Markets with Madison
00:11:45 · Madison, Jamie Beaton
[00:11:45] S0: where academia is still very important. Yeah, it seems like the value that these institutions will continue to hold, and perhaps the last thing that they will be able to hold, is the network effects. Is that what you see these institutions like a Harvard, Stanford, a Yale, turning into effectively like a Y Combinator, and it's the people that surround that institution, not actually the knowledge that you're taught within it? [00:12:07] S1: You know, that's bang on. I would actually say these universities have become like a Y Combinator, but for any industry, not just entrepreneurship. So if you want to, for example, be a top doctor like Ben Zhang, a Kiwi from Pakarani who went to Harvard undergrad, now he's at Harvard Medical School, that is like the Y Combinator for medicine. And so you get to meet the world's brightest minds in those areas, you get connected to leaders in industry and it opens up those doors for internships and everything. So yeah, I would say that's exactly what these schools are doing. That's also why, for example, take Nathaniel Massvignan, a young Kiwi boy. When he was 19 at Stanford, raised a US3.3 million dollars venture capital round. [00:12:41] S0: And 19? [00:12:42] S1: Crazy, right? Like think about that you go into campus and within a year, boom, VCs are happy to back you. And that is partially because of that Y Combinator effect, that the universities are a kind of talent signal that gives you confidence to kind of get behind someone.
00:12:42 · Jamie Beaton, Madison
[00:12:42] S1: Crazy, right? Like think about that you go into campus and within a year, boom, VCs are happy to back you. And that is partially because of that Y Combinator effect, that the universities are a kind of talent signal that gives you confidence to kind of get behind someone. [00:12:55] S0: And having that certificate on paper is a proof point that you're worth something. But I wanted to pose to you how that's changing. And we've seen some of the biggest and best companies in the world, take Rocket Lab for example, they don't hire people based on skills and certificates. They are hiring people based on character, and then they will, who have no engineering experience, and then they will teach them to become rocket engineers. Is real world experience, and perhaps you think character and companies adopting and hiring that way, like Crimson's biggest competition?
00:13:26 · Jamie Beaton, Madison
[00:13:26] S1: So actually Crimson is a really huge fan of live work experience. Actually, of the things we do is we have this program where high schoolers around the world can do work experience in some of the world's great companies like Ferrari, and they can get experience as to what it's like to be a mechanical engineer, for example, when they're in high school. Because the traditional high school experience today in every country basically lacks any kind of career connectivity. Things that you and I do every day, we had no experience to basically in high school, right? And so I would say, you know, that's a huge part of actually getting in. And if you want to get into a place like a Stanford or Yale or Harvard, you need that work experience. But more generally, philosophy isn't the university as an academic knowledge by itself is sufficient, you actually need that real world experience too. We're So always guiding our students, even on those who've gotten in already, you know, what internships to get, what job strategy to go for. It's really about how you kind of optimize your ambitious life rather than going through any particular institution. [00:14:14] S0: And you view education as like the access point to opening Exactly. People's minds up to [00:14:19] S1: It's like this global catalyst, this springboard. Of course, you can do it from anywhere, but it's much easier to get into, for example, a Tesla from Stanford, like a lot of our alumni have done, than just applying online. And of course, that's tough.
00:14:19 · Jamie Beaton, Madison
[00:14:19] S1: It's like this global catalyst, this springboard. Of course, you can do it from anywhere, but it's much easier to get into, for example, a Tesla from Stanford, like a lot of our alumni have done, than just applying online. And of course, that's tough. [00:14:29] S0: Perhaps it was never about the education at all, rather who you know, not what you know. It's true for Jamie, whose advisers include former Harvard president and ex US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, former New Zealand prime minister Sir John Key, and Australia's twenty sixth prime minister Kevin Rudd. Jamie cofounded Crimson with Shandre Kusho and Fengshao Zhang in 2013. Since then, it's raised almost 90,000,000 US dollars from global investors, including Tiger Global Management and VerlInvest. As an investor, when you consider all of the industries in the world that are ripe for disruption and innovation, How does education stack up?
00:15:11 · S2
[00:15:11] S2: I think it's right at the top. You know, Harvard, Oxford, you know, top universities around the world, they're not growing themselves. They're not creating new seats. Right? But the world population is growing. The strength and ambition of the university degree is growing in the minds of consumers. The affordability for people all around the world is increasing. And so demand for great educational services is for great education is increasing. And yet the supply is not, right? Part of what Crimson's mission is, is to open up access to these great institutions for kids all around the world. Americans are, I think, predisposed from a young age to sort of understand the college admissions process, and obviously they have parents who've gone through it themselves. I think one of the most incredible things about Crimson is how many... How often they've brought, you know, first generation Ivy League students to those universities where, you know, they're not getting in based on familiarity, with the American education system. They're getting based... You know, they're getting in based on their own ambition and their own drive, and they've had... They have to learn how The US college system works from scratch. I think that's that's a really special component of what they do.
00:16:30 · Madison, Samil Singh
[00:16:30] S0: One of those students is Sumil Singh, a kid from Hamilton, a town in New Zealand, who studied applied mathematics at Harvard and is now employed at an investment bank in New York. He put his own AI venture through Y Combinator, which gives him a unique view of education institutions versus idea incubators. [00:16:49] S3: I view them in different categories, so it's difficult to compare them directly. I would say being at Harvard helped me, you know, learn subjects and meet people that I could apply to Y Combinator with. It helped me explain why I was doing YC, all these sort of kind of details around my application. So it compounded into the admission into Y Combinator and ability to go through that program. YC is an investor, so they give you money to start building things. Harvard is not an investor in in students typically, I guess. So so the value is very different in in terms of what they're actually doing. I would say, YC, there's some really great immediate value in terms of, you know, help you grow your company. Harvard, I think, provides sort of a long term lifelong kind of value in network that I can keep going into and tapping into. And, you know, some of the folks I met there are are, you know, some of my best friends now, and I think that kind of value is gonna continue compounding for a long time. [00:17:39] S0: Yeah, spoke with Jamie about this, about the network effect of these enormous education institutions, but you would have also felt that pretty strongly at some point, like, why Combinator? [00:17:48] S3: Yeah.