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We still need verification
Matt Ober
August 08, 2023
For many years I woke up having the same dream or maybe it was a nightmare, “Did I graduate college? Did I forget to take a class?” It’s a weird feeling to have the same dream multiple times and wonder, did I actually graduate?….
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This dream had me thinking, how do you verify your education or diploma? I have a degree in Finance but also had two minors, can I prove it? What do you have to do to get proof? Can I prove I was in a fraternity or a club on campus, can I prove an award I won early in my career while at Bloomberg? When are we going to have a better system or platform for verification of our accomplishments?
This question of verification is something I have been thinking about for a long time. I enjoy the content on Linkedin, but a lot of the profiles, career accomplishments, and places of work are fake. How do we prove things we have done in the past? Is Linkedin profiles becoming the new MySpace? We shouldn’t have to brag about or sell ourselves on Linkedin to show what we have done. There is the old saying “it’s not what you say, it’s what you do.” Well, that’s hard in this world with a lack of a good verification platform.
At Social Leverage we invested in Ribbon as Dave and his cofounder Arsham have been working on solving this exact problem. Verify career accomplishments, verify organizations you are a part of, verify projects you have completed, and verify community service you have performed. The use cases are endless. Employers are recognizing that employees want a culture where they are recognized for their achievements. But they also want a way to take that recognition with them. Many people can relate to winning an internal award like customer service representative of the year, or exceeding a metric like 120% of your quarterly quota, and being recognized internally is exciting. But what’s more exciting is if this was verified, captured, and you had the ability to build your accomplishments profile. So when you look for your next opportunity, the data, the work, it speaks for itself.
I am excited about a future where we can look back as individuals on what we have accomplished. A CV that shows what I have done, what I have accomplished, both the small and large wins. Awards I have won, goals I have achieved, tests I have passed, and eventually being able to share that with others in a verifiable way.
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