Roundup: Amazon launches $1B FDE org, Microsoft does the same.

A biweekly roundup of everything forward deployed around the tech world. OpenAI acquires Northslope, Jason Lemkin on the FDE function, and more.

👋 Hey there - I’m Sanjay. I’ll be writing a little bit each week about what’s going on in the world of FDE. As always, would love to hear from you about how to make the newsletter more useful, and please do send along links or things I should be reading! You can email me at sanjay@fdeverything.com.

Favorite resources from the last two weeks:

• Amazon launches FDE org, now valued at $1B. This continues the trend of the big labs building massive deployment arms to try to get enterprises to adopt their AI systems. In similar news…

• OpenAI DeployCo acquires Northslope. This is particularly huge - Northslope was a very big ex-Palantir shop, and as far as I know they were only doing deployments of a single piece of software: Palantir Foundry.
  
  Presumably now that they’re a part of DeployCo they’ll be focused on trying to sell as many OpenAI tokens as possible instead.
  
  Does that mean there’s a gap in the market for an FDE shop who wants to help deploy more Palantir? Perhaps this is good news for Fourth Age and Foxtrot, similar shops that are also run by Palantir alums.

• Tomasz Tunguz wrote about the $10B FDE boom. While his focus was on how the big tech companies are funding the forward deployed work, I think the thing that’s more interesting to me is whether those people and dollars can be productively deployed at speed.

  

  Selling into enterprise is hard. You can’t really just hire a bunch of FDEs and magic your way into it. You need to get stakeholder buy in, budget approval, and so on.
  
  I think all of these FDE orgs have to prove that they can actually serve a tangible market pull. Are enterprises so hungry for AI that you can hire an army of FDEs to deploy it? How many of those FDEs are going to be sitting on the bench?
  

  Perhaps the answer is yes. Every business out there desperately needs AI, but can’t implement it fast enough, and so these FDEs will meet the surging market demand. And perhaps the answer is no - many businesses do want AI, but they are slow to adopt or have enterprise-length sales cycles or they want to run an RFP. And in that case my guess is there’s going to be a lot of layoffs at these places in about a year.

• Jason Lemkin wrote about FDEs on the SaaStr blog. It’s interesting that even a SaaS veteran like Jason has pretty great intuition for how FDEs are different from traditional CS:

Traditional CS was built for a different era. The job was: help customers use software they’ve already decided to buy, make sure they hit their renewal metrics, escalate bugs. It was reactive, relationship-driven, and optimized for retention.

FDE work is different in almost every way. It’s proactive, technical, and optimized for deployment. You’re not waiting for a customer to have a problem. You’re going in before the problem exists and configuring the system so the problem never happens.

Favorite FDEverything roles from the last two weeks:

• Scott is hiring for a Deployed Engineer at Cognition. Cognition is the maker of Devin, the AI software engineer, and Windsurf, the AI-native IDE. (SF, Austin, NYC) Apply here.

• Isaac is hiring for an Agent Engineer at Sierra. Sierra is building AI systems for customer experience. Bret Taylor is Sierra’s CEO, and the story of him rewriting Google Maps over a weekend is legendary. (SF, NYC) Apply here.

• Karan is hiring for a Forward Deployed Engineer at Cartesia. Cartesia builds fast, highly expressive generative voice models. (SF) Apply here.

• May is hiring for an AI Deployment Engineer at Writer. Writer builds AI agents for marketing. (USA, UK) Apply here.

Notes:

• Thanks for reading! Email sanjay@fdeverything.com with any ideas / feedback / suggestions / important content I’ve left out!

• If you found this helpful, respond with a thumbs up. Or ping me with a quick reply (it’s Friday, you know you want to). I respond to every email and am always excited to talk about work.

• I’m looking to write more about individual companies and how they do FDE. If you’re at an amazing applied AI company that wants a write up, please reach out!