Nick Frosst, the co-founder of $5.5 billion Canadian AI startup Cohere, has been a musician his whole life. He told TechCrunch that once he started singing, he never shut up. That’s still true today. In addition to his full-time job at Cohere, Frosst is also the front man of Good Kid, an indie rock band composed entirely of programmers.
Good Kid isn’t just a group of friends jamming on the weekends in someone’s garage. The band has 2.3 million monthly Spotify listeners and recently played at Lollapalooza. It was nominated for the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences breakthrough group of the year at the Juno Awards this year and opened for Portugal. The Man’s Canadian tour last fall.
Good Kid was formed at the University of Toronto in 2015 as a hobby, Frosst told TechCrunch. All of the members were in the computer science program except one, guitar player David Wood, but they all convinced him to switch. Good Kid launched its first single, Nomu, at the end of 2015. Nomu’s musical medley sounds like a nod to indie pop rock group Two Door Cinema Club, with Frosst’s vocals ringing out in a style that could be compared to Bloc Party front man Kele Okereke. Both Bloc Party and Two Door Cinema Club are inspirations for the group.
“We didn’t really have high hopes for it,” Frosst admits about releasing that first single. “We just wanted to create something that we liked, instead of recording a bunch of songs. It did much better than we thought it would.”
Good Kid dropped a handful more singles until releasing its first self-titled EP in 2018. The band has gone on to release 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 grown into a top-watched startup offering AI models for enterprises. The company has raised more than $970 million in venture capital from backers like Salesforce, Nvidia, Cisco, and Oracle, and is currently valued at $5.5 billion. Although Good Kid’s profile has continued to grow, Frosst said that he’s privileged to be able to be a musician at that level, but Cohere and working in AI is his real career.
“Cohere is my life’s work,” Frosst said. “I spend the vast majority of my time [on] Cohere and music is a thing I get to do and unwind and relax.”
Frosst said finding balance between the two hasn’t been too difficult. The band meets twice a week for two-hour practices. When Good Kid goes on tour, the band bangs out a full day of remote work — everyone works as a programmer — from the bus before taking the stage at night to play shows. Frosst said he actually feels he might be able to focus better on his work for Cohere when they go on tour because it prevents him from having too many meetings.
“I think they are additive,” Frosst said. “I really think being able to play music helps me with my job at Cohere. It clears my mind and gives me a dedicated time to focus and makes me a smarter person.”
But even when the members of the band are focused on making music they are still thinking about AI. In the band’s first single Nomu, produced years before Cohere was founded, that first song used the line “languages lost, tokens unknown,” a reference to the tech upon which Frosst’s company would one day be found.
When the band got to play on the last day of Chicago’s Lollapalooza festival in August, Frosst said it was an incredible experience. He admitted that prior to that, he actually had never even attended a musical festival, let alone played at one. Good Kid went on 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 be having such a successful musical career without the fear that it won’t work out, a dynamic not common in the music industry.
“Getting to come to music for fun, getting to come from creativity and not for career aspirations, I’m very lucky to have found myself in this situation,” he said.