Roundup: Matan vs Shyam on what an FDE is, Aaron Levie on the rise of the internal FDE.
A biweekly roundup of everything forward deployed around the tech world. Throwback to a Bob McGrew talk on FDE, DeepMind hiring FDEs now.
👋 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 week:
When we do FDE, the way I think about it is their goal should be acceleration.
If there’s a customer where we just give them our product, they’ll scale to like a million in six months. I’ll throw in FDEs if they’re going to scale them to a million dollars worth in three months. Great, they accelerated that.
If I’m sending in FDEs as services, like I’m not Accenture here. We are not a services company.
If we need FDEs to make the product work, we have a shit product. Like the point of FDEs should be accelerate and get them consuming faster.
The most interesting part of this is how several ex-Palantir FDEs chipped in to say Matan got this wrong. Here’s Barry’s take:
And Shyam’s:
The distinction between the FDE who helps accelerate an implementation of an existing piece of software, and the FDE who helps learn and build a new product, seems to be the biggest dichotomy in the field today.
I’ll write more about this in a future FDEverything post.
Aaron at Box says that an “internal FDE” is going to be an incredibly popular role, that is, an FDE that works directly for the organization rather than being from a vendor.
First of all you need to understand today’s workflow and then figure out how to how to bridge the capability of the technology that is emerging and constantly changing with the workflows of that organization. Sometimes you can get lucky and you can kind of embed agents in an existing business process and it sort of just miraculously works, but oftentimes you actually have to re-engineer the process.
You have to migrate the data sources into a modern system. You have to change the workflow so agents can be more effective in that workflow.
All of that is effectively the work of the forward deployed engineer. That forward deployed engineer could come from a vendor like Box or Salesforce or Palantir or it could come from a systems integrator or maybe a new consulting firm.
I believe Aaron that “internal” FDEs will soon become a thing. And obviously the other two categories are already very prominent.
Throwback - you should rewatch Bob McGrew talk about FDE on the YC podcast. His suggestions for what the Applied AI / FDE playbook will look like seems surprisingly prescient.
In particular, Bob talks about how in large enterprises / the US government, the market is very very segmented, and you want to understand deeply each part of the problem and build a solution for it. That lends itself well to an FDE style motion.
Favorite FDEverything roles from the week:
Prince is hiring a Forward Deployed Creative at Luma. Luma builds AI agents for creative work. What is a forward deployed creative? I’m not sure but it sounds really cool. (LA, NYC, SF) Apply here.
Vinoo is hiring for FDE at Kepler. Kepler is building verifiable AI systems for finance. (NYC) Apply here.
Anna is running the a16z FDE fellowship, an 8-week cohort for FDEs and Applied AI leaders. Deadline to apply is today! (SF) Apply here.
Omar is hiring an FDE at DeepMind. DeepMind won a Nobel Prize for AlphaFold, and invented many of the language model technologies that we use now. (London, EU) Apply here.
Damon is hiring a Technical Deployment Lead at OpenAI. (SF) Apply here.
Sanjay (that’s me) is hiring an FDE tech lead at Luminai. Luminai is building the AI platform for health system operations. I promise not to post about Luminai much, but we’re doing incredible work at Cleveland Clinic and other large health systems. (SF, NYC) Apply here.
Notes:
Thanks for reading! Email sanjay@fdeverything.com with any ideas / feedback / suggestions / important content I’ve left out!
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