Some people call me an entrepreneur or a visionary. I usually just say founder. But even that does not feel quite right anymore.
After sixteen years of Cohere, what I think I have actually been is a witness. I have watched people come in looking for a place to work and end up living huge parts of their lives out loud here. I have seen triumphs and defeats. Tears and laughter. So much laughter.
I have watched people grow into themselves and fall apart and put themselves back together again. I have watched them take risks, change careers, start businesses, get promotions, get married, get divorced, have babies, get sick, lose people they love, and keep going when I do not know how they did.
When you stay with a thing this long, you stop feeling like a person who simply built a business. You become someone who has stood at the edge of a thousand human moments and been trusted enough not to look away. That is what this has felt like to me. Not like building a company in the usual sense, but like staying present long enough to see what people carry, what breaks them, what heals them, and who they become on the other side.
We have been touched by suicide, chronic illness, and death. We have also been touched by joy in ways that feel almost unreasonable. New love. Deep friendship. Belly laughter across lunch tables. Relief. Reinvention. The strange miracle of watching someone become more themselves over time because they had somewhere safe enough to do it.
I imagine this is a little bit what a pastor might feel, though I do not have any real affinity for religion. I do not mean that in a lofty way. I just mean there is something deeply human about staying with people through enough seasons that you cannot help but be changed by what you have seen. There is something sacred in witnessing a life without trying to control it.
So yes, I founded Cohere. But the longer I do this, the less I think my role was to build something impressive and the more I think my role was simply to stay. To keep the doors open long enough for people to live parts of their lives here. To witness what was joyful and what was brutal. To hold a place while people changed. Sixteen years in, that feels like the truest thing I can say about it.
Love, Angel