From $1m in a week to a durable AI-native firm: building Tenex
Key points
Key takeaways from a theCUBE+NYSE Wired interview with Arman Hezarkhani, co-founder and managing partner of Tenex (October 2026):
Origin story. Hezarkhani launched Tenex with Morning Brew co-founder Alex Lieberman after observing that consumer AI revenue was vastly outpacing enterprise AI adoption; within a week of a launch tweet the pair had booked $1m in revenue from pure AI engineering work.
Founding playbook. A software engineer turned serial founder, Hezarkhani wrote an essay on the opportunity and pitched Lieberman — an investor in his previous venture Parthean — and the pair started the company the same day; for the first 12 months Tenex accepted only contracts of 12 months or longer, selling recurring revenue exclusively to keep forecasts predictable.
Three service pillars. Tenex now operates strategy (finding where AI can create leverage), deployed engineering (building the agents and applications), and transformation (change management and process redesign to secure the ROI) — with an ideal customer profile of mid-market enterprises whose CEOs have publicly made AI a top-one-to-three company priority.
Single-player versus multiplayer AI. Hezarkhani splits use cases into three buckets — single-player, multiplayer, and AI embedded in products — arguing single-player productivity tools are best rolled out bottom-up, with trained employees acting as sleeper agents who surface use cases, while multiplayer process transformation must be top-down because it touches many people and systems at once.
Quick wins are not quick. Behaviour change takes time, so Tenex goes after big, hairy, audacious goals first, only using quick wins inside behemoth clients to build trust; culture — set from the CEO down — predicts how fast a company can transform better than size, and nobody yet truly knows what being AI-native means.
A durable firm, not a flip. Unlike the deploycos being built to be acquired, Tenex is run to last: differentiation comes from platform-agnostic, high-ROI client work delivered through exceptional people, rebuilt processes, and an internal product platform that makes each subsequent engagement faster, cheaper and easier.
Operating leverage. Hezarkhani argues revenue can double without doubling headcount because AI amplifies already-exceptional 10x engineers — the services-as-software economics his theCUBE hosts have long tracked as the holy grail of AI-era services businesses.
Meta harness. Tenex builds and refines its own coding agents — a customer-support agent that first took an engineer five days to build is rebuilt in four days, then faster — so delivery velocity and quality compound with every engagement.
Read more: theCUBE+NYSE Wired (YouTube) · Tenex
