⚡️ 10x AI Engineers with $1m Salaries — Alex Lieberman & Arman Hezarkhani, Tenex
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Who are Alex Lieberman and Arman Hezarkhani and what is Tenex’s mission?
Okay, we're here in the remote studio with Alex Lieberman and Armand. Oh my god, I did not practice. Leave it in. How do I how did it leave it in? Uh, just the same Armand. Keep it rolling, Swinks. Keep it rolling.
If it makes you feel bad for the first probably twenty times that I said Arman's name, I said it the wrong way. And he was very polite in guiding me to the right pronunciation. He used to say Armin, not Arman. So it's okay. It's totally fine.
I don't think you have to I mean it's Hezer Khani, but we don't need Hezer Kani. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Armand
has Ricotdy is fine. Um Amazing. Yeah, that's f Honestly be even funnier now where as you're about to introduce him, you just dub Armand's saying his own name over your mouth.
Introducing Armand has a comedy.
It's so funny. It's like when you're when you're like on a voicemail and you're like saying your name while like the automated machine. Totally. Um so you guys are the co-founders of 10X and also uh MCs and speakers at AI AIE, right? So I I mean uh and I I think for me, I have a little bit of extra context on Alex because I followed Morning Brew for a while. You you have been an inspiration on the newsletter business. But let's let's talk about 10X, you know, like I I think that I my my goal here is just to introduce people to you guys, maybe you individually and then you together. So whoever wants to
take it first. Well, I can give you a little bit of the backstory uh behind the business and how Armand and I got to know each other. And then Armand, I'm sure, will fill in some gaps. You know, Armand and I met in 2020 uh when I had invested in his previous business, uh Parthian. And Aparthian uh was a AI financial tools business originally for consumers, being uh AI tooling for financial advisors or R RIAs. And um, you know, throughout Armand building that business, we had continued to talk about just our philosophy on product, how AI was influencing just product in general. And I kind of think, especially for Non-technical folks like myself, there's like a moment where you get smacked in the face by how profound this technology can be if harnessed in the right way.
And I experienced that moment in conversation with Armand. So it was probably this point nine months, nine, nine-ish months ago. Armand and I were talking and he he had shared a story about with Parthian, he unfortunately had to downside. His engineering org. And when he had downsized his engineering org, he had to decrease the size of his engineering team by 90%. And when he did so, he had to rebuild, he had to basically re-architect the entire product and engineering process to be AI first, because he just no longer had a human resource. And so he needed to like accelerate it with this technology. And basically, what Armand had shared with me is that output of production-ready software. Had text after making this shift with the org.
And I kind of didn't believe him at first because I had never seen kind of that level of leverage. Like I'd use ChatGPT, I'd use Grok, I'd use all these things. But and yes, they've been life-changing for me, but I wouldn't I wouldn't have explained them as 10X experiences. So we basically talked through it and he kind of shared with me why AI and specifically LLMs have made Such a profound impact on engineering as a type of knowledge work. And from there, the the thought was around. How the way in which engineers are compensated has to change materially. Because if you think about it, like historically, people charge for their time by hour. And then all of a sudden, let's just say you're a new, like you're truly an AI engineer who's truly 10x higher throughput.
Imagine you're selling your work and someone's used to pay spending $100 an hour for an engineer, and you go to them and you look them dead in the eyes and And you're like, yeah, on a thousand bucks an hour, you're gonna get laughed out of the room, even though you're you're a better engineer than the engineer they would have hired. And also you're perversely incentivized because you leveraging AI in your work.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
Who are Alex Lieberman and Arman Hezarkhani and what is Tenex’s mission?
0:03–5:28
2
How did a 90% engineering downsizing lead to a 10× productivity breakthrough?
5:28–11:03
3
Why does Tenex pay engineers by story points instead of hours?
11:03–17:59
4
What are the most impressive AI‑powered projects Tenex has delivered and how fast were they built?
17:59–24:03
5
How does Tenex’s interview process use “unreasonably difficult” take‑home challenges?
24:03–26:57
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