David Booth
David Booth is a Partner and Head of Ecosystem at Andreessen Horowitz, where he focuses on expanding networks spanning the firm and building pipelines for emerging talent, founders, and operators. He is best known as the co-founder and former CEO of On Deck, a startup community and accelerator that helped launch over 1,000 startups that went on to raise over $2 billion. Prior to a16z, he was an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Blackbird Ventures in New Zealand and held early roles at AngelList, Carta, and CoinList. At a16z he is involved in building Cosign, a professional reputation and endorsement product for the startup ecosystem.
“We're super excited to announce Cosign, a product that is around professional reputation for the startup community.”
Source→“Cosign will not host critique or negative signal — only endorsement.”
Source→“What's more impressive to you, someone who went to Stanford or someone who is followed by Patrick Collison, Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, etc. I think most people would say the latter.”
Source→“It's all going to work. Like, everything is going to be huge... another great podcast comes in and it doesn't kill the other.”
Source→“It's just fascinating... they have like low NPS on it or something. And they know that a better version can exist. And yet... it's been impossible to disrupt.”
Source→“They made a series of other bets that then sort of made them focus on other parts... or deprecate the free public social network that used to exist.”
Source→“I wish I could just download my followers... it's not built for this use case.”
Source→“One of them was Russell Kaplan, who's now the president at Cognition. And he was like a 22-year-old just engineer at Tesla.”
Source→“Brian Chesky, when he... goes public with Airbnb, who does he write in the blog post? He writes... YC, you know, Paul, his first investor.”
Source→“Basically, if they swiped right on me, then we would get an automatic intro... That event provided the context for us to... become friends and collaborators.”
Source→“Mark Andreessen wrote a blog post about me joining the firm.”
Source→“Paul Graham co-signed Sam Altman famously... he said, like, the five best entrepreneurs... and Sam Altman. And at the time, Sam Altman hadn't had a huge exit yet.”
Source→“One of the most important intellectuals right now is Dorkesh. He's 25 years old. He's never had a job... He just... came to San Francisco, started podcasting.”
Source→“Zach Frankel has done an amazing job, right? So many people have done amazing, building a reputation for discovering people.”
Source→“My Twitter account is more valuable to me than my college education.”
Source→AI-extracted from podcast / newsletter / paper summaries. May contain errors.