# Cohere's Aidan Gomez: The Canadian Founder Taking AI Models To The World, Not Just Big Tech

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

Aidan Gomez says AI can revive economic growth, while democracies need independent AI suppliers to strengthen resilience.

- Show: Upstarts
- Hosts: [Alex Konrad](https://realalpha.app/people/alex-konrad/)
- Guest: [Aidan Gomez](https://realalpha.app/builders/aidan-gomez/) is co-founder and CEO of Cohere.
- Published: Apr 16, 2026
- Length: 42 min

## The best minutes

- [30:18](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=1818) [Cohere chose independence over the easier growth path](https://realalpha.app/s/cohere-chose-independence-over-the-easier-growth-path/) (5 min)
- [21:48](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=1308) [Gomez sees AI-driven growth as a defense against scarcity](https://realalpha.app/s/gomez-sees-ai-driven-growth-as-a-defense-against-scarcity/) (4 min)
- [25:13](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=1513) [AI sovereignty depends on a diverse supply of providers](https://realalpha.app/s/ai-sovereignty-depends-on-a-diverse-supply-of-providers/) (4 min)

## Also worth watching

- [36:31](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=2191) [Cohere keeps humans involved in sensitive AI decisions](https://realalpha.app/s/cohere-keeps-humans-involved-in-sensitive-ai-decisions/) (3 min)
- [4:13](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=253) [North lets staff build automations without creating a new product](https://realalpha.app/s/north-lets-staff-build-automations-without-creating-a-new/) (3 min)
- [18:49](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=1129) [Cohere began with a bet on training a model on the whole web](https://realalpha.app/s/cohere-began-with-a-bet-on-training-a-model-on-the-whole-web/) (2 min)
- [8:17](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=497) [Rural internet scarcity led Gomez into hands-on AI research](https://realalpha.app/s/rural-internet-scarcity-led-gomez-into-hands-on-ai-research/) (5 min)
- [39:33](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=2373) [Gomez wants Cohere to IPO for broader ownership and scrutiny](https://realalpha.app/s/gomez-wants-cohere-to-ipo-for-broader-ownership-and-scrutiny/) (2 min)

Skip the opening company overview, the Transformer explainer, and the Mercury sponsor read.

## Summary

Aidan Gomez is Cohere’s co-founder and CEO and co-authored the Transformer paper Attention Is All You Need while at Google. He grew up in rural Ontario, studied computer science at the University of Toronto, went to Oxford for a PhD, and founded Cohere with co-founders Nick and Ivan.

Gomez says Cohere is entering a takeoff phase as enterprises adopt AI and seek privacy, secure deployments, and sovereign options. He describes Cohere’s North platform as infrastructure for secure enterprise agents that lets nontechnical workers build automations. He argues that AI could restore economic growth and support democratic resilience, and that countries need diverse technology suppliers rather than dependence on one country. He says Cohere has stuck with B2B, privacy, security, and independence rather than chasing consumer products or hyperscaler deals, and sees an IPO as a way to widen ownership and scrutiny.

### Minute by minute

- [1:24](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=84) **Enterprises push Cohere into takeoff.** Gomez says Cohere is in a takeoff phase as enterprises adopt AI across their organizations, with demand centered on privacy, sovereignty, and critical industries. He says use cases range from morning email summaries to monitoring ship sensors, and that some customers need on-premises or air-gapped deployment.
- [5:23](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=323) **North makes enterprise automation accessible.** Gomez says vibe-coding tools can get technical users 90% or 95% of the way to an application, but closing the last mile often still takes technical skills. He says North lets nontechnical users build automations by chatting with a model and connecting tools, without creating a new codebase for each task.
- [8:17](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=497) **Rural internet scarcity led to coding.** Gomez says unreliable internet in rural Ontario made computers compelling and led him to coding and a small website business. At the University of Toronto, he joined deep-learning research around Geoffrey Hinton, then worked on music transcription and later joined Google and the Transformer team.
- [14:35](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=875) **The Transformer scaled beyond translation.** Gomez says the Transformer was designed to improve machine translation by modeling language sequences efficiently, not to take over AI. Its scalability made it a strong fit for larger models and later applications to images, audio, and other data. He credits the wider research community for much of its impact.
- [19:05](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=1145) **Cohere began by modeling the web.** Gomez says Cohere grew out of an idea he and his co-founders developed to train a model on the web, after seeing language models produce increasingly plausible text. He says they chose B2B within the first year because they wanted to bring AI into the economy and support productivity and growth.
- [22:35](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=1355) **Gomez sees AI as a growth engine.** Gomez says slowing growth in developed democracies encourages zero-sum thinking and contributes to xenophobia and conflict. He argues that AI could restore broad-based growth and help sustain liberal democracy by improving efficiency and living standards.
- [25:43](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=1543) **AI sovereignty depends on diverse suppliers.** Gomez says technology sovereignty has declined outside the US and China, leaving countries more dependent on a small number of suppliers. He says building Cohere in Canada is an intentional contribution to resilience, and argues that democracies need diverse suppliers without every country having to build every technology itself.
- [30:38](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=1838) **Cohere preserves cloud independence.** Gomez says Cohere considered selling a large stake to a hyperscaler but did not pursue it, preserving independence from any one cloud ecosystem. He argues that enterprises need options to negotiate with providers and countries need diversified suppliers in case one becomes unavailable.
- [33:09](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=1989) **Cohere stayed on its chosen path.** Gomez says founding in Canada made the path harder, but Cohere stuck with privacy, security, independence, and B2B rather than chasing consumer AI. He says the market later moved toward those priorities and points to Jensen Huang’s long conviction in Nvidia as an example of a commitment that can take decades to pay off.
- [37:05](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=2225) **Human oversight matters in sensitive AI.** Gomez says AI will enter public and private sectors, including defense, healthcare, and finance, where deployments can have serious consequences. He says Cohere works with customers on readiness and safeguards, builds human oversight into North, and chooses which customers and governments it serves.
- [39:57](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=2397) **Gomez wants an IPO for public access.** Gomez says he wants Cohere to IPO so more people can own a stake and the company faces greater financial scrutiny. He says the company’s success should be measured by its impact on countries’ sovereignty and democratic resilience, not just its valuation.

## Transcript

Upstarts, hosted by Alex Konrad, with Aidan Gomez.

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

[0:20](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=20) There's been a sort of slowdown in growth for these developed democratic economies. When that starts to taper off, you see the emergence of things like xenophobia, like that immigrant is taking my opportunity, they're taking my slice of the pie. A lot of people talk about like AI destroying the world. I really don't think AI is going to destroy the world. It might be like our best shot at saving the world. Welcome to the Upstarts Podcast, our weekly show where we talk to emerging startup leaders about their upstart moment. Upstarts are challengers who punch above their weight and take on the status quo to improve the world, all while building a big business too.

[1:01](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=61) I'm your host, Alex Konrad, founder and editor of Upstarts Media. And I'm delighted to be joined today by Aidan Gomez, co-founder and CEO of Cohere. Thanks for joining, Aiden. Thank you for having me. This podcast is brought to you by Mercury, banking redesigned from the ground up. Aiden, you have run Cohere now for six and a half years. You guys have raised $1.7 billion. You work with some big governments, some big companies. When you think about sort of what Cohere looks like today, is it early innings? Is it everything you hoped for six years ago? I think we're in the takeoff phase. So we've been around for a while, but this past year was really the breakout year for us in terms of enterprises just adopting AI at scale across the entire company and the importance of all the things that Cohere is good at really sort of hitting the front of mind of executives at companies all over the world.

[1:54](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=114) So privacy, sovereignty, and this focus on critical industries. And so last year, all of that came together and we sort of started our takeoff. And then this year, we expect it to get even bigger as enterprises and the broader global economy really, truly adopts AI at scale. So with some of these big companies or G7 countries that are working with Cohere, what is the problem that they want you to solve? Or where is your technology actually helping them in sort of a simple overview? view. Yeah. Well, it's super broad because we're working with a really diverse range of customers from different industries, from like manufacturing to public sector to financial services, energy.

[2:38](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=158) And it's as simple as like, you know, get the model to every morning at 6am, check my unread emails and send me a text with a summary of like the most important one. that I need to know. So that's like a super general, you know, any company would want that to a hyper specific, you know, within a specific ship. I'm going to plug north into the telemetry within that ship, do continuous monitoring on different sensors on board and build automations around if sensors cross certain thresholds, what to do, who to notify, what sort of remediations. But I know it's a wide range of use cases, but generally speaking, why often do they need Cohere to exist?

[3:23](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=203) Like, why is that an unsolved problem for them? Yeah, I think it's the privacy piece. I think the secure deployment of this tech, of this platform, is something that our customers couldn't do without. It's something that is a hard requirement in their settings. They can't send data out into a cloud. They're highly regulated. They're in these high security settings. And so they need something that's deployed on-prem or even air-gapped on their infrastructure. There's a deployment-level differentiation, and the other piece is within the product itself. It's super easy to use. It's very customizable.

[4:00](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=240) There's tons of administrative enterprise controls that are unique to the North platform. So should we think of Cohere as sort of the base layer or this infrastructure layer that then the company is either building internal apps on top of or it's running these agents doing sort of all sorts of other work with sort of the info that your horsepower is providing? Or what would be the best way to sort of visualize this? Yeah, I think it's infrastructure for these high security enterprises to adopt agents and integrate it into their secure systems. That's what we do. At Cohere, obviously, we're internal customers of our own product, and many of the best automations have been created by or, like, discovered by folks who don't code.

[4:42](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=282) And they just, you know, as part of their day-to-day work, they're like, oh, I could totally use North for this. And they build an automation and they share it with people. And so that's what we want to be able to enable is, like, people just discover killer applications of the system, and then it goes viral within an organization and spreads out to all these different teams. and North really enables that. We are in a moment where we're being told you can Vibecode anything and there are some really successful companies that are helping people come up with an app out of an idea. Is the difference here that we couldn't really run a Bolt or a Lovable or one of these tools internally?

[5:20](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=320) in a sort of sensitive or secure environment with all our data? So using North is just sort of much more viable, or what would be sort of the distinction there? Yeah, I think the vibe coding stuff is very helpful for technical folks who want to get 90% of the way there, or even 95% of the way there. It can carry you quite far, but there's still a last mile that you need to close, and oftentimes you do need to be technical to close that last mile. And for North, you don't need to be technical to do that work. You have a sort of like builder view and you can just chat to the model and there's no need for you to be a developer yourself to do the work.

[6:07](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=367) So I think that's one thing.

[6:08](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=368) **Aidan Gomez:** The other thing is that for a lot of these applications, you don't need to create a product. You don't need to create a whole new piece of software to solve it.

[6:14](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=374) all you really need is it to have access to the right tools with the right authentication and then you need to be able to build a series of steps that you want it to accomplish and that's a much simpler problem and there's an easier way to solve that rather than for each one of these that I want to create I'm going to have to create an entirely new code base and program and ask an agent, coding agent to go build it for me so I think it's a more simple and elegant solution to the problem Very cool. There's an interesting question of are startups reflecting the personalities or sort of backgrounds, preferences of their founders, or is it vice versa? And I'm curious, is this the kind of business that you would have always imagined running or building?

[7:02](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=422) Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I definitely appreciate my own privacy as an individual, but I try to be open. I think for people to trust you, they have to know you. And so I talk about where I grew up, how I grew up, my family. So I try to be somewhat open, but I'm certainly not the type, I'm not a great marketing or sales guy. Like, I'm not out there screaming, you know, my own name or Cohere's name constantly. My background is, like, I'm an academic, right? Like, I came into this through research. And I think there's a very different type of personality that thrives in research than in company building.

[7:47](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=467) And I've been, you know, doing my best to adjust. to being a CEO and having to be spokesperson and a salesperson for the company. But you can't run from your nature, which is like, I'm a, you know, shy nerd. So that doesn't go anywhere. It's a very tall, it's tall, shy nerd. Yeah, got it. Well, so when you were in academia, you were privileged or you had earned your way to be at sort of the epicenter of some of the earliest work with LLMs, you know, the, this famous transformer paper, could you talk a little bit about how you first you know got into this field why it was exciting to you and sort of how the journey really starts there yeah I grew up in the middle of the woods in Canada without like any internet at some point we got like a satellite dish because before that it was a dial-up but this was like pre-starlink and so it was like these like geostationary like if there's a cloud because it has to be like super high up if there's a cloud you're you're screwed like goodbye internet and i think that scarcity from technology like it was just so hard to use my computer and like i couldn't watch youtube it was impossible i could like watch pixel load pixels load one by one on an image that scarcity made it um super appealing to me it was like just out of reach and like

[9:06](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=546) you know my friends were gaming online and like doing all this cool cool stuff and when i went home you know we had a computer in the house of course but it wasn't the the experience everyone else was getting so that made me deeply appreciate computers and be very excited about them invested in them I was always trying to make my computer faster at home or like let me access the things that other people were accessing through my my limited was it working were you hacking a faster computer i mean i mean it got me into like web dev and that type of i wanted to understand why this fucking web page wouldn't load faster and so you know i just inspect element blah blah but yeah that's what got me into coding like first it was just like going through websites and trying to understand all this text on my screen and then i took a course because i was interested in that then i started a little small business in my tiny little town of brighton Ontario building websites for the little businesses like there was a really nice lady who had a knitting store and you know yarn and patterns and stuff and so I helped her build like an online catalog for her customers and You know, she's been an incredible customer of mine, but I started that little business and then I just decided this is what I want to do.

[10:29](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=629) So I went into computer science at U of T. That was my local university, right? Like Toronto was the nearest big city and I just happened to go to university at like the epicenter of deep learning. Like Jeff Hinton was there, the guy who won the Nobel Prize and the Turing Award for his work creating deep learning, which is like the thing that worked. It was like the breakthrough system that let us reach where we are today. And were you immediately like, this is an area that I want to throw myself into or was it more grounded? I was obsessed. I, like, I just remember every waking minute of my day thinking about it.

[11:15](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=675) I would walk around with, like, a stack of papers. And initially, to read one paper in the field would take me, like, a month, actually. Because I would, like, be going through and I'd run into, like, a word that I don't understand. And then I would have to go start the process of, you know, researching what the hell is that? You know, like, what's Bayesian or, you know, what's a Gaussian? You didn't have LLMs to short cut for you. To ask, no, no. It's just Wikipedia pages and research papers. And then gradually I just got more and more familiar and comfortable with the material. And I went to a startup in Vancouver where I worked on, it's called polyphonic transcription, which is like listening to music and transcribing music into sheet music.

[12:01](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=721) So you listen to someone playing and you write down the notes that you're hearing. super difficult problem at the time but we used neural networks to approach it and and got some pretty good results and i had to this was before yes before jacks before tensorflow before pytorch

[12:19](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=739) **Aidan Gomez:** before any of these frameworks really existed and i had to write kernels in metal which was like apple's gpu language for forward and backward propagation so i just had to learn everything

[12:33](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=753) at like the lowest level imaginable you're like you know basically writing machine code not really but you know just super low level stupidly low level and then i came back to toronto and i messaged uh hinton and i was just like hey i have this idea this activation function that you've made i think there's a better one and he actually responded uh and then he sent me in the direction of uh roger gross uh and others inside the uft ml group and from there started doing work with them eventually ended up at google uh down here in mountain view and was on the transformer paper and the rest is kind of history Then I went off to Oxford.

[13:15](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=795) I met my co-founders when I came back from the Valley to Toronto, ran into Nick and Ivan. Nick was working for Jeff at Google. It was like Jeff's first report at Google. And then I went off to Oxford to do my PhD. And then from Oxford, I called up Nick and Ivan and just said, guys, we have to start something. I saw the first few results of language model scaling. and it was very much this zero to one, you know, we could barely get these models to string a sentence together to this was like plausible, fluent, ostensibly human-written text coming out of a machine. And now we take that for granted.

[13:58](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=838) It's so normal. It's like this is kind of not surprising. But back then it was like it was surreal reading a machine. I think people sort of take for granted the fact that like we're talking to some rocks and metal like we're literally talking to our pet rock at this stage which is it's so insane yeah it's normalized we do it all every day but good god like back then it was just mind-blowing and so like what else could you want to work on we talked about the transformer paper which was called attention is all you need i don't know what the best comp would be maybe the Magna Carta of AI research. Very seminal paper that you were a part of. For folks who are not deep in AI world, what would be the TLDR of what this paper was? Yeah, well, it was done when I was at Google. And in particular, it was done as a collaboration between Google Brain, which was like the AI research department under Jeff Dean and Google Translate. And the two teams came together and really the objective was to improve translation, improve the state of the art of translation. The architecture itself was designed to better and more scalably model language. And what I mean by that is You know, language is a sequence. It's a sequence of characters, it's a sequence of words, in order.

[15:24](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=924) The order matters, and you want to be able to model that or represent that data in the most efficient way possible. So the transformer was, that was the problem we were trying to solve. How do we just make this a more efficient model for language? Turns out, the transformer became extremely effective beyond language, and you can phrase many different data modalities, like video, etc. as a sequence. The fact that the model was so efficient made it a very good option as we were going through this process of scaling up models. And they're called large language models because they're really big. The transformers and architecture just scaled better than the alternatives because it was so efficient. And so as we went through this process of the field, building bigger and bigger models, training on larger and larger computing clusters, it was the best thing available and so people poured effort into optimizing chips for it and coming up with better uh you know libraries for training these models and then over time the transformer just kind of took over everything took over the domain of images took over the domain of audio it took over pretty much uh the whole field but it certainly was not designed for

[16:39](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=999) that it was just designed for this one narrow problem of like we want to make translation three percent better and now people are saying what's comes after the transformer now i've been hearing that for a long time now yeah i i don't know like i i've gotten so excited before i i thought um ssm state space models which was like this thing that came out three or four years ago i thought that was going to kill the transformer i get excited discreet would that be like killing your own baby if no no not at all no like if you're a researcher you really hope humanity comes up with something better than what you've created.

[17:15](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=1035) Otherwise, progress has ended. When you published the Transformer paper, the group of you, did you think this is going to be, like, we know this is going to be huge. We're all going to end up rock stars in this category. No. I mean, we're like the world's most niche celebrities. There's like 13 people that know us. But no, we didn't know the impact it was going to have. Or at least I didn't. I don't want to speak on behalf of all the Transformer paper authors, but we can't take credit for what happened with the Transformer. Like, we put it out there. Our effort was around improving translation performance.

[17:55](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=1075) That's the thing that we set out to solve and to come up with an architecture that was better suited to language and sequence modeling, and I think we did that. But then the community took it and applied it to everything, and they've taken it so far. They've optimized the hardware for this specific architecture. We sort of set the ball in motion, but the work has been done by thousands of others who have actually turned this into what it is today. We still call all these models Transformers. I think, I'm not trying to be like overly modest but if it wasn't us, something else would have come out that kind of looked and felt the same.

[18:34](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=1114) There were ideas along these lines with like WaveNet and ByteNet and all these different architectures that were emerging at the time. I'm so grateful that the community leaned in on the Transformer But someone else would have done it, you know, three months later. I do think that sounds kind of modest to me, but I respect it. I think it's true. I think it's true. Well, okay. Modest, but true. On your entrepreneurial journey. So it sounds like at Oxford, you're like, okay, we've got to build something here. Would you have kind of always had in the back of your mind, maybe I'm going to do a company or did it need to be the right moment, the right idea to feel excited to really go into company building?

[19:12](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=1152) so Ivan my co-founder he had been messaging me being like man like I you know I'm kind of done working where I'm working he's working at some other startup um I want to do a startup and I was in the middle of my PhD so I was like good luck you know but I was like dude I really don't want you like wasting like a company is such a huge commitment I don't want you wasting you know years of your time on some stupid idea let's come up with a cool idea together and so we were sending each other ideas back and forth um we had a bunch of ideas and then eventually there was this one which i think precipitated cohere and it was uh train a model of the web and we didn't know how that was going to be a business but we had seen these like internally google There were results on modeling Wikipedia with language models, produced incredibly compelling text.

[20:09](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=1209) GPT-2 came out. We saw the result of training on a much broader source of text.

[20:14](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=1214) **Aidan Gomez:** And so we just said, okay, what if we treat the entire internet, like all the pictures, the videos, etc. As a data set to train on, I bet you something interesting is going to fall out of that, and that eventually is sort of what led to Cohere.

[20:30](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=1230) We started to see these results like GPT-2, and it just gave us the conviction that there was some direction of travel here which was going to be pretty important. We went from a world where you couldn't speak to computers in natural language, and certainly they couldn't speak back to you in natural language, to one where that seemed like a plausible future. As a year-old startup, we experienced a lot of firsts at Upstarts Media. So when it was time to process our first international wire following a London event, I braced myself. This is going to be a painful lesson. Instead, Mercury made the process easy.

[21:06](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=1266) Issuing an invoice, sharing routing numbers, and processing the wire with just a couple clicks. No phone calls, no paperwork, no learning curve. We're still figuring plenty of stuff out. When it comes to our banking, Mercury's already got it all figured out for us. Visit mercury.com to learn more and apply online in minutes. Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column NA members FDIC. What was so exciting about the idea or the mission of Cohere that you were like, let's commit a lot of time and opportunity here? Because you predate and saw, for example, the team leave OpenAI and start Anthropic, and then all of a sudden Anthropic is growing super fast and sort of Cohere is continuing along the journey.

[21:54](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=1314) Why not just be like, we can do a better OpenAI ourselves, or let's go for sort of the most obvious piece of the pie here? Well, the attractive thing for us was the technical project. Like, that's what was the most exciting. we wanted to train this model of the internet that was really the the objective we we didn't initially know how we were going to monetize that quickly we did decide we want to be b2b like the impact that we want to have is driving this technology into the economy that was a very that was like within the first 12 months decision that we made and i still think that is like the most compelling application of this technology that is like the best impact we can have is by driving growth for the world and driving growth for the global economy.

[22:44](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=1364) If we can make people more efficient, that in itself is a good. A lot of the issues that I think are very prominent right now have sort of been stewing over the past like 15 years. I'm from Canada. I live in the UK. The same is true for Japan, Korea, much of Europe. There's been a sort of slowdown in growth for these developed democratic economies. when that happens when gdp per capita or like you know pick your metric when that starts to taper off and the pie isn't growing for everyone you start to see like zero-sum thinking start to dominate if the pie isn't growing then my slice isn't growing unless i'm taking it from someone else and vice versa i feel very threatened that someone else is eating into my slice of the pie so you see the emergence of things like xenophobia like that immigrant is taking my opportunity they're taking my my slice of the pie get them out i don't want them this is my pie you see things like you know territorial conquest war is back on the eastern front of europe and people are fighting for land for resources these traits they're not inevitable i think they come out of scarcity and people feeling they need to fight each other to get better off the big promise a lot of people talk about like ai destroying the world and there's all this like

[24:20](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=1460) **Aidan Gomez:** you know x risk ea fear it's important that we think about that but i really don't think ai is going to destroy the world it might be like our best shot at saving the world right like

[24:32](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=1472) restoring this hundred year arc of growth where billions of people their lifespans got longer They were healthier. They were living longer, better lives. Their education got better. Their access to medicine, to technology, their wealth, everything was just improving because the pie was growing. And we were all growing with that pie. But the past 15 years, as that started to stagnate, I think a lot of disturbing political trends have come back in. And so my hope is that by integrating AI into the economy, we can restore growth and carry forward this broader project of liberal democracy and these values that have lifted so many.

[25:20](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=1520) over the past 100 years. Would that help explain why Cohere has sought out or prioritized these sovereign customers so that other nations benefit or have their own sort of, you know, AI models, AI foundation they can trust that isn't dependent on one central place? Or is that more sort of incidental of where the tools, you know, flourish? Yeah, well, definitely over the past quarter century, sovereign capabilities in particular in technology have really declined outside the US and China. Like the US and China are still incredible strongholds of progress in technology. But where I'm from in Canada or where my parents are from in Europe, yeah, there just hasn't, there's been a gradual sort of, I don't know whether to describe it as like complacency or a hollowing out of the technological ambition and capability of the various nations, and a hollowing out of sovereignty.

[26:17](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=1577) We depend so much on a single source. We depend so much on one of a couple different places where we can buy things from, but we can't do it ourselves. And the reality is we can do it ourselves. We've just grown too comfortable. In part, founding Cohere in Toronto and keeping it a Canadian company. It's been an intentional choice to support this notion of resilience. And we're only going to have resilient democracies if more than one player can provide to the group capabilities. It doesn't mean we all need to do everything, right? We don't all need to build language models. That is, like, hyper-inefficient.

[27:00](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=1620) But we need a diverse supply chain. We need a diverse set of dependencies. so that it's not all concentrated in one place and that's something that you know i want to

[27:09](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=1629) **Aidan Gomez:** contribute to and i think is i actually think it's existential to democracy if you love democracy if you love people um having self-governance and having a say in in how they are they're governed

[27:24](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=1644) you can't have these single lines of dependency on any one country because if something happens to that democracy, suddenly everything breaks. The whole project falls apart. And so you need a decentralized, diversified set of contributors to each core technological pillar. operating at this infrastructure layer, these other countries or cultures can be building on top of it and feel more comfortable than if they were getting everything as an application from Silicon Valley? Exactly. Yeah. Like it's not just, you're not just reliant on one place. You have options and you can build resilience through interdependence with multiple different parties instead of just one. That's really what we've seen kind of hollow out is this notion of multiple parties inside this broad democratic coalition contributing. You know, there's been a lot of voiced frustration about that, like different parties not contributing enough and sort of just like riding off of the efforts and expenses of one party. And I think there's really a deep truth to that. And we need to step up to fix that. And I think Cohere is part of, on the AI file, at least, but across many files, right? Like on energy independence and manufacturing

[28:54](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=1734) and all these different fundamental parts of building a country. Those of us in liberal democracies need to contribute and step up and invest at the scale necessary to support developing these fundamental pillars of the economy. When you come to a place like San Francisco, where we are today, do you feel like an upstart or a contrarian by holding those views? Or do you feel like maybe more people have come around to see this? Or what is it like to share these principles with your peers in AI right now? I think some people see it. I don't think this is a particularly broadly held view i don't if you ask other people about these sorts of questions i don't know if they view it as actually that significant i think there's more ideology behind it or sort of political awareness than i think you know at least some very you know growth obsessed ai startups today really worry themselves with it seems like it's very intentionally intertwined with Cohere to be thinking about this, you know?

[30:02](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=1802) We're also, like, just uniquely positioned to be able to contribute to that notion of resilience, right? Like, being a Canadian company, like, we're one of a very small group that is building this capability outside. And so we're uniquely positioned to be able to deliver on that mission. I don't know if folks here are positioned to deliver on that mission. I don't think they are. 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?

[30:44](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=1844) 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 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.

[31:43](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=1903) 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. 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.

[32:21](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=1941) 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 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) **Aidan Gomez:** 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

[33:31](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=2011) 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 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

[34:50](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=2090) 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 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.

[35:36](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=2136) Yeah, I don't know what you mean. He appeared out of nowhere four years ago. No, no, he was just, he knew this was useful. like it's it's hard to describe but he knew that there was there was a need and he could have just done cpus and he could have just like folded and done rolled into like everything intel was doing and whoever the you know whatever the latest fad was and i'm sure he got told a million times this is irrelevant this is never actually going to take off it's niche it's niche it's not going of scale. Um, people don't need this, but you know, it's the biggest company in the world and, uh, well-deserved. Like no one has had as long a conviction and has like worked harder for this than Jensen has. And I think he deserves all the success he's gotten. And that sort of conviction to an ideal, that sort of conviction to his beliefs over decades is something I really, I really admire. How do you balance your own sort of, maybe idealism isn't the right word, but your values here and the vision of the world that seems to matter a lot to you with the sort of idea of letting these customers or these, you know, the sovereignty do things that maybe you wouldn't agree with. You know, we're in a moment where one of the big AI

[37:01](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=2221) labs has had a very public spat with the government about use of its tools. You are used by a bunch of governments? Is this something that you have to grapple with or that you feel really comfortable with? Kind of what becomes the true north for Cohere there? Yeah, it's super important. And this technology, it's going to be integrated everywhere. Every single industry, public sector, private sector, defense, civil, we just have to accept that it will be. The way we approach it at Cohere is we're fortunate in that because we work directly with our customers, we have a lot of opportunity to educate and engage with them so we're able to be a partner to them in thinking about where is it right to deploy this where's the technology ready to be deployed and what sort of safeguards need to be in place. And we try to build those into the

[37:55](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=2275) **Aidan Gomez:** model. We try to build those into North, the product around the model. Human oversight is a key component of it. The ability to say there's a certain category of activities or actions that we're never going to fully automate. We will always have a human in the loop for.

[38:11](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=2291) We ensure that within North that can be implemented in an extremely accurate and reliable way so that you know a human is involved in making that decision. And there are many, many ethical questions about how AI gets deployed into some of these more sensitive sectors. Of course, defense like you're referencing, but also healthcare and financial decisions. And all of these have meaningful consequences on people's lives. So we try to be very conscious of that and provide the tools to make effective decisions. And then we also choose who we work with, right? We can actually, from our position, make a decision of who we do business with and, in particular, which countries we engage with.

[38:54](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=2334) And with democracies, the fantastic thing is that it's a better way of governance. It tends to have much better checks and balances when someone does step out of line or when an agency does break the law. There's a reckoning with that. And then fixes are implemented. And the system self-repairs through those issues. And so we trust the democratic process to produce results that protect people and ultimately end up in the best possible policy environment to support the right sort of adoption of this technology. But of course, we do choose who we work with and what governments we engage with versus which ones we don't.

[39:40](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=2380) When you think about your overarching mission or sort of what winning or success would look like, is it measured by impact? Is it measured by the scale of how big Cohere grows? I don't know if a trillion dollar IPO is a goal for you as it seems to be for some of your peers, but is that something that you'd be happy to have incidentally? When you think where this ends up, what's on the vision board? Yeah, I don't care about the valuation of the IPO or I do care about IPO because I think people need to be able to, private citizens need to be able to take a stake in a company. I just think that's good. Like if we stay private forever and it's only like institutional investors.

[40:20](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=2420) have access to taking ownership of Cohere. That's a bad outcome. And the other good thing about

[40:25](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=2425) **Aidan Gomez:** IPOing is just the, you get additional scrutiny. People can see your finances, you know, you have to report them, you have no other choice, you're way more, you're better governed because you're under higher scrutiny. And so I think Cohere should IPO on the basis of those two things,

[40:45](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=2445) better governance, more scrutiny, and the fact that more people will get to participate. But I don't, like, obviously I want the valuation to be fair and high for my investors. For your investors, not for you, though. I don't know. I'm, like, rich enough already. It's okay. I don't know if it really matters that much anymore. But it matters to me the impact that Cohere has in the world and that we're able to support this broader mission of helping countries be more resilient. in particular helping democracies be more resilient no matter what comes so if we can contribute to that mission if we can help countries become more sovereign to have more autonomy to be able to feel like they're on more secure footing so that they can push back against bad behavior and make decisions that are right for the values that they believe in that's a success and I think we'll get paid along the way Awesome, well I hope that the impact you're having with these customers makes its way into the public eye more and more so maybe if it's not Cohere being the household name you know the products or the infrastructure run off of Cohere models is still having that huge impact as well. Yeah, well we sponsored

[42:01](https://realalpha.app/v/RZ9I_CsDaoo/?t=2521) an F1 team so Aston Martin. Was that just you could go to the race? That was so that I could go to the race. But our sticker is there. So people are going to be seeing it now. So maybe