a16z Podcast: Spotting Exceptional Talent Before the Market Does

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When it comes to talent, timing is everything. I've been thinking a lot about this idea that the best people are often discovered before the market catches up. It's like the most important skill in this industry is your ability to identify things early. That's exactly what Co-sign is built around, right?

This new product from Josh Elman, Olivia Moore, and David Booth is trying to make professional reputation more visible and durable.

The goal is turning scattered praise into a living directory for the startup world.

So how does it actually work? What makes it different from just another professional network? It's designed around three specific signals. First, 'who shaped your career.' Second, 'in the trenches with.' And third, 'person to watch.' These categories show not just who someone knows, but how they actually work and why others trust them. That addresses a real problem—information asymmetry.

Think about how many valuable endorsements happen in private or just disappear inside social feeds, even though they reveal so much about skill and judgment. Exactly. By making those signals persistent, they're creating what they call 'social capital investing.' It's basically a way to build trusted lists of designers, engineers, PR experts, founders, and investors that you can actually reference and search.

And let's be honest, Silicon Valley already runs on public co-signs. A strong endorsement can completely reshape a career, especially when it comes from someone respected. Paul Graham backing Sam Altman, Ryan Hoover co-signing Eric—these early beliefs compound into major outcomes. But here's what I find interesting. They're arguing the real value isn't just fame, it's context. LinkedIn captures identity, but Co-sign wants to capture relationships and conviction—the kind of human trust that AI-generated outreach cannot fake. That's a critical distinction. As they put it, 'human conviction and a genuine endorsement' are becoming scarcer and more valuable. What about the LinkedIn problem though? How do they deal with those massive network effects? They're not trying to replace LinkedIn. The pitch is to illuminate a different layer of the professional graph, especially for niche communities and operators behind the scenes—the people who shape companies without always being celebrated. So it's additive, not competitive. That's smart positioning. Right. And the thesis is compelling. If great people are remembered by who believed in them first, then the earliest public backers gain lasting value too. The first person to publicly back someone may end up owning something far more durable than a quick win—long-term trust. That's the bet. In a world where everyone's trying to identify talent early, this creates a permanent record of who actually had the judgment to see it first.