(2020-08-16) Torenberg The Promise Of Peer-to-peer Credentials

Erik Torenberg: The Promise of Peer-to-Peer Credentials. My last post detailed how college is a bundle between education, networks & relationships, and the credential.

Right now, we’re leaving millions of incredibly powerful credentials on the table—peer-to-peer credentials: Think of the best people you’ve ever worked with—your endorsement of them is a credential that you haven’t yet created.

If I trust someone and they give me their top five people they’ve ever worked with, that means more to me than a Harvard degree.

We have inefficient markets for reputation today, and that creates all sorts of market failures as a result.

Last year, we started working on a platform for P2P credentials called Cosign.

On Deck stopped working on it so that we could triple down on On Deck fellowship, but we’ll return to it in the next year. I’m writing this post as accountability, but also to drum up interest to work on it and be a part of it when the time comes.

Imagine if there was a verifiable way to look at the early discoverers of Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, etc.

The premise of the product was that people could cosign other people and thank people who had cosigned them. It turns out to be pretty viral behavior on Twitter.

I expect the next great VCs will get their start on a P2P credential platform, proving their talent discovery abilities way before they ever invest

I’m inspired by the idea behind these P2P credentials. That something as easy as a cosign — which is totally free — can open so many doors

I first discovered the term Cosign in the hip hop community.

We’re suffering, as Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen have noted, from a compliment deficit. Not in a millenial, insecure way, but in a “we-could-raise-the-ambitions-of-a generation way” by giving out this free resource— social capital.

OK great, so why haven’t P2P credentials taken off before? LinkedIn recommendations exist already and...they’re not great. The challenge with LinkedIn recommendations is that there is no scarcity to them, so there’s no real signal.

On LinkedIn there’s also no way to “rate the raters”. Cosign would have to figure out that part as well.

Doesn’t this exist already—Isn’t this Twitter?

There’s signal there, it’s just unclear what the signal is, and there’s also a lot of noise.

And that’s just P2P labor marketplaces. But you can imagine people search engines related to career, learning, friendship, dating, care-giving, exploring hobbies—anything. It’s fascinating how when we want to find books, Amazon has so much data on our preferences and can recommend the perfect book, but when we want to find people, we don’t have anything. (Does Amazon succeed at book-recommendation quality?)