If you have followed the news in any capacity over the last few years, you have undoubtedly heard about LLMs, and the companies building these models. Though the consumer-facing models from companies such as Open AI have captured the hearts and minds of the public, enterprises have different concerns–things such as data privacy, and model reliability.

Enter Cohere, a company developing LLMs to address these issues. Started in 2019, Cohere partners with companies such as McKinsey, Oracle, and all the hyperscalers, and boasts a valuation of $5.5 billion. I sat down with one of the co-founders, Ivan Zhang, to talk about his journey.

TLDR; Key Takeaways

If you only have a few minutes, here are a few golden nuggets from my conversation with Ivan:

• Sales should be customer-centric. This seems obvious, but have you ever started a sales conversation by talking about your product? Instead, try starting the conversation by asking your customer about their pain points, and then addressing them.
• Data will be a bottleneck for AI development. Not in the sense that we will run out of internet to train on, but rather that there are types of data which we don’t have a lot of published datasets for. 
• Your startup doesn’t have to be in the Bay to succeed. Cohere is headquartered in Toronto. This works for them because VCs are more open to remote work after the pandemic and Toronto has a lot of budding technical talent.
• A key signal to look for when hiring is mastery in any domain. Learning how to master something is fairly transferable. Masters in one domain can likely become masters in another.
• Being the lone Asian in a leadership room takes some time to adjust to. Getting more reps in has helped Ivan get used to his position.

Tell me about your upbringing, what pushed you to become a hacker?

I was born in Shenzhen, China, and moved to Toronto when I was eight. As a kid, I was always on the computer, even in China, playing the most random arcade games. I don’t want to paint Asians with a broad stroke, but if you’re a male Asian person who has been to high school in the past decade, more likely than not, you’ve played a ton of video games. I did that a lot, and I feel like it built a digital tolerance and stamina for sitting in front of a screen for long hours. Gaming was a big part of why I’m so drawn to building things, working really hard, and doing crazy hours in front of a screen. 

When I got to university, I discovered the hackathon community. Every weekend, we would just meet up at random Ontario universities and sometimes U.S. universities. We would build for the whole weekend. Gaming addiction primed me to get really good at software engineering. I spent my entire first year going to hackathons, building stuff on the side. I had this realization that I could be spending 18 hours playing League of Legends, or I could use the same energy to build stuff, which is also very fun and not as frustrating as a solo queue. It felt like a natural progression.

How has your role within Cohere changed as the company has grown?

When you’re in a startup, your role tends to evolve a lot. That’s been especially true for my time at Cohere. When we started, I was hands-on coding every day, building some of our early systems and pipelines. Eventually, the company grew, and we hired people. Some of our founders had to step up and do some people management.

Eventually, we hired people managers as well, so I have to do less of that. Nowadays, I’m much more settled. I’d say I spend probably 50% of my time still doing technical stuff like machine learning and data processing. For the other 50%, I spend time with customers, either building new relationships, fostering existing ones, or really bringing in business. I think that’s a big part of a founder’s job, like founder-led sales.

How was the transition to doing sales? Did that come naturally to you?

As someone who spent most of my time as the most backend of backend developers, it was definitely uncomfortable at first. When you think about sales, you might think of a business guy with a suit trying to convince someone to give you money for stuff. But when I started doing it more and more, it ended up being about genuinely trying to learn more about your customers, asking them good questions, and figuring out what issues they have. It’s honestly the most important thing you could do. Why are you building anything if you don’t know what your customers want? 

Sales has been super fun because it informs my technical work. I’m starting to see patterns across these conversations, which help inform what we should focus on. Another aspect is that as a founder, when you’re doing sales, you’re meeting executives and other founders as well–so you’re building good professional relationships. For anyone who’s new to it, you should expect some discomfort. But, like anything, you just learn to do it.

Why did you guys decide to focus on enterprise?

The enterprise market is often seen as boring, but actually, most of the world’s efficiency will come from automating a lot of these back-end use cases that don’t necessarily need human potential. A lot of these tasks we’re automating don’t need a well-educated human being sitting at a computer for eight hours a day. We’re much more interested in unlocking that human time for something else. Enterprise is where a lot of this kind of work is done. For example, Oracle is one of our customers, and they’ve deployed our models into their NetSuite features. So, a ton of HR and ERP use cases are now powered by our models. Our mission is scaling intelligence to serve humanity, and what better way to do it than to target the people doing this kind of back-end work at scale? 

We also liked the idea of not having to suck up all of our customers’ data to train these models. In enterprise, we actually ship our models on-prem and we air gap them, so we don’t see any of our customers’ data. In those kinds of scenarios, we have to build our models slightly differently. We have to teach our models to use the enterprise’s internal knowledge bases, use the information returned from these knowledge bases, and then write an answer and cite it. This is all RAG (retrieval augmented generation), which is what we’re focused on because we deploy these models in this air-gapped environment where we can’t continuously suck up people’s usage data. We still have an API and a demo, but the majority of our deployments are on-premise.

What are some areas of AI, whether infrastructure or application, that you think more people should be building in?

I think there will be a bottleneck in terms of training data, but not in the way it’s currently been communicated to the public. Some people paint a picture that we’ll run out of the internet to scrape. I think that’s a naive understanding of how these models work and how to train them. In terms of capturing digital signals—thoughts, demonstrations, audio, video, images, sensory data—there’s going to be a big bottleneck in capturing data from the world that’s not already represented on the internet. The internet does a good job of capturing data and it grows exponentially every year, but there’s information about the world that we experience on a daily basis.

Do you mean information that isn’t easily digitally representable, such as smell?

Yeah, so smell for example–we’d have to build this hypersensitive chemical detector. So if we want autonomous interactive robots in the real world that can smell, there is an information problem we have to solve for the robots, right? They don’t have a nose; we don’t have a great digital nose for them. And I’m sure there’s other stuff.

Why have you decided to keep Cohere headquartered in Toronto instead of the Bay Area?

The three of us co-founders just really like living in Toronto. We grew up here, we have roots here. We also realized that it is actually a pretty great city for A.I. At some point in time, most of the people leading A.I. in the Valley came from Toronto. They came from Jeff Hinton’s lab at the University of Toronto. So there’s a ton of great early talent here. And I think because of how the VC attitude has shifted since the pandemic, investors are investing everywhere. They aren’t restricting investments to the Valley. Remote work is a thing now. And so luckily for us, we’ve been able to raise successfully. We’ve been able to build good models. 

I’ve heard that you don’t pursue brand-name resumes when hiring. What are some signals that you look at instead of pedigree that indicate someone could be a great hire?

I’ve thought about this a lot. I try to think about my own trajectory and places that have rejected me and what signals they didn’t see. What it comes down to is that I look for folks who are extremely skilled at something. Once you’re skilled at something, you can take that anywhere else. Sometimes we want to hire more experienced folks, for sure. But especially in a field like ours where disciplines such as pre-training haven’t been around long enough for anyone to have much experience, you want high-energy, high-autonomy individuals who are excited to learn, experiment, and fail fast.

I try to ask a few questions that probe at stuff related to this. Like, “What’s the coolest thing you’ve worked on?” Then I get to see if they’re going into a lot of detail and are really excited about this random thing. “What’s the hardest you’ve worked on anything?” I want to see if they can go the equivalent of 16 hours a day, seven days a week when they’ve actually gone to bat for something. And then obviously, experience in the field is definitely a big plus, but honestly, the best hires we’ve made have just been high-energy, hardworking, genuinely curious people who are also skilled at software engineering.

How has being Asian impacted your founder’s journey?

I’m not ignorant of it. I definitely know it’s a thing. For example, on my board, I’m the only Asian guy on it. But I’ve been fortunate in that, growing up in Toronto and starting this company in Toronto, it’s not that weird to be an Asian guy in tech. So on the technical front, I don’t see it as a hindrance whatsoever. But it’s definitely been a factor for my own comfort in leadership situations–being the only person that looks like me in certain situations. But honestly, once I got the reps in, being in those situations, it was totally fine. And I think there are a few things that, depending on how you were raised, could affect you in doing business at the leadership level here. But generally, once you get the reps in, it doesn’t even matter.

Is there anything you’d like to shout out?

I’d like to shoutout my wife, she’s a big inspiration for me. Shoutouts to my mom, my dad, my sister. I think my parents taught me what it means to work really hard. I think this is true for many of us immigrants, watching our parents and grandparents work the most menial labor jobs just so we can be fed and go to school. It’s super inspiring. It makes me think: Why am I not working harder? Why am I not thinking about how I can level up and help them retire? My family has been a big inspiration to me. Lastly, shoutouts to Cohere and my co-founders. It’s been super fun, and I’m privileged to be working on this tech. I think it’s genuinely the most interesting thing I could be doing right now.

If you are high-energy, hardworking, and highly curious about AI, please consider applying to work with Ivan at Cohere! You can check out available positions at this link.

Thank you for joining us, Ivan!

Wendy Wen, founder and CEO of pet CPG platform Antelope and co-founder of luxury handbag brand Senreve, shares insights on the early days of building the Senreve brand with her co-founder Coral Chung, creating their first iconic Maestra bag, and overcoming the challenges of scaling a startup. She reflects on the importance of focusing on vision, strategy, and hiring the right people, as well as maintaining resilience and equanimity as a CEO. Wendy also discusses her new venture, Antelope, her excitement for its potential, and the lessons learned from her Asian upbringing and entrepreneurial journey.

HanYue: Tell us a little bit about the early days of Senreve. And then what was the biggest challenge you had to overcome?

Wendy: You know, it was really just me and my co-founder Coral sitting across from each other in an empty conference room. We were borrowing an office space from one of our investors. And a lot of it was just kind of dreaming: thinking about what the brand could be. It was actually really, really fun. And I think because it’s before you have any metrics, any real product, anything. So anything is possible. In the early days of us, we were literally just trying to figure out what’s going to be our value proposition, positioning, and how we’re gonna get started. It was super fun. 

HanYue: That sounds fun. Tell us about your first “IT” bag, as you call it.

Wendy: Our first bag was the Maestra bag, which is a convertible bag that becomes a backpack. You can wear it in different ways: you can hold it over your hand on the handle, you can wear it as a crossbody, you can wear it as a shoulder bag, and then you can also wear it as a backpack. It fits a laptop, it’s water resistant, and it’s 100% made in Italy. It has all these nice compartments on the inside, so you can keep everything organized. It’s a beautiful bag that happens to be really functional, especially for the modern working woman who needs to carry a laptop. 

HanYue: Tell us a little bit about how you and your team created this popular bag.

Wendy: So I loved bags. Coral loved fashion. Personally, we just wanted something that was really beautiful and also worked with my busy professional life. So it kind of stemmed from a personal need. 

HanYue: Wow, that is amazing to hear. You really found a way to personally connect with the product that you’re building. Let’s switch gears a little bit, to what you’re currently building. Do you feel better prepared for a second go at entrepreneurship?

Wendy: Absolutely. Yes. There are always ups and downs in any startup journey, and I think I made a lot of mistakes with Senreve. 

I think, first of all, I didn’t necessarily focus on the important things. I was always kind of doing urgent things. Graham Weaver (a lecturer at GSB and founder of Alpine Investors) talks a lot about that matrix of important, not important, urgent, not urgent. As a founder, you really want to be operating in the non-urgent, important bucket. 

An example of what I didn’t focus on enough before would be our hiring culture. Instead, I was focusing on getting things done, which in retrospect, might not have been the best use of my time. For Antelope, I’m much more disciplined about how I spend my time. I really believe that the founder and CEO job should just be vision and strategy. Setting that vision, getting alignment across your team on that vision, helping your team truly understand how their work and their outcomes tie up to the grand vision, and what the dream outcome needs to look like. That’s one big rock for me. 

Another one is just hiring the right people. The people who are going to be better than you, at each division, at each function. Hire the best people who will help you dream up something better than what you can dream of, and then make it into a reality. So now I am always pushing for the dream candidate. After that, it’s about developing them, keeping them motivated, and building the culture so that they can thrive.

When I was at Senreve, I was younger, more junior, and much more just about blocking and tackling and getting things done. Now I try to think more about scalability. I think the third piece that I’ve learned, and just gotten a lot better over the years, is just being resilient. 

Part of being an entrepreneur and a CEO is maintaining a certain equanimity in the face of problems. I have to maintain an objective distance from the company. Because if you hold on to it too tightly, and it becomes life or death, then every problem can catch you off guard. Versus, if there’s a natural kind of distance, then you have space to treat everything as just a small problem or puzzle that you have to fix.

It makes you as a CEO think a lot more clearly, and a lot more strategically. Because at these higher levels, your main job is making decisions. It’s not fixing the problem. It’s about finding the right architecture, the right people, the right processes, and structures so that your team can fix the problem. And so having that equanimity as a muscle, to deal with the ups and downs, is a really important part of my job as CEO. 

HanYue: That’s really powerful. I love your learning about equanimity. Looking forward, what is your biggest challenge right now you want to solve?

Wendy: Our biggest challenge right now is to hire a chief supply chain officer. I have a big gap in operations and supply chain. So if anybody is really good at that kind of stuff, come to me! ¹

I am also learning along the way, from 10 different colors to now 500 SKUs of pet treats, supplements, food, and dental treats with expiration dates. You have to get your planning and forecast super accurate. Every piece of the logistics needs to be precise and accurate in order to meet your demand. And it also has to be efficient from a cost perspective. We really need a C-level executive who has enough experience and lots of great attributes, so she/he can continue to learn and grow with us.

HanYue: Amazing. We hope someone in our subscriber base has this special talent! What are you most excited about next? 

Wendy: So many things excite me! I think Antelope is the next P&G/Honest Company of pet products. And we’re just getting started. And there’s just so much low-hanging fruit opportunity that we haven’t yet tapped. Every channel we are in can be grown by 10x. And I think that’s super, super, super exciting. It’s exciting to continue to educate pet parents. So many pet parents are not aware of the preservatives in their existing dog food, what the right content and makeup should be in their food, and what supplements they can give their dog to prevent cancer, arthritis, and joint pain. So I am super excited by this potential. 

HanYue: I think that there’s really nothing that compares to the potential as an early-stage founder. You can see this big dream just slowly unfolding in front of you. A lot of our new founders will be fundraising and thinking about working with their investors. I know you work very closely with Graham and Alpine Investors. Would love to hear a bit more about that partnership, and your advice on finding great mentors. 

Wendy: The relationship I have with Alpine and Graham has been just 20 out of 10 if I had to give it an NPS score. It’s beyond my wildest expectations what great partners they are. They provide the right level of support, but then they’re really hands-off. They’re empowering and trusting. And oftentimes, honestly, I think about how Alpine is treating and managing me, and how I should train and manage my executives and my direct reports, because they’re a really unique private equity fund that truly, truly has a heart of gold and focuses on people first. 

In terms of advice for how students can go out and build mentorship, and relationships with professors and people in their career. It’s simple –  just talk to them. Don’t be afraid to reach out. Make sure you follow up. That’s what I did to fundraise for Senreve. And those relationships have followed me through to Antelope.

I met Graham, in an MGE (Managing Growing Enterprise) class when he was practicing to become a lecturer at GSB. He was shadowing Dave Dodson back then. And I just had a conversation with him about what I wanted to do after school. That’s the most common question he gets nowadays, right? The students always go to a professor at Stanford and ask, what should I do with my life? Should I go back to private equity? Should I do this? And I remember, I think he actually offered me a job at Alpine as a CIT (CEO in Training), but I just didn’t want to move anywhere location-wise. So I politely declined.

Graham told the story about the genie goal in his class: if you have three wishes from the genie, what would your goals be? So when I was getting started with Senreve, I called him and I said, I think I’m gonna go pursue my genie goal – to cofound this handbag company. And he angel invested. It was really nice that he was willing to do that, and I think it came from the fact that I just asked and I had that prior relationship with him and reached out. 

After Senreve, when I was starting Antelope, I reached out again. So I think it’s just making sure you keep in touch with your professors. I remember going through every single person that I might have interacted with at the GSB. I was co-president of WIM (women in management), and I organized a ton of these speaker events. So I would email every one of the speakers I’d come into contact with. Many of them became mentors and some knew people in the handbag industry that could help. I was shocked that some of them remembered me. Most students don’t realize that all they need to do is a little bit of legwork and follow-up. Every time you go to a networking event, follow up. Even after a few months, send them an email, updating them on where you’re at. That’s how you build a relationship. It’s really not that hard. 

HanYue: That is really inspiring and empowering. The notion that a really good mentor relationship is just a few emails away is so powerful. 

Wendy: Definitely. Diane Von Furstenberg came to Stanford to speak once. After that, I was like, you know what, I’m just going to send her an email. And I said, “Hey, I loved your talk. I read your book, now I’m starting a handbag company. Would you mind talking to me?” And she replied, the same day, and said: “Here’s my number. Call me tomorrow at 9 am.” And that’s Diane Von Furstenberg. I think students overestimate how often these people get reached out to. I think you are probably thinking that – oh they get so many emails and pings. But the reality is that they probably don’t get that many. 

HanYue: Amazing. I want to switch gears a little bit again. If you don’t mind, we’d love to hear a little bit about your upbringing. How has being Asian impacted your entrepreneurship journey or maybe just the mentality of life? 

Wendy: I am Chinese, I grew up in Southern California to immigrant parents, who wanted me to be a doctor just like every other Chinese family. I remember doing like my freshman year summer internship in medicine and just being so bored. I was stuck in a lab all day. I think I was too extroverted to follow that path. I’m really dynamic. I love meeting people. I love talking, I love pitching. I get a high from pitching – probably why I enjoy entrepreneurship. And something just clicked. I realized that that medicine path wasn’t for me.

I think what my Asian upbringing helped with though was, that my parents were really good about rewarding effort and not outcomes. They always told me, “Hey, Wendy, it’s not about the grade that you get, if you get an A-minus, but you didn’t try, we will be disappointed in you. But if you got a B plus, and you tried your absolute best, we will be extremely proud of you.” They just wanted me to maximize my potential. And I think that notion really propelled me to just give it all to everything I do. If I’m going to put my mind to doing something, I want to knock it out of the park and do it really well. 

In terms of pursuing entrepreneurship, though, that is really not in my parents’ DNA, I think what happened is that they provided me with so many opportunities, by coming to the US and allowing me to have this American education, so that I just got so inspired and absorbed all these American thoughts. And I’m very American, obviously. But I still had the work ethic from my Asian upbringing. That, coupled with such family support, gave me the confidence to pursue what I really, really want to do, which is building companies. 

Mark Leslie, he’s another one of my angel investors and mentors, said, there are only three reasons why people want to start a company: one, it’s to make a lot of money. Two is to make a difference in the world. And then three is to build something of lasting value. He said usually people fall within one of these three camps. And I think for me, it’s definitely the last one like I just love building things. I love building culture. I love building a team, and I like building products. 

I also think being bilingual helped us expand into other regions for Senreve. We were in Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong. I think having multicultural blood and experiences in me, makes me more adaptable and flexible, and more resilient, potentially, because I know how to learn about a different culture. You know how to build a life somewhere else. That’s the entrepreneurial spirit. 

HanYue: So to sum it up, it’s like that notion of ‘give it your best’ that coupled with a little bit of risk-taking that allowed you to find out what you want to do and really go for it. On top of that, being open-minded and flexible when it comes to like, new obstacles, different experiences, and new regions. Those are amazing takeaways. You have accomplished a lot already. Do you have a few favorite moments from the past or favorite stories that you want to share?

Wendy: There was a time at my last company retreat for Antelope when I celebrated my birthday and the team surprised me with a birthday cake, a sash, and a crown. All 80 of our employees celebrated my birthday with me. And I thought that was really special. Because our team is so talented, they’re so smart. And for them to choose to contribute their talent, to Antelope’s vision – I take it very personally, I take it as a favor they’re doing for me. Seeing everybody in that room, working towards this Antelope vision was so inspiring. Running this company is the best job I could have asked for. 

HanYue: That is really heartwarming. You really build a great team and a great culture. And then you got to observe it taking on a life of its own! 

Wendy: Yeah, it did take on its own form. That’s the thing. I think seeing the moments when Antelope is taking on its own life just makes me so joyful. Our social media team is amazing. Last year, I remember seeing an Instagram post pop up on Bocce’s Bakery, which is one of our brands. The post was like PupChella – it was a play on Coachella. And they had a lineup of all these artists that were like, dog-named. Like Bark Pink, and Tailvin Harris. It was so cute. It was so funny. And I was so proud of my team. This team is so creative. And I was so proud to see their creativity come to life. 

HanYue: Wow. That sounds phenomenal. I think that is actually all my questions. Thank you so much. Wendy! 

Wendy Wen’s journey from Senreve to Antelope exemplifies the power of vision, resilience, and strategic focus in entrepreneurship. Her insights offer valuable lessons for aspiring founders on building successful and impactful companies.

1. Since the time of this interview, Antelope was able to hire a great Chief Supply Chain Officer. ↩︎