# Cohere chose independence over the easier growth path

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/cohere-chose-independence-over-the-easier-growth-path/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Aidan Gomez](https://realalpha.app/builders/aidan-gomez/) · Aidan Gomez is co-founder and CEO of Cohere. · Co-founded Cohere, the sovereign AI company, and co-authored the Transformer paper, Attention Is All You Need.
- Host: [Alex Konrad](https://realalpha.app/people/alex-konrad/) · Founder & editor, Upstarts Media · Ran Forbes' Midas List for ten years and co-created its Cloud 100 list; founded Upstarts in 2025.
- Show: Upstarts
- Episode: [Cohere's Aidan Gomez: The Canadian Founder Taking AI Models To The World, Not Just Big Tech](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/), Apr 16, 2026
- Moment: 30:18 to 35:41 of the episode (5 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/cohere-chose-independence-over-the-easier-growth-path/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=1818

## Quote

> “we're not looking for like the easiest path and we're looking for **the right path**”
> — [Aidan Gomez](https://realalpha.app/builders/aidan-gomez/) at [33:16](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=1996) · Upstarts

## Takeaways

1. Cohere declined selling a large stake to a hyperscaler.
2. Serving across clouds helps customers avoid lock-in.
3. The company held to privacy and independence for six years.

## About this segment

Aidan Gomez explains why Cohere passed on a hyperscaler deal and stayed available across cloud providers. He says the company stuck with privacy and independence before the market caught up.

From “Cohere's Aidan Gomez: The Canadian Founder Taking AI Models To The World, Not Just Big Tech”, Apr 16, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/)

## Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[30:24](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=1824) How'd you get there? Like, what has been the hardest piece to overcome? You know, on the show, we talk about the upstart moment where maybe you were punching above your weight the most, or you just felt like, I have to really overcome something to get that idea to reality. When you think back on the journey so far, what would that moment have been at Cohere? Oh, there were many, many different moments that kind of fit that character. There's been many hurdles to overcome and you know just like challenging strategic questions of like do we don't we it seems like the b2b choice was a first really important junction yeah the second one was do you sell off a huge chunk of your company to one of the hyperscalers that's the thing that like opening i did with microsoft and anthropic did with aws that we saw and considered um but ultimately

[31:20](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=1880) did not pursue there was always this notion in cohere even before like you know there's a lot of geopolitical stuff happening now that wasn't happening in the past six years we've been around like six and a half years but even before all this geopolitical stuff one of the core value props of Cohere was independence. So not getting locked into any one cloud ecosystem, et cetera. Oh, you want to run on AWS? Great. OCI? Great. Azure? Great. Sort of a friends with everyone approach. And we were pretty dogmatic about that. We were quite dogmatic that we're going to serve everywhere. And that is part of our value. We've always had that nature of like strategic independence is important.

[32:03](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=1923) It's important at the company level, right? Like if you're a large enterprise, you don't want to be completely locked in to your cloud provider, one ecosystem, because they're just going to keep squeezing you and squeezing you and squeezing you for margin over time. And you'll dig yourself so deeply into that ecosystem that you'll never be able to get out. It'd be too expensive to get out. So the company, you want this strategic independence to be able to negotiate different clouds off of each other, find like a fair or an actual competitive price at the company level at the country level right like you can't over depend on any one third party you need to be able to not only provide for yourself but have a diversified set of suppliers in case one goes down you can continue to work with these others and then at the individual level as well I think it's it's important to

[32:49](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=1969) expose yourself to diversity to expose yourself to different ecosystems different products and not get into a bubble or into um an echo chamber but you would have gained notoriety maybe a much higher valuation early on um at least like a lot more of some of the typical tech trappings of momentum so there is a trade-off there like you could argue maybe you guys were playing on hard mode a little bit. Yeah. No, we were definitely, I mean, like founding in Canada is playing on hormone.

[33:19](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=1999) Let's say like it started right there, but I mean, we're not looking for like the easiest path and we're looking for the right path and something that is a meaningful contribution to the market, to the world, to our customers. And, you know, we've been like quite earnestly dedicated to that for six and a half years. You know, we haven't pivoted that strongly in those six and a half years. We've kind of always been saying the same thing, that privacy and security is essential. Independence is essential. And the market has moved towards us. And I think that's what we've watched is like, first off, no one was buying LLMs six and a half years. Nobody knew what LLMs. There was like a group of 100 to 200 people who knew what llms were six and a half years ago and then um consumer took off blew up was super popular

[34:17](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=2057) we never did a consumer service we were always like was there any debate internally like oh my god so much so much like uh such a hotly but we were just like are we gonna spend our time like chasing what other guys are doing are we just gonna like replicate whatever these people are having success with we didn't want to do that we sort of wanted to carve our own path and we still do like that's it's fantastic that the market has moved towards us that suddenly like sovereignty and independence is the most important thing in the world enterprise is like the highest margin best business and we've seen the tailwinds of that like you know our revenue success thing last year it'll do another big multiple this year i don't know if i believe in karma but i do believe that like an earnest dedication to an idea that is like a good one and a useful one for the world

[35:14](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=2114) will be rewarded and it might not be the fastest rewarded it might not be the easiest rewarded Might not be the easiest path, might not be the fastest path, but it'll be rewarded. Like for like Jensen and NVIDIA, he's been like the longest serving public company founder, CEO. And man, like for 30 years, he just like. Yeah, I don't know what you mean.