60 | FORBES ASIA MAY 2018I
n October 2014, Julian Robertson had a presumptu-
ous guest on his hands. Jamie Beaton, 19, had conident-
ly strolled into the hedge fund billionaire’s home oce to
talk about sotware used by some of the scholars spon-
sored by Robertson’s foundation each year. Beaton, small-
framed with auburn bangs mopped across a boyish face, looked
even younger than his age. And the Harvard undergrad seized
his chance to ask why he hadn’t landed one of the 22 full-tuition
scholarships himself. “I thought, My God, what a question,” Rob-
ertson says. “hen I got to know him, and I hired him on the
spot.”
Beaton, who’s now 23 but still looks like a teenager, stands out as
one of the fresh faces at Stanford Business School, where he’s nearly
halfway through an M.B.A. and a master’s in education. A full-time
student since that meeting with Robertson, he still inds time to be
chief executive of Crimson Education, a college admissions and tu-
toring startup he cofounded with his girlfriend, Sharndre Kushor,
ive years ago.
With Kushor serving as chief operating ocer in their native
New Zealand, the two have quickly built quite the global em-
pire. Crimson, they say, connects 20,000 students to a network
of 2,300 part-time instructors and advisors, overseen by 204 full-
timers. hey have raised $37 million from outsiders while giving
up only 55% of their company. he last round of venture fund-
ing, in 2016, valued Crimson at $160 million.
Launched to help students from Asia and the Paciic get into
glamorous U.S. colleges, the company has expanded to serve
students in 40 nations, including Brazil and Russia. Revenue?
Circumstantial evidence is that it’s in the low eight igures. As
for the bottom line, the founders’ silence suggests outside in-
vestors are patiently waiting for it to turn black.You’d be forgiven for thinking the founders are stretched a
bit thin. Kushor spent the irst three years of Crimson getting a
degree in health sciences from the University of Auckland. And
Beaton, ater adding two Stanford degrees to his two from Har-
vard, plans to carry on with a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford
this fall or next. But somehow the two have made it work—
even maintaining a romantic attachment across 6,500 miles.
Six months before founding Crimson, Beaton and Kush-
or toured Europe with a group of Model UN students from New
Zealand. As the two began dating in spring 2013, they hatched
the idea for what became Crimson. “I hadn’t had any role mod-
els in my life that explored overseas and global opportunities for
their studies,” Kushor says.
By the time Beaton met with Robertson about his scholar-
ship miss, Crimson’s numbers were already good enough to
impress the semiretired Tiger Management founder. Robert-
son led a $1 million seed funding and enlisted Beaton in a two-
year side gig as an analyst. With the cash, Beaton and Kush-
or hired their irst full-time stafer in Australia and opened an
Auckland oce.
To develop their student-consultant matching system, they
turned to J. Galen Buckwalter, a psychologist who designed
similar tools for eHarmony. he sotware, in which Crimson
has invested several million dollars, uses a range of metrics to
match a student’s skills and personality to admissions advisors
(mostly veterans of college and high school admissions oces)
and subject tutors (mostly undergrads working part-time).
As Crimson picked up new customers through word of
mouth, Bea ton used his status as a Harvard student to recruit tu-
tors from Ivy League schools. He scored a powerful supporter
when Larry Summers, the former Harvard president and one-Technology
Junior Guides
BY ALEX KONRADAt age 23, Jamie Beaton and Sharndre Kushor have built a global
tutoring empire. All that’s missing at Crimson Education is a profit.