AI is creating two-person companies that scale

• In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady talks to Adam Khakhar about creating a two-person company with AI.
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Good morning. When I read about the supposed work style of Gen Z and the supposed impact of generative AI on jobs, I think of serial entrepreneur Adam Khakhar. I’ve known him since he was at Brooklyn Tech, launching a streetwear brand with my son called PureNYC. This is a generation raised on Shark Tank, social media, and distributed commerce. Khakhar also had an ed-tech app at the time and went on to co-found a quantitative hedge fund. 

Fast forward to today and Khakhar, now 25, sold his latest startup FlashDocs to Hebbia last month for an undisclosed sum. The idea came about when he was two years into a PhD program in machine learning at NYU. “I didn’t want to watch the world change around me, since I was writing about these technologies,” he told me recently. “I wanted to build something myself.”

He met veteran entrepreneur Morten Bruun at a VC dinner and together they decided to solve the challenge of synthesizing text into a slide deck, with charts, images and graphics that could be tailored to a company’s brand guidelines.

Working out of Khakhar’s Manhattan apartment, the two of them created an application programming interface (API) to turn AI prompts into branded slide decks in seconds. They sold their first subscription for $800 a month almost immediately. “I was able to develop a demo overnight but it took a few weeks to create something usable,” Khakhar said. “I was able to use AI tools to completely automate marketing functions, front-end engineering and other roles. It was kind of scary and exciting at the same time.”  

They amassed several dozen enterprise clients, including Amazon, by the time they sold to Hebbia a little over a year later. The duo became co-heads of API and artifacts at Hebbia, with access to an engineering team of about 30 people. “AI tools are really good for a quick start,” he said. “When you want to scale from tens of thousands to a million slide decks per day, you can’t really vibe-code your way there.”

Lesson One: AI will enable more two-person companies to thrive and scale. (I just had dinner with Humanitas.ai CEO Philip Chow, who says he and CTO Aravindh Ravisankar are focused on pursuing a “high-impact, asset-light greenfield opportunity that otherwise wouldn’t have existed without AI.”) 

Lesson Two: Don’t write off Gen Z. As Khakhar puts it: “At no other time could a 23-year-old create a B2B software-as-a-service startup and get publicly-traded companies as customers in such a short time.”

Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com