The Ledger
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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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: Forward-deployed domain experts must be 'heretics' rejecting existing workflows
“So the echo team, you know, a classic Profile for someone to join your echo team would be someone from the domain you're working in. So, you know, possibly a former army officer or someone who worked deeply in healthcare. So they have deep domain knowledge, bu…”
McGrew: Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar invented the FDE strategy
“And I think this is where Shamsankar, who's very early employee, you know, now that I think the president and CTO of Palantir, he really invented the FDE strategy.”
McGrew: Palantir spawned many startups because its culture prioritizes continuous learning
“This is why Palantir has birthed so many other startups is because even as a very large company, it is still a company where everybody all the time is learning, focused on learning and, you know, always doing that same grinding motion that it is to be a new st…”
McGrew: Forward deployed engineering is ideal training for startup founders
“What you're doing you know, in each of these new environments at each of these customer sites, Is a little bit like being a startup founder, but you're a startup founder where you have access to some very powerful piece of product leverage that makes your job …”
Nadella: Palantir's forward deployed engineer model is fantastic for AI adoption
“That's like the exciting thing is the Palantir model, which I think is a fantastic model. And why is that? That is because of that change management. Because I think you really need to help customers, partners really understand the benefits of any product you'…”
Tan: Former Palantir FDEs are becoming top YC founders
“Forward deployed engineers who Came up through that system at Palantir now. They're turning out to be some of the best founders at YC, actually.”
McGrew: Forward deployed engineers bridge the gap at customer sites
“A forward deployed engineer is someone typically technical and engineer who sits at the customer site and fills the gap between what the product does and what the customer needs.”
McGrew: Palantir's FDE model relied on Echo analysts and Delta engineers
“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 …”