The CV is dead, long live the scars
My read is that we're living through the moment when the top end of the job market (the part that pays well) has stopped believing the paper. It no longer buys qualifications, it buys evidence.
And there's a very practical reason behind it: with AI generating polished CVs by the million, perfect cover letters and airbrushed LinkedIn profiles, the filter has moved. The verifiable wins. A project that exists, a company that billed, a product people used, a piece of content that moved someone to do something. A prompt doesn't generate that.
So here's the play: if you're building your career (whether or not you plan to start something), stop optimising your CV and start optimising your portfolio of things done. I don't mean a nice PDF. I mean real projects, with a name, a date, and a measurable result or a story you can account for.
And if you're building a company, even more so. Every project you push through, even one that fails, is a lifelong asset. It's a scar the market pays for. One failure you actually executed says more about you than ten master's degrees.
What I learned
What I take from this round through the market isn't the financial validation (which does feed the ego, I won't lie). It's the confirmation of an old hunch: the education system and the labour system had been decoupled for decades, and the labour side has finally noticed.
When I was 14 I thought it intuitively, almost rebelliously. Today I think it from first principles: knowledge without execution is an ornament. Value is generated by whoever moves atoms, code, money or people.
And my bet is that this will sharpen over the coming years. The easier it becomes to generate appearances with AI, the higher the price of the verifiable will go. Of the person who can point at something real and say: I made this.
On the radar
- TIME creates an invisible site purely for AI crawlers to read, slipping advertising into ChatGPT's answers. SEO is dead, AIO (AI Optimization) begins. And with it, an opaque advertising market that's about to explode.
- Bill Gates says that in 20 years the current capitalist framework will stop working because of AI and robots. When the man who sold Windows to half the planet tells you the system is ending, something is moving. I don't relax, I start building.
- Framework confirms a mass breach: all its customers affected after a zero-day at its BI provider. Your security is worth whatever your weakest supplier is worth. Auditing the stack is no longer optional.
- Kalshi launches Blanket, an AI for SMEs to hedge risk using prediction markets. Hedge fund tooling reaching the self-employed. The barrier between small business and corporation is evaporating.
The actionable advice
Do this exercise today, it takes 20 minutes: open a blank document and write a list of the 10 most relevant things you've done professionally. Not what you studied, not where you worked. What you did, what you built, what you moved. If you struggle to fill the list, you now know what to invest the next few months in. If you fill it quickly, you know exactly what to say the next time someone asks what you do.
Behind VIVIO
All of this connects with something we live daily at VIVIO: influencer marketing is exactly the CV problem, cubed.
A creator can have a perfect feed, bought followers, inflated engagement and a bio promising the earth. All of that is the digital version of the airbrushed CV. What matters is the verifiable: does it move real sales? Does their audience respond? Does the campaign data say what they say it says?
My view as a founder is that the future of the sector won't be won by the biggest platforms or the ones with the most creators, but by the ones that can separate smoke from verifiable data. That's where we're betting.
This is a version of what I send every week, unfiltered, in my newsletter "Eso no fue suerte". If you want the rest, subscribe for free.