Markets with Madison
00:04:28 · Jamie Beaton, Madison
[00:04:28] S1: Absolutely. So the origin of course was helping ambitious Kiwis getting into the world's best universities and navigating that journey. From there we realised actually we could do this for students all around the world. So today we're helping kids from 20 plus countries, from China to India to Japan, even to The Middle East, helping navigate them through this process from high school to The States. Now after a while we realized actually we're getting pretty good at this and we should help Americans too. So about seven years ago we set up shop in California and now today Crimson's the largest provider of college admissions guidance for American kids getting into US colleges, which I think is pretty funny because they trust, of course, Kiwis to get into their own schools. Now, after college admissions, we've expanded into postgraduate admissions too, helping folks with MBA, law school, PhD. And then we have an online high school with thousands of kids who trust us as their full high school experience, which is pretty cool. And then we've got other things from tuition academies to AI learning platforms to Revision Village, which is the most popular study resource platform for the IB. So we've really tried to expand from the 16 to 18 New Zealand to The US corridor to a much more global kind of five through to early professionals learning ecosystem. Interesting. So in terms of countries that Crimson effectively touches through students that you admit into universities where around the [00:05:42] S0: world, how many countries and continents are you in?
00:05:42 · Madison, Jamie Beaton
[00:05:42] S0: world, how many countries and continents are you in? [00:05:44] S1: We're in about 35 countries today and The US is our biggest single market, but we've got a great presence everywhere from Southeast Asia, Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand. We even actually had operations in Russia for the longest time. With the recent spiciness, we've moved out a little bit to more the broader CIS region. Kazakhstan will be probably our most exotic office today. [00:06:04] S0: Where does the bulk of your revenue come from across those business divisions, from like the physical to the online So [00:06:11] S1: still today about 70% of our business is college mission. So that's definitely the thriving heart of Crimson. And within that, we've really built this global brand for helping students get into the most ambitious schools. So not necessarily just the Ivy League, but think about schools like Duke, UC Berkeley, the great UK schools like University College London or Oxford. So that would be the core, and then of that The US is about a third of that market, and then 40% is Asia Pacific at large from China through to Japan. [00:06:37] S0: When you're speaking to prospective students or existing students and their parents, what do they want from Crimson? What are they trying
00:06:37 · Madison, Jamie Beaton
[00:06:37] S0: When you're speaking to prospective students or existing students and their parents, what do they want from Crimson? What are they trying [00:06:44] S1: to seek through your offerings? So at the core, university is the fastest way to go from any corner of the world to these epicentres of innovation, whether it be AI, entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley, breaking into Wall Street like it did at Tiger, and there's nothing faster for a kid from, for example, Australia than going through these schools. So fundamentally what they're looking for is this ambitious career on the world stage. They want to make sure that the university degree kind of ports them into these centres of global capitalism. And so they're looking at, of course, an amazing university experience, but also all the jobs that come next. And today our Crimson students are working at the likes of Tesla, OpenAI, great firms like Goldman Sachs, many have gone on to raise venture capital rounds. One of our young Australians actually sold this company recently to Amazon, which is pretty cool. For how much? Good question, I should ask them, but at least in probably the tens of millions I would say, so a pretty good outcome. And then we've even got a Kiwi, Nancy Liu, who's in the New Zealand government who came through Crimson as well.
00:06:44 · Jamie Beaton, Madison
[00:06:44] S1: to seek through your offerings? So at the core, university is the fastest way to go from any corner of the world to these epicentres of innovation, whether it be AI, entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley, breaking into Wall Street like it did at Tiger, and there's nothing faster for a kid from, for example, Australia than going through these schools. So fundamentally what they're looking for is this ambitious career on the world stage. They want to make sure that the university degree kind of ports them into these centres of global capitalism. And so they're looking at, of course, an amazing university experience, but also all the jobs that come next. And today our Crimson students are working at the likes of Tesla, OpenAI, great firms like Goldman Sachs, many have gone on to raise venture capital rounds. One of our young Australians actually sold this company recently to Amazon, which is pretty cool. For how much? Good question, I should ask them, but at least in probably the tens of millions I would say, so a pretty good outcome. And then we've even got a Kiwi, Nancy Liu, who's in the New Zealand government who came through Crimson as well. [00:07:37] S0: In a way, Crimson has kept these institutions alive by keeping top talent flowing through its doors. But the prestige of places like this may be at risk. Artificial intelligence is democratising knowledge and possibly with it, the value of centuries old education institutions. How do you see that ultimately changing education and for better or for worse?
00:08:00 · Jamie Beaton
[00:08:00] S1: So at the core, AI is really exciting because today if you're a student and you have to get tutors in all your subjects, that's pretty expensive. And that could cost tens of thousands per year for that full personalised experience. Now AI can't fully replace tutors because a lot of the student relationship is actually that mentor mentee connection, that accountability, almost like a personal trainer. But for most of your questions, you're stuck on a math question, you need to get feedback on your English essay rather than waiting a month for your teacher, you can get that feedback instantly from a great AI tool. So the promise of AI is to really have a personalized tutor for every subject 20 fourseven and to really collapse that inequity that comes from whether or not your family can actually hire a tutoring firm. So I think that's a huge opportunity. The second piece is around career guidance. You If think about your classic career accounts around the world, they typically aren't that clued in to what's happening at frontier companies, especially in different countries. Maybe they're familiar with local opportunities. With AI tools, you can actually get career advice really fast that is generally pretty good and helps you with that discovery phase. So I would say it really opens up access to a really world class education to students globally. The ultimate solution will be combining, I think, teachers with AI, because you still need to have that mentor mentee inspiration that really makes a student want to get up every day and do their work, which AI struggles with, but I think it will help a lot with, you know, boost the academic grades. Of course, the challenge right now, which is really rippling through universities and high schools, is students are using AI of course for essays, assignments, homework, and many of the traditional assessment methodologies that you and I did in high school really don't work anymore because the take home essay is a thing of the past. Even NCEA internal exams in New Zealand, the vast majority can be done by AI they're and very hard to detect actually, which means you've got to move back to things. For example, I was just at Cambridge and the final exam for pen and paper on campus, because they can't do things like remote assessments anymore.
00:09:48 · Jamie Beaton, Madison
So that of course is creating a huge headache for teachers around the world. [00:09:52] S0: It begs the question though, in an age where information is abundant because of the internet, knowledge is no longer a human power, it is AI's tool as well, Does education matter? Like is education still relevant in this world?