👋 Hey there - I’m Sanjay. Every week, I share what I think is the most useful writing, data, and commentary from the world of FDE. Would love to hear from you if you have ideas about how to make the newsletter more useful, or if you think there’s something I should be reading that I missed! You can email me at sanjay@fdeverything.com with any thoughts - I reply to every single email.
Writing & videos:
Srikrishnan Ganesan, the founder and CEO of Rocketlane, did an interview about the economics of FDE. One of his main arguments is that you need to sell serious outcomes at a hefty price tag to justify putting engineers on a project, and that some of the FDE job growth out there is just coming from implementation teams that now have a new name vs. being ‘actual’ FDE.
On that topic… It’s worth revisiting (or visiting for the first time!) Ted Mabrey’s essay about why lots of ‘FDE’ roles are FDE in name only. Ted has been at Palantir for 15 years and is the head of commercial there; his take is that lots of companies are hiring for FDEs today but many of them aren’t owning the customer’s outcome. This may help you be more thoughtful as you look for FDE roles: you could consider asking the company a lot of specific questions about how their FDEs truly work and to what extent they are really selling outcomes.
Kevin Bai, a founding FDE at Rippling who now works at Anthropic, gave a talk about FDE to ~1000 AI engineers last month. It’s a helpful 101 if you’re curious for some thoughts about the role from a guy who’s been doing it for a while.
Priya Khandelwal, CEO at Nixo (an FDE success platform), shared some notes from an FDE roundtable. A few: 1/ reframe ‘I don’t know’ as ‘you’re the first customer to ever ask me that,’, never hand a customer a raw metric, and 3/ stop introducing yourself as an engineer to non-technical customers because the label makes people pre-sort problems into technical or not before bringing them up. All of these are rather debatable, I think, but are real FDE opinions!
If you want to learn more about OpenAI’s FDE project, the Wall Street Journal has a good writeup out on how it all works and why OpenAI believes it’s so important.
Interesting news:
Epic Systems, a healthcare software company, announced a program called ‘Epic Rangers’: staff can now sign contracts to embed in a customer’s IT team. (Some ex-Epic folks, on their podcast, referred to it as Epic’s answer to Palantir’s FDEs). It’s interesting to see even legacy companies get into the FDE game.
There’s an essay out on Ode, the $1.5B Blackstone/Hellman & Friedman/Anthropic joint venture with a ~160-person FDE team. It has some good detail on the structure and the actual work they’re doing. Interesting that the labs are basically buying distribution to a bunch of PE-backed or owned companies (Blackstone plans to roll out Ode at 25 of its companies) by partnering with these firms.
My favorite new FDE jobs this week:
Flink Robotics is hiring a lead FDE in Zurich. (Rare-ish European FDE role!) Apply here.
Protege is hiring an FDE to support their video customers. It’s remote! Apply here.
RingCentral, a voice AI platform that’s been public for more than a decade, is hiring a founding FDE to help build out their entire FDE team/function. Apply here.
Replit posted a new FDE role (hybrid in Foster City, CA, or in NYC). Apply here.
Notion is hiring a Forward Deployed Architect role in SF or NYC. Apply here.
Notes:
I hope you have a great week!
Soon I’ll be interviewing great FDEs and FDE leaders; if you know someone you think I should talk to, let me know at sanjay@fdeverything.com - would be much appreciated.
You can also email me with any feedback or suggestions you have.
Are you aware of any companies doing really great FDE work that the world should hear about in a longer-form essay/deep dive? Tell me about it if so :)
See you next week,
- Sanjay