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, Mark Andre?
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 novel 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 it.
But it's always hard to match the needs and the skills at exactly the right time. What we've enabled is this.
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 Prell told me. He said, 'My Twitter account is more valuable to me than my college education.' I would, you know, even though I paid, you know, a quarter million, whatever it is, you know, my Twitter has given me more value to my career and also personally. Now we, of course, just launched our own school, so we, you know, are big fans of higher education, but I thought that story was profound because, of course, you know, Twitter has been free for so long, you know, and this idea, what he got behind it is, of course, college is a bundle of, you know, education, network, and credential, and I think...
Yes. Yes. Of course. Yeah, some of that is hard to recreate on Twitter, but yeah, exactly. And so the education, you know, you learn from having conversations. The network, of course, you meet people. You discover people. People kind of is proof of work of like 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, you know, Mark Andre, etc.? People would say, I think most people would say the latter, right? And so this kind of like peer-to-peer credential. And so what that is, but you know, implicitly, although people also do this explicitly, is a co-sign. 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 reputational benefit that these people get, which is really an exhaust of this person is 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, you know, have you part of their team. And also there's benefit, so 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. Like you're more, you know, 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 know, or come from, you'll come from an unknown school. And so we're kind of all in this, you know, a little bit of a race to discover talent before anybody else. And the more that we get, like Zach Friesen has done an amazing job, right, of building a reputation for discovering people. And so talent, the benefit they get is talent thinks, oh, I can get king-made by them. Like if Josh Elman or Olivia invest in my company, that's a signal to the market. And angel investing or just investing from 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.
Really curious, as you've been building Cosign, 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 the three. One is who shaped your career, because we think this sort of like mentor economy is what Silicon Valley runs on, and it also just, it helps both the, you know, if I was shaped, if my, you know, if Josh Elman is my mentor, that means that he is putting, which was true actually, you know, just happens to be true, you know, said I was a young person, Josh spent a bunch of time with me, and that's a signal to other people that I'm, you know, 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, to be known, people want to work with you if you help them. So one has shaped my career. Two is who you'd work with anywhere or in the trenches with, because, you know, it's hard to tell from existing platforms, like you were saying the other night, who are you really in the trenches with? Like who have you really built, you know, bonds with? Who would you, you know, 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 a person to watch, like who do you think is going to really be emergent, like ascend it. And we rank order these too. So, you know, platforms just started, you know, most of it's fair game, but if you just, you know, in the same way, like, you know, to build a great investor profile, it takes like, you know, many years, but then you've got credit for doing so. We think you do that around people too. So you can say, hey, I think, like, I think Olivia is going to be one of the greats. I'm going to, like, you know, 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, at seed, but, you know, are, you know, going to be great? Because of course if you're able to, you can express your conviction with your, you know, money, but not everyone's an investor. This is 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 can give you kind of a read, 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, you know, do you know anyone who worked with this person? And we do it every day, and we still, I would say, like 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 of, 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, massive opportunity to add so much value to people's lives and careers.
No, talk a bit about, because you think a lot about talent discovery, talk about the newsletter you did, because I think as an interest, incredible stuff.
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.
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 at a venture firm, we had no way to differentiate between all these startups and founders of like who is legitimate, who's not, who's the most exciting. And so we were like, okay, we have some inside information now. Let's like curate a list of like 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. Like we had a network of like scouts on campuses at Reddit, and some of those people are now founders that Andreessen has invested in. They're all running like 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.
One thing I'd add 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 like 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 Pieter McCormack, who I think has always had a lot of very good signal around the deep tech and the vertical integrators in particular. And Pieter'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, you know, many, many more behind them, self included. So there was like, you're in a way, he's co-signing some of his reputation against that company. He's saying like, 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, you know, Crunchbase, PitchBook, you know, 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 want it to be the most valuable place where people can see, you know, who invested in what, you know, what is, you know, Olivia's, you know, set of deals that she's done, you know, what is the sort of most reliable, you know, 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, you know, no product can be all things to all people, and there are trade-offs, and we're, 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, you know, how often do you go to, you know, someone's LinkedIn and or text someone and be like, hey, you're connected to someone on LinkedIn, like, can you tell me about it? You're like, ah, 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, there's real signal there. But that is, you know, one product decision that we've made. David, I'm, this is something that we experimented with seven years ago and decided not to pursue because we got busy with other stuff, but I'm curious what has always struck you about this idea in terms of the need for it or, you know, 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, you know, in charge of procurement for, you know, a growing company, maybe you need to identify which product is better for 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 that, 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 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, 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, you could empower a lot more people to achieve a lot more. There's this novel quote I love from a long time ago: be so good that people would do business through you. In fact, if I co-sign two people, they might be able to, you know, meet and otherwise build something or otherwise hire each other or 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. They, I think they do 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 it was, you know, all of it was, you know, everybody was a, you know, baller. And they said, swipe who you want to meet, who you want to intro to. And I swiped on almost everybody. You know, 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 automatic intro, and it would be like, you guys have full context, you know, you should chat. And 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, but that event provided the context for us to, you know, become friends and collaborators. And I say that to say that 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, 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. I can't, there's a lot of people who I would hire, but I can't like reach out to all of them, and also might be inappropriate, and what, 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 granularity around professional intent, passively, there's no risk of 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 can unlock just a lot of, you know, 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 Cosign. Like I think about in all of our jobs, we meet so many people every day. I often meet someone, I'm like, they are 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 and somewhere that's more persistent 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 in 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, you know, 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. And I have to go through and see who have 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. Like, 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, you know, 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 Erik said, the private signal is one core piece of it, and I think what you'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, you know, work with in the future. And I'm going to put this person on my public list of designers that I rate. 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 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. I can kind of shortcut that work that you're saying you have to do it every time someone asks a 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, you know, I know this person has been trying to get their startup off the ground. This other startup would like love to, you know, 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, you know, are you thinking about exiting your company?' That's like a big risk. It could be like 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 is like really, really, really great on both hires, acquisitions, like job changes, tons of things.
Yeah, that's so fascinating. The company to company, I didn't even think about like I would buy stuff.
We'll get the product features tomorrow.
We just extended the roadmap.
Yeah, that happens. There are a couple things I want to add to that. So, you know, it's interesting. You know, we thought a lot about, you know, should there be a feed, you know, if so, what is on the feed? Is it free form, etc. And Josh helped us really nail down sort of the focus of the feed to be around questions and announcements. And, you know, announcement is 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, you know, 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, you know, publicly said anything recently because they didn't need to, and said, 'Wow, you know, I really endorse Josh. You should work with Josh. Josh helped me in my career.' You know, I said that, Nikita said that, a bunch of other people said that. And then, you know, the next day just happened, and 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, you know, durable reputation. And so when companies fundraise, when people switch jobs, these are opportunities for co-signs, for endorsements, etc. And then on the question side, it's really this, you know, this what we were talking about earlier is like who's the best comms person for this, or who's the best angel investor in fintech, or, you know, who are people I should work with for this, or this kind of like, you know, very specific, you know, 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, we'll also build durable reputation because you get added to a list through that.
No, 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, you know, be positive and help, you know, 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, you know, 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. And 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 think will be really powerful.
Do you know the meme where the guy's like walking into a party at Stick Figures and he's like, 'They don't even know that,' like that's something you get like a baller co-signer or whatever, and you're like, it's not like, you know, Marc Andreessen wrote a blog post about me joining the firm, like that's pretty dope. Like I want that on my, like I want just the first thing when you think about me is to like think about Marc Andreessen wrote a blog post about me joining the firm. And so yeah, there's just all these moments that happen. If we can make them more legible, you know, you can more accurately represent someone's.
Honestly, it wasn't until we actually hooked up the internet fire hose 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 somebody quote tweets an announcement or replies and it's a, we, you're filtering them. It's a genuinely thoughtful positive comment. Your point earlier about positivity, those are pulled through and it's, yeah, it's really coming from a person and it's on the profile the person comes from and it goes to a person.
And the reason why it's all positive is because products have to win on some dimension and this product is going to win on people using it to show off, like to show off in a good way, like 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 into 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 is, 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 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 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 were 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, justified, 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 that as well.
Totally. 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.
Because if you, yeah, have you endorsed someone who's not great? That reflects poorly on you. It's the natural like reputation sin 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 and 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, 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, 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 Erik to tell a story. One of the first times I actually heard of Erik and then went on to meet Erik 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, David, 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 people. 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.' [laughter] There's the samurai, that's the kick a thousand times. So, yeah, Rise Awards, cosign, 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 spitting 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 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, if they go to another one, and carry that accomplishment with them.
And they can't really do that right now.
