0:00The most important skill in this industry or perhaps in the world is your ability to identify things before the market.
0:06There 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?
0:11Someone who went to Stanford or someone who is followed by Patrick Collison, Elon Musk, Mark Andre.
0:17A 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 it's 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 [music] and really that reputation that transfers and builds over time.
0:37There'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 on a way that I enabled without even having to know about it.
0:47But [music] it's always hard to match the needs and the skills at exactly the right time. What we've enabled is this.
0:55We'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 of companies and people. And I want to start with a story um which is my friend David Prell uh told me he said my Twitter account is more valuable to me than my college education. Uh I would you know even though I paid you know quart million whatever it is you know I would have my Twitter has given me more value to my
1:23career and also personally. Now we of course just launched our own school. So we you know are big fans of uh of higher education but I I I thought that story was profound because of course you know Twitter has been free for so long you know um and um this idea what he got behind it is of course college is a bundle of you know education network and credential and I think and social life.
1:46Yes. [laughter] Yes. Of course. Uh yeah some of that is hard to recreate on on Twitter but yeah exactly. Um, and so the education, you know, you learn from having conversations, the the network, of course, you you meet people. Um, you discover people. Um, 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.
2:09What'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 cosign. It's a 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
2:39lots of other ways to express that that signal that that um and create this kind of like reputational um you know 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 re also read what you say. They want to work with you. They want to invest in you.
3:04they they want to, you know, um 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 abrand school and so we're kind of all in this you know a little bit of a race
3:32to discover talent um before anybody else and get the more that we get like Zack Franle's done an amazing job right of bu so many people have done amazing 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 Alman or Olivia invest in my company that's a signal to the market and angel investing or or just investing uh from venture firm that's one way to express an a co-sign or a signal but a lot of people aren't founders and a lot of people
4:01aren't investors and so we think there lots of other ways to express this this signal.
4:06Really curious as you've been building cosign like what are the kinds of endorsements you hope to get from the platform.
4:12Yeah. So we want on every profile to have at least the the three one is who shaped your career. Um because we we think this sort of like mentor uh econom this 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 Elma is my mentor that means that he is putting which was true actually [laughter] 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
4:41know 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 ly um to be known people want to work with you if you help them.
4:52So one has shaped my career. Two is would work with anywhere or in the trenches with um because you know it's hard to tell from existing platforms like you as you were saying the other night who are you really in the trenches with like who have you really built uh 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. Um and then third is uh person to watch like who do you think is going to um
5:21really be emergent like ascend it. Um and we rank order these too. So you know platforms just started you know most of it's fair game but if if you just you know in the same way like you know on to build a great investor profile it takes like uh you know many years but then you've got credit for doing so. We 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.
5:43I'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 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.
5:58And so there's actually signal in that too. Um, so those are some of the ones.
6:03We'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 uh 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 is like the most valuable data in
6:31all of Silicon Valley is like who has conviction and uh 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 uh 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
7:00how can someone who is maybe evaluating between five startup job offers um 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. Um and I know the data has to be handled carefully around who says what about who, but I I think it it will be and there's like a massive massive opportunity to add so much value to people's lives and careers.
7:28No, talk a bit about um because you think a lot about talent discovery. um talk about the newsletter you did because I think as an interest incredible stuff. Yeah. So um my twin sister Justine also works here at Andre on our infrastructure team. Um 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.
7:54Thank you so much. Um it was basically just aggregating startup job postings and the 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 that we think are worth joining for
8:22young people. Um, 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 a network of like scouts on campuses that Reddit and some of those people are now founders that Andre has invested in. They're all running like fantastic companies and in fantastic places. So, um, that was like the less scalable version of this kind of network. And I'm I'm excited for more
8:51people to have the ability to kind of put their name behind ideas.
8:55One thing I'd have is that as it gets easier and easier to start companies, as it gets noisier and noisier out there, um it's actually getting harder for people to do what you're describing.
9:04Exactly. So this kind of signal is more important than ever. Um if you think about uh the average student graduating out of sample 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. Um an example I love to to point to on the site when people go and you've got people like Py McCormack who I think has has always had a lot of very good signal around the deep tech and the the vertical integrators in particular and Paky's got 37 companies that he's chosen. He says these are the companies
9:33if you want to get into one into the space. Um, and there's, you know, many, many more behind them, self included.
9:38Uh, 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, um, so it becomes a sort of living directory of companies and of people that are worth paying attention to and free, you know, crunching base, pitchbook, you know, cost [clears throat] 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 we want it to be the most valuable place where people can see you know who invested in
10:07what you know what is uh you know Olivia's uh you know uh set of deals that she's done um 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 um you know How often do you go to uh you know
10:35someone's uh 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 like we're going to have a much more granular information to make sure that it's um there's real signal there. Um but uh that is you know one product decision that we've we've made. David, I'm 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 the need for it or you know what we're really trying
11:05One thing I've always believed is um 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. Um, 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. Um, 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, um,
11:35for angel investors, of course, um, they want to be non-conensus and right, and they're rewarded for doing so because I can invest in your preed round. If I'm right, then it's lucrative for me. Um, one of the things that's always drawn me back was the idea that I can't invest in my 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 Ilman, for example, um, and he will hopefully take that introduction because he's see sees me putting my reputation against that
12:04introduction. 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 the thing that stood out the first time around and the thing that we're trying to really lean on coming back is um like when I co-sign something, I take it seriously. I want that person to be able to take the cosign I've given given them and they might be able to go straight to Josh and they say, "Hey, David cosign me and Josh might see that he might reply to that cold DM." Um and in fact, that uh sort of lubricates the the wheels of social capital that should you could
12:34empower 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 cosign two people, they might be able to, you know, meet and and otherwise build something or otherwise hire each other or invest in each other in a way that I I enabled without even having to to know about it, which is very exciting.
12:52Yeah. I um 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 uh was this SV Angel conference in like 2018.
13:06They they I think they do once a year or something like that. And be every event should do this. But before I 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 um they said swipe who you want to meet uh who you want to intro to and I swiped on almost everybody. um you know it was up and coming you remember Josh um and eager to 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
13:35should chat and um 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 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 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
14:05think 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 uh 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 I can't there's 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
14:33um having more granular granularity around professional intent um passively there's no low no risk of like cuz 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 uh 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 full sign. Like I think
15:02about in 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.
15:10Then 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 is and can kind of work across time is really really interesting.
15:27I 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
15:56to 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.
16:10But 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. 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 that reputation that transfers and builds over time.
16:39So building on something Eric said the private signal um 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 um I mean honestly the the product is so fun you can go rabbit holeing 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 um maybe it's it's Pinterest that I'm going to put this person on my personal private list of people that I I want to, you know, work with in the future. And and I'm going to put this person on my public list of designers
17:08that I I rate. And every time a founder comes to me and they say, "David, who I need I need a new designer. I need a a growth guy. I need an engineer." Um 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.
17:26It'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 you you do you have to do it every time someone asks a question.
17:40What'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
18:08idea 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.
18:24Yeah, that's so fascinating. The company to company I didn't even think about like I would buy stuff. [laughter] Yeah.
18:31We'll get the product features tomorrow.
18:33We just extended the road path. Yeah, that happens. the there are a couple things I want to add to that.
18:38So, 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 um we think a way to differentiate there is to basically make reputation durable. A lot of reputation is uh built on social media, but it's um 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
19:06example. Uh, a lot of people came out of the woodwork, um, who've been working with him for a long time, um, 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."
19:18You know, I said that, Nikita said that, a bunch of other people said that. And then, you know, the next day just happened and 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 uh announcement is going to be tied to their sort of, you know, durable reputation. Um, and so when companies fund raise, when people switch jobs, these are opportunities for for co-signs for for endorsements, etc. And then on the question side, it's really this, you
19:47know, 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 or you know, who are people I should work with for this or this kind of like um you know, very specific uh you know question of of some sort of person or company or product you're looking to either surface to you or or learn more about and um in that way will also build durable reputation because you get added to a list through that. No, I I think this idea of bringing those ephemeral moments and those ephemeral conversations that
20:15happen 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 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 and you know I 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
20:44know David like we get these comments and 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 and I think this idea of tracking those co-signs and really making it feel like this fundamental network of the the web that we are of Silicon Valley of the tech industry I'll give you 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
21:12know that um like uh that's something you get like a baller cosigner or whatever and you're like it's not like like um you know Mark and Dre wrote a blog post about me joining the firm like that's pretty dope. [laughter] like I want that on my like I want just the first thing when you think about me is to like think about Mark and George professional ladies and so yeah there just all these moments that happen if we can make them more legible uh you know you can more accurately represent someone's honestly it wasn't until we actually hooked up the internet fire hose to this
21:40product that I realize how many of those moments are I mean you you look at the the main feed and every day there is fundraising announcements there's talent transitions uh thanks to our good friends at X we're we're plugged into a lot of those and we're we're taking like whenever somebody quote tweets and announce announcement or uh replies and it's a it's a we you're filtering them.
21:57It's a genuinely thoughtful positive comment your point earlier about positivity. um those are pulled through and it's 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 to and 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 um 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 like the full manifestation of what I'm capable of on a person level and on a company level.
22:27And and I really think it's about it's about celebration. I mean like so much of what we do there's so much hard work that goes on 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 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
22:56all the hard work that we do as opposed to, you know, there's 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.
23:06And one thing we're talking offline is interesting is a lot of, you know, there's a lot of um awards and a lot of shine on founders. Yeah.
23:13Uh and you know, justify so obviously.
23:15Um and also there's a lot, you know, a lot of other people build the companies too. Um, and a lot more people are critical to those companies and they're, you know, unknown uh or or not celebrated to the same degree and this is an opportunity to to do that as well.
23:26Totally. I think even just positive signal is going to be incredibly informative cuz I think a lot of people in Silicon Valley have a pretty high bar for who they're willing to publicly endorse in 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 I think it's cuz if you Yeah. Have you endorsed someone who's not great? That reflects poorly onact [clears throat] the natural like reputation sin mechanism.
23:51And 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.
23:57And I think 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.
24:09I'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 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.
24:23It takes so many great designers and engineers and marketers and product managers and we um 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
24:50the time. want tell a story or perhaps nudge Eric to tell a story. One of the first times I actually heard of Eric uh 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 um you know farmers 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?
25:12Yeah. So the the RISE awards were this uh series of awards meant to be for everybody else uh for the engineers, the designers, the product. I believe Josh was a judge uh you know many others and we had thousands of of submissions and um 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
25:41in 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 it's really interesting cuz um 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
26:09engineer 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.
26:20They're not going to be like the face of every article about the company. And 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.
26:34And they can't really do that right now.
26:36We're making the reputation market more like 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. Um, and then more liquid in the sense of if it was known that they reput great reputation, a lot of people would want to hire them or fund them and they should, you know, get those opportunities as a as a result. And so it's basically like trying to fix that information asymmetry. Um, I want to return to what you were saying earlier because it's really interesting. It's
27:05like, you know, a bunch of times a candidate will, you know, or someone looking for a new job will, you know, sit you down and say, "Hey, what company should I join?" And so, uh, and there's a lot of people who wish they can do that, but if you, you know, got your list of of companies they should join, it's kind of do business through you.
27:18They can. It's like Olivia stamped these companies. They can uh you know re reach out and similarly um the the u and it'd be cool also like for the ones you do meet with um that you could just like press a button and it would go to all all your companies instead of having to you know think through cuz there's there's some that you might want to you know share private just to keep to your companies or or whatever it is. Um but then also there are companies who want to who are like hey I want a head of comms. who in my network knows ahead of
27:46like who should I even talk to and to the extent that you know people are co-signing heads of comms or or or this kind of thing it can just like facilitate much more you know matching.
27:55Yeah totally. I feel like even for investors like the most upto-date profile of the companies they care about is maybe if they tag them all in their X 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 I if if I could and not ruin kind of the reach in the audience, I would be tweeting about all my companies all day every day [laughter] like promoting them. Go work for them.
28:20They just did this amazing thing. But you can't do that.
28:23And I love the idea of a place where like that kind of lives uh to see at any time.
28:30Yes, [laughter] it is interesting. I mean, so um let's talk about existing platforms for a second. you X obviously, you know, such a great platform and the exhaust of it is so valuable to so many people, but there's also times where like I'm like, man, I wish I could just download my follower. Like, I wish I could just like where like, you know, a few thousand people liked this thing about joining my company. I wish I could just like see this and why is it so difficult like 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 want to work for me? Do you want
28:59to invest in me? I don't like what do you want to what do we want to do here?
29:03Um, and so I um, and then LinkedIn, you know, it's such a valuable utility.
29:08We're on it all the time and yet everyone hates it. I'm I'm just [laughter] I'm just We love We love LinkedIn. We love LinkedIn. Josh used to work there. LinkedIn, you know, one of the most iconic products of of all time. Mark famously defended it. I remember when they when they got acquired cuz like what only 26 billion?
29:24It was like, you know, it's a it's a great outcome. And it was iconic product and and yet um, you know, people have frustrations with it. So I'm I'm I'm well maybe let's even even before the feed I some people say the feed is cring or whatever but even before the feed I feel like people were like ah I wish there was just more more that we could do here. So why don't you talk about that?
29:41Yeah look I worked at LinkedIn back in 2004 and five when we were just starting to form the network and and Reed 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 then we talked about
30:09usage we really have to start to build products on top of the network the 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 um and and then we'll build revenue. So first we so it was kind of the the I called it gurr growth usage revenue and and we really had to figure out what those platforms and products were going to be on top of the network. Now the challenge is as you built the network it was very single signal are we connected and at the early
30:39days 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 um to me and Olivia says David's really good um 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 um 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
31:09connect with you and I'll pass you on to somebody else. Was the important condition. But over time, it started to fade from that 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 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 that professional profile it's only
31:38really good if it adds value. Um, 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?
31:56When 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 have worked at similar companies they' worked at in the past or here's who knows people really well who also worked at those companies.
32:13So you wouldn't just get this flat resume, you'd get a resume annotated by who else can help you reach that person.
32:19So 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 that job looks really that company. We said, "No, we're going to put the hiring manager on. Their profile is going to be on the job." All of a sudden, instead of a faceless job that you're just applying and throwing your resume over the wall.
32:36Hey, you're going to get hired by this person and then by the way, here's the ways that you might have connections to that person or you might have connections to other people who work at that company. So, it's again, how do you use your network to do those things? And so, those were these like beginning epiphies of how to really rethink just something as simple as a job application and job site with this social network.
32:57And 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 that we all have but we don't figure out how to strengthen and put into LinkedIn anymore. The true connection the reason we were in the trenches together we worked on this thing. You bailed me out of a crisis. And when we can have that that information in the network is going to allow all these use cases to happen so much better. And when you get to focus just on kind of making sure the
33:26network's right and getting all that usage, I think cosign can really open up so many opportunities.
33:30Yeah, 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.
33:38I'm an hourly active user making a ton of revenue. They're clearly doing fine, but LinkedIn treats almost every kind of type of connection the same, especially as products like endorsements on LinkedIn haven't 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 hm I don't think I know them. Maybe I met them [laughter] 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
34:08same 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 cuz it's so much more useful.
34:25Seems 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 at the firm thinking a lot about like the talent in the social space and agents are an interesting way to accumulate a lot of context around a person. Uh I think a lot of the things that we're building here. Do you talk more about that?
34:45There's there's a lot of totally what does the future hold?
34:48So a lot of what we do it's 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 A16Z network. And so right now a lot of this is scraping these existing you know 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
35:17signal based and it's um kind of binary signal versus really granular signal that's only going to get harder because for example recently I posted on LinkedIn I was like hey I'd love to help my portfolio companies hire um if you want to 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 and that's going to happen to every person who posts a job or who posts any
35:45kind of opportunity and and it's going to be 2,000 now and it's going to be 10,000 you know a month from now as browser usage gets better and more people use browser it's going to be 100,000 and so it's like how do you even me using Astra at like maximum strength like how do you sift and sort and so in an age I think of like endless uh kind of outreach and interests with AI like the scarce thing is like the human endorsement or the human conviction or the human knowledge. And
36:15so that's where I get especially excited because I think cosign is going to be valuable hopefully so many people in the community and also very valuable to the work that we do and what we try to do here.
36:25And yeah, it's interesting. You know, we've sort of gotten to a place where there's only like broadcasting networks to the whole world or like group chats with like 50 people. There's not really this like you know 10,000 or like a much more vetted you know community and that's where we are to start. um and grow, you know, growing slowly and basically where you put out a post and you'll just be more confident in the signal that that that comes in. Um going back going back to LinkedIn for a second on some some things that I you know I wish it had is like you know sort of like um remember like a MySpace top
36:54eight like I want that for business like who who you have trenches with who do you talk to regularly like who who are mutuals h how do you know them? How'd you meet them? Um you know what do they think about you? There's more as sort of as you said it treats connections all all the same. Um and you don't really get context on the relationship or context on you know people's reputation.
37:13It's like LinkedIn is about personal identity. We hope that cosign is about you or I'm sorry professional identity. We hope cosign is about professional reputation. You know, LinkedIn is about they say it's like people you know. Twitter is like uh people who are interested in knowing you and we hope that cosign delivers both in a more granular way. And at the same time, you to give props to LinkedIn, it's like it started 20 plus years ago.
37:35And no one's even come close to competing with it in any capacity. I remember Charles Hudson uh you know great great investor like you know 12 years ago was a blog post like where are the LinkedIn competitors it's time to disrupt like I don't like the product for XYZ reasons it doesn't do this and we've seen tons of them you know we backed them you know at the firm individually and uh you know people try crypto like all sorts of like different incentives to to break LinkedIn and it it's just fascinating I you know I was joking when I said everyone hates it but people do have like they use it
38:04obsessively and yet they have like low NPS on it or or thing and they know that a better version can exist and yet you know it's been impossible to to disrupt but but I think the real thing with LinkedIn is actually think the NPS is really high for the people who aren't actively in the flow and in the searching and in the community. LinkedIn's always served two audiences.
38:25One is I call it the people who want to find people and the other one is people who want to maybe be found at some point in their lives. And when you think about it all of us would love to be found for the right opportunity that comes to us.
38:37We aren't no not a lot of us might be happy. We used to talk about the like mildly happily employed because there's a lot of people who like they like what they're doing. They're not in any urgent need to go do something else. But if the right thing popped, whether it was from, you know, someone you know or someone you don't know, but it matched all your interests, you might be like, hm, should I actually think about that? And I might consider it. It still may not be right for you in life at the time. But for those mildly happily employed people, they aren't constantly, you know, if they're an engineer, they're not
39:06checking LinkedIn every day for like new people or new things. If if you're in sales, if you're in BD, if you're in venture and investor, you're using it all the time. But but that was what was really special. And and I think moving tens and tens and tens or hundreds of millions, I think they're over a billion people now, of people who are happily employed, who are maybe open to the right opportunity, like that's the kind of network effect that really sticks.
39:30and and you think a lot about what is a 20-year network effect like look at LinkedIn and as you're building and and I say this a lot to to new companies as you're thinking about something new how do you think about that kind of network effect that could be so powerful for 20 years and even if some people wish there was a better product you can't move the masses over yeah we have looked at and invested in some attempted LinkedIn killers and I think what they've done a remarkable job with is the switching costs are just very high both because they are famously good at bot detection
39:59[laughter] 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. Um, but also because it's just such a tight and dense network that like ultimately if it's something as important as your career, you're going to want to be on the platform where everyone else is. That being said, I think there's a massive opportunity for a new platform when there is new information or new value to be kind of gleaned or shared which is like very much highquality endorsements and high conviction people
40:29generational shifts uh and also uh niche the the hyper niche that needs it own LinkedIn. For example, GitHub is arguably a better LinkedIn for engineers than than LinkedIn itself. And I'd say is there an opportunity to say like what is the emergent niche here? Is it the um the individual who's trying to build their reputation as a talent scout?
40:47They're trying to be a founder who wants to break through. could this is there a world for a better LinkedIn that represents their I yeah their taste in people the 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 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 at the very beginning the belief in this person
41:15who may not have had a previously strong reputation but has an insight an idea and that alone can gather a bunch of people and a bunch of momentum and change the world and and that's what makes this so special and that's what I think you know these platforms like LinkedIn you know serving so many people now across so many industries and so many domains and I think there's room for something that's really special for the the community that we have and that you know combines the things that are happening ephemerally with the things that are happening professionally with
41:43the depth that that is going to be great and if cosign works great and it still only serves the tech That's a huge win.
41:50And and and if it then other communities and other industries figure out they should figure out how to take part in this too and and bring some of that Silicon Valley energy to more places, that's even better. But the the pay it forward and the every great idea can just come from somebody who wasn't previously known but truly has a unique insight. Like that's what I hope this captures too. E Eric uh from Benchmark had this comment in the Patrick Ocean podcast where Patrick was asking him sort of like you know what do you think about every category and he's like it's
42:20all gonna work like everything is going to be be huge not every company but just as an index like every c I think we've come to similar conclusion um and I think and I think similarly like when people say like uh you know do does the world need another podcast like there's too many podcasts oh and yet another great podcast comes in and it doesn't kill the other it just all works uh everything that's great works and and similarly like you know we just launched school like Stanford's going to be fine you know our going to be fine and our thing's going to be great and then similarly like yeah LinkedIn's going to be great like it's it's going to keep
42:49doing it thing and you know we're inspired by them in so many ways we're also inspired by Angelist like 10 years ago when they owned the investor graph and really really it was for the startup community and it was really focused around you know companies investors and talent and you know they made a series of other bets that then sort of um made them focus on other parts of that or deprecate the the the the you the free public social network that used to exist and we think it's an opportunity to bring back and then we're also inspire in terms of like how we're going to do this. We're also inspired by Wikipedia.
43:19Um, one in terms of, you know, people want Wikipedia profiles, they're aspirational, but two, in that we're creating profiles for people. Um, so that that's where we're starting and we think people are going to be excited about it because we're bragging for them on their behalf in an exclusive, you know, way. And, you know, if they don't want it, we we'll take it off, but you're going to see your profile. it's going to be flushed out with all all you know people giving you compliments and also people expressing their interest in funding you or working with you or like even before you go to the profile like you know before you know and so that's one of the ways in which we're differentiating and only you know
43:48because of AI can we generate all of this information on people and like recreate you know a professional graph um but if we didn't go that third party route then we would have to get people to sign it's cold start problem it's the place where people go to update their you know professors it's the most reliable often people say like what's the daily behavior well we're, you know, brute forcing it by by covering every sort of, you know, transition. So, we will also have reliable profiles with uh, you know, more reputation benefits to it.
44:16Totally. 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, [laughter] especially if it's something it's the Nikita beard like your friends just answered this question about you strategy, which worked so well three times. Um and and it wasn't possible before AI for for a network I think as big as Silicon Valley and now it is which is awesome.
44:40Someone calling me today the Nikita Bureau founder communities. [laughter] That's a real compliment.
44:44That's that's a true compliment.
44:47Yeah. So it's worth pointing out um everything that is being pulled in is coming from public sources. So it's what people have posted on their uh you know variety of different places. Um it's being aggregated. Uh there's a lot of like the funding announcements. They're the ones that being announced. Um so there's a lot of really really high quality information that is spread across the publicly available internet and it's is uniquely uh compiled and structured we think in one place and Eric talks about the angelist example. I recall very early in my career angelist was probably the first it was like the wedge that I took into the Silicon Valley at all. was the it was the um
45:17ability to see which companies and which geographies which people at those companies which um you know for for a uh for a long time it it felt like it could be the LinkedIn for this sort of little niche of people who were ambitious in technology and then as Eric said it sort of it moved away from that for a number of reasons but that's been missing a place that you can go as a founder who's like uh which angel investors do I want to get to know over the next 6 months before my round it's a public utility something it's worth pointing out here you know we we're putting this out into the world it's it's like a um a thing
45:46we'd like to build with people. It's not something that's being presented as a a fully finished perfect products. You know, we it's an invitation. It's an invitation to everybody who wants to come in and you know edit and you know submit an update to to their own or someone else's profile. Uh it's a real ask like let's build this thing together for for everyone.
46:05Yeah. and and submit things to people's profiles, cosign the things you endorse on people, and then even if somebody has feedback, cosign that feedback so that it gets back to [laughter] David and the team in order to to keep improving things.
46:18Yeah. And so sort of to end on that sort of higher level note, uh a lot of the industry but also other industries sort of um run on cosigns in you know uh Paul Graham co-signed Sam Alman famously uh I feel like 2009 or something he said like the five best entrepreneurs like you Steve Jobs you know three other people and Sam Alman and at the time Sam Alman hadn't like had a huge exit yet but that really just like gave him such a reputational boost him running YC etc you know is critical to him then building going on to build one of the
46:46most important companies of all and and so many you know Ben Haritson Ali from data bricks I mean so many examples of people who got their cosign from someone older and more senior in the industry and were able to rise up because of it Ryan Hoover who was 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 grateful for him and um it it's it's
47:15so 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 take it seriously like one of the most important intellectuals right now is Doresh 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 if I don't know if it's Patrick Olson or Marson also went on like a number of people by going on his podcast early cosigned him and then said
47:43hey this is a place where then Zuck and others can go on you know the one of the most important founders is Michael Troll you know a young guy in his you know mid to late 20s etc. one of the most important uh you know people labelled Ashen Brener is like I think like 24 25 as well and so it just like if you're talented if you're smart in this industry um someone will discover you cosign you and make your career and so we hope that happens in our well we're talking about social capital and positive some mindsets I think it's
48:11a really important um there's a critique of of this I I wanted to to talk about where someone might rightfully say well why would I share this this cosign this is my alpha this is like I know that person's good like why would I tell you're you're good. And I think actually something um if if you take a very long-term view at this, you can say um sure if that person's raising a preede round right now and you want to do it, don't cosign them right now, but you the person you want to to cosign is the one that's raising a preede round two years from now, 5 years from now. And when they do, they remember you. They say,
48:40"Yeah, the reason I'm able to raise this free seed round is Olivia cosigned 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 preceding ground. And if you turn it around that way and you take a very long-term mindset like it's such a such a long-term 100% the benefits just acrew 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 Paul Brian Chesy when he uh you
49:09know goes public with Airbnb who does he write in the in the blog post he writes YC you know Paul his first investor he's had you know so much investment all throughout the book so much more money so much more time uh into this company but you remember the first person the so and so if you build if you are the first person especially publicly cuz that's where the value is uh because they will remember you for it and and then more people will come to you.
49:32Yeah. So let's wrap on that. Thank you so much. Thank you.
