Partner, Ecosystem @a16z || building @cosign || Formerly: EIR @Blackbirdvc; Co-Founder & CEO at On Deck; early-ish @AngelList, @Cartainc
San Francisco / NZ
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ok big drop today: very excited to announce
The Cosign Awards
2026 has been a crazy year. One thing we keep seeing: the people making the biggest impact inside top companies aren’t always the people you’d expect. The org chart no longer tells the whole story. a single, standout engineer, designer, growth leader, or operator can change the trajectory of the entire company.
If you’ve worked with someone like this, you know... the rest of the world hasn’t caught up yet. We want to help change that.
Today, we’re opening nominations for the @Cosign Awards.
For the next month, we’re looking for the most impactful contributors, and rising stars across the key functions that make great companies work.
We'll aggregate nominations across 41 categories, and with help from a panel of 21 judges including @lennysan, @omooretweets, @packyM, @gokulr, @rrhoover, @dhaber, @avichal, @gaganbiyani, @amasad, @illscience, @venturetwins & more - we’ll select ten people in each category, and then bring them together to meet, exchange ideas, and build relationships.
(this is the part i'm most excited about, to be honest .. gathering the winners IRL + group chats: we'll run this every year, and hope to see alumni communities of awards winners building things together, helping each-other out, and more - over time).
So, here it goes!
Who comes to mind?
Nominate at cosign.co/awards
Excited to announce the Cosign Awards: celebrating exceptional people, companies, and products that had a massive impact in 2026.
cosign.co/awards
Anyone can nominate and vote. Award winners will be chosen by the public in conjunction with a panel of judges, including industry leaders like @lennysan, @packyM, @amasad, and many more. We’ll host an event in December honoring the winners (10 per category).
For people categories, we’re mostly focused on everyone except the CEO–everyone else building the company behind the scenes.
Companies with the most amount of people nominations will be listed on our “Top Companies to Work For” page.
True to form, at Product Hunt I helped launch the Golden Kitty awards a decade ago to recognize great products. Soon after I launched the Rise Awards, honoring executives and ICs building companies that make them. The Cosign Awards is the next iteration.
We have 41 categories across people, companies, and products.
People categories:
- Future Founders
- Rising Stars
- Engineering
- FDE
- Product
- Design
- AI Researchers
- Marketing
- Comms
- Growth
- Chief of Staff
- Operations
- Talent
- Finance
- Public Intellectuals
- Podcaster of the Year
- Newsletter Author of the Year
- Poster of the Year
Company categories:
- Rising Stars
- Best Place to Work
- Founder Mafia
- Talent Density
- Highest Aura
Product categories:
- Product of the Year
- Launch of the Year
- AI Assistant
- AI Language Model
- AI Coding
- Dev Tools
- Open Source
- Consumer
- Productivity
- Creative & Media Tools
- Product Design & UX
- Enterprise B2B
- Hardware
- Robotics
- Self-Driving
- Healthcare
- Vertical Fintech
- Legal
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Alumni of an impactful, talent dense company (a.k.a. mafia) is similar in many ways to alumni of a top-tier college.
- shared values .. you applied to work there for a reason
- rite of passage .. you had to apply, get (and keep) the job, operate at a high level to earn the respect of your peers
- risk appetite .. depending on when you joined, people who have personal conviction and confidence to "go early" are more likely to do it again.
interested in hosting reunions for more of these groups
alumni communities are an untapped talent honeypot.
- talent spans across verticals. ex FAANG engineers, designers, etc. have gone on to lead departments and found the next generation of tech startups
- the 00's FAANG rise did not skimp on talent. i mean LOOK at the apple mafia! (@vipulved, @brianacton, @chichengcc)
- they’re the perfect level niche. hyper specific company culture = trauma bonding = deep alma matter pride. it's a breeding ground for a wholesome lets-get-the-gang-back-together-to-reminisce-on-both-the-good-and-the-bad-times reunion
we were OVER capacity at our @xapplecommunity last week.. should we run it back? @jakejooyoung.
who's next, @XooglerCo? 😅 👀 @ChristopherFong
cosign.co/apple/mafia
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TFW you're halfway through a call and just said something smart/insightful, but forgot to start the @meetgranola 😣
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David Booth retweeted
btw, there are 227,709 open roles listed on @cosign
cosign.co/jobs
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David Booth retweeted
babe wake up, the third cohort just dropped! 👀
apply here: a16z.news/p/announcing-the-t…
A year ago, I joined the first @a16z New Media Fellowship as a fellow.
Now I get to help run the third one (!) and we just opened up applications.
This is a unique opportunity to meet, spend time with, and learn from some of the greatest poasters on the Everything App (maybe the real NMF was the friends we made along the way).
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a16z's @davidbooth explains why your next job interview could be arranged by 2 AI agents talking to each other before a human ever gets involved:
"There's two ways 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."
"As models get better, you’re gonna be able to analyze the public, commoditized talent data."
"I’ve been following so closely the personal agent wave over the last month. Your personal agent could know you extremely well, all of what you want to achieve. But it still doesn’t have a way to actually connect with the people that it’s finding you."
"The best it can do is draft an email in your inbox and send it to someone else’s inbox, where maybe an agent picks it up and sends it back again."
"What if I’m looking for a job, and 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."
"Maybe Dhruv and I are looking to connect, and our agents are having a first conversation. Is there a coincidence of intents here? If there is, then the agents can connect us."
@cosign @a16z
Excited to announce the Cosign Awards: celebrating exceptional people, companies, and products that had a massive impact in 2026.
cosign.co/awards
Anyone can nominate and vote. Award winners will be chosen by the public in conjunction with a panel of judges, including industry leaders like @lennysan, @packyM, @amasad, and many more. We’ll host an event in December honoring the winners (10 per category).
For people categories, we’re mostly focused on everyone except the CEO–everyone else building the company behind the scenes.
Companies with the most amount of people nominations will be listed on our “Top Companies to Work For” page.
True to form, at Product Hunt I helped launch the Golden Kitty awards a decade ago to recognize great products. Soon after I launched the Rise Awards, honoring executives and ICs building companies that make them. The Cosign Awards is the next iteration.
We have 41 categories across people, companies, and products.
People categories:
- Future Founders
- Rising Stars
- Engineering
- FDE
- Product
- Design
- AI Researchers
- Marketing
- Comms
- Growth
- Chief of Staff
- Operations
- Talent
- Finance
- Public Intellectuals
- Podcaster of the Year
- Newsletter Author of the Year
- Poster of the Year
Company categories:
- Rising Stars
- Best Place to Work
- Founder Mafia
- Talent Density
- Highest Aura
Product categories:
- Product of the Year
- Launch of the Year
- AI Assistant
- AI Language Model
- AI Coding
- Dev Tools
- Open Source
- Consumer
- Productivity
- Creative & Media Tools
- Product Design & UX
- Enterprise B2B
- Hardware
- Robotics
- Self-Driving
- Healthcare
- Vertical Fintech
- Legal
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Will be on MTS in an hour chatting about the @cosign awards & what we are focused on next !
ANTHROPIC IPO FILING | STARTUP LENDING CRUNCH | CATHEDRAL BREACHES ANTHROPIC x.com/i/broadcasts/1nKOLQlpb…
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thinking in public re: @cosign
channeling Steve Jobs: "you can’t plan to meet the person who changes your life" ... but you can put yourself in the path of luck.
Great companies and careers emerge from a sequence of "coincidences" ... serendipitous encounters: the right cofounder, an early believer, a first customer, an opportunity you didn’t know existed. Those encounters become more likely when people can discover what you’re good at, what you care about, and who trusts you.
That’s the idea behind Cosign. Profiles, curated lists, and credible endorsements to help people with shared interests and complementary ambitions find each other.
What feels like luck is often actually a "coincidence of intent" - and we can build places that make those coincidences happen more often.
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Which tech companies have the highest talent density?
Nominate + vote now on the Cosign Awards: cosign.co/awards/talent-dens…
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David Booth retweeted
Everyone wants to talk about the AI @Alphaschool, and it’s understandable, because the software is impressive and continuously improving…but my daughter went from hitting her learning goal 0 days a week to all 5 a week in a month, and the difference came from her guide. 🧵
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David Booth retweeted
The @OpenAI mafia is not too shabby.
Explore the ex-employees turned founders of any company at cosign.co/mafia
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Clara is one of a very small group of people who truly, madly, deeply gets social capital & networks .. this is the product i wished existed 100 times in the last decade. LFG
Your AI agent can find anyone on the internet. It has no idea who can actually get you to them.
Until now.
Meet Gigi: the trusted network that gives agents access to people.
That investor you've been dying to meet. The engineer you'd hire tomorrow. The dream customer you can't get in front of. Chances are, someone in your extended network knows them. Gigi finds out who.
Your agent can now search your network, ask the agents of people you trust to search theirs, and find real warm paths to the people you want to reach.
All without exposing anyone's contacts. And without reading a single email or message.
Your network is no longer who you know. It's who your agent can get you to.
Think of one person you wish you knew. Ask Gigi to find your way in. Link in the comments👇
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David Booth retweeted
Big week for neolabs, with incredible releases from @flappyairplanes, @humansand, @Recursive_SI + @dreamlabs_ai coming out of stealth!
Excited to introduce our first of many dashboards at @cosign, a live way to track jobs, news, and data on neolabs.
cosign.co/dash/neolabs
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Excited to announce the inaugural class of @a16z Ops Engineer fellows!
~50 ops engineering leaders selected out of thousands of apps from talented people around the world.
They sit at the intersection of operations and engineering, scaling operational rigor within and across teams.. they are building the internal tools that consolidate the tooling stack, designing the data and context layers that agents draw on, deploying agentic workflows with human checkpoints, and driving adoption inside their companies.
We have folks like Ben Booi (@BenjaminBooi) and Rushaabh Saliya at Opendoor, Chris Jones (@chrisojones) at Shopify, Dilan Shah (@dilan_shah) from Cresta, Kevin Chu (@realKevinChu) from ElevenLabs, Saya Iwasaki (@iiiwokk) at Notion, Jordan Shapiro at Handshake, Christina Huang at Cognition, and Keith Gliksman (@KeithGliksman) at Tennr,
Others are are world-class COOs and chiefs of staff redefining how AI gets used across organizations. They’re deciding which workflows to automate first, the KPIs that prove it’s working, and are leading the teams that put it to work. Folks like Caroline Ingeborn (@caroingeborn) at Luma AI, Brandon Gell (@bran_don_gell) at Every, Rohan Shah (@RohanxShah) at Datavant, Gabriella Garcia (@reallygabriella) at Warp, Matt Stehle at Formation Bio, and Meera Shah at Glean.
Others are taking how software gets built to the next level, creating new products and leading the teams that ship them, like Claire Vo (@clairevo) at ChatPRD, Seb Goddijn (@sebgoddijn) at Yaklabs, TK Kong (@tkkong) at Concept, Matt Portnov (@MattnPortnov) at Decagon, Owen Williams (@ow) and Sharadh Krishnamurthy at Stripe, Andrew Qu (@andrewqu) at Vercel, and Maxwell Nardi (@maxwellnardi) at Runlayer, @davidgan at SpaceX/@bot, @matthew_busel at Basis.
And another ~25 awesome folks we can't squeeze into one post !! (see full list in comments)
Missed out on this but want to stay in the loop for future cohorts? sign-up at build.a16z.com/fellowships/o…
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Introducing the Cosign Awards.
cosign.co/awards
Excited to announce the Cosign Awards: celebrating exceptional people, companies, and products that had a massive impact in 2026.
cosign.co/awards
Anyone can nominate and vote. Award winners will be chosen by the public in conjunction with a panel of judges, including industry leaders like @lennysan, @packyM, @amasad, and many more. We’ll host an event in December honoring the winners (10 per category).
For people categories, we’re mostly focused on everyone except the CEO–everyone else building the company behind the scenes.
Companies with the most amount of people nominations will be listed on our “Top Companies to Work For” page.
True to form, at Product Hunt I helped launch the Golden Kitty awards a decade ago to recognize great products. Soon after I launched the Rise Awards, honoring executives and ICs building companies that make them. The Cosign Awards is the next iteration.
We have 41 categories across people, companies, and products.
People categories:
- Future Founders
- Rising Stars
- Engineering
- FDE
- Product
- Design
- AI Researchers
- Marketing
- Comms
- Growth
- Chief of Staff
- Operations
- Talent
- Finance
- Public Intellectuals
- Podcaster of the Year
- Newsletter Author of the Year
- Poster of the Year
Company categories:
- Rising Stars
- Best Place to Work
- Founder Mafia
- Talent Density
- Highest Aura
Product categories:
- Product of the Year
- Launch of the Year
- AI Assistant
- AI Language Model
- AI Coding
- Dev Tools
- Open Source
- Consumer
- Productivity
- Creative & Media Tools
- Product Design & UX
- Enterprise B2B
- Hardware
- Robotics
- Self-Driving
- Healthcare
- Vertical Fintech
- Legal
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David Booth retweeted
This is basically Oscars for Tech Twitter
(and shockingly i am in it hahaha, see cosign.co/awards/rising-star…)
Excited to announce the Cosign Awards: celebrating exceptional people, companies, and products that had a massive impact in 2026.
cosign.co/awards
Anyone can nominate and vote. Award winners will be chosen by the public in conjunction with a panel of judges, including industry leaders like @lennysan, @packyM, @amasad, and many more. We’ll host an event in December honoring the winners (10 per category).
For people categories, we’re mostly focused on everyone except the CEO–everyone else building the company behind the scenes.
Companies with the most amount of people nominations will be listed on our “Top Companies to Work For” page.
True to form, at Product Hunt I helped launch the Golden Kitty awards a decade ago to recognize great products. Soon after I launched the Rise Awards, honoring executives and ICs building companies that make them. The Cosign Awards is the next iteration.
We have 41 categories across people, companies, and products.
People categories:
- Future Founders
- Rising Stars
- Engineering
- FDE
- Product
- Design
- AI Researchers
- Marketing
- Comms
- Growth
- Chief of Staff
- Operations
- Talent
- Finance
- Public Intellectuals
- Podcaster of the Year
- Newsletter Author of the Year
- Poster of the Year
Company categories:
- Rising Stars
- Best Place to Work
- Founder Mafia
- Talent Density
- Highest Aura
Product categories:
- Product of the Year
- Launch of the Year
- AI Assistant
- AI Language Model
- AI Coding
- Dev Tools
- Open Source
- Consumer
- Productivity
- Creative & Media Tools
- Product Design & UX
- Enterprise B2B
- Hardware
- Robotics
- Self-Driving
- Healthcare
- Vertical Fintech
- Legal
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