Jamie Beaton walked into the interview room in Times Square, took off his coat, and glanced at the ball. He remembered New Year's Eve in 2014, when he had watched the ball drop here. That night, he was online coaching an international student from China, Fangzhou Jiang, who would later join him as a co-founder of what is now an almost $600 million business.

Born in New Zealand, Beaton started the college admissions counseling company Crimson Education when he was 17. He applied to US universities like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Wharton, Columbia and Duke — and he got into all of them.

"I had seven months free before starting at Harvard, so I began mentoring students in Auckland," he said. "I'd visit their homes, coach them, and do seminars. It grew organically, almost like a passion project before Harvard."

Soon the passion project grew into a company that has the highest revenue globally in the college admissions counseling space, especially in North America.

The company soon expanded globally across 23 countries and attracted many clients, especially in China.

"China is a little bit different from the rest of the world because they already had so many people applying that the numbers have been flat or moving around based on these geopolitical factors," Beaton told China Daily.

Working as an educator between China and the United States, he has firsthand experiences in what cultural exchange between the two countries could bring to the world.

"When it comes to cultural exchange in general, it's very important, because if the world breaks into, for example, a Cold War between China and its territories, America and its territories, and no one goes to each other's countries for trade, and you have this kind of segmented world where you don't have cultural exchange — you just create unnecessary conflict," he said.

But when people from China study in the US, or people from the US study in China, and there is a cross-pollination of ideas and understanding — very quickly, things that seem like they are insurmountable become negotiable, he said.

To further his business expansion in China, Beaton studied at Tsinghua University in Beijing, one of the country's top institutions, and spent six months living in Shanghai.

"It's been very rewarding in my life to have those kinds of cultural exchanges where I lived in Shanghai and I went to school in Beijing. And I think it's quite a limitation for a young person if you only live in your city or your country because you really don't have perspective on how your country can improve for the better," he said.