Nick Frosst, co-founder of Canadian AI startup Cohere, valued at $5.5 billion, has been a musician his entire life. He told britcommerce that once he started singing, he never shut up. That remains true today. In addition to his full-time job at Cohere, Frosst is also the frontman of Good Kid, an indie rock band comprised entirely of programmers.
Good Kid isn’t just a bunch of friends jamming on the weekends in someone’s garage. The band has 2.3 million monthly listeners on Spotify and recently played Lollapalooza. They were nominated for an Academy of Canadian Recording Arts and Sciences award. innovative group of the year at this year’s Juno Awards and opened for Portugal on The Man’s Canadian tour last fall.
Good Kid formed at the University of Toronto in 2015 as a hobby, Frosst told britcommerce. All members were in the computer science program except one, guitarist David Wood, but they all convinced him to switch. Good Kid released their first single, Nomu, in late 2015. Nomu’s musical medley sounds like a nod to indie pop rock group Two Door Cinema Club, with Frosst’s vocals resonating in a style that could be compared to Bloc Party frontman Kele Okereke. Both Bloc Party and Two Door Cinema Club are inspirations for the group.
“We didn’t have high hopes for it,” admits Frosst about the release of that first single. “We just wanted to create something we liked, rather than record a bunch of songs. It worked out a lot better than we thought it would.”
Good Kid released a handful of more singles before releasing their self-titled debut EP in 2018. The band has since released four more albums, the latest of which came out earlier this year.
About a year after the band’s debut album came out in 2018, Frosst launched Cohere with Aidan Gomez and Ivan Zhang. Cohere has since become a highly regarded startup offering AI models for businesses. The company has raised more than $970 million in venture capital from backers including Salesforce, Nvidia, Cisco, and Oracle, and is currently valued at $5.5 billion. While Good Kid’s profile has continued to rise, Frosst said he’s privileged to be able to be a musician at that level, but Cohere and working in AI is his true career.
“Cohere is my life’s work,” Frosst said. “I spend most of my time [on] “Cohere and music are things I do to relax and unwind.”
Frosst said finding the balance between the two hasn’t been too difficult. The band meets twice a week for two hours of practice. When Good Kid goes on tour, the band works remotely all day (they all work as programmers) from the bus before taking the stage at night to play live. Frosst said he actually feels like he could focus better on his work for Cohere when they’re on the road because it keeps him from having too many meetings.
“I think they are cumulative,” Frosst said. “I really think being able to play music helps me with my work at Cohere. It clears my mind and gives me time to focus and makes me a smarter person.”
But even when the band members are focused on making music, they’re still thinking about artificial intelligence. On the band’s first single, Nomu, produced years before Cohere was founded, that first song used the phrase “lost languages, unknown tokens,” a reference to the technology that Frosst’s company would one day be based on.
When the band played the final day of Chicago’s Lollapalooza festival in August, Frosst said it was an incredible experience. He admitted that before that, he’d never actually attended a music festival, let alone played at one. Good Kid started playing at 1:45 p.m. and opened the set with “No Time to Explain,” playing just hours before one of their inspirations, Two Door Cinema Club, took the stage.
Frosst says he feels grateful to have such a successful music career without the fear of it not working out, a dynamic that is not common in the music industry.
“I got involved in music for fun, for creativity and not for professional aspirations. I am very lucky to have found myself in this situation,” he said.