NZ Business Podcast - Paul Spain
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.
00:25:12 · Jamie Beaton, Paul Spain
[00:25:12] S0: First thing. [00:25:12] S1: First language.
00:25:13 · Jamie Beaton
[00:25:13] S0: The the key thing to be is pretty opportunistic, right, about opportunities as they come up, I guess. So let me give you a funny story. So I went to Thailand for this competition called the Global Student Entrepreneurship Awards, which is like a student challenge thing that we were competing in. I was on a boat, and I sat... And I was next to this lady. I thought she was actually about my age, you know, which is kind of funny. And I got talking to her, and turns out she was about 35. She went to Harvard, did applied math and economics, same program as me. And she had recently been working in private equity, but it had some young kids and was looking for a bit of a transition. And, you know, she spoke Thai. This was in Thailand, by the way. And, immediately, I leapt on that and said, hey. Do want to expand Crimson? It's going really well in Thailand. And she became our managing director of Thailand and did an incredible job of getting that, you know, off to market. I went to Singapore to visit my Singaporean team, and I was in the cafeteria of Yale NUS, which is a Singaporean university that are partnered with Yale. I was talking to this shop New Zealander called Andy Chen, and he told me, hey. Look over there. That kid over there, he's known as a really entrepreneurial guy on campus, does a lot of the startup competitions, is really good at computer science. You might wanna chat to him. So I got speaking to him, and turns out he he was speaking fluent English, but turns out he spoke Russian. I said, oh, how do you speak Russian? He said, I'm I'm half Russian, half American. And I said, what do you feel like about launching Crimson in Russia? And then within a couple of weeks, he he had confirmed his gap year, and he had landed in Russia and was expanding us over there. So for The UK, you know, my early director, Janine Manning, one of our first investors, she was moving to The UK, and so naturally, you know, she had the mandate to start us over there. And so it's about getting the tent poles out of people that know the local markets pretty well, figuring out what's happening. And in many cases, these early entrepreneurial people figured it out pretty well, figured out playbooks that we learned from and worked with them to succeed in. And then we kind of continued to optimize and optimize this...
00:26:57 · Jamie Beaton, Paul Spain
The country manager hiring process till we got it down to quite a consistent profile. And then we were able to ramp from five, six markets to more than 20 pretty quick. I looked for inspiration from Uber, their playbook for city expansion. They have actually quite a systematic process for who they hire. [00:27:10] S1: And it's not it's not necessarily... Well, I don't know. They... All the ins and outs of their model, but it seems as though it doesn't necessarily have to involve a huge number of people actually Totally. To get a new, yeah, operations [00:27:25] S0: That's right. That's right. [00:27:26] S1: That's right. So I thing that pulled out of New Zealand was the last I I heard in terms of, you know, this... Their their, you know, boots on the ground and having an actual office here as most of that's now being run out of Australia.