NZ Business Podcast - Paul Spain
00:19:47 · Jamie Beaton, Paul Spain
Then he went to Tiger Global, and so he was instrumental in guiding us through the process of many of the kind of org chart development things we had to do, building our operations functions, building out, you know, financial functions, etcetera. Other great people would like Janine Manning, who, from the early days, made sure that we were doing things like auditing through KPMG and stuff, which is really used for capital raising and putting in place really good financial controls. So, yeah, we've... We... I mean, we have a a long list of advisers to this day on everything from the education side to the data science side to the growth side. The recent one would be Ed Baker. He joined us. He was head of international expansion at Uber, sold a company to Facebook, was there for several years, and invested in us recently, and has been a great advocate for how we can grow CGA, our new school, for example. So I've always... [00:20:29] S1: This is your Crimson Global Academy? [00:20:31] S0: Yes. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Crimson Global Academy are New Zealand's first online online high school, and we're growing really quickly, which is really exciting. So these different advisers have been instrumental as as young cofounders who've been trying to learn learn fast alongside a very strong kind of full time bench as well, which we keep improving and growing.
00:20:31 · Jamie Beaton, Paul Spain
[00:20:31] S0: Yes. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Crimson Global Academy are New Zealand's first online online high school, and we're growing really quickly, which is really exciting. So these different advisers have been instrumental as as young cofounders who've been trying to learn learn fast alongside a very strong kind of full time bench as well, which we keep improving and growing. [00:20:47] S1: Yeah. Now you you talked about some some areas of the business there, such as IT, where, you know, it didn't pan out so well. What were the triggers that helped you realize, you know, that it was, you know, that what you had was was broken in some way? And then how did you actually go about sort of navigating from what you had to, you know, what you had decided you you needed and how, you know, how hard was that, particularly if you've employed, you know, friends and, you know, people that you, you know, that you'd know outside of the business Yeah. Into those roles. And then you've, yeah, you've decided, hey, this this actually isn't really what's gonna fly for us for the next stage of the business.
00:21:31 · Jamie Beaton
[00:21:31] S0: So I guess the good thing is we've always had a pretty meritocratic culture in the sense that we really focus on performance, delivering results, etcetera. So when I was going through this process, a key thing was discovering that the outcomes were not were not there. Once we discovered those outcomes, you know, it was pretty easy relatively to have, you know, transparent conversations with those leaders, and then, you know, mutually agree it wasn't working, and then, you know, evolve and fix the teams. But as far as figuring out the outcomes weren't working, you know, in digital marketing, it's really interesting. So it sounds like an easy problem to solve. You know, if you spend money on Facebook or Instagram, etcetera, how do you track end to end whether that is actually converting? And it sounds pretty simple, and everyone's pumping money into these different online platforms. But, actually, the complexity of tracking things across, you know, Eventbrite, different landing pages, you know, websites with, you know, various tracking codes, you know, it's it's pretty complicated. And so for a while, you may... You can't attribute necessarily your marketing spend to what's happening on the revenue side. Right? Once you have more visibility into that, you can make much more sound decisions, and you can set, you know, ROAS or return on advertising spend targets, things like this for various teams. And so I guess we had a bit of first principles intuition for, okay, if we're putting this much money into this, these are the kind of outcomes we should be seeing. We weren't seeing some of them. Yeah. And then secondly, we put in place better and better tracking, which would... You know, which kind of ultimately shows what's happening and kind of, you know, if things aren't really working in the engine room, it becomes very clear when you have all the metrics. So I think that would be kind of how we help find those problems. You know, Fungus background is advanced, computing, minds, applied math, lots of our team are pretty quantitative. So if there are no metrics in a unit, you know, we quickly put in place metrics and then sort of find the truth, I guess. And I think that metric driven culture has been quite useful as we've continued to scale and scale and scale.
00:23:07 · Jamie Beaton, Paul Spain
Particularly going from one fifty to 400, that's been a much more smooth, I think, ramp up because we now have those, KPIs in place and, you know, infrastructure, which we keep improving. But I would say it's pretty robust. And we've got a really good chief operating officer, called David Fried. He was a really high achieving student from Harvard, top in economics there, went to Goldman Sachs, really strong data scientist. And then he's been hitting up our charge on the service delivery team, putting in place these metrics. And, you know, that plus Penny, for example, building a pretty good infrastructure. So I really recommend founders that are trying to go fast, raise a lot of venture capital they need to they need to go. That's their mandate to make sure they have they have those metrics so that if you do take bets and stuff, you at least can, you know, measure the outputs and then evolve and iterate and learn. [00:23:46] S1: And when you've when you've gone for funding, how how ambitious have you been in terms of what you've what you've put on the table? Because you've raised... How much money have you raised so so far? Share on that front.
00:23:46 · Paul Spain, Jamie Beaton
[00:23:46] S1: And when you've when you've gone for funding, how how ambitious have you been in terms of what you've what you've put on the table? Because you've raised... How much money have you raised so so far? Share on that front. [00:23:58] S0: Yeah. We... We've raised ballpark about 60 mil USD, so that gives you a sense of how much capital we've raised, which sounds like a lot in New Zealand. I don't think it's that much compared to Silicon Valley companies we benchmark ourselves to. And broadly speaking, I mean, we are ambitious. So with both our college admissions offering, you know, we see a massive market all around the world. Lots of very, you know, ambitious families that wanna make sure their children are equipped to succeed in a very competitive environment. That's a very big market, and so... And it's also across many geographies. So we needed to raise capital to dominate that niche across across the world. My strategy was very intentional. I didn't wanna go into America or particularly China that much in the early days. I wanted to focus on geographies that were quite uncontested, so I went into places like Russia, like Korea, like Brazil, and, you know, built up our operations there. Largely, that kind
00:23:58 · Jamie Beaton, Paul Spain
[00:23:58] S0: Yeah. We... We've raised ballpark about 60 mil USD, so that gives you a sense of how much capital we've raised, which sounds like a lot in New Zealand. I don't think it's that much compared to Silicon Valley companies we benchmark ourselves to. And broadly speaking, I mean, we are ambitious. So with both our college admissions offering, you know, we see a massive market all around the world. Lots of very, you know, ambitious families that wanna make sure their children are equipped to succeed in a very competitive environment. That's a very big market, and so... And it's also across many geographies. So we needed to raise capital to dominate that niche across across the world. My strategy was very intentional. I didn't wanna go into America or particularly China that much in the early days. I wanted to focus on geographies that were quite uncontested, so I went into places like Russia, like Korea, like Brazil, and, you know, built up our operations there. Largely, that kind [00:24:45] S1: of foreign push has been pretty instrumental to our success. So, yeah, just sort of stopping there for a minute, how do you actually do that as a business that's operating in New Zealand? Things are a little bit different now in terms of terms of travel, but when you when you started doing that, what did it actually, you know, what did it actually look like? What were the steps? Yeah. And what was the, you know, what was the hardest thing, particularly if you're you're in a country where, you know, English isn't the first [00:25:12] S0: First thing.