Forward Deployed Engineering 101 — Kevin Bai, Anthropic, ex Palantir & Rippling Founding FDE

Transcript

All right, thank you so much, Basil, for the introduction. Hello there, those of you in the audience. Thank you so much for joining us today. My name is Kevin. Technically, we don't really have titles. So I am a member of technical staff at Anthropic working on the Applied AI team. Before this, I joined Rippling to help build their FDE function. I was the first person to join that team, and we grew it to around 25 in a year. And so that's pretty cool. And then before that, I did a bunch of stuff at Palantir. But the list of companies is not really that interesting, right? Because we're talking about a function, and what I hope you're all here for is to hear about forward deployed engineering. If you're here for evals, or if you're here for, I don't know, videos of kittens, that's probably one room over. I'm also not qualified to talk about those things. So I am trying to give a talk to you on forward deployed engineering 101. So what I want to do is walk you through the history of the role, the nature of the function, why Palantir chose to adopt FDE as its go-to-market motion, and then extend that to maybe how you could apply it to your own organizations and businesses. And if possible, at the end, I would love to take any and all questions. All right. Does that sound good? Yeah? Okay, that's too low energy. Does that sound good? There we go. Oh my god, it's a conference, not a funeral. Let's go. Okay. High level, right? What does Palantir do? Palantir is a technology company that creates a technology platform, a software platform, called Foundry. What Foundry does is enable organizations of arbitrary size to centralize all of their data in one place, to create an ontology. What that means is to create proper nouns out of their data, so that instead of having table one, table two, table three, if you have warehouses, you have a single table that's the source of truth for warehouses. And then on top of that, Foundry enables companies to build applications. Okay. So if I were to explain that to some industry leader or other, they would be like, cool, you've made my data organized, but what does that do for my actual business, right? And so that's where it falls short if you're just selling technology. And then the other piece that's interesting, right, is that you, as an app-building platform, Foundry, your success is determined by how well your customers can use your particular piece of software. And so there's also a huge tax, right? Not only are customers paying to invest in this platform, they also need to train up their people to get effective on it, and then and only then are they able to build things. That is a terrible way to do business. And we soon realized that instead of selling just services or just products, you sell both. So it's one combined thing where the customer is neither buying a piece of software, nor are they buying the time of someone. They are buying an outcome, right? You're sending over really smart people who will go and understand the nature of the customer's business, build them a solution on top of this platform, Foundry. And then the thing that you get in the end is that outcome. Because if you are a leader of industry, right, if you're working in CPG, you care about getting more placement on the shelves, or you care about higher throughput of sales. You don't really care how the data is organized, and nor should you care, right? That's more of an implementation detail. So where does this notion come from, this ridiculous idea of sending engineers to the forefront? Right. Because I'm pretty sure of all the folks in the audience, if you're familiar with software engineers, myself included, we're some of the last people that should be customer-facing. And so I want to make this really, really clear. Okay, you can imagine this as a Punnett square. It has to do with what it is you're selling and then who it is that's buying from you. So if you sell a very technical platform or product, right, let's forget Foundry for a second. If you sell a GitHub, or if you sell a Datadog, it is an incredibly complicated piece of software. However, your ICP, right, is going to be CTOs, CIOs, and then your users are going to be software engineers. They're going to be people who can take and absorb this complexity and use it because it's part of their job. The other situation is you are selling something that's not that complicated, and your buyer is not that technical, which is also fine, right? Say you have a tool, something like Rippling or something like Jira or Slack, and those tools might be complicated, but they're configurable. They're not meant to be developed upon. And so it's fine to be selling to a non-technical buyer. You only need FDE if you are in this weird, unique situation of Palantir, where you are having to sell something very technical to a non-technical buyer. Now historically, why was that the case? Didn't Palantir like to do things easier than that? Well, it's because the nature of Foundry, right, which is an app-building platform, makes it inherently not as interesting to the large tech companies. Google, Meta, what have you, these days, the labs, they all have great software engineers, and they can build whatever apps the organization needs. But when you're selling to, say, a Fortune 500 client that works in oil and gas, they're not really going to have that kind of engineering depth, right? Their pipelines are not data pipelines. It's more going to be fluorocarbons or something like that. So for them to really get full value of your platform, you could either trust that they'll spend the time to not only buy your platform and use it, or you could just say, hey, here's the setup. We will loan you some really good engineers that you don't have to hire, recruit, manage, or retain. They will be trained in not only how to use this platform, but they will also work really closely with you in the same way that if you were at a fine dining restaurant, right, the waiter is there to cater to your every need, and they will figure out how to solve you the problem and then build you the software. And so that ended up being the way that Palantir went to market with the Fortune 500, with the Global Fortune 500. And how has that turned out, right? Because there's no point in me just getting on stage saying, oh, this is so cool, here's the details, blah, blah, blah. So I'll give you some numbers. If you look at the public SaaS companies in the Fortune 500, and you measure them by ACV, average contract value, so of any given customer, how much money is that customer spending with that particular vendor, Palantir is first at $4 million, last I checked. Next biggest is ServiceNow at $1.2 million. Next biggest, I want to say, is Workday at $600K. And then there is not a single public SaaS company that even cracks half a million ACV. So just by these numbers, I would say it works pretty well. Palantir is at some ridiculous valuation now, and only at a few thousand headcount. So, okay, what is this FDE thing? What is this model? What does this mean? Do we have any startups in the audience? Or anybody working early stage? Yeah? Okay, some hands. So I'm sure you're familiar with the concept of a design partnership. So in the early days of a startup, when you don't know what your product is, and your customers don't know what they're buying, you say, hey, let me work with you really closely. Let me figure out what it is you need. I will spend my time, my energy, my technology, my resources. You just give me the context on what your problem is, and I'll build you a really good solution. That's generally how most startups, at least in the B2B segment, find product-market fit. FDE is basically taking this concept of a design partnership and scaling it up into enterprise, right? That was the core assertion of Palantir, which was that who said design partnerships were only for the beginning stages of a company? Why can you not just do that at scale at enterprise? Well, some of you in the audience who are very smart and observant might say, Kevin, you can't do that in the enterprise because you can't maintain it. If you build something custom for every single customer, you are going to be hurting a whole bunch of cats, and you're going to have a bunch of really shitty code, and no engineer is ever going to work for me because they can't maintain it, and no one solution. That's generally how most startups, at least in the B2B segment, find product-market fit. FDE is taking this concept of a design partnership and scaling it up into enterprise, right? That was the core assertion of Palantir: who said that design partnerships were only for the beginning stages of a company? Why can you not just do that at scale in enterprise? Well, some of you in the audience who are very smart and observant might say, Kevin, you can't do that in the enterprise because you can't maintain it. If you build something custom for every single customer, you are going to be herding a whole bunch of cats, and you're going to have a bunch of really shitty code, and no engineer is ever going to work for me because they can't maintain it, and no one wants to learn 55 repos. And you would be totally right. If you were to implement an FDE function where each FDE is building entirely from scratch, my friends, you do not have an FDE function, you have a dev shop. Nothing wrong with that, of course. Those are really profitable businesses. But the thing that makes an FDE program different is that they are building on top of a platform. They are never writing software from scratch, right? There is already a set of primitives on top of which they could assemble them into some application, some workflow, some solution that is arbitrarily valuable to their customers. That is the really key ingredient here because otherwise you are reinventing the wheel from scratch again and again. And before you know it, your P&L will eat you alive from the maintenance costs if your engineers don't all quit first. Okay. I feel like I just said a lot of words. Do people have a general idea of what I am talking about? Yeah? Some hands. Okay. Great. Great. Oh my gosh. I am above where I thought I would be. So, okay. You are now saying, Kevin, that is cool. You have just told the story. You have given some frameworks. But then I am not here to listen to you talk. Right? I want to know how to apply this to my organization, to my business, how to bring this back to my team. So how do you go about doing that? First and foremost, and this is the thing that I advise to everyone who is thinking through the concept of forward deployed engineering, is really ask yourselves, do I need an FDE function? Do I need one? Not want, right? It is easy to want things that are in vogue. It is easy to want to do AI because that is what everyone else is doing. But do I need one? Do I have some corner case in my business where I must, must GTM a technically complicated thing to a non-technical buyer? If I don't have a situation like this, probably FDE is not the right fit. There are a lot of great things you could do with DevRel and building a great developer engagement team if you are having a technical go-to-market motion. There are a lot of great things you can do with an SLG sales-led motion if you are doing more traditional SaaS. Right? It is only in this situation where you need FDE. That is the first piece. So the second piece is, do I have a platform? Or, phrased another way, am I willing to invest in building one? Because I assure you, no matter how tempting it is to have these engineers that can make you money, if they are not building on top of a platform with some number of shared primitives, you are in for a very bad time. I could not begin to stress the amount of maintenance burden that will be on your team even if you have a robust platform, never mind if you don't have one. And so these are the questions that I would really encourage you to think about from an FDE 101 perspective: do I have to sell something complicated to a non-technical buyer? And do I have a platform on top of which my FDEs can build? Okay. Now for the AI piece, because that's obviously happening in 2026. What's changed since Palantir came onto the market, which I think was 2004, 2005, and now, is that artificial intelligence has made it really, really easy to build, really, really easy to write code, and also really easy to build sophisticated, customizable software for customers. I mean, how many people in the audience are building Agent4X, insurance, legal, what have you, right? I don't even need to see the hands for this one. But the thing that's changed is not that the world has suddenly realized Palantir's FDE motion is a really good idea and they should do that. My personal hypothesis is that the thing which has changed is that the nature of doing business in the software industry itself is what's changed. Because now, nearly every platform is agentic, and that means nearly every platform is customizable. And that also means nearly all of you are going to have a situation where your customers have no idea what the heck it is that you actually do. And if you leave the success or failure of your product to their hands and to their ability to implement, I assure you this is not going to be an easy motion as you try and sell either into the upmarket or try and expand horizontally or vertically. All right. I think that's enough words out of me. I would really like to hear some questions from the audience. Anything and everything is on the table except my current work. Thank you. Hands. Yeah. You talked about shared primitives. Can you give a little more detail? How atomic should these primitives be? Yeah. Just some example of. Yeah. That's a really good question. So, oh. Can I repeat the question first? Oh, yes. So the question was, talk about shared primitives. How atomic should those shared primitives be? What does that mean? So, okay. If you are trying to sell a platform where you're building something that involves data models, right, perhaps one place to start is not having to define a data model from scratch. But I would say, and this is a very lawyerly answer, that it depends on what it is that you're getting into. There's a lot of industries and a lot of situations where you can get away with having very robust primitives, right, where the app itself is 60% built and then people are just customizing the other 40%. And then there are certain use cases in certain industries and spaces where that's really not appropriate. And you need extremely granular configurations and extremely granular tooling. A good example of a platform that I think all of you should be familiar with is AWS, right? I'm sure many of the folks in the audience are really great engineers. And if you wanted to, you could buy your own server racks and then get them online and then maintain them. But who's really done that since the 1990s? But within AWS, right, they give you a shared set of primitives, like DynamoDB. So you don't have to invent the database from scratch. But that's because they're trying to serve an extremely broad swath of customers. So it depends on your user base. Anyone else? Yes, right there. Have you seen cases where two different things collaborate on? So how has that been? Is there a question in turn? What else? Yeah. So the question is on what is the collaboration mechanism? If two FDEs or multiple FDEs work on a project, I would say that's really encouraged. That's a really good pattern. Because especially when you're doing custom work for a customer, the last thing you want is a single point of failure, right? Where one person knows all the information, they go on vacation, and then you're kind of screwed. And so two different companies. Yeah, you go on, let's just say AWS, and then you need to do a project. You're going in from your account. Like working on the same project, like a bake-off? Oh, okay. Or collaboration, like a partner. Yeah, yeah. That model exists as well. It's just no different than having a contractor, right? You have to figure out who the contractor is in that situation. But that's the mental model. All right. Right there in the back. Hi. What's the decision-making that goes on when, like, how do you determine when they change, like, whatever . That is a really good question. The question is, what engineering changes go onto the platform versus what engineering changes go onto the forward deployed side? So anything that's bespoke and unique to a particular customer is something that should really only exist for that one customer. Anything that can be generalizable should be generalized in the long term. Now, when you begin your FDE-ing, probably you're not going to have a lot of different primitives. But that's okay, because FDE is also a great way to scout ahead and to find what additional product services you can build upon to further enable the success of your business. How are we doing on time? Good? Oh, no, not good. All right. Right there in the back. Hi. What's the decision-making process for determining when they change? That is a really good question. The question is, what engineering changes go on the platform versus what engineering changes go on the forward-deployed side? So anything that's bespoke and unique to a particular customer should really only exist for that one customer. Anything that can be generalized should be generalized in the long term. Now, when you begin your FDE-ing, you're probably not going to have a lot of different primitives. But that's okay, because FDE is also a great way to scout ahead and find what additional product services you can build upon to further enable the success of your business. How are we doing on time? Good? No, not good. All right. All right. Last question. Right there. What is the perfect profile of? Oh, this is so good. What is the perfect profile of an FDE? So the tagline that I will leave you with is that a FDE is nothing more than a customer-facing software engineer. And so it is a person who you would hire as a software engineer on your team, but at the same time you would trust them in front of a customer in some shape or capacity. And then the rest you'll have to figure out as you go because we are capped. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. see the hands for this one. But the thing that's changed is not that the world has suddenly realized Palantir's FDE motion is a really good idea and they should do that. My personal hypothesis is that the thing which has changed is that the nature of doing business in the software industry itself is what's changed. Because now, nearly every platform is agentic, and that means nearly every platform is customizable. And that also means nearly all of you are going to have a situation where your customers have no idea what the heck it is that you actually do. And if you leave the success or failure of your product to their hands and to their ability to implement, I assure you this is not, you know, like going to be an easy motion as you try and sell either into the upmarket or try and expand horizontally or vertically. All right. I think that's enough words out of me. I would really like to hear some questions from the audience. Anything and everything is on the table except my current work. Thank you. Hands. Yeah. You talked about meeting shared primitives. Can you give a little more detail? Like how atomic should these primitives be? Yeah. Just some example of . Yeah. That's a really good question. So, oh. Can I repeat the question first? Oh, yes. So the question was, talk about shared primitives. How atomic should those shared primitives be? What does that mean? So, okay. If you are trying to sell a platform where you're building, you know, something that involves data models, right, perhaps one place to start is not having to, you know, define a data model from scratch. But I would say, you know, and this is a very lawyerly answer, is that it depends on what it is that you're getting into. There's a lot of industries and a lot of situations where you can get away with having very robust primitives, right, where the app itself is like 60% built and then people are just customizing the other 40%. And then there are certain use cases in certain industries and spaces where that's really not appropriate. And you need extremely granular configurations and like extremely granular tooling. A good example of a platform that I think all of you should be familiar with is AWS, right? I'm sure, you know, many of the folks in the audience are really great engineers. And if you wanted to, you could, you know, buy your own server racks and then get them online and then maintain them. But who's really done that since, you know, the 1990s? But like within AWS, right, they give you a shared set of primitives, like DynamoDB. So you don't have to, you know, invent the database from scratch. But that's because they're trying to serve an extremely broad swath of customers. So it depends on your user base. Anyone else? Yes, right there. Have you seen cases where two different things collaborate on? So how has that been? Is there a question in turn? What else? Yeah. So the question is on what is the collaboration mechanism? You know, if two FDEs or multiple FDEs work on a project, I would say that's really encouraged. That's a really good pattern. Because especially when you're doing custom work for a customer, the last thing you want is like a single point of failure, right? Where one person knows all the information, they go on vacation, and then you're kind of screwed. And so two different companies. Yeah, you go on like, let's just say AWS, and then you need to do a project. You're going in from your account. Like working on the same project, like a bake-off? Oh, okay. Or like collaboration, like a partner. Yeah, yeah. That model exists as well. It's just no different than having a contractor, right? You have to figure out who the contractor is in that situation. But that's kind of the mental model. All right. Right there in the back. Hi. What's the decision making that goes on when, like, how do you determine when they change, like, whatever . That is a really good question. The question is, what engineering changes go onto the platform versus what engineering changes go onto the forward deployed side? So anything that's bespoke and unique to a particular customer is something that should really only exist for that one customer. Anything that can be generalizable should be generalized in the long term. Now, when you begin your FDE-ing, right, probably you're not going to have a lot of different primitives. But that's okay, because FDE is also a great way to scout ahead and to find what additional product services you can build upon to further enable the success of your business. How are we doing on time? Good? Oh, no, not good. All right. All right. Last question. Right there. What is the perfect profile of? Oh, this is so good. What is the perfect profile of an FDE? So the tagline that I will leave you with is that a FDE is nothing more than a customer-facing software engineer. And so it is a person who you would hire as a software engineer on your team, but at the same time you would trust them in front of a customer in some shape or capacity. And then the rest you'll have to figure out as you go because we are capped. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.