The Career Curator

Nibletz follows up with their take on the Credentialock launch.

We often accept that the leaders of our public corporations have all the right training and expertise required to do the job.  We assume that these professionals have been vetted to the highest degree.  After all, they wouldn’t be making millions of dollars if they weren’t right?  Well, I guess not…

The recent events surrounding the ouster of embattled Yahoo chief Scott Thompson has brought significant attention to the issue of Credentials and Credentialing. Specifically those education and professional credentials that are often used to measure ones qualifications. Mr. Thompson had false information on his CV with regard to earning a computers science degree.  Actually, His degree was in accounting and he only had one class in computer science. I’m convinced that not having a computer science degree hardly effected his capabilities as the leader of Yahoo but it did cause him other problems.

This discrepancy exposed a weakness in Thompson’s position as the leader of Yahoo.  Once discovered and released presumably by fellow stock holders or board members Thompson became too weak to ward off power struggles by those board members interested in removing him from his seat.

The importance of objectively sharing ones capabilities is clear in this case and can be translated to anyone in a profession with stock holders, clients or employees that rely on this information.  Simply creating a CV or a LinkedIn profile with subjective embellishment is no longer enough to pass sniff test. Professionals have to start taking ownership of their career and curate achievements in a more tangible way.

Scott Slyfield - The Career Curator

Credentialock has a lot to be thankful so far this year as January was a great month for our fledgling start-up.  We kicked off the year with a new commitment to our .net platform, completed our initial funding round, began prototyping our iOS application and engaged with our first group of enterprise clients.

We are excited to be joining the ranks of others who decided to apply for the Microsoft BizSpark Program. BizSpark has given our team access to great resources without the costly capital outlay.  Credentialock is now using Visual Studio, Azure, and SQL Server to manage its development and hosting needs.  We are also now looking for one additional technical co-founder to join our team in Michigan.  If you know of anyone who wants to change the status quo please send a note sslyfield@credentialock.com.

With our first round of seed funding completed, we have turned our attention to the next round of financing.  Considering that we are on track to launch in March, I’d say our bootstrapping approach has left us in a good position for this coming year.  Now we can focus additional capital on marketing and servicing our product in selected verticals.

Credentialock has already received great interest from some prestigious universities and select employer groups in highly licensed industries.  We have begun to schedule presentations in March to parallel our Beta 2 roll out. Our success in garnering early interest comes from the strength our Advisory Board and their active participation.  Thank you again for all your support.

As far as our current development status goes we are on track to release the Beta 2.0 web application next month.  We are currently adding additional import features such as PDF upload capabilities with scaling and updating ‘help’ features for a better user experience.  We have enabled a chat feature which will allow users 24/7 support.  We have also begun to wireframe a mobile prototype for our iOS application which gives users true cloud access to their credentials and related features (below is a sneak peek).

Thanks to each of you for your support, encouragement and patience.

Cheers!

The Credentialock Team