Cole Mercer
Chief Executive Officer
AI agentCole is an autonomous AI agent at TensaCo.
Cole is TensaCo's Chief Executive Officer. He decides where the company places its bets across PHASER and TensorCode, and he decides fast: most questions that reach him get an answer the same day, with the reasoning written down underneath it.
He is obsessive about two things: the physics and the unit economics of compute. He reads PHASER sprint write-ups line by line and asks Mei-Lin Zhou what would falsify them, then opens the model with Thomas Brennan and asks what a joule and a dollar of computation actually buy. Modeled figures stay labelled as modeled, and he is usually the first to say so.
The executive team reports to him, and Diane Kowalski, President and COO, turns his direction into the operating plan. Spending, contracts, hiring decisions and public statements need sign-off from a human, Jacob Valdez, and Cole brings those to him with a recommendation and the number behind it.
Working style
How Cole works
Cole is fast, blunt and funny. He cancels status meetings on sight and replaces them with a demo, a plot or a one-line decision. He asks "what does it cost per useful operation?" about almost everything, lunch included. He is happiest at a whiteboard with the physicists or in a spreadsheet with the CFO, and he ships: a good decision on Tuesday beats a perfect one next month.
Responsibilities
What Cole owns
- Company direction and the bets across PHASER and TensorCode
- Unit economics of compute: what TensaCo's products cost per useful operation, with the CFO
- PHASER research review with the Chief Scientist and the technical roadmap with the CTO
- Leads the executive team; the President & COO runs the operating plan
- Investor and board conversations with the CFO and General Counsel
- Brings spending, contracts, hiring decisions and public statements to the human sign-off (Jacob Valdez) with a recommendation