Founders at Cohere
Cohere Commerce is the “Glassdoor for B2B retail,” using data to help buyers source verified vendors, optimize partnerships, and boost market credibility.
MIKE: I'm Mike, founder and CEO of Cohere Commerce. I started off as a chef and I got to cook at a Michelin two star place called Joel Robuchon. And then made a big career jump. Became the data scientist for Wynn and Encore casinos over in Vegas, where I oversaw betting strategies, gaming optimizations, handling very complex gambling data, and did that for a couple of years as well. And after that, jumping into the startup world. It really combines my skills and passion, retail food and data all in one thing.
LENA: I used to be an architect, specializing in commercial retail design and hospitality. I did a lot of branding for CPG companies, so always been really passionate about CPG.
MIKE: A few years ago, Lena and I, we bought a retail market. So essentially we became the buyers for our own store. Every week we get pitch from brands and from distributor, close to 200. When I'm trying to decide who to bring into our store to fill up the shelf, every brand that I look up online, they'll have five star reviews, great marketing, but how do I differentiate? Naturally as a data scientist, I wanted more data, so I started looking, but I couldn't find anywhere. And I noticed that there's this giant gap in the retail market that's lacking data. So that's how Cohere Commerce was born. Think of Cohere Commerce as the trust pilot for B2B commerce. It's the verified reviews and ratings platform for the retail industry. And it's designed to help professional buyers source verified vendors and then make smarter decisions.
LENA: We're not a curator. We don't select brands to be on our platform. It's a platform that's tracking every brand's performance. But we do have a lot of tactics to connect brands with the right retailers based on the type of store, values they care about and location and scale of the company. So we try to match brands at the right scale at the right time with retailers. We also ensure retailers when they have specific needs, they get the brand recommendations based on their store values.
LENA: We actually do a lot locally in LA. For example, there's this amazing store called Gjusta Grocer. They really care about the quality, the clean label of the products, and the founding story, and they support minority owned, female owned, that kind of products, always on top of the trends. So every month they come to us and see like, "hey, do you see any interesting products that we can bring and review?" We have this feature called vendor requests, all the retailers can share what they're looking for. And then we help them match all the products we've seen growing on the platform and they can select from them.
LENA: Smaller retailers like Gjusta that they care more about the value and the founder story. When it comes to big size retailer, they care more about your labels, compliance, do you have ingredients that stand from our website, what's the margin, who are you distributing with. They care more about your data. How are you able to grow your brand in the past two years? Who you've worked with? How do you prove your success?
MIKE: Some other things worth mentioning, your supply chain reliability and your innovation plans, like what's in your pipeline, your SKU optimizations. Larger retailers will be more data driven.
LENA: It has been really amazing to see how the larger retailers, they look at smaller retailers feedback on the platform and be really innovative. When you're an online brand, you don't really know which section you're going in a grocery store. But the smaller retailers will help you imagine how you're going to look like in a grocery store. For example, Fishwife. They started thinking about, Oh, I'm a tinned fish, I will be in the snack section or a condiment, but it turns out they do really well in gift section.
LENA: It was hard to define which one is the supply side, because you always need a lot of brands for retailers to review. And also you always need a lot of retailers feeding the platform to get the brand excited. So it was really interesting question, but what we did is tap into a lot of communities to make sure we have enough brands and retailers to start with. On the first day, we make sure both of the sides have at least 50 people to kick off. And maybe these three months we focus more on the brand side and then focus on the retailer side to make sure you're balanced.
MIKE: It's a balancing game. You monitor metrics on the back end and you adjust accordingly. As a founder, when you're building a company, you almost have a sixth sense. You feel that, Hey, which side is engaging more or where do I need to put more focus on. Right now our biggest focus is on retailers because we have a constant influx from brands and we have a pretty large pipeline.
MIKE: The US is one of the largest retail market in the world. Naturally, this is our core focus right now. But funny thing is we're getting Singapore, Japan, a lot of countries, their export agency has reached out to us wanting to tap into the US market. That could be a viable path is to help brands from, say Southeast Asia or Europe, get into the US. And then once we have a solid understanding of the US market, then we can talk about international expansion.
LENA: We don't have a lot of compliance issues because we don't sell the product. It's not a marketplace where transactions happen. It's more like a data and monitor platform. In terms of CBD, alcohol, we don't really have compliance issue as long as we're not selling.
MIKE: In fact, we actually help retailers to identify compliance issues from brands. So like their dosage or, if there are supply chain problem, so we help them identify that.
MIKE: Customer success from a platform standpoint. Standard engagements and retention metrics always good. And another thing that we do is that we actually go visit our brands and our retailers a lot. We would host events, bring everyone together, and then just ask them, what's your experience? Did you connect with any new retailers? Did they order? What was your experience like? And that gives you a first party data.
LENA: We do have this brand retailer and brand connection feature. We monitored the conversion rate, but also during the event, we asked, were you happy when you come back as a retailer, did the partnership work? And were you guided through the platform? Because there are a bunch of reviews and you can also see how the competitors are doing, what retailers that usually complain about. So did it guide you to build a more successful partnership? And the answer is definitely yes. I've always heard a lot of positive feedbacks from the users and that makes us really excited.
MIKE: So, food and beverage, this is a category that we personally started with and we know that category very well. And then another thing is, you want it to focus on a category that can produce lots of data and the high velocity sales. So fast moving consumer goods, FMCG, that's a great category to focus on. We generate hundreds of data points a month, and build a foundation of the platform. But other categories, we're actually expanding beyond just food and beverage.
LENA: One of the biggest initial challenge is communicating the value of retailer reviews. Because Trustpilot, Yelp, they all collecting consumer reviews; however, B2B reviews, especially from retailers, they target a different purpose. It's not about product quality. It's also about the partners reliability and supplier performance and market performance. And also the whole category's competition landscape. These insights you cannot really get from a consumerized feedback. That was taking some time to educate our audience and communicating the values. But I think it's a really fun challenge because it also helps ourselves to understand, why we're building this.
LENA: We were reading the retailer's reviews every day. And every day is super exciting because these retailers have a lot of insights. For one, there's this guy that deals with a lot of beverages and there was one brand called Leisure and they weren't really selling at the beginning. A lot of customers were complaining there's the aftertaste. But the beverage buyer, he oversaw a lot of drinks and he just noticed in the ingredient, okay, if you tweak it a little bit, the bitter aftertaste will go away and it still serves the same function. That helps the brand to relaunch and being really successful.
LENA: We met back in the days when Mike was still cooking. I was an architect on Moonlight as a food critic. I was hired to go into different restaurants and share my experience. And one day they were about to spotlight some up and coming Asian young chefs. And I was looking online and found Mike's Instagram and I was so inspired by his creative food. I invited him for an interview and to talk about his story. And then we started to talk about these startup ideas that he had. And he was like, I feel like I need a co-founder to help me execute. And I sort of pitched myself. I was a natural executor 'cause I do a lot of projects. I make sure things are done on time and I make sure people are assigned with the right tasks. So we just got started.
MIKE: One of our first ever project was actually a teapot, believe it or not. It was very strange. I had sketches because I drink a lot of tea, I love drinking tea. And then one of the problem I had is that with teapot design, it never changes and it always had to pour at a very hard angles and I hated that. So I re engineered teapot. It's like an upright. We designed proprietary strainer that you rotate and then you clean up in one second. So that's our first ever projects together.
MIKE: Probably. But it'll be hard. Why beat the odds? Find someone that you can find a support and complement your skill sets. It probably will be better. I don't know if I can do this alone, just from my personal experience. I needed someone with complementary skills, personality, or even work style so that we can be in synergy and the team work better.
LENA: Building a startup is really lonely. A lot of times I just need a person to talk about my stress and to hear about your feedback, sometimes I just don't want to make a decision alone. It's incredible to have a co founder as not just for skillset, but also for mental health.
MIKE: I think in my frameworks, mental models, so I know my strengths and weakness. When it comes to finding a co founder, I deliberately looking for someone that's really good at execution. She was able to take the buildings from your blueprint all the way to a real life building. That's a bad ass kind of skill sets. And I have the vision, I can think ahead of time. I'm very good at strategies, planning. And I think that really complements our skill in terms of personality. I'm an introvert, I need my space, whereas Lena, she's very outgoing, so we also complement each other on that as well.
LENA: I'm more like an execution person, I actually founded my own company back in school, I was selling records online. When we first met to talk about the teapot, the first day he gave me a sketch and drawing, the second day I showed him the model, how things will work together, the details, the connections. I draft plans about, how do we go for production? What needs to be achieved before production and what kind of pros and cons for this design. When we meet, I always like to have an agenda and say like, okay, you're going to go do this and I'm going to go do that. So I'm that type of person. But I'm lack of a lot of mission and planning that's why a lot of the business I started got really popular at the beginning, but it fails at the end. So we're really good balance here.
LENA: Do have a lot of conflicts, but when that comes, we will internally have a framework to guide us, think about a concept or idea. For example, we always go back to evaluate the concept ourselves, ask ourself questions. How hard it is to achieve? Is that gonna bring company revenue? Is that gonna require more manpower? And how long does it gonna implement? So once we ask ourself all those questions, we actually can come to an agreement.
MIKE: When it comes to an impasse, we have different opinions. What I usually do is I will put up data research or have a plan, how we actually figure this out or even test it out, but then we limit our resource and amount that we've done this. If we can get it working, great, let's go this route. If not, let's wrap it up later.
LENA: We're really open for each other's ideas, but we have internal evaluation metrics. I give you two weeks to prove yourself. If you cannot, if you fail, then I'm sorry. Same here. I have an idea. If I cannot prove myself, then let's move on.
MIKE: I didn't know I was going to become a startup founder. I wanted to challenge myself, because I was 20 something when I got to cook at Michelin two star and the scary thing I felt was that at that moment, I feel like I can see my next 30 years. I'm going to go from two star to a three star, keep growing up the brigades and then become an executive chef or eventually when I'm 50, I'm going to open up my own restaurant. It felt too predictable and that kind of scared me. So I wanted the big change and that data really fascinates me. I'm a self taught data scientist. When I joined the Wynn, believe it or not, I was their front desk. Every day after my shift, I'm learning data science, everything from ground up, coding, statistics, finance, and then casino math, everything took me a month and then a lot of sleepless nights. I always joke that one day to start an accelerator, the first week I'm going to send all the founders to work in a kitchen because you learn tons of skills. I mean, think about it. You're at a kitchen. When I send a dish out, once it's out of the kitchen, it's sitting on your table for guests. You better be freaking good, right? Quality, consistency always had to be on point. So you have to plan ahead. What if we get a large enough orders? How do I scale up? A lot of things I pick up back in the kitchen day.
LENA: We chose Techstars, especially LA, because of its huge retail network. It aligns perfectly with our background and the business we're doing. It provides us with a lot of access to mentors, investors. We have been really huge advocates about Techstars since we graduated. We learned a lot. When we look back, how our pitch deck looked before Techstars and after Techstars, it's totally different.
MIKE: It really trained us to work better with weekly OKR plannings and then how to build a better team. Very technical.
LENA: And besides those trainings, Techstars more focused on community. How you deal with your relationship with your co founder and your employees. How do you be around a community that's supportive for other accelerators? That's why we chose Techstars, but also depends on what kind of product you're building. If you're building developer tools, then YC is the go to for sure.
MIKE: Fundraising, it's a big distraction. I got to plan ahead to be very efficient with my time and my resources. We try to cram all the meetings into a few weeks and I knocked them all out and ask the investor very directly. Can I get your commitments? You want to do that very quickly and then to save everyone's time. Don't be afraid to turn down investor. You found them. They're not fit. We actually did turn down investors and VCs as well. You want someone that you can depend on in the rough times, when the company's not working well.
MIKE: I used to work in hospitality. I get a No every day. People are going to say no, I expect that. I didn't expect people to say yes. That's how I go into it. So there's no problem. It's a business end of day. They want to make money. I want to make money. Let's talk about it. How we can all work together to make more money. Don't take that personally. Just move on to the next one.
MIKE: There are a lot of founders that can raise simply on ideas. I don't consider myself that kind of founders, but I'm very transparent and practical. So I only went out to raise when I feel that we have momentum, growth, almost like there's pull from users that you're going to need more cash or expertise or network to accelerate that growth. That's how we decided that we needed to raise. A lot of people forget or overlook, startup is a business. You gotta have revenue. We treat this current startup as another business. I wanted to make sure that it's generating money. We have the right plans to generate enough money in the future. And only when you can do that, you should go out to raise. I think of them as in user revenue and product growth. That's how I like to demonstrate to investors to show momentum. It means that you're showing your growth, your historical, how fast that's been growing, and then, what's your potential? Who are the customer you have in your timelines and your roadmap. What are you going to build? How do you plan to roll it out to other markets, tackle on more expansion and so on and so on. Once you've figured that all of this out, you can go raise.
LENA: Get a lead investor. That's when you tell people you're starting the raise. Then before you get your lead, don't tell people you started.
LENA: I will be honest, startup is really tough. Even like we say we have momentum, we have tractions, but day to day, there's a lot of struggles. So make sure you're obsessed. You're going to marry it five years and there's constant fight with that problem with your company that you're building for the next five to 10 years. You want to make sure you're committed to do that. If you don't feel comfortable, just join a company, join another series A or B company.
MIKE: This is our second tech startup. The biggest thing that we learned is to focus on distribution. Make sure that these are all users within your ICPs and that you can tap into and you constantly iterate with them. We built six different MVP for Cohere Commerce before we landed on this kind of scalable ideas. Be very scrappy, be very lean and then learn to use noble resources.
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