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

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2. 0:16 All right, thank you so much, Basil, for the introduction.
3. 0:19 Hello there, those of you in the audience.
4. 0:20 Thank you so much for joining us today.
5. 0:22 My name is Kevin.
6. 0:24 Technically, we don't really have titles, so I am member of technical staff at Anthropic, working on the Applied AI team.
7. 0:31 Before this, I joined Rippling to help build their FDE function.
8. 0:35 I was the first person to join that team, and we grew it to around 25 in a year.
9. 0:41 And so that's pretty cool.
10. 0:42 And then before that, did a bunch of stuff at Palantir.
11. 0:45 You know, list of companies is not really that interesting, right?
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13. 0:48 Because we're talking about a function, and what I hope you're all here for is to hear about forward-deployed engineering.
14. 0:56 If you are here for evals, or if you're here for, I don't know, videos of kittens, that's probably one room over.
15. 1:03 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.
16. 1:11 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.
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18. 1:30 And if possible at the end, would love to take any and all questions.
19. 1:34 All right, does that sound good?
20. 1:36 Yeah?
21. 1:36 Okay, that's too low energy.
22. 1:38 Does that sound good?
23. 1:40 There we go, oh my god, it's a conference, not a funeral.
24. 1:42 Let's go!
25. 1:44 So, okay, high level, right?
26. 1:47 What does Palantir do?
27. 1:48 Palantir is a technology company that creates a technology platform, a software platform called Foundry.
28. 1:57 What Foundry does is Foundry enables organizations of arbitrary size to centralize all of their data in one place to create an ontology.
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30. 2:08 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.
31. 2:19 And then on top of that, Foundry enables companies to build applications.
32. 2:24 Okay, so if I was 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?
33. 2:36 And so that's kind of where it falls short if you're just selling technology.
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35. 2:40 And then the other piece that's kind of interesting is that you as a app building platform, Foundry, your success is determined by how well your customers can use your particular piece of software.
36. 2:52 And so there's also a huge tax
37. 2:54 Not only are customers paying to invest in this platform, they are also needing to train up their people to get effective on it, and then and only then are they able to build things.
38. 3:03 That is a terrible way to do business, and we soon realized that instead of selling just
39. 3:09 services or just products, you sell both.
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41. 3:12 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?
42. 3:21 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.
43. 3:35 because if you are a leader of industry, 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.
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45. 3:47 That's more of an implementation detail.
46. 3:50 So where does this notion come from, this ridiculous idea of sending engineers to the forefront?
47. 3:55 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.
48. 4:03 And so I want to make this really, really clear.
49. 4:07 You can imagine this as a Punnett Square.
50. 4:09 It has to do with what it is you're selling and then who it is that's buying from you.
51. 4:15 So, if you sell a very technical platform or product, right?
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53. 4:19 Let's forget Foundry for a second.
54. 4:21 If you sell a GitHub or if you sell a Datadog, it is an incredibly complicated piece of software.
55. 4:29 However, your ICP, right, are going to be CTOs, CIOs, and then your users are going to be software engineers.
56. 4:35 They're going to be people who can take and absorb this complexity and use it because it's part of their job.
57. 4:40 The other situation is you are selling something that's not that complicated, and your buyer is not that technical, which is also fine.
58. 4:47 Say you have a tool, something like a Rippling or something like a Jira or like a Slack, and those tools might be complicated, but they're configurable.

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