Posts Tagged "Collegewise"

Paul Spain:
I’m Paul Spain, futurist and chief executive at Gorilla Technology. I love seeing individuals and their organisations thrive. The New Zealand Business Podcast is all about this through helping you learn from our most tenacious and successful leaders. In this episode, we’re catching up with New Zealand’s youngest person to build a unicorn business that is one valued at a billion dollars plus. Yes, it’s Jamie Beaton, co founder and chief executive of Crimson Education. This is an in depth conversation that goes behind the scenes and into Crimson successes and challenges on their journey of explosive growth and global expansion across the last five years and delves into the strategies driving their transformation from a New Zealand startup to a global education powerhouse. The New Zealand Business Podcast is brought to you by one New Zealand and Gorilla Technology. Before we jump into the interview, if you work for a mid size or smaller organisation, I have a quick question.

Paul Spain:
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Paul Spain:
Jamie Beaton, great to have you back on the podcast. How are you doing?

Jamie Beaton:
Absolutely fantastic. Great to be back.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, really keen to catch up. It’s been about just over five years since we last chatted. There’s been a huge amount going on in that period. I think when we spoke last time, you had a full time team of around 400 people. You mentioned that’s grown to 1100 now.

Jamie Beaton:
That’s right. It’s been a massive period of growth and I think back when we spoke, we hadn’t even launched our Crimson Global Academy at our online school. And building out all the schooling parts of Crimson in the last several years has been really exciting. But yeah, now the team is really global and the US is actually our biggest base of full time staff now.

Paul Spain:
Right. So walk us through some of those areas of sort of growth and revenue. It’ll help give listeners a bit of a bit of a picture on just how fast things have been moving.

Jamie Beaton:
Absolutely. So of course our Adventure began in core college admissions, initially helping Kiwis going to the us. Then the next part of our strategy was to help more and more foreign kids coming into the US and uk. So we opened up in places like Russia, the uk, the Middle East, South Africa, Taiwan. And we pursued this strategy of focusing on places where there wasn’t much information about the college admissions process. So we began there. Then as our products evolved, around 2017, 2018, we then went into more competitive markets like China, Korea, India, and then about eight years ago, we entered into the US market. Crimson built this really high performance training process for getting students into these schools, across mentorship, online delivery, all this content.

Jamie Beaton:
So we began first Boots on the Ground in San Francisco and California. And then a major area of growth for us has been really building the nation’s leading brand in America for college counseling, bigger scale. We also acquired the third biggest player as well, called Collegewise, which is a slightly different brand proposition to Crimson. And Crimson’s focused on how do we take a student and really maximize their performance. College wise is very focused on applying to a broad range of US 100 schools and actually removing stress and pressure from the process. So that’s really been a key evolution, the growth of our college missions. And then we’ve also launched this fully accredited online high school. Crimson Global Academy now has nearly 3,000 students.

Jamie Beaton:
And our recent online charter school, Aotearoa Infinite Academy, and even our first physical school here in New Zealand, the Age School or the Academy for Gifted Education. So a lot of other different things happening to Revision Village or our Concorde Visa unit, but I would really characterise the last five years as moving beyond our core to a whole variety of new adjacencies, new bets, and it’s been really fun.

Paul Spain:
Right? And in terms of revenue growth, what’s that look like, say, the last four years?

Jamie Beaton:
So in the last financial year, we exceeded 300 million New Zealand dollars in bookings. And, you know, that’s up about four times over the last four years. So. So we’ve actually managed to sustain really rapid growth over the last period of time. Last year, for example, our North American operations grew 150% year over year. So that was a really big breakout year. And that actually took America to being Crimson’s largest market, which is exciting because it’s also probably the deepest market alongside perhaps China and India, as far as spend and investment in education services.

Paul Spain:
Right. Now, last time we spoke, India was. You’d kind of figured out India probably wasn’t a useful market for you at that Point. Is that still the case, or has that changed?

Jamie Beaton:
It’s actually funny. So back when we spoke, we’d gone into India, and it was very difficult. It was almost like a needle in the haystack, because while there’s more than a billion people, the share of families that are excited to send their kids abroad to the US for undergrad and pay for that process is fairly low. At that time, we’re talking about less than 50,000 people out of a country of a billion. What’s happened in the last six years is India’s gone through a pretty massive economic growth wave, have seen a lot of growth and willingness to spend and also desire to go to some of these different countries for education. And so Crimson actually relaunched in India about four. About. Probably just after I spoke Jack, about five years ago, led by a talented guy called Kunal, who used to run the College Board, which administers the SAT in India.

Jamie Beaton:
So he joined our team, and we’ve been able to now make India a top six global market for Crimson, one of our fastest growing markets, too. And that’s an interesting example of how quickly some of these big markets can shift. India still has a lot of unique dynamics where only a small portion of the country can afford to pay for, you know, US College tuition, but there’s also been a huge growth in financial aid, and so more of those talented applicants from rural parts of the country can apply.

Paul Spain:
You know, you’ve shared in the past around, you know, chance meetings with people, and, you know, new information comes in and you make a quick change and you go for it. How did that play out in India from, you know, us chatting and just like, oh, yeah, India. You know, that’s probably not, you know, it doesn’t make sense for us at the moment. And now it’s one of your big markets.

Jamie Beaton:
Yeah, it’s a classic example of this iteration process where I first hired a fantastic guy, but he was an Indian American from Michigan, and I naively thought, okay, he’s got a lot of cultural connectivity back to India. A lot of his relatives are in India. So he and I thought we’d be able to figure it out. When he got on the ground in India, we quickly realized that actually that local connectivity is so critical. Knowing how to get into the schools, knowing how to find the different parent communities and building that network out. So, you know, we tried. You know, we just weren’t getting that product cut through, and so we got out of there. I think what changed is a couple of things.

Jamie Beaton:
First of all, the market got more savvy when it came to college admissions, and there was more a willingness to pay for a high quality service. But also the right leader came along. We found someone who had spent the last 10 years of their career leading a college board and also Coursera in India. And so he had taken a foreign company into India successfully. We thought he was, you know, good local knowledge and he had a pretty clear game plan. And he actually sought us out and said, hey, I want to expand Crimson to India. So actually we had a bit of an exec team discussion about this, and given we’d all burnt our fingers off in India the last time, there wasn’t much appetite for it. But, you know, a couple of us said, hey, let’s do it.

Jamie Beaton:
And you know, we sent in our man Kunal, and we’ve been able to build now a great practice. The interesting thing about many of these markets, not just in Crimson, but in general, is that they can evolve in three or four years quite dramatically. And your go to market strategies, you know, with one team, it can be a total disaster, and another team with different approach can be very successful, which is why entrepreneurship is messy and fun.

Paul Spain:
That’s interesting, you know, that you were approached on, you know, on that occasion. Have you had many of those situations arise where, you know, great, great talent has come knocking, knocking on your door and you, you weren’t, you know, maybe aware of the. The individual or the opportunity?

Jamie Beaton:
Totally. I mean, I’ll tell you a funny one. I was actually visiting a campus called Yale NUS in Singapore, and I was meeting a Kiwi guy that I knew in high school called Andy Chen. This is back when I was 19. And I was in this cafeteria with him and we were talking about Crimson and what he was up to, and he looked across the room and he said, hey, that guy over there, Andrew, he’s actually one of the best in entrepreneurship I’ve come across. He loves computer science. You go chat with him. So I went and had a chat with him and turns out Andrew was half Russian, half American.

Jamie Beaton:
And we were thinking about different markets and then he began to ask, well, what do you think about Russia? And he described some of the dynamics in Russia at the time. And I thought actually this could be very, very compelling. And so Andrew took a gap year from Yale and us went in Russia and began building the market out. And actually Russia, for a part of Crimson’s early days, was our fourth biggest market. And then Andrew, a super talented guy, he ended up becoming our chief revenue officer and he built Crimson through an enormous Wave of growth. You know, really interesting. And you know, we found him when he was kind of 19 in college and seeing that growth trajectory is very inspiring. To answer your question, we’ve had a lot of opportunities for folks come to us.

Jamie Beaton:
We’re always also reaching out, finding new people, you know, thinking of new people that could fit in a certain area. Great example is Kevin park, you know, legendary Kiwi entrepreneur. He helped us take Crimson Global and he also helped us launch Crimson Global Academy. And then we thought actually Concord Visa in the immigration space could be really interesting for him as well. And he’s just hit the ground running and that business has grown really well.

Paul Spain:
Great. Tell us about some of these new things. Maybe start with over this period that sort of stands out.

Jamie Beaton:
We acquired a business called Revision Village which is the leading provider of International baccalaureate study resources. So if you’re a student at Kristin or you’re a student, for example, St Cuthbert’s and you want to boost your score on the ib, our platform is the most popular for helping you study for those exams. We initially bought this when it was just a math product and, and then we expanded it to all the key IB subjects. And then the leader is called Tim Vaughan. Tim used to be on the exec team and one of the founding hires at Education Perfect, which sold to KKR and then he joined as CEO for Revision Village. Now over the last several years, I think two and a half, we’ve taken that from being in zero schools to more than 430 of key IB schools around the world. And so we love Revision Village because it’s a really good bang for buck for the students. Revision Village has been a major new part of Crimson and Our first major B2B software division of the business.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, great. So maybe you can walk us through a little bit of the sort of history on the acquisition front, because that’s not the only acquisition that you’ve done. This seems to have been actually a really important part of the journey so far.

Jamie Beaton:
Totally. Now if I was to characterise my acquisition strategy at this point, it’s really a learning strategy. What we do is we find new verticals that we don’t know enough about ourselves. Take Revision Village. That it was a self serving IB platform that was being used by students in the IB at a certain price point that was quite different to Crimson. And we had a theory that if we acquired the business, we’d learn enough about the space to be able to really expand and grow this thing. And so we generally like this kind of buy and build thesis where we find something that is compelling as a standalone. We’ve got a good strategy of how we grow that.

Jamie Beaton:
So that was the case with Revision Village. Another recent one would be College Wise, which is the the third biggest college Counselling firm in the U.S. we were able to take our Crimson technology platform, put that into the College Wise business, add a whole new range of enrichment products. So a family, for example, in Irvine, California, can benefit from our research training, different honours training competitions, academic tutoring, and really enhance their performance. So that’s another good example too. But we also like to do a lot of acquihires as well. We recently acquihired a team who runs Science Fair IO that they are America’s best training for science fair competition. So this will sound a bit funny, I guess, because we don’t really have such a big culture for this in New Zealand.

Jamie Beaton:
But in America, there are massive science fair competitions where tens of thousands of kids are competing through these projects. And it’s backed by companies like Jane Street, Top hedge funds, Regeneron, used to be Intel. And so students will often spend one or two years developing these projects. And so what we developed now with this acquihire is a training program to help students with enhancing their skills for the science fair competitions, which in turn helps them get into top universities. So that’s another example of a recent acquisition. So we are very flexible. We’re actually bidding on a really exciting thing right now, but I won’t jinx it. And then some other things in the pipeline, but definitely, as you said, it’s been a core part of the strategy.

Jamie Beaton:
But it’s worth noting that the huge majority of Crimson’s growth has come from the organic growth of our launched businesses. So although we do a lot of acquisitions, it doesn’t tend to be a huge share of our revenue relative to just the organic build out of Crimson Education’s core college missions business and numberworks.

Paul Spain:
That one’s, you know, quite some time back.

Jamie Beaton:
Yes.

Paul Spain:
Tell us a little bit about, you know, that, how that, how that’s gone and how that sort of fits into the overall picture.

Jamie Beaton:
Totally. Well, first of all, I’m eternally grateful to numberworks. I went along when I was, I think, three and a half with my numberworks coach, Lloyd. My mom would take me out there and when I finished my numberworks math in English, I’d go get a donut afterwards and some Papa Jacks. So that was good fun. And that was really one of the things that sparked my initial passion for math and English. So when the numberworks team was interested in a partner to help them grow the business. You know, we thought it’s a great opportunity for us.

Jamie Beaton:
And Numberworks caters to 5 to 14 year olds and it’s actually quite a world leader when it comes to using computer learning where students have typically one teacher supervising three or four students and, and the results are really fantastic and has been for now going on nearly 40 years. So we’ve seen Numberworks grow fantastic, really well under the Crimson banner and they’ve got great traction in Australia and they’ve got really a lot of popularity in places like Sydney and Melbourne and then it’s continued to do very well in New Zealand. So very proud of the numberworks team. They’ve also rebuilt the platform and you know, incorporated a whole variety of new tools and student experiences. So it’s been fantastic. And it’s been nearly 10 years under Crimson now.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, fantastic.

Paul Spain:
Now you’ve talked about the US market, you know, being, being your number one market now. That’s your biggest base. You know, walk us through that journey because, you know, it’s, it’s not necessarily a predictable journey when you, when you get into the US market. Right. And yeah, it can be pretty brutal too, 100%.

Jamie Beaton:
And you know, it’s funny, last year I was teaching a class at the University of Auckland with my co founder Feng Zhou and, and we studied many of New Zealand’s unicorn companies. And a recurring pattern in these companies, whether it be, you know, businesses like Halter or Rocket Lab or Pushpay, Xero et cetera, is they typically have had to get, you know, quite massive US traction. And I think the thing about the US market is when you crack into it, there’s high willingness to pay, it’s a big market and each state’s almost like its own country. So there’s a lot of depth there. But of course there requires a lot of, you know, nuance to adjust your go to market your product to make it work. In our case, the good thing about what we have already built before we entered America is we built this training engine to get a 14 year old who’s somewhat ambitious, make them really ambitious, help them find where they want to go in their future, build all their core skills and then get them into these top schools. And the same passion that a Singaporean mum has to get their child into Yale is very similar to an Upper east side mom trying to get their kid into Columbia. And so when we rolled into America, we focused on some of the key states that have, you know, pretty fantastic universities California’s got schools like Stanford and UC Berkeley.

Jamie Beaton:
You know, the east coast got all the Ivy League schools. And so we focused on a couple of key states and used our city launcher model, began to get traction on the ground. We did all kinds of things from live event, like for example, this summer I’m doing about 30 live events across North America. I just came from one on Friday in Silicon valley. There was 300 mums that turned up and dads and they were pumped to hear about how to get into Stanford. We just had about 6% of the world’s Stanford admits in the early round through Crimson. And so the families are really curious about that process. And as you can imagine, in Silicon Valley, families are very tech savvy.

Jamie Beaton:
So they like Crimson’s data driven technology, first approach to college admissions. And it really matches their intensity in terms of the ambitions they have for their child as well. So I think overall, when we first entered America, the US market wasn’t yet so focused on these really competitive colleges as a primary goal for a lot of these families. But it’s evolved now where that’s really nationwide and so we’re able to get early traction in New York and California. That really snowballed. And then we took that to more places like Chicago, Texas, etc. Florida. And we’ve really kept that growing.

Jamie Beaton:
And then we’re actually been quite fortunate to get some good, you know, marketing coverage in the US in places like the Wall Street Journal or Fox or, you know, CNBC and stuff. And that’s helped to build Crimson as sort of the national brand for college admissions. But it all began, you know, I think our first thing was a. We had an ice cream social with about 20 kids in Palo Alto, California. So you’ve got to start somewhere.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Oh, that’s, that’s good. And how, how has your relationship sort of developed with the universities, them themselves?

Jamie Beaton:
Well, really good. I mean, I, first of all, I’ve kept studying at more of them, so I’ve been making my way around, you know, recently, I won’t say what university it was, but I received an email from one of my professors, or rather one of the deans, and I was a bit nervous because I had been traveling for Crimson and I missed a couple of classes and they wanted to meet me. And so I rolled into the office, slight butterflies, and I sat down. The dean looked at me and said, Jamie, I’m actually going to be leaving the university soon and I’d love to come work for Crimson if there’s any spots available. This Particular fellow wanted to move to Europe and do some more flexible work. And Crimson, of course, has a lot of remote work options for our college admissions counsellors. I thought that was pretty funny. But I guess, in short, what we’ve been able to do is build Crimson as a fantastic employer of choice for many of these graduates.

Jamie Beaton:
So whether it be at education schools like UPenn, all the way to Harvard undergrad, a lot of graduates are really excited to work for Crimson, both in college admissions roles, teaching roles, tutoring roles, some full time, some part time. And it’s a really good way for someone to convert their passion for academics into an earning stream and also a way to inspire students. So it’s definitely become very mainstream. We also hire a lot of former admissions officers that used to work in admissions that then joined Crimson and provide advice to Next Wave. And it’s quite impactful work because when you’re in the admissions office, you’re often declining people and accepting some. But when you’re working on the Crimson side, you’re actually making every student you interact with a stronger profile, a better outlook and helping them get more career direction. So it often often can feel quite fulfilling. So, yeah, that’s been very exciting and I think we’ve continued to build relationships with more and more institutions and it’s been key to our success.

Paul Spain:
Great. That’s good. Now, tell us about how you looked at Crimson and from the early days sort of through and where your inspirations were in terms of, you know, were you looking at other sort of specific entities that you might, you know, you might be competing with? Were you looking at Silicon Valley tech startups? Were you looking at, you know, New Zealand success stories? What were the directions you looked and where did you take the most inspiration from?

Jamie Beaton:
The big inspiration was the pain that I felt going through the College of Admissions process from New Zealand, which, where I was at a fantastic school with great teachers who were really excited to help me. But the process was simply so complicated. It took hundreds of hours and it took me on a very different path to many of my peers. And all the way through the process, I had no idea how it was going. I had this idea I wanted to get into these schools, but I didn’t know if I was going to get into one of them. So I applied to all these universities and only when I actually got the result and I got into all these different universities that I realized actually I’d kind of stumbled upon this approach that was quite effective and distinct. So I think initially it was this combination of Having a lot of voices around me saying, hey, you don’t need to do this. It’s not necessary.

Jamie Beaton:
This isn’t going to work. And then getting the positive feedback that actually, well, it did. And then seeing actually many of my smart peers who I did math Olympiad with or chemistry competitions with or whatever, who didn’t get into these schools, realizing, okay, there’s actually a bit of a problem here, like an information knowledge training problem. So that was like, I guess, the key catalyst. But as far as inspiration, when I began working at Tiger for the late Julian Robertson, I studied companies like New Oriental and Tele Education Group, which got up to 40 and $35 billion companies, respectively, on the US stock market. And seeing how they had shepherded more than a million students in China through different learning processes and built a valuable company, but also a really important training engine for students, that certainly was a kind of inspiration. So I actually didn’t look at many Western examples of these education companies. I looked at particularly China as a heavy inspiration.

Jamie Beaton:
And I sort of took the view that over time, the kind of competitive academic culture that existed in places like China will eventually diffuse around the world, both literally because Chinese families will move to places like New Zealand and Australia and the UK, but also because the world generally gets more competitive over time. And I thought that, you know, if I, if I built this, you know, training program that was aligned to what I would have loved in high school, that will be quite powerful over time. So that was one inspiration. I also looked at other companies like Teladoc, you know, online healthcare delivery. I looked at businesses like Rocket Internet in Germany, which were really notable for execution, looking at things that were working, cloning them, launching them across Europe and Africa, and then even across different investors that I admired too. So there are some of the different types of inspiration that I took. I also was very inspired by folks like Rod Drury, because when I was first beginning at the Icehouse in 2013, Xero had an office across the hall from us. And I heard they were this really exciting company.

Jamie Beaton:
And actually, when I was getting trained as a hedge fund analyst in New York, one of the mentors I had told me to go study zero stock. And so I thought, wow, this Kiwi company is doing so well that this New York hedge fund is now looking at it. So I think there are a couple of the different touch points that really inspired me. But certainly my approach as an entrepreneur is to study business obsessively, see what’s going on across many different industries and take different ideas, and hopefully that Helps me keep adapting our roadmap.

Paul Spain:
And walk us through your opportunity to learn from Julian Robinson. How did all that come together and what were the big lessons there?

Jamie Beaton:
Totally. So I first met Julian through interviewing for his Robertson Scholarship back when I was 18. And at the point, I knew a bit about investment banking. I’d read some books like what they teach at Harvard Business School. My knowledge is pretty low. And I was reading about him and his background. I read about hedge funds and this idea of investing and finding good companies and bad companies and this kind of thing. Now I went along to the interview process and I began speaking to him.

Jamie Beaton:
Fast forward about 12 months. I was at Harvard. I was interning for a hedge fund called Weiss Asset Management, and I was building Crimson. It was rapidly growing and I thought, okay, maybe I should reach out to him and check in and get some advice. So I sent him a cold email and I said, hey, you know, submaphia Robertson scholars using Crimson for sad tutoring. And I’d love to tell you a bit about the business I’m building and also I’m working in finance now. I’d love to get some wisdom from you. So he very kindly met with me in New York.

Jamie Beaton:
Now, the short meeting ended up running and he took a lot of fascination with our rapid growth at Crimson and this, I guess, growing interest I had in stock investing and also even just my family journey and a bit about kind of this multi generational adventure from my granddad moving to New Zealand through my mum, through to me and really took me under his wing. He hired me to work at Tiger and also he invested in Crimson in the seed round alongside his son, Alex Robertson. So throughout college, I, I was born in Crimson investing for Tiger and Julian was taking me all around the US, meeting different CEOs, learning the tips and tricks of a stock investor. And I think that foundational training really helped me see how do you build a good company? What do you look for in enduring businesses? Strong leaders. And actually I learned so much from him in terms of financial advice, but I actually learned a ton as well from general leadership, his principles, his integrity as a leader, and how he’d built this incredible community. The Tiger universe around him. And, you know, to this day, alongside my own family, has definitely been the most inspirational role model that I’ve ever had.

Paul Spain:
Wow. And when you think about that time, what do you think was, you know, was most, most impactful that you, that you walked away with in terms of lessons?

Jamie Beaton:
Everyone in life needs a mentor who believes in them more than they believe in themselves. And I remember these conversations with Julian where, you know, I was thinking about how I could grow Crimson, maybe New Zealand and Australia, and. And he was so confident that I could build it all around the world, build it in China, build it everywhere. He introduced me to investors that had seen great success in China as inspiration to me to dream bigger. And he had this resolute confidence that we’d be able to make it work. And I think during our darkest, most spicy times, where we were failing in India or we had high cash burn, we had trying experiments that weren’t working, he was just calm, confident, and kept backing us. And I think, you know, that really showed what the power of mentorship does, because ultimately, whenever you build any kind of venture, almost everyone is initially a doubter. Maybe they’re neutral, but they’re usually a doubter.

Jamie Beaton:
And they might not say it to your face, but they usually are. And then over time, you know, more and more folks kind of pile into the journey. And I think having someone who just stands by you from the beginning and believes is incredibly powerful. So I think about that all the time when it comes to our students who have these bold goals. I think about one of our students, Brendan, who went from Canberra, came through Crimson, got into Harvard. He’d recently sold his company to Amazon. We want to be that kind of mentor for our students, just like he was to me and our team.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, I guess Sir John Kere is someone who’s been important in your journey as well. Tell us a little bit about that.

Jamie Beaton:
I mean, John is, of course, a legendary Kiwi, and his journey of really thriving in New Zealand and then going to work in the US and the uk, having great success in Wall street and then impacting New Zealand, and in particular, his way was politics. Incredibly inspiring journey. And I think early on, going through high school, John’s story was one of, you know, this ambition and willingness to also impact the community, too. And I think as a Kiwi, you know, we of course, have a lot of folks, this tall, poppy culture, where aiming high is not always really encouraged. I think actually that culture has been changing, and even in the last 10 years, I think it’s dramatically changed in many parts of New Zealand. But I think I looked at John earlier as an example of this tall puppy who. I was proud of his achievements on the world stage, but also down to earth and chill as a Kiwi, and it certainly made me believe that maybe it was possible for me to go to the US too. I think now, in a Crimson context, his Experience working in some of the biggest boards in the world at companies like Palletta Networks has leveled up.

Jamie Beaton:
Our corporate governance has helped us usher in new parts of Crimson, like our charter schooling and online schooling. He’s helped me make some of Crimson’s most transformative hires. Famously, John was able to build a really fantastic core group of folks around him. I give them a lot of autonomy, responsibility with really high performance standards, but also give them the space to be able to lead folks like Steven Joyce and others. And so I think seeing this leadership style of focused goal orientation, but also betting on people and making them feel like they have the remit and the trust to go, certainly we’ve tried to take that lesson at Crimson. So definitely he’s been really a very holistic influence to myself, but also to Crimson as well. Now on our board, I guess that

Paul Spain:
other one you mentioned, Sandeep Jane.

Jamie Beaton:
Yeah, so this is a funny example, but I first actually met Sandeep through Crimson, I guess, you know, helping some folks in his family with their admissions process. And so we built this really special relationship as his kids got into Stanford. And also at the time, you know, he was growing Uber through this crazy phase of growth. I’ve always been very inspired by Uber and I took early inspiration from their city launcher model and how Crimson expanded from New Zealand and Australia to 20 plus markets with our growth operations team. So when I realized he was actually working at Uber in the senior role, you know, I began asking for all kinds of advice. That relationship built and built and built. Now he’s on our board and certainly Sundeep is really at the forefront of innovation. Moving from Uber, after he took it from about a, I think 60 to nearly 300 billion mark cap company, he then joined this company, Mercour, with a bunch of 22 year olds.

Jamie Beaton:
And that company now provides a lot of the data labeling and data training services for labs like OpenAI and Anthropics. And so, you know, Sundeep strikes me as maybe one of the smartest minds that I’ve come across in Silicon Valley. And certainly as we continue to lead Crimson through this AI era, very, very important.

Paul Spain:
So what would you say would be the biggest lesson that you’ve learned from Sundeep?

Jamie Beaton:
I think what Sundeep teaches is that even if you are in totally different industries, whether it be an AI lab or whether it be Crimson, whether it be a law firm, a, a lot of the time teams that can’t quantify success and just vaguely aim for goals and, you know, it’s kind of ambiguous, always underperform teams that have a clear North Star metric that you drive towards. And in his career, almost every team that doesn’t have that clear North Star metric basically struggles, underperforms. And almost every team that really cranks at an elite level, whether it be Google search or ride sharing, excellence at Uber or now data labeling, has those really effective North Star metrics. And I think as an entrepreneur, it’s easy to have a sense that, oh, we vaguely know what the goals are or we kind of know, but going beyond just like, you know, revenue or something to clear operational metrics that the whole team is aligned behind and truly is aligned from your, you know, base new recruit all the way to your exec is really critical. So I think that is a very simple concept, but actually one that few companies truly execute on. And I think that would be, you know, one great example. The second piece that I would say I’ve really learned from Sundeep would just be around what, what in the new AI era will be driven by human teachers versus AI and where that settles out. And those discussions, debates with them have really helped form my view for kind of what I’m betting on at Crimson.

Paul Spain:
And let’s talk about you. What really drives you? What drives you every day because you seem to be working, studying, you don’t seem to slow down at all. And I think we were chatting before we kicked off and you were saying, yep, things haven’t slowed down since we last talked.

Jamie Beaton:
I thought you speed up a little bit, to be honest.

Paul Spain:
You’ve been going at an insane pace. So what is it that drives you and what does that look like for you kind of day to day? How do you get some balance in there?

Jamie Beaton:
So at the core, I feel like I’m truly obsessed with learning. And that can be a new academic concept in healthcare policy. It can be a new scaling challenge in entrepreneurship in India. But I hate to be static and I think I like max challenge, max learning in all areas. So I think that’s really drawn me to many of these universities to keep discovering new fields, whether it be law or journalism, whatever. And then in the business context, it really inspires me to push into new divisions, new units, embrace new technology, and try to push ourselves to grow at faster rates and achieve more excellence. So I think for me, that desire to learn drives a lot of things because if you do things slowly, you often will get into quite a routine and rhythm. But I think it’s that agility to learn that is very inspiring for me.

Jamie Beaton:
Of course there are Many other things, like impact. But I think probably, if there was one thing, I like to put myself in an environment where the learning curve is very steep. And so that tends to be perhaps why at Crimson, we go into a lot of different new units and we’re always trying new countries, new approaches. Why I’m always studying at different university programs. And also the cast of characters that I’ve surrounded myself with in the US and in general are generally folks that, for example, are at the coal faces of different industries. I think one of my best buddies, a guy called apoorv who’s investing in ultimeter capital, you know, they’ve become one of the biggest investors in OpenAI and I just love chatting with them about all these different trends across different industries. Certainly back when I was doing stock investing at Tiger, I loved it because you’re studying many different industries, long, short, seeing which companies will be disrupted, which companies won’t. And so it’s just max learning and challenge.

Jamie Beaton:
So I think for me, that’s probably what drives me the most.

Paul Spain:
And how do you put it all together? Studying and running the business and, you know, having a personal life too.

Jamie Beaton:
Fortunately, in Crimson, I found this, you know, beautiful vehicle in which all my learning, curiosity basically helps. So every new program that I do at a great place like Columbia journalism school or something, there’s, you know, more. More learning, more knowledge, more insights to help me build Crimson. And then, you know, Crimson ultimately is about taking the passion that many of our team have for learning and inspiring tens of thousands of kids around the world to really do so in their own journey. And. And there are many young people today who aren’t inspired by learning. They go through high school, it’s quite dreary and not so exciting. And when I come across a student that has a little bit of that spark and we can kind of convert that into this burning passion for what comes next.

Jamie Beaton:
I think it’s really epic. And I think about, for example, a boy, Ty Renner. I was just actually catching up with him in the Joe’s Cafe at Columbia. He was the head boy of Wellington College. Super ambitious guy. We helped him get into Columbia. He won his full scholarship there. And I think he’s going to first perhaps do something like managed consulting, but.

Jamie Beaton:
But I think he’ll be able to do big things for New Zealand in the future. And playing a role in igniting that curiosity in others has always been really exciting. I definitely have a fun personal life. I probably like theme parks a bit too much, and I’ve built a Great community around me in New York and the U.S. but I always love spending time at home with my family back here in nz. So looking forward to getting a couple of quiet days with them on this trip.

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

Paul Spain:
Fantastic.

Paul Spain:
And how do you look at things like time management and, yeah, other aspects of the way that, you know, life kind of intersects, you know, what are some tips and tricks are you up at, you know, 4:00am you know, what are those things that, you know, are your everyday.

Jamie Beaton:
I am up at wacky hours, that’s for sure. And I think part of that is because of all the different time zones of Crimson, I tend to have pretty scheduled, structured days and I think that really helps to get through all the different types of, you know, key meetings that I need to have with various folks, get through all the various, like, you know, new projects that we’re working on. So I think generally, you know, a lot of structure in my working days, but I try to have a lot of fun adventures when I’m, for example, visiting a country like Japan for work, try to squeeze in a fun adventure as well. So I think from a time management standpoint, I think if you don’t really plan for things intensively, I’ll give you an example. We have these work off sites every three months. It’s very easy for a hectic, busy team to slip out of that cadence and, you know, maybe just do something online or whatever. But we find that when we have that consistency, the whole team’s more motivated, more charged up and it flows through the whole company. And so I think having that operating rhythm and cadence just by default is really, really effective.

Jamie Beaton:
And if you’ve got to practically go and schedule something or make yourself do it randomly, it’s a lot tougher than just this auto running process. So I’m always thinking about, you know, does this exec meeting need to be, you know, running every week or whatever, or, you know, what cadence do we need to run things? And I think adjusting the kind of operating rhythm of the business for each new phase is very important.

Paul Spain:
Now, often the best learnings come through the challenges and the hard parts of the journey. What stands out to you over these last five years of the things that have been tough and more challenging to deal with and any lessons that have fallen out from there.

Jamie Beaton:
So some of the most entertaining struggles. I say entertaining now after some reflection, but if you think about last May, Trump came out and said he was going to ban all, all Chinese kids from Harvard, he was going to ban all foreign kids from Harvard, he was going to freeze visa interviews to the US now, you know, at Crimson, about a third of our two thirds of our college admissions revenue is foreign kids coming to the U.S. so theoretically, that would be quite spicy. Now, I guess the interesting thing about the last couple of years is there’s actually been more geopolitical instability than ever before. We, for example, have a big team in the Middle east based in Dubai. What we’ve seen the last three, four years is probably unprecedented amounts of instability, you know, and I think as a leader, you’re of course, responding to not only, of course, looking after your team, but also this kind of evolving world. And I think probably for us at least, the core demand to go to the US and, like, go to these top universities is not driven by a love of Boston or something. It’s driven by the fact that there’s a lot of economic opportunity for, you know, folks in these places, at least in early phase of their career.

Jamie Beaton:
So despite a lot of these geopolitical shocks, the main themes of Crimson have remained very resilient. But, you know, for example, I never could have imagined when I began in Crimson that you’d have a US President trying to, like, nuke his own universities or, you know, kind of throw out this instability. And so I think I haven’t. I hadn’t had to adapt to geopolitical shocks before then. There’s also things. For example, China, they randomly woke up one day and they banned all domestic tutoring. And so companies like New Oriental that were worth 30 billion dropped by 95% within a matter of days. Now, that didn’t really affect us, fortunately, because we do international students, you know, heading abroad, but just being more aware that actually in business, no matter what you think is happening, almost anything you build, you know, can have some, you know, tail risk, basically, and then adapting for that, whether it be diversification, more geographies, just a more, I guess, strong intestinal fortitude within your team and culture.

Jamie Beaton:
These things are very important because in this environment, like, you truly can’t know all the unknowns.

Paul Spain:
And it seems like politics is something that you’re really interested in, you know. Tell us about your interest in politics and learning about politics.

Jamie Beaton:
Yeah, so I guess, firstly, on an academic note, I guess my interest probably began fairly early on in debating in high school in New Zealand, because a lot of the time you’re debating different policy areas. And I guess when I was doing my DPhil at Oxford, I was at the Blavatnik School of Government, which is all about how you take research, then apply it in government to drive impact. I think government’s interesting because you can have massive impact through policy changes, but it’s so painful sometimes to get anything done. And it’s such an entrenched bureaucracy that is. And ultimately politics is super consequential to the whole country’s life or the world. You know, one man sitting in, you know, Washington D.C. can, you know, globally spike oil prices with, you know, the push of a button. And so I think for me, you know, it’s very consequential to humanity.

Jamie Beaton:
If done well, it can create massive change and it relates to everything in business of course too. But ultimately, you know, it’s the governing body that the Western countries have chosen to, you know, push their countries forwards. And that inherently makes it really interesting.

Paul Spain:
So looking at New Zealand politics, what would you imagine a kind of a utopia or a sort of perfect version of New Zealand politics might look like?

Jamie Beaton:
Well, that’s a great question. I think at the core of New Zealand, there’s a bit of a struggle between two alternative visions for the country. One, it’s this hermit kingdom where foreigners can’t, you know, move here. We were locking ourselves off from, you know, trade where we’re happy to sort of just compete locally. We don’t want Kiwis to move abroad and we just look very inward. And the second is really a globally open, competitive New Zealand that encourages people from around the world to be here, is proud of Kiwis to go abroad and shine abroad and come back. So I think as a country, New Zealand, we kind of have to decide do we want to be a country for local born Kiwis that is pretty inward facing and we’re kind of content with the economic consequence of that, or do we want to have a bigger vision for our country on the world stage? And so I think we’re kind of wrestling with that right now. I think if New Zealand can decide, and I personally think it should be the more open version of New Zealand that’s ambitious on the world stage and lock into that vision.

Jamie Beaton:
It provides at least an overarching framework everyone can get behind and then you don’t have as much, you know, fundamental policy disagreement.

Paul Spain:
From a business perspective, what would be some advice that you would, you might share with our listeners in terms of, you know, something that’s, you know, been really key for you and your success.

Jamie Beaton:
I think almost any ambitious Kiwi company has to export and has to go offshore. For me, within the first 18 months, we began selling into Australia and then going offshore and New Zealand’s a fantastic HQ location. Even today, our headquarters is in New Zealand and we’re really proud of that. We’ve got many of our key executives here, but we’ve been able to take that and compete in China and in India and in America and beat the local guys and build this global company. So I think as a Kiwi businessman or a Kiwi entrepreneur, don’t be afraid to tackle Australia, don’t be afraid to look into Southeast Asia. And, you know, you’ve got to get out there to win those markets. You know, we only were able to crack all these markets by flying out there, building teams on the ground, challenging the status quo. And I think, you know, we’re well positioned to do that.

Jamie Beaton:
New Zealand’s a great place where there’s, you know, almost no corruption. It’s easy to register companies, it’s easy to hire, there’s great talent here locally, so it’s a great hub. But because of the size of the country, we’ve got to export, compete and win on the world stage. So I think if you’ve been, you know, building a great Kiwi company for five or six years and you haven’t yet figured out a foreign market to attack, you know, maybe think about that

Paul Spain:
and looking at our tech sector, what are your thoughts on things that we should be aware of going forward to help us do better?

Jamie Beaton:
So one of the things that I really think we have to do is dramatically level up our education system, particularly our math education. You need to view math excellence as almost something of national security importance, because in the AI era, this is one of the key skills that actually lets you build these transformative companies. Think about, for example, you know, a place like, you know, Singapore or, you know, Denmark. I think about, for example, the maker of Ozempic, that one company is, is almost as big as the whole GDP of the country. And so if we can, for example, build more of these transformative technology companies that, you know, aren’t just solving a small problem, but actually can compete as one of the mainstream, you know, global winners that can really transform our economy. And you see with, you know, Ireland, only a couple of big tech companies based there, like Stripe, have made a big difference to their economy, their GDP per capita. And I think, you know, that’s probably a good way, good way forwards.

Paul Spain:
Was there anything else that you’d like to add?

Jamie Beaton:
No, that’s fantastic. Very spicy. I appreciated it. Really interesting questions and you’ve challenged me to make sure the next five years are more interesting than the last.

Paul Spain:
Look forward to it. Yeah. Great. Thank you. Thank you, Jamie.

Jamie Beaton:
Cheers.

Paul Spain:
Much appreciated.

Paul Spain:
Well, I hope you really enjoyed hearing from Jamie Beaton, who founder and chief executive at Crimson Education. And if you want to learn more about Jamie and the early years of Crimson Education, then check out our previous New Zealand business podcast interview with him. And of course, we also have a recent New Zealand tech podcast interview with Jamie. The New Zealand Business podcast has been brought to you by One New Zealand and Gorilla Technology. Be sure to listen in to our other episodes featuring many of New Zealand’s most incredible leaders, the likes of Brooke Roberts from Sharesies, Sir Peter Beck of Rocket Lab, Cecilia Robinson from MyFoodbag, Intend, Sir Stephen Tyndall and many more. And be sure to share this episode with a friend or colleague who you think will benefit from it. Final question, if you’re working at a mid size or smaller organisation, are you completely confident your organisation has its house in order from a cybersecurity and data privacy perspective? If you’re not so sure, then get in touch with Gorilla Technology for an initial advisory session. Well, thanks for listening in.

Paul Spain:
This is Paul Spain signing out. I’ll catch you again on the next episode.

Paul Spain:
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