Nick Frosst, co-founder of the $5.5 billion Canadian AI startup Cohere, has been a musician his entire life. He told TechCrunch that he hasn’t shut up since he started singing. And he still does. In addition to his full-time job at Cohere, Frosst is also the frontman for Good Kid, an indie rock band comprised entirely of programmers.
Good Kid isn’t a group of friends jamming in someone’s garage on the weekends. The band has 2.3 million monthly Spotify listeners, recently performed at Lollapalooza, was nominated for Breakthrough Group of the Year by the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences at this year’s Juno Awards, and opened for Portugal on The Man’s Canadian tour last fall.
Good Kid formed as a hobby at the University of Toronto in 2015, Frosst tells TechCrunch. All members except guitarist David Wood were in the computer science program, but they convinced him to switch. Good Kid released its first single, Nomu, in late 2015. Nomu’s medley of songs pays homage to indie pop-rock group Two Door Cinema Club, while Frosst’s vocals resonate in a style that has drawn comparisons to Bloc Party frontman Kele Okereke. Both Bloc Party and Two Door Cinema Club are inspirations for the group.
“We didn’t have high expectations for it,” Frosst admits of releasing the first single. “We just wanted to make something we liked instead of recording a bunch of songs. It turned out much better than we expected.”
Good Kid released several more singles before releasing their first self-titled EP in 2018. The band has since released four more albums, the most recent of which came out earlier this year.
About a year after the band’s debut album, in 2018, Frosst launched Cohere with Aidan Gomez and Ivan Zhang. Cohere has since grown into one of the most high-profile startups providing AI models for businesses. 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. As Good Kid’s profile continues to grow, Frosst says he’s honored to be a musician at that level, but working on Cohere and AI is his real career.
“Cohere is my life’s work,” Frosst said. “I spend most of my time on Cohere, and music is something I can do, relax and unwind.”
Frost says it wasn’t that hard to find a balance between the two. The band meets twice a week for two-hour rehearsals. When Good Kid is on tour, the band works remotely all day on the bus. Everyone works as a programmer. Then they go on stage at night to perform. Frost says he feels like he can focus more on Cohere when he’s on tour, because he doesn’t have so many meetings.
“I think they’re additive,” Frost said. “I think being able to play music really helps me with my work at Cohere. It clears my mind, gives me time to focus, and makes me a smarter person.”
But even as the band members focus on making music, they still think about AI. The band’s first single, Nomu, which was produced years before Cohere was founded, featured the lyric “Languages are lost, tokens are unknown,” referring to a technology that Frosst’s company would one day discover.
When the band played the final night of Chicago’s Lollapalooza festival in August, Frost said it was an incredible experience. He admitted that he had never been to a musical festival before, much less played one. Good Kid kicked off their set with No Time to Explain at 1:45 p.m., playing a few hours before the Two Door Cinema Club, which inspired them, took the stage.
Frost says he’s grateful to have been able to pursue a successful music career without the fear that “it might not work out,” a common occurrence in the music industry.
“I got into music for fun, and it came from a creative drive rather than a career aspiration, so I feel really lucky to be in this situation,” he said.
