The a16z Show
00:13:17 · S2
[00:13:17] S2: Yeah. Completely agree. I would say for a lot of this young talent too, or talent that just... Exceptional talent that maybe wants to make a career change, it can be really hard to find what are those companies that they should go towards. You hear about the big companies and the big companies have a monopoly around attention because you consistently hear their names again and again, but you don't hear about some of these smaller startups. And so I know that's something that you guys have been very focused on. I know famously Katie Kirsch with her LinkedIn posts is one of the best ways to find out about new types of jobs within the a16z Portco world. But tell me what Cosign's role is here.
00:13:55 · David Booth
[00:13:55] S0: There's... I mean, if you think, again, Awards Live Now, they're kind of community generated lists. They're lists that anybody can nominate to. There are lists all across... I mean, it's one of the core things that we're playing with. I think of Cosign in sort of these three layers. One is it's almost like Wikipedia style. You've scaffolded out profiles, but 40, 50,000 people across the site now, you can just... You can click through. You can rabbit hole up and down the companies or investors back to people. The next layer up is list. It's a way of doing a lightweight curation. So you can go to many... I think about 400 people at this point have made lists of companies. Packy McCormick, Not Boring, is one of my favorite examples. I'll go and, you know, Packing's got 36 companies listed there, which he and his time that he takes to write and research thinks are really interesting, vertically integrated, you know, companies that somebody who reads Not Boring might be interested in going to work at. But then that equivalent across of however many, like, angel investors and GPs at great funds, These are the companies that if you're looking for something, you should go and join one of these. If you go and sort of dig into, there's there's this tabcosign.co/lists. You can scroll down. It's a... It's an infinite scroll, and you go through all of these different subsets of of the company ones, but also people. Yeah. What if you could look at every, you know, different individual list? There's sort of the Interact fellows, the Thiel fellows, the different lists that are being created over time, and see where they intersect. See where the, you know, the Interact fellows of 2014 are now is the one that has to be on my screen
00:15:25 · S2, David Booth, Dhruv Gupta
[00:15:25] S2: Wow. [00:15:25] S0: In front of mind. And we think that by having... So if if there if there are all these profiles for, you know, 50,000 really interesting people in the industry, there's this lightweight layer of curation that sits on top of that. Then the the cherry on top of that is the cosign. You talk about that's the it's the very intentional given from me to you to say, I... This is somebody that I would work with anywhere, someone that I think is gonna be great in the world doesn't know yet, or someone that, you know, changed my career and helped put me in in business. And honestly, I I do wanna say as [00:15:55] S3: well, this is very, [00:15:55] S0: early in this product's development. There is a lot more that we're we're testing, iterating on live. I would encourage everyone to go on go and click around and and and, like, flag anything you see for us. You're like, you know, there's still some rough edges on the experience. Yeah. Cosign's particularly we're gonna be leaning in on in the future. I think one of the most important things Dhruv is very, very passionate about this given his story and Brent and things as well is is I think there is, like, one of the most interesting things this could do is be that opportunity for the next 50,000 Dhruv's. Yeah. It has no equal, but, you know, there's another 50,000... How many how many thousand people out there just have incredible potential and they haven't been discovered yet?
00:15:55 · David Booth, S2
[00:15:55] S0: early in this product's development. There is a lot more that we're we're testing, iterating on live. I would encourage everyone to go on go and click around and and and, like, flag anything you see for us. You're like, you know, there's still some rough edges on the experience. Yeah. Cosign's particularly we're gonna be leaning in on in the future. I think one of the most important things Dhruv is very, very passionate about this given his story and Brent and things as well is is I think there is, like, one of the most interesting things this could do is be that opportunity for the next 50,000 Dhruv's. Yeah. It has no equal, but, you know, there's another 50,000... How many how many thousand people out there just have incredible potential and they haven't been discovered yet? [00:16:33] S2: And they haven't been discovered yet. Yeah. 100%. I especially think about that when it comes to a global, you know, at a global level because it's not just in The United States. There's probably some amazing exceptional people in other countries that can never find out about the opportunities here in The US. And now with social media, with ability to network across borders, who knows what's going to be possible? We can tap into everyone's untapped potential. You know?
00:16:33 · S2, Dhruv Gupta
[00:16:33] S2: And they haven't been discovered yet. Yeah. 100%. I especially think about that when it comes to a global, you know, at a global level because it's not just in The United States. There's probably some amazing exceptional people in other countries that can never find out about the opportunities here in The US. And now with social media, with ability to network across borders, who knows what's going to be possible? We can tap into everyone's untapped potential. You know? [00:16:58] S3: Yeah. It's incredible. Back when I was at MTS when we were trying to hire engineers, there was a 17 year old kid from Sweden who, like, reached out to me about that role. And even though we weren't able to have him work with us at MTS, I've been able to help him in other ways in his career. And I'm sure that there's so many other thousands of young people like that around the world too. Yeah. [00:17:18] S2: I am really curious to hear about this agent piece. You, I know, work on the software, the tech behind this entire product. How do lists and then the ability of agents to then parse those lists and get information might create the next data layer for these hidden networks behind the startup ecosystem?
00:17:39 · Dhruv Gupta
[00:17:39] S3: Yeah. So I think that one thing that, like, LinkedIn will never do is introduce an MCP that allows you to have vast search access over the graph. So even though there are so many thousands, hundreds of thousands of accounts on LinkedIn, your ability to, like, find the people that you need is limited. And the same thing for companies. I think I remember back when I was, like, in New York this summer, I wanted to start, like, meeting people who I thought I might be able to work for one day. So I Googled, like, who are the best startups in New York? And Gemini gave me, like, a pretty bad answer. I switched to ChatGPT. It also gave me a pretty bad answer. I think that that, like, whole data layer of information is kind of missing right now. Yep. And our hope is that with Cosign, with people contributing to their profiles, contributing to lists, enriching our graph even more, as agents are able to to, like, search through that, we'll be able to get like much better answers to those questions, much better answers to those questions personalized to you. Because like as you are interacting with the platform, we're getting a better understanding of what you're looking for, what you would want to do, what answers would like make you the happiest. And we want you to also be able to access these agents anywhere. We have like our on platform Ask Cosign feature, but we also have an iMessage agent. We also have a personal MCP that lets you connect your Muse, your Grok bot, your Instinct, etcetera, to the platform. And we're gonna keep on building more and more of those types of integrations to make this truly the first kind of agent native professional networking platform.