Why the Next Big Network Replaces LinkedIn | a16z New Media Team

David Booth (0:00)

Many firms will scale by adding more partners, more headcount, and there's a law of diminishing returns that kicks in as you continue to scale, because not every incremental person continues to increase the value the firm can deliver at an exponential rate. Every additional person who joins the firm's network, Conway's law is the exponentially increasing value of the network with every single node that's added to it. Context capture is no longer a technology problem. Anybody can scrape the internet. It's actually an incentive problem. It's a working bill that incentivizes people to want to come and engage with, to want to give value to, because they get value from.

SPEAKER_2 (0:36)

Welcome back to MTS. This is an exciting day. We had two launches in one week. I bet you guys haven't slept at all, but wanted to introduce who I'm joined with today. Today, we have both David Booth and Katie Goldstein. They are both from Andreessen Horowitz. David is a partner and head of Ecosystem, and Katie is a PortCo services partner. And today, they both, and Eric Thornburg and the New Media team launched Cosign. This is a curated professional network where founders, operators, investors vouch for the people and companies they believe in. So Katie and David, welcome to MTS.

Katie Goldstein (1:10)

Thanks for having us.

SPEAKER_2 (1:11)

Oh my gosh, thank you for joining. This is so fun. This has actually been a crazy week, double launches. You were just telling me before we went live how this all came together. I know this is a seven, eight year long thesis, but a one week, two week long build out. Tell me a little bit more about it.

David Booth (1:29)

It's something that Eric's been a person for many years, who's a decade or so, who's been really about like, how do you find people before the world knows they're great? And that's the core thesis here. So seven or eight years ago here, and I built the first version of this. And we asked a few hundred people, I think it was maybe up to a thousand people at that time, like these same three questions, and got some incredible emails back, and then the pandemic happened, and a lot of them things kind of petered out again. But that same idea has always been there in the background.

And then it was really, it was about a month ago, maybe six weeks ago that we finally started to realize that maybe the time is now, there's a lot of the ability to use AI to generate out the profiles, to do a lot of the collection aggregation of cosigns that are given natively and naturally, but in a very transitional way on the internet and to aggregate them into these profiles.

Katie Goldstein (2:19)

And the need is still there. I can always ask you my friends who are the best designers, what are the top companies I should send my friends to? I mean, that never goes away, but the information has never been so transparent. It's always been so siloed in the hands of friends that people have access to.

David Booth (2:31)

So Katie's been on the team for three days.

Katie Goldstein (2:33)

We've had a hand of people on this particular product.

David Booth (2:36)

We've had a core-cracked product team working on it for about a month. And then the team's really coming together this week just to pull out what you've seen on the timeline today, which is quite a lot.

Katie Goldstein (2:46)

Well, with our fearless leaders, I will say.

SPEAKER_2 (2:49)

Oh my gosh. And so one thing I wanted to just better understand here, why now? So you say this all came together within the past month. I know there was some attempts at this earlier, but the fire, it just wasn't, the timing wasn't totally right. What is unique about today, September 2026?

Why now?

David Booth (3:08)

I've been at the firm for coming on a year, and in that time we've built all sorts of amazing infrastructure around the firm, the fellowships. We've had just a lot of dinners, a lot of retreats, things that bring people together for all sorts of reasons. But ultimately it's about a serendipity connection to people that might start a company, an incredibly talented person that probably wasn't looking for a job, because the best often aren't, that we've introduced to a company.

What we've always said is, when they come in and apply to fellowships, the things that we're really looking for is who believes in you, who's nominating you, who's the testimony we can ask for when you come in into these. So in a way we've been thinking about almost an analog form of Cosign over the past year. We've been thinking about as we go out into the world and do something, we want to host a dinner, we want to start a group chat, we want to make an introduction suggestion between two people who just must meet. But all of that data is very siloed. It's in someone's head. Katie here has got 10, 20 people in her head who's, I know you're going to be great, and I'm so excited for when you are, and I want to help you. Yeah. But it's illegible. It's illigible.