David Booth

Partner, Ecosystem @a16z || building @cosign || Formerly: EIR @Blackbirdvc; Co-Founder & CEO at On Deck; early-ish @AngelList, @Cartainc

[David Booth @davidbooth]

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 https://t.co/ZQI1VSgH1f

[Erik Torenberg @eriktorenberg]

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

https://t.co/fULXo55gkr

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

[David Booth @davidbooth]

@gregisenberg #3 is @solofounders :-)

[David Booth @davidbooth]

new handle, who dis?

[David Booth @davidbooth]

@karinabao @X omg

[Dhruv Gupta @droovg]

The @OpenAI mafia is not too shabby.

Explore the ex-employees turned founders of any company at https://t.co/9V4JBZ5jg1

[David Booth @davidbooth]

@hazhubble @pally yes pls!

[David Booth @davidbooth]

@karinabao @X omg

[David Booth @davidbooth]

@hnshah @a16z stoked to have you along at dinner last night!

[David Booth @davidbooth]

@danielkhunter fun idea you'd like - tell the agent to look out for new posts, lists, or cosign on the timeline that would be interesting for you, send you a digest

[David Booth @davidbooth]

txt Cosign, now live 👀

[David Booth @davidbooth]

https://t.co/wml3QVQ7kR

[David Booth @davidbooth]

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

[Clara Gold @Clara_Gold]

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👇

[David Booth @davidbooth]

@Clara_Gold yass such a fan of this, you know it. inspiring

[David Booth @davidbooth]

@plsoulie @a16z https://t.co/4gHAurhwXE

[David Booth @davidbooth]

@akcushman actually my tweet/title was an error - it's "operations engineering" not "ops engineer"

some of the cohort are actually "Ops Engineers"

most are "engineers" who are applying themselves to "the operations team", or ops leaders who are AI pilled

[David Booth @davidbooth]

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 https://t.co/frfnA7R7If

[David Booth @davidbooth]

@akcushman actually my tweet/title was an error - it's "operations engineering" not "ops engineer"

some of the cohort are actually "Ops Engineers"

most are "engineers" who are applying themselves to "the operations team", or ops leaders who are AI pilled

[Dhruv Gupta @droovg]

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.

https://t.co/iUsTaRneKw

[David Booth @davidbooth]

More on Substack: https://t.co/pBxztu34WW

[David Booth @davidbooth]

Full cohort: https://t.co/HH6hPEq8w4

[David Booth @davidbooth]

@rexsalisbury Co-working / third space you can bring your kids to, instant subscribe for me

[a16z @a16z]

Introducing the Cosign Awards.

https://t.co/Bh408DFXQf

[Ishan Goswami @TheIshanGoswami]

This is basically Oscars for Tech Twitter

(and shockingly i am in it hahaha, see https://t.co/YjsJ8PDJsz)