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hopped on the @a16z pod with @eriktorenberg, @omooretweets, @joshelman to chat about @cosign
but, what is a Cosign?
It’s a small slice of your reputation- your personal credibility- attached to a person you want to vouch for.
A Cosign aims to capture what a résumé or a generic connection cannot: the strength and meaning of a relationship.
We have three core endorsement prompts:
- who shaped your career?
- who is someone you would work with anywhere?
- who is a person to watch - someone you think is going to be a star, and the world doesn't know it yet.
We want to make belief in someone more specific and useful.
Let's see if it works 😅
Would love any early feedback
but, what is a Cosign?
It’s a small slice of your reputation- your personal credibility- attached to a person you want to vouch for.
A Cosign aims to capture what a résumé or a generic connection cannot: the strength and meaning of a relationship.
We have three core endorsement prompts:
- who shaped your career?
- who is someone you would work with anywhere?
- who is a person to watch - someone you think is going to be a star, and the world doesn't know it yet.
We want to make belief in someone more specific and useful.
Let's see if it works 😅
Would love any early feedback
Who believed in you first? Silicon Valley runs on that question.
a16z's Erik Torenberg, David Booth, Josh Elman, and Olivia Moore on Cosign:
Cosign is a curated professional network for the startup community. Profiles are built from endorsements, fundraises, and talent moves, with a private layer to signal who you'd fund or hire.
Erik ran a small version of this seven years ago, emailing a few hundred people and asking each for one person to watch. One of the answers was Russell Kaplan, then a 22-year-old engineer at Tesla, now president of Cognition.
Olivia on why this matters: "The most valuable data in all of Silicon Valley is who has conviction in who." Investors chase it every day and still struggle to find it. An engineer choosing between five offers has almost no way to get it at all.
Paul Graham cosigned Sam Altman in 2009, six years before OpenAI was founded. Ryan Hoover cosigned Erik early at Product Hunt. Silicon Valley has always run on cosigns from people whose word carries weight, and until now nobody kept the record.
The conversation closes on the question of why anyone would share their alpha. David's answer is that the person you cosign today is the one raising a round in two years, and when they do, they remember who believed in them first.
0:55 Twitter as a credential
3:05 Silicon Valley is a race to discover talent
4:10 The 3 questions on every Cosign profile
5:45 The email that found Russell Kaplan at 22
6:15 Conviction is the scarcest data
9:50 Why Cosign is free and strictly positive
11:05 Seeing things before the market does
13:00 Sending private "I'd fund them" signals
18:35 Endorsements that don't vanish
23:05 Recognition for the unsung engineer
29:40 Building LinkedIn Jobs in 2004
34:25 AI made human endorsement scarce
36:45 Why nobody has disrupted LinkedIn
42:10 Your Cosign profile may already exist
46:25 Silicon Valley always ran on cosigns
48:10 "Why would I give away my alpha?"
YouTube: youtu.be/-ywZlfznTa4
@eriktorenberg @davidbooth @joshelman @omooretweetsView quoted post on X
