In second grade, Mason Swofford won a math contest and took home a one-cent bubblegum machine. Most kids would have eaten the gum. Mason started selling it on the playground at a 2,400% markup. Within weeks, he had traded three pieces of bubblegum for a pair of pink diamond earrings from a classmate whose parents owned every Domino’s franchise in Indiana. He was seven years old.
Two decades later, that same instinct for spotting value where others see noise led Mason to build Tenzo AI, a recruiting technology company that uses AI agents to transform how large employers find and hire talent. From bubblegum arbitrage to billion-dollar hiring infrastructure, Mason points to a single trait that has driven his success so far: he cannot move past something he does not fully understand.
From Indiana to Stanford, by Way of Stubbornness
Mason grew up in Indiana, the youngest of three siblings. His father jokes that raising Mason was “payback” for his own childhood habit of asking a million questions. On 30-to-45-minute drives to school, Mason’s parents would quiz his older siblings on math. Mason just listened. By the end of three years, he had caught up to his eldest brother’s math level, simply by asking “how do you do that?” over and over.
His relentless curiosity carried Mason to the top of his high school class of 712 students. His GPA gap over the second-place student was the same as the gap between second place and 50th. He earned more fives on AP exams than anyone else in the state of Indiana. No one from his school had been admitted to Stanford in 17 years.
“My guidance counselor, everyone was like, good luck,” Mason recalled during a recent conversation on the Founder Uncovered podcast with host Kevin Jurovich.
He got in. He found out in a barber’s chair, phone buzzing with texts from friends in a group chat who had all been rejected. He checked the email, saw the acceptance, and opened a bottle of champagne with his parents opened that night.
Meet Tenzo: Agents That Recruit
At Stanford, Mason studied computer science and dove headfirst into artificial intelligence research, driven by his aptitude for statistics. He was working in AI labs as early as 2016, when the field was still called machine learning by most people outside academia. He watched every lab on campus run their work on NVIDIA GPUs, put all of his money into NVIDIA stock as a college student, and has watched that investment grow roughly 50 to 60 times since.
After graduating, Mason started a PhD at the University of Texas at Austin, then dropped out when he realized he was spending years on a path that kept moving further from what he actually wanted: to build a company. He explored for about a year, building coding agents and legal agents in early 2023, before most people had heard of either concept. One of those coding agents had more users than Cursor at the time. Mason walked away from the project, convinced that Microsoft and GitHub Copilot would steamroll any competitor.
“That’s a mistake that was costly for me. Kudos to the Cursor founders. They knew that if they built a better product, they would eventually win out.”
That lesson reshaped how he approached his next venture. Mason and his co-founder, JC, launched what is now Tenzo AI (originally called Salve) with a focus on recruiting. Tenzo builds two types of AI tools for hiring teams: autopilots, which are true agents that take actions on behalf of recruiters and hiring managers, and copilots, which assist humans in real time by pulling up context, searching information, and surfacing relevant data during conversations.
What sets Tenzo apart in a market that now has 40 to 50 competitors is its emphasis on three things most rivals treat as afterthoughts: compliance, candidate experience, and customization.
“A company is nothing more than a collection of people and contracts, and frankly, people built the contracts, so it’s really just a collection of people.”
Mason brings his Stanford research on algorithmic bias directly into the product. Tenzo’s agents operate within strict regulatory guardrails, ensuring companies avoid disparate impact against protected classes. He pointed to lawsuits against Amazon and Workday as cautionary examples of what happens when hiring technology is built without compliance at its core.
On the candidate side, Mason described a common frustration: applying to 1,000 jobs, hearing back from five, and receiving a rejection email a year later for a role long forgotten. Tenzo’s Candidate Concierge agent lets applicants have open-ended conversations with an AI that searches every available role at an organization, matches candidates to the right positions, answers their questions, and guides them through the application process.
The company primarily serves larger employers. Its largest client has more than 250,000 employees. The sweet spot starts at companies hiring at least 50 people per year.
The $4 Million Week
Mason and JC raised a $4 million seed round in just over a week, with their pick of term sheets. Mason is candid about why it came easy: both co-founders came from Stanford, and they had built credibility over years of working at strong companies where leaders could vouch for them.
The key, Mason said, was not cold outreach to investors. It was founder introductions. Friends from Stanford who had started their own successful companies, and founders at places where Mason had previously worked, made direct introductions to their VCs. One friend had previously asked Mason to be his co-founder and CTO. That endorsement carried real weight.
According to Mason, the best way to get a VC meeting isn't cold outreach. It's a founder they already back picking up the phone for you. Someone who can say, "Mason and JC are the smartest people I know. I'm putting money in."
The duo ultimately chose Abstract Ventures as their lead investor. Mason also offered practical advice for founders who lack those networks: go through an accelerator like Y Combinator, and above all, build a track record at every job that makes people say “I wish I would have met them five years earlier” during backchannel references.
Stop Planning, Start Doing
Mason’s biggest advice for aspiring founders is blunt: stop planning and start doing.
“Don’t prep. Don’t set up your legal entity. Don’t do any of those things. Get in front of customers. Don’t even build. Get in front of customers.”
He believes the recruiter role itself is undergoing a fundamental shift. Roughly 60 to 70 percent of people who call themselves recruiters today are really screeners, he argued, and that job is being replaced by AI that can screen more effectively, more consistently, and at lower cost. The recruiters who thrive will be the ones who sell candidates on why their company is the best place to work, advise hiring managers, and orchestrate the agents doing the heavy lifting.
When asked about his biggest inspiration, Mason did not name a tech icon, but mentioned his parents instead.
“I would not be where I am today without my mom having dedicated so much of her life to raising us and my dad putting up with all of our crazy questions and pushing us. There’s nothing that I look back at and I go, they did it wrong.”
His favorite book is “The Challenger Sale,” which he recommends to anyone, not just people in sales roles. “Every job, frankly, is sales,” he said. “Especially to move up.”
This season is supported by Perkins Coie. Perkins Coie is a leading international law firm known for providing high-value, strategic solutions. The Emerging Companies and Venture Capital team counsels startups and the investors who back them, supporting clients from formation to exit. In the past three years, clients have raised more than $23 billion in private markets between the pre-seed and growth stages. Perkins Coie combines tailored counsel with sector experience, so when it’s time to accelerate, whether for the next financing round, a strategic deal, or going public, your team is ready. To learn more, visit perkinscoie.com
More from Uncovered Media
