How to Spot Exceptional Talent Before Everyone Else

Key Takeaway

Make your professional reputation visible through specific, high-conviction endorsements. Today, identify one person you have genuinely worked with, mentored, or watched excel; write a short public or private recommendation that names the context and their distinctive strength. Then keep a personal list of people you would hire, fund, collaborate with, or introduce. Specific signals compound: they help others find great talent, make you a trusted connector, and create goodwill long before you need it.

Episode Overview

Josh Elman, Olivia Moore, and David Booth introduce CoSign, A16Z’s professional-reputation platform for the startup community. They discuss why credible peer endorsements can reveal talent and companies earlier than traditional credentials, how better context can improve hiring and introductions, and why human conviction becomes more valuable as AI increases the volume of generic outreach and content.

Full Transcript

Transcript of How to Spot Exceptional Talent Before Everyone Else from A16Z. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

The 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 Collison, Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen? A lot of people in Silicon Valley have a pretty high bar for who they're willing to publicly endorse. A lot of what we do is finding awesome people and connecting them to our companies.

Otherwise, kind of getting them in the A16Z 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. There's this Noval quote I love, be so good that people do business through you. In fact, if I co-sign two people, they might be able to meet and otherwise build something in 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.

What we've enabled is this. Some of the most important opportunities in Silicon Valley start 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 CoSign, 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 AngelList. And what happens when the reputation that normally lives in private conversations and fleeting social posts becomes more visible and durable. We're super excited to announce CoSign, a product that is around professional reputation for the startup community. And 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 Perel told me, he said, my Twitter account is more valuable to me than my college education.

You know, even though I paid a quarter million, 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 story was profound because, of course, Twitter has been free for so long. And this idea, what he got behind it is, of course, college is a bundle of education, network and credential. And social life. Yes, yes, of course. Some of that is hard to recreate on Twitter, but 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 of if they're interesting, if they're funny, etc. If they build something cool, you can discover them. But I think the credential thing is really interesting because here's a thought experiment. What's more impressive to you, someone who went to Stanford or someone who is followed by Patrick Collison, Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, etc.? I think most people would say the latter. And so this kind of like peer-to-peer credential.

And so what that is implicitly, although people also do this explicitly, is a cosign. 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's not even 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, that's kind of how Silicon Valley operates. You're going to be able to hire them quicker. You'll be able to fund them quicker. And the cool thing about Silicon Valley is you don't know who the next big person is going to be always.

And sometimes they're 18. Or you'll come from an A-brand school. And so we're kind of all in this little bit of a race to discover talent before anybody else. And Zach Frankel's done an amazing job, right? So many people have done an amazing job of building a reputation for discovering people. And so the benefit they get is talent thinks, oh, I can get king made by them. Like if Josh Allman or Olivia invest in my company, that's a signal to the market. And angel investing or just investing for a venture firm, that's one way to express a co-sign 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. I'm really curious, as you've been building co-sign, 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. Because we think this sort of like mentor, this is what Silicon Valley runs on. If Josh Allman 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 want to work with you if you help them. So one has shaped 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. So it'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 ascendant? And we rank order these two. So platforms just started. Most of it's 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 it 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 their person to watch. I was just checking today. One of them was Russell Kaplan, who's now the president at Cognition.

And he was like a 22-year-old just engineer at Tesla. And so there's actually signal in that too. So 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, you know, I'd see 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. It's almost like fantasy investing or social capital investing. 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. It's like the most valuable data in all of Silicon Valley is like who has conviction and 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 level? 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 the data has to be handled carefully around who says what about who. But I think 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, because you think a lot about talent discovery. Talk about the newsletter you did. Yeah. 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. I'm a subscriber.

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. And so we're like, OK, we have some inside information now. Let's curate a list of the companies that we think are worth joining for young people. And it 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 running 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 one thing I'd have is that as it gets easier and easier to start companies, as it gets noisier and noisier out there, it's actually 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 have to empower here. An example I love to point to on the site when people go and you've got people like Paki McCormick, who I think has always had a lot of very good signal around the deep tech and the vertical integrators in particular.

And Paki's got 37 companies that he's chosen. 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-included. So there was like, in a way, he's cosigning 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 people that are worth paying attention to.

And free. Crunchbase, Pitchfork cost money, etc. They're great products. They have to be businesses. But 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. What is Olivia's set of deals that she's done? What is the sort of most reliable company information on 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. But 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, Ah, I don't really know them. We're going to have a much more granular information to make sure that there's 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, it's companies. If you're a hiring manager, if you're a founder, it's people.

Sometimes it's products. If you are 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 hipster leaderboard that says this person found this coffee shop. 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 has heard of them, I can make an introduction to them. You know, the Josh Elman, for example. And he will hopefully take that introduction because he sees me putting my reputation 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 him. To me, the thing that stood out the first time around and the thing that we're trying to really lean on coming back is.

Like when I co-sign something, I take it seriously. I want that person to be able to take the co-sign I've given them and they might be able to go straight to Josh. And they say, hey, David co-signed me. And Josh might see that. He might reply to that cold DM. And in fact, that sort of lubricates the wheels of social capital that should, could empower a lot more people to achieve a lot more. There's this novel 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 two people, they might be able to meet and otherwise build something or otherwise hire each other, 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 about 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 SV Angel conference in like 2018.

I think they do it once a year or something like that. And every event should do this. But before I went to the event, they had this list of 150 people that they sent out. And everybody was a baller. And they said, swipe who you want to meet, who you want to intro to. And I swiped on almost everybody. It 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 should chat. And I then ended up meeting with most of those people. Of course, I couldn't have met 40 people at an event and had deep conversations with them. But that event provided the context for us to become friends and collaborators. And I say that to say that 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. And if you can reduce the friction to make that introduction.

Because right now, it's like I have to DM them. I have to think about something to say. Are they interested? I don't know. But this is just sort of passive. Like, yeah, here are people I would meet. 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 start a company. Or I would hire them if they consider leaving. There's a lot of people who I would hire.

But I can't reach out to all of them. It also might be inappropriate. 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 granularity around professional intent passively. There's no risk. 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 Tollsign. 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. Then I meet someone else three months later who's 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 like, that store of information in somewhere that's more persistent is, and can kind of work across time, is really, really interesting. I mean, I agree with that completely. You know, 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. And remember that, and 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.

Being 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 have I recently talked to, who's fresh, top of mind that I can think of, that I can really go back and be able to say, hey, Josh, I'm looking through those cosigns, 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. 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 on something Eric said, the private signal is one core piece of it, and I think what we're talking about here 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-holing around. It's a bit like Wikipedia, clicking from link to link to person to profile to 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 with in 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, 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 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, and I can kind of shortcut that work that you're saying you do. You have to do it every time someone asks a question. What's so interesting about that to me as well is there's this often timing discrepancy that happens in networks where I'm like, oh my gosh, I know this person has been trying to get their startup off the ground. This other startup would love to merge with them or welcome them to the team, something, 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 a big risk. It could be offensive or insulting or maybe the company is working and they want to keep going on it. And so the idea of just like 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 like really, really, really great on both hires, acquisitions, like job changes, tons of things. So, and it's so fascinating that company to company, I didn't even think about.

Like, I would buy this company. Yeah. Yeah. We'll get the product features in tomorrow. Yeah, exactly. I think we just extended the roadmap. Yeah. Yeah, 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 sort of the focus of the feed to be around questions and announcements. And announcements are so interesting because we think a way to differentiate there is to basically make reputation durable.

A lot of reputation is built on social media, but it's ephemeral. 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 endorse Josh. You should work with Josh. Josh helped me in my career. I said that. Nikita said that. 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 the first time you're looking them up. And so for us, any announcement is gonna be tied to their durable reputation. And so when companies fundraise, when people switch jobs, these are opportunities for cosigns, for endorsements, et cetera. And then on the question side, it's really this, this is what we were talking about earlier. It's like, who's the best comms person for this?

Or who's the best angel investor in fintech? Or who are people I should work with for this? Or this kind of very specific question of some sort of person 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. No, and 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 forums all the time are like, there's so much that just happens and 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 be positive and help shine on your strengths, I think is really, really powerful. And 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. We get these comments and it's just so special and you feel so lucky to have people that you've helped in the past be able to say those things about you now.

But then again, it just gets lost. And I think this idea of tracking those cosigns and really making it feel like this fundamental network of the web that we are, of Silicon Valley, of the tech industry, it's really powerful. Do you know the meme where the guy's walking into a party of stick figures and he's like, they don't even know that, that's something, you get a baller cosign or whatever and you're like, but it's not probably, Marc Andreessen wrote a blog post about me joining the firm.

That's pretty dope. Like, I want that on my, the first thing when you think about me is to think about Marc Andreessen. And so, yeah, there's just all these moments that happen. If we can make them more legible, you can more accurately represent someone's. Honestly, it wasn't until we actually hooked up the internet firehose to this product that I realized how many of those moments are. I mean, you look at the main feed and every day there is fundraising announcements, there's talent transitions, thanks to our good friends at X, we're plugged into a lot of those and we're taking like whenever someone quote tweets an announcement or replies and it's a, you're filtering them, it's a genuinely thoughtful, positive comment you pointed out earlier about positivity.

Those are pulled through and it's, yeah, it's really coming from a person and it's on the profile a person comes from and it goes to a person. To, and the reason why it's all positive is because products have to win on some dimension and this product is gonna win on people using it to show off. Like, show up in a good way. Like, hey, this is what I'm proud of. Like, this represents the full manifestation of what I'm capable of on a person level and on a company level.

And I really think it's about celebration. I mean, like, so much of what we do, there's so much hard work that goes on in making every single product that happens. 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, you know, are you gonna 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 of 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 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, you know, just by the show, obviously. And also, there's a lot, you know, a lot of other people build the companies too. 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 just 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 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 great. Because if you endorse someone who's not great, that reflects poorly. Exactly, yeah. It's an actual reputation-setting mechanism. And there'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 retweet it? And I think the key is like, you'll get to know pretty quickly who's just spouting things in is, you know, celebrating everything that can 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, that's 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, 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, and be 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. I want to tell a story or perhaps nudge Eric to tell a story. One of the first times I actually heard of Eric and then went on to meet Eric was the Rise Awards. And the Rise Awards 2015, 16, thereabouts.

So over a decade ago now. And it was around this 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 principle, do you want to tell the story? What were the Rise Awards? Yeah, so the Rise 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, what's the phrase? Fear not the guy who has a thousand moves, but the guy who does one move a thousand times. There's the samurai, that's your kick a thousand times. So Rise Awards, co-signing, a lot of these ideas have been in the ether for us for. In fact, the thing that stands out is a lot of the people who were the Rise 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 because 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, it'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 publicize. They're not gonna be the face of every article about the company, and yet there's 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, if 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 efficient, basically, more liquid in the sense of, well, 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 the sense of, if it was known that they had a great reputation, a lot of people would wanna hire them or fund them, and they should get those opportunities as a result.

And so it's basically like trying to fix that information asymmetry. I wanna 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 sit you down and say, hey, what company should I join? And there's a lot of people who wish they could do that, but if you've 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, like for the ones you do meet with, that you could just like press a button and it would go to all your companies instead of having to think through. Because there's some that you might wanna share private just to keep to your companies or whatever it is. But then also there are companies who are like, hey, I want a head of comms. Who in my network knows, 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 like facilitate much more matching.

Yeah, totally. I feel like even for investors, like 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. And like if I could and not ruin the reach in the audience, I would be tweeting about all my companies all day, every day. Like 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 at any time. Yeah, be shameless. Yes. It is interesting. I mean, so let's talk about existing platforms for a second. X, obviously, such a great platform and the exhaust of it is so valuable to so many people. But there's also times where I'm like, man, I wish I could just download my follower. I wish I could just like, or like, you know, a few thousand people liked this thing about joining my company.

I wish I could just like see this. Why is it so difficult? Or it's not built for this use case of like, you know, discovering people to work for or just get more signal like, okay, you follow me, but like, you know, do you wanna work for me? Do you wanna invest in me? I don't know, what do you wanna, what do we wanna do here? And so I, and then LinkedIn, you know, it's such a valuable utility. We're on it all the time. And yet everyone hates it.

I'm just saying. I'm just teasing. We love- We love LinkedIn. Yeah, we love LinkedIn. Josh used to work there. LinkedIn, you know, one of the most iconic products of all time. Mark famously defended it, I remember, when they got acquired. Because people were like, what, only 26 billion? It was like, you know, that's a great outcome. And it was an iconic product. And yet, you know, people have frustrations with it. So I'm, well, maybe let's, and even before the feed, I see people say the feed is crazy or whatever, but even before the feed, I feel like people were like, I wish there was just more that we could do here.

So why don't we talk about that? I worked at LinkedIn back in 2004 and five, when we were just starting to form a network. And Reid Hoffman, the founder, used to talk about it very much as 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, was a perfectly good usage.

Then we talked about usage. We really have to start to build products on top of the network. The real thing was the network is just the substrate. We need to go. Build a real job service. I helped launch the first LinkedIn jobs. We had to go build services, find the best PR professional, find those things, and then we'll build revenue. So first, so it was kind of the, I called it GRR, growth usage revenue, and we really had to figure out what those platforms and products were gonna be on top of the network.

Now the challenge is, as you built the network, it was very single signal. Are we connected? And at the early days, the beauty of that was the idea that we really know each other. I'll vouch for Olivia, and if David is asking for an intro to me, and Olivia says, David's really good, will 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 him 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 connection to like, yeah, we met once at a party, we high-fived, we had a good email exchange, and all of a sudden then, 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 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 he'd say, what is a social resume? When a job application comes in, and it wasn't just, here's who this person is. It was, 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've worked at similar companies they'd 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'd get a resume annotated by who else can help 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, ooh, that job looks really nice to that company. We said, no, we're gonna put the hiring manager, their profile's gonna 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 gonna 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 it's again, 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 ephemerally 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 gonna allow all these use cases to happen so much better. And when you get to get focused just on kind of making sure the network's right and getting all that usage, I think Cosign 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 product, I'm an hourly activist, making a ton of revenue, they're clearly doing fine.

They're doing great. 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 intro me? I will get the, hmm, I don't think I know them. Maybe I met them at 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 Cosign of being able to like break that into the granularity that it deserves because it's so much more useful. Seems like the greatest time in history to 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 and 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 does the future hold? So a lot of what we do, both actually our investing teams and our operating teams is just finding awesome people and investing in them, connecting them to our companies, otherwise kind of getting them in the A16C 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, that's only gonna get harder. Because for example, recently I posted on LinkedIn, I was like, hey, I'd love to help my portfolio companies hire. If you wanna work at a startup, fill out this Google form.

When it works, it's almost harder because I get 2,000, I get 2,000 results, right? And that's gonna happen to every person who posts a job or who posts any kind of opportunity. And it's gonna be 2,000 now and it's gonna be 10,000 a month from now as browser usage gets better and more people use browsers, it's gonna be 100,000. And so it's like, how do you, even me using Astra, like maximum strength, 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 Cosign is gonna be valuable to hopefully so many people in the community and also very valuable to the work that we do and 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 10,000 or like a much more vetted community and that's where we are to start and you're growing slowly and basically where you put out a post and you'll just be more confident in the signal that comes in.

Going back to LinkedIn for a second, some things that I wish it had is like, sort of like, remember like a MySpace top eight, like I want that for business. Like who are you in exchanges with? Who do you talk to regularly? Who are your mutuals? How do you know them? How'd you meet them? What do they think about you? There's more sort of, as you said, it treats connections all the same and you don't really get context on the relationship or context on people's reputation.

It's like LinkedIn is about personal identity. We hope that Cosign is about professional identity. We hope Cosign is about professional reputation. LinkedIn is about, they say it's like people you know. Twitter is like people who are interested in knowing you and we hope that Cosign delivers both in a more granular way and at the same time, to give props to LinkedIn, it started 20 plus years ago and no one's even come close to competing with it in any capacity. I remember Charles Hudson, a great investor, 12 years ago was a blog post like, where are the LinkedIn competitors?

It's time to disrupt. I don't like the product for X, Y, Z reasons. It doesn't do this and we've seen tons of them. We've backed them at the firm individually and people have tried crypto, all sorts of different incentives to break LinkedIn and it's just fascinating. I was joking when I said everyone hates it but people do have, they use it obsessively and yet they have low NPS on it or something and they know that a better version can exist and yet it's been impossible to disrupt.

But I think the real thing with LinkedIn is I 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. I call it the people who wanna find people and the other one is people who wanna 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, a lot of us might be happy.

We used to talk about the 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, it still might not be right for you in life at the time but for those mildly happily employed people, they aren't constantly, if they're an engineer, they're not checking LinkedIn every day for new people or new things.

If you're in sales, if you're in BD, if you're in venture, an investor, you're using it all the time. But that was what was really special and I think moving tens and tens and tens or hundreds of millions, I think there are over a billion people now, of people who are happily employed, who are maybe open to the right opportunity, that's the kind of network effect that really sticks and you think a lot about what is a 20-year network effect? Look at LinkedIn and as you're building and I say this a lot to new companies, as you're thinking about something new, how do you think about that kind of network effect that can be so powerful for 20 years and even if some people wish there was a better product, you can't move the masses over?

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 bot detection, 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 ultimately if it's something as important as your career you're gonna wanna 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 very much high-quality endorsements and high-conviction people. Generational shifts and also niche, the hyper-niche that we need also in LinkedIn. For example, GitHub is arguably a better LinkedIn for engineers than 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 their taste in people? And what gets me excited about Cosign isn't that it has to even be a better LinkedIn, it's that it really pulls together all this information that's already latently happening in our industry and look, Silicon Valley and the tech industry is so special for this kind of pay it forward, for this belief in somebody, the stuff we talked about at the very beginning, the belief in this person who may not have had a previously strong reputation but 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 these platforms like LinkedIn 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 have and that combines the things that are happening ephemerally with the things that are happening professionally with the depth that is gonna be great and if Cosign works great and it still only serves the tech community, that's a huge win.

And if 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 every great idea can just come from somebody who wasn't previously known but truly has a unique insight, that's what I hope this captures too. Eric from Benchmark had this comment in the Patrick O'Shaughnessy podcast where Patrick was asking him sort of like, what do you think about every category?

And he's like, it's all gonna work. Like everything is gonna be huge, not every company but just as an index, like everything we've come to a similar conclusion and I think similarly like when people say like, 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 that's great works and similarly like we just launched a school, like Stanford's gonna be fine, you know, Harvard's gonna be fine and our thing's gonna be great and then similarly like yeah, LinkedIn's gonna be great, like it's gonna keep doing its thing and we're inspired by them in so many ways.

We're also inspired by AngelList like 10 years ago when they owned the investor graph and it was for the startup community and it was really focused around companies, investors and talent and 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 used to exist and we think it's an opportunity to bring back and then we're also inspired, in terms of like how we're gonna 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 we're starting and we think people are gonna be excited about it because we're bragging for them on their behalf in an exclusive way and if they don't want it, we'll take it off but you're gonna see your profile, it's gonna be fleshed out with people giving you compliments and also people expressing their interest in funding you or working with you or even before you go to the profile. Like, 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 but if we didn't go that third party route, then we would have to get people, it's a cold start problem.

It's the place where people go to update their, you know, purpose is the most reliable. Often people say like, what's the daily behavior? Well, we're, you know, brute forcing it by covering every sort of transition so we'll also have reliable profiles with, you know, more reputation 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 if it's 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 a network I think as big as Silicon Valley and now it is, which is awesome.

Someone called it today the Nikita beer of founder communities. It's a real compliment. That's a true compliment. Yeah, so it's worth pointing out, everything that is being pulled in is coming from public sources so it's what people have posted on their, you know, a variety of different places. It's being aggregated. There's a lot of like the funding announcements, they're the ones that are being announced so there's a lot of really, really high quality information that is spread across the public available internet and it's uniquely compiled and structured we think in one place and Eric talks about the AngelList example.

I recall very early in my career, AngelList was probably the first, it was like the wedge that I took into the Silicon Valley at all. It was the, ability to see which companies in which geographies, which people at those companies, which, 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 that's worth pointing out here. We're putting this out into the world. It's like a thing we'd like to build with people. It's not something that's being presented as a fully finished, perfect product. It's an invitation. It's an invitation to everybody who wants to come in and edit and submit an update to their own or someone else's profile. So a real ask, like, let's build this thing together for everyone. And submit things to people's profiles, co-sign the things you endorse on people.

And then, even if somebody has feedback, co-sign that feedback so that it gets back to David and the team in order to keep improving things. Yeah. And so, just 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-signs. Paul Graham co-signed Sam Altman famously, I feel like 2009 or something. He said like the five best entrepreneurs, like Steve Jobs, three other people, and Sam Altman. Sam Altman hadn't like had a huge exit yet, but that really just like gave him such a reputational boost.

Him running YC, et cetera, is critical to him then going on to build one of the most important companies of all time. And so many, Ben Horowitz and Ali from Databricks, I mean, so many examples of people who got their co-sign from someone older and more senior in the industry and were able to rise up because of it. Ryan Hoover, who was the founder of Product Hunt, co-signed 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 and your potential.

I mean, look at what you've become since. It's amazing. I'm immensely 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, you know, pay your dues for 20 years before you're taken seriously. Like one of the most important intellectuals right now is Dhorkesh, he's 25 years old. He's never had a job as far as I'm aware. He just, you know, came to San Francisco, started podcasting.

And you know, someone was, I don't know if it was Patrick Collison or Marc 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 Truel, you know, a young guy in his mid to late 20s, etc. One of the most important people, Leopold Aschenbrenner, is like, I think like 24, 25 as well. 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 platform. Well, we're talking about social capital and positive some mindsets, I think is 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, this co-sign? This is my alpha. This is like, I know that person's good. Like, why would I tell you? You're good. And I think actually something, if you take a very long term view of this, you can say, sure, if that person is 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 this pre-seed round is Olivia co-signed 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 in my product. And that's why I'm here today. And 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. Oh, I understand. And the benefits just accrue to you in the sense of people always remember, like by order of magnitude more, the people who 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, his first investor. He's had so much investment all throughout, so much more money, so much more time into this company.

But you remember the first person. And so if you build it, 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 let's wrap on that. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast. If you like this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review and share it with your friends and family.

For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts and Spotify, follow us on X at A16Z and subscribe to our sub stack at A16Z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode. As 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 companies discussed in this podcast.

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