Every major change starts with a great insight and this was mine: there's a significant gap in how we engage and retain employees.

In 2022, I branched out from On Deck to form Coho. Originally, I continued with a fellowship/community approach where professionals could connect meaningfully. However, the challenges of last year made me reevaluate the business deeply. 2023 was a shitshow.

The "aha" moment came when I saw the power of our peer groups during this tough period, leading me to focus intensely on this aspect. Feedback from peer group participants—including designers, engineers, and data scientists from companies like Google, Netflix, Airbnb and Amazon—validated the approach, confirming its effectiveness.

This prompted me to dig into understanding how learning and connection happen in companies and other communities. Through extensive conversations and feedback, I learned that while many organisations tried to create peer groups, their efforts were often makeshift and largely unsuccessful. And very very expensive.

I discovered we had a unique edge: the manual process of curating groups of six peers was effective and demonstrated significant results.

Data confirms the need for a better way to bring professionals together: 97 million workers in the US are lonely, with 81% of Gen-Z employees and 69% of millennials reporting loneliness at work.

But 55% of employees want a better way to access their peers for advice.

Building Coho V1 became essential not just for the market, but crucially, for myself first. Managing peer groups for over 850 community members manually, highlighted the complexity and solidified a need for a scalable solution.

Encouraging feedback from potential customers like 'Can I buy your curation system?' and 'We need this because doing it ourselves is too complex and expensive' confirmed the wider demand.I heard this from multiple large enterprise companies. Motivated by both my internal need and external interest, I’ve set out to productise and expand the proven curation process through Coho V1, aiming to serve more organisations effectively.

Today, I’m at the beginning stages of building a platform that makes it easy for employees to learn from each other's experiences, so companies can tap into the most valuable knowledge that already exists within their workforce.

It starts by tackling the 'impossible' – curating perfect groups of six peers from thousands of employees.

Of course, building this is hard. It requires cracking some of the toughest problems in natural language processing, knowledge representation, and privacy-preserving data analysis. It requires a deep empathy for the human side of workplace dynamics. And most of all, it requires a willingness to challenge entrenched assumptions about what corporate learning should look like.

But this is precisely why I'm so excited to take on this challenge. After years of manually curating 100’s of these groups, I've never been more convinced that peer learning, powered by today’s tech and our unique, real-world insight, is the key to transforming how people grow at work.

And with organic interest from enterprise companies to pilot this tech, it's clear that the world is ready for a solution like Coho.

What We're Building Right Now:

V1 Test in June: We're starting with a version that blends what we've learned from manual group setups with our new technology. This first step lets us test and improve quickly.

Rapid Feature Releases: After V1, we'll introduce more automation like an AI facilitator to make group discussions even more effective without needing a human to always guide the process and features like ‘summon an expert’ to deliver expert advice to the group when they actually need it.

Scalable System Development: Our ultimate aim is a system that any company can use to unlock meaningful peer interactions at scale without manual overhead.

By early summer we'll be running pilots with a select group of enterprise companies after it passes our internal tests. If you're a forward thinking HR, L&D or People Experience leader you should join us on this journey.