a16z Podcast
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.”
Resources:
Follow David Booth on X: https://x.com/david__booth
Follow Dhruv Gupta on X: https://x.com/droovg
Cosign:https://cosign.co
Cosign Awards:https://cosign.co/awards
Stay Updated:
Find a16z on YouTube: YouTube
Find a16z on X
Find a16z on LinkedIn
Listen to the a16z Show on Spotify
Listen to the a16z Show on Apple Podcasts
Follow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg
Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
-
Anatomy of the SolarWinds Hack: Who What Where When How
In this special “3x”-long episode of our (otherwise shortform) news analysis show 16 Minutes — past such 2-3X explainer episodes have covered section 230, Tiktok, GPT-3, the opioid crisis, more — we cover the SolarWinds…
-
Psychedelics: Striking a Balance Between Benefits and Side Effects
In recent years, there’s been a shift in how we think about psychedelics – from drugs of abuse and recreation, to powerful drugs for treating neuropsychiatric conditions such as depression, addiction, and PTSD. But…
-
Developers as Creatives
The rise of developers — as buyers, as influencers, as a creative class — is a direct result of “software eating the world”, and of key shifts in IT from on-prem to cloud & SaaS…
-
Section 230: Everything You Need to Know — Tweets, Free Speech, Beyond
All about section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — in what Wired senior writer (and host of the Get Wired podcast) described as “one of the clearest-but-still-nuanced explainers I’ve heard – worth listening to”. …
-
Baumol’s Cost Disease, in Healthcare… and Where We Go Next
If software’s eating the world — and more specifically, bringing costs down and increasing productivity through entire industries — why have some industries, like healthcare, been so resistant? And what could the future look like…
-
Words of 2020! (and Metaphors, and Interfaces of the Year)
“In a year that left us speechless, 2020 has been filled with new words unlike any other”… so it’s unprecedented that for the first time, the Oxford English Dictionary did NOT name a word of…
-
The Machine That Made the Vaccine: Company, Platform, Innovation
In this special episode of Bio Eats World — which aired right after the FDA authorized Moderna’s mRNA vaccine for emergency use — Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel tells the story of not just the vaccine’s…
-
The PPP Omnibus: Eminent Domain, Fraud, and Fintech
This episode features two relevant but previously recorded episodes, discussing the relevance of the Paycheck Protection Program (or PPP) from the Small Business Administration and the role of government stimulus/ pandemic relief for the economy…
-
The Holy Grail of Social + Fintech
The intersection of social and finance—as well as shifting attitudes around what we share about money online—have given way to an ambitious new wave of financial products. While revealing one’s financial information was once considered…
-
On Fear and Leadership: Product to Sales CTOs & CEOs
There’s a few ontologies for describing the phases leaders — and their startups — go through, whether it’s product-sales-etc. or pioneer to settler. In any case, as companies evolve, so must the leaders — but…