The Reputation Graph of Silicon Valley | Introducing Cosign

19:54No, and I think this idea of bringing those ephemeral moments and those ephemeral conversations that happen on Twitter and other social X and other social media forums all the time are like, there's so much that just happens and it's wonderful in the moment and then it gets lost. And I think this idea of building a profile, not a profile that is just what you say about yourself, but really that lets other people, you know, be positive and help, you know, shine on your strengths, I think is really, really powerful. And, you know, I see a lot of these for you and the great work you're doing here.

20:25I see a lot of these for Olivia and, you know, David, like we get these comments and it's just so special. And you feel so lucky to have people, you know, that you've helped in the past, be able to say those things about you now. But then again, it just gets lost. And I think this idea of tracking those cosigns and really making it I feel like this fundamental network of the web that we are, of Silicon Valley, of the tech industry. I'll give you an example. It's really powerful.

20:50Erik Torenberg:Do you know the meme where the guy's like walking into a party and stick figures and he's like, they don't even know that. Like that's something you get like a baller, cosign or whatever, and you're like, it's not probably like, you know, Mark Andreessen wrote a blog post about me joining the firm. Like that's pretty dope. Like I want that on my, like I want, the first thing when you think about me is to like think about Mark Andreessen. Professionally it is. And so there's all these moments that happen. If we can make them more legible, you can more accurately represent someone's. Honestly, it wasn't until we actually hooked up the internet FIHOs to this product that I realized how many of those moments are.

21:25I mean, you look at the main feed and every day there is fundraising announcements, there's talent transitions. Thanks to our good friends at X, we're plugged into a lot of those and we're taking like, we never send one in quote tweets and announcement or replies and you're filtering them. It's a genuinely thoughtful, positive comment to your point earlier about positivity, those are pulled through and it's really coming from a person and it's on the profile that person comes from and it goes to a person.

21:50Erik Torenberg:And the reason why it's all positive is because products have to win on some dimension and this product is going to win on people using it to show off. Like, show off in a good way. Like, hey, this is what I'm proud of. Like, this represents the full manifestation of what I'm capable of on a person level and on a company level. And I really think it's about celebration. I mean, like so much of what we do, there's so much hard work that goes on into making every single product that happens. It's a toil of somebody's love, their idea, the coding they wrote or maybe that they worked on with their agent now.

22:24But like putting that out in the world, it's a very vulnerable moment. And it's very like, do you like what I've tried to make? Are you going to use it? And I think we need to celebrate that effort and what goes into those moments and what goes into all the hard work that we do. as opposed to, you know, there's plenty of places for critique and we see all that all the time too. But I think that doesn't need to be recorded for posterity in the same way.

22:49Erik Torenberg:And one thing we're talking offline is interesting is a lot of, you know, there's a lot of awards and a lot of shine on founders. Yeah. And, you know, just probably so, obviously. And also there's a lot, you know, a lot of other people build the companies too. And a lot more people are critical to those companies and they're, you know, unknown or not celebrated to the same degree. And this is an opportunity to do as well.

23:09Olivia Moore:I think even just positive signal is going to be incredibly informative because I think a lot of people in Silicon Valley have a pretty high bar for who they're willing to publicly endorse in any way. Like when I think about like the number of intro requests that come in and how many of those do I actually bridge? Like I think it's great.

23:28Erik Torenberg:Because if you endorse someone who's not great, that reflects poorly. Exactly. The natural reputation of sin and mechanism. And there's a whole thing about, you know, do you share something that you haven't even played with? You know, there's a whole, you know, I've even read the article before you retweet it. And I think, I think the key is like, you'll get to know pretty quickly who's just spouting things in is, you know, celebrating everything that can be celebrated versus, you know what, I've actually played with this. I've spent time with it. I've heard the backstory. I've thought about the backstory.

23:53And I just want to double down on one comment you said about this going beyond the founders. Like I think, you know, the founders who take that risk to start a company from nothing, that's such an incredible thing. But it takes a village to build every one of these companies. It takes so many great designers and engineers and marketers and product managers and finance. And there's so many parts of every single company that have to get built. And celebrating that work and when that happens from a specific team or a specific individual, and be able to have that be part of this kind of endorsement and co-signing, I think is going to be incredibly powerful beyond just the people that we talk about most of the time.

24:34I want to tell a story or perhaps nudge Eric to tell a story. One of the first times I actually heard of Eric and then went on to meet Eric was the Rise Awards. The Rise Awards 2015, 16, thereabouts. It's over a decade ago now. And it was around this thesis that, you know, farmers get a lot of publicity, a lot of credit, but it's actually the people who are the operators behind the scenes. And so the principal, do you want to tell the story? What were the Rise Awards?

24:54Erik Torenberg:Yeah, so the Rise Awards were this series of awards meant to be for everybody else, for the engineers, the designers, the product. I believe Josh was the judge, you know many others and we had thousands of submissions and you know discovered and selected some great people because of it and we're going to bring that back to some capacity you know there's this what's the phrase fear not the guy who has a thousand moves but the guy who does one move a thousand times there's the samurai that's a kick a thousand times so rise awards cosine a lot of these ideas have been in the ether for us for in fact the thing that stands out is a lot of the people who were the rise award recipients got to know each other and built lifelong relationships through the retreats they attended, through the groups that you added them to and things.

25:35So there's something around that connection too.

25:37Olivia Moore:It's really interesting because I feel like we often meet people who are spinning out of great companies that start their own companies. And often if you get really deep, like if you call everyone they've ever worked with, it's like, wow, this person who was like, I don't know, engineer number four actually was a huge determinant in this company being successful or not. But that, to your point earlier about legibility, that's not something that they can like publicize. They're not going to be like the face of every article about the company. And yet there's like so many of these people who I think I would love to see them get to leave that company if they go start a new company, if they go to another one and carry that accomplishment with them.

26:16Erik Torenberg:Totally.

26:17Olivia Moore:And they can't really do that right now.

26:19Erik Torenberg:We're making the reputation market more like efficient, basically more liquid in the sense of both efficient and liquid. So for example, there's some people who have an amazing reputation, but there's not awareness. Not a lot of people know that they have a great reputation. And then more liquid in the sense of if it was known that they had a great reputation, a lot of people would want to hire them or fund them and they should get those opportunities as a result. And so it's basically like trying to fix that information asymmetry. I want to return to what you were saying earlier because it's really interesting.

26:47Erik Torenberg:It's like a bunch of times a candidate will, or someone looking for a new job will sit you down and say, hey, what company should I join? And there's a lot of people who wish they could do that. But if you've got your list of companies they should join, it's kind of the do business through you. It's like Olivia stamped these companies. They can reach out. And similarly, and it'd be cool also for the ones you do meet with, that you could just press a button and it would go to all your companies instead of having to think through. Because there's something you might want to share private just to keep to your companies or whatever it is.

27:23Erik Torenberg:But then also there are companies who want to, who are like, hey, I want a head of comms. Who in my network knows a head of comms? Who should I even talk to? And to the extent that, you know, people are co-signing heads of comms or this kind of thing, it can just like facilitate much more, you know, matching.

27:38Olivia Moore:Yeah, totally. I feel like even for investors, like the most up-to-date profile of the companies they care about is maybe if they tag them all in their ex-bio and maybe if they put them on their LinkedIn, Otherwise, you have to go to the firm's page and see if they connect them to investments. And like I, if I could and not ruin kind of the reach in the audience, I would be tweeting about all my companies all day, every day, like promoting them, go work for them. They just did this amazing thing, but you can't do that. And I love the idea of a place where like that kind of lives to see it anytime.

28:11Erik Torenberg:Yeah, be shameless.

28:12Olivia Moore:Yes.

28:13Erik Torenberg:It is interesting. I mean, so let's talk about existing platforms for a second. Like X, obviously, you know, such a great platform and the exhaust of it is so valuable to so many people. But there's also times where like, I'm like, man, I wish I could just download my follower. Like, I wish I could just like, or like, you know, a few thousand people liked this thing about joining my company. I wish I could just like see this. And why is it so difficult? Like, or it's not built for this use case of like, you know, discovering people to work for or just get more signal. Like, okay, you follow me, but like, you know, do you want to work for me?

28:42Erik Torenberg:Do you want to invest in me? I don't know. What do you want to, what do we want to do here? and so I and then LinkedIn you know it's such a valuable utility we're on it all the time and yet everyone hates it I'm just I'm just we love we love LinkedIn we love LinkedIn Josh used to work there LinkedIn one of the most iconic products of all time Mark famously defended it I remember when they when they got acquired because people were like what only 26 billion it was like you know it's a great outcome and it was an iconic product and yet you know people have frustrations with it so I'm well maybe let's And even before the feed, I said people say the feed is cringe or whatever, but even before the feed, I feel like people were like, I wish there was just more that we could do here.

29:22Erik Torenberg:So why don't you talk about that? Yeah, look, I worked at LinkedIn back in 2004 and 2005 when we were just starting to form a network and Reid Hoffman, the founder, used to talk about it very much as like we have three stages of the company. Like first is growth. We really have to figure out how to make sure we have the largest professional network and give everybody value of just being part of their network, even if they have nothing to do. And actually, for a lot of users, sign up, make your profile, don't do anything else for a while unless something comes to you, was a perfectly good usage.

29:51Then we talked about usage. We really have to start to build products on top of the network. The real thing was the network is just the substrate. We need to go build a real job service. I hope mom's the first LinkedIn job. We had to go build services, find the best PR professional, find those things. And then we'll build revenue. So first, so it was kind of the, I called it GR, growth usage revenue. and we really had to figure out what those platforms and products were going to be on top of the network. Now, the challenge is, as you built the network, there's very single signal. Are we connected?

30:21And at the early days, the beauty of that was the idea that we really know each other. I'll vouch for Olivia. And if David is asking for an intro to me and Olivia says, David's really good, will you take this intro? That's great. And it was even better if you imagine this whole table, David would ask Olivia for an intro to say, hey, can you introduce me to Eric? And then Olivia would say, Josh, David's my really good friend. It looks like you know Eric. Would you be willing to pass him on? And this idea of this trusted graph, I'm so happy to connect with you and I'll pass you on to somebody else was the important condition.

30:55But over time, it started to fade from that strength of connection to like, yeah, we met once at a party. We high-fived. We had a good email exchange. And all of a sudden then, everybody kind of got into a collecting. And the challenge with collecting that network is it makes it much harder to figure out where the real signal is. Now, on the other side, it still is the iconic representation of who each of us is, the professional profile. But when we think about how to use that professional profile, it's only really good if it adds value. One of the things I remember when we were first building LinkedIn Jobs was the goal was to take a current job service where someone just applies and gets a resume, and you see a job listing and go, how do we use the power of your professional network to make it better?

31:35My very favorite, like Reed would push us a lot, and he'd say, what is a social resume? When a job application comes in and it wasn't just here's who this person is, it was here's who this person is and here's who else in your company might also know more about who the person is. Here's who else might have worked at similar companies they'd worked at in the past. Or here's who knows people really well who also worked at those companies. So you wouldn't just get this flat resume. You'd get a resume annotated by who else can help you reach that person. So that was like this big change to make job applications socially enhanced.

32:06And then when you're looking at jobs, you might just see a flat job and like, ooh, that job looks really easy to that company. We said, no, we're gonna put the hiring manager, their profile's gonna be on the job. All of a sudden, instead of a faceless job that you're just applying and throwing your resume over the wall, hey, you're gonna get hired by this person. And then by the way, here's the ways that you might have connections to that person, or you might have connections to other people who work at that company. So it's again, how do you use your network to do those things? And so those were these like beginning epiphanies of how to really rethink just something as simple as a job application and job site with this social network.

32:40And I think, again, what has been missing, though, is the set of things that happens, ephemerally through X, like you were talking about, the set of things that we all have, but we don't figure out how to strengthen and put into LinkedIn anymore. The true connection, the reason that we were in the trenches together, we worked on this thing, you bailed me out of a crisis. And when we can have that, that information in the network is going to allow all these use cases to happen so much better. And when you get to focus just on kind of making sure the network's right and getting all that usage, I think Cosign can really open up so many opportunities.

33:13Olivia Moore:Yeah. It feels like there's kind of like a hierarchy almost of connections. And LinkedIn, for good reason, again, I feel like we're all saying iconic product. I'm an hourly active user, making a ton of revenue. They're clearly doing fine. They're doing great. But LinkedIn treats almost every kind of type of connection the same, especially as products like endorsements on LinkedIn have been really taken off. So like, for example, 90 % of the time when I say to someone, hey, I saw you're connected to this person on LinkedIn. Can you intro me? I will get the, hmm, I don't think I know them. Maybe I met them at a party.

33:44Olivia Moore:I'm not sure. So there's like, do you actually know the person? Did you work at the same company? Did you work at the same company at the same time? Were you on the same team or adjacent teams that work together? Did you manage them? And like all of those are treated as one like connection or not connection now. And I love the idea for Cosign of being able to like break that into the granularity that it deserves because it's so much more useful. It seems like the greatest time in history to be building products generally that can accumulate context that was otherwise unavailable. You say the social CV, I love that idea.

34:16I think Olivia, in particular, you're at the firm thinking a lot about like the talent and the social space and agents are an interesting way to accumulate a lot of context around a person. I think a lot of the things that we're building here, to talk more about that, Now there's a lot of, what does the future hold?

34:31Olivia Moore:So a lot of what we do, both actually our investing teams and our operating teams is just finding awesome people and investing in them, connecting them to our companies, otherwise kind of getting them in the A16C network. And so right now, a lot of this is scraping these existing, you know, profiles and networks and then doing a lot of manual work of going to see who actually is the best strength of connection, how can we make this happen? I think that that kind of manual work that's truly external signal based and it's kind of binary signal versus really granular signal, that's only going to get harder.

35:07Olivia Moore:Because, for example, recently I posted on LinkedIn. I was like, hey, I'd love to help my portfolio companies hire. If you want to work at a startup, fill out this Google form. When it works, it's almost harder because I get 2 ,000 results, right? And that's going to happen to every person who posts a job or who posts any kind of opportunity. And it's going to be 2 ,000 now and it's going to be 10 ,000, you know, a month from now as browser use agent gets better and more people use browser, it's going to be 100 ,000. And so it's like, how do you, even me using Astra, like maximum strength, like how do you sift and sort?

35:44Olivia Moore:And so in an age, I think of like endless kind of outreach and interest with AI, like the scarce thing is like the human endorsement or the human conviction or the human knowledge. And so that's where I get especially excited because I think Cosign is going to be valuable to hopefully so many people in the community and also very valuable to the work that we do and what we try to do.

36:08Erik Torenberg:And yeah, it's interesting. You know, we've sort of gotten to a place where there's only like broadcasting networks to the whole world or like group chats with like 50 people. There's not really this like, you know, 10 ,000 or like a much more vetted community. And that's where we are to start. And you're growing, you know, growing slowly and basically where you put out a post and you'll just be more confident in the signal that comes in. Going back to LinkedIn for a second, some things that I, you know, I wish it had is like, you know, sort of like, remember like a MySpace top eight? I want that for business.

36:39Erik Torenberg:Who are you in the trenches with? Who do you talk to regularly? Who are mutuals? How do you know them? How do you meet them? What do they think about you? It's more sort of, as you said, it treats connections all the same. And you don't really get context on the relationship or context on people's reputation. It's like LinkedIn is about personal identity. We hope that Cosign is about, or I'm sorry, professional identity. We hope Cosign is about professional reputation. LinkedIn is about, they say it's like people you know. Twitter is like people who are interested in knowing you. And we hope that Cosign delivers both in a more granular way.

37:13Erik Torenberg:And at the same time, you need to give props to LinkedIn. It's like, it started 20 plus years ago. And no one's even come close to competing with it in any capacity. I remember Charles Hudson, you know, a great investor, like, you know, 12 years ago was a blog post, like, where are the LinkedIn competitors? It's time to disrupt. Like, I don't like the product for X, Y, Z reasons. It doesn't do this. And we've seen tons of them. You know, we backed them, at the firm individually, and people trying crypto, all sorts of different incentives to break LinkedIn. And it's just fascinating. I was joking when I said everyone hates it, but people do have, they use it obsessively, and yet they have low NPS on it or something, and they know that a better version can exist, and yet it's been impossible to disrupt.

37:57But I think the real thing with LinkedIn is I actually think the NPS is really high for the people who aren't actively in the flow and in the searching and in the community. LinkedIn's always served two audiences. One is, I call it the people who want to find people. And the other one is people who want to maybe be found at some point in their lives. And when you think about it, all of us would love to be found for the right opportunity that comes to us. We aren't, no, a lot of us might be happy. We used to talk about the like mildly happily employed because there's a lot of people who like, they like what they're doing.

38:28They're not in any urgent need to go do something else. But if the right thing popped, whether it was from, you know, someone you know or someone you don't know, but it matched all your interests, you might be like, hmm, should I actually think about that? And I might consider it still may not be right for you in life at the time. But for those mildly happily employed people, they aren't constantly, you know, if they're an engineer, they're not checking LinkedIn every day for like new people or new things. If you're in sales, if you're in BD, if you're in venture and investor, you're using it all the time.

38:56But that was what was really special. And I think moving tens and tens and tens or hundreds of millions, I think there are over a billion people now, of people who are happily employed, who are maybe open to the right opportunity, like that's the kind of network effect that really sticks. And you think a lot about what is a 20-year network effect? Like, look at LinkedIn. And as you're building, and I say this a lot to new companies, as you're thinking about something new, how do you think about that kind of network effect that could be so powerful for 20 years? And even if some people wish there was a better product, you can't move the masses over.

39:31Olivia Moore:Yeah. We have looked at and invested in some attempted LinkedIn killers. And I think what they've done a remarkable job with is the switching costs are just very high, both because they are famously good at bot detection. So you can't really scrape it in real time. There's whole businesses that are built off of scraping LinkedIn and selling that data. but also because it's just such a tight and dense network that like ultimately if it's something as important as your career you're going to want to be on the platform where everyone else is. That being said, I think there's a massive opportunity for a new platform when there is new information or new value to be kind of gleaned or shared which is like very much high quality endorsements and high conviction people.

40:12Generational shifts and also niche, the hyper niche that needs us on LinkedIn. for example, GitHub is arguably a better LinkedIn for engineers than LinkedIn itself? And I'd say, is there an opportunity to say, what is the emergent niche here? Is it the individual who's trying to build their reputation as a talent scout? Are they trying to be a founder who wants to break through? Is there a world for a better LinkedIn that represents their taste in people? And what gets me excited about Cosign isn't that it has to even be a better LinkedIn. It's that it really pulls together all this information that's already latently happening in our industry.

40:47And look, Silicon Valley and the tech industry is so special for this kind of pay it forward, for this belief in somebody, the stuff we talked about at the very beginning, the belief in this person who may not have had a previously strong reputation, but has an insight and idea. and that alone can gather a bunch of people and a bunch of momentum and change the world. And that's what makes this so special. And that's what I think, you know, these platforms like LinkedIn, you know, serving so many people now across so many industries and so many domains. And I think there's room for something that's really special for the community that we have and that, you know, combines the things that are happening ephemerally with the things that are happening professionally with the depth that is going to be great.

41:28And if Cosign works great and it still only serves the tech community as a huge win, And if it then other communities and other industries figure out they should figure out how to take part in this too and bring some of that Silicon Valley energy to more places, that's even better. But the pay it forward and every great idea can just come from somebody who wasn't previously known but truly has a unique insight. Like, that's what I hope this captures too.

41:55Erik Torenberg:Eric from Benchmark had this comment in the Patrick O'Shaughnessy podcast where Patrick was asking him sort of like, you know, what do you think about every category? and he's like, it's all going to work. Like everything is going to be huge. Not every company, but just as an index, like every cat, and I think we've come to a similar conclusion. And I think similarly, like when people say like, you know, does the world need another podcast? Like there's too many podcasts. Oh, and yet another great podcast comes in and it doesn't kill the other, it just all works. Everything that's great works.

42:22Erik Torenberg:And similarly, like, you know, we just launched a school, like Stanford's going to be fine, you know? Harvard's going to be fine and our thing's going to be great. And then similarly, like, yeah, LinkedIn's going to be great. Like it's going to keep doing its thing. And, you know, we're inspired by them in so many ways. We're also inspired by AngelList like 10 years ago when they owned the Investor Graph and really, really, it was for the startup community and it was really focused around, you know, companies, investors, and talent. And, you know, they made a series of other bets that then sort of made them focus on other parts of that or deprecate the free public social network that used to exist.

42:55Erik Torenberg:And we think it's an opportunity to bring back. And then we're also inspired in terms of like how we're going to do this. We're also inspired by Wikipedia. one in terms of, you know, people want Wikipedia profiles, they're aspirational, but two in that we're creating profiles for people. So that's where we're starting. And we think people are gonna be excited about it because we're bragging for them on their behalf in an exclusive, you know, way. And, you know, if they don't want it, we'll take it off. But you're gonna see your profile, it's gonna be fleshed out with all, you know, people giving you compliments and also people expressing their interest in funding you or working with you or even before you go to the profile, like, you know, before, you know.

43:27Erik Torenberg:And so that's one of the ways in which we're differentiating. And only, you know, because of AI can we generate all of this information on people and like recreate, you know, a professional graph. But if we didn't go that third party route, then we would have to get people to decide. It's a cold start problem. It's the place where people go to update their, you know, purposes, the most reliable. Often people say like, what's the daily behavior? Well, we're, you know, brute forcing it by covering every sort of transition. So we'll also have reliable profiles with, you know, more reputation benefits to it.

43:58Olivia Moore:Totally. I feel like the best, I'm curious if you agree, but for consumer products, like the easiest way to acquire users is to tell them that someone else is saying something about them on the product. Especially if it's something, it's the Nikita beer. Like your friends just answered this question about your strategy, which worked so well three times. And it wasn't possible before AI for a network, I think, as big as Silicon Valley. And now it is, which is awesome.

44:23Erik Torenberg:Someone called me today, the Nikita beer of founder communities.

44:26Olivia Moore:It's a real compliment.

44:27Erik Torenberg:That's a true compliment. Yeah, so it's worth pointing out, everything that is being pulled in is coming from public sources. So it's what people have posted on their variety of different places. It's being aggregated. There's a lot of the funding announcements, they're the ones that are being announced. So there is a lot of really, really high quality information that is spread across the public available internet. And it's uniquely compiled and structured, we think, in one place. And Eric talks about the AngelList example. I recall very early in my career, AngelList was probably the first, it was like the wedge that I took into Silicon Valley at all.

44:58It was the ability to see which companies in which geographies, which people at those companies, which, you know, for a long time, it felt like it could be the LinkedIn for this sort of little niche of people who were ambitious in technology. And then, as Eric said, it sort of moved away from that for a number of reasons. But that's been missing. It becomes a place that you can go as a founder who's like, which angel investors do I want to get to know over the next six months before my round? it's a public utility. It's something that's worth pointing out here. We're putting this out into the world.

45:28It's like a thing we'd like to build with people. It's not something that's being presented as a fully finished, perfect product. It's an invitation. It's an invitation to everybody who wants to come in and edit and submit an update to their own or someone else's profile. So a real ask, let's build this thing together for everyone. Yeah, and submit things to people's profiles, co-sign the things you endorse on people. And then even if somebody has feedback, co-sign that feedback so that it gets back to David and the team

45:58Erik Torenberg:in order to keep improving things. Yeah, and so just sort of to end on that sort of higher level note, a lot of the industry, but also other industries, sort of run on co-signs. And, you know, Paul Graham co-signed Sam Altman famously, I feel like 2009 or something, he said like the five best entrepreneurs, like Steve Jobs, you know, three other people, and Sam Altman. And at the time, Sam Allman hadn't like had a huge exit yet, but that really just like gave him such a reputational boost, him running YC, et cetera, you know, is critical to him then building, going on to build one of the most important companies of all time.

46:32Erik Torenberg:And so many, you know, Ben Horowitz and Ali from Databricks, I mean, so many examples of people who got their co-sign from someone older and more senior in the industry and were able to rise up because of it. Ryan Hoover, who was the founder of Product Hunt, co-signed Eric and brought Eric on to become one of the leaders of building the community for everything. And it was such a great endorsement of you early in your career and your potential. I mean, look at what you've become since. It's amazing. I'm immensely grateful for him. And it's so fascinating because, I mean, one of the things that makes Silicon Valley so special is how much of a meritocracy it is and how you don't have to like, you know, necessarily just, you know, pay your dues for 20 years before we're taken seriously.

47:10Erik Torenberg:Like one of the most important intellectuals right now is Dorkesh. He's 25 years old. He's never had a job as far as I'm aware. He just, you know, came to San Francisco, started podcasting. And, you know, someone was if I don't know if it's Patrick Collison or Marc Andreessen also went on or like a number of people by going on his podcast early co-signed him and then said, hey, this is a place where then Zuck and others can go on. You know, the one of the most important founders is Michael Truel, you know, a young guy in his, you know, mid to late 20s, etc. One of the most important, you know, people labeled Ashenbrenner is like, I think like 24, 25 as well.

47:42Erik Torenberg:And so it just like, if you're talented, if you're smart in this industry, someone will discover you, co-sign you and make your career. And so we hope that happens on our platform. Well, we're talking about social capital and positive sum mindsets. I think it's really important. There's a critique of this I wanted to talk about where someone might rightfully say, well, why would I share this co-sign? This is my alpha. This is like, I know that person's good. Like, why would I tell you they're good? And I think actually something, if you take a very long-term view, this. You can say, sure, if that person's raising a pre-seed round right now and you want to do it, don't co-sign them right now.

48:15But the person you want to co-sign is the one that's raising a pre-seed round two years from now, five years from now. And when they do, they remember you. They say, yeah, the reason I'm able to raise this pre-seed round is Olivia co-signed me two years ago. And in doing so, she helped me meet my co-founder and she helped me meet the five people who were my early believers in my product. And that's why I'm here today. And of course, I'm going to call her first my pre-seed round. And if you turn it around that way and you take a very long-term mindset. It's such a long-term place. 100%.

48:42Erik Torenberg:The benefits just accrue to you in the sense of people always remember by order of magnitude more the people who believed in them first. Brian Chesky, when he goes public with Airbnb, who does he write in the blog post? He writes YC. Paul Gray, his first investor. He's had so much investment all throughout. So much more money, so much more time into this company. But you remember the first person. So if you are the first person, especially publicly because that's where the value is because they will remember you for it and then more people will come to you. Yeah. Set up 10. Let's wrap on that.

49:18Erik Torenberg:Thank you so much. Thank you.

49:20Olivia Moore:Thank you.

49:23Erik Torenberg:Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast. If you liked this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts and Spotify. follow us on x at a16z and subscribe to our sub stack at a16z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode.

50:07Erik Torenberg:For more details, including a link to our investments, please see a16z.com forward slash disclosures.