“The most valuable data in all of Silicon Valley is who has conviction in whom.”
– Olivia Moore
Some of the best people in tech are people you’ve probably never heard of.
Think about the best person you’ve ever worked with. Very few people outside your team know how good they are. If more people knew, it could change their career. They’d get their next job faster. They’d have an easier time starting a company, raising a round, and hiring people of their own.
Today we launched Cosign - a curated professional network for the people and companies that drive the startup ecosystem.
So much of the tech industry revolves around taking early bets on people. VCs taking bets on founders, founders taking bets on hires, hires taking bets on founders, rinse and repeat. But getting conviction takes a lot of asking around, and most people don’t have wide enough networks to get that information.
While LinkedIn shows you who’s “connected,” on Cosign, you can get more granular detail on who’s actually worked side-by-side or made a big impact on someone else as a mentor or advisor. The kind of signal that, up until now, didn’t publicly exist anywhere.
You can also cosign companies and create your own lists. For example, here’s a list of companies that Packy McCormick would advise a new grad to join and bet their career on. Cosign automatically surfaces the open roles at those companies. You can think of this almost like fantasy investing or social capital investing - where in lieu of backing a company with money, you’re backing it with your name.
Along the way, you can ask the community questions:
Who’s a designer you think is great?
Who’s an angel in fintech you enjoy working with?
What are the best up and coming startups to join in NYC?
The answers get added to each person (or company)’s profile - so other people who have the same question can learn from the responses.
Finally, there’s Industry Watch. If you’re thinking about your next move, it helps to follow what companies are building and who’s joining them. This is the type of internal tool that VCs have built for themselves for years, and that we’re now making public in Cosign. It includes:
Top talent moves in tech/AI
Fundraising announcements
Product launches
And, you can find 69,000+ open roles at top tech companies hitting the newscycle.
Inside the team building Cosign
Cosign is the first (of many!) products to launch from a16z’s New Media product team - which is hiring, by the way.
Erik Torenberg, who recruited the team, has been trying to build something like this for years. At Product Hunt, he helped builders get their work discovered. In 2016, he launched The Rise Awards to celebrate tech talent who deserved more recognition.
Why build Cosign now? AI. It auto-populates company data, auto-researches information online, auto-filters out spam, and auto-writes the industry watch feed.
The core product team that built Cosign is just three people, two of whom are ex-founders/CEOs. Every morning, they test the latest version, talk through what it should be, and then make big changes. Their belief is that you don't find product-market fit with small tweaks. You find it by reworking the whole product until it feels right. Every few days, they ask friends and colleagues to use the new version, and apply their feedback in the same day’s cycle.
“I have 4 terminals open all the time running Cursor, until I run out of credits. Then I switch to Codex,” says Dhruv Gupta, Cosign’s core engineer. The team also has AI agents pulling context from daily syncs, Slacks, and text messages, and auto-updates internal docs and team-wide updates.
Building Cosign has given the team a list of other tools and ideas to work on next. If you want to join a tight-knit, fast-moving product studio within a16z that’s building innovative new tools for the startup community, take a look at the roles below.
Open roles
You can find all open roles on the a16z New Media team here. On the product team, we’re hiring:
Designer (SF or NYC)
Senior AI Engineer (SF or NYC)
Senior Product Engineer (SF or NYC)
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This is excellent. Congrats.
I developed a basic plan (design and funding) to create a Tech-Tinder, but matching start-ups with funders, based on a few fixed criteria, but it is still in my folder.
Would be interested to co-create something, if anyone's interested.
Can’t wait to try this !!