First Published on Ynetnews.com 18 May 2023
As you will probably already know, Elon Musk made headlines recently for charging users money to display blue ticks on twitter profiles, essentially declaring that anyone can verify themselves and do away with 3rd party verification. He fired an army of employees which were responsible for, along with policing content, deciding which special humans were important enough to sport the coveted blue tick next to their names.
Musk’s new plan was simple. Just pay a few shekels, and your profile is indistinguishable from your favorite celebrities. At least in theory anyway, and only if you don’t notice the discrepancy in the amount followers between your profile and the A-listers.
Tweeting out his plans for blue-tick reform on his own account, the Twittersphere erupted with memes, outrage along with immediate excited enquires from some asking when they can grab themselves the icon. Passionate arguments also broke out in the between total strangers, strangers and famous people, famous people and other celebs, social elites and business people and of course between influencers and the rest combined. Influencers feeling most under threat having invested a mini lifetime building their following, working every hour off the day to earn their blue tick status, a badge of honor, pride and undiluted ego. Hollywood actors and models, used to preferential treatment bestowed upon them by society, now found themselves in the same boat as you and I, stripped of freebies and forced to fork out real cash to feel good about ourselves. The outrage was immense. Vintage Twitter.
Some users, we all know them, were just pleased with what they saw as a victory against the system [or machine, or Matrix]. On the other side, some seasoned conformists were going as far as to demand that Twitter provide rainbow colored ticks to those accounts which have been verified to really truly be members of the LGBTQ+ community. Other colour ticks would be good enough for anyone account which has been policed and verified that he, her or they are indeed a ‘Him/Her/They’ as they claim in their profile description. Silly hour indeed!
With multiple sides emerging, each trying to read into the great mans motivations, a few reoccurring theories rose to the top.
The political theory; is this personal revenge on the elite?
The Pragmatic business theory; Was he just looking for a way to save manpower and/or a short term play for cash booster?
The social Theory; maybe, surmised some of the more conspiracy inclined, Musk was intentionally holding up a mirror to the absurdity of what a blue tick actually stands for in todays society.
Elon later explained in interview that his intentions were purely to increase revenue to the platform, but many still believe that the holding up a mirror to our own vanity theory remained his real puristic and ideological motivation.
Whatever his motivations were, the conversations around blue tick transparency had begin in earnest.
At least that’s true in the land of egocentric personalities, and the opinions they nobody is able to keep from sharing with the world, up to max 280 characters or Unicode glyphs of course!
But in the land of business, It’s still the Wild West. Linkedin in particular is a good case study. In its purest form, Linkedin is a jobs and recruitment platform, and professional profiles still list their previously held positions. Linkedin officially links the position to the corresponding company page and it becomes somewhat official if not exactly concrete evidence.
It’s certainly not a foolproof verification for the rest of the haughty self descriptive traits and skills e.g. ‘thought leader’ or ‘Truth Seeker’, but at least, the profile is being transparent and an official employee profile can be mostly verified. From a potential employers standpoint, they get the message.
I saw a funny meme the other day by a Linkedin connections poking fun at the colorful professional descriptions we give ourselves in our profiles (business connections on Linkedin are what friends are to Facebook or followers to Twitter). Is Anikin Skywalker’s job description simply “Assistant to the Emperor” or is Darth Vader, LORD a “CEO of Death Star 1,2, Chief of staff to Supreme Councillor, Lord of Dark Sith, Ex-Jedi Knight, Ex-General Army or Republic, Star Fighter Pilot, Lobbyist, Thought Leader, Activist, Leader, Inventor, Lightsabersmith, etc” ?
But let me ask you, more importantly, who is going to verify all that anyway?
There is a compelling and real issue with a lack transparency in the business and corporate world, namely regarding their own connections. And here lies the biggest bottle neck for businesses doing business with each other.
I can share an example I have come across personally as a startup founder who spends half of my time raising funds, which perfectly sums up the problem.
Because are hundreds of small VC and family funds with websites claiming unique investment thesis’s and reasons that their money is the savviest choice, the first thing any founder will do, is go and checkout their investment portfolios. This usually gives a complete picture to prospective startups. Actions talk louder than words, and if a VC has invested in one of your competitors for example, the founder immediately knows that his or her project may fit the funds thesis but probably faces a conflict of interest. So far so good, and logical.
But what if I told you that over 50% of the investment fund portfolios which I have prospectively looked a, list startups and corporations which didn’t really invest in? Yes, there might be a word play involved in the case study, or an advisor to the fund which may holds shares in one of them personally, or any other half truth to justify slapping at the top of the page the logos of Facebook and Wework, but it is still misinformation and grossly misleading.
Other example; online FX brokers (we have has our fair share in Israel unfortunately) and crypto exchanges unashamedly sporting bank logos on their homepage. In this case, its actually illegal. How many naive folk have fallen for scams, comforted by the sight of a corporate finance logo on a website? Whereas an FSA logo and number might link you to a regulatory governmental body’s website to verify a a merchants certificate, where does a logo of Credit Suisse Bank link to? Absolutely Nowhere. And here in lies another important part of the corporate transparency [or lack of] problem.
Changing direction slightly for just a moment, I want to digress towards another vertical of corporate business transparency and verification which requiring a solution (bare with me, it does tie in). As the reader will already know, we are collectively witnessing the emergence of generation which puts ethics at the forefront of consumerism. Although socially conscious buying is not necessarily a new movement and mostly manifested in virtue signaling on social media (probably with a blue tick profile), as evident by yearly increasing sales of popular products sold by tech empires with well known ethically dubious sources of smartphone hardware and electric car batteries. Non the less, the latest generations of consumers are more and more opting to put their money where their mouth is when spending their hard earned cash and let social social consciousness play a growing role in their purchasing decisions.
The fashion sector which has arguably most effected the past decade, has made the most reforms to that effect from top to bottom. You won’t see mink on the catwalk these days the same as high street labels are careful to sell their good ethics front and centre of any purchasing experience.
Coming back to, Inter-corporate business dealings, it is very, very different. Transparency is not a priority for corporation and in many cases actually counter productive.
The reality is, that on a civil level, there are big moves towards accountability and transparency and ways to earn trust and credibility. But on a corporate level and B2B; not so much.
So what is the solution? More biased oversight by self appointed technology police dishing out stars and ratings? Or even worse, more government medalling and red tape?
Or does the solution require a grass roots solution with the participation of a growing network of B2B connections, verified by themselves?
One Israeli startup, recently come out of stealth mode, has quietly been monitoring our social and corporate trajectory and having spent two years harnessing new emerging deep technologies, specifically AI (Artificial Intelligence), believes it has the engineered the solution to solve this very obvious problem. A problem which I am inclined to think has purposefully being ignored until now, and I will explain why I think so.
Putting aside our favored startup nation buzz-words like ‘innovative’ and ‘thinking outside the box’ and even (you will forgive me) ‘Chutzpa’ for a moment, the reason I chose to feature Venturefy AI in this article so far down, was to allow me to properly sketch the layout of corporate business territory (cue buzz-word ‘Eco-System’), and highlight the sheer enormity of the problem. And in my utterly biased opinion, a prerequisite for having the b*lls to attempt to create a new transparent norm in the face of the most powerful corps in the world is being a startup nation native founder in every sense. Does a massive problem always need a corresponding gigantic solution?
Venturfy AI doesn’t believe so. Quoting straight from their number #1 best rated product spot on ProductHunt:
“Venturefy is a new platform leveraging AI to create an open database of verified corporate relationships. It’s like a blue checkmark for businesses. It uses AI to verify B2B relationships to ensure that the relationship actually exists.
Venturefy also offers a way to protect your brand reputation. It'll scan the web for other brands that claim to work with you and send alerts when it finds others trying to leverage your brand name.”
The description seems simple enough, but as we have the implications are far more reaching if they do succeed in creating a new corporate standard.
And just like Elon Musk eventually did with blue ticks at Twitter, Josh Unsdorfer, CEO and Founder to Venturefy AI, also explained to me his motivations (albeit directly on the phone rather than being just one of 54m twitter followers).
“Our platform is to aiming to catalyze a paradigm shift in corporate transparency. More than just a tool - it's a reflection of a commitment to building a better, more transparent business world; transforming the way businesses operate by providing accurate and verified corporate relationship data.”
And there we have it - A blue tick for businesses, is good for business and good for the world. I have already signed up.
By the way, Josh is not your typical startup nation founder by any means either. Seemingly destined for a life in law having finished top of his class at the prestigious London Law school, he settled in Israel, emigrating in 2014 by way of traveling half the word first. Not exactly unit 8200 material.
Yet, he does make the point that spending countless sleepless nights, laptop open on the balcony as not to wake his four children all under the age of six (BL”H), relentlessly growing his network on zoom while simultaneously mapping out the architecture for an ambitious startup intent on dominating new socially conscious standards for corporate transparency, was not what he expected either.
Then again, that’s what living Israel can do you if you’re not careful. The startup nation spirit, has a way of accelerating entrepreneurial potential. And since we don’t do blue ticks on news sites (yet), I hope the team at Venturefy AI will make do with a well deserved thumbs up instead.
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