James da Costa

Investing in B2B & Enterprise AI companies @a16z

Partner to @Lio_Technology @StitchHQ @PetualAI @hilbertsai @StiltaIP and more

[James da Costa @jamdac]

https://t.co/TeV8e3ndp7

[James da Costa @jamdac]

@lisashmulyan @SurbhiTodi @missionstcap Go @lisashmulyan and @SurbhiTodi !!

[Lisa @lisashmulyan]

Personal update: today we’re launching Mission Street Capital.

@SurbhiTodi and I met as housemates at Mission Control, the oldest hacker house in SF, where we lived, breathed, and cooked with the best founders well before anyone knew them.

As hacker houses rise in popularity, they’re becoming talent clusters for exceptional hackers to meet and work together.

Our fund’s thesis is in identifying brilliant oddball builders emerging out of these talent clusters. Builders recognize other builders.

Our fund is backed by hacker house alumni, technical leaders from OpenAI and Anthropic, and GPs, partners, and emerging managers at the most iconic funds (a16z, CRV, Emergence, Uncork).

Thank you to our LPs including @AriX @thedanigrant @KevinUnkrich @tanzealous @ashvinair @mgrczyk @nikhilthota @SoheilK @jamdac @caitlinbolnick1 @anamitra @DOitChoco @v_maini @aaronligon @crapshoot101 @PachexMix

[James da Costa @jamdac]

#7daysofCosign kicks off today, ahead of the @cosign Awards!

These are the 10 very best people in startup growth. They built the growth backbone that took ElevenLabs, Listen, Fal, Reducto, Cognition, Cursor, Kalshi, Lovable & Superhuman to the moon.

You should have hired them yesterday. Who else belongs on this list?

https://t.co/qMhIfBmFUr

[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

[Dhruv Gupta @droovg]

Wrote about how I went from a total outsider to the startup ecosystem to building Cosign https://t.co/4eKxbSVEEd

[James da Costa @jamdac]

Congrats on launching, my friend!

Excited to see more businesses that grow the pie with AI!

[Gagan @GaganSKhurana]

Insurance is the single most important market on planet Earth, yet it still runs on manual work. Today ancep is coming out of stealth with an $8.5m pre-seed round to change that. Our AI agents are being used daily by the largest global brokers to help them place more risk.

[James da Costa @jamdac]

Guilty

[Jack Moshkovich @jack_moshkovich]

Stanford tennis courts are so bottmaxxed

(my bot is currently getting lapped by someone else's and i'm upset)

[James da Costa @jamdac]

@igarciacamargo @pranavreddy I like the og pranav!

[James da Costa @jamdac]

@Ronanchamberss @tdoggyholhol Jude move

[James da Costa @jamdac]

@Houda_nait No they need a Houda!!!!

[James da Costa @jamdac]

Every company needs a Jude Bellingham

[etn. @etnshow]

Andreessen Horowitz Partner James da Costa (@jamdac) says every company needs a high-agency, high-output "weapon":

"In the South [of England], a weapon is like, you're on the football pitch, this person is an absolute weapon... Because he gets the ball, he drives up the pitch, he makes tackles, he scores goals... he's extremely dangerous on the field and he turns the course of games."

"In companies, for me, these are people... who have unimaginable throughput. So they're sort of autonomous missiles. They set the target themselves and then they go and execute on those things, and you don't have to worry about the thing getting done. It's already done."

"They create preferential attachment. Because they are setting the bar for what kind of high throughput in the company means, it means that other people raise themselves to that bar in the company."

"Other good people want to work with good people. And so then you start to get this network of really, really good talent that works within the company."

[James da Costa @jamdac]

@zkevinbai Stated otherwise. You need a Kevin, and then that attracts more Kevin’s!

[James da Costa @jamdac]

@kirbyman01 Or a Bryan Kim!

[Josh Gruenstein @joshgruenstein]

Introducing TRACE: deployment-time compute scaling for robot learning.

From a few Tutor demos, frontier LLM agents rebuild a robot's task in sim and train reliable, human-speed policies. Performance becomes a function of compute.

TI-0.1 is our first model trained with TRACE.

[James da Costa @jamdac]

@emilymspector @etnshow Wide blast radius!

[James da Costa @jamdac]

@Konstantine Daring greatly as always, sir. Long Konstantine!

[etn. @etnshow]

ETN x @a16z special tomorrow.

Live from a secret location.

First guest revealed in this photo, can you spot it?

[James da Costa @jamdac]

@denishkc_ Some of the best I’ve seen

[James da Costa @jamdac]

Back in London this week to catch the last of the summer!

[James da Costa @jamdac]

@kallasmaa Are there corgis?!

[James da Costa @jamdac]

This was ironic. There is no sun in London. But there are a lot of great founders. :)

[James da Costa @jamdac]

Back in London this week to catch the last of the summer!