Diaspora NZ with David Booth
00:06:16 · David Booth
[00:06:16] S0: Yeah. I'm excited to hear more about some of the the network that have come through it. I'm sure you've kept tabs on them as they go. Tell me about how it actually works, because we're gonna get into some of the the... I I wanna trace this thread through from a little bit earlier on the journey, how it's evolved, a few of the different acquisitions have plugged in into the sort of the broader outlook on the industry. So I think it's a fascinating vantage point that you have. Yeah. How does it actually work? What is the core of the Crimson offering? Obviously, starting a couple of years out before you want to go and get into the the college of your choice, there's a lot of things you should be doing to get your your CV in order, your your sort of your academic extracurricular pursuits in order. What is the core thing that you're paying for and participating in?
00:06:54 · Jamie Beaton
[00:06:54] S1: Yeah. Great question. So the typical student is applying to The US and The UK. To get into a great US university like a Harvard or a Yale, you need to do academics, extracurriculars, leadership, essays, interviews. A student's gonna do five different major competitions. They need three different references. They're gonna write about 30 essays in that final year, and all their academics count from age 14 to 18. They've gotta take a standardized test, SAT. So all of that goes into this application, which then gets submitted to a wide range of schools. Our typical student today applies to about 13, 14 universities. So when they come to Crimson, you know, what do they get? They get access to counselor, somebody like me, that's been through the application journey firsthand. It can help them figure out how they can best enhance their profile, what they should spend time on in high school, what activities to do. They're gonna have a network of usually four or five different tutors. Could be a debate coach, could be a model UN coach, could be a tutor for their a levels, and then access to our Crimson app, which is a software platform with lots of interesting data analytics on your admissions odds to various schools, resources for what competitions you can do over the summer, and a lot of parent reporting as well. So mom and dad can sort of follow along on the journey. And we'll work with you typically for about three, four years, training you up and then sending you off to one of these great universities.
00:08:07 · David Booth
[00:08:07] S0: The story sort of goes or or the or the... As the journey evolves, I as you're involved in these kids' lives earlier and earlier, more opportunities to provide more to them. So Revision Village, I believe, came about as you were just looking for ways to to plug in to give more to people pre Crimson off sort of further upstream. Another was the CGA, the Crimson Global Academy. I'm fascinated when you think about one of those I mentioned, I believe, was acquired in. It was sort of an existing asset. You said this makes more sense to exist within our family. Another was built internally. It was an opportunity identified. What's the difference between those two, and and why would you buy versus why would you build an asset from a a business point of view as well as a product experience point of view?
00:08:47 · Jamie Beaton
[00:08:47] S1: So generally at Crimson, the earlier we can start with a student, the more we can inspire them, the more we can train them up, the more we can boost their academics, but also help build up their resume and extracurriculars. So we're always looking at opportunities to go younger. A good example would be Crimson Rise, which is for 10 to 14 year olds, kind of before the high school journey begins. CGA or our online high school, Crimson Global Academy, and Revision Village are a little bit different. I'll start with Revision Village. So Revision Village is... It was acquired from these talented Aussie guys from the Gold Coast. They were math teachers, and they'd built this platform to help IB kids get better at math, which is typically the hardest subject in the International Baccalaureate. Now I had this weird experience where I was speaking to my students in Hong Kong and China, and they kept mentioning this website, Revision Village, Revision Village, Revision Village. And I almost went down this wild goose chase, you know, speaking to different IB students in all these different Crimson countries. What do you use to learn the to to learn the IB? And they kept saying the name of this, you know, website, and it was a kinda kooky WordPress website, but it had gone totally viral for the quality of its videos and resources. So we looked at this, and we thought this could be really interesting. So we spoke to the folks, acquired Revision Village, and then we actually took it from math to all the main IB subjects. So from one to eight different subjects, we added an AI tutor. We added different tools for teachers. Platform today has become the most popular study resource across all the major IB subjects. So we have tens of thousands of subscribers that use the platform to boost those IB scores, and it really helps Crimson because if a student can improve their IB score by two points, that will give us, you know, a lot more universities we can help them get into. So that's a really good example of a, you know, low cost or free learning resource for many students that helps bring more students into the world of Crimson. Moving to Crimson Global Academy. The story there really starts with a boy called Samil. He grew up in Hamilton, and he was at Hamilton Boys High School in NCEA School.
00:10:35 · Jamie Beaton
And we saw in the student the potential to really take a lot of extra subjects, get into these crazy universities. We saw that he had a lot of untapped math skill, and so we recommended him this pretty ridiculous high school course load, six extra a levels, which is like almost triple a regular course load because he had his full school NCEA and all his subjects on top. Now he used probably 20 different tutors, teaching him all these different subjects online over the course of two years to learn all these subjects. And seeing this, I realized actually there are a lot of kids sitting in traditional high schools that have untapped potential, that are kind of wasting time, and they could be doing more, they could be going deeper, etcetera. Then at Stanford, I came across the Stanford Online High School, which was a school that Elon Musk had a child in, and I started studying it actually. And I I was very fascinated. 800 kids in the school, all online. I'd never seen an online high school before. I saw this concept, and I thought, actually, our Kiwi kids and Crimson kids around the could really benefit from this. So that led us to launch Crimson Global Academy. So that was internally built because the philosophy was very core to our ideology at Crimson. It had the same core capabilities of online delivery, teacher recruitment, quality control, content development. Revision Village, it was a brand new thing. E commerce, lower price point, asynchronous delivery, a lot of things that meant it wasn't in our wheelhouse. We'd actually tried things like that before and we'd failed. And so I thought buying it was a much safer play, and then we could actually invest more in it, and we've done a lot with it post acquisition. But, yeah, at Crimson, we're very open to buying or building, and we are pretty adaptable. But the closer it is to our core college admissions wheelhouse, we usually build that internally.
00:12:05 · David Booth
[00:12:05] S0: Yeah. I've got a sort of a visual image of a a funnel here, I suppose. And the the... As you say, so the closer something is to the core of the admissions business, the more likely it's be something exists in your core customer journey that you're gonna build internally, the more sort of a a content asset in this case or like, the the... I love the framing of the the low cost accessible revision support. There are so many threads I wanna pull here, but gonna stick on the business piece of it. When you think about the the moving pieces today of Crimson to reflect on, you've you've sort of walked us through the external experience in the... Of the journey. Internally, you have five, 600 people now across the board, across... Around the world. How do you think about the leadership of of these, you know, teams and setting each up internally for success? Are you are you founder mode in the weeds every day, or are you, yeah, hiring good people or handing off into the divisions and sort of to leading them for... From more of a distance?