I think that could be very powerful. And so, you know, I used to sort of advocate go young, go as fast as you can anytime, et cetera. But there are many domains for which some experience actually helps. So I would just say as a young founder, like don't feel like there's this urgent need to go right now. You know, feel free to build some more skills, build specialist domain knowledge, especially in industries like healthcare or fintech. Yep. You know, a bit of experience, it could be very helpful. Um, obviously the Stripe guys are a great counterexample. They just ripped it straight out of college. But, um, I would say don't be afraid. Don't feel like FOMO in your mind to need to like jump into this right now. Um, feel free to acquire some skills, then take your shot. Because basically it takes 5 to 10 years to build a transformative company, at least to a good scale. Probably 20 years or 30 years to build something momentous. But you can pull the trigger on that at many ages in life. So I would say don't, don't sort of drink too much entrepreneur Kool-Aid and then mess up your career development because of this.

61:48 David Booth: Yeah, it's a really good piece of advice. And every company you join and operate at is another pool of potential co-founders, potential talent you can hire in. It's another opportunity to learn from everyone else's mistakes before having to make them yourself. Um, so I'm excited to see more Crimson students, more Kiwis across the board, uh, starting companies at some point. But, um, and like you, I think looking forward to backing a lot of them, investing along the way. Jamie, it's been fun. What a pleasure. I'm looking forward to doing this again in a few years' time, 10 years' time, continue to see the growth. Look forward to following on.

62:20 Jamie Beaton: Cheers, David. I appreciate it. Thank you.

62:24 Speaker C: And that's a wrap. Thanks for listening. As a quick reminder, make sure you hit subscribe over on your favorite podcast player so you can keep getting stories like this landing in your feed every Friday. Help power you through those weekend chores. For my day job, I'm an I'm an entrepreneur in residence and an investor at Blackbird Ventures. We're backing best Kiwi and Aussie founders no matter where they are in the world, back home with global ambitions or out there building generational companies. My personal sweet spot is pre-seed and seed. I like to say there's no check too early, so drop me a line anytime. It's dbooth@blackbird.vc. This episode was produced by Day One, the podcast network for founders, operators, and investors, and is part of the Day One network. Thanks again. Look forward to seeing you back next week.