Numinous is a protocol for the advancement of the human species
The Numinous Name
Numinous (/ˈnjuːmɪnəs/) is a term derived from the Latin numen, meaning "arousing spiritual or religious emotion; mysterious or awe-inspiring." As a company we chose the name Numinous because we are obsessed, in awe, and hold deep wonder for individual + collective human epistêmê (knowledge) and technê (applied knowledge). This name is because we are humbled by you, not ourselves.
Vision & Mission
The Numinous Vision → advance the human species through a composable, on-chain brain
The Numinous Mission → we’re creating an open network that allows anyone to coordinate humans, their knowledge, and their skills to conquer any problem set.
Background & Problem Statements
Employees are spending an average of 4.1 years inside of companies using and accruing skills as they traverse a series of tasks and projects as individual contributors or managers. When it’s time to switch employers, prospective employees get no formal, forward “credit” for their historical body of contributions. Their accomplishments are as trapped as the intellectual property sitting within their former company's closed MySQL servers. Further, when evaluating and talking with new prospective employers, employees have to distill years of performance into, oftentimes, interviews as brief as 15-30 minutes. For the candidates that pass the interview stages and start with a new employer, they find themselves starting from scratch to rebuild all of the trust they previously accrued at the former employer, now with a completely new set of managers and colleagues. The exception proves the rule here when previous colleagues recruit each other to their new firms and benefit from instant clout. So much energy is lost when employees switch organizations. This is why reverence is reserved for the “ex-uber”, “ex-airbnb”, etc. alumni; it’s one of the best, but almost useless, proxies employers have to assess a candidate independent of what they tell them.
On the employer side, managers are responsible for assessing candidates based on an unaudited resume with often dubious claims, self-selected references, and no legal recourse for candidates that misrepresent themselves., I have conducted 100+ interviews for technical roles as part of a16z, Founder’s Fund, and Norwest backed companies and have seen first hand how prospective employees try to tie themselves to group outcomes where they had little to no direct influence, overstate KPI contributions, outright lie about interpersonal skills, amongst other tactics to get the job.
The current state is a lose-lose where employee contributions are left unverified and trapped in past employers and the distant memories of their former managers, and future employers are left making long term, expensive, and high stake hiring decisions with unverified and incomplete information.
Web3 enables us to move from a world where skills are self-certified and siloed within employers to one where skills are verified by employers and exposed through NFTs on public blockchains that are transportable from dao to dao, employer to employer, or project to project.
Proposal
Numinous is the platform that enables DAOs, employers, managers, universities, trade schools, and freelance project owners (collectively to be referred to as “entities” hereafter) to mint and issue skill-based NFTs to contributors, employees, and freelancers (collectively to be referred to as “contributors” hereafter) respectively. Numinous is publishing an open source skill dictionary and standardization index that entities can reference when issuing NFTs (through the Numinous platform) to contributors as rewards and validation for their work.
Through this mechanism, Numinous is upgrading the static, unverified “paper resume” (which even in digital form is highly skeuomorphic) to a living, publicly verifiable individual “skill graph” that contributors can take with them from entity to entity
Entities issuing NFTs through Numinous will have their public key tied to the issuance which provides an accountability and reputation layer for both entities and contributors. This can be thought of as Google’s Page Rank, but for wallets (links) and skills (web pages). Reputation becomes an important mechanism for the verification of knowledge based work.
Over time, Numinous will capture a larger, collective skill graph to help entities analyze, compose, and refactor their organizations using the exact right combination of skills to maximize contributor utilization and cost efficiencies.
Defensibility
There’s no incentive for any single entity to pursue this idea since one of the key value propositions here is the transparency and portability of skills which works against what entities want, to attract and retain talent. And although entities may hesitate to utilize Numinous for their contributors, if any of their competitors do, it will become table stakes as a contributor (employee) benefit. (Contributors will flock to platforms that do utilize Numinous which means entities will risk brain drain if they do not adopt it) the incentive for entities to partner versus compete is far greater.
The Numinous mechanics also foster network effects where the more entities and contributors that join, the more the breadth and validity of the network and NFTs extends and strengthens which attracts more entities and contributors, repeat.
[Need to add more about the reputation system, brand, and the schelling point driven by instantiating the skill ontology + taxonomy (i.e. non-conforming NFTs that are issued outside of the Numinous platform would be the Web2 equivalent of a Harvard degree versus a self-certified YouTube course)
There’s no section yet for this but unlike digital art NFTs and platforms that are plagued with theft and right click save warriors, there’s little incentive for contributors to fake credentials since entities serve as a natural check and balance against this during each engagement.
Where We’re Starting
We’re starting out by allowing users to connect their wallet to three different “credential sources” and self-mint NFTs for bragging rights or to win jobs. This will allow us to bootstrap verified skills from existing platforms and jumpstart our “skill graph”. We just released the ability for engineers with at least 1 starred repo to mint an NFT indicating as such.
Business Model
TBD, but possibilities include:
Charge entities for each NFT awarded to contributors
Charge contributors for self minting NFTs
Charge entities a subscription for access to NFT skill library
Charge entities for access to the skill graph (future)
Create curriculum and tests and then charge for skill training and assessment
Partner with education institutions/trade schools for sponsored/branded NFTs
One-Line Descriptions
verify your skills and teleport them anywhere
web3-erizing resumes
skill protocol for web3
Additional Resources
Link to Video Intro/Pitch (2m)
Contact
Reach me at shaun@numinous.fyi