The a16z Show
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.
00:19:19 · S2, David Booth
[00:19:19] S2: Wow. That's so interesting to me because a lot of this information right now is completely gated away. You can't actually parse it. [00:19:26] S0: There's the... There's there's so many fun layers to this, and and I'm gonna start with a call out to people who are thinking about this kind of stuff. DMs are open, and I wanna chat. But there is... A lot of what Dhruv is talking about rightly is about the search problem. And search is, I think, still a problem, but it's getting easier and easier. There is a new... Yeah. Exa is phenomenal. There's so many different databases that you can you can search across. You've got more powerful models. I think that there's kind of two two ways to find... To get alpha in talent. One of them is like a quant fund. You take the same public information that every other fund has, but you can analyze it [00:20:01] S2: better. Mhmm.
00:20:01 · David Booth
[00:20:01] S0: And I think that as models get better, you... You're gonna be able to analyze the public commoditized talent data. The the thing that I've been thinking a lot about is what does it mean when agents can kind of negotiate with each other on behalf of their owners? So I've been following along so closely with a personal agent wave of the last, like, month. Seems insane that it's only like a let's say, month or two, users hit 10,000,000 users now, I think. There's this line, I I realized that your personal agent could know you extremely well. It could know all of what you want to achieve. It could be that you're asking questions about how to get promotions and how to find new jobs and how to, like, develop skills, but it still doesn't have a way to actually connect with the people that is finding you. The best it can do is draft an email in your inbox and send it to someone else's inbox where maybe an agent picks it up and sends back in. So we realized that recently there was some very early show... Showing of like agent to agent communication and customer success is one. Decagon was one of the first to introduce their agent to agent protocol with news and instincts, and they, you know, their customers who might be big companies like a car rental company, say, and the personal user can just negotiate directly with the agent on the other side. And then we started thinking, go down that rabbit hole, you realize that, well, what if I'm looking for a job, and in fact, like, our agents should connect with... My agent should be able to connect with the company's agent and do a first pass of whether it's worth elevating me to the hiring manager, or maybe it's Dhruv and I are looking to connect, and it's our agents are having a first conversation, whether it's like, what are our mutual goals? What is the the coincidence of intents? And is there one here? Where if there is, then the agents can connect us. So there's a lot of fun to be had here. We're basically, at the moment, prioritizing building at at cosign.co/agents. I don't know if we tweeted that out yet, but people can go there and they can connect their MCP. They can text the the agent. They can find... Ask Cosign, super powerful, just conversational agent built... Baked right in the UI. And there's a lot more coming. Yeah.
00:22:11 · Dhruv Gupta, S2, David Booth
[00:22:11] S3: I mean, on networks right now, the the inbox works the same way for Sam Altman as it does for me as for my 14 year old little sister. Well... And I probably shouldn't. And I think that that's one of our core beliefs as well is that we really want to, like, be able to preserve that signal and make sure that you are meeting the people who you should be meeting and you don't have to spend time looking through a ton of people who you probably shouldn't be meeting. [00:22:37] S2: Definitely. One last thing for you guys since I know we're kind of out of time. What's next for Cosign? What can people expect to see from you all in the next few months? [00:22:46] S0: Well, we've gotta close out these Cosign awards. That's a big one. Voting is open or nominations are open through the end of the month... Sorry, through the end of November. So we've got about three weeks left. Cool. Now the coolest thing about this, by the way, is that everybody who was, like, with the judges' participation selected as the winners of the categories we're gonna invite to bring together. So I think that people don't need another trophy or another certificate. The opportunity to build relationships with the other category winners is the the real thing I'm honestly the most excited about. So that's a big one for us. A lot [00:23:18] S3: of product coming. So much product coming. Yeah. And I can't answer what it's gonna be a week from now, much less a few months from now. All you know is that you're busy.