Nick Frost, co-founder of the $5.5 billion Canadian AI startup Cohere, has been a lifelong musician. Once he started singing, he never stopped, he told TechCrunch. That’s still true today. In addition to his full-time job at Cohere, Frost is also the lead singer of Good Kid, an indie rock band made up entirely of programmers.
Good Kid isn’t just a bunch of friends jamming in someone’s garage on the weekends. The band has 2.3 million monthly listeners on Spotify and recently played at Lollapalooza. They’ve been nominated for a Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences award. Leading Group of the Year at this year’s Juno Awards and opened in Portugal. The band also toured Canada last fall.
Good Kid was formed at the University of Toronto in 2015 as a hobby, Frosst told TechCrunch. All but one of the members, guitarist David Wood, were in the computer science program, but they all convinced him to switch. Good Kid released its first single, Nomu, in late 2015. Nomu’s soundtrack sounds like a nod to the indie pop rock band Two Door Cinema Club, with Frosst’s vocals ringing out in a style comparable 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 the first single,” Frost admits. “We just wanted to come up with something we loved, rather than record a bunch of songs. The song was a much bigger hit than we could have imagined.”
Good Kid released a handful of singles until their self-titled debut EP in 2018. The band went on to release four more albums, the most recent of which was released earlier this year.
About a year after the band’s debut album in 2018, Frosst launched Cohere with Aidan Gomez and Ivan Zhang. Since then, Cohere has grown into a top-rated startup that provides enterprise AI models. 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 continues to grow, Frosst said he’s fortunate to be able to be a musician at this level, but that Cohere and AI are his true careers.
“Cohere is my life’s work, where I spend the vast majority of my time,” Frost said. [on] “Hanging together and music is something I can do and relax.”
Frost said finding the balance between the two hasn’t been too difficult. The band meets twice a week to practice for two hours. When Good Kid goes on tour, the band works a full day remotely — with everyone working as programmers — from the bus before hitting the stage at night to perform. Frost said he actually feels like he can focus better on his work at Cohere when they’re on tour because it keeps him from having to have so many meetings.
“I think it helps,” Frost said. “I really think being able to play music helps me do my job at Cohere. It clears my mind, gives me dedicated time to focus, and makes me a smarter person.”
But even when the band members are focused on making music, they still think about artificial intelligence. The band’s first single, “Nomu,” released years before Cohere was founded, uses the phrase “lost languages and unknown codes,” a reference to the technology that Frosst would one day be built on.
When the band got the chance to play on the final day of Chicago’s Lollapalooza festival in August, Frost said it was an incredible experience. He admitted that before then, he had never been to a music festival, let alone played one. Good Kid started the show at 1:45 p.m. and opened with “No Time to Explain,” just hours before one of their inspirations, Two Door Cinema Club, took the stage.
Frost says he feels grateful to have a successful music career without fear that it won’t work out, an uncommon dynamic in the music industry.
“I am very lucky to find myself in this position, because I came to music for fun, for creativity and not for career ambitions,” he said.