Junior Guides

At age 23, Jamie Beaton and Sharndre Kushor have built a global tutoring empire. All that’s missing at Crimson Education is a profit.

- Alex Conrad

IN OCTOBER 2014, JULIAN Robertson had a presumptuous guest on his hands. Jamie Beaton, 19, had confidently strolled into the hedge fund billionaire’s home office to talk about software used by some of the scholars sponsored 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,” Robertson says. “Then 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 finds time to be chief executive of Crimson Education, a college admissions and tutoring startup he co-founded with his girlfriend, Sharndre Kushor, five years ago.

With Kushor serving as chief operating officer in their native New Zealand, the two have quickly built quite the global empire. Crimson, they say, connects 20,000 students to a network of 2,300 part-time instructors and advisors, overseen by 204 full-timers. They have raised $37 million from outsiders while giving up only 55% of their company. The last round of venture funding, in 2016, valued Crimson at $160 million.

Launched to help students from Asia and the Pacific 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 figures. As for the bottom line, the founders’ silence suggests outside investors are patiently waiting for it to turn black.