It started with my daughter.
A story about a job market, a first attempt called Forte, and why the reason behind Kleoverse hasn't changed.
It started with my daughter.
In 2022, I watched my 20-year-old daughter try to find her place in the job market.
She did what young people are told to do.
Join job platforms. Write a resume. Write a cover letter. Enter the same information again. Answer the same questions again. Try to make a limited amount of experience sound impressive enough to get through systems designed to filter people.
And then wait.
Sometimes the result was nothing.
Sometimes it was another rejection.
Sometimes it was a WhatsApp message about a waiter shift starting in four hours. Essentially a race to see who could respond first.
I kept thinking:
Is this really the best we can do?
People are more than two pages of bullet points.
The problem wasn't my daughter. The problem was the system we were asking her to fit into.
A resume asks someone at the beginning of their career to compress who they are into job titles, dates, education, keywords, and carefully written bullet points.
But being good at writing a resume doesn't mean you'll be good at the job.
Dates
Education
Keywords
Bullet points
Motivation
Potential
Projects and interests
Achievements and evidence
And being inexperienced doesn't mean you don't have capability, motivation, potential, projects, interests, achievements, or evidence of what you can do.
That realization started a journey that I've now been on for years.
Forte was the first attempt.
I founded ForteAI because I wanted to challenge resume-first hiring.
The idea was simple: what if people didn't have to keep rewriting themselves for every opportunity?
We started building Adaptive Profiles. Living professional profiles that could evolve as a person evolved and present the parts of their experience that mattered in a particular context.
At the time, I described it as something like a book of your professional life.
The whole book belongs to you. Different people don't necessarily need to read every chapter.
A recruiter might need to understand your relevant experience.
The underlying person doesn't change. The context does.
That idea stayed with me.
Then I realized the problem was bigger than resumes.
The deeper I went, the more obvious it became. Your professional identity is everywhere.
And every new platform asks you to reconstruct yourself again.
We haven't built professional identity around the person.
We've built copies of people around platforms.
That's the problem I'm now trying to solve with Kleoverse.
Kleoverse is the evolution of that original idea.
Kleoverse isn't about making a better resume.
And I don't want it to become another professional profile platform where you fill in boxes and maintain yet another version of yourself.
The ambition is much bigger:
One living, user-controlled professional identity grounded in what you've actually done.
Instead of repeatedly telling platforms who you are, your professional identity should be able to evolve with you.
AI makes this more important, not less.
When I wrote the original story in 2024, generative AI was already changing hiring.
Now there's another question: what happens when AI starts discovering people?
That is fundamentally different from searching a database for a job title and five keywords.
But there's a problem. AI needs reliable context. If the information about us is fragmented, outdated, self-reported, or inaccessible, AI either has an incomplete picture or starts making assumptions.
Neither is good enough. That's why Kleoverse is being built around evidence, provenance, and explicit uncertainty.
AI should help understand reality, not invent a better version of it.
Your professional identity should belong to you.
This has become the principle underneath everything I'm building.
And your professional identity shouldn't have to start from zero every time you enter another platform.
The reason hasn't changed.
But the reason I started hasn't really changed.
My daughter was my fast charger and driving force.
I wanted her, and people like her, to have a better way to show what they can do.
Those are much more interesting questions.
I'm still betting on people.
I wrote something in 2024 that I still believe.
When things go wrong, I'd rather bet on the person who rises to the occasion than the person who simply looks best on paper.
A resume has a hard time showing you that person.
A static profile has a hard time showing you that person.
Maybe technology can finally help us do better. That's what I'm trying to find out.
That's why I'm building Kleoverse.
Jan ValkonenFounder of current Kleoverse