The World We're Building Away From
Right now, across every industry:
→ A significant share of resumes are exaggerated or fabricated. Organizations are making million-dollar talent decisions half-blind.
→ Mis-hires quietly bleed companies of time, money, and momentum — regularly costing around half of first-year salary per bad hire.
→ Most professionals who spend their days inside Salesforce, GitHub, HubSpot, or Claude are completely unrecognized for their real capability. A builder with 10 years of hands-on experience competes on paper with someone who just passed a certification exam — and hiring managers can't tell the difference.
→ Students graduate with a GPA but no proof of how they actually think. Colleges see that Sarah got an A in Computer Science. They don't see the late nights she spent debugging code for her peers, the way she breaks down complex problems, or how she leads under pressure.
→ People fear the future. With AI accelerating change, millions are quietly asking: "How do I stay relevant? How do I prove my value when the rules are being rewritten?"
The system doesn't measure what matters.
It never has.
The Founder Story
In 2011, Matthew started working in venture capital, helping early-stage companies go from idea to traction. Over the years, he worked with hundreds of startups — some reached IPO, some got acquired, many are now doing tens of millions in revenue.
But every time he joined a new project, he started from zero.
It didn't matter what he'd done before. On paper, at the beginning of every engagement, he looked like everyone else making claims. What he could prove only came after someone took a chance on him first.
He watched the same thing happen to the founders he worked with:
The ones who succeeded weren't always the most capable. They were the ones who could make their capability visible fast enough to earn trust.
That's when it became clear: if visibility and trust determine who wins, they can't depend on who you know or how well you tell your story. They need to be infrastructure.
Something you build once and carry everywhere.
Mimi: Building Infrastructure That Outlasts You
Mimi brings over two decades of engineering leadership and systems-building experience. She's architected mission-critical defense systems at Northrop Grumman, built scalable fintech infrastructure, and led technical teams through multiple Web3 ventures.
She's one of the rare engineers who understands both how to build complex distributed systems at scale and how to lead teams through technological transitions that reshape entire industries.
She knows that the hardest problems aren't just technical. They're about building infrastructure that outlasts you — systems so fundamental that they become invisible because they just work.
And she believes, like Matthew, that the infrastructure we design today will quietly decide who wins and who gets left behind for the next 50 years.
years in deep R&D, building, breaking, learning
AI applications tested, researching behavioral verification models
Together, they didn't always know what the final product would be. They just knew the problem was so fundamental that solving it would change everything.
Three months ago, they realized what ELITE is.
What ELITE Is
ELITE is the Human Capital Operating System.
It's an infrastructure layer that turns real work into verified, portable proof of capability — so platforms, companies, universities, and individuals can finally see what people can actually do.
Not what they claim. What they prove.
The Problem We Solve
For Organizations
You want to hire the best people. But your process is broken:
- → You're flooded with hundreds of resumes for every critical role. Many are padded. You can't tell who's real and who's performing.
- → Your best people sometimes leave before you realize their full potential — because you don't have early signals of capability that go beyond their job title.
- → You spend massive budgets on hiring, training, and turnover — while relying on self-reported data that's impossible to verify.
- → You believe in skills-based hiring. You've read the studies. You know it works. But you can't execute it at scale because the infrastructure to verify skills in real time doesn't exist.
ELITE changes this: Every professional proves capability through real work on the platforms they already use. You make hiring decisions with evidence, not guesswork.
For Professionals
Your real value is invisible:
- → You've built deep expertise over years. You solve hard problems daily. Your resume doesn't capture any of it.
- → You're losing opportunities to people who are less capable but better connected or better at interviewing.
- → Every time you change jobs, you reset to zero. What you've already proven doesn't follow you.
- → As AI accelerates, you feel your value slipping. You don't know how to show you're not just keeping up — you're already working at the frontier.
ELITE changes this: Your work becomes your proof. Your capability becomes portable. Your value follows you — across companies, industries, career transitions.
You stop starting over. You start compounding.
For Students
The system doesn't see you:
- → Your GPA is a number. It doesn't show how you think, how fast you learn, or how you lead.
- → You're competing against brand-name universities and well-connected peers before you've even had a chance to prove what you can do.
- → Internships and entry-level roles are often gatekept by pedigree and proximity, not by capability.
- → You worry about a future where a transcript defines you instead of your actual potential.
ELITE changes this: You build your verified profile starting today. Your projects, your collaboration, your learning velocity — all of it becomes visible to the world.
You graduate with proof, not just a diploma.
The Opportunity
By 2030, the World Economic Forum estimates that over 160 million new jobs will be created globally.
The people who adapt fastest — who can prove they learn and execute — will capture those roles.
But here's what almost nobody is saying out loud:
- Most of those jobs don't exist yet. They don't have names. They don't have descriptions. They aren't legible to today's hiring systems.
- The infrastructure we build right now will decide who gets access to those opportunities.
new jobs will be created globally by 2030
people could unlock economic opportunity
If we build it wrong, we get the same story we've always had: pedigree wins, connections win, capability gets buried.
If we build it right — if we make human capability visible, verifiable, and portable — we unlock economic opportunity for over a billion people.
If We Build It Wrong
→ Pedigree wins
→ Connections win
→ Capability gets buried
The same broken story
If We Build It Right
✓ Capability becomes visible
✓ Skills become verifiable
✓ Proof becomes portable
Economic opportunity for 1B+ people
We create a world where what you can do determines your future, not where you went to school or who your parents knew.
That's not idealism. That's infrastructure.
Our Unfair Advantage
1. The Data Layer
Over three years, we've built and refined a system that captures real capability signals from the tools professionals already use — Salesforce, GitHub, Claude, HubSpot, and dozens more.
This behavioral proof layer is our moat. It can't be copied quickly because it's built from years of experimentation, iteration, and deep learning about what signals actually predict performance.
2. The Network We Already Reach
We're starting with tens of millions of digital professionals, students, and organizations within our initial ecosystem — accessible through existing communities, channels, and partnerships.
Every verified professional makes the signal stronger for everyone else. We're not just acquiring users. We're activating a self-reinforcing network.
3. The Operating System Perspective
We're not building a better recruiting tool. We're building the operating system for human capital — an infrastructure layer that platforms, universities, and employers plug into.
Over time, this doesn't compete with other solutions. It becomes the standard layer they all rely on.
4. Aligned Incentives by Design
We use blockchain verification and token mechanics not for speculation, but as infrastructure for aligned incentives.
Professionals earn as they build reputation. Organizations benefit from better data. The ecosystem accrues value to the people creating it — not just extracting from them.
This isn't Web3 for the sake of buzzwords. It's infrastructure designed to make the system fair by default.
What Success Looks Like
In 18 Months
- → 100,000+ verified professionals actively building and proving their capability on ELITE.
- → Early enterprise partnerships validating that verified capability data significantly improves hiring outcomes.
- → ELITE recognized by innovators and early adopters as the emerging standard for capability verification.
- → Revenue traction proving the model works at scale.
verified professionals in 18 months
In 5 Years: A World That Sees People Differently
Skills replace pedigree. Hiring on degrees becomes outdated. Organizations compete on capability, not prestige.
Geography stops mattering. A developer in Lagos competes equally with an Ivy League grad. Opportunity flows to proof, not proximity.
Careers become portable. What you've proven follows you. Your value compounds instead of resets with every job change.
Students graduate with proof. Verified capability profiles replace meaningless GPAs. The world sees how they think, not just what they memorized.
Infrastructure becomes invisible. Verification is so standard that every platform plugs into it. ELITE becomes the trust layer everything runs on.
Launchpad solves tomorrow's problems. We see what the world needs 18 months early and build it: workforce planning, career transitions, talent insurance, emerging skills.
Ten million people get access. Those who would've been filtered out by zip code or school name now compete on what they can actually do.
The language shifts. "I can't get hired without credentials" becomes "I earned this because I proved it." Proof replaces claims. Infrastructure replaces gatekeeping.
Not just a bigger platform. A different system entirely.
Why This Matters (Beyond the Business)
This is about human dignity and economic justice.
Right now:
A brilliant developer in Lagos can't get hired by a Silicon Valley company, even though she's better than most local applicants. Not because she lacks capability. Because she lacks visibility.
A student from a working-class neighborhood can't break into consulting or tech because they don't have the right alma mater or family connections — even though they out-think and out-work many Ivy League graduates.
A 45-year-old professional changing careers feels invisible because hiring systems see "years of experience in Field A" and can't recognize the transferable capability they've built.
These aren't edge cases. These are system failures.
And they're not individual failures or moral failures. They're infrastructure failures.
Build the right infrastructure, and the world changes.
Economic opportunity flows toward capability instead of pedigree. Careers become paths forward based on what you've proven, not what your resume claims or who you know.
People stop being filtered out by proxies.
They start being seen for what they can actually do.
That's not just better hiring. That's justice at scale.
Who This Is For
This manifesto is for three groups of people:
If You're a Professional or Student
If you've ever felt invisible to the system — if you've ever known you were capable but couldn't prove it in the way the world demanded — this is for you.
There's nothing wrong with you. The infrastructure has been broken. ELITE exists to make your real capability visible.
If You Run an Organization
If you're tired of mis-hires, tired of guessing, tired of spending massive budgets only to watch great people slip through the cracks — this is for you.
There's finally a way to see talent clearly and hire on truth, not proxies.
If You're an Investor, Advisor, or Partner
This is one of those rare opportunities where impact and returns align completely.
You're not choosing between doing good and doing well. Solving a problem this fundamental — one that affects over a billion people and every organization that hires — creates extraordinary value because the mission matters so much.
The infrastructure we're building becomes more valuable as more people use it. The network effects are massive. The TAM is essentially every professional on earth. And we're early enough that you're investing in the foundation, not just another layer.
If you've ever looked at a hiring decision and thought, "There has to be a better way to see who's actually capable" — you already understand the opportunity.
If you've watched talented people get overlooked because the system couldn't see them — you already know why this has to exist.
We're looking for partners who see both: the world-changing mission and the category-defining business.
If that's you, let's talk.
ELITE isn't just a startup.
It's infrastructure for a world that sees people for who they really are.
And this is only the beginning.
If that resonates — if you see the world we're building and want to be part of making it real —