Is the West Losing the Education War?

If you want to get a proxy for who's going to win the global economic warfare of the next century, you just look at who has the most competitive education system. For every weed smoking Steve Jobs, there's probably like a million weed smoking Call of Duty players in their underwear in their lounge. We tried this sort of project based learning fluff stuff. We've seen a lot of the pain in our math and English stats from that period. There is a lot of overpaid people in the Ministry of Education who are very unproductive building these new curriculums that frankly we don't need. It's a wealth management industry. Just suck rent, negative rent from you every year in these random managed funds.

Yet, this industry is like a multi- trillion dollar industry. I think maybe AOC will become the 2028 Democratic candidate. Not Gavin Newsome. Let's go and do it and see what happens. Ideas are worth like jack Absolute jack Like if you can't execute, there's nothing. Just take that initiative to actually take whatever crazy ideas that they might have and just try to see what comes of it. Don't be afraid of ambition. Chase it, love it, wrap your arms around it and and say it out loud. New Zealanders don't know any better. They will just get up and give it a shot. That's why we were first to get to the top of Mount Everest. Go to dream that ultimate dream.

Like, what is it that you ultimately want to do? And it's all achievable. All right, Jamie, welcome to Techmates. Great to have you for a second time. I heard you got married since we last back. Looking forward to it. Yes. Yes, very exciting stuff. That's that's amazing. So, you're um how are you enjoying how you enjoying married life? Good. Very zen. I'm excited. And my wife is a New Yorker and it's it's an interesting uh coming together of our Kiwi family and her American one. But she loves New Zealand which is great and got to get her down here more often. Great. Yeah, it's great to have you back second time on Tech Night. So, yeah, we I think we got cut off last time so we appreciate you coming on again and uh having a conversation.

I want to start with something I read about you. um a story about when you were 19 and correct me if any of this is wrong, but I read that you when you were 19, you walked into uh Julian Robertson's office and asked him why you didn't get the scholarship from his foundation. So, I just want to yeah kind of go back to that moment and uh understand a little bit more about what what drove you to kind of make that kind of move and and go and ask him about it. Well, uh, I hate to disappoint, but actually, so I applied for the scholarship, Robertson scholarship, and then I didn't get it. What I did is I emailed Julian to ask if I could catch up with him and walk him through Crimson and get some tips for breaking into finance.

I was working at a hedge fund called Weiss Asset Management. Then he invited me down to come meet him in New York. Now, I think his recollection was that I rolled into his office and asked why I didn't win the Robinson scholarship. I don't quite remember it that way, but I guess I was I was grateful I was grateful to meet him regardless. Although I don't think I actually did that. But I think in general, you know, you know, Julian was a is an amazing mentor and you know, really encouraged me to dream big from that young age and certainly uh one of the things I'm really grateful for is he introduced me to a lot of folks in China like New Oriental and Teleucation Group and you know really motivated me to think that I could build crimson far bigger than just New Zealand and Australia.

So even if I didn't quite remember that exact story from him, I do think his spirit of encouraging his analysts to aim higher, dream bigger, swing for the fences, which has, you know, played out with a lot of the fund managers that have spawned from his analysts to Crimson in our global ambitions and execution has been good fun. What's it like as a 19-year-old meeting somebody like this? Um why were you kind of um interested in um getting his advice and um what what did you learn from him? I guess Julian was the first person I met who was this tycoon on Wall Street and I'd met him when I was you know 17 or so 18 in New Zealand and you know I really inspired I was really inspired by his leadership the fact that he'd been able to build this hedge fund full of talented analysts create this high performing culture that really

you know delivered incredible returns for you know 30 years or so on on Wall Street and beyond that you know have a reputation for strong personal integrity but also this competitive spirit and that interesting balance between the two. So I think I was inspired by this. I also love finance still do and I think it was really interesting just to understand also how we just technically thought about companies valuations financial markets you know long short all these different bets and what what made an enduring business and so I guess I was fascinated by both the person and also his technical skills you know but over time he became a mentor to me in many facets of life and certainly played this transformative role as I first landed in the US and got to know the country he took me under his wing introduced me to all these great folks and you know really there wouldn't

be a Crimson without his influence And certainly his son Alex has continued to be an amazing mentor to me and to the team to this day and still on our board and it's been a relationship that's been running now for you know 12 years. Wow. Jamie, speaking speaking of the board, is it is it correct that you actually couldn't sit on your own board when you first founded the company because you were under 18 and you had to that that is true. That is definitely true. Yes. So my mom had to jump on there at the start because you have to be 18 I think at least certainly then that was the advice that we received.

So my mom was temporarily on the board and then quite hilariously she was very enthusiastic to get off that board as soon as I was 18 and switch out with her. So you know it was very kind of her to step in temporarily. What was it what was that like running board conversations about your company through your mom and where you couldn't technically vote? Well it didn't last very long so I I shouldn't embellish it. My me my memory of actually our first board meeting is quite funny. I was thinking about this the other day. I was sitting in this office on Queen Street and you know I had a bunch of these early angel investors around the table and you know we were thinking about Crimson's growth plans and I just kind of realized in this moment that I'd taken this external capital that the race was certainly on and from this moment on

it would never stop and I was kind of excited by that. But it's really interesting because once you take the capital, you are kind of on the clock and you you're not you're not running at your own pace really. You're running at sort of your own pace plus the cumulative responsibility of the willpower of those that have backed you. And so I sort of looked at this and thought this was a you know big call but you know I was delighted to be on there and you know frankly that was the beginning of an amazing adventure taking us from you know Oakland in the small dinky Queen Street office to you know going global over the next you know decade plus.

But yeah, certainly it hasn't been a slow day since that first board meeting. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Jamie, I mean to your to your point, right, of being on the clock. I think a lot of investors when they invest in a company, they say very nice things about, you know, we're backing the mission, we're backing the founder, but underlying all that is the hard truth that, you know, you got to got to deliver returns over a 10-year period. And fun investing into you is probably not on year one. They're probably somewhere further. So, you have even fewer than 10 years. How did that change your relationship with your investors and maybe like fundraising conversations that you had after when you had that realization?

So, I think we've been actually quite fortunate. If you think about a lot of the pockets of capital we've raised, we've raised from some, you know, leading individual investors, a lot of family officers, a lot of long-term strategic investors that own school groups and stuff as well as pretty evergreen vehicles from Isel's ventures to uh, you know, groups like MOVAC that really are looking to keep compounding their capital. And certainly some of them, you know, may have various liquidity periods, but on the whole, you know, they're really just focused on supporting this compounding growth. And Crimson's managed to really keep compounding at a high KGA since 2013, you know, we just posted, you know, a really strong year of growth and the financial year that just ended on July 31st.

So my general sense is as long as we're delivering great growth and we are compounding the business, the value and our investors are excited by that, you know, it's a really great opportunity for them to really ride these gains. Certainly some of our early investors have, you know, sold into new rounds of funding and things like this. Uh, and there's, you know, quite a a vibrant set of funds that, you know, look to pick up some of those early investor shares. But on the whole, you know, I think the long-term nature of many of our investors actually been really good. So, I haven't really had to deal with any like super short-term investors and I am kind of thoughtful about who I bring on the cap table in the first place, how long their fund is, you know, their ability to roll over, um, and, you know, what expectations they have of us.

But yeah, I think ultimately a lot of angst with investors occurs when there's a discrepancy between what you say you'll do and what you do. In our case, touchwood, so far we've been able to really post up some really strong student outcomes, you know, revenue growth, uh, you know, profitability, etc. And, you know, keep adapting with times and you've just come off a big multi-ity tour through India, if we if we saw that correctly, where you talked about Crimson to hundreds of thousands of uh, Indian families. What does what does a day on the tour look like and yeah what was the experience like traveling through India? First of all it's pretty hectic cuz I visited about five or six cities in 3 days.

So uh places like you know Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Delhi etc. Sometimes two events in one day and generally what it looks like is landing in these cities meeting my local team many of which I'm meeting for the first time because we've been hiring aggressively in India since then. of course a lot of the veterans that have been there from day one and then we'll be you know I'll be going through student cases from the local city then I'll be going on presenting about you know global emissions trends and then deep diving into local case studies from that that city that region I'll then often be hosting students who just gained admission to Harvard and Stanford on stage so families can kind of see what it takes to get in then we'll have this kind of open form Q&A which typically descends into madness as you know many of these enthusiastic Indian parents you know fire

up questions at us and sort swarm the swarm the front there but it's super electrifying and I think the passion for education is really frenetic you can feel it in the rooms and then after that you know I'll often meet a number of our current clients some business partners I I met you know various top investors in the education space and otherwise I checked in on some of the there've been some big public listings in education in India like physics wallet recently so I was getting some of the local rundown on that and then you know really hopping from city to city to city you know doing this all across India and yeah it was it was a great for and certainly always interesting things pop up like you know one of our original kind of on the ground competitors reached out to us while I was there to look at you know if they

could roll into Crimson in some format and you know it's just interesting kind of being there on the ground tends to ignite a lot of activity so I'm always a big fan of you know getting out there and visiting these different markets and spending time there because it tends to you know not only just drive a lot of revenue but also give me a lot of intel into what's going on for the next phase of growth. Yeah Jamie I mean that that energy that you felt Sorry, I also ate Subway four. What do you go for? I was going to say I I ate Subway four times in two days in India. Is that to avoid the uh food po food food poisoning or Yeah.

Yeah. I I was I was I was trying to avoid any, you know, crushing sickness. So, I thought I would just keep it safe with some uh very standard chicken subway 6-in subs. It's okay to cheat on those tours. That energy that that energy that you felt from the crowds, you know, similar stuff in China. These both these markets have had huge edtech industries. The companies you mentioned Norantel and TAL they were listed in the US they were very large and I think that speaks to the culture in both India and China just like education being the ladder for you to move up in society and I had an edtech company actually had a couple of edtech companies and it was always very very stark contrast between the US and western countries and and and India and China.

What do you think like how does that change your perspective on like where the west is going right? If if India and China continue to be on this trend of and you can see it in the numbers, right? China's now second maybe first biggest the biggest economy. Who knows? India is on on its way up. Does it make you scared for how lax the west is about education? I mean absolutely. I think ultimately if you want to get a proxy for who's going to win the global economic, you know, warfare of the, you know, next century, you just look at who has the most competitive education system multiplied by how big is the population. And that's basically your, you know, talent density to compete with.

And in equilibrium, whoever has the most talent will create the most valuable companies and win. And capital is more mobile than ever before. So I think basically, you know, it's it's very bad for the west when, you know, I'll give you a funny story. Recently, I went to Texas, okay? And I was expecting a room full of cowboy hats and people with, you know, guns toading. I'm not serious. But you know, I roll into this room in for example in Dallas in Austin and there was like 300 people in each room and there was about 10 Caucasian people in the room. They were primarily Indian and Chinese people in Texas at our event and you know in Silicon Valley I was there as well.

you know there was there was over 400 people in Silicon Valley and I was like oh this is going to be a diverse room you know nope it's all these folks from you know China and India that have moved in the last generation or two to Silicon Valley and work for Nvidia and OpenAI and all these labs and stuff and so I do think it's a bit of an issue when you know a lot of the west is so complacent in education and the parents are actually fixated on success in this process are the same parents who a generation ago were trying to get into IIT trying to get into chinua. And the reason why this is important is this actually matters because when a child is trained in a high-intensity format, they're going to be more successful in life on average.

And so, you know, I I do think it's a bit of a gap the West has. Now, I then see some families, for example, in New Jersey where I just actually did an event in Connecticut, uh, you know, before I flew back to New Zealand and the demographics are more diverse there. But the general point you make is a strong one, which is how does the West compete against the East basically over time when the West is so chill in education? And I think to some degree in New Zealand, our standard is being pulled up by talented migrants from China and India who are coming into Oakland Grammar and coming to Kings, coming to Pinehurst.

A good example is Westlake vers Pinehurst. When I was in high school, Pinehurst was not considered a serious academic school. They flipped to do A levels and then Westlake dropped A levels, did NCA. A lot of Chinese kids moved into Pinehurst and the demographics totally flipped and now Pinehurst is one of the country's top academic schools by a wide margin. We sent kids like Linda off to Cambridge Medical School. We have a lot of Pinehurst students. And so I do think also part of this is that the students will move from other cultures of value education into the Western world and pull people's socks up because they have to compete with these kids. But yeah, I do think you know we should be thinking uh in the Western world, how do we make ourselves more competitive academically cuz ultimately it it does fuel these talent wars.

Last point I'd make on this. If you look at the super intelligence team at Meta, you know, and you look at these top 20 guys in the AI team, you know, they're basically all from China. there are very few western folks that can compete with this talent and you know that's a problem I think so you know I I do think we have to think about this and and how this plays out over the next two decades I mean one counterpoint that someone would could bring up is you know you look at like a Steve Jobs who was like dropping out of school smoking pot doing shrooms and a lot of people point to oh well because we're not so focused on education it allows us kids to be more balanced to be more creative I think you were maybe making that point as well in some way around with in in the age of

AI being in general is actually maybe more important. What are your thoughts on that? I think it's a fair point, but for every weed smoking Steve Jobs, there's probably like a million weed smoking, you know, Call of Duty players in their underwear in their lounge, you know, and I think those guys really on average, it's a it's a bad strategy. So, I think, you know, I think I'd rather I'd rather bet on the highly motivated kid who, by the way, when you're trying to get into a place like Stanford, what do you have to do? You've got to launch leadership projects. You've got to learn how to code. You've got to, you know, be able to speak publicly and, you know, win leadership competitions and stuff and acquire many of the same skills a startup founder has to acquire.

You know, we sent 54 kids to Stanford this year. We've sent over 25 kids into Y Combinator and, you know, these guys generally went really hard in high school. So, yeah, you can sort of like randomly, you know, figure things out later, but it's not a good thing to bet on. So I think my response is it's good this has worked for the west in the past but you know I don't think the people who are reaching the top of Silicon Valley think about you know Nikesh who's the CEO of Palato networks who's taken that business from 13 billion market cap to over 300 or 400 billion you know recently I don't think these guys were chilling in high school so I would say on average like I don't really believe that you know going for this like sort of flexy schooling system actually yields these great results and in New Zealand for example we

tried this sort of project bas based learning fluff stuff you know under the Labor government I think when Hipkins was Ministry of Education and you know we've seen a lot of the pain in our in our math and English stats from that period and now it's being now it's being reversed so overall like I think you can still have creativity alongside academic excellence but the west is far far far away from what I would say is academic excellence and I see this when I visit Singapore or Korea or India or Taiwan or China you know there's just a massive gap so we can we can 2x our intensity and we're still like you know we still have plenty of time to play some sports and, you know, play a bit of Call of Duty.

Speaking of the Labor government, you seriously explored running for national in 2025 from what I understand. What was the thinking there? What made you consider it? What made you not eventually do it? Well, I'm very focused on on building Crimson. You know, I love what we do. I think in New Zealand, one of the really exciting things that has happened is we've been able to build this Aero Infinite Academy, which is a national online charter school. It now has 600 full-time students. It's the largest charter school in New Zealand. And you know what I really want to do among other things is make sure that Kiwis are leveling up their education as much as possible.

And right now in New Zealand, we've got special education needs schools, Summit Point, we've got high achieving schools, future school, we've got our numbersmies, we've got our med view helping kids getting into medical school. We've got Crimson Athletics for the academ for the athletic kids. We've got Crimson Core helping you go abroad. And now through ATR Infinite Academy, we can help you know low-income kids from any part of the country or just any income family accessing that. and hopefully we can scale that up. And to me, I think the pathway through to impact there is a lot more exciting than you know other things. The other thing that I've been doing lately on the side is I've been teaching this course at the University of Oakland on you know how to build unicorns and tomorrow actually we've got Peter Beck coming in from Rocket Lab and we'll be doing a case study on we've sent

out the case study in Rocket Lab to our students and we'll be teaching that you know to to the students and hopefully you know get more founders. So, we just made our first investment into a kid from the cohort last year, which is going to be coming out shortly in in New Zealand media. Um, but I'm really optimistic about, you know, spawning more entrepreneur talent both through education, through formats like that and through Crimson's infrastructure. And I think I think that's more impactful in terms of what I can do than, you know, government stuff. Happy to, you know, definitely play a role in, you know, sending thoughts and, uh, you know, giving input to things, for example, the Ministry of Education is doing or other things.

But yeah, I think I think my impact is maximized through Crimson. So what are what are some of these kind of recommendations or yeah any policy recommendations around education for a country like New Zealand in order to decrease that gap that you were just describing to to countries like China or India? Yeah. So I think the first thing that New Zealand should do is they should really throw out the you know the national curriculum which they've kind of half done and replace that with for example the A levels. Now Singapore's got the Singaporean A levels. We could have our New Zealand A levels which could have our own, you know, Trey Omari history sequence, but otherwise we can have an international benchmark.

The benefit of this is we don't have to rebuild our curriculum. We don't have to waste time, you know, figuring out, you know, what modules to teach. We can teach to a global standard, roll it out across all of our schools. When it comes to recruiting teachers, if you want to get a British teacher, you don't have to train them in this mythical national New Zealand curriculum. You can bring them in already trained in A levels and it's like portable and simple and efficient. So, you can get more teachers in to teach this as well. and then and then all of the practice exams, the resources, the edtech tools that help kids study are all already available.

So I think this idea that as a country of 5.3 million, we have to build our own curriculum is kind of crazy. So I would I would fix that. The second thing that I think is really important is getting the University of Oakland up to at least top 20 25 in the world. Um if you think about Singapore, they have two universities in the top 20 based on some rankings N US and NEU. And that's huge because it means you've got world-class talent coming to your country actually for your university. And generally where you go to university plays a huge role in you know your friends maybe who you marry you know where you work postgraduation.

So if University of Oakland's ranked 25 not 100 that's actually a very compelling value prop for many of these folks who would be in Singapore to come here because New Zealand is probably a better place to live than Singapore. But if the difference is you know a school ranked top 15 versus 100 you're probably going to choose Singapore if you're an ambitious you know person. And so I think getting University of Oakland up to 25 is really important. A couple of tactical things we can do is you know Tim Brown the founder of just taught an amazing class at University of Oakland. We can get our 100 best technology leaders and other you know leaders to you know teach courses and get involved in you know not only teaching but also research other things to help level up the university.

We could get give a bigger push philanthropically to raise capital for the endowment of the University of Oakland and we could also back it with more government funding. And that'd be kind of two tactical things, both improving the high school and then improving at least one of the universities to I think make a bit of a dent. The final thing is we should be realistic that some of our students will hit abroad and we can give them some student loans as long as they move back to New Zealand, you know, for example, within 3 to 5 years post their degree. I don't think it needs to be straight away. But if you go to Singapore or you go to Australia and then you come back after you've learned, say 3 to 5 years in that economy, you're going to bring those skills here.

you can work at, you know, Partley or Crimson or Rocket Lab or whatever. And, you know, we're going to have that talent in our ecosystem trained up abroad with global networks. So, they're probably three examples of, I think, you know, easy to execute, no-brainer policies that don't cost the government very much, but um would make a big difference. And and actually, that first curriculum session would would cut the cost dramatically cuz there is a lot of overpaid people in the Ministry of Education, you know, who are very unproductive building these new curriculums that frankly we don't need. Sounds like a very good political platform. I think you should run for some kind of office. What what made you what made you not want to do and what made you consider it in the first place?

Was it the fact that you had all these ideas being done? I mean it was quite frustrating seeing the time required to for example spin up like our accredited online high school or other things like you know even with a lot of our push and hustle it took quite a lot of time to get these things through and it's quite painful because you know I can impact thousands or tens of thousands of kids but you know the government can impact you know all the students in the country and so you know I I think as I thought about this though going through our ATR infinite academy and other things is is a more scalable way for me to drive impact and hopefully get others on board too but you know maybe you guys should on.

You can disrupt the opportunities party and become the new kingmaker. Solve the problem with those guys throw in their crazy proposals. Yeah. Um I want to talk about uh another um venture of yours that we didn't talk about last time, which is the Concord visa. Yeah. Can you tell us more about that and what you're what you're building with that? Yeah, sure. So, when I first moved to America, I bumped into this person called Divi Daar. And I said, you know, how are you actually staying in the country? and she described to me that she had filed for this visa category called the O1 visa which is like a high ability visa. And she explained this to me, you basically have to hit a bunch of criteria and you essentially get this work visa which renews every 3 years and then if you wish you can file four to 6 weeks later for this EV1

visa which essentially gives you a green card and it sounded like a magic trick. So then I checked it. Turns out it was true. So then I filed and got my you know one visa but it was a very random experience. Fast forward, you know, nearly 10 years. We have thousands of Crimson alums moving to America. In fact, tens of thousands, you know, across the system. And many of these guys want to build companies. They want to work at Goldman Sachs. They want to, you know, go, you know, get involved in all kinds of organizations. And the visa is a big source of pain and friction. And then AI came along and I thought, you know, I'm used to these big law firms like Fragman, which, you know, have 800 million in revenue or something, but they're slow and they're expensive and cumbersome and hard to deal with.

And so I thought, well, Crimson's already very good at service. I just passed the New York bar. We've got a great AI team. Why don't we build something really exciting here that's a lot better than the status quo? So we launched Concord Visa. We took Kevin Park, who helped us scale Crimson from 2 to 20 countries. He helped us scale CGA, Crimson Global Academy, and he's the CEO of Concord Visa. We've built out this AI native platform which basically can help a company like Halter that's trying to rapidly expand across America, manage all the visas for all of the staff across the key markets they're expanding into, file all these visas at a lower cost, much faster, and then get this talent moving across the world more rapidly.

And you know, think about Crimson, it's all about breaking down barriers to ambitious people going global. So, Concord Visa is a really natural extension. Where AI comes in is, you know, we're able to make our immigration attorneys a lot more efficient, speed up the cost, ultimately, you know, get a better result for the end user. And, you know, AI tuned on a lot of these applications is actually a lot more accurate than an average immigration attorney. And unlike college admissions where you actually have to get the student to do the work for themselves, obviously in a law firm, you can do the work for the client. That's what they're paying you for. And so, all of this led to an amazing opportunity.

Now, we launched this. We've already gotten some fantastic traction. You know, we've helped companies like Halter, Partley, you know, A16Z, ISA House Ventures, Blackbird, all these different portfolio companies with their global expansion. Filed a lot of O1 visas for talented Kiwis going global. And we've also expanded into Australia, Cander, and UK visas, too. So, it's all guns blazing on Concord visa. And I'm really excited by this AI law space. I think it's a really perfect application of AI, and it also suits Crimson's, you know, flavor as a company. Jamie, would this have been an area you would have gone into if it wasn't Trump who was president and if he wasn't so, you know, I guess against immigration to the US, cracking down, enforcing, etc.

It's a good question. I think that Trump did not really change the probabilities of, for example, getting an F1 visa in reality, but definitely Trump created a lot of psychological angst. So I would meet these students who are on an F1 visa and their biggest stress is H1 visa or whatever the visa comes next and it would be so anxietyinducing for them and you always talk about like burning pain points and you know Trump plus visas for international students for some of them not all of them some of them it is really a hard pill to swallow because they don't like this uncertainty where they're going to be based and so I would say he definitely catalyzed me to jump into this faster and you know I think the landscape made it really ample for us to find powerful solutions for our students uh and also founders and companies in general.

So I think Trump was not the source of the idea. The idea really came from that experience myself kind of coming to the states through this visa process and having to navigate a lot of complexity lawyers and costs. But I think Trump was certainly an amplifying catalyst that's made the business really rip. Actually one one quick follow-up question. You said you you're very excited about um uh the AI and law space. this this use case with concord visa is a very obvious one where there's just a bunch of paperwork that the scarf needs to be filled out filled um kind of totally makes sense to play AI for it. Is there any other kind of area in law where you think it's just a no-brainer to to um do something what you did with Concord with in in a similar way?

I actually think there are a lot of use cases in law like this. If you think about most legal interactions, it's someone asking a lawyer a question, which to the lawyer is a super easy question, but to the, you know, client is pretty complicated and they're often, you know, charged this relatively big fee for, you know, basically assurance. So, in general, I think that a lot of the direct to consumer legal services will be dramatically affected by AI over the next several years. Some of the things I'm interested in are at the intersection of tax, you know, crossber tax, accounting, and then, you know, certainly commercial agreements, signs, signing things like non- uh non-disclosure agreements between companies, you know, during investment processes or acquisitions.

some of the paperwork around employment law in various jurisdictions, intellectual property filings, when you're trying to search, for example, trademark databases and then file these things and paid an attorneys or trademark attorneys are often charging you an arm and a leg for, you know, pretty rudimentary search capabilities. So, they're probably a couple of the ones that I'm most interested in right now, but I think there's a lot. I think it's a really fruitful space for AI and it's it's hard for a lawyer to have a lot of edge against AI even current AI but certainly where AI is going for many of these use cases and so I think the lawyer will basically be playing a role of trust with the client you know sales uh you know credibility enhancing distribution but you know the percentage of value created by AI versus the lawyer is probably going to be 9010 or 955 pretty soon I

mean looking at where you're going with Crimson you started as you service to help kids get into universities. You expanded kind of beyond that to to help them throughout their entire schooling life journey. You now have a school yourself. You now also help kids go to different countries. And it sounds like maybe the next step is eventually investing into those kids to start their own company. Do you see a bigger vision for what you're building sort of like you know from start to end of investing into the kids first through teaching them and then later maybe through capital and then incubating companies. Is that is there a bigger vision to what you're building? Totally.

So, we're really excited by this, you know, 5 through early 20s life cycle of taking, you know, amazing talent from all corners of the world, training it up, upskilling it for the AI world, sitting at different pathways, not only

top universities, but other pathways too, not only high achieving kids, but kids with special education needs, remedial learners that need that support ultimately maximizing potential. And then certainly for a small section of our alumni, you know, betting on them directly. And we've already been, you know, investing in a lot of our alumni and we are scaling that up. And I think, you know, it's a wonderful way to really align incentives behind our outcomes. You know, we really back our best alumni to build these transformative companies. And, you know, if we can help them literally everything from training them, getting them to university, getting their visa, you know, backing them to build these companies, sending off to YC or even being, you know, a YC alternative or some of the talent that knows us well.

That's really interesting. So I definitely think you know we're building out the pieces for that life cycle and we're doing that both through organic launches like Concord Visa as well as through acquisitions but certainly it's an exciting time and you know it's a very global vision as well because we see you know some of the talent that I see in India is mindboggling. We had multiple kids on stage who are regeneron science fair winners. Some of these guys, I think, would compete with, you know, top scientists in the world for their knowledge. And it's incredible to see what a talented 18-year-old can know today relative to, you know, even 10 or 20 years ago because most teenagers are distracted.

But if you're really focused and you're obsessed with learning and you're doing it in a very high dosage way and you get into a unique STEM field, by the time you're 18, you've gone so deep into it that actually you have pretty world-class knowledge, which is why a lot of the guys building these forefront Silicon Valley companies are very young. And you know, uh that's I can see that even accelerating. So certainly, you know, we want to be betting on our bleeding edge crimson talent and also creating more talent, too. There was a company called Indela. I don't know how they're doing now. I'm sure you know it, but you've heard of it. And so you know the idea was to find talent in in Africa I think places like Kenya find the talent train the talent in things like coding development QA and then actually place them in jobs right you know in the

same way you go to a place that has I mean basically they were taking advantage of of a non- workinging education system or maybe taking advantage of the lack of access those people had to create better opportunities for everybody. Do you see do you see the bigger vision of what you're trying to build similar to that? Do you try are you or or are you are you seeing differently? What is if you were like to kind of crystallize the vision for how what you want crimson to do in the world, you know, the next 50 years, what does that look like? So, I I like the Andeler example, but I think we create a lot of value just by taking talent when they're like five or 10 and unleashing their potential in in those critical primary intermediate high school years.

That alone done globally is a really transformative opportunity. We don't need to be ultimately the beneficiary of all this talent all the time. You know, we're happy to bet on some of the talent. We're happy to, you know, help these guys landing jobs, but where we think we can add the most value is the education system layer, which I think is, you know, pretty agreed upon is quite deficient in almost every country. And the physical school offers some benefits, but we want to at least have all of the infrastructure around that physical school and in some cases be the school as well. That's really exciting to us and certainly we'll keep pioneering you know new services around that you know downstream etc.

So I think in some in some areas the endeller example is apt but I am fundamentally very focused on the education part of the journey and there's still a lot to be done there and a lot of scale to be unlocked. You had that Forbes column in May where you I think were responding to Reed Hastings and you wrote that the vertical the cost of vertical expertise is sort of collapsing now with AI right and it's all about intersectional thinking you are a very well credentialed individual with degree you're a lawyer you have finance degree from you have all kinds of degrees nine institutions maybe more that I don't know about you've gone deep on a lot of different things right so how does that square with what you believe the world's going and what does is the right strategy for somebody who is you know about to embark on their college journey or about

their about to embark on their high school journey today. Is it to follow your example or is it to to go broad? So I mean if you think about what I've done academically I basically have gone broad right I've I've gone deep but I've gone deep across you know 13 different fields or so and so my general idea for a high school student is the founder skill set is the most adaptable useful skill set whether you want to be a founder or you want to get a you know job but be very effective in that place. So if you're at a law firm and you're the AI native person who can interface with clients and help launch new tools and deal with the corporate politics and also is really technically strong, you know, you're a really powerful person to quickly ascend that ladder.

So I think in general this founder mentality is really effective and the founder mentality by definition is often this generalist that has knowledge across finance, certain domain topics, interpersonal skills, dabbles in curiosity and things like history, pattern recognition, you know, psychology, other things.

So I think that what the US top universities offer which essentially is this liberal arts menu of you know testing different things and building different skills is very powerful and what I what I'm what I'm pretty bearish on is things like a singular degree for example a you know economics degree at a certain you know mid-range university where all you learn is economics and nothing else that feels very restricted and limited in this era because I think being more flexible across different knowledge pools is probably you know where humanity's advantage continues continues to lie compared to narrow domain expertise because otherwise you're just going to get crushed by like a

you know advanced posttock level AI you know bot in in economics. So I think I would say I would push my students towards that founder style set of skills and and being certainly having two or three zones of competence but being more on the generalist side than you know a focus subject matter expert only. I think you could also be extremely deep in STEM uh if you want to and you know make that technical expertise your edge but most talent in the world won't be in that camp and so I think you know this foundike skill set is probably a more helpful bet so they're probably a couple of thoughts but you know on the whole I think the vast majority of folks can just level up a lot by putting a lot more focus into academics when they're younger so that that mental gym is trained to a high level and they can actually

use these tools more effectively. So you know I think I think you don't need everyone to become founders to dramatically improve you know for example a nation's like talent output. I think the biggest that makes sense and I think the biggest question that everyone has on their minds right now I get this question a lot from parents who I talk to is what should I be teaching my kid right in the world of AI or AI can do everything you know should they go become plumbers as I believe Jeffrey Hinton said maybe that's the last frontier of human innovation and talent. What what are your thoughts on it? I mean because because as you as you understand everything all the knowledge that we interact with is fundamentally a set of a set of you know bits that could could be transformed into a set of bits that could be processed by an LLM or a

similar similar model and it could create you an output and what is the value that that a human can bring to transaction or relationship. I mean it's a it's a great question in response to your question. I'll give you an interesting example which is the wealth management industry. This is, I think, fascinating because you've got this whole industry that charges 0.5 to 1% fees per year to manage assets and essentially normally puts clients in funds that do worse than the S&P 500. And so, you know, you have this like double whammy of, you know, stupidity, right? Where you you hire someone and they basically, you know, just suck rent, negative rent from you every year in these random managed funds.

Yet, this industry is like a multi- trillion dollar industry around the world. And so I guess the first thing that I would say is it takes a long time for let's say you know AI market efficiency to destroy uh some of these things. And the reason why wealth management probably exists is that stock market volatility is scary. And so actually having a wealth management adviser who forces you to not sell during a downturn even if you're losing to the S&P 500 is better than what you would actually achieve if you were sitting there yourself selling during a market low and buying during a market high which many folks would do. So essentially, the wealth management service, if you're being kind to it, is going to be like the human behavior of just returns, even though it would lose to like an efficient AI allocator of capital that like locks you out of your account.

I think there are a lot of examples like this. Think about a family lawyer whose job is to facilitate a divorce and basically has to, you know, make mom and dad stop yelling at each other and agree to something reasonable while taking a big cut of the assets to facilitate this sort of like screaming, you know, uh, cat fight. So I think there are many examples of this kind of service. Think about an interior designer. Their job is often, you know, to make a bunch of people's preferences, you know, agreed and harmonized to then create an output at a reasonable cost. You know, AI could probably generate one output, but could you get the whole family on board with it?

You know, probably not. So there are many, many examples of these services that rely on this kind of humanistic negotiation that actually aren't that efficient, but they will exist for a long time because we're fundamentally human. And so I think my general point is it'll take a long time for many of these, you know, quote unquote inefficient services to be destroyed by AI. And you know, in the meantime, there'll be lots of services that combine humans and AI that will probably be a really great service experience and certainly 10x better than the current. And so I don't think you need to move all the way to being a plumber. You probably can just be AI native and that will probably take you a long way for, you know, for a while.

Um but I am very skeptical about the value that many services deliver around the world compared to like their truly efficient frontier. Makes sense. I guess the one advice that a lot of parents especially in the west would give their children is kind of just like follow your passion, right? And um that might be a little bit different to uh in China and India where there's a clear focus probably on like the outcome and you know with that you probably advise your kids to study engineering or any you know become a lawyer, become a doctor or something like that. Do you think in an AGI world or an AI first world um we can actually encourage kids more to follow their passion and maybe do something totally creative or you know study I don't know like arts history just because there is enough kind of abundance for for people to do what they actually want

to do. So I mean in general I'm I'm very profiling your passions but I'm profiling your passions because your passions generally lead to competitive advantage and the competitive advantage combined with your sustained focus normally means you can like thrive in the economy. So I mean um if your passion is like for example fine art then that's probably going to be tough to crank. So, I'm not a big fan if there are history degrees. But, you know, I think most passions if they have some real world connection will normally lead to, you know, an ability to really compete and thrive because ultimately you tend to get bad at an industry because you get bored of it or you fall into lazy habits, your curiosity dies.

And so, I think having that burning passion for it is pretty important. Now, a lot of folks won't have burning passion for the same thing for, you know, a long period of time. They might have to keep switching it up. But I I do think in general that if you can combine like the passion focused western parent mentality with some degree of like focus on core skills that actually cranks that's kind of where you have that nirvana. And so I don't necessarily think sort of like the cold hardcore like Singaporean style education system is the best. But you know what I see in Silicon Valley where parents are pragmatic but they still want the child to do robotics.

They like robotics or debate if they like debate. I I think that's probably where you know things can shake out for now. And so I I don't really view it as like these dueling extremes that can't be, you know, unified. But I do think, for example, it's a bit silly how much time is spent on, you know, musical instruments you drop or, you know, art classes that you drop. If you take it too far compared to putting that time into core skills that will compound over time. You said that over the next sort of 3 to 5 years, the whole world will have a personal tutor for core subjects. You know, we talked about alpha school last time and Alpha School is trying to do that.

Giving kids a tutor that they can spend two hours a day with to learn all the core subjects and then do other things, more interesting things with their time. Are you guys playing that space? What do you think that looks like? What what do you think the world looks like? And what does the crimson business look like if everything that you're now providing with humans for you know I don't know what the what the cost is but you know I'm sure it's it's it's expensive when the cost of that collapses and you can do that with a with a personalized chatbot what happens to your business. So in our view what we've seen so far is it's very hard for AI to motivate a young person and complete these things end to end similar to online courses like MOOS or similar to Khan Academy you have this high dropout rate and actually what tends to

happen is you know a student's got their social media tabs open their Tik Tok their YouTube whatever else they're looking at and they've got their chat GPT and you know it's really this attention race between all these different apps to capture your marginal hour and the marginal hour generally isn't won by Chpt it's usually won by Netflix or it's won by YouTube or whatever. I think the value of the human is that it forces you to actually focus, lock in and you know make progress on skills. And so actually if you compare the results of, you know, one-on-one tutoring with a human verse, you know, AI tutoring, the problem is you can't actually make the kid do AI tutoring for very long.

And so I do think that, you know, this human-driven model will still be very effective for a long time to come because of the cognitive limits of the child's ability to actually focus, which you see if you, you know, talk to any 12, 13, 14y old, it's very hard to find a child who can actually selfotivate and propel themselves through all their subjects without this kind of coaching infrastructure. Which is why, you know, the typical teacher thinks that AI is pushing kids backwards, not forwards on average. Also, kids are writing less essays than ever before. A lot of kids are writing almost no essays per year, which is destroying people's ability to write. So, I think that theoretically, if you could focus and engage with the AI perfectly, you know, maybe that would be a valid challenger.

But for now, I think this human AI combo is much more realistic. And certainly alpha school is not really, you know, throwing out the humans. They've got all their motivational coaches for the pure purpose of making you complete those tasks and push through. And actually, Alpha School is more expensive than traditional high schools, not less. uh and so if anything I think it sort of supports the same thesis that Crimson is currently running on at the same time we've got a lot of units many aspects of the core business using AI as well as our platforms like revision village which is in over 500 IB schools and that has a lot of AI tutoring for the IB kids can use while they're learning you know self-study resources on our video databases and question banks and stuff but still you know there's real value for the live tutoring as well so that's probably how I think

about AI right now it might change if AI becomes more able to motivate. But for now, there's definitely a big gap between outcomes achieved with, for example, a tutor or even Kuman relative to your AI chatbot. And you know, Khan Academy announced they saw pretty weak utilization from their Kamingo AI tutor. Um, and you know, maybe they'll improve it, but so far it's not really working. Why is it important to write? And by the way, I think good question. Why is it important to write? Um well I mean theoretically you could not write but I think writing is a way of articulating coherent logic. You either need to speak it probably or you need to write it down.

And if you can't do either of those things then I think you know humanity is just getting cognitively dumber. So I think you know writing forces you to engage with different ideas and you know be structured and put out an argument that actually can be critiqued. So it's it's a form of putting reps in at a mental gym and you know it's very hard for you to be a really strong thinker if you skip the whole writing argumentation stage because certainly that's where I learned a lot of my skills in economics or debating or you know international relations tested my logic in many different fields and I think if you just interface with chat bots you know you're skipping a lot of that human learning so probably you can produce output but you can't check the output verify the output you know you don't know if there's been a you know critical error And then

you're probably also just getting dumber as an individual too. So I'm pretty nervous about a world in which no one writes. At least right now it seems pretty precarious. Are you worried about look because at the end of the day what you just said which is like we articulate thoughts and we think in words whether it's writing or speaking. Fundamentally that's what LLMs do, right? They're just word predictors. And some would argue that some of the best LMs today are doing some level of thinking. Some people argue that we've reached AGI already. Are you worried about a world where we have a lot of potentially thinking agents running around directing humans who are not very clear-minded, who are distracted, who go for the Netflix instead of the the physics, who are easy to control and manipulate.

Yeah, I mean, it seems pretty dystopian, but kind of like a pretty valid a pretty valid risk. I think right now what we're seeing is an explosion of entrepreneur activity, a lot of human innovation, a lot of powerful results of combining human and AI, you know, boring jobs like just, you know, coding for the sake of coding that can be automated, you know, being replaced so that people can kind of actually elevate up the, you know, coding consciousness stack, if you will. These things seem positive. You know, replacing folks that, for example, verify, you know, random financial filings that require, you know, agonizing hours, that's not a really satisfying job.

So I'm optimistic that hopefully we land in an equilibrium where a lot of the boring tasks of humanity that like drills you into submission in these you know corporate jobs gets replaced and people can actually focus on more cognitively exciting tasks and we

can create more economic growth and there can be more prosperity. You know most economic revolutions have produced more jobs not less and so I currently land in the place of the techno optimist where I think there'll be net new job creation from all of this economic productivity. You know, if you look at, for example, even software engineering hiring in the US, it's actually going up, not down right now. And there doesn't seem to be any any evidence of, you know, sustained mass layoffs really anywhere in the world. So, I'm currently not that bearish. I think, you know, there's certainly plenty of folks that are alarmed about this, but for now, it seems like, you know, that pattern of technology creating net new prosperity appears to be in place.

But, you know, I'm watching closely and and watching with fascination. Certainly if you look at the politics of the world the rise of folks like AOC Abdul in Michigan you know Zoran in New York the opportunity partner here in New Zealand um I guess Khloe's sort of declining but you know certainly you know top in New Zealand it suggests that there is a fundamental skepticism of capitalism emerging and there are a lot of folks who are saying let's rip the system out let's basically reset the economy divide up society's current assets and hand them back to everybody and restart the game so to speak and I think that is to some degree a reflection of the anxiety around AI and the world view that you're describing and the potential for it to create you know mass equality.

So I I don't think this is a resolved debate and I think you know this political reverberation will continue and we're going to see you know what's going to happen in the next you know 3 6 years but I think the 2028 US election is going to be very interesting. You know my hot take is I think maybe AOC will become the 2028 Democratic candidate not you know Gavin Newsome. Um because if you look at the the trends in these far-left candidates, they're actually outperforming across many of these states. And you know, in a in a primary, which is not necessarily a run for the center, but really a run for you know, the the base of the party, you know, I think someone like AOC might be able to actually win that.

And then, you know, it's not obvious that AOC would lose to someone like JD Vance or even Marco Rubio. Maybe it's Yeah. So I I I think that we're going to see probably the consequence of a lot of this AI angst, at least partially in this upcoming cycle, both in the midterms in the US and in the 2028 race. And it's going to be interesting to see. I was shocked to see Khloe Suabrook announced she wants to ban AI data centers New Zealand. You know, before anyone's really building big ones here, she's already practically, you know, putting her her ban in place. And I think that reflects her reading the tea leaves around the world and thinking, okay, AI is a good political topic for me to jump in there and sort of exert this worker rights sort of socialist view and you know that is writing off this AI hate that I think is

spreading. So I mean it's certainly an interesting time to be thinking about these things. So what has to happen to restore the this generation's faith into the technology and into entrepreneurship because this should be really exciting for our generation, right? like there's new technology, there's tons of opportunity, but yeah, for some reason people are not seeing it that way. So what what has to happen? I mean, I think people ultimately need to feel like right now, you know, a lot of people feel even if they actually are experiencing economic gains, they are experiencing the feeling of falling behind. There are funny surveys in New York of people who are actually objectively quite wealthy feeling like they are behind and struggling psychologically.

And so, you know, I think if people feel like they're struggling and they can't see prosperity and they they perceive inequality, you know, that creates a lot of angst. If they feel like they're actually experiencing, you know, quality living improvements, that's great. So, ultimately, this will come down to, you know, can we, for example, you know, make core goods, shopping, you know, food, you know, rent, electricity actually more economical? Can we actually produce more highpaying jobs with AI that actually means this is all actually a win for the average worker? is definitely right now a win for the Silicon Valley entrepreneur, but is it a win for the average worker? No one really knows yet.

And so I think that's going to really be the determining factor. And until we know, the left will say it won't be. The right will say it will be, and we won't really know for a little while. So I think that's probably the question of the next several years. Are you afraid that these kinds of policies, if they come to New Zealand too early, will squash the just now starting to blossom entrepreneur ecosystem in New Zealand? Yes, certainly. I mean, I think it's it's crazy for us to, you know, go and ban things before there actually problems here like data centers because we've got such a densely um, you know, populated urban hub, but we've got almost no population, right, once you go out to the countryside all across the nation and we have all this just empty farmland.

So, you know, I think you could you don't need to destroy the beauty of New Zealand by, you know, putting in some data centers in certain places that actually could be a great business for us. and you know there's enough space you could actually build them quite far from the population hubs uh which are you know not going to be disrupted and that could be a great source of gains for us maybe a big economic advantage so you know I I I don't I haven't looked into the economics data centers too closely but it would appear to me like it could be quite a good you know business unit for the country and quite a powerful um area of competence to attract a lot of a entrepreneurs who need to find you know you know capacity so I I think it it would be you know scary so I personally I I think running to

ban these things is sort of nuts, but you know, it's the populist thing to do from the left and you know, it sort of polls well in some countries. So, I think politicians will pitch it, but hopefully the centrist New Zealand voter who's actually thinking, how do we grow this country? How do we lead in the new AI era sees AI as an opportunity rather than this, you know, threat they must ban before we even see any evidence. Yeah. Jamie, completely different topic. You just got married um in LA um and you had Sir Jean Key, the former prime minister of New Zealand officiating a wedding. First of all, congratulations and uh yeah, what was that like?

I mean, it was amazing to get married. You know, I uh fell in love with my wife Priscilla on very early. I met her on the first day of school at Columbia and you know, they have the saying when you know, you know. So it was a special day and you know I I have a pretty small family on my side and Priscilla has a gigantic family with her three brothers and cousins and siblings running around and so it's it's quite exciting to have this larger than life American family bolt on my super close kiwi family and you know we're very excited for all their benches that that comes next. But yeah it was really cute and uh plenty of hilarious speeches at the wedding.

My dad gave me a good thorough roasting and you know there was plenty of good banter and we actually had a haka performance at the wedding and then we even had some minimum on the tables for the rare American who had the courage to try it. So it was good fun. We definitely got a a lot of kiwi dose into that Santa Monica wedding. That's amazing. Congrats. Oh, thank you Jamie. Thank you for your time. This is great. Cheers guys. Great to talk to you again. Thank you for tuning in to TechMates. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share with friends. We'll be back soon with more stories of Kiwi and Aussie founders reshaping the future and disrupting Down Under.