Archive
10 posts · newest first
2026 · 10
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Credentialing is a two-sided market — and nobody builds the supply side
The verifier side of credentialing is over-served (signaling, hiring, ATS); the evidence-production side — assess, custody, revoke, portability, agent-readability — is barely built. In a two-sided market the underbuilt side is the leverage point. Own supply, own the platform.
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Multi-model councils as a governance primitive, not a demo
A credentialing decision is a governance decision, not a grading optimization. A multi-model council that adjudicates a credential verdict is the new registrar — a governance primitive (quorum, disagreement, conviction, appeal trail, versioning) that makes AI-issued credentials legitimate, not an eval demo for accuracy. Own the reference implementation.
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Neurodivergent cognition as competitive strategy in the age of average
AI is a regression-to-the-mean engine; as it homogenizes output, cognitive variance becomes the scarcest strategic input. Neurodivergent cognition is a large, underused reservoir of it — not a DEI cost-center, a competitive asset. The reframe requires the workplace protocols that stop suppressing it.
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Non-consumer strategy: the 80% no EdTech VC will fund
Christensen's non-consumer frame applied honestly to the markets institutional capital dismisses — neurodivergent adults, regional builders, re-entry learners, late-career pivoters. The ~80% the credentialing system never reaches. The dismissal is the moat — and serving them is the slow, hard path, not a blue-ocean quick win.
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The custodian problem: sealed-key custody is a platform decision, not a feature
A credential is only as trustworthy as the custody of the key that signed it. Custody isn't a feature toggle or a dev-ops detail — it's the platform decision that determines your trust posture, your blast radius, and whether you can be the aggregation point at all.
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The discovery layer breaks: agents don't browse your course catalog
Catalogs built for human browsing are invisible to AI agents. As agents mediate discovery, the move is credentials-as-evidence, not credentials-as-marketing — and whoever owns the agent-readable credential interface becomes the aggregation point.
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Unbundling the degree: what agents will reassemble
The degree is a bundle — curriculum, signaling brand, accreditation, time, social-credit — shrink-wrapped into one artifact because verification was expensive. Agents make verification cheap, dissolve the bundle, and reassemble atomic, verifiable units at query time. Whoever issues the atoms agents compose wins.
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Differentiation by experience in a post-content world
When AI makes content infinite and near-free, content stops being the moat. The defense against saturation is verifiable doing, the evidence of embodied experience that AI cannot fabricate, which credentialing exists to capture.
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Aggregation theory for credentials
Thompson's aggregation theory, applied to learning and credentialing — why credentials are becoming the new discovery layer, and what that means for builders of trust infrastructure.
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Building in the gap
Why the most important learning markets are the ones institutional capital dismisses — neurodivergent learners, regional builders, non-consumer tech — and why the gap is the opportunity, not the warning sign.