Cosign has opened a beta professional network built around a familiar startup-world currency: who is willing to vouch for whom.
The official site describes Cosign as a curated network for the people and companies in the startup ecosystem. Its profiles pair work histories with attributed “cosigns,” moving some of the emphasis away from what a person writes about themselves and toward endorsements from people in their network.
Profiles are only one layer
Cosign also lets members curate lists of people and companies, compare community picks and browse a feed of company and industry activity. A jobs section connects those discovery features to open roles, with listings from companies surfaced inside the network.
That combination makes Cosign broader than a directory. It is trying to turn endorsements and curation into a reputation layer that can be reused across talent discovery, company discovery and hiring.
The beta's landing page uses example profiles and rankings to demonstrate those features, so the visible counts and sample recommendations should not be read as evidence of real-world adoption or hiring outcomes.
a16z is putting its name behind the launch
The site's footer credits a16z, and the venture firm's accounts promoted the launch as a new product. One attached post contrasts Cosign's third-party context with the self-authored profiles common on LinkedIn.
The harder question is whether endorsements from a curated startup network reveal genuinely useful information or mainly reproduce the status relationships already visible in Silicon Valley. The public beta shows how Cosign intends to collect that signal; it does not yet establish how accurate, inclusive or durable the resulting reputation system will be.
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