Bob McGrew
Co-founder, Arda · 2 appearances on the record.
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executiveengineerscientistfounderoperator@bobmcgrewai ↗LinkedIn ↗
After spending a decade directing engineering and product management at Palantir, McGrew served for eight years at OpenAI as VP of Research and Chief Research Officer, overseeing breakthroughs including GPT models, DALL-E, and o1. After leaving OpenAI in late 2024, he co-founded Arda and joined Thinking Machines Lab as an advisor.
51statements → 16claims → 4claims resolved → 100%fully supported → 3.65/5average certainty → 2.39/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated →
4 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 12 not checkable as stated how the 16 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
7 predictions · 9 assertions · 6 opinions · 29 insights · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 16 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 4 are resolved, and 12 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Bob argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
Expressed certainty vs assessment result
weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet
How they sound: not measured why? →
We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Bob McGrew on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Bob McGrew said on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
McGrew: LLMs have entered a pure scaling regime toward AGI
“And now that that has been cracked at this point, I think we actually have a very clear path to just focus on scaling. You know, we were, you know, talking about that you know, the zero to one part, that's not about scaling. I think there's a really strong cas…”
McGrew: FDE-led product discovery beats traditional sales-led discovery
“Sales-led product discovery, you're talking to people from the outside. And again, this is important very early on, but it's not as effective as the FDE-led product discovery, where you're solving these problems from the inside.”
McGrew: Building what customers ask for turns startups into consulting firms
“I think one of the other failures, by the way, that's even prior to that, and more, the easier failure to become a consulting firm, it's where you build the product in the field that the customers are asking for, rather than the one that's actually valuable to…”
McGrew: Startups should avoid FDE strategy unless no alternative works
“My first, second, and third pieces of advice to people who are thinking about trying an FDU strategy is like, don't,
Don't do this at home.
If you can avoid it, like it's probably bad for you.
Probably you're going to end up doing services.
And then only if yo…”
McGrew: In five years, AI agents won't be a single category
“Probably in five years, we'll look back, we'll be like, well, AI agents, there wasn't even a thing at all, right?
We were actually doing all these different things.”
McGrew: FDE strategy succeeds by growing contract sizes rather than cutting customization
“In the product market fit strategy, you want to be doing less work for every customer, you want to be driving down costs, you want to keep the contract size the same. In the FTE strategy, you want to drive the contract size up. So you're doing more and more va…”
McGrew: AI capabilities will outpace adoption over the next five years
“What the world is gonna look like over the next five years is that the capabilities just race ahead and race ahead and race ahead.”
McGrew: Nobody believed next-token prediction would work before GPT-1
“And the core idea behind GPT-ONE is that if you have a transformer and you apply this super simple objective of guessing the next token, guessing the next word, that that would be enough signal that you could actually have something that would be able to gener…”
McGrew: LLM pre-training scaling will inevitably hit a data wall
“It is definitely the case that there is a data wall and that if you take the same techniques that we were using to scale LLMs you know, at some point you're going to run into that.”
McGrew: AI founders should build with frontier models first, distill later
“Yeah, I would say if you're a founder, the right approach is to start with the very best model you can, because, you know, your startup is only going to be successful if it exploits some, something about AI that realistically is going to be on you know, the fr…”
McGrew: AI impact is not visible in productivity statistics
“I mean, yes, AI has had some effects, you know, particularly on people who write code, but, you know, I don't think you can see it in the productivity statistics, unless it's about how big the data centers are that we're building.”
McGrew: Future human jobs will bifurcate into 'genius' and 'manager'
“I think that the role that we're going to be playing, You know, one, I think there's going to be two roles. One will be something like a lone genius. You know, the Alec Radford of the world working alone at his computer, coming up with some crazy idea, but now…”
McGrew: Robotics will see a 'ChatGPT moment' within five years
“Robotics companies now are where, you know, LLM companies were five years ago. So I think in five years, you know, or even, even sometime in the next five years, we will see the chat GPT moment for robotics.”
McGrew: AI will automate scientists before physical experimenters
“I think weirdly we're going to end up with, you know, automating the scientist, the innovator before we automate, you know, the experiment doer.”
McGrew: FDEs function as product discovery linking client needs to platforms
“What he realized we needed was for the FTEs to act as product discovery. So they would go to the site, they would take the product as it was, and they would fill the gap between what the product did and what the users needed. So, you know, the FDE goes and bui…”
McGrew: Forward deployed engineers must be rapid prototypers, not code craftsmen
“And then for your deltas you want someone who's really good at prototyping. So the wrong profile for a Delta would be someone who's a craftsman who really loves, you know, making sure the abstractions are exactly right. That, you know, they're building softwar…”
McGrew: FDE deployments start at negative margins before becoming profitable
“From a business model perspective, one of the key things that you will see, that you should see, is that it may be the case that you're, when you go into, you do a new deployment at a customer, that you're actually losing money early on. As the longer you're a…”
McGrew: Bringing one-off FDE solutions directly into core products causes over-specialization
“There's a classic failure mode here where, you know, the FD implements something for one customer and you say, great, well, that's how you should do it. And you bring it directly into the product. And it turns out if you do that, you're building something that…”
McGrew: Palantir avoided hiring traditional PMs who lacked abstraction skills
“We didn't hire product managers for a long time. And when it did come time for me to hire product managers, I would interview people who were amazing product managers at, you know, other companies. And I would ask them to think at this level of abstraction. Th…”
McGrew: The FDE model is doing things that don't scale, at scale
“Well, that's the advice that you give to an early stage founder, and the FDE model effectively is doing things that don't scale at scale.”
McGrew: Most successful FDE startups have Palantir alumni leading the model
“I think the startups, the most successful startups doing the FTE model have people from Palantir running the FTE model.”
McGrew: Early startups should take on execution risk with outcome-based pricing
“Early on, it makes sense for the startup to just take on all the risk and say, we're going to just believe in our own execution. And, you know, we're going to take on the risk and you pay us if it works or you pay us when, you know, we're actually able to expa…”
McGrew: Platform teams must treat internal FDEs as their key customers
“You want to focus on, on the user experience and you have to do that, but you also have to remember your other key customer is the FDE. Your product should be, you know, ultimately delivering a good thing to the user after FDE customization, but it should be d…”
McGrew: Solving Dota 2 proved scale enables AI generalization
“And there was real insight that was generated there, which was that it really strengthened our belief that scale was the path to improving artificial intelligence. That with Dota two, the secret idea was that we could take huge amounts of experience and feed i…”
Appearances (2)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| The FDE Playbook for AI Startups with Bob McGrew · Y Combinator | Sep 8, 2025 | 36m |
| Bob McGrew: AI Agents And The Path To AGI · Y Combinator | Jan 31, 2025 | 20m |