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

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n 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 companies with 50k and above employees. 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 developing a platform that will simplify the complex, manual and expensive process of building effective peer groups, making meaningful professional growth accessible to all.

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

The strategy is as follows:

- If you can successfully curate peer groups that lead to genuine professional growth, you create immense value. And the value that happens in these groups can't be replicated by conventional training methods.
- Use tech to take our successful manual system and make it accessible to more.
- Keep learning and adapting, so Coho always meets the real-world needs of professionals.

By early summer we'll be running V1 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.

Stay tuned. The future of professional development is about creating real connections and learning from each other, not another LMS system.