Can AI Fix Professional Networking? | Inside Cosign

What if finding your next job, co-founder, or collaborator depended less on a resume and more on who is willing to vouch for you? Cosign is building a professional network around those signals, with the longer-term goal of giving AI agents access to the relationship and reputation data that traditional networks keep locked away. a16z New Media’s David Booth and Dhruv Gupta join MTS to introduce the Cosign Awards, which recognize standout operators, companies, and products based on nominations from the people who know their work. They also unpack the bigger idea behind Cosign: mapping the people and relationships that rarely show up in public data, then making that graph accessible to both humans and agents. Looking ahead, they imagine professional networking where your personal agent can talk directly to a company’s agent, determine whether there’s a potential fit, and only bring the opportunity to you when there’s a genuine “coincidence of intent.”

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  What if I'm looking for a job and in fact like my agent should be able to connect with the company's agent and do a first pass of whether it's worth elevating me to the hiring manager or maybe it's Drew and I are looking to connect and it's our agents are having a first conversation, whether it's like what are our mutual goals, what is the coincidence of intents and is there one here where if there is, then the agents can connect us?

• 0:23Erik Torenberg?

  The biggest opportunities in your career often come down to one person willing to vouch for you. What happens when you turn that signal into a network? In this episode of MTS, Sophia sits down with A16Z New Media's David Booth and Drew Gupta to discuss Cosign and the new Cosign Awards, recognizing the operators behind some of the most successful companies. They also explore a bigger idea, a professional network built around reputation and trusted relationships, where AI agents could eventually connect people and companies without the noise of job boards and cold outreach. The goal is to increase what David calls your surface area for luck.

• 1:04Speaker 02

  Hello, everyone. Welcome back to MTS. Today, we are joined live by two guests. We've got David Booth here and Drew Gupta. They're both from A16Z's New Media team and they just launched Cosign Awards. So excited to have you guys on MTS today to talk a little bit about it.

• 1:20Speaker 00

  Excited to be here.

• 1:22Speaker 03

  Do you want to kick us off with what Cosign Awards are?

• 1:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, let's kick it off.

• 1:26Speaker 00

  We did. I mean, we're coming in towards the end of 2026 and it's been crazy. It's been a crazy year. One of the things we keep seeing again and again is that sometimes you know, the people that get the recognition in public, the founders, the CEOs, the face of the company, but more and more in this year in particular, I think going forward, there's across all of the functions, there's like one or two or you know, there's some smaller number of people who are just the operators who are like having the most impact. They can single-handedly turn a company's trajectory around. They can you know, single-handedly have the have more impact than anyone across it. So Cosign Awards is honestly, the first idea was can we shine a spotlight on who are the people that had the most impact across the year? Which are the companies that had the highest talent density that you know,

• 2:11Speaker 00

  have the most impact on the world, but also could have the most impact on your career? Which are the products that had the most impact throughout the year? And it's to bring that together and to do this combination of like the incredible opportunity for people to nominate those that they see that someone might not see. And also for people who you know, we've selected this pool of judges, we'll talk about some more, who have this visibility spanning the industry and can talk about you know, what they're seeing at the higher level in the meta trends. And hopefully we pull this together into some really, really interesting people to celebrate, companies to celebrate.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  This is pretty cool. I would say one of the big things that I saw from Cosign Awards is that this information right now lives in silos. Like maybe here at MTS, we know who are some of the top people when it comes to Twitter growth, but that information isn't known across you guys or you guys know some information across other companies that we don't quite know. So what's the big goal here with Cosign Awards? Maybe Drew, I know you were played a really impactful role in actually building this system. So tell me more about that.

• 3:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that Cosign Awards, our main goal is to give people the chance to celebrate everyone at their company that they think deserves it. I remember like being at like MTS, that was really my first experience in San Francisco. I think that I really could only get into like the startup ecosystem as a whole because Brent, the CEO of MTS, cosigned me in one way. And I think Cosign Awards are a way for us to also try and give all those people who are doing great jobs that visibility. With anyone being able to nominate, anyone being able to vote, we hope that a lot of like operators that are under

• 3:59Speaker 03

  recognized by the public but have great recognition inside their company are able to kind of take that step to being like well-known in the public for the great work they're doing as well.

• 4:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. You brought up an important point right there around Brent cosigned you. Oftentimes, it's not the resume that's the impressive piece or your past job, but it's the person that I trust who can vouch for you. It's that connection, that's that person who can actually cosign and prove that this person is worthy or this person should get hired or this person is phenomenal at what they do. And a little bit what you guys are doing is you're just now allowing that to happen on a massive scale. So what are some of these awards that you could potentially win here?

• 4:42Speaker 00

  There's, I mean firstly, exactly that. One way you could say is like if you were willing to introduce this guy to somebody that you deeply respect that's incredibly busy, not most, most people can't get to, but you say, actually, this is worth your time. That's the that's the cosign. In the same way here, I'd say across of what we tried to do is we tried to break and it's not perfect. We couldn't get as granular as you as you'd like to, but break down across those three categories, the people, companies and products. What's like the most logical way to think about each? For people, there's a lot of them are role-based. So there's things like engineers, FDE, product design, there's things like AI researchers, comms growth. There's a couple that are like less traditional on

• 5:26Speaker 00

  the org chart, like category for public intellectuals with 65 nominees. There's one for Podcaster of the Year with 76 nominees.

• 5:33Speaker 02

  Well, maybe we can end up on it.

• 5:35Speaker 00

  Well, I was gonna say, I mean.

• 5:36Speaker 03

  I think you are on. There's a video, yeah.

• 5:38Speaker 02

  Sweet.

• 5:39Speaker 00

  If all the MTS hosts are there already, then we're doing something wrong. Hoster of the Year, I mean, any, you know, a lot of the audience here will be pretty X-native anyway. So they'll see a lot of familiar faces in there. There's ones I'm personally very excited about. I think the Rising Stars is the is the most popular category. We can, we could share this or otherwise people should head to cosign.co/awards. But there's 135 so far and there's some really interesting people. There's a mix of like, I see founders who are you know, seed through Series A, but still a huge rambo ahead of them. I see people who are like, you know, some are better known and some I've never heard of ever in my life. But you know, I sure know that if if someone out there thinks they're a rising star, then that is a cosign and that's something that I'm gonna you know, take note of and pay attention to.

• 6:24Speaker 03

  Yeah. And similarly for companies, we have a lot of awards that you can win by industry, but also general awards for things like talent density. We want like employees especially to be voting for their own companies because that tells us that you know, this is a place that they like to work and probably a place that like other people would also like to work.

• 6:42Speaker 02

  That's really interesting too. So the people that would benefit from this information, it's not just individuals to figure out, it's also companies. So who are the who's this for? Like what is all this information for?

• 6:57Speaker 03

  I think it's for for everyone. I think we want Cosign to be the source of truth for the startup ecosystem. This should be where you go to get like any question you have answered, whether that's like who in New York is building the coolest thing in biotech? Or like who, who was like the first person who discovered Sophia Duke? All of those questions should be able to be answered from Cosign. And I expect that like people will be interested in it, companies will be interested in it, agents will be interested in it. We're really building this for everyone.

• 7:30Speaker 02

  Agents will be interested.

• 7:31Speaker 00

  Let's say like what types of questions could you not just go to your friendly LLM for an answer and get sort of a something that's ingested off the public internet, something that comes from you know, a relationship graph. One thing that we, I mean, personally, I've spent most of, if not all of my career in pursuit of at this point is the idea that a huge amount of what happens around us comes down to what feels like coincidence, what feels like you know, just meeting the right co-founder at just the right time or you know, conversation with a friend of a friend who introduces you to the person that offers you a breakout job or or the cold email you sent. It's to feel like how like what happened to create that coincidence? There is the, I was tweeting about this earlier today,

• 8:16Speaker 00

  but the Steve Jobs quote I've always loved, that you can't meet, you can't plan to meet the person who changed your life, but you can certainly put yourself in the path of luck and you can know that you know, when that person appears, you can grab it with both hands and run with it. So one way I've started reframing Cosign is, yes, I hope that it can be what Drew's, I hope there can be a source of truth for the tech ecosystem. I hope there can be a place that you can go and ask questions that you can't ask anywhere else. But like, and it's.

• 8:45Speaker 00

  Almost easiest form, I hope it's a place where you can increase your surface area for luck. It's a place where you can go and you know that if you build a profile out or if you browse the graph and you sort of you teach Cosign, you talk to, there is an agent, we're talking about that, you ask Cosign questions, then it's going to help you put yourself in the path of luck. It's going to help people find you. It's going to help your future co-founder, you know, find you and realize that you might be into the same things. This idea of a coincidence of intent, how do you make two people who have the same hope streams and complementary skills come into each other's orbits sooner? And the whole awards is really part of this, like maybe a winner of a design and a winner of an engineering award, who otherwise never would have found each other, have a better chance of doing that now.

• 9:29Speaker 00

  And if that happens, then they build something together, then we're all better off for it.

• 9:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's pretty interesting because it feels like the legacy systems for maybe how you would traditionally get a job are outdated, just the idea, even just going to college, a lot of young people are like, do I need a degree to get my dream job? And you hear this in Silicon Valley, especially in San Francisco, where you have young ambitious people who just show up with a big dream. And for a lot of people, social media is that outlet that allows them to actually get an opportunity, land them their first job, open up doors. But it's not that clear of a path. It's really hard to build up a social media following and try to create those opportunities for yourself. So it feels like Cosign is almost this shortcut.

• 10:14Speaker 02

  If you already have some of these people, you can get some of those opportunities that maybe social media traditionally could give you, but just get them through people you already know who can vouch for you.

• 10:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I'm a senior at Penn right now. In my career, in my summer internship sophomore, junior year, I went down the like very traditional path of like Morgan Stanley and Jane Street finance stuff.

• 10:37Speaker 03

  And to get those jobs, I was just like cold applying on handshake, every day checking new jobs. It was like horrible. It was not a fun experience at all. My first like experience in tech, as I mentioned earlier, was through Brent, seeing like some of the work I'd done at Polymarket before and recognizing that I would be able to contribute at MTS. And him taking that chance on me really allowed me to get into this tech world. I think that everyone will have someone like that who can take that chance on them. And we want Cosign to be the place where that happens. And you can find the people who, the people you trust are cosigning and like, think about giving them jobs.

• 11:20Speaker 03

  I think if we move more and more towards that as a means for hiring, instead of like cold applied button mashing on LinkedIn or handshake, it'll be like a better world for everyone.

• 11:31Speaker 02

  I completely agree. I think there's one piece that you just alluded to, which is the person piece, where now you can actually find people and opportunities because there's a person that vouched for you. But on the other end, there's also this company piece, I see it here, David, that you're pulling up. One thing I think that's interesting here is if you can get all the people who maybe have a traditional job that they don't love, maybe some people love their traditional jobs, so keep them wherever you're excited there. But there's a lot of amazing talent stuck with golden handcuffs, who for whatever reason, don't know what else exists. And I have a fundamental belief that if you get all of these people to genuinely do what they're passionate about

• 12:14Speaker 02

  and what they're exceptional and one of one in, in an industry or solving a problem that a specific company is working towards, that's how you change the world. Just get everyone to work on the thing that they were meant to be doing.

• 12:27Speaker 00

  It's, yes, and it's not even that company which needs to change the world. It's the fact that a lot of people who think that way go work there together and they build their own relationships and they meet their own future co-founders. And it's kind of, it's an extension of the idea that you are the average of the five people you spend the time with. So if you want to, you desperately want to help, you know, re-industrialize America or uncover new sources of essential minerals or whichever one of a thousand missions that people are working on out there. If you self-select into a culture of people who are working on that mission, then you will find that it's not even just the, there's this line of careers, a long, you know, roles are short, but you, it's the people you meet along the way that you can build the next thing with.

• 13:13Speaker 00

  And Cosign, when you're there with them so that you can keep tabs on them.

• 13:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, completely agree. I would say for a lot of this young talent too, or talent that just, exceptional talent that maybe wants to make a career change, it can be really hard to find what are those companies that they should go towards. You hear about the big companies and the big companies have a monopoly around attention because you consistently hear their names again and again, but you don't hear about some of these smaller startups. And so I know that's something that you guys have been very focused on. I know famously Katie Kirsch with her, LinkedIn posts is one of the best ways to find out about new types of jobs within the A16Z portco world. But tell me what Cosign's role is here.

• 13:55Speaker 00

  There's, I mean, if you think, again, awards live now, they're kind of community generated lists. They're lists that anybody can nominate too. There are lists all across, I mean, it's one of the core things that we're playing with. I think of Cosign in sort of these three layers. One is, it's almost like Wikipedia style. You've scaffolded out profiles for 40, 50,000 people across the site now. You can just, you can click through, you can rabbit hole up and down the companies and investors, back to people. The next layer of his lists, it's a way of doing a lightweight curation. So you can go to many, I think about 400 people at this point have made lists of companies.

• 14:29Speaker 00

  Peggy McCormick, Not Boring is one of my favorite examples. I'll go and, you know, Peggy's got 36 companies listed there, which he and his time he takes to write and research thinks are really interesting vertically integrated, you know, companies that somebody who reads Not Boring might be interested in going to work at. But then that equivalent across of however many like angel investors and GPs at great funds, these are the companies that if you're looking for something, you should go and join one of these. If you go and sort of dig into, there's this tab, cosign.co/lists, you can scroll down. It's an infinite scroll and you go through all of these different subsets of, that's the company ones, but also people. What if you could look at every, you know, different individual list, there's sort of the Interact fellows,

• 15:13Speaker 00

  the Thiel fellows, the different lists that have been created over time and see where they intersect. See where the, you know, the Interact fellows of 2014 are now, it's the one that has to be on my screen in front of mind. And we think that by having, so if there are all of these profiles for, you know, 50,000 really interesting people in the industry, there's this lightweight layer of curation that sits on top of that, then the cherry on top of that is the Cosign. You talk about that's the, it's the very intentional given from me to you to say, this is somebody that I would work with anywhere, someone that I think is going to be great and the world doesn't know yet, or someone that, you know, shaped my career and helped put me in business. And honestly, I do want to say as well, like this is very, very early in this product development.

• 15:57Speaker 00

  There is a lot more that we're testing, iterating on live, or would encourage everyone to go on, go and click around and like flag anything you see for us. You like, you know, it's still some rough edges on the experience. Cosign's particularly, we're going to be leaning in on in the future. I think one of the most important things, Drew is very, very passionate about this, given his story on Brent and things as well, is I think there is like, one of the most interesting things this could do is be that opportunity for the next 50,000 Drews. He has no equal, but yeah, there's another 50,000, how many, how many thousand people out there just have incredible potential and they haven't been discovered yet?

• 16:33Speaker 02

  And they haven't been discovered yet. Yeah, 100%, especially think about that when it comes to a global, you know, a global level, because it's not just in the United States. There's probably some amazing, exceptional people in other countries that can never find out about the opportunities here in the US. And now with social media, with ability to network across borders, who knows what's going to be possible? We can tap into everyone's untapped potential, you know?

• 16:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's incredible. Back when I was at MTS, when we were trying to hire engineers, there was a 17-year-old kid from Sweden who like reached out to me about that role. And even though we weren't able to have him work with us at MTS, I've been able to like help him in other ways in his career. And I'm sure that there's so many like other thousands of young people like that around the world.

• 17:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. I am really curious to hear about this agent piece. You, I know, work on the software, the tech behind this entire product. How do lists and then the ability of agents to then parse those lists and get information might create the next data layer for these hidden networks behind the startup ecosystem?

• 17:39Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I think that one thing that like LinkedIn will never do is introduce an MCP that allows you to have vast search access over the graph. So even though there are so many thousands, hundreds of thousands of accounts on LinkedIn, your ability to like find the people that you need is limited. And the same thing for companies. I think I remember back when I was like in New York this summer, I wanted to start like meeting people who I thought I might be able to work for one day. So I Googled like, who are the best startups in New York? And Gemini gave me like a pretty bad answer. I switched to ChatGPT, it also gave me a pretty bad answer. I think that that like whole data layer of information is kind of missing right now.

• 18:25Speaker 03

  And our hope is that with Cosign, with people contributing to their profiles, contributing to lists, enriching our graph even more, as agents are able to like search through that, we'll be able to get like much better answers to those questions, much better answers to those questions personalized to you. Because like as you are interacting with the platform, we're getting a better understanding of what you're looking for, what you would want to do, what answers would like make you the happiest.

• 18:56Speaker 03

  And we want you to also be able to access these agents anywhere. We have like our own platform, Ask Cosign feature, but we also have an iMessage agent. We also have a personal MCP that lets you connect your Muse, your Grokbot, your Instinct, et cetera, to the platform. And we're going to keep on building more and more of those types of integrations to make this truly the first kind of agent-native professional networking platform.

• 19:19Speaker 02

  Wow, that's so interesting to me because a lot of this information right now is completely gated away. You can't actually parse it.

• 19:26Speaker 00

  There's the, there's, there's so many fun layers to this. And, and I'm going to start with a call out to people who are thinking about this kind of stuff. DMs are open and I want to chat. But there is a lot of what you were talking about rightly is about the search problem. And search is, I think, still a problem, but it's getting easier and easier. There is a new, yeah, Exra is phenomenal. There's so many different databases you can, you can search across. You've got more powerful models. I think that there's kind of two ways to find, to get alpha in talent. One of them is like a quant fund. You take the same public information that every other fund has, but you can analyze it better. And I think that as models get better, you, you're going to be able to analyze the public commoditized talent data.

• 20:09Speaker 00

  The, the thing that I've been thinking a lot about is what does it mean when agents can kind of negotiate with each other on behalf of their owners? So I've been following along so closely with the personal agent wave of the last like month. It seems insane that it's only like a, maybe let's say two, you know, month or two. Muse has hit 10 million users now, I think. There's this line, like, I, I realized that your personal agent could know you extremely well. It could know all of what you want to achieve. It could be that you're asking it questions about how to get promotions and how to find new jobs and how to like develop skills. But it still doesn't have a way to actually connect with the people that it's finding you. And the best it can do is draft an email in your inbox and send it to someone else's inbox,

• 20:54Speaker 00

  where maybe an agent picks it up and sends back again. So we realized that recently there was some very early showing of like agent-to-agent communication and customer success was one. TECAGON was one of the first to introduce their, their agent-to-agent protocol with Muse and Instinct. And they, you know, their customers who might be big companies, like a car rental company, say, and the personal user can just negotiate directly with the, the agent on the other side. And then we started thinking, you go down that rabbit hole, you realize that, well, what if I'm looking for a job? And in fact, like our agents should connect with, my agent should be able to connect with the company's agent and do a first pass of whether it's worth elevating me to the hiring manager.

• 21:37Speaker 00

  Or maybe it's true of, and I are looking to connect and, and it's our agents are having a first conversation. Whether it's like, what are our mutual goals? What is the, the coincidence of intents? And is there one here where if there is, then the agents can connect us? So there's a lot of fun to be had here. We're basically at the moment prioritizing building at cosign.co forward slash agents. I don't know if we tweeted that yet, but people can go there and they can connect their MCP. They can text the, the agent. They can find Ask Cosign, super powerful, just conversational agent built right into the UI. And there's a lot more coming.

• 22:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, on networks right now, the, the inbox works the same way for Sam Altman as it does for me as for my 14-year-old little sister. And it probably shouldn't. And I think that that's one of our core beliefs as well is that we really want to like be able to preserve that signal and make sure that you are meeting the people who you should be meeting. And you don't have to spend time looking through a ton of people who you probably shouldn't be meeting.

• 22:37Speaker 02

  Definitely. One last thing for you guys, since I know we're kind of at time. What's next for Cosign? What can people expect to see from you all in the next few months?

• 22:46Speaker 00

  Well, we've got to close out these Cosign Awards, that's a big one. Voting is open or nominations are open through the end of the month. So through the end of November, so we've got about three weeks left. Now, the coolest thing about this, by the way, is that everybody who was like with the judges' participation, selected as the winners of the categories, we're going to invite to bring together. So I think that people don't need another trophy or another certificate. The opportunity to build relationships with the other category winners is the, the real thing. I'm honestly the most excited about. So that's a big one for us. A lot of product coming.

• 23:20Speaker 03

  So much product coming.

• 23:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:21Speaker 03

  And I can't answer what it's going to be a week from now, much less a few months from now.

• 23:27Speaker 02

  All you know is that you're busy.

• 23:28Speaker 00

  What we can say is that it, the, the product changes rapidly with feedback. So the more that people can come and, and share. One of the biggest ones that we've, we've been hearing over and over again is that the onboarding needs to be a lot smoother and a, and a big opportunity to learn how we can help people. So there's a lot of changes coming there. And yeah, just hit us with your, your questions and we're excited to be building more.

• 23:55Speaker 02

  Awesome. Well, thank you guys so much for joining us today on MTS announcing the Cosign Awards. I had you on earlier when Cosign first launched and so excited to have you on again to talk about the latest updates. But thank you so much for joining us.

• 24:07Speaker 00

  We'll have to come and announce the winners in a month.

• 24:09Speaker 02

  I can't wait, can't wait. It'll be happening live on MTS. Maybe we'll get a little exclusive.

• 24:13Speaker 00

  It'll be fun.

• 24:14Speaker 02

  It'll be fun.

• 24:17Erik Torenberg?

  Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z Podcast. If you liked this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review, and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on X at A16Z and subscribe to our Substack at A16Z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode. This information is for educational purposes only and is not a recommendation to buy, hold, or sell any investment or financial product. This podcast has been produced by a third party and may include paid promotional advertisements, other company references, and individuals unaffiliated with A16Z. Such advertisements, companies, and individuals are not endorsed by AH Capital Management LLC,

• 25:02Erik Torenberg?

  A16Z, or any of its affiliates. Information is from sources deemed reliable on the date of publication, but A16Z does not guarantee its accuracy.