McGrew: Palantir's FDE model relied on Echo analysts and Delta engineers
Bob McGrew · The FDE Playbook for AI Startups with Bob McGrew · Y Combinator · Sep 8, 2025 · at 9:57
Bob McGrew, former Palantir executive and former OpenAI Chief Research Officer, details the team mechanics behind Palantir's Forward Deployed Engineer strategy.
0:00 / 0:51exact quote · 52.0s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“The two key roles are those of what we call the echo team and the Delta team. The echo team were Embedded analysts. So they would go to the customer site. They would speak to the users. They would try to figure out what demo or what use case really made sense for the users at this site. What was the key problem that could be solved? And they would also be the account managers. So they would also be the people managing the relationships at the customer site. And the Delta team the deployed engineers were effectively software engineers Typically very good at writing code extremely quickly, eating a lot of pain, as we put it. And they would be the ones who sort of took those ideas and brought them into the real world and built a solution, a prototype, but something that could actually work.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Bob McGrew
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…”