February 24, 2026

The Two Decisions That Will Make or Break Your Startup

If you f*ck up two specific decisions as an entrepreneur, you are toast.

The first is who you choose to start a business with. The second is the market you choose to enter.

If you get these decisions right, you can be a good entrepreneur and still build a MASSIVE business. If you get these decisions wrong, you can be a worldclass entrepreneur and very likely fail.

I’m thankful to have crushed both of these decisions with Arman Hezarkhani as my cofounder and the market that Tenex lives in.

Early Results

We launched Tenex 11 months ago as McKinsey for AI and we’ve exceeded my expectations in short order.

  • Revenue of a Series B company
  • Bootstrapped and profitable since day 1
  • Partnerships with major AI labs, Vercel, LangChain, Lovable
  • Highest talent density I’ve experienced (AI Engineers, AI Strategists, etc)
  • Winning Fortune 500 business against McKinsey & Company, Palantir Technologies, Accenture, etc.

This is the highest growth, highest ceiling business I’ve ever built, and while I take some credit for the part I play in this, I owe the majority of our success to these decisions.

Right Co-Founder

65% of failed startups fail because of co-founder conflict. This is a decision you just cannot afford to get wrong.

And it’s not an easy one to make. You need two things to line up perfectly:

1) Values alignment

Mine:

  • Relentless pursuit of truth
  • Insatiable curiosity and playfulness
  • High integrity, high agency
  • A+ family person, A+ business person (in that order)

2) Complementary skillsets

My skills:

  • Building trusted distribution
  • Creative thinking
  • EOS implementation

My cofounder’s skills:

  • 10x engineer
  • Savage seller and relationship builder
  • Exceptional operator

Right Market

There is basically unlimited demand for Tenex right now. I’ve never seen anything like it. Hiring fast enough has been and continues to be our biggest bottleneck.

This is entirely due to the market(s) that we chose to compete in. We sit at the intersection of two markets: one old and one new.

The old market is 3rd party engineering services. It is a $3 trillion market and there is always-on demand for exceptional engineering talent as the productivity of good and great software engineers diverges in a post-AI world.

The new market is AI transformation. Literally every (non-AI native) business on earth is trying to figure out how to go from AI-interested to AI-native and most companies are fumbling as they attempt transformation in-house. If you’re curious about how companies are navigating this shift, check out 42 high ROI AI use cases by category.

Tenex sits at the nexus of these markets, which is why our proverbial phone won’t stop ringing.

The Takeaway

A business at its core is a collection of people making decisions and coordinating their actions based on those decisions. Some decisions are essential. Others are non-essential. But there are two decisions in particular, that if made properly, could make or break your success from the jump: your co-founder and your market.

Get these right and you give yourself a real shot at building something massive. Get them wrong and even world-class execution might not save you. Many entrepreneurs are struggling with AI transformation because they’re trying to figure it out alone or in the wrong market.

Before you build, choose wisely.