Markets with Madison
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?
00:10:08 · Jamie Beaton
[00:10:08] S1: So I would actually say the demand for these schools like Stanford have actually grown incredibly in the last ten years. So a lot of these schools have seen twice as many applicants in the last decade. NYU, for example, right here in New York City has gone from netting 40% back in 2013 to less than 7% now. So it's become one of the world's most selective schools. And the question is sort of why? And there are a couple of reasons. The first thing is a lot of these employers, whether it be a Goldman Sachs or Microsoft, they still recruit on camps at these top universities in droves. So if you're an ambitious student, of course you can get into these jobs from anywhere, but if you want to get into that New York Goldman Sachs office or McKinsey, New York, like our Kiwi student, Giga Dua from Linfield, she came through Duke, got access to those recruiters, then landed that job. So that career connectivity is still very hard to beat because if you're McKinsey, you can't just go and recruit from anywhere, anywhere in the world very easily. The universities do that filtering for you. The second piece is that campus community of amazing scholars. Of course, in a place like Harvard or Yale, there are talented ambitious students from all over the world. And we all know it's such a function of our environment. And so when you go to these places, can't help but leave much more inspired, swinging big and of course connected, whether it be tapping into investors or founders for your company or whatever. That's a second huge piece. The third and final part are professors, and of course, these professors are at the cutting edge of world leading research. My thesis advisor at Harvard, for example, was Larry Summers, who advised presidents, then would come and teach me macroeconomics. That kind of connectivity is of course world class. And if you want to break frontier research and actually create new knowledge, need to be working with those leading minds, because of course AI is looking at the existing corpus of human knowledge and splitting it back to you. But if you want to break new research, that's
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.