Crimson’s Growth and Edtech Innovation with Jamie Beaton

Paul Spain:
I’m your host, Paul Spain, and on today’s New Zealand Tech Podcast, I talk with Jamie Beaton, co-founder and chief executive of Crimson Education. Crimson is a fast-scaling global leader in the edtech sector, helping thousands of students gain entry to the world’s top universities, and is continuing to expand its reach with innovative tech-enabled services and programs, and recently reached unicorn status with a billion-dollar valuation. Jami currently holds more than 10 different university degrees from Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, and Oxford universities, amongst others. This includes being a Rhodes Scholar and graduating up to a doctoral level. Many thanks to our show partners, Fortinet, 1NZ, 2Degrees, Spark, Workday, and Gorilla Technology for their incredible support of the New Zealand Tech Podcast. Jami Beaton, great to have you back on the podcast. How are you doing?

Jamie Beaton:
Absolutely fantastic. Great to be back.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, really keen to catch up. It’s been about just over 5 years since we last chatted. There’s been a huge amount going on in that period. I think when we spoke last time, you had a full-time team of around 400 people. You mentioned that’s grown to, what, 1,100 now?

Jamie Beaton:
That’s right. It’s been a massive period of growth. And I think back when we spoke, we hadn’t even launched our Crimson Global Academy yet, our online school. And building out all the schooling parts of Crimson in the last several years has been really exciting. Our adventure began in core college admissions, initially helping Kiwis going to the US. Then the next part of our strategy was to help more and more foreign kids coming into the US and UK. And then about 8 years ago, we entered into the US market. Crimson built this really high-performance training process for getting students into these schools across mentorship, online delivery, all this content.

Jamie Beaton:
Crimson’s focused on how do we take a student and really maximize their performance. CollegeWise is very focused on applying to a broad range of US 100 schools and actually removing stress and pressure from the process. So that’s really been a key evolution, the growth of our college missions. And then we’ve also launched this fully accredited online high school, Crimson Global Academy, now has nearly 3,000 students. And our recent online charter school, Aotearoa Infinite Academy, and even our first physical school here in New Zealand, the Age School, or the Academy for Gifted Education. So a lot of other different things happening too, Revision Village or our Concord Visa Unit. But I would really characterize the last 5 years as moving beyond our core, to a whole variety of new adjacencies, new bits, and it’s been really fun.

Paul Spain:
Well, now maybe is a good time to tell us about some of these new things. Maybe start with, with Concord Visa and where that fits into the picture and why that makes sense rather than, you know, being a distraction.

Jamie Beaton:
Great question. So when I first came to the US, I came over on an F-1 student visa and then I got an O-1 visa, which basically is a visa which you can qualify for if you hit a certain number of criteria. And I only heard about it because there was another Kiwi called Divya Dhar who was a Young New Zealander of the Year. And she told me, hey, you should look at this visa category. And that advice actually changed the game for me because it let me have the certainty that I could stay and work and build Crimson in the US. And so I learned about this process. I engaged this law firm which is called Fragomen, which was a major US immigration law firm. Now that was all well and good, but I started thinking to myself, first of all, more Kiwis in particular, but also just general Crimson alumni Kiwis should pursue this visa category if they want to work in the US.

Jamie Beaton:
The Australians have the E-3, and this is a really good way for Kiwis to kind of get over. So the thought was in the back of my mind, and I’d recommend it to Crimson students here and there. But then as AI evolved, I really saw an interesting opportunity because a lot of the work that is conducted by these lawyers is super repetitive, and actually there’s a lot of errors and mistakes. So for example, when I filed my application with this firm, they had a couple of errors they made, and so I had to do like a second iteration of it to actually get the visa. So I thought if we combine Crimson’s strength in service delivery and this kind of structured admissions process with AI and top lawyers, we could probably build a very disruptive offering to the traditional law firms that, you know, typically slow, unresponsive, hard to engage with, you know, just a bit painful. And that really led to the launch of Concord Visa. Around this time, I just finished Yale Law School, passed the New York Bar, and I thought, you know, great time to rock and roll. Now, at this point also, we had thousands of Crimson alumni who were asking us, hey, like, where should I work in the US, what visas should I get.

Jamie Beaton:
And so there was this natural moment in time where we had enough of our graduates coming out, we could get the service ready for them. They were our early adopters. And then from there, we’ve expanded to support all kinds of awesome companies like TrackSuit, uh, for example, A16Z, the venture capital fund, um, uh, you know, uh, Partly, a whole variety of these different organizations.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, fantastic. Walk us through a little bit more around the, um, you know other new things you’ve been doing, for instance, maybe the charter school.

Jamie Beaton:
Yeah, totally. This is something that’s actually been in my mind since I spoke to my mentor, the late Julian Robertson, and he’s a big fan of charter schooling in America. And he explained the concept to me where basically an entrepreneur can run a school with a model they like and then the government can fund it, which means that someone from a lower income background can afford to go to the school and have a private school-like experience. And provide different alternative options to, you know, public schools nearby. Now for a long time, New Zealand didn’t have charter school legislation. They tried a little bit under a previous national government, but the current regime has brought that policy into the mainstream. And so we looked at this and thought there’s a really interesting opportunity for us to take our education capabilities and actually bring it to more Kiwis who can’t actually afford, you know, the classic private school fees. And so we thought of this concept, the Aotearoa Infinite Academy.

Jamie Beaton:
So the way it works is that students from anywhere in the country can join our online school. They’re getting taught by some of the country’s best teachers from schools like Maclean’s College, and the school combines the Cambridge exams and then NCEA for the final assessment, and it’s really focused on exam performance and also university entry. So we’re servicing students who might be from a part of the country where only 30% of students of a high school go to university, and our school is aiming for 100% university entrance. And so we’ve studied many of the top US charter school models and we’ve worked with some fantastic entrepreneurs in our team like Penelope Barton. And then now the school actually opened on Jan 27th, and within 6 weeks we’ve actually hit the full cap of 450 full-time students. So we’re oversubscribed now, which is really exciting. Students are loving it, and we’re really excited to scale this thing. And it’s really meaningful to me as a Kiwi because a lot of the students that Crimson supports, there are many New Zealanders, but also now a huge portion of them are outside of New Zealand.

Jamie Beaton:
Whether our charter school is purely focused on Kiwi students and helping them achieve the fundamental academic performance to help them really achieve university success and hopefully career success too.

Paul Spain:
What are the benefits for Crimson of doing this, of having the charter school and sort of the bigger picture? How does that all connect together? What are the benefits that flow back into the business? You know, as well as, you know, how does it work financially to run a charter school?

Jamie Beaton:
You know, our mission is to build this next generation schooling system. We began with college guidance because we really see it as this pivotal moment in someone’s life where, you know, when I was, for example, 17, if I didn’t know about applying to the US, you know, I wouldn’t have been able to break into Wall Street or raise all the capital that I did for Crimson at those foundational moments. So that was a key part for us to begin our adventures. Crimson’s moved from helping 16-year-olds all the way down to 10-year-olds. We’ve got things like NumberWorks New Zealand helping 5-year-olds with math and English and a whole variety of services. Actually, New Zealand tends to be our incubation bed for new innovations that we typically then take to the world. Same as Crimson Global Academy, we began that in New Zealand and we took it to more countries. So I guess with our charter school, we see great opportunity to help Kiwis across the country and then do this, for example, in places like potentially America.

Jamie Beaton:
Or other countries too. So we are laser-focused on delivering great academic outcomes, and then if we’re able to do that really well and it’s working effectively, we’ll take that to more countries over time.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, good. And, you know, walk us through the Crimson Global Academy story. I think last time we, we chatted, that was, that was underway, but obviously a lot’s kind of happened in the, in the last 5 years.

Jamie Beaton:
Totally. So when we first conceived of this, we really thought about the experience of one of our students, a boy called Sameel Singh from Hamilton. He was at an NCA school, Hamilton Boys’ High School, but he was using Crimson. And our strategies for him was to take a lot of extra subjects. So he took 6 extra A-level exams, which normally you take at, for example, Auckland Grammar or King’s, to build that top profile. Sameel then got into Harvard, a bunch of other Ivy League schools, Stanford, and he began his American adventure. We saw that it was quite painful to deliver a lot of these extra subjects to him. Now we did it all one-on-one, it was fine, but we wanted to build Crimson Global Academy initially so students could be at their physical school, then use our school part-time to fill in that gap, whether it be for the British A-Levels, the American AP.

Jamie Beaton:
What we found is that actually there was a lot of demand for this, but then COVID emerged, and so a lot of families wanted to join our school full-time. And they were comparing their physical school’s attempt at online schooling to our native online school. And so we saw really a surge in growth for those students. Now it was very interesting because we attracted a lot of students who weren’t Crimson’s classic kind of type of student applying abroad. Some students, for example, were athletes who needed to prepare for their competitive sports. Other students had business families who were traveling around and needed to be in different countries. Other students had different kinds of challenges in the physical school environment and they wanted to kind of overcome that with a virtual school. So we began to really focus actually quite heavily on full-time students and have since built one of the world’s biggest private online high schools.

Jamie Beaton:
Our school’s now ranked top 5 in America for online high schools and fully accredited by the same group that accredits, for example, Stanford Online. So we’ve really focused a lot on academic excellence. The key bases of our students are in New Zealand, Australia, Japan, the Middle East, and America. And it’s been awesome to build because at Crimson, we typically support a student for several hours a week with our college guidance service. But for the school, we’re responsible for the full end-to-end academic excellence. So we can have a lot more impact on a student’s holistic performance.

Paul Spain:
And what age are you seeing people join the school? What age range do you cover? What years?

Jamie Beaton:
So we initially started with high school, but we now have junior high, so kids join as young as 10 into the school. And we have a bit of an interview process and academic assessment just to make sure they’re a good fit for the learning environment. Some students will join us part-time, others will join us full-time. So we have plenty of Kiwis that are at, for example, like a Maclean’s College and they’ll use our school for extra subjects. And then there’ll be a lot who just go full-time.

Paul Spain:
And what’s that scale of your full-time role now?

Jamie Beaton:
So the school itself’s got nearly 3,000, and then the full-time component’s over 1,000 now.

Paul Spain:
Wow. How does that actually sort of play out for students in differing parts of the world, different time zones, maybe different languages? What does that mix?

Jamie Beaton:
So one of the great things for our school is we’ve been able to attract really an incredible roster of teachers, folks that taught at schools like Eton, some of the top schools in the US, some of the top schools in New Zealand, you know, schools like King’s, for example. My old English teacher, Mr. Walker, I can’t quite make myself say Steve Walker sometimes because I’m used to being in his English class. And so these different teachers really are top of their game. Many of them have 20 years of experience. And so we’ve really got this kind of Avengers-like roster of great teachers. And we’ve built this across a lot of the key time zones. So now with our scale, we’re able to deliver, you know, live classes typically with about 10 students in the class.

Jamie Beaton:
Across all the key time zones and really make sure students have a lot of choice. We also have a program called Da Vinci, which is quite unique, where you basically have a one-on-one teacher for a certain subject. So let’s say you want to learn English literature and you want to do it at a really fast pace. That Da Vinci experience lets you get that, you know, high level of instruction. And so you might have a Kiwi student like one of our kids Jade, who was down in Kerikeri. She was doing, for example, our live classes for a lot of her experience than some 101. And she’s now actually a sophomore at Princeton University studying computer science. And so she really loved that online flexibility.

Jamie Beaton:
But yeah, so that’s how we’ve been able to do this. But the school was really focused on live delivery because in our experience and research, just watching recorded content and everything, it’s quite disengaging. And you actually want to have the attention of a teacher saying, hey, Jade, we’d love you to answer that question. That cold calling interaction makes you more accountable. And builds a more fruitful learning experience. Actually quite similar to the one, for example, that I have right now at Columbia Journalism School where they love that classroom discussion and that kind of makes every student stronger and better because of it. It also means you do your homework ’cause you’re shy to get cold-called in front of your friends.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah. Anything else new that we’ve kind of missed in terms of over this period that sort of stands out?

Jamie Beaton:
We acquired a business called Revision Village, which is the leading provider of international baccalaureate study resources. So if you’re a student at Kristen or you’re a student, for example, you know, St. Catharines, and you want to boost your score on the IB, our platform is the most popular for helping you study for those exams. We initially bought this when it was just a math product, and then we expanded it to all the key IB subjects. And then the leader is called Tim Vaughan. Tim used to be one on the exec team and one of the founding hires at Education Perfect. Which sold to KKR, and then he joined as CEO of Revision Village. Now over the last several years, I think 2 and a half, we’ve taken that from being in 0 schools to more than 430 of key IB schools around the world.

Jamie Beaton:
And so that’s a really exciting part of Crimson. It’s also awesome because for, you know, about $100 or so on average per subject, you get access to all these amazing, you know, videos, AI tools, questions, resources, diagnostic tests. And if you’re at, for example, you know, fairly pricey school like a St. Catharine’s, you’re spending a lot of money on tuition. But actually every extra point you get in your IB score makes a big difference for the outcome. And so we love Revision Village because it’s a really good bang for buck for the students. And also now that we’re in so many schools, we’ve been able to build a lot of good AI tooling for the teachers. So imagine the pain of a teacher having to grade all these essays or having to generate new exam questions all the time.

Jamie Beaton:
It takes a huge amount of their time outside of the classroom and actually is one of the reasons why teaching is so overwhelming. But our platform’s been able to save teachers a ton of time and actually enhance quality as well. So Revision Village has been a major new part of Crimson and our first major B2B software division of the business.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, great. So maybe you can walk us through a little bit of the sort of history on the acquisition front because that’s not the only acquisition that you’ve done. This seems to have been actually a really important part of the journey so far.

Jamie Beaton:
And so we generally like this kind of buy and build thesis where we find something that is compelling as a standalone. We’ve got a good strategy of how we grow that. So that was the case with Revision Village. Another recent one would be CollegeWise, which is the third biggest college counseling firm in the US. We were able to take our Crimson technology platform, put that into the CollegeWise business, add a whole new range of enrichment products. So a family, for example, in Irvine, California, can benefit from our research training, our different honours training competitions, academic tutoring, and really enhance their performance. So that’s another good example too. But we also like to do a lot of acqui-hires as well.

Jamie Beaton:
We recently acqui-hired a team who runs sciencefair.io. We developed now with this acqui-hire is a training program to help students with enhancing their skills for the science fair competitions, which in turn helps them get into top universities. So that’s another example of a recent acquisition.

Paul Spain:
You know, we, we started on the on the Crimson journey in terms of the role of technology as part of the business in those sort of early days. And yeah, curious to delve into a little bit of how, how that’s evolved and the role of technology, you know, in terms of, yeah, from, from, from the beginning through to the AI world where we’re in now. So, you know, what did that look like initially in terms of what what tech that you had at hand and what your thoughts were on the role of technology?

Jamie Beaton:
So just to go back, and I’m starting to feel like a bit of a dinosaur now, but when I first began Crimson, you know, Skype was really the video calling thing of choice. And it was pretty janky and often would have some different connection issues. And it sounds funny to say, but back then the idea of online tutoring was a little bit novel, you know, tutoring via Skype, et cetera. For the first 2 years of Crimson, we were just using off-the-shelf tools. And then by about 2017, we decided that it was time to build something more comprehensive to really enable our scale. So we launched the first version of our Crimson app. These days, the Crimson app is very powerful. It gives students access to all these different live and recorded classes, gives them access to psychometrics to help them assess their career interests, personality, academic skills.

Jamie Beaton:
It lets them meet other Crimson students around the world like a kind of social network. It helps them, of course, book sessions with all of their different mentors and provides a lot of AI coaching and feedback as to how they can improve their performance. Parents can tune in and get a sense of how their child is learning across all the different lessons with Crimson at different touchpoints. They can get their college admissions scores around what their odds are at various schools. And the whole crazy process is managed end-to-end through our application. It’s now actually integrated with the US Common Application, which is the main portal you apply with. So a student can create their account at Crimson when they’re 13. By the time they’re 18, it’s ready to go and submit.

Jamie Beaton:
So we’ve really built this thing out to be really industry-leading. And college admissions has always been a cottage industry with a lot of these subscale players. And building our Crimson app has really enabled this global scale-up of Crimson where we now have a very vibrant marketplace of teachers and mentors and coaches on one side teaching to these students around the world and their parents, and other side in all these different countries. So the Crimson app’s been very key. AI has been incredible because AI brings down the cost of some aspects of tutoring dramatically. And a student who might want to invest in tutoring in some subjects can get AI tutoring in other ones. Or if you’re stuck and it’s 1:00 AM and you’re stuck on a certain math question, you can get that instant step-by-step feedback. We also can use AI for things like interview training.

Jamie Beaton:
We have AI coaches for our students as well as helping teachers with verification and assessment. We use AI for all kinds of things across the stack now. And my co-founder Feng Zhou, he did machine learning at Stanford. He’s been really leading the charge in terms of pioneering a lot of the new and novel ways you can use AI in education. So I would say whether it be our schooling team to college admissions all the way through to Revision Village, you know, we’re obsessed with how we can incorporate AI and launch new AI tools. This offsite we just had in California, AI was the theme and we had some fantastic outside experts coming in. One of our board members, a guy called Sandeep Jain, who’s the president of Mercore, one of Silicon Valley’s fastest growing AI companies, you know, really helping us think through our product strategy. So it’s a very exciting time in education and in almost any industry.

Paul Spain:
You spoke about the classroom and not just having your students do something online, but they’re actually participating in a live classroom environment. And so you’ve got that side and then you’ve kind of got the AI and very digital ways of doing things. How do you see those crossing over and how do you see that sort of shaping the future of education over the next decade or so?

Jamie Beaton:
So fundamentally, there’s a magic moment that takes place between a mentor and a mentee. For me, I think about Mr. Walker or Steve, I should call him, in English, where he was my English teacher. He’d gone to Cambridge University. He kind of took me under his wing and he described to me, of course, all these ways that I can improve my English literature and essay writing and stuff. But also gave me great wisdom about the benefits of potentially going to a school in the UK or the US and was very supportive of my ambition to do so. And all you need as a student is a couple of teachers that really inspire you and believe in you for you to level up your ambition. And so I think what I’ve seen time and time again is part of Crimson is of course all the information, the data, the strategy, the time management of this process that is quite hectic.

Jamie Beaton:
But some part of it is that motivational impact where you meet, for example, a student who’s gone into the school you want to go to, or you meet someone from Stanford who’s just got into Y Combinator and you hear about that for the first time in Wellington, these types of interactions typically lift up your ambition because you believe if they did it, so can I. So I think in short, regardless of how powerful AI is, there’s still a fundamental human connection that kind of unleashes your motivation. And products that are purely AI tend to have quite high attrition rates and relatively low efficacy. These days, the internet is more distracting than ever before. And so often you need that combination of mentorship and human wisdom alongside, you know, the AI to help you figure out your multivariable calculus question, which is a nightmare at 1 AM. So I think for us, we’re thinking about that multimodal learning. We’ve got enough human immersion with, you know, best-in-class AI tools. And that, you know, we really see as the future of education.

Paul Spain:
What are you seeing out there, you know, amongst your students in terms of how they balance the role of technology in their lives, social media and distractions and balancing that with growing up and learning along the way.

Jamie Beaton:
Growing up in New Zealand, I remember when I was at my friend Henry Chan’s house and I created my first Facebook account when I was like, for example, I think 12 or 13. And back then, you know, there was no adaptive newsfeeds or content. You know, it was a very different era. These days, almost all the key apps from LinkedIn to YouTube to TikTok have such an addictive component to their newsfeed, so customized and tailored to you, that you can be scrolling on this thing for a long time. So I think a lot of students do face this almost digital paralysis where they are wasting so much time looking at memes. And you think about, for example, the White House TikTok page for Donald Trump. Some of the content they post there, it’s almost like designed for a teen-year-old to consume. Now, I think the best students do a form of digital detox where when they’re studying, they basically only have a single tab open, they’re studying on their material, or even they’re studying in pen and paper, and they are able to really control when they dip into the online world and when they don’t.

Jamie Beaton:
I think a lot of teenagers don’t have that self-control and discipline, and they get sucked into all kinds of rabbit holes, which actually burns their ability to actually study and acquire knowledge. The other thing about AI is when you use AI too much, it actually undermines your learning outcomes because it becomes a shortcut as opposed to an enabler. And I think, unfortunately for a lot of students, that is currently what’s happening. For a typical student in New Zealand right now, many students are submitting their whole assignments from AI and the teachers are unable to detect if it’s AI or not. And it becomes a real problem for assessment. And so I was recently, for example, sitting an exam at Cambridge and I had 4 3-hour exams, pen and paper in person. And part of the reason for that is to combat this kind of AI paralysis. So I think long story short, it’s a challenging time to be a teenager if you don’t have that self-control mechanism built in.

Jamie Beaton:
And even the most motivated students have to put in place pretty good systems. A lot of the time, a lot of the human coaches with Crimson have to break up that potential distraction time where you actually do work, deep work with the tutors, get things done. And then that helps to kind of offset just wasting an afternoon in the sort of the AI universe.

Paul Spain:
What would you say are the hacks or the guidance that, you know, you and the Crimson team would be giving to your students around, you know, managing the role of technology so they’re getting the maximum leverage that they can from AI and technology to help them, but they’re, you know, bringing down the negatives and the downsides in the tech?

Jamie Beaton:
So I guess a couple of things. First of all, there’s some great books that have been written on this, like The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, also Deep Work by Cal Newport. And so I think first of all, just getting some self-awareness about the fact that even if you’re really motivated, you can’t fight against these AI algorithms that are simply too engaging. And so the only way you can kind of control the engagement is to limit the time you’re interfacing with various apps. A lot of our students will download, or rather delete, a lot of mobile apps off their phone that are, for example, like a TikTok. And when they want to engage with it, they will redownload the app and use it. A lot of screen time blockers and things people have. And then also they’ll schedule their Crimson Mentors throughout the week in a way to make sure that, for example, when they get home, they’ve got that Crimson Mentor right then to kind of get things off on the right note.

Jamie Beaton:
And then they can go on and do some homework and studying. So often it’s about locking in accountability systems throughout their week with human touchpoints and then having really clear measurable goals you’ve got to get done typically each day, each week. Such that you kind of know, well, if I go onto this big distraction road, I’m not gonna actually get this thing done. The other thing is about just having this healthy balance, similar to how an athlete is in the gym where you have to keep stretching yourself. For our students who are trying to aim for a school like Stanford, they have to keep doing so many activities that it’s almost uncomfortably intense but not crazy. And if it’s too chill, they’re missing opportunities. And if it’s too stressful, you typically react by doing nothing and jumping into YouTube or whatever. And so that fine balance where it’s engaging and exciting and there’s constant progress is a great state to be.

Jamie Beaton:
The other thing is you want to be very synced with the parents as well and making sure the whole family’s kind of aligned around this. But generally what we find is once our students are in the middle of high school, they’re really motivated by this vision they have for the future. It could be being an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. It could be, you know, becoming the next academic like Adam Grant. And that tends to provide some degree of motivational drive. And what we find is the students in high school who don’t have a clear sense of their career goals or university goals, they’re the ones who tend to spin into this kind of AI wasting time, you know, universe.

Paul Spain:
Right. So, so the key is having a vision and goals of where they’re heading, and with that, then the other things kind of, you know, will, will hopefully come and come into line if they’re, you know, committed enough to, to that future.

Jamie Beaton:
Totally. But just one, one thing I’ll just add is you can’t necessarily purely rely on self-control these days. As we discussed, you need to kind of have some sort of structured approach to this. So it could be, you know, debate training, it could be your sports you do, it could be academic coaches. Um, but your willpower alone is no longer enough.

Paul Spain:
That’s good. And, you know, walk, walk us through your opportunity to learn from Sandeep Jain.

Jamie Beaton:
Um, yeah, so this is, this is a funny example, but I first actually met Sandeep through Crimson, I guess, you know, helping some folks in his family with their admissions process. And so we built this really special relationship as his kids got into Stanford. And from there, you know, we really had this very aligned philosophy around how critical education can be to transforming the trajectory of someone’s life. And also at the time, you know, he was growing Uber through this crazy phase of growth. I’ve always been very inspired by Uber and I took early inspiration from their city launch model and how Crimson expanded from New Zealand and Australia 20+ markets with our growth operations team. So when I realized he was actually working at Uber in the senior role, you know, I began asking for all kinds of advice. That relationship built and built and built. Now he’s on our board.

Jamie Beaton:
And certainly Sandeep is really at the forefront of innovation moving from Uber after he took it from about a, I think, $60 to nearly $300 billion market cap company. He then joined this company Mercore with a bunch of 22-year-olds, and that company now provides a lot of the data labeling and data training services for labs like OpenAI and Anthropic. So if they’re trying to get data on how, for example, a doctor, a GP diagnoses different medical issues. They will hire, for example, 1,000 doctors to make all this custom data to then train the LLMs. And so that business has gone from nothing to more than $1 billion in revenue in a couple of years. And seeing that rapid scale, of course, is fascinating from even just beyond the business’s success, just the operational excellence required to work that fast. And so, you know, Sandeep strikes me as maybe the, or one of the smartest minds that I’ve come across in Silicon Valley. And certainly as we continue to lead Crimson through this AI era, very, very important.

Jamie Beaton:
And we actually just had him speaking to our exec team a couple days ago.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. So what would you say would be the, the biggest lesson that you’ve learned from Sandeep?

Jamie Beaton:
I think what Sandeep teaches is that even if you are in totally different industries, whether it be, you know, an AI lab, or whether it be Crimson, or whether whether it be a law firm, a lot of the time teams that can’t quantify success and just vaguely aim for goals and, you know, it’s kind of ambiguous, always underperform teams that have a clear north star metric that you drive towards. And in his career, almost every team that doesn’t have that clear north star metric basically struggles, underperforms. And almost every team that really cranks at an elite level, whether it be Google Search or ridesharing excellence at Uber or now data labeling, has those really effective north star metrics. And I think as an entrepreneur, it’s easier to have a sense that, oh, we vaguely know what the goals are, or we kind of know. But going beyond just like, you know, revenue or something to clear operational metrics that the whole team is aligned behind and truly is aligned from your, you know, base new recruit all the way to your exec is really critical. So I think that is a very simple concept, but actually one that few companies truly execute on. And I think that will be, you know, one great example. The second piece that I would say I’ve really learned from Sandeep would just be around what in the new AI era will be driven by human teachers versus AI and where that settles out.

Jamie Beaton:
And those discussions, debates with him have really helped form my view for kind of what I’m betting on at Crimson.

Paul Spain:
And for yourself, what do you see the next few years ahead looking like?

Jamie Beaton:
Right now I’m super focused on Crimson and I’m really excited by particularly our charter school here in New Zealand. To me, charter schooling represents the ability for us to take our education experience and bring it to more Kiwis all across the country. And that’s super exciting. And I think we could do it at great scale and be a really good partner to the education system at large. I’ve been studying very closely a lot of the top US charter schools like Success Academy. I just visited that last week and I witnessed, you know, 20 students from some of the lowest income parts of New York State studying for their Physics C calculus and physics exam, which is super difficult. With, you know, great results. And if we can bring some of the academic excellence to New Zealand and really propagate that culture, not only through our school but through inspiring other schools too, I think hopefully we can make a small dent in the education system.

Jamie Beaton:
So for me, I’m really focused on that right now.

Paul Spain:
And looking at our tech sector, what are your thoughts on, you know, things that we should be aware of, you know, going forward to help us do better?

Jamie Beaton:
If I think about New Zealand, we have some great breakout success stories. But first of all, a lot of them are very prone to AI disruption. And secondly, we don’t have a strong enough math education here locally for a lot of our entrepreneurs, our team, our engineers to be truly competitive with the best coming out of, for example, China or Korea right now. Recently I met with a young girl in America called Karina Hong, and at the age of 18, She began her MIT degree and she was America’s top math graduate. And then she went to Stanford, to Oxford, and at the age of 27, she’s now running a $1.2 billion AI lab, which is designed to build the next, the best math model. Recently, her math LLM has been able to solve all of the Putnam math challenges, which is some of the hardest math problems in America. And she’s got 20 staff And the thing that is really distinctive about Karina is that she’s had the most rigorous math education to get to this point where she can compete in the frontier of the AI era, beating folks who are like 40, 50, and she’s from a low-income family in China. So she actually came in and was able to build this revolutionary thing.

Jamie Beaton:
So one of the things that I really think we have to do is dramatically level up our education system, particularly our math education, to make ourselves competitive to be able to build, for example, one of these AI models from New Zealand, or at least be able to compete at the frontier of that space from here too. We have been very good in all kinds of different industries and areas, but I think right now there’s, for example, a French AI model called Mistral, and there’s a bunch of these other models in China like Deepseek. But we need to have a deeper capability in hard STEM here to make things happen. So I think we’re doing very well, and there’s been massive growth in the last 10 years, But I think we can tune some of the downstream things in the education system so that the next generation of entrepreneurs and teams and engineers have much more ability to compete. And in this era, you can actually live in New Zealand and you could work for, for example, many of these companies earning fantastic salaries if you have a competitive enough skill set to win those jobs. And so I think for me, I’d focus heavily on the education system. You need to view sort of math excellence as almost something of like national security importance because in the AI era, this is one of the key skills that actually lets you build these transformative companies. Think about, for example, a place like Singapore or Denmark.

Jamie Beaton:
I think about, for example, the maker of Ozempic. That one company is almost as big as the whole GDP of the country. And so if we can, for example, build more of these transformative technology companies that aren’t just solving a small problem, but actually can compete as one of the mainstream global winners, that can really transform our economy. And you see with, you know, Ireland, only a couple of big tech companies based there like Stripe have made a big difference to their economy, their GDP per capita. And I think, you know, that’s probably a good way, a good way forwards.

Paul Spain:
Was there anything else that you’d like to add?

Jamie Beaton:
No, that’s fantastic. Very spicy. I appreciated it. Really interesting questions. And, you know, you’ve challenged me to make sure the next 5 years are more interesting than the last.

Paul Spain:
Look forward to it. Yeah, great. Thank you, Jamie.

Jamie Beaton:
Cheers.

Paul Spain:
Much appreciated. Well, thank you for listening in. We hope you enjoyed hearing the very latest about Crimson Education from Jamie Beaton. And if you’d like to hear more about the journey of Crimson Education, we will have a New Zealand Business Podcast episode coming out in the next few weeks with the business perspectives on the story. And we also have a previous episode that we republished around the end of 2025, beginning of 2026, that I think you’ll really enjoy listening to. Also, just a heads up, finalists for the NZ Hi-Tech Awards will be announced this Thursday, 26th of March, and tickets are now on sale for the gala dinner being held in Auckland in May. You can find out more at hitech.org.nz. And of course, a big thank you to our show partners Workday, Spark, 2degrees, One NZ, Fortinet, and Gorilla Technology for their incredible support.

Paul Spain:
And thank you for listening in. If you’ve been listening via an audio platform, then do make sure you follow us on your favorite video channel. And if you’ve been watching the video, make sure you follow us on your favorite podcast or audio platform. All right, catch you next week. See ya. The New Zealand Tech Podcast, brought to you by Guerrilla Technology. Proactive and strategic IT.