Paul Blackstone: Global EdTech Lessons, China’s Hypergrowth Era and Why Mindset Beats Curriculum – E651
“I went to the interview, it was partly in Spanish, my Spanish was terrible, and we still cobbled the interview together. Three days later he called and said, ‘I’ve got some good news and some bad news.’ I asked what the bad news was, and he said I didn’t get the teaching job. I asked what the good news was, and he said they were giving me the center manager role and that I needed to fly to Barcelona the next Monday for two weeks of training at the company’s headquarters. I thought, ‘Oh man, let’s do it.’” - Paul Blackstone, Founder of SummitLearn
"China was thriving at that time, and that was the rocket ship. It became an amazing opportunity to learn from a leadership perspective while scaling a business from something relatively small. It was a boiling pot of problems and challenges, but sometimes you have to take those opportunities. You’re going to get punched in the face, things will go wrong, there will always be something, but if you see growth and believe you can learn from it, you hang on because you don’t know where it will take you." - Paul Blackstone, Founder of SummitLearn
"To be an entrepreneur and create something new takes incredible courage and bravery. Anytime you step off and take that entrepreneurial journey, especially when you know it will take three times longer, cost three times as much, and be ten times more painful than you remember, that is brave. From the outside it looks easy, but on the inside you don’t know where the money is coming from to pay salaries that month. To be an entrepreneur and build something from zero demands real courage and bravery." - Paul Blackstone, Founder of SummitLearn
Paul Blackstone, longtime education operator and founder of SummitLearn, joins Jeremy Au to unpack his path from running a small health-food shop in Australia to leading one of China’s largest English-learning organizations and advising education companies worldwide. He shares how early failures taught him to learn fast, why teaching adults unlocked his passion for human development, and how China’s boom years shaped his leadership approach. They discuss how culture and discipline drive scale more than perfect products, why schools struggle to build creativity and mindset, and how parents can raise independent kids in an AI-first world. Their conversation explores the tension between academic metrics and behavioral growth, the power of founder-led culture in scaling teams, and why entrepreneurship can thrive both inside companies and in startup life. Paul also reflects on world-schooling his children, building Curio to fill classroom gaps, and why resilient learners will define the next generation.
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