a16z Partner Torenberg Launches Entrepreneurial Network Cosign
a16z General Partner Erik Torenberg announced the launch of Cosign, a curated professional network aimed at the startup community, featuring directories of investors, companies, and operators, documenting what each person has done and who they have worked with.
The core of the platform is the Cosign Map: who shaped your career path, who truly collaborated with you on projects, who is willing to work with you again, and who believes you are worth watching. The site includes profiles of both companies and individuals, with example profiles generated from public funding, job changes, and public statements, without requiring prior registration.
Torenberg stated that high-quality endorsements appearing daily on X get lost in the information flow, while Cosign permanently attaches these signals to individuals and companies. The discovery layer answers who the best fintech angels are, which AI companies to watch, and who the best designers are. The intention network allows private tagging of "I would invest in him," "I would hire him," "I would work with him," and in the future could extend to "I would acquire this company," facilitating mutual interest.
Joining requires being cosigned by others, but direct applications are also accepted. He and David Booth had a similar idea seven years ago, but lacked the computational power and organizational capability to realize it; now they have it. He likens the product to a combination of Wikipedia, LinkedIn, and early AngelList, emphasizing that Cosign is a community rather than a company selling ads. Concurrently, a16z released a discussion featuring Josh Elman, Olivia Moore, and Booth discussing the product's form.
Profiles only provide positive endorsements. The three main signals are who has worked with you, who is willing to fight alongside you again, and who is an unpriced observation target. An early "people worth watching" experiment was conducted around 2019 via email, where a Tesla engineer later became the president of Cognition, illustrating the value of early record-keeping.
In market mechanics, buyers are founders and investors looking for talent, projects, and collaborators, while sellers are recommenders willing to stake their reputation on specific individuals. The event-driven nature arises from recruitment being overwhelmed by AI, diluted LinkedIn signals, and the inability of X endorsements to solidify. Capital and attention flow towards individuals and companies that can be named and endorsed, with early discoverers gaining traceable social capital; those without signatures from insiders face pressure, and LinkedIn-style self-statement profiles are relatively downgraded.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Torenberg's path has always been about turning social capital into a searchable infrastructure. From being the first employee at Product Hunt for product discovery, to co-founding Village Global to raise early funds using a celebrity limited partner network, to On Deck turning fellowships into a conveyor belt for founders, and then to Turpentine being integrated into a16z where he became a General Partner. Cosign is not a new concept; he wrote about peer-to-peer credentials in 2020 when On Deck halted that product to focus on fellowships, and now, seven years later, he reignites it using a16z's media and investment network.
The capital mobilization does not follow the route of "creating another social company to sell seats," but rather integrates a16z's investment coverage, On Deck's old map, and public data into profiles, generating them with AI first and waiting for people to sign. The motivation is: checks are just a high-cost form of trust, and most operators lack the qualification to issue checks, yet vote with their reputation every day; turning "who is willing to work together again" into a searchable asset is akin to moving Silicon Valley's private ledger to the forefront, allowing those who discover talent to keep early records.
The benchmark is not the current LinkedIn homepage, but the early AngelList's public investor-company-talent map, as well as Wikipedia-style accountable entries. The industry phase is shifting from "relationships existing in chat software and dinner parties" to "relationships being structured, searchable, and reusable." Elman's participation in the discussion indicates that the product directly targets the area where LinkedIn's recruitment signals have failed: after massive applications are filtered out by agents, human signatures become scarce again.
The structural judgment pertains to the transfer of pricing power. In the past, career pricing power was based on education, company titles, and self-reported resumes; now it is shifting to "who is willing to stake their name." The mechanism is that after an oversupply of information, cheap signals fail, and expensive and irrevocable personal endorsements become the new filter; those who are signed by insiders first gain priority pricing power for the next round of capital and positions.
ABAB News · Cognitive Law
The more cheap signals there are, the more expensive signatures become.
Those who discover talent are priced by the market earlier than the talent themselves.
Once social capital is searchable, dinner parties become balance sheets.