Markets with Madison
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.
00:17:48 · Samil Singh, Madison, Jamie Beaton
[00:17:48] S3: Yeah. [00:17:48] S0: Can you kind of tell me the differences between the two in terms of who you meet and how it then like, accelerates your life and what you can do with it? [00:17:56] S3: Yeah. I would say the the difference in network between Y Combinator and Harvard is that YC, everybody is essentially trying to build a venture backed company. So everybody's an entrepreneur and working on very different problem areas, all, know, generally working on some kind of new technology or some kind of technical breakthrough or something to do with software perhaps. At Harvard, there are folks, you know, many more stripes. So there are folks that have gone into finance that have done very well. There are entrepreneurs as well, and I think the sort of diversity is maybe where there's some difference. I would say the average age of a YC founder is much higher than the folks I've at Harvard. [00:18:29] S1: You know, [00:18:30] S3: I think that's probably one of the youngest people there. And so there's some difference in sort the stage of career as well. I would say they're both very powerful networks, though, for sure. And, you know, both networks that can continue continue kind of producing interesting sort of outcomes for the folks who were able [00:18:43] S1: to join them.
00:18:43 · Jamie Beaton, Madison
[00:18:43] S1: to join them. [00:18:44] S0: How do you at Crimson approach pricing education products and services in this world? Do you start to adopt that Y Combinator approach, and rather than charging somebody to go to a university or charging the fee to get access to it, do you start then taking a percentage of their income in their first job at Tesla or SpaceX or like a percentage of equity in their idea like a Y Combinator would? Do you think that that's sort of a future approach? [00:19:12] S1: So we actually have a great fund, Crimson Accelerate, which invests in some of our best and brightest young alumni. So already we've had folks like Young Fun, a guy from Auckland who's been off to Stanford, he just raised about 8,000,000 for a cyber security company in his, you know, mid-20s and so you know, we invested for example in the first round with him. So we of course love to get behind our alumni, but I think for the core Crimson service model, you know, charging for the education delivery is probably how it will stick. Because I think when you start doing income sharing agreements as your main revenue model, you know, it's tricky and also if a student has massive success, don't want be charging them sort of massive fees. It's much better in my opinion to, you know, really make that a more consistent function for all students. So I would say no income share agreements for us for a little while.