(our Founder & CEO) shares some of the important events from his life that motivated him to start True Group Inc. and develop platform.
Disclaimer: This blog post is not intended to offend or or or any individuals or parties involved. The goal of this blog post is to point out some of the inefficiencies and acknowledge them as one of the motivations behind developing platform.
The year was 2005. I was applying for a PhD program in Computer Science in the top US universities. I have applied to 14 US universities. On Dec 2nd 2015, I received the following email (see the screenshot below) from the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn), Penn Engineering, Office of Academic Programs, Graduate Admissions. I have redacted the name, email address and the phone numbers in the emails, to preserve their privacy.
In Summary, UPenn was concerned that my transcript is laminated and opened. Surprised at their response (“Your application will not go any further with the opened transcript”), I have spent couple of hours searching online and discovered that there is a lot of scam involving fake degrees and fake transcripts. There are “professionals” in India and creating the “highest quality fakes”. These fakes are often laminated. So, UPenn decided not to process any applications with opened and laminated credentials. All my credentials are valid and correct, but my application was not processed because IIT Kharagpur has no way to “securely send” valid transcripts and UPenn has no way to “efficiently validate applicants’ transcripts”.
I have applied to 14 universities and some of them rejected me because ‘they found a better candidate’ or ‘the research group is not looking for new PhD students’ etc etc. But my UPenn application not going further because of an “inefficient and broken system” is frustrating, to say the least.
After a week, I have recovered from this frustration and went back to my daily routine of reading research papers on Theoretical Computer Science. I said to myself “I will get into one of the remaining 13 universities and I have to focus on research and resolve the ” 😉
On a lighter note: There is a simple way to verify that my transcript is valid — ‘Simply open it and look at my grades’. I have received several B’s, some C’s and even couple of D’s. My CGPA is just average. Nobody in their right senses would create a fake transcript with those grades 🙂 During the last decade, whenever I met any IITian I first set them up telling (B-Tech from IIT Kharagpur, Masters from USC, PhD from GeorgiaTech, Taught at Princeton) and after they say “wow”, I bet with them that their CGPA at IIT is greater than mine. I never lost till date. I take pride in this fact 😉 In my defense, I was an all-rounder at IIT Kharagpur, balancing studies, serving as a ‘secretary of fine arts, modeling and dramatics’ of my hostel, painting, learning guitar and many more things.
A second incident: During summer 2010 (at the end of my fourth year as a PhD student at GeorgiaTech), I was offered an internship at Yahoo labs and the Yahoo HR team said they want to verify all my credentials (my IIT B-Tech degree, USC Master’s degree, work experience). Yahoo uses a third-party service to rigorously verify all credentials of potential employees / interns. when they found that he lied in his resume. This process is very rigorous, but very time-consuming. The verification of all my credentials took more than couple of months. Meanwhile, I was waiting with my fingers-crossed (figuratively speaking) and hoping these verifications happen soon, so that I can start my internship and earn some serious summer money for two months and see a bank balance of more than $1,000 dollars for the first time during my grad school 😉
Later that year, when I discovered white paper and the underlying , my first thought was to use the technology to build a ‘document integrity platform’ to issue tamper-proof credentials (degrees, transcripts, employment certificates, Visas, Identity documents, driver’s license etc), which can be verified instantaneously and securely on the .
Early 2011, I got busy with writing thesis and joined the CS department Princeton University in September 2011. I have spent the first couple of years teaching at Princeton, , keeping track of and hoping that somebody will develop a ‘document integrity platform’. To my relief, some entrepreneurs tried to develop a ‘credential verification solutions’. To my frustration, none of those solutions are perfect. So I started preparing myself to become a full-time entrepreneur and left Princeton in summer 2015.
Today, I am very glad we have a complete data integrity solution (for universities, employers and enterprises) and I am very excited that we are preventing fraud and corruption in several areas using our platform.
Every week I read several stories about fraud and corruption online (Eg: the recent ). I approach the involved parties and explain how such instances can be rigorously prevented using technology.
I feel very fortunate to have discovered an exciting vision towards a fraud-free and efficient future. This discovery happened through the above mentioned unfortunate events. Sometimes the lowest points in your life have the greatest potential to show you the right path to your highest points.
Published at Mon, 15 Apr 2019 03:12:38 +0000
