Güld: The Operating System for Skilled Work
Co-Founder & Systems Architect (In Development)
01 / Context
Güld is the TradeOS—the career operating system for skilled labor. Electricians, plumbers, welders, carpenters: the hands that build our world have never had software built for them. We founded Güld to change that—to design a platform that brings dignity, structure, and continuity to the trades.
Today, skilled workers manage their livelihoods across paper certifications, fragmented associations, and disconnected payroll systems. Güld’s mission is to give them one digital identity, one ledger of proof, and one lifetime of career mobility. From apprenticeship to retirement, Güld creates a full-stack ecosystem where work, credentials, payments, and legacy coexist.
We’re building the first closed-loop economy for essential work, merging the precision of SaaS systems with the soul of human craft.
02 / What I Walked Into
The idea was deceptively simple—and technically massive.
We saw a broken system with invisible labor at its core. The trades economy runs on generational trust and analog workflows: apprenticeships tracked by memory, licensing buried in paperwork, and business operations still tied to pen and paper. There was no digital backbone connecting it all. Every point in the trades career journey is fractured:
Training still lives in physical classrooms, geographically bound and bureaucratic.
Licensing is handled differently in every state, with no shared database or digital validation.
Apprenticeships depend on who you know, not what you can prove.
Business operations run on borrowed tools: QuickBooks for invoices, Jobber for dispatch, Gusto for payroll—none speaking to the others.
Reputation is reduced to unreliable reviews on consumer platforms.
The result: a profession that keeps the lights on but can’t see itself clearly.
So, we started by asking a hard question: what would it look like if skilled workers had the same software leverage as founders?
Our challenge wasn’t adoption—it was translation. How do you build a system that understands tradespeople’s realities without trying to “techify” their culture? That became the foundation: Güld wouldn’t replace tradition. It would preserve it digitally, to unify the fragmented systems that make up a skilled career into one environment. A system of dignity, trust, and verification.
03 / What I’m Actually Doing
Güld isn’t software—it’s a system.
I’m building it as infrastructure: a digital backbone for the trades that carries the weight of proof, trust, and continuity.
My work lives where product, regulation, and anthropology intersect. I’m building from first principles—how labor, identity, and dignity should flow through a lifetime of skilled work—and translating that into logic.
System Architecture & Product Logic
Mapped the full career lifecycle—from apprentice to master—into a coherent digital ecosystem: Identity → Credential → Operation → Marketplace → Legacy.
Structured Güld’s closed-loop environment so every module feeds the next: a single identity, a single credential record, a single operational suite, and a self-reinforcing marketplace that generates verified reputation.
Defined the data architecture linking hours, licenses, CEUs, insurance, and compliance into one verifiable schema capable of audit-level proof.
Translated regulatory workflows into logic, modeling how apprenticeship hours, supervisor IDs, and CEUs flow into state licensing verification processes across jurisdictions.
Scoped the MVP to the foundational layer—a digital apprenticeship ledger and credential wallet that form the trust spine of the platform.
Field & Institutional Research
Conducted dozens of ethnographic interviews with apprentices, supervisors, union coordinators, and board administrators to expose hidden friction in every stage of licensing.
Catalogued state-by-state licensing frameworks, identifying where reciprocity or data digitization already exists and where manual entry still governs certification.
Began outreach to trade schools and boards, opening early conversations to validate data models and compliance reporting needs before any pilot is launched.
Documented the emotional economy of skilled work—the quiet fear of losing proof, the pride of legacy—and built those human realities into our system requirements.
Reverse-engineered licensing frameworks across North America to understand reciprocity, CEU obligations, and how data must be structured for legal acceptance.
Built a comparative taxonomy of FSM, marketplace, and educational tools (ServiceTitan, Jobber, Angi, Thumbtack, state portals) to identify lifecycle gaps and where Güld creates continuity rather than fragmentation.
Brand & Philosophical Architecture
Created the name Güld: a modern refraction of guild—the ancestral system of shared mastery and mutual accountability that once defined trades. The umlaut signals renewal: a bridge between heritage and the future.
Defined brand thesis and pillars—Trust, Continuity, and Craft—as operational principles, not marketing lines. Every product decision flows back to them.
Built the narrative core: Güld doesn’t automate labor; it dignifies it. The product exists to make invisible excellence visible—and verifiable.
Designed visual and linguistic scaffolding: modern minimalism with institutional gravity, rooted in ledgers, stamps, and proof documents that symbolize credibility.
Operational & Technical Groundwork
Authored technical specifications for our first hire: a full-stack engineer able to architect a compliance-ready identity infrastructure with intuitive UX.
Structured user journey models across all key stakeholders—to align design with real workflows.
Drafted investor and technical materials, framing Güld as a closed-loop system that reduces friction, fraud, and administrative overhead rather than a simple SaaS tool.
Built the early growth thesis: institutional onboarding (schools + boards → workers → businesses) as the primary loop; no paid ads, no B2C acquisition, only systemic adoption.
Established early compliance research framework—collecting documentation on data security, retention, and verification to anticipate state approval requirements.
This isn’t just “early-stage research.”
It’s the groundwork of an ecosystem—legal, architectural, human—so when we write the first line of code, it will already know what problem it’s solving and for whom.
04 / Building the System
I don’t build companies to move fast—I build them to endure.
Before code, before traction, before metrics, the work begins with architecture: of systems, of people, of thought. Güld is no different. It’s a startup, yes—but it’s also a framework for dignity at scale. My job is to ensure that when growth comes, the infrastructure can hold it.
Operational Architecture
Startups break where their structure doesn’t match their mission.
So I treat operations like narrative: everything must reinforce the central truth.
Decision Stack. I built Güld’s operational scaffolding early—clarifying which systems centralize trust and which preserve user control and institutional autonomy.
Compliance as culture. Instead of viewing regulation as red tape, I treat it as product design—every licensing rule, every audit requirement, every CEU submission becomes a design constraint that sharpens clarity.
Early systems design. I wrote internal operating manuals before hiring began—documenting workflows, decision paths, and escalation models so future teams inherit clarity, not chaos.
Scalable rituals. Weekly debriefs, idea backlogs, and feedback loops are embedded now, while the team is small. Systems age well when they’re built with rhythm.
Structure isn’t bureaucracy—it’s freedom you can scale.
Strategic Growth Design
Growth starts as hypothesis, not headcount.
I think about marketing and distribution like I think about design: story first, system second.
Our growth strategy centers on trust networks—industry institutions and training partners. One partner unlocks hundreds of workers; one approval builds credibility at the system level.
Proof > Promise. Early storytelling isn’t about ambition; it’s about showing process. Every investor deck, every landing page is written to make people believe in inevitability, not hype.
User as distributor. Tradespeople have one of the strongest word-of-mouth ecosystems in the world. I’m designing Güld’s early experience so that every verified credential becomes both proof and promotion.
Growth by coherence. The marketing engine is the product engine—aligned language, consistent feedback, and truth-driven storytelling.
When a company speaks the same language inside and out, growth compounds naturally.
Founding Philosophy
Güld began with a simple frustration: the people who build our world are the ones technology forgot.
We build tools for everyone except the ones who lay the brick, wire the walls, pour the concrete, and keep our lights on. These workers spend 75% of their time chasing paperwork instead of perfecting their craft—not because they want to, but because the system demands it. That’s the problem I couldn’t ignore.
I wanted to make their lives lighter.
To build for the people who build everything else.
Every decision at Güld starts from that belief: technology should serve the worker, not the other way around.
We’re reimagining what it means to work in the trades—where proof of skill doesn’t live in a drawer, where compliance isn’t chaos, and where digital tools give time back.
Our philosophy is rooted in three truths:
Care is infrastructure. Every workflow we design begins with empathy for the human doing the work.
Design follows respect. If the system feels heavy, we failed. If it feels effortless, we’ve honored the craft.
Technology should dignify, not disrupt. The best innovation doesn’t replace people—it removes friction so they can thrive.
That’s what Güld is: a framework for dignity, built by those who still believe good work should be seen, trusted, and celebrated.
05 / What Comes Next
Güld is entering our season of construction, not commentary. The system is architected—now it’s about giving that architecture weight, texture, and proof.
The next chapter focuses on strength, not speed.
We’re converting research into practice, pilots into principles, and design into something that holds under real-world load.
Our direction is clear:
From research to rhythm. Every insight gathered from tradespeople, unions, and training institutions is becoming a living feedback engine inside the product. We’re translating human experience into product logic—so that the software learns as the industry moves.
From trust to traction. Güld’s first public interactions will not be marketing moments but credibility tests. Each integration and partnership must reinforce the same truth: the system works, and it works for the people who make everything else work.
From platform to ecosystem. Güld will be less a single product and more an open scaffolding for others to build on—a framework of verification and reputation that strengthens with every connection.
From identity to dignity. The ultimate goal is to return time, transparency, and ownership to the tradesperson—reducing bureaucracy so they can focus on mastery.
Our internal roadmap is far more detailed than we share here—some blueprints are better kept quiet until the foundation sets. What matters is intent: Güld will launch strong, evolve responsibly, and scale only where the structure can sustain.
06 / Learnings & What I’m Still Learning
Güld has reminded me that innovation isn’t invention—it’s translation. To build technology for the trades, you have to understand law, language, legacy, and labor at once.
What I’ve learned
That systems design begins with anthropology, not wireframes. You cannot automate what you don’t understand. I’ve learned to sit inside the workflow of a tradesperson, tracing every manual form and phone call until the real bottlenecks show themselves.
That policy and product are inseparable. A button on-screen can shift compliance behavior in the real world—and if you get it wrong, you cost someone their license, their livelihood, their dignity.
That designing for legacy industries means writing code for people who have seen a hundred software promises fade. Trust is not a feature; it’s a currency earned line by line.
That growth in a platform like this isn’t measured by registrations or MRR but by time restored—the hours a worker gets back when bureaucracy no longer owns them.
That you can’t build credibility in isolation. I’ve learned to navigate regulators, unions, engineers, and end-users in one conversation, aligning speed with compliance and empathy with efficiency.
What I’m still learning
How to model governance so that power stays distributed—so Güld can scale without drifting into another platform that extracts more than it gives.
How to translate regulation into readable design: building compliance directly into UX so users stay protected without realizing they’re being protected.
How to recruit engineers who don’t just want to build fast, but want to build right—people who understand that dignity is a design constraint, not a pitch slide.
How to think in decades while delivering in sprints. To balance the architecture of permanence with the urgency of product-market fit.
How to lead a company whose success will be invisible if done right—because when Güld works, bureaucracy disappears, and all that remains is work itself.
Güld is teaching me that the future of work is not automation—it’s recognition.
We’re not digitizing labor; we’re dignifying it.
We build for those who build everything else.
*Certain architectural and operational details have been omitted to protect partner confidentiality and preserve competitive advantage.
