Unicorn founders on campus

LinkedIn profiles aren’t usually the stuff of viral sensation, but Kiwi entrepreneur Jamie Beaton’s caused a stir last year when his impressive education and career history caught the online world’s attention.

Jamie, who has degrees from universities including Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Princeton and Oxford, is the youngest New Zealander to found a ‘unicorn’ – a company valued at more than $1 billion. And the 30-year-old can now add another line to his career profile: teacher at the University of Auckland.

Jamie is CEO and co-founder of Crimson Education, a university admissions consultancy, and, along with his fellow co-founder Fangzhou (FZ) Jiang, he will be on campus this semester leading a project for first-year commerce students in the Business School’s new Navigators programme.

Jamie, who is an honorary associate professor and on the advisory board of the Business School, says the opportunity to teach on the programme evolved from discussions with the school’s dean, Professor Susan Watson, about how to supercharge the entrepreneurial aspirations of students. When she mentioned the Navigators programme, which includes a stream focused on innovation and entrepreneurship, Jamie says it seemed natural for the co-founders to contribute.

The course content is modelled on the Harvard Business School case method, where students will learn key entrepreneurship concepts through case studies. Students will study globally successful New Zealand companies like Xero, Zuru, Halter and Pushpay, and the entrepreneurs will also share lessons from helming Crimson Education.

“To me, it’s exciting and rewarding to take some of the knowledge that I’ve garnered on the world stage building Crimson and inject some of that ambition into young Kiwis and help them get fired up,” says Jamie, “because the best way for us to solidify our economy and really get some ambition pumping, is to get many, many more Xeros and Rocket Labs emerging.

“I think our biggest constraint in New Zealand is there aren’t enough aspiring founders coming out of high schools, there aren’t enough of these role models, there aren’t enough reference points. But if you look at Silicon Valley, and talk to 15-year-olds in California, they’re aware of all these companies, they’re aware of how they were built, they’re aware of accelerators. It’s about amplifying that culture.”

Importantly, says Jamie, students will also look at how local early-stage companies are currently navigating start-up life.

“In the early days, it’s always chaos. There are a million fires, and it seems impossible. It’s really good for students to see that successful start-ups weren’t always these smooth success stories; actually, they were gnarly and messy and required quite a lot of courage at the beginning.”

Jamie lives in New York but is regularly in New Zealand and says he’s looking forward to connecting with students while on campus.

“Hopefully we’ll build a great mentoring bond between FZ and I and our students, so they can always reach out to us. And if we can connect them to seed investors or they want to talk about business ideas, we can be a resource for them well past the programme’s end.”

FZ came to New Zealand from China as a 16-year-old and was the first international student to be named among top high-school Scholarship exam achievers as a Premier Award winner. He’s since gained degrees at universities including Stanford and Harvard (where he’s a John F. Kennedy Fellow) while building Crimson Education, and Jamie says his story could inspire aspiring offshore entrepreneurs.

“We want to make sure that the University of Auckland is an exciting hub not just for Kiwis, but also if you’re a student sitting in China, or in Korea and thinking about where to study.”

Despite spending time in front of the class, Jamie is still a student himself and continues to grow his academic record. He recently completed a Military Studies degree at King’s College London and is now studying sociology and political science at Cambridge University.

“It’s opening up a new set of perspectives, which I really enjoy,” he says, “but right now I’m quite stressed, because I’ve got to learn all this content before my next exam.”

Caitlin Sykes