“When I was at Harvard…”

“While working at McKinsey..”

“After Goldman…”

If you live in NYC, you’ve probably met folks who work this into the first 5 minutes of their conversation with you. It is credentialing at its finest.

It is intended to make you think “Holy shit – you went to Harvard. You must be smart.” or “Holy shit, take my money”.

It must work in some locations outside of NYC or San Fran which aren’t overrun with these types of folks and hence why it’s used, but when I hear it, it’s a warning sign.  It’s unnecessary and in my highly unscientific dataset, there is a high correlation with this type of credentialing and douchey’ness.

Now that startups are hot/en vogue, the new credential I’m seeing is is having raised venture capital.

At startup events (which I do try to avoid), I will hear the following during introductions from time to time

I’m Dick, the CEO of BFD an eCommerce firm that sells catnip for dogs. We just raised $5.4M from XYZ Ventures and 123 Partners in our Series A.

If XYZ ventures is a big dawg in venture, all the better. But again, I don’t get the purpose of this.  And my extensive analysis seems to highlight that folks who lead with this are equally vacuous.

Of course, given the beauty of pattern matching, I’m now hearing multi-credential droppings.

When I was at McKinsey, I noticed this problem and left to build BFD which recently raised $5.4M from XYZ Ventures and 123 Partners in our Series A.

I love it.