by Nadav Zeimer

Every platform that ever mattered almost died in the same graveyard. Not in the boardroom. Not from lack of funding. Not because the technology failed. Platforms die in the gap between “built” and “used.” They die in that eerie silence after the engineers shake hands and the product sits there, live, ready, and completely empty. Silicon Valley calls it the cold start problem. Economists call it the chicken-and-egg dilemma. I call it the moment of truth—because everything you’ve built is just theory until somebody shows up to use it.

Imagine Airbnb with no listings. YouTube with no videos. The App Store launched with five hundred apps because Apple begged developers to build for a phone nobody owned yet. Every two-sided platform faces the same impossible ask: convince one side to show up before the other side has any reason to be there. Drivers had to sign up for Uber before any riders had even downloaded the app. The history of technology is littered with platforms that were beautifully engineered and never used. Not because they were bad. Because nobody went first.

Nobody knows who posted the first Airbnb listing or drove the first Uber ride. Once a platform reaches escape velocity, the origin story gets compressed into myth and the early adopters disappear into the crowd. But there is a window—a brief, fragile window—when the people who go first are the entire platform. When their judgment, their reputation, and their willingness to take a risk on something unproven is the only thing standing between an idea and oblivion. That’s the window HSCred is in right now.

Now take the cold start problem and drop it into education—an industry where trust moves at glacial speed, where reputations are earned over decades and lost in a news cycle, where every failed pilot becomes a cautionary tale that district leaders whisper to each other at conferences for years afterward. The cold start problem in education isn’t just hard. It’s the graveyard where good ideas go to rest in peace.

HSCred is at the edge of that graveyard. Whether we pass it depends on what happens next.

This month, for the first time, professors are building channels on a platform designed to publish the academic work of high school students—evaluated with the same rigor that scholars apply to each other. At the same time, on the other side of the Pacific, a parallel team is doing the same thing from Osaka. The technology is live. The first editors are setting their rubrics and content resources. No student work has been published yet. But the people who will make that possible have signed on, and the first students are invited to submit.

I want to acknowledge those people. The early adopters. But before I get to names, I want to say something about what we can see just past the graveyard: an empty ocean of opportunity. There is no competition here. Not yet. Let me be precise about what I mean. Platforms that deal in alternative assessment do exist. Mastery.org, owned by ETS, offers competency-based records—and they do it well. Schools using CBA frameworks are doing important work. FairTest and the Learning Policy Institute, High Tech High and Big Picture Learning, EL Education and the New York Performance Standards Consortium and its nearly forty member schools—so many organizations have been working shoulder-to-shoulder for decades to push standardized testing out of everyone's way, and their work is succeeding. 

As testing is pushed aside, we have an opportunity to put something in those open waters. Portrait of a Graduate opened the channel legislatively. Portfolio systems threw out the standardized tests and the independent evaluators at the same time. They moved all the assessment work back inside the school building, asking teachers to track student progress across dozens of sub-skills using locally defined frameworks. The result is more paperwork for educators, more compliance infrastructure for administrators, and a portrait of each student that is filtered through whatever competency lens the school chose to adopt—a lens that may or may not match what a university on the other side of the country values. Consistency within each school building improved, but not across schools let alone over international borders. 

HSCred is the only platform that is built on paying for three objective evaluators while throwing away single correct answer keys. Subject-matter experts who don’t know the student and have no stake in the outcome. Standardized testing was right about only one thing: independent evaluation matters. 

Ten-minute academic recordings where students make their thinking visible, defend their reasoning, and demonstrate what they can actually do with feedback and revision. No competency checklist. No institutional filter. Just the work product, evaluated by expert judgment, published for the world to see on HSCred.app. That combination—independent evaluation plus authentic student work, scaled across borders through a decentralized network of professors—does not exist anywhere else. Not yet. 

The policy landscape is begging for it. New York’s Portrait of a Graduate framework requires alternatives to traditional assessments by 2027–28. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Students for Fair Admissions has left universities scrambling for constitutionally permissible ways to identify talent across diverse populations. GPAs are inflating, test scores are declining, and admissions offices are making life-altering decisions using information that everyone quietly agrees is unreliable because of artificial intelligence use. The post-test era is arriving whether or not anyone builds the infrastructure for it. Which brings us to our early adopters. Our flesh and blood account holders leading the first channels of published student videos. Like YouTube if every piece was by an 11th or 12th grade student after multiple rounds of academic feedback and revision, pre-validated by three academic content area experts. 

In New York, our surviving the graveyard of irrelevancy is thanks to the remarkable CCNY STEM Institute—and the CUNY CollegeNOW program that makes it possible for participating high school students to earn college credit. If you ever have a chance to visit these Saturday sessions where kids from around the city come to be trained by TAs from around the world to do hard science and engineering challenges and earn college credit, besides. 

The STEM Institute, based at The City College of New York within CUNY, is a rigorous academic enrichment program designed to help underrepresented middle and high school students reach their full academic potential. If you’ve worked in education equity in New York, you know the name. If you haven’t, know this: they exist because of the same conviction that drives HSCred—talent is distributed evenly and opportunity is not. Not all students at the STEM Institute are CollegeNOW students—the Institute also serves middle schoolers—but every student who will publish on HSCred through this partnership is a CollegeNOW student. That means that they will earn CUNY course credits for the same work being published on HSCred. CollegeNOW is a groundbreaking program that has been bridging the gap between high school and college since Leon Goldstein launched it from Kingsborough Community College in 1984. 

None of this would have happened without Kaliris Salas-Ramirez. Dr. Salas-Ramirez is a member of the HSCred advisory board, and it was her advocacy that got us through a door we couldn’t have opened alone. She connected us to Doris Cintron and Gareth Williams who make this STEM Institute real for hundreds and hundreds of kids. They feed them a wonderful lunch, too! The Logistics are seamless as students grab lunch after doing calculus all morning. In the world of education, warm introductions from trusted colleagues are the currency that makes everything move, and Kaliris spent hers on us before we had anything to show but a vision and a platform waiting for its first users.

Doris Cintron took the meeting—and then did something harder than taking a meeting. She initiated. In the world of cold starts, initiating is the whole game. Initiating means you evaluated something that had no track record and decided it was worth your name. Initiating means you moved first when moving first carried all the risk and none of the proof. Doris saw what HSCred could become for students at the STEM Institute and chose to act on that conviction rather than wait for someone else to go first.

Gareth Williams turned vision into operations. Anyone who has run a district initiative knows that the distance between “great idea” and “functioning pilot” is measured in logistics, and most great ideas are sullied in that gap. Gareth has been the person making this partnership executable—turning excitement into timelines, agreements into workflows, and a promising concept into something that professors could actually use. Jennifer C. Taveras, Associate Director, provided the steady coordination that transforms a launch plan from a document into a reality. Every district leader reading this knows the truth: execution lives and dies on the person managing the details that nobody sees.

And then came the professors. This is where the cold start problem either gets solved or doesn’t, because a platform that publishes student work is nothing without editors willing to define what “publishable” means.

Deepak Kapoor in physics signed on. Keydra Manns, a journalism instructor, signed on. They didn’t deliberate for months. They saw what Doris and Gareth had opened up and they asked the question that every visionary asks when something obvious finally becomes possible: “why did it take so long for this to exist?” These early adopters are the visionaries, able to see a future first and to initiate the logistics to bring it to reality. 

That question tells you everything. It means they’ve been seeing what the state officials saw passing POG and what the HSCred team learned from decades of work in NYC Transfer Schools. It means they understand, from their own experience evaluating student and scholarly work, that the infrastructure for recognizing high school talent has been missing. These professors are not “trying a tool.” They are building something that has no precedent. They are preparing to do for high school students what journal editors do for scholars: defining the bar, recruiting reviewers, protecting the integrity of the process, and putting their names on the result. Whether the model proves itself will depend on what the first published work looks like—and we’ll know soon.

While this is happening in New York, something equally significant is happening eight thousand miles away—and it’s happening faster because the Japanese school year is coming to a close in March. Professor Tamaki Akiko at Osaka University is already building her Tankyu channel. She may be ready before the CCNY STEM Institute. It was Professor Takahashi who introduced us to her, and that introduction set in motion something that neither side of the Pacific could have built alone.

If you’ve followed this blog series, you know why Japan has been cautious about attaching formal stakes to inquiry-based learning. Inquiry was protected by keeping it separate from anything that “counted.” The result is that some of the most remarkable student work in the world floats in a bubble, disconnected from the admissions process, invisible to the very institutions that claim to value independent thinking.

The channel model offers Japan something it has never had: a way to validate inquiry without corrupting it. And the team building it—Tamaki, Takahashi, and an extended community of volunteers and advocates including Fujiwara Sato and her daughter Hanako, whose coordination and bridge-building have been indispensable—understands what’s at stake. If this works, it resolves a tension that has paralyzed Japanese education reform for years.

Before we publish our first official channels, before new student videos are popping up, four student videos have already crossed the Pacific. Four students produced academic videos that we used as exemplars in our Japan symposium—real artifacts, demonstrating real thinking, strong enough to stand on their own in front of an audience of Japanese university professors and educators. Their names deserve to be here because they are about to become the first students ever invited to publish on HSCred: Noa Salas Adam, Jeremiah Dickerson, Mher Melikyan, and Autumn Wynn. Their work, will be the first to be evaluated for publication to the Japanese Tankyu channel. 

A student in New York produces work. A professor in Osaka treats it with the same seriousness she treats scholarly research. A platform makes it visible, reviewable, and permanent. The work doesn’t need a government or corporate bureaucracy to validate it. It doesn’t need an institutional partnership agreement to travel. A network of editors, a rubric, a panel of experts, and a student willing to show what they can do in the form of a recording. 

That is what solving the cold start problem looks like—not a grand launch, but a handful of people on two continents who decided this matters enough to go first. Whether it scales from here depends on whether the work speaks for itself. We believe it will.

For the superintendents and district leaders reading this: you know how hard it is to move from “purchased” to “adopted.” You can buy the best curriculum in the world, license the best platform, send out the most thoughtful implementation memo you’ve ever written, and still watch it die because nobody with real responsibilities chose to make it real when face-to-face with students. What is happening right now at the CCNY STEM Institute and at Osaka University is the beginning of adoption—not because someone mandated it, but because professionals who understand assessment looked at this system and decided it was worth their time and effort.

For the university admissions executives reading this: in the coming months, you may start seeing student work that arrives not as a GPA or a test score but as a link or QR code. If you follow it you find published work. Ten-minute academic presentations reviewed by a teacher, evaluated by three independent subject-matter experts, and permanently published to a professor’s academic channel. You won’t have to build anything or change your process. You’ll just have to decide what to do with it. 

For anyone advising a mayor or a governor on education: the post-test era is not a policy debate anymore. It’s a logistics question. The question is whether the infrastructure that replaces standardized testing will be built by organizations designed to serve students or organizations designed to serve shareholders. Right now, HSCred is the only platform doing what we’re doing—keeping independent evaluation while honoring the complexity of authentic student thought. That won’t last forever. The large education conglomerates will inevitably launch portfolio products that look similar from the outside. The question is whether a system built on the logic of academic peer review—transparent, decentralized, corruption-resistant—gets to prove itself before the old guard repackages compliance checklists to look like project-based work assessment.

We are in open water. We have zero published student work on the platform as of this writing. We have professors building channels, rubrics taking shape, and students preparing to submit. In April, HSCred will be a keynote sponsor at the annual conference of the National Partnership for Educational Access in Atlanta—a national gathering of education access leaders. What we’ll have to show by then will speak louder than anything I can write here.

But this post is about the people who took the hardest step in platform building by doing the simplest thing imaginable. They showed up.

Kaliris Salas-Ramirez, who opened the door. Doris Cintron, who walked through it. Gareth Williams and Jennifer C. Taveras, who built the runway. Keydra Manns, Deepak Kapoor, who are becoming the first editors. Takahashi Tetsu and Tamaki Akiko, who are building the same thing from the other side of the world. Fujiwara Sato and Hanako, who are thought partners to make such a bridge possible. And Noa, Jeremiah, Mher, and Autumn—four students whose work has already crossed an ocean before a single channel has officially gone live.

Every platform that ever mattered had a moment like this. A moment when the empty system started to breathe. When the theory became people, and the people became proof. When someone who didn’t have to show up, showed up anyway.

Now comes the part where you can help. The students at the CCNY STEM Institute are CollegeNOW students from underrepresented communities. HSCred charges students $100 per credit to coordinate independent evaluation—because keeping students in control of the incentive structure is how we prevent corruption. “Follow the money” and you see that it leads to the hands of students who are our VIP investors.  

For students who can’t afford that fee, we need donors willing to issue fee waivers to these promising young minds. Every $100 donated allows one student to submit one piece of to be validated as published academic work on HSCred. That money goes to pay the university experts who take their time to review the student work and evaluate it based on the rubric provided. Donations are fully tax-deductible in the United States and go directly to the Academic Capital Foundation’s Fee Waiver Scholarship Fund. If you believe that academic credentials shouldn’t be a luxury good, this is the most direct investment you can make: not in test prep, but each student’s published academic thinking.

Donate at academiccapital.org or every.org/academiccapital.

Student exemplar videos (with Japanese subtitles): Noa Salas Adam: youtu.be/_EGz2aObrbg Jeremiah Dickerson: youtu.be/iBLKfV8FUfk Mher Melikyan: youtu.be/QyT3KsewAlY Autumn Wynn: youtu.be/Nw-sQzYMcGc

Japan symposium: hscredjp.org | Slide deck: japan-slides-final-krmb2yo.gamma.site Symposium video: Part 1 (youtu.be/na-kICzMzZE) | Part 2 (youtu.be/XaEfLo9KYEQ)

Nadav Zeimer is the founder of HSCred, Inc. and a former NYC turnaround principal. #PassionForLearning #AcademicCapital #探究学習