I Hired My College Roommates to Build a $300M Empire — Transcript

You are the co-founder and CEO of Crimson Education. Manhattan, to me, feels like capitalism cranked on steroids, like capitalism cubed. It feels almost like a meme of capitalism. My first year, we did 300k in sales. By the end of Harvard, we were doing 5 million per year. Alpha School promises to get through all that content in 2 hours rather than seven. When I finished Harvard, that next year I was basically on a plane every week opening up Crimson markets in Thailand and Russia and Vietnam and Singapore. So, it's about 40% academics, 30% extracurriculars and leadership, 30% essays and interviews. You know, last year we did just over 300 million in sales, New Zealand dollars. Let's go and do it and see what happens. Ideas are worth like jack [ __ ] absolute jack [ __ ]. Like, if you can't execute, there's nothing. Just take that initiative to actually take whatever crazy ideas that they might have and just try to see what comes of it. Don't be afraid of ambition. Chase it, love it, wrap your arms around it, and say it out loud. New Zealanders don't know any better, and they will just get up and give it a shot. That's why we were first to get to the top of Mount Everest. Go to dream that ultimate dream. Like, what is it that you ultimately want to do? And it's all achievable. All right, Jeremy, thank you for joining us on TechMates. It's a blast. Pleasure to be with you guys. Great. And you're in New York today, right? That's where you're kind of based at the moment. Yes. Yes. Mainly in New York. I just got back from a spicy trip to Brazil yesterday. Spicy trip. Yes. Our Crimson team has been there for like about seven years or so, and I haven't actually been back on the ground for a while, and it's a really good market for study abroad. So just there for the weekend. Oh, very cool. Yeah. Well, I guess Jamie can be introduced as the least qualified person that I've ever met. He only has like five degrees from Ivy League universities instead of all eight. So something like that. I don't know. Yeah, we usually want to inspire people from New Zealand to kind of think big, but that doesn't really sound impressive. So, I don't know if we should kind of continue with this interview, but no, I mean, in all seriousness, we're super happy to have you on. You are the co-founder and CEO of Crimson Education, a huge education company that we love to talk a little bit more about. But usually, what we do is we kind of give a bit of background on founders who are coming out of the New Zealand ecosystem or part of the New Zealand ecosystem to inspire others to think about becoming entrepreneurs. And we usually start by going back all the way to where you grew up, how you grew up, and what made you become an entrepreneur. So yeah, would love to start kind of at the beginning. What was your childhood like and from your upbringing? Yeah, sure. So, I grew up with my mom Paula and my grandparents in a three-generational home. And I think growing up, my mom was always running her business, growing her property management company. And so, from a young age, I sort of saw her hustling all the time, picking up client calls at wacky hours. I'd be doing my homework in her meetings around Oakland. And so, I guess growing up, I was always really exposed to business. In saying that, I always thought that I was just doing my academic stuff, doing some sciences, maybe I'd do medicine at the University of Oakland. And so, I really had no connection to business emotionally. I didn't really think it was a thing that I would do. And when I was about 16, I picked up A-level economics and I began to see really how cool financial markets were, investing, economics, things like this. And I was also doing the Young Enterprise Scheme. And I was having a bit of experience there with business. But it really wasn't until I applied to all these US and UK schools when I was about 17 and got into them, and all these people were asking about how I'd gotten into schools like Harvard and if I could help them, that I began to build Crimson. And initially, it was really a bit of a side hustle, really helping Kiwi kids that I just wanted to give some support to before I began at Harvard, and I kind of stumbled onto Crimson in many ways. But by about that time, I began to get really curious about business, both investing in companies in terms of public equities and also building them as an entrepreneur. And I think from about 18 onwards, I became pretty obsessed with business building, and I've been kind of hardcore building Crimson ever since. But Jamie, if we sort of go back a little bit, what did your mom kind of instill in you that education was important? Or how did you, like, what was it like for you growing up in that? Were your grandparents important to you and kind of shaping how you thought about that? Yeah, totally. So, my mom was a big believer in education. She had an MBA degree, a law degree, a commerce degree, and she was a chartered accountant. And she sort of said to me early on in my career, or rather in my education, that education's the super high-stakes part of your life, that really whatever happens to you, you always have your education, and there's an aspect of self-reliance and self-determination, I think, that she associates with education in general. From a young age, I guess I was always really excited by school, and I think I began pretty early on to associate school and academics the same way maybe a Kiwi kid associates rugby or sports, something like this. And so it was like the thing that I loved doing, the thing that I sort of associated myself with. And I think my mom always cheered me on and encouraged it. Student before the age of 12, she was very hands-on, like she would teach me Latin and history and all these things. But I think I was pretty self-motivated, especially kind of heading into high school years. And I sort of just had the sense that academics was a thing that would kind of take me somewhere. And so it was a big deal in our family. And I think as I went through high school, I became progressively more high stakes as I learned about these US admissions processes to schools like Harvard, where everything that I was doing kind of countered towards this long-term goal I had of getting into one of these great universities. So yeah, I would say our family, from like a Caucasian Kiwi family, was pretty high intensity on the education side, and in many ways, my childhood was much more like probably a Chinese kid growing up with some intense academic parents than your typical Kiwi laid-back mom. So it was kind of a special Kiwi experience. Interesting. What kinds of things did you do besides academics? Did you do a bunch of other extracurriculars? Were there any things that were particularly interesting to you? Yeah. I mean, I would say I tried a bunch of stuff. I tried basketball unsuccessfully, but I also played tennis and hockey and other sports. Tennis and hockey were the things that I really kind of went deep on. Tennis was really one of my main loves going through school. So, I'd play tennis a lot, play for my school teams, competitive teams, different tournaments and stuff. I also love debate. I love Model United Nations, which I kind of got into later in high school. I love creative writing, and I was really involved with a lot of different extracurriculars. I think in high school, though, I never really saw myself as a leader. I was more just doing my academic things, doing some activities. So the idea of public speaking or being the head of the school government, whatever, I never really saw that as somet-

doing 5 million per year. Alpha school promises to get through all that content in 2 hours rather than seven. When I finished um Harvard that next year I was basically on a plane every week opening up crimson markets in Thailand and

Russia and Vietnam and Singapore. So, it's about 40% academics, 30% extra cookies and leadership, 30% essays and interviews. You know, last year we did just over 300 million in sales, New Zealand dollars.

Let's go and do it and see what happens. Ideas are worth like jack [ __ ] Absolute jack [ __ ] Like, if you can't execute, there's nothing.

Just take that initiative to actually take whatever crazy ideas that they might have and just try to see what comes of it.

Don't be afraid of ambition. Chase it, love it, wrap your arms around it, and and say it out loud.

New Zealanders don't know any better. and they will just get up and give it a shot. That's why we were first to get to the top of Mount Everest.

Go to dream that ultimate dream like what is it that you ultimately want to do and it's all achievable.

All right, Jeremy, thank you for joining us on TechMates. It's a blast. Pleasure to be with you guys.

Great. And you're in New York today, right? That's where where you're kind of based at the moment.

Yes. Yes. Mainly in New York. I just got back from a spicy trip to Brazil yesterday.

Spicy trip. Yes. Our Crimson team has been there for like about seven years or so and I haven't I haven't actually been back on the ground for a while and um it's it's a really good markup for study abroad.

So just there for the weekend. Oh, very cool. Yeah. Well, I guess Jamie can be introduced as the least qualified person that I've ever met. He only has like he only has like five degrees from Ivy League University instead of all eight.

So something like that. I don't know. Yeah, we usually we usually want to inspire people um from New Zealand to kind of think big, but that doesn't really sound impressive. So, I don't know if we uh should kind of continue

with this interview, but um no, I mean, in all seriousness, we're we're super happy to have you on. Uh you are the co-founder and CEO of uh Crimson Education, huge education company that we love to talk a bit a little bit more

about. But usually yeah what we do is we kind of give a bit of background um on uh founders who are coming out of the New Zealand ecosystem or part of the New Zealand ecosystem to inspire others to

think about becoming entrepreneurs. Um and we usually start by going back all the way to kind of where you grew up, how you grew up and you know what made you become an entrepreneur. So yeah would love to start kind of at the

beginning like what what was your childhood like and from your upbringing? Yeah, sure. So, I grew up with my mom Paula and my grandparents in like a three generational home. And I think growing up, my mom was always um running

her business, growing her property management um company. And so, for a young age, I sort of saw her hustling all the time, picking up client calls at wacky hours. I'd be doing my homework in her meetings around Oakland. And so, I

guess growing up, I was always really exposed to business. In saying that, I always thought that I was just doing my academic stuff, doing some sciences, maybe I'd do medicine at the University of Oakland. And so, I really had no

connection to business emotionally. I didn't really think it was a thing that I would do. And when I was about 16, I picked up Alevel economics and I began to see really how cool like financial markets were, investing, economics,

things like this. And I was also doing the young enterprise scheme. And I was having a bit of experience there with business. But it really wasn't until I applied to all these US and UK schools when I was about 17 and got into them.

And all these people were asking about how I'd gotten into schools like Harvard and if I could help them that I began to build Crimson. And initially it was really a bit of a um side hustle really helping Kiwi kids that you know I just

wanted to give some support to before I began at Harvard and I kind of stumbled onto Crimson in many ways. But by about that time I began to get really curious about business both investing in companies in terms of public equities

and also building them to as an entrepreneur. And I think from about 18 onwards I became pretty obsessed with business building and you know I've been kind of hardcore um building crimson ever since. But Jamie, if we if we sort

of like go back a little bit. So, um, what did your mom kind of like, you know, instill in you that education was important or how did you like what was it like for you and growing up in that?

Were your grandparents important to you and and kind of like shaping how you thought about that?

Yeah, totally. So, my mom was a a big believer in education. She had an MBA degree, a law degree, a commerce degree and she was a chartered accountant. And she sort of said to me early on in my

career that u or rather in in my education that you know education's the super high stakes part of your life that really whatever happens to you you always have your education and there's an aspect of sort of self-reliance and

self-determination I think that she associates with education in general. From a young age I guess um I was always really excited by school um and I think I began pretty early on to associate school and academics the same way maybe

a Kiwi kid associates rugby or sports something like this. And so it was like the thing that I loved doing, the thing that I sort of associated myself with.

Um, and I think my mom always cheered me on and encouraged it. Student before the age of like 12, you know, she was very hands-on, like she would like teach me Latin and history and all these things.

But I think, um, I was pretty self-motivated, especially kind of heading into high school years. And I sort of just had the sense that, you know, academics was a thing that would kind of take me somewhere. And so it was

a big deal in our family. And I think as I went through high school, I became progressively more high stakes as I learned about these US admissions processes to schools like Harvard where everything that I was doing kind of

countered towards this long-term goal I had of getting into one of these great universities. So um yeah, I would say our family from like a you know Caucasian Kiwi family was pretty high intensity on the education side and in

many ways my childhood was much more like probably like a Chinese kid growing up you know with some you know intense academic parents than your typical Kiwi laid-back mom. So, uh, it was it was kind of a special Kiwi experience.

Interesting. What kinds of things did you do besides academics? Did you do a bunch of like other extracurriculars?

Were there any kind of Yeah. things that were particularly interesting to you? Um, yeah. I mean, I would say I tried a bunch of stuff. I I tried basketball unsuccessfully, but I also played like tennis and hockey and other sports. And

tennis and hockey were the things that I really kind of went deep on. Tennis was really one of my main loves going through school. So, I'd play tennis a lot, play for my school teams, competitive teams, different tournaments

and stuff. I also love debate. I love modern United Nations which I got kind of got into later in high school. I love creative writing and I was really involved with a lot of different extracurriculars. I think in high school

though I never really saw myself as like a leader. Um I was more like just doing my academic things, doing some activities. So the idea of like public speaking or being like the head of the school, government, whatever. Um I never

really saw that as something that sort of fitted me. Um I was much more my academic swim lane. Um and then I think um as I went through high school, debate became a big part of things. Um, and I

think uh near the end of high school, I started to get a bit more comfortable with leadership and building clubs and stuff. And so I launched like a student newspaper and I launched like this business and a bunch of other clubs for

things like youth against drink driving. And that became u my first exposure sort of leadership and coordinating people and running an organization.

Well, and what was the first time that you learned there was like I mean I assume you you had known there was universities in New Zealand. At what point the idea of like going abroad for university enter your mind? So I

actually remember the moment very distinctively because I was on a train from Glenus out to Kings in Odoo and I sat next to this guy called Ben Kornfeld and you know to me this guy was like sort of an all black because he was the

best academic kid at Kings. He was the ducks of the school. He'd won all of these different Olympiad medals, top in the world awards in his academics, and he was, you know, kind of like the big brother, you know, sort of figure. And

so he told me on the train out to school that I should really think about not only applying to New Zealand schools, but also these, you know, American schools. And he' just gotten into Yale and he was telling me about the process

and said, you know, that he applied quite last minute, but if he could go back, he would have started to think about it from my age. And so I think that was sort of the initial seed.

How old were you? I was 13. Yeah, it was great timing. And that kind of really lit lit a fire under me because before I did all this academic stuff sort of out of the thrill of the chase and I enjoyed it and I

think from that point there was a real purpose behind everything that I was doing um that would really kind of sync to my career and um I went to Columbia with my mom when I was 15. She took me

around campus and it felt like a kind of you know academic Disneyland of sorts and um it was super inspiring and I kind of came back to New Zealand fired up by that and uh yeah each new year just

added more and more stuff in this kind of endless pursuit of trying to get into these schools and it was really fun actually but um I definitely put a lot of pressure on myself I think um you know in that last year in particular as

I was kind of applying to all these schools. Interesting. And as you as as you kind of like thought thought about these schools and did you think I just want to get into a school and that's kind of the

achievement in itself or did you think I want to go to I don't know Princeton because they have a low you know professor to student ratio and they're undergrad focused or I want to go to Harvard for this like or did you do you

have a specific or was it more just like I just want to get into NIV I want to get into a top school or like how did you think about so the way I kind of stumbled upon this

is I in high school I was like reading these like Wikipedia profiles of people like political leaders as you know business leaders, entrepreneurs, CEOs and I kept discovering that these guys had gone to these you know great schools

and I was like very very interesting. It seems like, you know, in order to kind of break into these worlds, particularly investing and and Wall Street and finance, this could be useful. And so I actually kind of like I had the Ben

inspiration from that train conversation. And then I kept seeing these examples of interesting people, you know, um that had come like you know, Zuckerberg was building Facebook and that was a big deal at the time or like Evan Spiegel on Snapchat from

Stanford. And I kept hearing these university names and it began to sort of um seep into my brain a little bit that getting into the schools would equal opportunity. For me, what that looked like it's a bit ambiguous at the start

of high school. Maybe it was medicine again. But I think from the age of about 15, 16, I began to kind of think about investing in Wall Street and um you know, becoming like a hedge fund investor or whatever that meant at the

time. And so I think I I began to see sort of the universities as this launch pad to you know, this compelling opportunity. And maybe it was a little bit ambiguous exactly what I was striving for, but it felt like that was

the very clear direction. Do you know what that meant? like being a hedge fund investor or being in do you understand what that actually meant where you just like why why why did you gravitate towards that? I read this book

called What They Teach You at Harvard Business School, which I picked up at a secondhand bookstore in Hamilton. And I was just reading it kind of on the way back up to Oakland. And you know, it was sort of recounting what it was like in

the Harvard MBA program. And it was a journalist who had sort of, you know, gone around and interviewed all his classmates who were doing things like private equity and banking. And and so I began to kind of build a bit of

intuition for what this finance world was like. And I love math and I I didn't really know what I could do with math at the time. But then when I began to read about finance and investing, I sort of

realized that actually this career, you know, it seems pretty high stakes, exciting, you know, adrenalinefilled, you know, lucrative, this could be good.

And so I think I began to get a clearer idea of it. I think I was still a bit hazy on what a hedge fund was until I actually met with the late Julian Robertson as part of the Robertson

scholarship interview process. And in preparation for that, you know, I was reading about his background and story and I didn't know what this hedge fund thing really meant. And so I was kind of going deep on studying, you know, okay,

what is shorting? um you know, how do these hedge funds work? What why are they different to like a bank? And so I would say I was murky in the beginning of high school. Then by the end of high

school, I had a pretty clear sense of this. And certainly by the time I was heading off to Harvard, I was kind of like hellbent on this mission of getting into Wall Street.

Why why was that interesting? Like that these are like such abstract things. Like why was that interesting to you?

I think um it seemed like an intellectual gladiatorial arena or something where you know these sharp guys from around the world would come along. they'd compete with their minds in this sort of like pseudo video game.

And in doing so, you learn about the world. You learn about, you know, different companies, but it was sort of an expression of creativity. It seemed like, yeah, it seemed kind of like a a thrilling adrenaline, you know, high

speed chase. So, I I think there was some aspect of this and I also just loved economics and it felt like, you know, the industry that I could best use economics. I couldn't see myself becoming like a professor straight away

in economics, but it seemed like if I use these economic skills maybe in in investing that'd be quite helpful. And you know, probably the first like serious heavyweight guy that I met in my life, American guy, was probably Julian

Robertson. And you know, I just began to get attached to sort of this idea of, you know, what he had built, how he had built it, the framework for analysis that he had. It seemed compelling to me.

So what was this first year in Harvard like? Like what was the experience? Was it everything you kind of imagined and dreamed of from an academic perspective?

So, oh, so wait, so hold on. But where did you get in? I guess maybe let's let's rewind a little bit before where where did you all where all the schools you where did you apply? Where did you

get in? And then Yeah. So I applied to schools like Cambridge, Harvard Yale Princeton Stanford Columbia, Wharton, and Duke. And I got into all of those schools. So it was a good it was a good sweep. And um I also

applied to random schools in like New Zealand and Australia and stuff. Mainly the goal was to get into the top US schools. I was considering going to Cambridge. Um, but I think ultimately America seemed more ambitious, more entrepreneurial. And in the UK, you

would just do one degree, a focus in a singular domain. And I kind of like the idea of these US schools where you could try a bunch of different things. And I also like the idea of a school where

every single person there, you know, had these deep passions, but they they were quite broad. And so I could just imagine sort of making lots of friends with very different interests to my own and that being quite fun. So that was I guess

what drew me to Harvard over some of the other schools like Wharton which is very hardcore on the finance side as you know. So I think that that was it. And then I guess to answer your question Hendrickk when I got to Harvard I

basically I felt like I had entered into a new universe where I was liberated.

And what I mean by that is I think in high school there was this like stance of the tall puppy syndrome phenomena a little bit where you know I was very ambitious maybe too ambitious and you know I was sort of pushing against this

quite chill relaxed environment even in my great high school and you know I love my high school but it it it felt like there was something unusual where like um I was really you know itching to get out there

into the world and education seemed very high stakes to me and there was only a couple of kids in my high school that probably felt that way as well. When I got to Harvard, every single kid had these crazy ambitions. And I remember

this stark first week where I met this kid, Danny, and he told me that he wanted to become the US president. And at the time, I thought it was kind of nuts, this 18-year-old guy telling me this. And, you know, he he declared to

me quite confidently that was he was the head of the student government in his high school and he was going to go to Harvard and he was going to become the president of the States. And I thought, you know, this is just like crazy. And I

kept meeting these guys. I met this girl, Katherine, who was very good at statistics. She told me she wanted to launch a hedge fund. And it was again and again and again these these Americans with these big dreams. And I

was so used subconsciously to kind of bottling up my ambitions in New Zealand and it being kind of weird or or quirky.

And so when I got to Harvard, it really did feel like this great liberation every single meeting, every professor um and you know speed and excitement was appreciated. So, uh, I loved it and I jumped into some really challenging

economics and math classes and I I met these, you know, world-class professors and it was just all go from day one and I just, you know, loaded my schedule up with crazy classes and I was joining all these different finance clubs and

building crimson at night and it was just like a baptism by fire and um, it was very intense because I was like doing all the classes doing crimson but I was I loved every minute of it.

Were you a part of any final clubs? No, no, I actually I did go along to the um to some of them. uh I went along to the speed but I don't I don't drink any alcohol and so at some points you know

uh in the process you kind of have to uh either commit or not and and I this is not really for me um but very nice people and I a lot of my good buddies are in those finals clubs

so you've had more uh kind of among your peers and uh could suddenly start dreaming big and kind of yeah saying out loud what you actually wanted to do with your life and your career.

Yeah, I think that's right. And you know I was sort of quite yeah inspired by this this ambition. It felt like the other thing is very interesting. High school felt like you couldn't be too ambitious because that was frowned upon,

but also it felt very zero sum because you ultimately have to compete with your classmates to get into these universities. Harvard felt you could be loud with your ambitions, but it also wasn't zero sum basically because there was so many, you know, things you could

be striving for from academia to, you know, getting a hedge fund role and there are so many shots on goal in different organizations that you're not really kind of competing with your classmate all that much. you know, may

maybe if you're both trying to get a job in Mackenzie, maybe, but even then, they can take a lot of people. I just I didn't I no longer felt this zero sum competition. I felt it was more just

like a race against myself. And um that was pretty awesome. And you know, I was sort of going down quite a different track to many of my classmates with my hedge fund stuff and also with Crimson.

You know, I had these great swim lanes loving it. Jamie, what like why do you think the US and I don't know, US is unique, but yeah. Like why do you think there was such a difference between what you

experienced? Obviously you were in high school and going to college and I'm sure like most US high schoolers similar to yours but like just from a more macro perspective you've lived in a lot of places now. You've seen a lot of

different people you older now. Do you have any like thoughts around like I guess why New Zealand has this tall poppy thing and is there ways to change it or maybe is it a good thing for a small country to have that kind of thing

like or Yeah. Or do you think it holds the country back? Any thoughts on that?

Yeah. So I actually think Manhattan, where I live right now, and New Zealand have this wonderful contrast almost four to each other. And I think they both have their pros and cons. So take New Zealand. It's a very egalitarian

country. You know, everyone's pretty equal in feeling. You respect your common person. You know, it doesn't matter what you're doing. There's a lot of mutual respect there. And who whoever you are in life, you know, your life isn't so radically different. Obviously,

it can be quite different, but it's not the same as India or something between like the Amanis and people who are, you know, unable to feed themselves to quite that extent. So I think New Zealand has this and also generally it's people that

have that are sorting for lifestyle in terms of moving to New Zealand in the first place and there's an element of sort of a pace of life as well there.

It's not quite island time right like Hawaii or something but it's also you know it's it's it's a bit more relaxed.

So I think there's plenty of benefits to that. Um you know it's a very I think psychologically safe place to grow up.

Um then I think on the flip side you've got Manhattan and Manhattan to me feels like capitalism cranked on steroids like capitalism cubed. there's like a Super Mario game. We run around chasing the gold coins and um you know, everyone's

running around 24/7 and it's like a nutty little inferno. So, I think um you know, the problem the problem with that in Manhattan is um to some degree there's an element of superficiality maybe to the society and there's also a

sense that I mean people always joke that often in New York you first describe who you are by saying what you do. Whether in New Zealand often you'll have a conversation, you won't even talk about what your job is, you know, for

like a whole meeting. In fact, it's kind of weird to talk about work sometimes.

So, I think um that really epitomizes this difference. So, I think when I first got to America and I first got to Harvard, I felt liberated by that raw ambition. But as I've gotten older, you know, I think it's fair to say that

there is pros and cons to these types of intense psyches and probably different flavors of life. I also think that in general, you know, I have a lot of kids from Crimson from all corners of the world. I think if you grow up in

Manhattan your entire life, um there's an aspect of how it affects a child's psychology which I think is can be damaging sometimes. And I do think that the Kiwi childhood can have a lot of benefits actually. So overall, I mean, I

think America is just the most extreme version of capitalism filtering through every part of the society. I think about like, you know, you go to all these states, there's just like endless fast food chains. you know, you go to these

like strip malls, you know, you go to like an emergency care doctor that's going to charge some crazy price owned by some private equity firm down the road. Um, and you know, you have like members clubs, you know, stacked for the

only purpose of creating these zones of exclusivity just to appeal to these people that need to find some difference in a city where like lots of people have theoretical abundance. So, it it feels almost like a meme of capitalism. Um,

and then, you know, I think New Zealand's on the other side of that spectrum. So yeah, I think that's probably my reflections a little bit.

And I personally at this stage of my life, I love mixing it up. You know, I love to be in the the New York grind.

Then I love to just um it's almost like a cleansing process being in New Zealand. It like purifies my soul of sort of just the the capitalist grime.

Um that's and the literal grime too. Yeah, that's true. That's true. New Zealand is much cleaner.

May Yeah, maybe we can talk a little bit more about Crimson and the the early days. Um so you said um what started it was basically other people asking you how did you get into Harvard? Um yeah but maybe talk a little bit more about

like how you got started. Yeah. So going through high school I had this very bizarre experience where I was reading about what it took to get into these schools. I I was buying books like what they teach you at Har know the 50

applications that got you into Harvard and I was like on these online forums and stuff and it seemed like this incredibly complicated process that I'd speak to folks in Oakuckland and they would generally tell me to like chill

out and or do less stuff. you know, these extra activities I was doing isn't necessary. A classic example is these A levels. So, uh, in my high school, normally you do three or four A levels, and I was like pretty convinced that if

I did a lot of A levels would help me get into all these schools, and I also I like studying. So, I I took 10 of these things. And I had all these folks telling me it was kind of like a bit

nutty. Now, when I ultimately applied, I got into all of these schools, and many of my classmates were very sharp, who had great achievements. I got declined from everywhere. And I kind of realized actually that a lot of this advice that

we were getting, a lot of it was just actually wrong. Like, it wasn't just neutral. what actually was like damaging negative advice that would actually decrease your odds if you listen to it.

And so I thought this is kind of wacky because getting in is super high leverage but the advice is really hard to access and there are all these kind of weird cultural barriers that you know make you more likely to quit the

process. And so when I began Crimson I just thought that I had a differentiated point of view about you know what it takes to bridge a Kiwi education through to these great schools. And I was pretty confident that I could add some value to

these students. And so I began running around um initially kids from my high school, kids from peer high schools, recruiting tutors that I knew through like Math Olympia and model UN and stuff.

So So Jamie, so just just to double click on that, so the insight was you were getting not only neutral information, but like unhelpful information that was preventing kids from getting to these good schools in New Zealand. And so you were like, I've

gone through the process. I have peers and I see what kind of peers they are, what they've done. I can actually provide some insights and some insight knowledge for kids who want to get into these schools.

Exactly. That's exactly right. And did you did did you already think of it as a business at that time or you were just like I just want to be helpful?

At the start I just thought I could be helpful. Pretty quickly though I realized that if I was just being helpful everywhere I would I would have uh you know so many folks coming to me that it was probably challenging. So

then I started to charge for it and I also began to realize that actually rather than doing it all myself if if I began hiring all these tutors I can actually serve more students. So I think pretty quickly I figured out that I

should deliver this through a more scalable channel and so I was very happy to help people that needed the help but I I felt like the way to kind of solve the problem went beyond me and I could

probably be like a facilitator for this. So very quickly it evolved into a business. Around the same time I was interning for the ICE house and I was going to these like ICE house pitch days where entrepreneurs would come along and

pitch their ideas to a room full of investors like Deote partners and lawyers and stuff and a lot of these guys had no revenue and they had these like slides but they would raise these like seed rounds and I thought it was

sort of mythical that this guy with no no business would be able to make money pl from the sky from these investors and it just didn't seem sort of I don't know real. Meanwhile, you know, Crimson and I

was sort of pulling in the revenue. I think we did several hundred,000 revenue in our first year and I thought 700,000 uh se 30 I said several hundred,000 it was yeah 300,000 in our first year it was our sales

hold on hold on you this while you're at Harvard yeah yeah so my first year we did 300k in sales while you were at Harvard you have a business that's pulling in 300k yeah yeah by the end of Harvard I we

were doing 5 million per year what so so the way you did it was basically first you kind of did the tutoring yourself and then did you kind of give other tutors a manual of like this is what you need to teach Um that's

the way you scaled it. That's right. So I I began recruiting all these tutors. I would build these packages that had sort of a team of tutors uh working on different things around a student and then I would go

find all the tutors that the client needs and I would um you know match them up and then manage these cases. And so I was sitting on campus at Harvard. So I had access to many of these super sharp

kids that had come from all corners of the world with amazing achievement. So if you wanted to become a debate champ, I'd go find the guy who won debating.

and if you wanted to be a math Olympiad medalist, I'd go find the kid who had a math Olympiad medal. So, it was kind of like I'm sitting in the ultimate recruiting zone and I knew all these guys because I was eating lunch with

them, right, in dinner and stuff. And so, I was able to kind of find some pretty unique talent. And um back then it was like early days Facebook so I could, you know, find a lot of the students. There were a couple groups

behind behind us and I would do events and it would be very viral amongst their um you know, social media pages and stuff so they would hear about Crimson quite quickly. So that was kind of how I got some quick traction with no

So So the tutors were all your fellow your peer students. That's right. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Like this is kind of funny, but at one point like all my college roommates were working for Crimson. It was like a serious

operation. So we had one guy who was like we we created um we created a video series called Ask a Harvard student and we we we'd get all these questions from the internet and then we'd have these Harvard kids come in and answer all

these questions and then I'd have like a bunch of the other guys like doing tutoring sessions and stuff. So you'd like come into our dorm room and it was just like four desks all all Crimson Operations. Um it was it was pretty

funny. A sweat shop. Wait, so so what was your but what was it kind of what were you actually selling? Was it I will help you do your A-level prep or I will tell you high level advice about how you structure

your application or I will kind of tell you what Harvard's like or like what what exactly was the product you were selling. The product is like a detailed emissions plan for what you need to do each week, each month for your

extracurriculars, for your leadership, for your academics, for your subject choice, for your grade targets, what schools you're going to apply to. So all of these this game plan and then all these tutors have help you actually do it. So it'd be a combination of like

counseling, consulting as we call it, and then academic tutoring the both. And this was actually modeled after my own my own final phase of high school where I had tutors for about five different subjects and I was kind of trying to

crank the intensity to max. And so I would use tutors to get through like 140 hours of economics in 40 hours.

How did you how did you find these tutors for yourself? Um it was a bit of hustle. I you know I asked my math teacher um for recommendations and and she referred me to this like legendary math olympied

tutor and then I stumbled across like my science teacher uh through like a referral from this doctor guy. So, it was just a bunch of asking people, you know, who's the best tuty you've heard of and then I would, you know, kind of

like go through and have lessons with them and figure out who was good. Then I assembled this team and then I would just um you know uh see if if we had a good vibe um and you know it became it

was I realized it was so productive like I I did I used to do tutoring on a supplemental basis and then for say Alevel further maths I essentially learned the whole class with with my tutor next to me which made it way more

efficient and then I was able to get through way more classes and how did you do that? What tell me the logistics. So here I'm your tutor, you're you. What are we doing? What how do we spend the time? What do we

actually do? So you're sitting next to me and I'm doing further maths practice papers.

Then as soon as I'm stuck, I'm like, "Hey, can you explain this concept to me?" And then you're going to give me, you know, guidance to what I got wrong.

Then I'm going to get back to my past paper exam. So it's like, it's like a, you know, two 2012 version of GPT where, you know, you are the GPT and I'm doing my homework. And then when I'm stuck,

rather than being like, gosh, I have no idea. I can't ask my mom, you know, I don't know who to ask. you're sitting there ready to help. So, it wasn't the typical like you're coaching me on the whole curriculum. It was very much like

rather than having this, you know, one hour of confusion every time I'm confused. I'm just going to ask you and it'll make the process a lot faster. It also was like a self-discipline thing.

You know, I had discipline, but at the same time, if you're sitting right next to me, I can't go and get distracted and play like Runescape or Call of Duty or something. So, it was also like a force

lock in mechanism. Interesting. So, you basically did you did you did you come that yourself or did you like how did you That's a very interesting hack, right? You're like, "Okay, I got to get through all these A

levels. I'm going to hack it through a combination of like, yeah, smart person can enforce discipline and like help me when I get stuck." That's kind of like clever, right? How did you come up with that?

I guess um from a young age, I had math and English tutoring. Like I did things like Kuman and number Works. And I thought it was like it it was just so effective compared to going to school.

Like in Kuman, I'd get through kind of years ahead of the, you know, what I'd be doing at school. So I'd just go to school and I'd have seen all the stuff before when I was younger. And I

thought, you know, if I compare how much I got through in one hour with my tutor oneonone versus sitting in my school chatting to my friends, you know, it was very different. So I used to sort of almost like go to school to eat my lunch

and hang out with my buddies, but then like the real grind would begin when I got home from school. So yeah, it was I guess my own intuition sort of thinking about the relative efficacy of these two environments and like you know I was

just always asking what is the bottleneck to getting through the subject? Is it like is it like how many hours they have to learn the content? Is it practice exams? Is it like time in the school schedule? And I sort of there

were these rules like you can only take four A levels. And I sort of wondered, you know, why because some A levels like further maths take so much time. Others like business and economics are much faster and shorter. So I sort of assumed

I could get through more of these things. And then I also assumed that doing more would help me get into the schools. So I began to kind of, you know, construct this like team around me to kind of crank out the results with

That's so cool. Have you heard of Alpha School? I have. I've been reading all about it.

I'm actually going to an Alpha School demo in New York shortly. and we just bought a school in New Zealand called the Academy for Gifted Education and we're adding a lot of um AI learning during the days with some references

back to Alpha School. Maybe you want to explain quickly what Alpha School is and like that concept and then so the idea behind alpha school is that in a traditional school day you might spend you know 7 hours in classes but

it's pretty inefficient. You've got these large group classes the teachers teaching to this big group of students often who may be distracted. They might be looking at their laptops. There might be different levels of ability. Alpha School promises to get through all that

content in two hours rather than seven through a hyperefficient one-on-one delivery where you're interacting with an AI and rather than teachers, you have a motivational coach of sorts who essentially is like that self-discipline thing that I described earlier. Then

once you get through your 2 hours of high-intensity work, you then can do other things like you can go and do some debating or you can do some community service, which in the world of college admissions is like your extracurricular

building. So essentially it's it's almost like removing the time loss you get from physical schools and um that's really the model. Now the critique of the model is that if you're a very high achieving student this kind of

self-paced learning can work quite well. Maybe myself in high school you know I liked academics and so I kind of had the willpower to do this but a lot of the time if you're struggling in school this kind of highintensity one model can can

be challenging because it can be not so rewarding compared to like a fun social dynamic in a classroom. So anyway, Alpha School promises to revolutionize schooling and it's sort of charging quite premium prices beginning in parts of the US and they kind of see how fast

they can scale this thing. Well, they I mean on the incentive model, you know, they have this whole like that they actually pay students which is the incentive piece.

Yeah, that that's very interesting. I mean I read some research on sort of the effects of paying students to get grades and from what I can see from what I've read it's not ultimately that effective.

I mean what I've seen at Crimson is the kids that really crank ultimately the reward is not money. The reward is an understanding of how this grade fits into some long-term game plan. And maybe the game plan changes, but ultimately

once you start seeing the grades as your progress to your ambitious vision for yourself in the future, then you really care. And so often students that really grind in high school, like myself, have this combination of intrinsic curiosity

for the subject and then an extrinsic kind of goal orientation. And I think anyone who says, "Oh, you know, you're just going to study hard because you like the subject is kind of dreaming because, you know, uh, you also could

just listen to random podcasts too to learn about, you know, economics." So, you need an element of tactical thinking to kind of really want to grind the academics. But, yeah, I I think that intrinsic extrinsic combo is very

important. Let's go back to the kind of crimson story. So, you were saying you were at the ice house. You saw all these startups kind of asking for money even though they didn't have any revenue. You were bringing in 300k in your first

year. What was your kind of conclusion from there? Well, my conclusion was you know we should raise some money and um you know we should go faster and like you know I figured if I can you know really take

this thing to more countries it could be really good. Now I had this great mentor the late Julian Robertson and you know it's he had a really transformative effect on on my life on so many areas but one of the things he did is he

introduced me to these guys who had invested in new oriental and teleucation group in China. these two companies that had begun as after school tutoring centers and had evolved into these 40 and 30 billion dollar respectively passive education companies that were

responsible for educating huge numbers of ambitious Chinese kids both to stay within China and to go global. So I saw this and I figured I should do Crimson in more countries and if I'm getting all this traction in New Zealand which is a

relatively chill academic country surely if I do this in like Singapore or Vietnam or Brazil or something I could do it at a much bigger scale. So I raised my seed round when I was 19 in college um from the late Julian

Robertson and Chase Coleman, bunch of these KB guys. I flew back to New Zealand for 24 hours to close around at this ice angel showcase event. Raised the money uh and then you know we went hard grown um and then we raised our

series A round when I was 20 and then our series B round when I was 21. And so you're you're still a corporate as you're doing this?

Yes. Yes. So I raised I raised these three first funding rounds while I was still a student. And so uh by the end of it, you know, I'd closed the series B round. I was also graduating from college. Um, we raised like a $30

million round. You know, these days it's sort of like a a cute a round, but back in 2016, you know, that was a pretty chunky raise for a early stage company.

Is that New Zealand or US? US. US. Um, and the game plan behind this raise was to go from New Zealand and Australia to 20 plus key markets we we identified. So, when I finished um Harvard that next year, I was basically

on a plane every week opening up crimson markets in Thailand and Russia and Vietnam and Singapore. And it was full, you know, balls to the wall to really get this thing moving. And the idea was I wanted to be first in many of these

markets to kind of build out this college admissions offering, you know, get the networks going. Uh, and at the same time, Uber was rapidly growing around the world and I was very inspired by their city launch model. So I was we

created a growth operations team led by this guy called Kevin Park who's um still with us today grinding on a new business we're very excited about and um we you know we began kind of going very global. So that was how we began to ramp

Crimson from a kind of A&Z company to over a global college missions business. And while you were still in Harvard, did you ever think about dropping out?

Because lots of your kind of founder peers who start something in college, they just kind of drop college at some point like it's not worth my time.

Yeah, totally. So I had these guys actually in my year and it was quite funny. I think they saw Crimson and they like sort of tried to copy it and they they dropped out. They also they raised maybe 50 million in total but certainly

in the colleges they raised a couple of million and um you know they basically were trying to do college missions in North America similar to my model but that I was doing around the world and they took the dropout approach for me

you know I really value education I just also thought like on a very first principles level you know I'm in the education business and it feels sort of BS to not finish my education now I couldn't see the time that I was going

to do a lot more education but certainly I thought I'd finish my Harvard degree and so I thought you know there's no chance I'm dropping out this I didn't come all this way spending all these years to you know not finish this great

experience and I was already building Crimson quite successfully while I was a student so I didn't really feel the need to drop out and I felt quite additive to what I was doing you know to be to be

finishing my degree so I never really thought about dropping out although I had some folks mention it but actually honestly to the credit of my amazing investors they never asked me or even thought that I would drop out they just

assumed that I could do both which I really appreciated so that was really the idea um but yeah it's Actually early on it's funny it's developed so much the world but there was the teal fellowship and back then it was quite early stage

and um you know I just heard about these guys doing random biology things that were teal fellows and so I did speak to the teal fellowship but I never really liked the idea of you know taking a year

off or anything so yeah I would say I was never never very open-minded dropping out I was always very committed to finishing what I did do is speed things up so I took six classes every semester to get through my degree faster

and and so my approach was rather than dropping out just finish it quicker so that I could go and build crimson.

And most of your tutors, most of your tutors were at Harvard, right? Like most of your actually people you were hiring, like that was your unique advantage, right? So actually dropping out would have heard that, right?

Yeah. Yeah. I I totally agree. And now the guys that did drop out, you know, they basically opened an office in Harvard and they they would similly tap into the Harvard community. Exactly. I just thought this is kind of crazy

because I'm going to be a Harvard lum in the future. I can keep hiring these Harvard, you know, Harvard kids and Harvard grads and they can become great mentors for Crimson. Why would I ever drop out? Um, and then I just like I had

these experiences like, you know, I got hired by Tiger Management and they never would have interviewed me had I not been a Harvard student and I thought it would be crazy to have this sort of like I feel like I hit the jackpot getting into

these schools. It would be crazy to sort of throw that advantage to the wind. You know, who knows what could happen. So yeah, I was very committed to finishing my degree.

Wait, sorry. You you you got hired by Tiger? Yes. So, I work for I worked for Tiger Management when I was in college uh from age 19 to 21 and I would go down to New York on Thursdays and Fridays and I'd

work throughout the week um doing stock investing. So, it was it was quite hectic because I was doing they basically invested in Crimson and hired me to work for them and so I was learning investing, managing these stock

portfolios, like pitching ideas which was pretty adrenaline pumping honestly and then I was you know building Crimson rapidly with my team. So, it was it was you know it was really fun and exhilarating.

So, you were doing you were doing you were Jesus Christ. So you were you were working for Tiger building crimson and taking more classes than you should have every semester and you know I just loved it. It was it

was pretty nuts. Like I remember I'd I'd have an assignment due at like I don't know like 8 a.m. or something and I'd open the assignment. It'd be like 400 p.m. and I would have no idea these concepts cuz I'd like missed the lecture

that week or something. And I' I'd have this mad hustle to get through my crimson calls and then figure out this mysterious concept and then submit my problem set on time often at like 4:00 a.m. or something in the science center.

And I'd be like I'd like hobble to the thing, drop on the it was back then it was like paper. So I'd drop the paper into like the little bucket and then I'd go back to my room and sleep before the

classes began. But you know I just I just loved it and it was sort of why I came to America right for this highintensity action-packed adventure.

So I just kept jamming more and more and more things into the schedule. But you know I I loved it and I was just learning so much. Like I was learning so much about investing. I was meeting awesome people in New York. Crimson was

really cracking. Uh it was super fun. Amazing classmates. So it was a incredible time.

Well, like I was saying earlier, I've been like the underachiever of the century. Yeah, that's incredible. So when you when you graduated from Harvard, did you then want to go all in on Crimson? Um, and what was your kind of big vision

once you started kind of really focusing on it? Yeah, so my initial goal coming to America, as you talked about earlier, was to get into Wall Street. And, you know, my idea was I was going to work for Tiger, then I was going to launch a

hedge fund and, you know, scale this thing. When I was at Tiger, there are a couple of interesting things. The first is that I began seeing this trend where there was these like hedge fund hotel stocks where like many many hedge funds

were involved in the same you know longs and there were these thesis that would be spread around the city and uh I'd look around Tiger and there was like road scholars and like Harvard business guys and you know all these dudes were

sort of super competitive academic types and it felt to me like um you know there was some alpha here but it was it was certainly a very competitive arena.

Meanwhile, I was thinking about college admissions and I was having a great time coaching these students. But also from a business standpoint, it felt like there was this like global opportunity that was untapped and actually there should be way more guidance uh taking place

than there exists and this problem exists all around the world and I was in a good position to build it and I thought you know I have a unique competitive edge because I was a foreign kid who came to Harvard through this

process. I'm entrepreneurial and I have some knowledge of business so I thought I could do this. So my game plan initially was to graduate from Harvard, launch my hedge fund, rock and roll. But I guess as I was raising the third

round, the series B round, I thought actually this is really what I should be doing. I love it. It's really fulfilling. I love working with the students and it's also very scalable and um you know I was pretty high conviction

that it would be a lot of execution, but if I pull the trigger on Crimson, I could build a really scaled company. And so hold on.

Yeah. Go. But but but you you were raising money and at the same time you were thinking I'm going to go like for a while thinking I'm still I'm still going to go and start a hedge fund.

Yeah. So for my seed round and my series A round, you know, I had my various co-founders. And remember, keep in mind the people that I was going to launch the hedge fund with were my the people that were my investors in Crimson. So it

was all the same family. So basically these guys who just were cheering me on in any of these domains.

And so it wasn't like two different sets of people. It was the same same core.

And you know, I'd be talking to my mentor Julian about these different tracks. You know, should I do this investing route? Should I go hardcore and crimson? And keep in mind that for me, these these seed and A rounds were

like, you know, gigantic. But for them, you know, they're like, as they call them, science experiments to see if this thing would crank. And so when it started to get real, well, like series B was when it was really like, what am I

doing? And I had to be decisive then because that was when I went from raising sort of money from these guys individually to that to actually the institutional fund with with their own outside investors. And at that point,

you know, I had to really commit. Was I going to go full-time on Crimson uh and just ship this thing and build it with everything they've got or do my finance stuff? And um you know, I thought about

it, but it just felt very natural to do Crimson. So, it was actually a very easy choice. And it was funny actually because many of my classmates at Harvard, they were really obsessed with getting these, you know, tiger jobs,

these hedge fund jobs. And so, I think it was kind of ostensibly wacky to leave that and do college missions. But, you know, I was pumped to do it. So, I think by the time I was probably 20 and a

half, I was very convinced that I was going to ship it on Crimson and um I was having a blast with my team and, you know, went all in. Wow. So, what did you and what did you like figure out like is

this whole cuz cuz to me this whole college admissions and things feels like a very strange and arbitrary process, right? Like I went to Princeton and like I think it was complete like luck of the draw. Like I met people there who

thought were great. Some people were like I was like I'm not sure why you got in. I don't know if you had that experience with Harvard and it it felt like quite an arbitrary process where like you sort of gain some things but at

the end of the day it was like still quite like a luck base kind of thing.

I'm curious what you thought about that like how did you think about this whole like thing? Was this actually a real problem you were solving? Like I understand there's anxious parents, tiger parents who want to like invest money and feel like they're doing

something for their kid, which probably tutoring and like giving advice is probably useful in and of itself, but like tying it to like college admissions then kind of I think in my mind my mind kind of makes it feel like it's a step

too far because you don't control that. There's arbitrary kind of decision making that happens there. Did you feel like there was a real process and real kind of like I don't know you really increasing the chances or like Yeah. How

do you think about kind of what you were actually kind of selling as a product?

Yeah. So, we were very much selling this endto-end process where we'd start with you very early, we'd train you over several years and we would generate enough alpha such that if you apply to the range of schools we're targeting,

we'll get you into one of these schools. So, we yeah, we really were selling this in offering. So, we weren't selling a particular school you're going to get into cuz you can't predict that perfectly, but we were selling perhaps a

basket of schools that we thought you had a good shot of getting into. And we were pretty good at calibrating what you can get into. we would build these packages that were very high intensity around getting to the necessarily score

thresholds to make it you know d-risked and um I think a lot of the people that you know you meet at Princeton that have kind of quote unquote random backgrounds as you said it can be legacies it could

be some athlete who doesn't have traditional academics um or some other thing but if you think about the foreign kids that get in there's not really many crazy cases they're usually all very academic and I I I think that in general

it's quite a repeatable consistent process not to get into one specific school like Princeton, but to get into like a basket of schools conditional on a tariff applicant and you know just like in stock investing you don't have a

perfect outcome when you buy a stock but you you know you build this portfolio of stocks with different risk return profiles just like you've got like a mixture of schools with different correlations and characteristics and you've got candidates with some

ambiguity you know remember I was building crim while I was stock investing so I felt like a very relevant relevant analogy so yeah I mean basically we were selling this end to end and I think um people like college

counseling because it is end because you wouldn't use all this tutoring if if there wasn't this process and this incentive system at the end of it that rewards it I would say I see so yeah and you were focused on

non- US markets that was kind of the the core thing right yeah yeah so at this point it was all foreign kids coming to America we didn't have any US clients we we took the occasional guy in Boston just through

like a Harvard classmate who would refer me somebody but it felt like a alien language like like and I just had no intuition for what it's like to be an American applying to US colleges because all my intuition was like these foreign

kids coming over and the Other thing is Americans at this point it was a very different level of composition to get in. So like I'd meet these kids from China with 10 APs and I'd meet some American people with three APs who'd

gotten into like Harvard or something and I would just yeah it was a very different intuition and that was because you know that's still true now but back then in particular there was a huge gap between the average international kid

and the average domestic American kid as far as how hard it is to to go and you know the kind of competitions they did and stuff are quite different. So my initial call was I'm not going to worry

about Americans. I don't understand this. I'm going to focus on the foreign kids, you know, and the segments like me and then I'm going to go from there.

So, what's the formula? You know, the um song by the guy from Lincoln Park, it's like 15%, you know, uh Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I can't I can't remember the lyrics. 15% pressure, 20%. Yeah. Yeah. So, I think the formula, this is a bit simplified, but for the top schools, it's about 40% academics, 30% extracurriculars and leadership, 30% essays and interviews. The 40%

academics, if your academics suck, you're screwed anyway. So when I say 40% academics, it means subject to being academic enough to be like competitive.

That's kind of how the mix sort of plays out. And within the academic category, there's SD ACT, there's your internal grades, things you use to show intellectual vitality outside of school.

The next category is your 10 activities plus leadership projects you do. And the final one is just all the different essays you write plus the interview you have with an alumni, which has varying significance. And so, you know, you

basically have the scoreboard across these different traits. Initially, there's an academic cutoff. Once you pass the academic cutoff, you know, you're then kind of in the arena and then you've got to appeal to kind of people who have to really fall in love

with your story and then uh want to admit you within your regional quota. So there isn't like a secret science formula here, but there is, you know, a variety of competitions, activities, initiatives that you can do that will

make you very favorable compared to people from your country and who you're competing with. And if you have a strong enough profile and you apply to a broad enough range of schools, you know, you you'll get in at a very high hit rate.

So our Crimson kids get in at about seven times the success rate of applying by themselves over a huge data set over 12 years. So at this point we do have quite a good recipe. And where's the e

are there I assume this is like true. I assume different regions have different like eases or different competitive levels, right? Like if you're from Alaska or something like probably like or North Dakota like in the US or but

like I guess do you see that globally as well? Like where's the easiest place to like apply from?

Yeah. So certainly in the US the easiest places are places like Montana. Um and then the hardest places in New York and California. And if you just think about sort of sophistication, competition, intensity of schools, intensity of parenting, also the amount of like let's

say in some of these states people just think of their state as like the whole world, right? Like their local university is like the best option. And for a long time that was actually happening all across America. It's only

quite a recent phenomena that everyone applies across the whole nation. Um a lot of the time if you talk to like the parents in America right now, many of them went to like their instate college because that was the thing that you do.

Not so much if you meet New York parents, but if you meet random people in Michigan, a lot of them have Michigan degrees because that's just what they did. So I think there was that phenomena. But yeah, so long story

short, Montana and stuff would be the easiest based on those characteristics. When it comes to international countries, the most crazy is like um India, Korea, uh China, and then the easiest would be places like South Africa or if you're applying from a

disadvantaged background like for example from the from an indigenous community. It's interesting because theoretically there shouldn't be discrimination anymore based on race.

But what we see is that people applying from these indigenous backgrounds from outside of America get in at much higher rates. So I think yeah probably some cultural disadvantage there or um you know a place like South Africa is a

great place to apply from. Why South Africa? Like I would have I would have thought that like I don't know a Zimbabwe or I don't know or Congo or do you not even have people in those places as clients?

Yeah I mean like I think you're probably okay fine. Sierra Leone might be the easiest place to apply from, but I I'm sort of adjusting for where people are actually applying from. There aren't many applications places. So, yeah, but

but I mean theoretically, yeah, you could move to Sierra Leone and apply from there if if you really wanted to, but you need you have to survive. You have to survive long enough to.

Yeah, that's true. Interesting. So, you graduated in uh 2016, right? That correctly? Yeah, I was in the class in 2017, but I finished in 2016.

Right. And then so you went all in on kind of this global vision of Crimson and went kind of more or less full-time on becoming the CEO. All right. Being the CEO and we're scaling it across the globe.

That's right. It was very much full send and you know that was a crazy year. You know, we were in different cities every couple weeks building new markets, hiring country managers, and we were kind of really figuring out how to grow

our sales and marketing engine, how to localize the product, how to scale the service, how to build our app, you know.

Um it was it was a lot of burning fires at the same time. But did you did you do did you have indications that every place that there was demand like okay so you you did New Zealand it kind of worked then well you

maybe did Australia it's similar okay it kind of worked but like did you have it was just intuition like oh other places should have this or want this or how how would how do you like think about that

and like how do you think about sequencing which countries to go after and like yeah so we did like a um almost like a management consulting style analysis of all these markets. We looked at factors like how many people were applying, how

many international schools there were, what curriculums there were, you know, what we thought about affordability within the country, and we ranked all of the key markets. And so there was quite a top down view, but you know, we opened

in Thailand third. You know why? Because I was on a boat at this um entrepreneurship competition, and there was a girl next to me that I was talking to. I thought she was 22. Turns out she was 36 and she was also like a Harvard

applied math grad, but I guess Thai people don't age. So um I hired her to become our country manager and she became our Thailand country launcher called Palm and she was a rock star. She was a king she was like the king's

medalist or something in Thailand. She was number one in the country academically went to Harvard and she had these young kids and she was doing private equity but she wanted more time and she loved education. So she jumped

in bought first country manager. So we had like the markets you wanted to hit but then it was a bit of a you know symphony of serendipity around who we found when where to ship them into various markets. For example, to

describe how random this is, I visited my buddy Andy Chen at in Yale N US, which is a school in Singapore that's now closed. I was in the cafeteria and he was saying, "Hey, by the way, Jamie, see that kid over there? He's the

entrepreneurship guy at Yale in US." And I look over and it was this dude called Andrew Wooten. And I spoke to him and he was half Russian and he was half American, you know. I said, "You're half Russian. Do you want to open Crimson in

Russia?" And, you know, uh, he took a gap here and he just opened Crimson Russia. He was 19. And then he went on to become our chief revenue officer. and he you know grew like a several hundred person sales and marketing team and you

know Russia became one of our biggest markets in Crimson for for some of those early years and then he built like a whole like revenue team. So it was super there was a combination of like good top down analysis plus serendipity and just

being entrepreneurial but it was it was also kind of scary because we were cranking up our cash burn taking a lot of bets on different markets with this belief that we'd be able to make it work. Um, and um, you know, I think if

you kind of roll the dice in this scenario, I don't know, six times, you probably only make it out alive three times. So, I'm I'm glad we got lucky on that one.

Yeah, we're still in Russia, although a lot of our staff in Russia have moved out to like other parts of the CAS region. And we we serve a lot of Russian clients remotely, so it's gotten a bit harder to service. We're also in

Kazakhstan, too. But actually, our Russian market, how we define it, has kept growing because we keep servicing like global Russians. Can you can can you give us a sense of the scale that you got to? So in 2016 when you left

college it was at like 5 million revenue you said. Um how did that kind of go from there in terms of numbers students who I can say now um you know last year we did just over 300 million in sales New

Zealand dollars. We've basically been able to grow revenue typically like you know 50 to 100% year-over-year growth numbers. I think we went from 5 to 15 million and then I think we went to like in a mid mid 20s then like 37 then maybe

in the mid-50s. something like this. Um yeah, we've been able to keep posting pretty good growth largely organically.

We've launched new business units like we've got an online high school. We have a lot of um other units now. We've got a unit that helps people getting visas who want to um go to the US like visas.

We've got like physical schools and all kinds of stuff. But I think a lot of this growth came from, you know, the global roll out of college missions. And actually that mysterious American market that I had no idea about at the

beginning has become our biggest market at Crimson and one of our fastest growing markets. So, it's it's really interesting. Actually, our strategy was we're going to compete first where there was no competitors and we're going to build a position and then we're going to

figure out how this works. We're going to build our app, build our curriculum, and then we're going to enter more savvy markets like China and India, Korea, then finally America. Um, and I guess in hindsight, that was a maybe a good

strategy. Arguably, we should have started earlier in America, but you know, I guess it's it's working out so well.

And Jamie, whenever you spend other markets, what does that what does that mean? Like whenever you send this Thai girl or this Russian guy like to go there and like what what do they actually do? So they uh you know we

register, we hire, we open an office, we hire sales and marketers on the ground, we create local school partnerships, we hire local service delivery staff, you know, we find local clients. In the world of college admissions, you can't

really like if you're chilling in California, you're not really going to be able to get many clients from Russia to join you. You need to kind of have that on the ground presence usually to build that trust particularly initially.

So what when I say open a market, I mean hire a country manager, hire a local team in the same like but but then like what is the team doing? Is the team like literally going out and finding

customers or are they working with the kids or like what are they both? They're they're finding customers and then they're not they're not doing all of the service because a lot of the services globally standardized but they're doing the localization. So for

example, you've got a Russian mom. She can't speak English but the Russian team will translate to her will give bring her up to speed. Um and then the kind of English speaking main team will just work with a kid. So there will be some

localized language support and then there'll be like you know business development on the ground sales and marketing and stuff to find the students and you know grow Crimson's recognition in that market.

So so so the the core kind of service delivery would still happen over Zoom or video calls in English.

That's right. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Interesting. Do you ever have a problem where like the kids don't speak English that well?

Well most of the kids applying right they want to go to top US schools. So they have to be able to speak English to a high level because they've got to often set the SAT or the TOEFL. And if

their English isn't good, they're kind of screwed in the process. So I would say they almost all speak pretty good English. We have some products for second language English speakers, but it's quite rare that yeah, we we get

anyone in our college admissions business that isn't quite strong in English. They might have a strong accent or something, but often their grammar is very good um because they've got to achieve high scores in the SAT. So yeah,

I'd say it's quite a self-filtering product, which actually means it's nice because as we built out the core college mission service, even though it was like 20 plus countries, there was a lot of similarity in how we delivered it

because ultimately we were gating all of this foreign talent towards the same end goal, which was US colleges.

So, so what's next for Crimson from here? You're 300 million revenue. You're all over the world. Also, you launched a school. We spoke to uh Penny um on the podcast a few months ago. How do you see the future of of Crimson evolving?

Well, that's a big question, but I'll focus on one thing. I'm very excited about which is very relevant to New Zealand. After a couple years of hard work, we recently secured this national online charter school license which means we can service kids anywhere in

the country and we work with the government, the department of education, so the student isn't paying any money out of pocket. They can access this amazing crimson quality high school experience. It's really exciting because if you're a kid in rural New Zealand,

you've got this physical school which isn't going to be very good usually. it's hard to find good teachers there and certainly if you have big ambitions on the world stage it's very hard to unlock that. So a lot of the kids that

have been getting abroad to the US typically have come from Oakland historically. So through our online high school we're able to now service a much wider range of students across the Kiwi diaspora many of which aren't going to

be aiming for foreign universities but maybe getting them into you know University of Oakland is considered a major win for them. So that is really exciting because it's very scalable and it enables us to take many of the

learnings of the last 12 years and also some of my research from Oxford around online schooling achievement to Kiwis in a much more scalable systematic way. So that's really exciting and part of our vision at Crimson is building this next

generation education system. So college missions being very much like the start of this journey and then schooling is broader but this you know schooling in partnership with the government is very scalable and you know my general belief is the government struggles to deliver

schooling you know at a world-class level at scale because you know it's tough for these you know bureaucratic organizations to really function well in these you know remote parts of the country and actually having partners like Crimson who are very dialed in at

online delivery we can recruit elite teachers we can run these things you know we love academics it's a very powerful partnership for you know both the taxpayer and also the student and the teacher. So, you know, we're going

to work hard on this and knock it out of the park, but that's a very exciting ex next evolution. And, you know, it's a material opportunity from a business standpoint, but actually as a Kiwi from really an impact standpoint.

So, is that something that kids will be able to choose to go to or it will be mandated or or how how will it work?

Um, yeah. So, actually just yesterday was the day that the the lottery went live. So, we basically have an enrollment level we're allowed to take.

kids will fill out the online submission and we have to take them in order of the the time which they applied. So um we had like the full role filled within four hours yesterday because kids all across the country submitted and so you

know we're accumulating this large wait list but basically that the child applies you you got to take them in that order because it's a government funded school. So we we can't choose who we admit and then you know we've got to

really do right by them and deliver some great academic outcomes in partnership with them and their parents. Why do you have a limit if it's online?

We can scale it more, but there's a funding limit based on how many students the government allocates to us each year. So, we can apply for more, but the government has like a budget of how much they're willing to spend on charter

schooling and funding per student. And so, they they tell the charter schools, hey, you guys have this target to hit.

Now uh from our understanding we have the biggest one that's been given which is exciting and is a good demonstration of the you know confidence the department has in Crimson which I think is well placed because we we we do have

a very good team for this and you know some of the guys helping me ran the biggest charter schools in America one is the head of the Stanford online high school you know we have like a really crack team here to deliver this which is

exciting and I think for a new policy like charter schooling you don't want to have random operators you know you want to do this at great scale with great results because it's high stakes like if the first guys screw it up, you know, it

kind of ruins it for everyone else. And if we can deliver a really robust national experiment um and get great outcomes, then you know, it can become a mainstream part of public policy going forward. So, you know, we're putting

everything we've got at this and it's is a big big passion of mine right now.

How does how does it work? So, is it basically just on your on your computer, you're sitting there and you you have your lectures and then there's other people in the same lecture as you you ask questions. How does that actually

work? Yeah. So, like you describe, you're sitting in a live class, you know, video cameras on, a lot of interactive tools, you know, uh, in-classroom debates, conversations, no, there's nowhere to hide because the teachers cold calling on you like a half business school

class, you know, and you've got to turn up for class, and then, you know, it's a classic high school academic lecture, but quite focused on exam results, quite focused on academic success, quite focused on university entry. Um and so

that's really the delivery model and it's based on learnings from our Crimson Global Academy which is our exist existing online high school that has nearly 3,000 students and um you know through that we've got great reps with delivering online learning at a high

quality and so we're going to do that now for a wider range of Kiwi students.

How does how did you go from like advising on sort of like hacking this out of admission system to full-on education? What was the thinking behind that? like from like a strategic point of view also from business point of view

both from like a talent and capability point of view it's different capabilities different talent right so you use the word hacking and um I can see Mark as you think about this cultures pro with great skepticism which I I appreciate you know you kind of

think about this like how we sort of go out there with our grand theft auto cheat codes hit a bunch of buttons and the kid gets in but actually in reality we often begin with the kids like 14 and

we're going to spend a lot of time building their you know raw human capital increasing their academic skills in math making them better students, making them better communicators. It's so they actually build very high intensity skills through this process.

And so I would say what we do is probably 90% like skill creation and then probably 10% like marketing optimization, but a lot of the value is actually training the child. So when it came to going from college admissions to

the online high school, we already had a lot of experience with actually developing students ability and um we were already delivering a lot of classes one-on-one. And so the main change was going from oneonone to to to groups uh

and then also going from like tutors to teachers which are a very different kettle of fish to organize, manage, hire and recruit. So once we did that evolution, we were then building those capabilities that are now helping us

doing this charter school. But yeah, I would say the desire to go from college missions to schooling is that in college missions you have a couple hours a week with the student, but in schooling it's you control the whole end to-end result.

So if you're good at what you do, you can deliver great outcomes, which is, you know, exciting. And we had these amazing cases of students that basically would use us for like six A levels. And you know this this boy Sil, he went from

Hamilton, he got into five Ivy League schools, got into Stanford, he completed six A levels, he was the second best NCS student in the country and he had about 20 Crimson tutors helping him. And when I saw cases like this where the more

Crimson the kid had, the better the results. I began to build conviction that we could, you know, successfully build an online high school. And um we had great advisers as I mentioned behind that. I did my PhD on that at Oxford and

um yeah we we sort of had the theoretical foundations and we thought we could extend our competencies to that. That's been a really fun um adventure. Interesting. But like what what does that sort of stop? I mean I

guess like tell me more about education in general, right? Cuz like education as a whole you know the whole alpha school like theory and approach which I agree with generations like you waste kind of 12 years of your life, right? And like

they sort of proved and then you can get seven years back if you do like alpha school end to end you and like the whole like K to curriculum and whatever like in 5 years you get seven years back

right like how do you guys I mean I mean I mean so and like I guess the other kind of piece of research has been shown is like if you like the whole like two sigma thing right if you set people down

one tutoring like two sigas or whatever right like how does that all kind of factor into what you're trying to do cuz like cuz I think when you start working with with governments and like you become school like it's different

different objectives like as a parent as an individual you're very incentivized like I want to do the best thing for this person whereas like as a school you have this like broader kind of like broader good that you have to like look

after and like the incentives get muddled and it's what I feel like that's why schools are have always been kind of I mean I think in today's world where like it's really unclear like you don't need to actually force everyone to like

learn these specific skills at this exact time um and it's more like focused on creativity like you sort of you get confusion teachers don't know why they're there kids don't know why they're learning this stuff it's not it's not like the stuff and um and

government kind of doesn't know government doesn't know what what the bigger vision should be. Like should we make everyone like geniuses or should we just make sure everyone's kind of like confident or should we just actually encourage kids to explore their passions

and if that's being a tick tocker that's fine too right like like you start getting kind of confusion about like what is the purpose of education um when governments get involved how do you think about that so I think the first thing is when you

go through highintensity education it generally instills within you uh a level of focus self-determination resilience stamina coordination time management a lot of these executive functioning skills which are really important if you thing about kids that drop out of high

school. The problem with like leaving high school early and leaving schooling early in general is you don't just lose content, you actually lose a lot of capability you need as an adult to like function effectively and commit to

things and solve them end to end. And to some degree, the schooling system is almost like this human conditioning to make you able to function in the economy and be reliable and these kind of things. So more than any kind of

content, I think a large part of schooling is is that and generally when I I I meet many kids that are very talented and they want to drop out. And in general, the people that drop out, the people that don't finish school

normally have some sort of dysfunction in some area of their executive functioning. They might be very talented in some dimension, very creative, but maybe they're not as able to stick with things or as resilient. So I think that

the alpha school 5 hours, 12 years thing, a five years, 12 years thing. I think that the problem with this is, you know, Kuman's very similar. Okay? So you can do kuman and you can get through 12 years of school in 5 years too. And so

it's actually very similar to that. But at the same time, you know, no one just does kuman then finishes school because you typically build a lot of other social skills. You build a lot of, you know, relationship building skills. And

if you leave school too early, you know, you you kind of have this very isolated experience and you probably don't function that well in your in your career. And a lot of the young child prodigies, you know, really don't um

they struggle in in the real economy for some of those reasons. So I normally don't recommend kids to go to university too early. So to answer your question overall, what is the point of the schooling system? What should the

government worry about? I do think you know great academic outcomes, high university entrance rates are very important. I think a lot of those soft skills that I mentioned earlier are very important as well. Socialization is really important and ideally some

interest discovery too. You know, some inclination what you want to do in the future. But I think if I could choose between a system where kids can do whatever they want, drop out, do whatever, you know, be Tik Tockers or a

highly structured Singapore like education engine which has a very high completion rate and a very high rate of university degree completion. I would still choose this the second thing. I don't particularly have any attachment to universities. Like I'd be happy if

the first thing worked. I would be fine with that. But what I've seen is that the kids that tend to drop out early usually really struggle. And a lot of the kids that I meet, even teal fellows who drop out of university when they're

like 19, much of they have a lot of mad regret and and darkness about it because they feel like they've missed some social part of their life. Even the ones who are wildly successful. I'm not sure about Dylan from Figma, but I know a lot

of teal fellows that you have sort of an angst about this. So, long story short, I think actually when university start to deviate from the incentives that an individual has, that's when problems start arising. Like you shouldn't be

trying to be too woo and creative about this. I think the best uh schooling is is is very black and white. You know, great academics, focused, high standards, high intensity, you know, it's it's it's a little bit stressful,

but it makes you grow as a person and you know, you you build fraternity through it and you you know, can be a functioning adult. So, I that's probably my hot take.

Yeah. I mean, I I agree with that, right? What you're saying basically is like you should learn some basic skills and you should also learn the soft skills and obviously you should be like growing up around peers because that

teaches you some other like social skills. But like I guess my question is like is the substrate the like K through2 curriculum which again you can actually do most people can do in like much shorter time just is that like

actually a good use of people's time um is the right substrate on which to be learning these skills.

Yeah good question. Okay so I think everyone should get through that K12 curriculum and if they get through it fast that's all good. What they what they should then do is find some interesting niches. could be AI, it

could be, you know, neuroscience, psychology, whatever. Could be public health, could be, you know, urban town planning and they can just go deep in that area. So, I'm totally fine with like accelerated learning. But what I think is problematic is, you know,

dropping out of school too early or having sort of this unstructured teenage years where you're going through a lot of, you know, growth, but you're not in that that environment. So I think I am totally fine with yeah making sure that

human potential is accelerated because of AI and you know other capabilities such that tomorrow's 18-year-old is smarter than yesterday's because they've gone through more content. I'm fine with that but I I think you don't want to mess with the the social conditioning of

the system too much. And normally I just see too many examples of kids where dropping out early creates, you know, all kinds of weird problems.

Interesting. Yeah, that makes sense. Um also do you think that Yeah, I was going to say like school is one of the most social things anyone ever experiences. Think about this. When you're in high school, you know, you're

around like like maybe you know you date some girls, you know, some people, you know, reject you, others like you, but you know, where are you in an environment where you've got all these people, you know, uh, romantically, then

all these friends and all these teachers and it's such a dynamic social situation all the time, right? You've got, um, all these people competing for the same things. you have um you know sports teams in there you know people know

about your your highs your lows your family background whatever it's a very intense social situation as you become like an adult you know and you're in your nuclear house you know the concentration of human interaction typically drops off dramatically and so

uh I think it's very important actually the start of your life to have this super high density social experience because it kind of primes you well for later years so some people hate school but I think that there is a lot of value

to that now some kids these days have like intense social anxieties from the physical school and you know to some degree there's a lot of online schooling because physical school is quite intense socially but I think on the whole and

you know it's very powerful. No but but the thing is like I I think like because what you just said I mean school is not representative of the real world right it's like it's like in the real world like you you have some

objective like I don't know you go to work or you because you do or you need money or whatever and like you interact with people who you like in school like none of that applies. It's like this artificial environment that's not

representative of anything else that you're going to do. So like why is that actually useful for kids to experience?

Like why is it useful to like do things you don't want to do interact with people you don't want to interact with.

Um I mean maybe you do like to but like you're kind of forced into this like right what actually we live in a world now where like you can really do whatever you want. You can work on anything you want usually computer. You

can live wherever you want. Create a life that is like much more customized than like at any time in human history.

So like what is the point of actually like going through this like sort of yeah like kind of painful for some kids process if it's not representative.

I mean I think that uh first of all when it comes to socializing the same way there's like 10,000 hours of I don't know math to become an ex expert or something 10,000 hours of painful socializing where you're experiencing

you know that bully in in school or you're experiencing that person who's rejected you or you're experiencing you know that friend who's stolen your PSP or whatever. Um those interactions you know make you ready for the real world.

And I think if you had a very diluted version of that where you just interacted with a fraction of those people in those first 18 years, you'd have far less reps about how society and humanity functions to go. So, you know,

doesn't need to be exactly, you know, 18 years. Like, I'm not sure. But on the whole, I think this like high immersion socialization thing is probably net good. And in general, people who don't have that socialization often have

unusual problems that emerge later on. and you know all those conflicts you experience basically make you you know a more functioning adult. I think I'm all I'm all for a pick your own adventure, you know, modern economy thing. You

know, if you want to be a remote worker in Bali, like be my guest. And I think early on in your life, there's an element of, you know, training, which is good. And I I think the same way I don't

know, puppies go through the same socializing process or animals do, you know, there's an element of, you know, we are all humans and there are some commonalities and this is somewhat of a, you know, like I don't know how many

hours you need to socialize to be socialized, but whatever that threshold is, it seems like school is quite an effective high dosage way to get there.

Interesting. But doesn't and then then the next point like doesn't the online school kind of completely mess with that and prevent you from having the full like high intensity exposure?

So I guess um our online school is one in which every class you sit in is live and and you discuss live like this conversation like you and I met for I don't know 30 minutes in that in that

place we're having this great discussion you know we're exchanging and learning from one another here. Is this the same as you and I talking in person? It's probably not exactly the same but it's probably better than us both looking at

our Tik Tok feeds. So I think um in our school, you know, we acknowledge that being online maybe isn't as compelling as a physical environment, but for a rural kid in some part of New Zealand where the physical school kind of sucks

or isn't as compelling, you know, this is a much better option than that. And so we we do we do think that the socializing effect can still take place online in a live context. What I don't like is like cameras off, textbased

chat. I think that's not really getting to the point, but I think a conversation like this is totally fine. It actually is kind of like remote work. I don't know about you guys, but you know, certainly at Crimson, I spend more time

on remote calls than I do in person meetings, you know, by far. And so a conversation like this is actually quite representative of modern work.

Yep. Yep. That makes sense. One quick question from the business side of Crimson. I mean, the customers eventually turn out, right, is eventually like go through school or they don't need tutoring anymore. And you managed to keep growing through

that. How do you how do you think about that? I mean, is that a problem? I guess I guess that's why you you sort of gone into school because you can get more of their lifetime um and value probably

more value kind of throughout their lifetime as customers. But but yeah, do do you kind of see that being a problem?

Will that at some point sort of like plateau the growth plateau? Will you are you thinking about I guess you are uh new business models and new new products and so I guess you know everyone loves enterprise SAS because you sort of have

this wonderful recurring revenue but ultimately most of the world's revenue and business is not in enterprise SAS and there are companies that sell you a fridge that you might use once and maybe you change brands. So I guess there are

many great businesses that aren't like perfectly recurring. In our case actually for something in education we normally will spend you know four to six years with a student. So it's actually a very long-term relationship with them and um you know we're able to add a lot

of value to them and capture some of that value in our delivery. So the economics actually work quite well.

Certainly we love schooling too. We don't necessarily do schooling because it's like some desire to change our model. In fact today our college admissions business is one of our strongest around the world and certainly has been a sustained driver of growth

for us. So yeah, I mean ultimately it's a question of CAC and a question of LTV and you know in our case that equation you know works very well and as we've gotten bigger we've gotten more reputation better results more referrals

we're more trusted we're known quantity for ambitious families around the world and that's really made the business work. So I think certainly in the early years there was some hardwood chopping and and then you know we've got to keep

our eye on the puck but um we've definitely bought a good reputation now in the space. families know us, trust us, like us, and they can, you know, decide to join us pretty fast.

Yeah. Yeah. And how do you how do you think about the the global kind of like macro like just college people feeling that college is not worth the money like that they spend on it like college like people are questioning whether there's

actually value in a world where again whereas before right maybe in the time that you and I went to school the internet wasn't what it was there was no AI and so you went to most of these places to get information right whereas

now information is freely available and you're going to these places because of connections because of I don't know the more like say you're going there to learn the actual information you're going to network to meet people maybe for the brand right how do you think

about that kind of macro does that does that change how you think about what you're offering yeah so so firstly I agree that there are many uh universities in the world that don't add much value relative to their tuition

price um and you know there's like more than a thousand US universities many of them are average we focus on sending kids to basically the top 100 and in particular the top 30 and these schools have become stronger and stronger and

stronger you used to admit 40% % when I began now I'm at 7% and the demand for these schools is very strong and the reason for that is they are like a Y combinator for human potential whether it be in law or urban or town planning

or architecture when you go to the Harvard Graduate School of Design you're around some of the world's best architects and you build you know uh not only a network but you you know you're interacting with some of the world's

best teachers you're getting access to these careers job opportunities so the network effects within these campuses are really mindboggling and an example I'll describe to you is the difference between the market rate for some of these speakers and then the rate they

charge the school to be part of it. So let's take someone like Ken Griffin. Ken Griffin you know his hourly rate is probably I don't know in the it's probably like $100,000 some high number.

However, when he comes to Stanford he does it for free and he's happy to partially because of you know his desire to give back. It's also kind of prestigious for him to be part of that community. And so many of these guys

they're happy to take basically an effective economic pay cut be part of this community this network effect and then you know give back. And so essentially what these universities have created is is a world where talent that shouldn't really work for the price they

do does and then you have all these great faculty around you and there really is this escape velocity of connections and and serendipitous opportunity that that emerges. The other thing I'd say is people make this argument that you know you can't

everything's free, information is free, you can learn whatever. I'm actually um you know doing um actually I'll give an example of Y Law School. Theoretically you could learn all this stuff online kind of but actually you can't really a

lot of the content that we we're being taught like from the heads of top law firms about how the business law firms work you can't actually find online in very good detail. And also as humans you learn a lot better in this kind of human

conversation and it actually sticks with you in a way that some random online content doesn't. So, I actually think even though the content could all be online theoretically in the future, it's still very different to how you consume

it, remember it, and engage with it from the in-person interaction. And so, I think I do believe that the in-person class will be way more enduring than anyone probably gives it credit for. So, anyway, I don't have to believe that the

average university is sustainable, but I do believe the top 30 are. Will will AI change that? Like, will if you create, you know, that's already possible now, realistic avatars that can talk to you in real time and engage in

the same way a teacher will engage with you. Does that change in a good way or a bad way? Do you think about that?

I think that um hopefully that that that'll be great because ultimately only a small number of kids can sit in the Yale law class and learn from the guy from Wocktail Lipton about corporate litigation. So having these AI teachers

is is really good experience. I have a feeling that you know through a combination of the motivational effects where you interact with a mentor who makes you want to be better and holds you to more account with a grading

incentive structure and a diploma that means something in a framework where like the jobs at the end of it are very lucrative that whole structure will be very differentiated compared to like just your AI coach that ultimately will

be harder to properly incentivize you to really commit to it. So I I think I think it'll be very enduring, but I'm you know I'd be delighted if you can replicate that yellow law school teacher through an AI avatar and that becomes

very mainstream. I still think the demand for these schools would be much higher in that world. If anything in an AI world of abundance, these types of experiences will become more coveted, not less. And you can see that in

Manhattan, there's an explosion of these like weird membership clubs where people apply and they sign up and they do their random thing and they're sort of craving this exclusive community. So I think if those things are thriving based on very

little beyond some you know interesting entree in a in a weird building you know these universities that are actually based on a lot of actual value I think will become more and more desirable and I see it in Crimson from sort of the

world's most prominent business leaders to you know firstg college kids from the Mari community in New Zealand it's a very universal aspiration to go to these places and I think people love to hate on the universities because most people

getting rejected but it is fundamentally a very desirable uh product. What do you think about how does education kind of fit in in a world where you know a lot of people prognosticate 40% or 50% or 60% white collar jobs will kind of now

be around next probably our five 10 years whatever your pick your favorite like prognostication metric right because of AI I I actually on a call earlier today with the chief economist of open AI it was very interesting and I asked him

this exact question and I asked him this because a couple years ago I asked a mentor of mine Larry Summers will AI basically create mass job loss and what he said is in every major technology revolution People are scared of job

loss, but the net effect is always job creation. And I do have this feeling that in an AI world, if if you have these, you know, amazing AI agents, there's still some ratio of human to agent that you need. And I suspect that

all this boost in productivity will will create, you know, an explosion of new types of jobs. And I suspect that overall the amount of net employment will actually go up, not down. It might change the kind of jobs you do. But I I

I have an instinct just like I find it hard to believe that this is a technology breakthrough so revolutionary that it rewrites all the laws of the economy that have you know taken place through all previous revolutions. So I'm

I'm kind of optimistic that actually there may be some massive job loss of certain types of existing roles but there will probably be you know more stimulating more interesting jobs in the AI world that we'll be able to look

forward to. Makes sense. Makes sense. Thank you so much for doing this. It's been really great and yeah we should we should definitely do a follow-up. I think we have plenty more questions.

Yeah. So so much fun. I really I really enjoyed it. It was one of my favorite conversations ever. Really?

All right, guys. Thanks so much and have a good one. And I'll see you guys hopefully at some stage in person.

Absolutely. Thanks, Amy. See you. See you soon. Bye. Bye. Thank you for tuning in to TechMates. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with friends. We'll be back soon with more stories of Kiwi and Aussie founders

reshaping the future and disrupting Down Under. Until next time, keep dreaming big and daring to disrupt.