Jamie Beaton on Concord Visa, taking ambition global and learning in the age of A.I
Save the date for Caffeine's next in person event.
Happy Friday Caffeinators,
We’ve made it to the end of the week, congrats to us all. As a reward, help yourself to special bonus edition of the newsletter featuring my conversation with one of New Zealanders most impressive young founders - Jamie Beaton.
We’ve also got another great case study courtesy of our friends over at Kami about how they use Notion. If you like what you read, we’re throwing in a link for our subs to get 6 months of Notion Business for free.
Lastly, a save the date for September 2nd for Caffeine’s next in person event for our Auckland based community. Spots will be limited so keep your evening clear, more detail to come next week.
If you’ve got a story, press release, interview to pitch or just want to tell me I’m wrong about something - send it over to finn@caffeinedaily.co
If you’re interested in working with Caffeine as a partner, flick Georgia an email on: georgia@caffeinedaily.co
Have a great weekend, look after each other, and we’ll see you next week.
Finn and the CAFFEINE team
Jamie Beaton on Concord Visa, taking ambition global and learning in the age of A.I
Crimson Education co-founder Jamie Beaton hardly needs much introduction to the Caffeine audience.
He created a billion-dollar company younger than many founders close their first seed round. He’s earned degrees from multiple Ivy League universities, going viral for having such an unassailable CV that he earned the nickname “the Thanos of LinkedIn.”
I caught up with him for a chat while he was in Manhattan, on his way back to New Zealand, preparing to unveil his latest venture: Concord Visa.
The lightbulb moment for Concord Visa
“As a student in New Zealand, I naively had this idea of a borderless world where a young, talented guy can rock and roll to any country and work wherever they like,” he says.
“And then you get confronted with the real world, which is your rules for a place like America or the UK, and there’s a very defined restriction on how much time you can actually spend in the country. I didn’t have a good plan for how I was going to stay in the US, but then I met an entrepreneur who told me how she secured an O-1 visa. Once I heard about this, it was transformative, because it meant I could build Crimson in the US and stay as long as I needed to.”
He quickly realised the problem wasn’t just his.
“Most people don’t know about all the different visa categories that exist and what they’re actually eligible to get. The current process is very expensive, you’ve got to engage lawyers, and they give you vague answers. They’re very black and white – they look at you as you are today and say yes or no.”
The “post-grad programme for Crimson” might be slightly reductive as a tagline, but Concord is the natural evolution of Crimson’s existing mission.
If Crimson Education is about candidacy building by helping someone get eligible for a university, then Concord takes the same approach for visas. It can provide a roadmap for achievements—PR milestones, a certain degree, professional wins—that will then enable you to get that visa and lock it down.
The goal for Concord isn’t just to process paperwork; it’s to partner with clients to understand their unique trajectory and build a compelling narrative that maximises their chances of visa success.
Concord currently helps with immigration into Australia, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand, but has a particular focus on the United States.
The company already supports a spread of US visa types including the L-1, E-2, E-3, EB-1A, and NIW, with a particular focus on the O-1, which is open to “individuals with extraordinary ability or achievement.” It’s perfect for ambitious startup operators and founders, and often underutilised.
Beaton points to the story of Wayne Zhou as an example.
“Wayne Zhou was in Sydney,” he says. “If he didn’t receive the O-1 visa, he wouldn’t have been able to go to San Fran and be part of this amazing growth journey at Paraform, which just raised a $20 million Series A. Because of that visa, his career opportunities are transformed. He’s building in the middle of Silicon Valley, part of the team in person. That’s a game changer. It lets him compete in the arena he wants to be in.”
Before publicly launching, Concord Visa had already guided more than 100 individuals and companies through their US visa process, including brand-tracking startup (and friend of Caffeine) Tracksuit.
Mikayla Hopkins, Head of Marketing at Tracksuit, used Concord to navigate visa applications during a critical period as they closed in on a $25m USD Series B raise.
Work is underway to build out Concord’s offering to help automate and digitise some of the onerous and slow-moving aspects of visa management.
“We’re building out an exciting software platform for companies to be able to manage the visas for their employees and manage eligibility and filing deadlines and renewal applications, which removes some of that compliance burden that can be very annoying for companies to deal with.”
Taking ambition global
Founders often talk about a “borderless world,” but often through a SaaS and payments lens - how easy it is to do business globally. Concord is making the idea of a borderless world feel more tangible and embodied.
“If you’re ambitious and bring a lot of value, it’s frustrating to be weighed down by arbitrary rules around where you were born. The more we can enable rapid mobility of talent, the more value we can unlock,” Beaton explains.
It’s not abstract for Beaton. He says Crimson’s scholarships for Māori students are one of the things he’s proudest of, because they made a visible shift in who sees themselves as belonging in the global arena.
“When I began Crimson, there was no track record of young Māori students going for academics at these universities. Now we’ve had Sam Taylor from Mount Maunganui get to Harvard. That tall-poppy syndrome that would hold kids back a little bit ten years ago has been unshackled.”
Concord is designed to unshackle the next step—turning educational ambition into geographic mobility. For founders, the pitch is simple: faster, clearer, cheaper visas, with a path to eligibility if you’re not there yet.
For Beaton, Concord offers a more philosophical opportunity to prove an age-old dichotomy false.
“I think there’s this debate in the world about capitalism at large. Is there a fundamental tension between capitalism and good? I think at the most core level, I’m proud that Crimson proves you can have something that’s a sustainable business but also can generate immense social good.”
A.I. and the future of learning
Of course, while Concord is the new kid on the block, I couldn’t have an interview with Beaton without touching on how the sector where he built his most famous existing business will be affected by the emergence of new technologies.
Higher education is grappling with how to teach in a world where the vast majority of university work can at least in part be assisted by A.I.
The solution emerging in parts of the Ivy League is to go back to older forms of examination—live presentations and pen-and-paper exams—because too many take-home assignments will just incentivise overuse of AI.
He’s clear-eyed about the benefits. As someone who studies voraciously, the benefit of using AI to summarise 600 readings and then pattern-match across sources is too good to pass up.
But while A.I. can make a phenomenal tutor in some areas—particularly as frontier models roll out features like ChatGPT’s “Study Mode”—there is an embodied element to learning that cannot be replicated.
“There’s a very core human interaction between a mentor and a mentee where the mentor inspires a level of accountability and inspiration in the student that lets them make their way through the distractions of TikTok or whatever distractions they have in their life, and get some academics pumping. And that human interaction is very hard to replicate with AI.”
There’s also a broader question of what kind of thinking A.I. incentivises. Having all the answers at your fingertips seems fundamentally at odds with the slow, considered kind of thinking universities are built to encourage.
“The worry with heavy integration of AI tools is the dilution of your ability to brainstorm. The glory that comes from really mulling on ideas gets crowded out by this quick-hit answer. I think there’s a risk of the commodification of the cerebral beauty of education.”
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How Kami Keeps Its Global Team Aligned, Playful and Growing using Notion
It takes more than clever code to transform global education in 2025. It takes a company brain that anyone can tap into, whether they’re deploying features in Auckland or coaching teachers in Austin.
For Kami, the New Zealand ed-tech scale-up now serves more than 50 million students and teachers worldwide, and Notion is the companies second brain.
Caffeine recently caught up with Estelle Curd, Chief People Officer at Kami, to hear how Notion became Kami’s operating system for knowledge and company growth.
Curd joined Kami three months ago, fresh from stints at Rocket Lab and a steel-manufacturing giant, and had to get up to speed on how a new, surging scale up operated, quickly.
Thankfully, Notion made it easy for her.
“What I like about it is it’s just very intuitive to use,” she told me. “I have had approximately zero training on Notion. My people-and-culture coordinator, who I brought on about a month ago, didn’t need training. It was just that easy”
Walk through Kami’s workspace and the logic clicks right away. Locked pages hold the must-haves: HR policies, contract templates, regional compliance docs. Unlocked pages are fair game for anyone to extend: the living founding story, a glossary of acronyms, a gallery titled “Doggos of Kami” that gets new photos every fortnight. You know, the essentials.
That balance of permanence and playfulness matters, says Curd, because Kami is not just shipping software; it’s onboarding humans who need context, confidence and a bit of joy. It’s flexible to whatever you need at that moment.
“You can bend it, but it never snaps,” she explained. “That’s exactly what you need when the company is changing every quarter.”
From Mars-Wide Time-Zones to One Rhythm of Work
Scale-ups live or die by how quickly they turn ideas into decisions. At Kami, decisions start in Notion and can be actioned there too. When the company recently hired a new UI/UX designer, one of the engineers spun up an interview feedback database in minutes:
“You can go in and populate your scores… compare it to the position description… and we can quite clearly say, This is the person that we want.”
Because the page is permission-locked, only the hiring panel can see the page until a choice is made, but everyone else still sees a clean record of the process so institutional memory stays intact.
That same logic drives policy roll-outs. Instead of emailing five PDFs across five continents, HR can publish a single link:
“We said, ‘Hey, we’ve got an update in Notion. Here are our five policies It keeps everything in the same system and easy to access.”
Even seemingly mundane logistics can become nightmares across a great enough distance and since Kami’s workforce spans New Zealand, the United States, the UK, Singapore and South Africa, each with its own national holidays and payroll quirks - the potential for headaches is high.
Luckily, Notion helps bridge both the geographic and chronological gaps. Like how its “Holidays & Happenings” calendar lists them all with a two-line explainer (“What on earth is a Spring Bank Holiday?”) so cross-team meetings don’t collide with local long weekends. The payoff is cultural: people feel seen, not squeezed into a New Zealand-only cadence.
“With Notion it feels like there's no limit on where you could be working from. You could be on Mars. You could be on another planet,” Curd laughed.
And because the workspace is permission-layered, every team can decorate its corner without breaking the master template. “Sometimes it’s nice,” Curd said, “because the engineering team will be slightly different to the marketing team… You can design what speaks most to your team”
Scratch Pads, Sub-Pages and the Right to Be Weird
Creativity rarely strikes in neat bullet points. Curd loves that Notion ships with a private “Scratchpad” block where any employee can jot those streams of consciousness thoughts which may not coalesce into anything in the moment but could be a gold mine down the line.
“Maybe you want to keep it as a diary for the moment, but once you’ve got to that point where you’re like, I want to share it with my team but not the world yet, you have those levels of lock-in, lock-out.”
Engineers sketch database schemas there; marketers paste half-finished campaign slogans; Notion gives Kami a safe sandbox where curiosity can bloom without polluting the production pipeline.
That same ethos powers “Sub-Teams,” private spaces where departments add flavour. The One department can run a library of classroom hacks while Data science tracks experiments with tidy dashboards. “You get your own weirdness,” Curd says, “inside a shared language everybody understands.”
Curd has piloted more knowledge-management tools than she cares to remember, and many failed for the same reason.
“I’ve worked with tools that are very complex. They have all these features and you think, gosh, it’s overwhelming. You pay for this huge complexity, but you only really use the basic necessities. Notion's done a great job of keeping it simple for everyday use and having those other features there if needed.”
What Would Break If Notion Disappeared Tomorrow?
“I think, in a sense, generational knowledge,” she said. “Even though we’re a young company. There is a basis of sales, engineering, teacher success, data, marketing knowledge. It’s like Lego. Each block is building on top of each other. If you take it away, it takes away the little intricacies that you’ve built into the system over time.”
Lose that archive and you lose not just efficiency but identity, it’s the anecdotes that make new hires feel they’ve joined a story in motion, not a faceless SaaS machine.
In the end, Kami’s Notion story is less about productivity hacks and more about cognitive load. Start-ups run on energy; every extra click drains some of it. The tools that win are the ones people can use at 8 p.m. after a long sprint, without opening a training deck.
Curd put it plainly: “In this day and age, there are so many things out there… I’ve got so many things going on in my brain every work day. I want it to be easy. And I think that’s one of the really critical key parts that make Notion cool.”
That ease lets Kami focus on its real mission: giving teachers superpowers and students a more engaging classroom. Knowledge flows, decisions speed up, culture stays quirky. Notion is the quiet backbone behind it all, proof sometimes the most powerful tech in a high-growth company is the one which makes everything else feel simple.
That’s it for today, thanks for reading. Want to get in touch with a news tip, bit of feedback or just to chat? Email hello@caffeinedaily.co. Look after yourselves this weekend and we’ll see you Monday.