The Reputation Graph of Silicon Valley | Introducing Cosign

0:00The most important skill in this industry, or perhaps in the world, is your ability to identify things before the market. There are so many people in the world who we want to meet, who also want to meet us. And it's just an information problem. What's more impressive to you, someone who went to Stanford or someone who is followed by Patrick Hallsend, Elon Musk, Mark Andreessen? A lot of people in Silicon Valley have a pretty high bar for who they're willing to pull. Indoor, a lot of what we do is finding awesome people and connecting them to our companies otherwise kind of getting them in the A16D network. And it allows us to really extend all that network and all that value and all that trust and really that reputation that transfers and builds over time. But as this Naval Quo, I love to be so good that he would do business through you. In fact, if I co-sign to people, they might be able to meet ends otherwise build something on a way that I enabled without even having to know about. But it's always hard to match the needs and the skills at exactly the right time. But we've enabled is this, some of the most important opportunities in Silicon Valley,

1:01start with a simple signal. Someone you trust believes in someone you don't know yet. In this episode, I sit down with Josh Elman, Olivia Moore, and David Booth to introduce co-sign, a new product built around professional reputation. We talk about why those who believe in you can sometimes say more than a resume. How endorsements can help serve as great people before they're obvious. And why that human signal could become even more valuable as AI makes everything else easier to generate. We also get into what we've learned from LinkedIn, X, and Angel List. And what happens when the reputation that normally lives in private conversations and believing social posts becomes more visible and durable. We're super excited to announce co-sign, a product that is around professional reputation for the start of community. It's really just trying to be the most comprehensive directory of companies and people. And I want to start with a story, which is my friend David Perrell told me, said, my Twitter

2:02account is more valuable to me than my college education. You know, given that I paid quarter of whatever it is, my Twitter has given me more value to my career. And also personally. Now we, of course, just launched our own school. So we are big fans of higher education. But I thought that the story was profound because of course, Twitter has been free for so long. And it's a deep, we got behind it is, of course, college is a bundle of education, network and credential. And social life. Yes. Of course. Yeah. Some of that is hard to recreate on Twitter. Yeah, exactly. And so the education you learn from having conversations, the network, of course, you meet people, you discover people. It's proof of work. If they're interesting, if they're funny, et cetera, if they build something cool, you can discover them. But I think the credential thing is really interesting because here's a thought experiment. It's more impressive to you, someone who went to Stanford or someone who is followed by Patrick Hallsson, Elon Musk, Mark and Jason, et cetera. I think most of us say the latter. Right. And so this kind of like, peer to peer credential.

3:02And so what that is, implicitly, other people also do this explicitly, is a cosine. It's an endorsement that this person is worth tracking. It's a public signal that this person is worth following. And we think there are lots of other ways to express that signal and create this kind of like, reputational benefit that these people get, which is really the exhaust of this person that I'm trying to give them, reputational benefit. They're just trying to read what they write. And the exhaust is this endorsement. And this endorsement, if you're followed by these people, now your doors are open. People want to also read what you say. They want to work with you. They want to invest in you. They want to have you part of their team. And also there's benefit to the receiver, but there's also benefit to the giver too. Because if you're the first person to discover someone, well, it's kind of how Silicon Valley operates. Be able to hire them quicker. You'll be able to fund them quicker. And the cooling vessel, the value is you don't know who the next big person is going to be always and sometimes they're 18 or come from, you don't come from a name brand school. And so we're kind of all in this a little bit of race to discover talent before anybody else.

4:03And like Zach Frankl's an amazing job, right? So many people have done amazing building your reputation for discovering people. And so the benefit they get is talent. Thanks. Oh, I can get king made by them. Like if Josh Alman or Olivia invest in my company, that's a signal to the market. And angel investing or just investing from venture firm, that's one way to express a cosine or a signal. But a lot of people aren't founders and a lot of people aren't investors. And so we think there are lots of other ways to express this signal. Really curious as you've been building cosine, like what are the kinds of endorsements you hope to get from the platform? Yeah. So we want on every profile to have at least three. One is who shaped your career? Wow. I think this sort of like mentor, this what Silicon Valley runs on. If Josh Alman is my mentor, that means that he is putting, which is true actually, it just happens to be true. I was a young person. Josh spent a bunch of time with me. And that's a signal to other people that I'm worth, other people spending time with too. Because if you respect Josh, you respect me by association. And it's also again, the benefit to you to discover talent early, to be known, people

5:06want to work with you if you help them. So one is shape my career. Two is would work with anywhere or in the trenches with because it's hard to tell from existing platforms like as you were saying the other night, who are you really in the trenches with? Who have you really built bonds with? Who would you go to war with? Who would you, like no matter what you're doing, you'd want to work with them. That's a much more granular signal than do I follow them, which could be any number of things. And then third is person to watch. Like who do you think is going to really be emergent, like I said, and we rank order these two. So platforms just started most of its fair game. But in the same way, like to build a great investor profile, it takes many years, but then you've got the credit for doing so we think you do that around people too. So you could say, hey, let's say when you're just starting in your career, I think Olivia is going to be one of the greats. I think she's a person to watch. It's actually funny. I did this experiment seven years ago where I emailed a few hundred people. You were definitely one of them. And I asked them for the person to watch. I was just checking today. One of them was Russell Kaplan, who's now the president of cognition. And he was like a 22 year old, just engineer at Tesla. And so there's actually signal in that too.

6:08So those are some of the ones. We're also excited for people to do it for companies too. Like what are the companies that you think right at seed, but are going to be great because of course, if you're able to, you can express your conviction with your money. But not everyone's an investor. This is almost like fantasy investing or social capital invest. Yeah. I love this idea. I feel like I have long felt this, but as I have invested now for almost a decade, I believe it more and more every week, every day, every month is like the most valuable data in all of Silicon Valley is like who has conviction in who and who can give you kind of a real read on a person for so many decisions. Like who do you invest in? Who do you hire? What company do you join? And there's such information asymmetry right now, like our job investing every day. We are pinging people saying, Hey, do you know anyone who worked with this person and we do it every day and we still, I would say have to work really hard to find that signal. And so how can someone who is maybe evaluating between five startup job offers get that

7:09level of them? You just can't, especially if you're like an entry level engineer and yet that could be the difference between joining like a complete rocket ship and like a company that isn't doing as well. And I know that the data has to be handled carefully around who says what about who, but I think it, it will be and there's like a massive opportunity to add so much value to people's lives and careers. Talk a bit about is you think a lot about town discovery? Talk about the news that you did because I know it's incredible. Yeah. So my twin sister, justine also works here at Andreessen on our infrastructure team. We have both been in venture for basically a decade now. And at our very first venture role, we started a newsletter that we ran every Sunday for I think like six and a half or seven years. Which is a driver. Thank you so much. It was basically just aggregating startup job postings and the thesis was like we both went to Stanford. We ran a startup incubator at Stanford and still before we were working in a venture firm, we had no way to differentiate between all these startups and founders of who is legitimate, who's not, who's the most exciting.

8:12And so we're like, okay, we have some insight information now. Let's curate a list of the companies that we think are worth joining for young people. And really it built up a real community because I think people appreciated it because you can't get that information outside of Silicon Valley. We had a network of scouts on campuses that read it and some of those people are now founders that Andreessen has invested in. They're all funding fantastic companies and in fantastic places. So that was like the less scalable version of this kind of network. And I'm excited for more people to have the ability to kind of put their name behind ideas. And the other thing I'd have is that as it gets easier and easier to start companies, as it gets noisy out there, especially getting harder for people to do what you're describing exactly. So this kind of signal is more important than ever. If you think about the average student graduating out of Stanford today, they're looking at the startup market and they have to rely on the signals that are given by firms who are investing, but even before that, that are given by people like you and hundreds of others we hope to empower here. An example I love to point to on the site when people go and you've got people like

9:14Pachy McCormick, who I think has always had a lot of very good signal around the deep tech and the vertical integrators in particular and Pachy's got 37 companies that he says these are the companies if you want to get into one into the space. And there's many, many more behind them self-employed. So there was like in a way he's co-signing some of his reputation against that company. He's saying, I trust this company, I'm putting my money where my mouth is, I'm writing about them and I think that if you wanted to start your career off there, so it becomes a sort of living directory of companies and of people that are worth paying attention to. And free. CrunchyBee's, Pitchwork, Cosmoney, etc. They're great products. They're businesses. We have the luxury of being able to just really offer this for the startup community. And so we wanted to be the most valuable place where people can see who invested in what is Olivia's set of deals that she's done, what is the most reliable company information on like who are the co-founders, who are employees, what are the products they shipped. And one thing we've decided is that no product can be all things to all people and there are trade-offs and this is just going to be positive. So this is going to be a place where people brag, it's going to be accurate.

10:14But how often do you go to someone's LinkedIn or text someone and be like, hey, you're connected to someone on LinkedIn, can you tell me about it? And you're like, I don't really know them. You're like, we're going to have a much more granular information to make sure that it's a real signal there. But that is one product decision that we've made. David, this is something that we experimented with seven years ago and decided not to pursue because we got busy with other stuff. I'm curious what has always struck you about this idea in terms of the need for it or what we're really trying to do here. One thing I've always believed is the most important skill in this town or in this industry or perhaps in the world is your ability to identify things before the market. And those things, if you're an investor, as companies, if you're a hiring manager, if you're a founder, it's people, sometimes it's products. If you're in charge of procurement for a growing company, maybe you need to identify which product is better before the market. But there's no way of recording that. There's no, there's no hipster leaderboard that says this person found this coffee shop

11:16that's for angel investors, of course, they want to be non-consensus and right. And they're rewarded for doing so because I can invest in your pre-seed round. If I'm right, then it's lucrative for me. One of the things that's always drawn me back was the idea that I can't invest in my personal social capital in you. I am very willing to make an introduction for you. Like if I really, really believe in someone and no one else is ahead of them, I can make an introduction to the Josh Elman, for example. And he will hopefully take that introduction because he sees me putting my rotation against that introduction. He has no idea who this person is, but he knows that David thinks highly enough of this person to take a chance on. To me, the thing that stood out, the first time round and the thing that we're trying to really lean on coming back is, when I co-sign, I take it seriously. I want that person to be able to take the co-sign I've given them and they might be going straight to Josh. And they say, hey, David co-sign me and Josh might see that. He might reply to that cold damn. And in fact, that sort of lubricates the wheels of social capital that should, you could

12:16empower a lot more people to achieve a lot more. There's this Navajo quote I love from a long time ago, it's be so good that people do business through you. In fact, if I co-sign to people, they might be able to meet ends. And otherwise build something or otherwise hire each other and invest in each other in a way that I enabled without even having to know about it, which is very exciting. Yeah. It's really interesting. Related to that, I want to talk more features of the product. I was talking about sort of the more granular ways of expressing reputation. One of the best events I ever went to was this SBA Angel conference in like 2018. They, I think they do in once a year or something like that. And every event should do this. But before I went to the event, there's this list of 150 people that has sent out. And all of them was, you know, everybody was a, you know, baller. And they said, swipe who you want to meet. Who you want to enter to. And I swam up to almost everybody. You know, I was up and coming. You remember Josh and eager to meet great people. And basically if they swiped right on me, then we would get an automatic intro. And it would be like, you guys have full context, you know, you should chat.

13:19And I then ended up meeting with most of those people and they became like really, like, so that event, of course, I couldn't have met, you know, 40 people at an event and had deep conversations with them. That event provided the context for us to, you know, become friends and collaborators. And I say to say that there's, there's so many people in the world who we want to meet, who also want to meet us. And it's just an information problem. And if you can reduce the friction to make that introduction, because right now it's like I have to DM them, but I have to think about something to say. And are they interested? I don't know. But this is just sort of passive. Like, yeah, here are people out of meat. Now what we've enabled is this privately-signal. It's actually a bit more granular. So it's not just I want to meet them, though there is that. But it's also, I would fund them if they started coming. Or I would hire them if they consider leaving. I can't, there's a lot of people who hire would hire, but I can't like reach out to all of them and also might be inappropriate and would like, I'm too busy. And I would only want to talk to them if they want to join me or whatever. And so having more granular, going to your priority around professional intent, possibly,

14:22there's no risk of such, like, because there's some cost in sending a DM. I don't know, you might feel rejected or it's time or whatever it is. And if they also express interest, then it's an introduction with high intent. I think it can unlock just a lot of good stuff. Yeah, that conference example is so interesting because I feel like the other takeaway for me is like, we can all be people-matchers now with a product like Tulsaan. Like, I think about in all of our jobs, we meet so many people every day. I often meet someone I'm like, they're awesome. They have this really specific skill set that I meet someone else three months later who is looking for that skill set. And I have to figure out, like, remember this person, check if they still want the intro, make the intro. And so that's the story of information and somewhere that's more persistent is and can kind of work across time is really, really interesting. I mean, I agree with that completely. So much of what we like to do, both as investors and people around Silicon Valley, is make these connections. But it's always hard to match the needs and the skills at exactly the right time.

15:22And remember that, being able to codify this, here's the people I think are truly great designers. Or here's the people I think are truly great PR people who can help you through a crisis. Or here's the people that have really helped me through a career decision that I was making and are the mentors that I go to, be able to actually endorse that, now has it available so that when you're looking for that, you don't just have to go, Josh, who can help me think through this decision? I have to go through and see who I recently talked to, who's fresh top of mind that I can think of, but I can really go back and be able to say, hey, Josh, I'm looking through those co-signs and you said that this person really helped you in this one situation. Do you think they'd be open to helping me? And it allows us to really extend all that network and all that value and all that trust. And yet still is a way that you're trusting me to try to make that introduction. Like it's not that any of us want to just say, hey, everything's open to everybody. It's really still part of the trusted community and really that reputation that transfers and builds over time. So building our son and Eric said, the private signal is one core piece of it and I think

16:27what you'll hear is in a way the public signal. So we've built the two of them, the private signal. I mean, honestly, the product is so fun. You can go rabbit-hulling around. It's a bit like Wikipedia, clicking from link to link to person to profile, a company to investor and back again. And as you go, you're collecting. Maybe it's Pinterest that I'm going to put this person on my personal private list of people that I want to work on the future and I'm going to put this person on my public list of designers that I write. And every time a founder comes to me and they say, David, I need a new designer, I need a growth guy, I need an engineer, I can say, well, do I consult my private signals or do I send them my public list? And hopefully everyone has this sort of habit of, if I really believe in someone, I'm putting them on my private list. It's actually utility both ways. It's telling them that I believe in them, it's telling them their network, that I believe in them. It's also something I can use, I can turn around, I can give to a founder or someone I respect. Kind of shortcut that work that you're saying, do you have to do it every time? Someone asked the question. What's so interesting about that to me as well is like, there's this often timing discrepancy that happens in networks where I'm like, oh my gosh, I know this person has been trying

17:32to get their startup off the ground. This other startup would like love to merge with them or welcome them to the team something like if the timing is right. But if I go to that founder and I'm like, hey, are you thinking about exiting your company? That's like a big risk. It could be offensive or insulting or maybe the company is working and they want to keep going on in. The idea of just having this two-sided network where there's information on both sides and they can match when the time is right, when they indicate, I think it's really, really, really great. On both hires, acquisitions, job changes, tons of things. So fascinating. The company that company I didn't even think about. I would buy a stop. Yes. We'll get the product features in the next one. We just extended the roadmap. Yes. That happens. There are a couple of things I want to add to that. So it's interesting. We thought a lot about, should there be a feed? If so, what is on the feed? Is it freeform, et cetera? And Josh helped us really nail down the focus of the feed to be around questions and announcements.

18:34And announcements so interesting because we think a way to differentiate theirs to basically make reputation durable. A lot of reputation is built on social media, but it's a femoral. So when Josh joined the firm, he wanted me to focus on other people, but you're such a good example. A lot of people came out of the woodwork who've been working with him for a long time, but who maybe haven't publicly said anything recently because they didn't need to and said, wow, I really enjoy Josh. She should work with Josh. Josh helped me in my career. I said that. Nikita said that. But a bunch of other people said that. And then the next day just happened. Some people saw that, some people didn't see it, but that type of stuff is so valuable and should exist on someone's profile, like the first time you're looking them up. And so for us, any announcement is going to be tied to their sort of durable reputation. And so when companies fundraise and people switch jobs, these are opportunities for co-science, for endorsements, et cetera. And then on the question side, it's really this way we talked earlier is like, who's the best comms person for this or who's the best angel investor in Fintech or who are people

19:37who should work with for this or this kind of like, you know, very specific question of some sort of person in or company or product, you're looking to either surface to you or learn more about. And in that way, it will also build durable reputation because you get added to a list through that. I think this idea of bringing those ephemeral moments and those ephemeral conversations that happen on Twitter and other social X and other social media forms all the time are like, there's so much that just happens in it. It's wonderful in the moment and then it gets lost. And I think this idea of building a profile, not a profile that is just what you say about yourself, but really that lets other people, you know, be positive and help shine on your strengths. I think is really, really powerful. And, you know, I see a lot of these for you and the great work you're doing here. I see a lot of these for Olivia and David. Like, we get these comments and it's just so special and you feel so lucky to have people, you know, that you've helped in the past be able to say those things about you now. But then again, it just gets lost.

20:39And I think this idea of tracking those co-signs and really making it feel like this fundamental network of the web that we are of Silicon Valley of the tech industry. I'll give you an example. I'll give you an example. Do you know the meme where the guys like walking into a party at stick figures and he's like, they don't even know that, like, that's something you got like a baller, co-sign or whatever. Yeah, it's not probably like, you know, more congees and we're a blog post about me joining the firm. Like, that's pretty dope. Like, I want that on my like, like, I want the first thing when you think about me is to think about marketing and doing it professionally. And so, yeah, there's all these moments that happen if we can make them more legible. Yeah. You know, you can more accurately represent someone's. Honestly, it wasn't too we actually hooked up the internet fire hose to this product that I realized how many of those moments that I mean, you look at the main feed and every day there is fundraising announcements, there's talent transitions. Thanks for our good friends at X. We're plugged into a lot of those and we're taking like, we never somewhat in quotes tweets in announcement or replies and it's a, it's a, we, you know,

21:39filtering them. It's a genuinely thoughtful positive comment you pointed out about positivity. Those are pulled through it. And it's, yeah, it's really coming from a person and it's on the profile person comes from and it goes to a person. And the reason why it's all positive is because you know, products have to win on some dimension and this product is going to win on people using it to show off. Like, yeah, it should have been a good way. Like, this is what I'm proud of. Like this represents the like the full manifestation of what incapable of on a person level and on a company level. And I really think it's about, it's about celebration. I mean, like so much of what we do, there's so much hard work that goes on making every single product that happens. Yeah. It's a toil of somebody's love, their idea, the coding they wrote or maybe that they worked on with their agent now. But like putting that out in the world, it's a very vulnerable moment. And it's very like, do you like what I've tried to make? Do you know, are you going to use it? And I think, you know, we need to celebrate that effort and what goes into those moments and what goes into all the hard work that we do as opposed to, you know, there's plenty

22:43of places for critique and we see all that all the time too. But I think that doesn't need to be recorded for posterity in the same way. And I, one thing we're talking offline is interesting is a lot of, you know, there's a lot of awards and a lot of shine on founders. Yeah. And just by the way, so obviously. And also there's a lot, you know, a lot of other people build the companies too. Yeah. And a lot more people are critical to those companies and they're, you know, unknown or not celebrated to the same degree. And this is an opportunity to do as well. I think even Jess positive signal is going to be incredibly informative because I think a lot of people in Silicon Valley have a pretty high bar for who they're willing to publicly endorse. And in any way, like when I think about like the number of intro requests that come in and how many of those do I actually bridge? Like I think it's because if you endorse the one who's not great, that reflects poorly and the natural like reputation of cinematicism. Yeah. And it's a whole thing about, you know, do you share something that you haven't even played with? You know, there's a whole, you know, have you even read the article before you and I think the key is like, you'll get to know pretty quickly who's just spouting things

23:45in is, you know, celebrating everything that could be celebrated versus, you know what, I've actually played with this. I've spent time with it. I've heard the backstory. I've thought about the backstory. And I just want to double down on one comment you said about this going beyond the founders. Like I think, you know, the founders who take that risk to start a company from nothing is such an incredible thing. But it takes a village to build every one of these companies. It takes so many great designers and engineers and marketers and product managers and we have, you know, finance and like there's so many parts of every single company that have to get built and celebrating that work and when that happens from a specific team or a specific individual, I'm able to have that be part of this kind of endorsement and co-signing. I think is going to be incredibly powerful beyond just, you know, the people that we talk about most of the time. What, tell us story or perhaps Nudge Eric to tell us story the one of the first times I actually hit it Eric. And then when on to meet Eric was the Riser Awards. The Riser Awards 2015, 16, they're about. So over a decade ago now.

24:45And it was around the thesis that, you know, founders get a lot of publicity, a lot of credit, but it's actually the people who are the operators behind the scenes. And so the principal, do you want to tell us story? What was the Riser Awards? Yes. So the Riser Awards were this series of awards meant to be for everybody else, for the engineers, the designers, the product, I believe Josh was a judge. You know, many others and we had thousands of submissions and, you know, discovered and selected some great people because of it. And we're going to bring that back to some capacity. You know, there's this whistle phrase, fear not the guy who has a thousand moves, but the guy who does one move a thousand times. There's Samurai. That's a kick a thousand times. So you know, Riser Awards, cosine, a lot of these ideas have been in the ether for us. In fact, the thing that stands out is a lot of the people who were the Riser Award recipients got to know each other and built lifelong relationships through the retreats they attended, through the groups that you added them to and things. So there's something around that, the connection too. It's really interesting is I feel like we often meet people who are spinning out of great companies that start their own companies. And often if you get really deep, like if you call everyone they've ever worked with,

25:48it's like, wow, this person who was like, I don't know, engineer number four actually was a huge determinant in this company being successful or not. But that to your point earlier about legibility, that's not something that they can like, publicize. They're not going to be like the face of every article about the company. And yet there's like so many of these people who I think I would love to see them get to leave that company. If they go start a new company, they go to another one and carry that accomplishment with them. And they can't really do that right now. We're making the reputation market more like efficient, basically more liquid in a sense of both efficient and liquid. So for example, there's some people who have an amazing reputation, but there's not awareness. Not a lot of people know that they have a great reputation. And then more liquid in a sense of if it was known that they have a great reputation, a lot of people would want to hire them or fund them and they should get those opportunities as a result. And so it's basically trying to fix that information asymmetry. I want to return to what you were saying earlier because it's really interesting. It's like a bunch of times a candidate will, or someone looking for a new job will say

26:52you down and say, hey, what company should I join? And so there's a lot of people who wish they can do that. But if you got your list of companies they should join. It's kind of the do business through you. It's like Olivia stamped these companies. They can reach out. And similarly, and it'd be cool also for the ones you do meet with that you could just press a button and it would go to all your companies instead of having to think through. Because there's some of you might want to share private just to keep to your companies or whatever it is. But then also there are companies who want to, who are like, hey, I want to head of comms. Who in my network knows I had of Kali? Who should I even talk to and to the extent that people are co-signing heads of comms or this kind of thing, it can just facilitate much more. You know, imagine. Yeah, totally. I feel like even for investors, the most up-to-date profile of the companies they care about is maybe if they tag them all in their ex bio and maybe if they put them on their LinkedIn, otherwise you have to go to the firm's page and see if they connect them to investments.

27:54If I could and not ruin the reach in the audience, I would be tweeting about all my companies all day, every day, promoting them, go work for them. They just did this amazing thing, but you can't do that. And I love the idea of a place where that kind of lives to see it anytime. Yeah, be shameless. Yes. It is a shame. So, let's talk about existing platforms for a second. Like, X obviously, such a great platform and the exhaust of it is so valid to some people. But it's also times where I'm like, man, I wish I could just download my follower. I wish I could just like, we're like a few thousand people like to this thing about joining my company. I wish I could just see this and why is it so difficult? It's not built for this use case of discovering people to work for or just get more signal. Like, okay, you follow me, but do you want to work for me? Do you want to invest in me? What do you want to do here? And then LinkedIn, it's such a valuable utility. We're on it all the time and yet everyone hates it. Obviously, we love LinkedIn.

28:56We love LinkedIn. Yeah, we love LinkedIn. Josh used to work there. Yeah. One of those iconic products of all time. Mark famously defended it. I remember when they got acquired, because we were like, what, only 26 billion. It was like, you know, it's a great outcome. And it was iconic product. And yet, you know, people have frustrations with it. So, maybe even before the feet, I still people say the feet is crazy or whatever, but even before the feet, I feel like people were like, I wish there was just more that we could do here. You might talk about that. And look, I worked at LinkedIn back in 2004 and 2005. And we were just starting to form the network and read Hoffman, the founder. You just talk about it very much. It's like, we have three stages of the company. Like, first is growth. We really have to figure out how to make sure we have the largest professional network and give everybody value of just being part of their network, even if they have nothing to do. And actually, for a lot of users, sign up, make your profile. Don't do anything else for a while unless something comes to you. It was a perfectly good usage. And then we talked about usage. We really have to start to build products on top of the network.

29:57The real thing was the network is just the substrate. We need to go build a real job service. I helped launch the first LinkedIn job. We had to go build services, find the best PR professional, find those things, and then we'll build revenue. So first, it was kind of the, I call it, Gerr, growth usage revenue. And we really had to figure out what those platforms and products were going to be on top of the network. Now, the challenge is, as you build the network, is very single signal. Are we connected? And the early days, the beauty of that was the idea that we really know each other, all vouch for Olivia. And if David is asking for an intro to me and Olivia says, David's really good. You take this intro. That's great. And it was even better, if you imagine this whole table, David would ask Olivia for an intro to say, hey, can you introduce me to Eric? And then Olivia would say, Josh, David's my really good friend. It looks like you know Eric. Would you be willing to pass them on? And this idea of this trusted graph. I'm so happy to connect with you. And I'll pass you on to somebody else was the important condition. But over time, it started to fade from that strength of the connection to like, yeah,

31:00we met once at a party, we high five, we had a good email exchange. And all of a sudden, then you, you know, everybody kind of got into a collecting. And the challenge with collecting that network is it makes it much harder to figure out where the real signal is. Now on the other side, it still is the iconic representation of who each of us is, the professional profile. But when we think about how to use our professional profile, it's only really good if it adds value. One of the things I remember when we were first building LinkedIn jobs was the goal was to take a current job service where someone just applies and gets a resume and then you see a job listing and go, how do we use the power of your professional network to make it better? My very favorite, like Reed would push us a lot and you'd say, what is a social resume? When a job application comes in and it wasn't just, here's who this person is. And here's who else in your company might also know more about who the person is. Here's who else might have worked at similar companies they worked at in the past. Or here's who knows people really well who also worked at those companies. So you wouldn't just get this flat resume, you get a resume annotated by who else can

32:01help you reach that person. So that was like this big change to make job applications socially enhanced. And then when you're looking at jobs, you might just see a flat job and like, who that job looks really so that company, we said, no, we're going to put the hiring manager, profile is going to be on the job. All of a sudden instead of a faceless job that you're just applying and throwing your resume over the wall, hey, you're going to get hired by this person. And then by the way, here's the ways that you might have connections to that person or you might have connections to other people who work at that company. So to get how do you use your network to do those things? And so those were these like beginning epiphanies of how to really rethink just something as simple as a job application and job site with the social network. And I think again, what was been missing though is the set of things that happens, a family through X like you were talking about, the set of things that we all have, but we don't figure out how to strengthen and put into LinkedIn anymore. The true connection, the reason that we were in the trenches together, we worked on this thing, you bailed me out of a crisis. And when we can have that, that information in the network is going to allow all these

33:04use cases to happen so much better. And when you get to focus just on kind of making sure the network's right and getting all that usage, I think cosine can really open up so many opportunities. Yeah, it feels like there's kind of like a hierarchy, almost of connections. And LinkedIn for good reason, again, I feel like we're all saying iconic products. I'm an hourly, not to meet you. Making a ton of revenue, they're clearly doing fine. But LinkedIn treats almost every kind of type of connection the same, especially as products like endorsements on LinkedIn have been really taken off. So like, for example, 90% of the time when I say to someone, hey, I saw you're connected to this person on LinkedIn, can you interrupt me? I will get the, hmm, I don't think I know them. Maybe I might have had a party. I'm not sure. So there's like, do you actually know the person? Did you work at the same company? Did you work at the same company at the same time? Were you on the same team or adjacent teams that work together? Did you manage them? And like all of those are treated as one like connection or not connection now. And I love the idea for cosine of being able to like break that into the granularity that

34:05it deserves because it's so much more useful. It seems like the greatest time has should be building products generally that can accumulate context that was otherwise unavailable. You say the social CV. I love that idea. I think Olivia, in particular, you're at the firm thinking a lot about like the talent in the social space and agents are an interesting way to accumulate a lot of context around a person. I think a lot of the things that we're building here to talk more about that. There's a lot of totally what is a future hole? So a lot of what we do, both actually are investing teams in our operating teams is just finding awesome people and investing in them, connecting them to our companies. Otherwise kind of getting them in the A16z network. And so right now a lot of this is scraping these existing profiles and networks and then doing a lot of manual work of going to see who actually is the best strength of connection. How can we make this happen? I think that that kind of manual work that's truly external signal based and it's kind of binary signal versus really granular signal.

35:06That's only going to get harder because for example, recently I posted on like Dan, I was like, hey, I'd love to help my portfolio companies hire. If you want to work at a startup, fill out the school form. When it works, it's almost harder because I get 2000, I get 2000 results, right? And that's going to happen to every person who posts a job or who posts any kind of opportunity. And it's going to be 2000 now and it's going to be 10,000, you know, a month from now as browser user, it's better and more people use browsers can be 100,000. And so it's like, how do you even be using Astra at like maximum strength? Like how do you sift and sort? And so in an age, I think of like endless kind of outreach and interest with AI. Like the scarce thing is like the human endorsement or the human conviction or the human knowledge. And so that's where I get especially excited because I think cosine is going to be valuable. Hopefully so many people in the community and also very valuable to the work that we do

36:07and what we try to do. And yeah, it's interesting. We've sort of gotten to a place where there's only like broadcasting networks to the whole world or like group chats with like 50 people. There's not really this like, you know, 10,000 per, or like a much more vetted, you know, community. And that's where we are to start. And you know, going slowly and basically where you put out a post and you'll just be more confident in the signal that that comes in. It's going back to LinkedIn for a second on some things that I, you know, we should have had is like, you know, sort of like, remember like a Myspace topic. Like I want that for business. Like who are you in the trenches with? Who do you talk to regularly? Like who are mutuals? How do you know them? How do you meet them? You know, what do they think about you? This more sort of, as you say, the treats, connections all the same. And you don't really get context on the relationship or context on, you know, people's reputation. It's like LinkedIn is about personal identity. We hope that cosine is about, you know, or professional identity. We hope cosine is about professional reputation. You know, LinkedIn is about, they say it's like people you know, Twitter is like people who are interested in knowing you.

37:09And we hope that cosine delivers both in a more granular way. And at the same time, you know, to give props to LinkedIn, it's like, it started 20 plus years ago. And no one's even come close to competing with it in any capacity. I remember Charles Hudson, you know, great, great investor. Like, you know, 12 years ago was a blog post like where are the LinkedIn competitors? It's time to disrupt. Like I don't like the product. Because he reasons it doesn't do this. And we've seen tons of them. You know, we backed them, you know, at the firm individually. And, you know, people try to crypto all sorts of like different incentives to break LinkedIn. And it is fascinating. I was joking with everyone hates it. But people do have like, they use it obsessively. And yet they have like low NPS on it or something. And they know that a better version can exist. And yet, you know, it's been impossible to disrupt. But I think the real thing with LinkedIn is actually think the NPS is really high for the people who aren't actively in the flow and in the searching and in the community. LinkedIn's always served two audiences. One is I call it the people who want to find people.

38:11And the other one is people who want to maybe be found at some point in their lives. And when you think about it, all of us would love to be found for the right opportunity that comes to us. We aren't, no, not, a lot of us might be happy. We used to talk about the like mildly happily employed. Because there's a lot of people who like, they like what they're doing. They're not in any urgent need to go do something else. But if the right thing popped, whether it was from someone you know or someone you don't know, but it matched all your interests, you might be like, hmm, should I actually think about that? And I might consider it still may not be right for you in life at the time. But for those mildly happily employed people, they aren't constantly, you know, if they're an engineer, they're not checking LinkedIn every day for like new people or new things. If you're in sales, if you're in BD, if you're in venture and investor, you're using it all the time. But that was what was really special. And I think moving tens and tens and tens are hundreds of millions. I think they're over a billion people now of people who are happily employed, who are maybe open to the right opportunity. Like that's the kind of network effect that really sticks.

39:13And you think of a lot about what is a 20 year network effect? Like look at LinkedIn. And as you're building, and I see a lot to new companies is you're thinking about something new. How do you think about that kind of network effect? It'd be so powerful for 20 years. And even if some people wish there was a better product, you can't move the masses over. Yeah. We have looked at and invested in some attempted LinkedIn killers. And I think what they've done a remarkable job with is the switching costs are just very high, both because they are famously good at botting the tech show. That's true. So you can't really scrape it in real time. There's whole businesses that are built off of scraping LinkedIn and selling that data. But also because it's just such a tight and dense network that like ultimately if it's something as important as your career, you're going to want to be on the platform where everyone else is. That being said, I think there's a massive opportunity for a new platform when there is new information or new value to be kind of gleaned or shared, which is like very much high quality endorsements and high conviction people. Generational shifts and also niche, the hype and niche that needs that.

40:17So in LinkedIn, for example, GitHub is arguably a bit of LinkedIn for engineering. And then LinkedIn itself, and I'd say is there an opportunity to say, what is the emergent niche here? Is it the individual who's trying to build their reputation as a talent scout? Are they trying to be a founder who wants to break through? Could this, is there a world for a better LinkedIn that represents there? I'd hate it. It's some people that... And what gets me excited about CoSign isn't that it has to even be a better LinkedIn set. It's that it really pulls together all this information that's already lately happening in our industry. And the Silicon Valley and the tech industry is so special for this kind of, pay it forward for this belief in somebody, this upper tech is very beginning. The belief in this person who may not have had a previously strong reputation that has an insight and idea and that alone can gather a bunch of people and a bunch of momentum and change the world. And that's what makes this so special. And that's what I think, you know, these platforms like LinkedIn, you know, serving so many people now across so many industries and so many domains. And I think there's room for something that's really special for the community that we

41:21have and that, you know, combines the things that are happening affirmatively with the things that are happening professionally with the depth that is going to be great. And if CoSign works great and it still only serves the tech community as a huge win. Oh, I'm sorry. And if it then other communities and other industries figure out they should figure out how to take part in this too and bring some of that Silicon Valley energy to more places, that's even better. But the pay it forward and the every great idea can just come from somebody who wasn't previously known, but truly has a unique insight. Like that's what I hope this captures too. Eric, from benchmark, I had this comment in the Patric or Shana See podcast where Patric was asking him sort of like, you know, what do you think about every category? And he's like, it's all going to work. Like everything is going to be huge, not every company, but just as an index like every category. And I think we've come to some other conclusion. And I think similarly, like when people say like, you know, does the world need another podcast? Like there's too many podcasts. And yet another great podcast comes in and it doesn't kill the other, it just all works. Everything is great works.

42:22And similarly, like, you know, we just launched a school like Stanford's going to be fine, you know, our offer is going to be fine and our thing is going to be great. And then similarly, like, yeah, like, LinkedIn's going to be great. Like it's going to keep doing its thing. And you know, we're inspired by them in so many ways. We're also inspired by Angelist, like 10 years ago when they owned the investor graph and really it was for the startup community and was really focused around, you know, companies, investors and talent. And you know, they made a series of other bets that then sort of made them focus on other parts of that or deprecate the free public social network that you should exist. And we think it's an opportunity to bring back. And then we're also inspired in terms of like how we're going to do this. We're also inspired by Wikipedia. One in terms of, you know, people want Wikipedia profiles, they're aspirational, but two in that we're creating profiles for people. So that's where starting and we think people are going to be excited about it because we're bragging for them on their behalf in an exclusive way and they don't want it. We'll take it off. But you're going to see your profile is going to be fleshed out with all people giving you compliments. And also people expressing their interest in funding you or working with you or even

43:25before you go to the profile. Like, you know, before, you know, and so that's one of the ways in which we're differentiating. And only, you know, because of AI, can we generate all of this information on people and like recreate, you know, a professional graph. If we didn't go that third party route, then we would have to get people aside. It's a cold start problem. It's the place where people go to update their, you know, purposes is most reliable. Often people say like, what's the daily behavior? Well, we're, you know, reinforcing it by covering every sort of, you know, transition. So we will also have reliable profiles with, you know, more reputation and benefits to it. Totally. I feel like the best. I'm curious if you agree, but for consumer products, like the easiest way to acquire users is to tell them that someone else is saying something about them on the product. Especially, but something it's the Nikita beer. Like your friends just answered this question about your strategy, which worked so well three times. And it wasn't possible before AI for, for a network, I think is big as Silicon Valley. And now it is, which is awesome. Someone called me today the Nikita beer founder communities.

44:26It's a real compliment. That's a true compliment. Yeah. So it's worth pointing out everything that is being pulled in is kind of from public sources. So it's what people have posted on their, you know, a variety of different places. It's being aggregated. There is a lot of like the funding announcements. They're the ones that being announced. So there is a lot of really, really high quality of mention that is spread across the public development and that and it's uniquely compiled and structured. We think in one place. And Eric talks about the angiolus example. Eric called very early microarray at angiolus was probably the first, it was like the wedge that I took into Silicon Valley. It was the, it was the ability to see which companies and which geographies, which people at those companies, which, you know, for a long time, it felt like it could be the LinkedIn for the sort of little niche of people who were ambitious in technology. And then as Eric said, it sort of moved away from that for a number of reasons. But that's been missing. It becomes a place that you can go as a founder who's like, which angel investors do I want to get to know over the next six months before my round? It's a public utility. It's something it's worth pointing out here. You know, we're putting this out into the world.

45:28It's like a thing we'd like to build with people. It's not something that's being presented as a fully finished, perfect products. You know, it's an invitation. It's an invitation to everybody who wants to come in and, you know, edit and, you know, submit an update to their own or someone else's profile. So a real aspect. Let's build this thing together for everyone. Yeah. And submit things to people's profiles, cosine, the things you endorse on people. And then even if somebody has feedback, cosine that feedback so that it gets back to David and David ordered it. So to keep improving things. Yeah. And so it's sort of to end on that sort of higher level note. A lot of the industry, but also other industries sort of run on co-science and you know, Paul Graham co-science Sam Almond famously, I feel like two or nine or something. He said like the five best entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, you know, three other people and Sam Almond. And at the time Sam Almond hadn't like had a huge exit yet. But that really just like gave him such a reputational boost, him running YC, etc. You know, it's critical to him then building going on to build one of the most important

46:30companies of all time. And so many, you know, Ben Harowitz and Ali from Databricks. I mean, so many examples of people who got their cosine from someone older and more senior in the industry and were able to rise up because of it. Ryan Hoover, who was founder of Productment, cosine Eric and brought Eric on to become one of the leaders of building the community for everything. And it was such a great endorsement of you early in your career at your potential. I mean, the good would you become sick? Yeah. It's amazing. I'm basically grateful for him. And it's so fascinating because I mean, one of the things that makes Silicon Valley so special is how much of a meritocracy it is and how you don't have to like, you know, necessarily just pay your dues for 20 years before we're already taken seriously. Like one of the most important intellectuals right now is Durkash. He's 25 years old. He's never had a job as far as I'm aware. He just came to San Francisco, started podcasting. And you know, someone was, I don't know if his Patrick Olsen or Mark Andreessen also went on like a number of people by going on his podcast early, co-signed him and then said, hey, this is a place where then Zuck and others can go on. You know, one of the most important founders is Michael Trull, you know, a young guy in

47:34mid to late 20s, et cetera. One of the most important people, they pulled the Ashen Brenner is like, I think like 24 or 25 as well. And so it just like, if you're talented, if you're smart in this industry, someone will discover you, co-sign you, and make your career. And so we hope that happens on our part. Well, we're talking about social capital and positive some mindsets. I think it's a really important. There's a critique of this. I wanted to talk about where someone might rightfully say, well, why would I share this co-sign? This is my alpha. This is like, I know that person's good. Like, why would I tell you? You're the good. And I think actually, if you take a very long term view of this, you can say, sure, if that person's raising a pre-seed round right now and you want to do it, don't co-sign them right now. But the person you want to co-sign is the one that's raising a pre-seed round two years from now, five years from now. And when they do, they remember you. They say, yeah, the reason I'm able to raise a pre-seed round is Olivia co-sign me two years ago. And in doing so, she helped me meet my co-founder and she helped me meet the five people who were my early believers and my products. And that's why I'm here today.

48:35And of course, I'm going to call her first, my pre-seed round. And if you turn it around that way and you take a very long term mindset, it's such a long term play. Oh, I understand. The benefits just go through to you in the sense of people always remember, like, by order of magnitude more, the people believed in them first, right? You know, Brian Chesky, when he goes public with Airbnb, who does he write in the blog post? He writes, YC, you know, Paul Graz is first investor. He's that, you know, so much investment. All the time. So much more money, so much more time into this company. But you remember the first person. So it's so, if you build a, if you are the first person, especially publicly, because that's where the value is, because they will remember you for it. And then more people will come to you. Yeah. So 10. Let's wrap on that. Thank you so much. So great. Thank you.

49:48As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only. Should not be taken as legal business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the company's discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see a16z.com forward slash disclosures. No more comments?