By: Halden Reed – interviewer & journalist covering business, entrepreneurship, and finance
Establishing credibility used to depend on institutions. Royston G King argues that the system has weakened without being replaced by anything as clear, leaving founders to build credibility from uneven materials. Here he discusses what he thinks still works, including how he handles his own credentials.
Royston G King began working in digital marketing while studying business administration at the University of Southern California, running campaigns for local businesses before founding his own firm in 2018. He was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Monaco list, has advised more than 1,000 clients across over 100 industries, and his work has been covered in publications including Entrepreneur, Inc., USA Today, Chicago Tribune, and LA Weekly.
Much of what he does involves helping people establish that they are what they claim to be, and he has argued the task has become harder for two connected reasons.
“Institutional markers stopped carrying information,” said Royston G King. “A senior title at a company nobody has heard of tells you nothing. And there are now so many awards and lists and certifications, at wildly different levels of rigor, that a credential has become one more thing a buyer has to evaluate rather than something that ends the question.”
The second problem, in his account, is that the alternatives are easier to manufacture than the institutions were. Follower counts, appearances, and published articles can be acquired rather than earned, and any sophisticated buyer knows it. The result is that the most available signals are also the cheapest to fake, which degrades their value for the people who obtained them legitimately.
“That pushes everything toward evidence that is expensive to fake,” said Royston G King. “A detailed account of work you actually did, with specifics somebody could check. Sustained output on one subject over years, which a burst of activity cannot imitate. Coverage from a publication that did its own reporting, because an intermediary applied judgement you did not control. Those are harder to produce, and that is exactly why they count.”
“A credential has become one more thing a buyer has to evaluate rather than something that ends the question.” Royston G King
He applies the standard to himself, as shown in how he handles his own recognition.
“That was a nice marker along the way,” said Royston G King, of the Forbes listing. “But it tells you somebody cleared a bar at a particular moment. It does not tell you what they can do now. If you are deciding whether to work with me, I would rather you looked at the systems underneath the work, because that is the part that actually determines whether anything gets delivered.”
For founders building credibility deliberately, he has emphasized documentation over assertion. Claims about capability are universal and therefore carry no information. Accounts of specific problems addressed, including the parts that proved difficult, convey expertise in a way claims cannot, because a reader with domain knowledge can assess whether the account rings true.
“Write about the thing that did not work,” said Royston G King. “Everybody writes the version where it went well, and everybody discounts it automatically. The moment you include the approach you had to abandon, the rest of what you said becomes considerably more believable. It reads as somebody who was actually there.”
King has also raised a durability concern.
“If your entire public record lives on a platform, it belongs partly to that platform,” said Royston G King. “Distribution changes, policies change, and decisions get made that you had no part in. Keep the substantive work somewhere you own and use the platforms to distribute it. People get that backward constantly and then are surprised when it costs them.”
The shift toward AI-mediated discovery has added a further layer. Systems synthesizing information about a person draw on the whole body of text describing them, and King has argued that someone described consistently across many independent sources gets described consistently by those systems, while someone with a thin or fragmented record gets described vaguely or not at all. The correction is slower than the search era allowed, because the material has to exist before anything can draw on it.
His conclusion after close to a decade is that credibility has become a construction project rather than an inheritance, and that the people who handle it well treat it as continuous work rather than a problem to be solved once and then filed away.
