The Reputation Graph of Silicon Valley | Introducing Cosign

The most important skill in this industry, or perhaps in the world, is your ability to identify things before the market.

There are so many people in the world who we wanna meet who also wanna meet us.

Yeah.

And it's just an information problem. What's more impressive to you, someone who went to Stanford or someone who is followed by Patrick Collison, Elon Musk, Mark Andreessen?

A 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 is finding awesome people and connecting them to our companies, otherwise kind of getting them in the A sixteen Z network.

And it allows us to really extend all that network and all that value and all that trust, and really that reputation that transfers and builds over time.

There's this Naval quote I love, "Be so good that people do business through you." In fact, if I cosign two people, they might be able to, you know, meet and otherwise build something in a way that I enabled without even having to know about.

But it's always hard to match the needs and the skills at exactly the right time. What we've enabled is this... Some of the most important opportunities in Silicon Valley start with a simple signal. Someone you trust believes in someone you don't know yet. In this episode, I sit down with Josh Elman, Olivia Moore, and David Booth to introduce Cosign, a new product built around professional reputation. We talk about why those who believe in you can sometimes say more than a resume, how endorsements can help surface great people before they're obvious, and why that human signal could become even more valuable as AI makes everything else easier to generate. We also get into what we've learned from LinkedIn, X, and AngelList. And what happens when the reputation that normally lives in private conversations and fleeting social posts becomes more visible and durable. We'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 companies and people. And I wanna start with a story, which is my friend David Perell told me, he said, "My Twitter account is more valuable to me than my college education." You know-

Wow

... even though I paid a quarter mil, whatever it is, my Twitter has given me more value to my career, and also personally. Now, we of course, just launched our own school, so we are big fans of higher education. But I, I thought that story was profound because, of course, you know, Twitter's been free for so long, and this idea... What he got behind it is, of course, college is a bundle of education, network, and credential. And I think-

And social life.

Yes. [laughing] Yes, of course. [laughing] Yeah, some of that is hard to recreate on Twitter, but yeah, exactly. And so the education, you know, you learn from having conversations. The network, of course, you meet people, you discover people, and kinda is proof of work of 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. What's more