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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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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David Booth retweeted
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
Thank you @packyM 😁😁
Packy McCormick's picks for the most compelling companies to join: "ambitious missions, exceptional talent density, steep learning curves, and the potential to create enormous value."
Software / AI
- Ramp
- Thatch
- Replit
- General Intuition
- Arena Physica
- Blackbird
- [untitled]
- Poetic
Hardware / infrastructure
- Base Power
- Anduril
- Hadrian
- Astro Mechanica
- Somos Internet
- Meter
- Earth AI
- Radiant
- Varda Space
- Fuse
- Westmag
- Antares
- Terraform Industries
- Standard Nuclear
- Standard Bots
- Valar Atomics
- Ulysses
- Aalo Atomics
- Senra Systems
- Impulse Labs
- Vight
- General Matter
- Monumental Labs
- Daylight Computer
- Airbound
- Autoridad Panandina
Services
- Primer
- Wander
cosign.co/lists/packym/top-c…
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The top 100 companies Lenny Rachitsky would most want to join: companies with the highest talent density, tackling the most ambitious problems, where you'll learn the most, and see the biggest upside.
- Abridge
- AfterQuery
- Airbnb
- Airwallex
- Anduril
- Anthropic
- Applied Compute
- Applied Intuition
- Base Power
- Baseten
- Basis
- Bedrock Robotics
- Black Forest Labs
- Chai Discovery
- Chainguard
- Clay
- ClickHouse
- Cloudflare
- Cognition
- CoreWeave
- Crusoe
- Cyera
- Databricks
- Decagon
- Deel
- ElevenLabs
- Etched
- Exa
- Factory
- fal
- Figma
- Figure AI
- Fireworks AI
- Gamma
- Genspark
- Gimlet Labs
- Glean
- Granola
- Hadrian
- Handshake
- Harvey
- Helsing
- Hex
- Kalshi
- Lambda
- Legora
- Linear
- Liquid AI
- Lovable
- Mercor
- Mercury
- Mistral AI
- Modal
- n8n
- Notion
- NVIDIA
- OpenAI
- OpenEvidence
- Palantir
- Parallel Web Systems
- Periodic Labs
- Physical Intelligence
- Pierre Computer
- Polymarket
- PostHog
- Prime Intellect
- Profound
- Railway
- Ramp
- Reflection AI
- Replit
- Revolut
- Ricursive Intelligence
- Rippling
- Runway
- Safe Superintelligence
- Saronic
- Shield AI
- Shopify
- Sierra
- Skild AI
- SpaceX
- Stripe
- Sunday Robotics
- Suno
- Supabase
- Surge AI
- Temporal
- Tesla
- Thinking Machines
- Together AI
- Turbopuffer
- Valon
- Vanta
- Vercel
- Waymo
- Whatnot
- Wispr Flow
- Wonderful
- WorkOS
cosign.co/lists/lennysan/100
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Last night we co-hosted a reunion for former Apple employees who are now building / working at startups ..
Such an incredible group .. even across a giant company like Apple, many former colleagues, some who worked together over a decade ago, vs. the most recent alumni i met who came straight to the event after handing in keys on his last day.
Also- tested some new @cosign features live .. ask cosign: "who should i meet at this event" 👀
Excited to do more of these .. what other company alumni groups should we help bring together?
So wonderful to welcome a roomful of amazing xApple alumni who are now building and interested in startups!
Here is what it looked like from the mini stage @a16z
We had a great discussion on what people learned and had to unlearn from time at Apple to build great startups!
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David Booth retweeted
Almost a month in.
So much promise here.
I wrote an essay about my first "cosign" in tech, the price of being wrong, and some of the challenges of peer-to-peer credentials.
Rising Stars Need a Witness: indiethinkers.com/essays/the…
Excited to introduce @Cosign: the curated professional network for the startup community: cosign.co
Our goal is to create the following:
- A comprehensive startup directory of investors, companies, and operators, including what they worked on and who they worked on it with.
- Cosign graph: Who shaped your career? Who were you actually in the trenches with? Who would work with you again? Who thinks you’re someone to watch?
- Durable reputation: Great endorsements happen every day on X and disappear into the feed. Cosign attaches those signals permanently to people and companies.
- Discovery: Who are the best fintech angels? Which AI companies should I watch? Who are the best designers?
- Intent network: Privately signal “I’d invest in them,” “I’d hire them,” “I’d work with them,” or eventually even “I’d acquire this company.” Match people when interest exists on both sides.
Imagine if Wikipedia, LinkedIn, and OG AngelList had a baby. Though Cosign is a community, not a business.
In order to join, you need to be cosigned. Or you can apply directly.
David Booth and I started this idea 7 years ago but didn’t have the firepower to make it work. Now we do.
No one has really touched LinkedIn in 20 years. Excited to take a swing.
cosign.co
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Coming into our first full winter living in the U.S. with the family .. need to figure out how to get some snow in our lives ⛷️❄️
What's everyone's rec for best family ski trip set up ?
Tahoe, aspen, colorado, canada ?
Best place with a group? could round up some friends ☃️☃️
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…Imagine now the AI version that knows far more about your interests, what you consider a stimulating conversation, and the kinds of people you want to meet. Imagine them on a mission to pitch your great virtues in front of your best prospects, whether for dating, work, friendship or simply a fabulous afternoon.
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what does a headless / agent-native professional social network look like?
likely involves some version of:
- I connect my personal agent (@Muse, Instinct, @bot ), it automatically builds out / updates / validates my profile based on it's knowledge of me and ability to search the internet;
- my agent asks me / I tell it who I want to meet, what I'm working on, and where i can help. Accepting/passing on various opportunities is stored as data to reinforce and specify these preferences.
- If directed, it can proactively find people whose interests and intentions overlap with mine; and (maybe more importantly) acts as a gate-keeper to other people's agents who want to connect with me.
Maybe the scarce thing becomes "permission to reach someone" ... and the hard thing is having honest negotiation between our two agents, before the connection lands in my "inbox"
who is thinking about this stuff? DM me i wanna chat
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