# Design Partner Cohort — Tenki

**Owner:** opencolin DevRel team
**Cadence:** 12-week cohorts · 4 batches per year · 8–10 companies per batch
**Annual budget:** $50K (program ops); white-glove time is in the DevRel retainer
**Targets:** 20 named customer references in 12 months · 8 quotable publicly · 150 paid Team/Enterprise teams by Q2 2027

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## Why this program

Tenki's single biggest weakness (W1) is that it has a real product and almost **no public customers** — early traction is warm and crypto-network-heavy. You can't sell a developer platform on benchmarks alone; evaluators want to see *who else runs this in production and what it saved them.* The Design Partner Cohort is the machine that manufactures those references on a predictable schedule: white-glove onboarding in exchange for quantified case studies, quotes, logos, and Demo Day talks.

It is the supply side for every other GTM motion — sales narratives, the `tenki.cloud/customers` wall, conference talks, and the trust that converts trials to paid usage.

## The deal

**Cohort companies receive:**

- Dedicated private Slack channel with Eddie (CTO), Hayssem (Product Lead), and the DevRel team
- Weekly 30-minute founder office hours
- White-glove migration of their CI to Runners + a custom Code Reviewer rollout
- Hands-on Sandbox integration for their AI agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Devin, Cline)
- **Early access** to unreleased features (Sandbox capabilities, new runner classes) ahead of GA
- A meaningful **credit grant** + lifetime preferential pricing
- Direct line to the eng team via a shared Linear project

**Cohort companies provide:**

- Permission to publish a quantified case study (CI $ saved, build-time saved, real bugs caught, agent runs isolated)
- Permission to use their logo on `tenki.cloud/customers`
- A quotable customer quote
- One co-presented conference talk during the cohort year
- Demo Day participation — a 5-minute live talk at the public livestream

The exchange is deliberately balanced: white-glove + early access + credits **↔** case study + quote + logo + Demo Day talk.

## Cohort #1 target list

Two pools. The first is AI-native teams already standardized on Claude Code / Cursor — they feel the Sandbox and Code Reviewer value immediately and are credible public endorsers. The second is the Luxor network, which de-risks the very first batch with warm intros.

**Pool A — AI-native companies (targets, not confirmed customers):**

| Company | Why a fit | Likely champion |
|---|---|---|
| Vercel | AI SDK team runs agents heavily; CI volume + agent sandboxing | Lee Robinson / Guillermo Rauch |
| Linear | Public Claude Code adopter; quality-obsessed eng culture | Karri Saarinen |
| Replit | Agent platform; per-job microVM isolation is native to their story | Amjad Masad |
| Sourcegraph | Cody + agent workflows; Code Reviewer head-to-head narrative | Beyang Liu |
| Browserbase | Agent infra company; "give your agent root without giving it yours" | Paul Klein |
| Modal | Serverless compute peers; Sandbox cost/boot comparison angle | Erik Bernhardsson |
| Cognition (Devin) | Autonomous agent needs isolated run + review loop | Scott Wu |

**Pool B — Luxor network (warm intros, targets):**

| Company | Why a fit | Path in |
|---|---|---|
| Blockware | Existing Luxor relationship; heavy infra/CI footprint | Luxor BD / Ethan Vera |
| Citrea | Bitcoin-adjacent eng team; warm via Luxor | Founder intro |
| Sia | Decentralized-storage eng org; CI + agent fit | Luxor network |

Pick 8–10 across both pools for Cohort #1. Reach out via warm intro first (Luxor network, Anthropic/OpenAI engineering relationships, founder mutuals), cold-with-a-benchmark second.

> Note: every name above is an **outreach target**, not a current Tenki customer. The cohort is the mechanism that converts a subset of these into the first public references.

## Cohort 12-week schedule

| Week | Cohort focus | DevRel deliverable |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Onboarding · Slack channel · baseline current CI cost + agent setup | Welcome packet · 1:1 kickoffs · before-state metrics captured |
| 2 | Runners migration — one `runs-on` change, Migration Wizard PR | Per-company migration walkthrough video |
| 3 | Code Reviewer enabled on top repos · tune to "merge decisions, not nitpicks" | Reviewer config + first-week review report |
| 4 | Sandbox integration for their agent harness (Claude Code / Cursor / Codex) | Reference setup paired or authored |
| 5 | Benchmark co-publication — their CI bill + build-time, before/after | Cohort-specific benchmark drop |
| 6 | Mid-cohort retrospective + early-access feature preview | Early-access enablement for cohort |
| 7–8 | Production hardening · multi-product adoption (the ≥2 North Star) | Runner/Sandbox tuning · reliability review |
| 9 | Case study interview + draft (quantified ROI) | Draft case study circulated for approval |
| 10 | Demo Day talk prep | Slide review · run-through |
| 11 | Demo Day talk rehearsal | Full dress rehearsal |
| 12 | **Demo Day livestream** | Public publication of case study + logo live |

## Demo Day mechanic

Quarterly public livestream — the YC Demo Day playbook applied to a dev platform:

- 8 cohort companies × 5 minutes each
- ~90-minute total broadcast
- Multi-platform: YouTube primary, X / LinkedIn secondary, Discord audio, seeded to dabl.club's 86k developers
- Each talk recut as a standalone case-study video within 7 days
- Post-event newsletter + blog recap + press push

It manufactures social proof at scale, creates a recurring press moment, and seeds the next cohort's applicant pipeline.

**Production budget per Demo Day:** ~$10K (~$40K/year across 4 events; inside the $50K program line with admin).

## Application flow

1. Public landing page at `tenki.cloud/cohort`
2. 5-question form: company, AI agents/CI in use today, top goal (cost / speed / agent isolation / review quality), timeline, OK-to-publish
3. 15-minute screening call with DevRel
4. 30-minute deep-dive with Eddie or Hayssem
5. Cohort decisions within 7 business days
6. Onboarding kickoff within 14 days of acceptance

## Scope limits

What the cohort does **not** commit to:

- A production-support SLA — that's the Team/Enterprise tier
- Custom feature builds outside Tenki's roadmap
- White-labeling or proprietary forks
- Unbounded credit grants — each cohort has a fixed credit pool

## Risks

| Risk | Mitigation |
|---|---|
| Cohort companies won't go public | Credit grant + lifetime pricing is the quote-permission incentive; secure publish consent in the application |
| Quality variance across cohort | Screening call filters; can decline applicants |
| Scope creep on white-glove | Fixed weekly office-hours window; founders not on-call; roadmap-only feature work |
| Crypto/Luxor association deters Pool A | Lead with the dev products + agent-era story; keep Luxor as an economics asset, not the headline |

## Success metrics (12-month, across 4 cohorts)

- **20 named references** secured
- **8 quotable** publicly (logo + quote on `tenki.cloud/customers`)
- 8/10 case studies published per cohort
- 3/10 co-presented talks delivered per cohort year
- Cohort companies a leading contributor to **150 paid Team/Enterprise teams** by Q2 2027
- ≥60% of cohort companies running **≥2 Tenki products** by week 8 (North Star input)