Diaspora NZ with David Booth
00:12:59 · Jamie Beaton
[00:12:59] S1: It's a great question. First of all, I should say when I saw that founder mode thing go viral, I felt some sort of great relief. I, yeah, I saw this and I thought, okay. I really resonate with this because I think for Crimson, I usually snap between delegation, hiring, you know, empowering a leader. When there's a problem, going, like, really deep into it, talking to students, talking to customers, talking to parents, you know, going down to the most junior staff. And so I think at Crimson, I like to make sure that I'm never, like, flying in the sky, but also I'm not, you know, so in the weeds that I'm missing strategy. So to answer your question, these days at Crimson, we've got 800 full time staff. We've got CEOs of most of our key business units. We've got a leader for our college admissions business, our online high school, Revision Village, Number Works. And so what this means that I can actually spend a lot of time helping them, you know, thrive in their role and also looking at what comes next, and then, you know, double clicking on to what units need more help to hit hit the next growth milestone. So I would say it's evolved. For the probably the first five to six years of Crimson, I was deep in the college admissions founder mode on every aspect of the business, opening up the markets myself, flying around the world doing nothing but college admissions. These days, I probably spend my time across the whole group a bit more, and I'm thinking about what comes next and, you know, capital allocation.
00:14:12 · David Booth
[00:14:12] S0: Mhmm. That makes a lot of sense. And then some of them, there'll be more sort of expansion opportunities and new market growth and things going on as well. When you say online high school, and I I think it's fascinating. It's an area that I and I think many parents have followed very closely for the the past three or four or five years. Anybody who tried to parent during the the pandemic for a start saw that, you know, online education was clearly the future. I I built a big online education business during the same the same era, and then it seems like now everything is kind of pivoting back in person. And a lot of the... A lot of people are realizing that the going, you know, over the top or all in on virtual only or, you know, missing opportunities to build in person relationships and to sort of experience schooling early. I suppose in high school, it's it's a little bit better, a little bit further down the journey, and also your CGA students are getting a bit of bit of both. Right? But I'd be really curious how you see, like, the geographic nature of that business evolving and, yeah, how many of the nodes will be in New Zealand versus The US versus where else around the world?
00:15:10 · Jamie Beaton
[00:15:10] S1: Great question. So just this weekend, on Sunday, had a great event here in Manhattan with hundreds of parents coming out, Crimson parents. And actually, one of my students surprised me. Her name was Jade Skeets, and she was an early student from Crimson Global Academy, grew up in Keri Keri. She used our school initially part time. She was at Keri Keri High, an NCA school. She was finding it pretty slow. She hopped into our school part time, found that pretty exciting, and then she moved full time for three years. She got into Princeton. She got into Columbia for computer science. So now she's a freshman at Princeton. For students like Jade, the full time online works really well. But I would say she's very self motivated, there were certain things that she really wanted to get out of high school. For 70% of our learners, it's part time. So they go to a physical high school. They use our school alongside it to take more advanced math, more challenging law, subjects they couldn't take, curriculum that they can't access through their high school. So a lot of the time, it's about, you know, supplementing and enabling that physical environment to be even stronger and actually giving students the academic challenge they're craving from that physical school. Even for our full time students, there's lots of social meetups and events and extracurriculars, and they're spending a lot of their time doing sports, community meetups in different cities around the world. But I would say, you know, everyone needs intense physical interaction regardless of what your learning mode is. Mhmm. And I definitely find this... And even in the degrees that I've done, the purely online ones, I just feel far less of a connection Yeah. Than, you know, the Stanford MBA experience or something deeply in person.
00:16:29 · David Booth
[00:16:29] S0: There's something you say that that's possibly the most important bit of it all, which is the self motivation. And if somebody is motivated to learn a subject, they're curious to pursue it themselves, then the world is their oyster. If they're not, then it doesn't matter what, you know, prestige, you know, institution you're part of. How how does somebody get self motivated? What have you seen that really lights the fire under people to to drive them like that, or do they have to come into Crimson with that ambition prepackaged? So I would
00:16:54 · Jamie Beaton
[00:16:54] S1: say the vast majority of students that come to Crimson don't yet have that spark, you know, burning. They have a curiosity. Mhmm. They have an idea, but they might not have that fire yet. Some of them do. You meet these guys at twelve, thirteen, and you just know they're gonna, you know, tear up on the world stage. But a lot of students, it's about actually helping them find that fire. And, you know, how do you do that? I guess, in a traditional high school experience, you don't usually understand how these classroom subjects leads to my wild goal for a career in the future. Take entrepreneurship. Lots of young kids today wanna be entrepreneurs. They don't understand how doing, you know, math in high school or going to English literature and learning Shakespeare connects to my goal of running a future Tesla. Right? So there's not a connectivity there, and they don't feel inspired. I think what Crimson often does quite quickly is we help the student figure out what swim lanes they wanna focus on academically they really get excited by, what subjects they enjoy, what extracurriculars they wanna do, how that actually links to a university and then to a career goal that will help them, you know, be the best version of themselves. Mhmm. So if you, for example, wanna work at... Wanna work in Wall Street at a quant hedge fund like Citadel, like my student, Sayun, and we can explain, actually, if you can take your math, do Math Olympiad, do these value investing competitions at Wharton, you know, then you can get into a school like a Princeton. That path's gonna be very possible and very hard to unlock in another direction. So it isn't rocket science, but your typical high school student around the world has no idea what they wanna do in the future, and they've spent probably less than five hours in their whole life in high school doing career strategy or Yeah. Or future direction guidance. And so it's parents maybe throwing in ideas, but often most kids are, you know, meandering in a valley of confusion, and we try and remove that, you know, uncertainty.
00:18:33 · David Booth, Jamie Beaton
[00:18:33] S0: Yes. Career strategy is a is a is a good way of putting it. And you're right that most 10 to 15 year olds sitting there learning math are struggling to figure out how it connects to the, you know, the the dropout story of Mark Zuckerberg they watched on The Social Network, what it might [00:18:48] S1: be. Exactly.