Markets with Madison
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.
00:19:12 · Jamie Beaton, Madison
[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. [00:19:53] S0: I'm interested in where specifically you see growth coming from. Is it in something like Crimson Accelerate or is it something in like Crimson Rise, which is your for 11 to 14 year olds? Do you see that addressable market expanding in age and also in career for the students that come through your system?
00:20:09 · Jamie Beaton, Madison
[00:20:09] S1: So definitely it's around age, but also it's around ambition. Which country are applying to? So Crimson's now helping kids from age five all the way at Numberworks across New Zealand and our adorable learning centers with these cute little kids, all the way through to you know, these postgrads who are applying for their PhDs and their fellowships. Our students are going from applying to just The US to now US, UK, EU, Singapore, you know medical schools, a whole variety of different pathways, and then learning model from our of course flagship 101 training at Crimson Core, all the way to our physical school we just opened in Takapuna, to our online school. So many different learning models, but the core of Crimson Today that's driven really massive growth, particularly this year in North America, is just the huge volume of increased applicants going to US schools and the global demand for these top universities. Because people actually are asking the same question you are, which is what's the value of this local university degree? What am I actually getting? And should I in fact be applying globally and actually comparing this opportunity to schools in Australia or schools in The US, and then, you know, making that best choice on the world stage? And so education is fundamentally becoming a global marketplace. I wanted to [00:21:10] S0: ask you about these acquisitions that you've made recently, not only the physical school in Takapuna, which is down the road from my house, so I know exactly [00:21:15] S1: Oh, where it nice.