00:52:24 · David Booth
[00:52:24] S0: You're pitching my my my diaspora back to me. You're right. I used to talk about imagine that you you have a large family, and you tell them, oh, I I want you to stay at home. I don't want you to leave the home. I I want you to stay here and and do work here because, god, if if if you go out to the world and learn things, you might stay there. If you love something, you... You've gotta let it go. And we've also, you know, gotta encourage people to go overseas. We're gonna help stay in touch with them when they're over here. You're a perfect example of this, so I'm excited to to be here in New York with you. The personal journey you've been on throughout this, you've acquired business mentors. You've acquired investors among all sorts of very interesting, you know, groups of people, board members. John Key is on the board today. Tell me, I'd love to hear, like, how... Who have been the strongest influences in your professional life? Who who have you sort of intentionally set out to learn from, and and how do you go about building those relationships and benefiting the most from those relationships?
00:53:20 · Jamie Beaton, David Booth
[00:53:20] S1: So the most influential mentor, besides my my mom, would be the late Julian Robertson. So Julian, founder of Tiger Management, a big Kiwi supporter. I met him when I was 18, interviewing for his Robertson scholarship. I then met up with him in New York, and he put me through his Tiger test for hiring, and he ended up hiring me to work at Tiger, investing in Crimson Seed round. And he really encouraged me to dream sky high. I I was ambitious, but he had that resolute conviction that that we could make it happen at Crimson, and he really got behind me, opened up his network to me, but more than anything, showed me what leadership was like. Julian inspired a kind of cult following, competitive but high integrity, high performance culture within Tiger that led to the creation of many of the world's best hedge funds, like Tiger Global or, you know, Viking and things like this that spun out of his [00:54:10] S0: The Tiger Cubs. [00:54:11] S1: Exactly. Tiger Cubs. That's right. And, you know, seeing him in action, even in his eighties, and seeing his competitive spirit, his fire, his passion for life, inspiring. [00:54:20] S0: Mhmm.
00:54:20 · Jamie Beaton
[00:54:20] S1: And so I think for many of Crimson's formative years, I was working at Tiger and then building Crimson, getting lessons from Julian, being introduced to all kinds of fascinating people. You know, he led our our seed a and then co led the b with Tiger Global and was just incredibly inspirational in all these areas of life from family, relationships, all the way to business. So I would say he was the single most influential by a wide margin. Next up, I'd actually talk about a fellow called Jason Linger. He's an Aussie guy who was the... One of the most senior folks at Seek, know, the multibillion dollar job marketplace. He was actually put on our board from Tiger Global as part of their round. And, you know, I mean, we just raised 30 mil, you know, from Tiger Global, you know, a bunch of, you know, early twenties kids. He had he had a tall order. Came on the board. He was sort of the responsible man in the room helping us level up and figure out what we were doing. You know, we had these wild goals to build Crimson everywhere, in 20 countries in two years, expand everywhere. And he both cheered us on, but also brought rationality, experience, war stories to us. He told me, you know, Jamie, when you go into China, you're gonna get your pants ripped off, you're get your face ripped off, you know, and and and he still let me do it, and I did. I did get my face ripped off, but I at least learned faster because of his lessons. So Jason helped us level up as a as a company and helped me with a lot of executive hiring. You know, he's been an amazing mentor over the years. So I would say those two stand out as two really amazing business mentors. One, Ozzy and, you know, Julian.
00:55:51 · David Booth
[00:55:51] S0: That's fantastic. When you think about leveling up as a person, as an individual, what what if you had to unlearn? I've had to unlearn a lot of my, you know, desire to do everything myself and learn a lot of sort of bit better delegation, bit of management, bit of sort of collaboration as I've sort of gone to the world. How about yourself?
00:56:10 · Jamie Beaton
[00:56:10] S1: I had through a lot of unlearning, and I would say leadership did not come very naturally to me. I don't think I was much of a leader in high school, and it was definitely a work in progress and still very much is. I think a couple of things. One is not I'm going to just get out of the room and let let your folks create and build and be entrepreneurial without you necessarily there. I think sometimes in building a company, you know, you wanna lead from the front and you wanna do everything and lead the charge. But when you've got talented people with the entrepreneurial spark and that that are local operators and they know the market well, getting behind them, cheering them on and showing you trust them is very powerful. So that's one thing that I think I learned early. I think the second thing would be just time and time again, bidding on someone with a steep learning curve is better than someone with tenured experience. As a young founder, it was always so attractive to find the guy from, I don't know, Microsoft or some company, and, you know, they seem so tenured and experienced, the magic guy that will solve But, all of our you know, they usually always struggle. And then it's typically the folks with the fast learning curve who wanna, you know, roll up their sleeves that have built immense value with us at Crimson. And so I think betting on that sharp learning curve again and again is important. And then finally, I would just say the importance of working with great high integrity people. Often this comes from when we're doing business in places like China or, you know, Russia or India or something like this. There are a lot of times where we've been looking at a company to acquire, and we just get an uncomfortable feeling about, you know, maybe who we're getting into business with and Mhmm. You know, what the vibes are and we avoid that. And in the small instances where I've gone forward with a deal where I didn't quite feel comfortable, it's, you know, usually always a dumpster fire. And, you know, ultimately, building a business is a people driven phenomena, and you wanna build a people that you trust, that you can build and compound with, and it's great for your culture.
00:57:48 · Jamie Beaton, David Booth
And so I guess I've really become, you know, almost like a culture fanatic, I would say, in the last five years of Crimson, whether in the first five years, I was probably a bit more, you know, robotic in my approach. Mhmm. [00:57:58] S0: Yeah. And build build your instinct, train your your gut, and trust it when you do. [00:58:02] S1: Yep. [00:58:02] S0: Tell me... I mean, final question perhaps, and and a great place to to wind up. Well, it's twofold. Usually, I ask people, I love to ask people, like, how can the diaspora support you? Like, what what are the the upcoming asks for talent for, you know, anything that we could be bending the world to... In... Into your your benefit?