Can AI Fix Professional Networking? | Inside Cosign

The host, Sophia, opens by introducing David Booth and Dhruv Gupta from a16z New Media and asks them to explain the newly launched Cosign Awards. David says that, especially during what he describes as a crazy 2026, public recognition usually goes to founders, CEOs, and other faces of a company. In practice, however, one or two operators in each function may have the greatest impact, sometimes single-handedly changing a company’s trajectory. The awards were created to spotlight those people, along with companies with unusually high talent density and products that had the greatest impact during the year. David describes the awards as a combination of community nominations and a selected group of judges with broad industry visibility. The goal is to identify and celebrate people, companies, and products that matter both to the industry and to other people’s careers. Dhruv adds that anyone can nominate and vote. He connects the project to his own experience: he entered the San Francisco startup ecosystem because Brent, MTS’s CEO, co-signed him after seeing his work at Polymarket and recognizing that he could contribute at MTS. Cosign Awards are intended to give similarly under-recognized operators a path from strong internal reputations to broader public visibility.

Sophia observes that the important signal is often not a résumé or a previous employer, but a trusted person willing to vouch for someone. David agrees and defines a co-sign as being willing to introduce someone to a highly respected, extremely busy person because the introduction is worth that person’s time. Cosign is trying to scale that interpersonal signal rather than replace it with another impersonal database. The people awards are organized largely by role, including engineering, product, design, AI research, communications, and growth. They also include less traditional categories such as public intellectual, which had 65 nominees, podcaster of the year, which had 76, and poster of the year. David highlights Rising Stars as the most populated category, with 135 nominees at the time of the conversation. The nominees range from seed- and Series A-stage founders with substantial growth ahead of them to people he had never heard of before; in his view, a nomination itself is evidence that someone in the ecosystem considers that person worth watching. Company awards include industry-specific categories and broader categories such as talent density. The guests particularly want employees to vote for their own companies, because internal enthusiasm can indicate that a company is a place where other talented people may also want to work. The awards therefore serve both individuals seeking recognition and companies trying to attract talent.

When Sophia asks who the platform is for, Dhruv says the ambition is to make Cosign a source of truth for the startup ecosystem. He imagines users asking questions such as who in New York is building the most interesting biotech company or who first discovered Sophia Duke, with people, companies, and eventually agents all using the same relationship-rich information. David frames the broader purpose as increasing a person’s “surface area for luck.” He cites a Steve Jobs idea he has long liked: people cannot plan to meet the person who changes their life, but they can put themselves in the path of luck and be ready to act when that person appears. Cosign profiles, lists, and conversational tools are intended to help users become more discoverable to potential co-founders, employers, and collaborators. The guests call this a “coincidence of intent”: two people with compatible goals and complementary skills finding one another sooner. David gives the example of a design-award winner and an engineering-award winner who might otherwise never meet but could now discover each other and build something together. He also argues that the important outcome is not only joining a particular company; it is entering a community of people working on a mission and forming relationships that may lead to future ventures.

Sophia says traditional routes into work, including degrees, job boards, and cold outreach, feel outdated. Social media can create opportunities, particularly for ambitious young people in San Francisco, but building a following is difficult and does not provide a clear path. She describes Cosign as a possible shortcut: instead of manufacturing visibility online, a person could benefit from people who already know and trust their work. Dhruv compares that idea with his own search for internships. As a senior at Penn, he says he followed a traditional path during his sophomore and junior summers, applying to Morgan Stanley and Jane Street through Handshake and checking new listings every day. He describes the experience as unpleasant “cold apply button mashing.” His move into technology happened through Brent, who had seen his Polymarket work and took a chance on him. Dhruv believes many people have someone capable of making that kind of introduction and wants Cosign to help surface those connections. David extends the argument to people stuck in jobs they do not love, including those constrained by “golden handcuffs.” He says that helping people find work aligned with their unusual abilities and passions could change what gets built. He adds that people are shaped by the other people around them: someone who joins a group working on reindustrializing America, finding essential minerals, or another major mission may gain not just a job but relationships with future co-founders. Cosign is intended to help people find those mission-aligned communities and keep track of the relationships formed there.

David explains that Cosign is being developed in three layers. The first resembles Wikipedia: the team has created profiles for roughly 40,000 to 50,000 people, connected to companies and investors, so users can click through the ecosystem and follow “rabbit holes” across the graph. The second layer is lightweight curation through lists. About 400 people had created lists of companies, including Paki McCormick of Not Boring, whose list includes 36 companies he considers interesting and potentially attractive places to work. Users can also browse lists made by angel investors, general partners, fellows, and other communities, then compare where those lists overlap. David mentions examining where the Interact Fellows of 2014 are now as an example of the kinds of career and relationship patterns the platform might reveal. The lists are not presented as definitive rankings; they are curated entry points into parts of the ecosystem that are otherwise hard to find. The third layer is the co-sign itself: an intentional recommendation from one person to another saying that the recommended individual is someone the recommender would work with anywhere, someone likely to become important before the broader public recognizes them, or someone who changed the recommender’s career. David emphasizes that the product is still early, has rough edges, and is being iterated in public. He especially sees it as a way to discover the next 50,000 people with exceptional potential, including people outside the United States. Dhruv gives the example of a 17-year-old in Sweden who contacted him about an MTS engineering role; although the teenager could not join MTS, Dhruv has continued helping him in other ways.

Sophia asks how agents might use Cosign’s lists and relationship graph. Dhruv says that existing professional networks limit search access. He argues that LinkedIn is unlikely to provide an MCP with broad access to its graph, leaving users dependent on imperfect searches. He recalls asking Google, Gemini, and ChatGPT for the best startups in New York and finding the answers poor. Cosign’s hope is that user-contributed profiles, lists, and relationship information will produce more useful and personalized answers as agents search the graph. Cosign already offers an on-platform Ask Cosign feature, an iMessage agent, and a personal MCP that can connect tools such as Muse, GrokBot, and Instinct to the platform. Dhruv says the team wants users to access the system wherever they work, while the platform learns from their interactions what they want to do and which recommendations would be useful. David says the next step is not merely better search over public information, but agents communicating and negotiating on behalf of their owners. He points to early agent-to-agent customer-service work, including Decagon’s protocol with Muse and Instinct, where a customer’s agent can negotiate directly with a company’s agent. He imagines a job seeker’s agent speaking with a company’s agent to decide whether the candidate is worth elevating to a hiring manager. In another case, two people’s agents could compare their goals, skills, and “coincidence of intent” before connecting the humans. The point is to preserve scarce human attention: unlike current inboxes, where Sam Altman’s messages and a 14-year-old’s messages are treated similarly, agents could filter for relationships people genuinely should pursue.

At the end of the conversation, Sophia asks what users should expect next. David says the immediate priority is closing the Cosign Awards. Nominations were open through the end of November, with roughly three weeks remaining at the time of recording. Winners selected with the judges’ participation would be invited to a gathering with the other category winners. David says the gathering matters more than another trophy or certificate: the most valuable result would be for winners to form relationships with one another. He and Dhruv also say substantial product work is coming, though they cannot reliably predict what the product will look like even a week later because the team changes it in response to feedback. One repeated piece of feedback is that onboarding needs to be smoother. The guests invite users to click around the site, ask questions, and report rough edges. They specifically direct listeners toward Cosign’s agents area, where people can connect an MCP, text the agent, or use Ask Cosign in the interface. Sophia closes by saying the winners may be announced live on MTS in about a month, leaving open the possibility of an exclusive follow-up.