Excited to announce the Cosign Awards: celebrating exceptional people, companies, and products that had a massive impact in 2026. 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

Next week my team and I are gathering a group of the most interesting folks we know- who are at the very early stages of starting, or open to joining a new startup. We usually do this via small dinners, ~15 at a time. But honestly there's so much incredible talent out there right now, this one's going to be a little different. We're calling it "Arfer Hours with @a16z Build", and hosting closer to ~50 people at one of our GPs houses. We are also deploying @cosign to help everyone get connected: everyone gets a verified profile, suggestions for "people you should know" in advance, and can send signals to connect + follow-up after) We have a little big of space left.. link to apply below: join us!

"What's more impressive to you: someone who went to Stanford, or someone who is followed by Patrick Collison, Elon Musk, and Marc Andreessen?" Erik Torenberg on the peer-to-peer credential, and why attention from the right people can open more doors than a degree: "My friend David Perell said, 'My Twitter account is more valuable to me than my college education. My Twitter has given me more value to my career and also personally.'" "College is a bundle of education, network, and credential. You learn from having conversations. You meet people and discover people. It's proof of work: Are they interesting? Are they funny? Did they build something cool?" "What's more impressive to you: someone who went to Stanford, or someone who is followed by Patrick Collison, Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, et cetera? I think most people would say the latter. It's this kind of peer-to-peer credential." "Implicitly, although people often do this explicitly, that is a cosign. It's an endorsement that this person is worth tracking. It's a public signal that this person is worth following." "If you're followed by these people, now your doors are open. People want to read what you say. They want to work with you. They want to invest in you or have you as part of their team." "There's benefit to the receiver but there's also benefit to the giver because if you're the first person to discover someone, that's how Silicon Valley operates." @eriktorenberg

Many founders wish they had true peers & thought partners in comms & people leadership roles. If you’re gifted with words & people, these roles are opportunities to have meaningful impact at top companies and they’re less competitive than being a top founder/investor/creator.

i will literally hire you for a16z new media if you can monologue for 30 minutes about tech twitter please share your best takes about: - high aura companies - up and coming posters - what you miss about the glory days of tpot - what distinguishes aura from motion reply/dm/email/loom/carrier pigeon

of all the takes that age terribly, “dont put ads in a consumer product” is probably the one that’s most guaranteed to make you look sanctimonious and self-righteous in retrospect. every single great consumer internet product and platform with >1bn users delivers some form of ad unit, because that’s how you scale a product to the largest group of people possible. ads are, quite literally, why we can have nice things. and so it shouldn’t have been a surprise that back in jan / feb the following things happened 1) openai announced they were rolling out ads to subsidize their enormous base of free users 2) a bunch of people tried to paint this as a bad thing. now, with the benefit of ~240 days of hindsight, we can audit just how ridiculous this kneejerk reaction was. as of august, oai has ~$1bn in arr for their ad product. in this podcast recorded for the 7th edition of the top 100 consumer ai apps leaderboard, i sat down with @omooretweets, author of the bi-yearly report, and @joshelman, to discuss why ads remain such an important part of the consumer experience, and why subscriptions can only take us so far. some takeaways: - the subscription market is a peculiar slice of the consumer market. olivia's yipit panel suggests around 4.5% of US consumers pay for an ai subscription, and spending is concentrated in people using it to build, create, and get work done. -a founder who needs every user to pay has a strong reason to keep building for that audience (a rather circumscribed group of people who value saving time over spending it). advertising creates room to serve people with different interests and willingness to pay. developers / creators who view ai as a way to get leverage over their lives is an important group of paying subscribers, but a smaller cohort compared with people who view ai solely as a source of information or mild entertainment for now. - josh pointed out that ai companies can become afraid of growing too fast because every new user brings meaningful expense (this explains why, for example, meta seems to be pushing muse a little less aggressively than a product like threads, which cost far less marginally to serve to users). but as inference gets cheaper, ads and transaction fees can support more of the experiences people might want to try. - josh found its ads useful while planning a trip. olivia thinks the context people supply could make the advertising more effective. that creates a product-design opportunity: help someone find what they want, with the sponsorship made overt and a clear value add. - a valuable audience doesn't have to be everyone. olivia points to openevidence's early success with advertising among doctors. specialized ai products can gather audiences whose shared needs are useful to particular businesses. there is room for companies with much more focused purposes than a general assistant. i think this is why the ads question matters beyond oai’s revenue. the business model helps determine who gets products built for them. ads are what enable ai to get built for everyone.

🚨 The @a16z Consumer AI Top 100 is back - but this time, it's 150! We added revenue data from @yipitdata to track how consumers are spending not just time, but money, on AI. The result? A story of heavy concentration among AI's power users. Our takeaways 👇

1/ America, going viral, funerals Today we sent out the latest edition of People Watching, a newsletter to help you discover great, under-the-radar people. Sharing some highlights (link to subscribe at the end of this thread):

.@OpenRouter co-founder Alex Atallah on the "everyone is building the same thing" take: "This reminds me of this tweet I saw... Everybody's building an agent loop with notifications, third-party connectors, context management, memory, sandboxes, agentic web search, an always-on agent on top." "This product is showing up everywhere. It is showing up everywhere, but these are just the new table-stakes primitives." "A 2005 version of that tweet would be: 'Oh, everybody's building the same thing. A database, a users table, a sign-in page, a sign-up page, a profile page, a logout page. Everything's the same.'" "There's like a lot of differentiation really. There's table-stakes needs for AI just like there's table-stakes needs for the web." @alexatallah @amasad

Introducing Underdog, your Private Personal AI on devices you already own Today we're announcing our backing from @a16z @khoslaventures @HummingbirdVC Anthology (@AnthropicAI @MenloVentures) @patrickc @naval @rauchg @polynoamial @Thom_Wolf @Mascobot @tszzl @OfficialLoganK and other top AI leaders Our mission is to provide free, capable, reliable and private AI to billions of people. Underdog’s Law: today’s frontier intelligence reaches your devices in six months. We’re starting with fast, capable AI that runs on consumer hardware. By co-designing models and inference engines, we’re pushing the frontier of capability, speed, power and data efficiency. Our research also spans agentic commerce, confidential inference, and how AI will reshape the internet economy. Privacy and capability no longer needs to be a tradeoff. If you believe in this future, join us. Time to build.

Introducing Discourse: not a group chat, not a broadcast social network, but a secret third thing. Discourse is built off the Cosign graph and will be embedded into the platform.

Excited to release Discourse, a tech forum for the modern era. Today, the discourse in tech is either free for all (broadcast social networks) or completely private (group chats). There’s no midsize social network where a few thousand tech leaders talk to each other. We'll have a hybrid model. Some people will have access to post directly, and everyone else's posts will go through a queue. We'll start with ~5,000 white-listed people, and more people who post smart comments will be given direct access over time. Discourse is built off the @cosign graph and will be embedded into the platform. We’ve partnered with our favorite monitors to make sense of what’s happening in real time. P.S. True to form, I actually built a version of this a decade ago called @beondeckdaily, inspired by Hacker News.