WEBVTT

NOTE Sentence-level transcript of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwhgfwOSToQ

NOTE One cue per sentence. Cue ids are the line anchors on /transcripts/KwhgfwOSToQ.html. A cue ends where the next begins, or 2 s after its last word.

s1
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All right.

s2
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Thank you so much, Basil, for the introduction.

s3
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Hello there.

s4
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Those of you in the audience, thank you so much for joining us today.

s5
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My name is Kevin.

s6
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Uh, technically we don't really have titles.

s7
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So I am member of technical staff at Anthropic working on the applied AI team.

s8
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Uh before this I joined Ripling to help build their FTE function.

s9
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I was the first person to join that team and we grew it to uh around 25 in a year.

s10
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Um and so that's pretty cool.

s11
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And then before that did a bunch of stuff at Palunteer.

s12
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But you know list of companies is not really that interesting right because we're talking about a function.

s13
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And what I I hope you're all here for is to hear about forward deployed engineering.

s14
00:00:56.079 --> 00:01:03.359
Um if you are here for for evals or if you're here for I don't know videos of kittens that's probably one room over.

s15
00:01:03.359 --> 00:01:06.000
Uh I'm also not qualified to talk about those things.

s16
00:01:06.000 --> 00:01:11.520
So I am trying to give a talk to you on for deployed engineering 101.

s17
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So what I want to do is walk you through the history of the role, the nature of the function, why Palunteer chose to adopt FTE as its go to market motion

s18
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and then right extend that to maybe how you could apply it to your own organizations and businesses.

s19
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Um and if possible at the end would love to take any and all questions.

s20
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All right, does that sound good?

s21
00:01:36.079 --> 00:01:36.720
Yeah.

s22
00:01:36.720 --> 00:01:38.079
Okay, that's too low energy.

s23
00:01:38.079 --> 00:01:40.240
Does that sound good?

s24
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There we go.

s25
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Oh my god, it's a conference, not a funeral.

s26
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Let's go.

s27
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Um, so, okay, high level, right?

s28
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What does Palunteer do?

s29
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Palunteer is a technology company that creates a technology platform, uh, a software platform called Foundry.

s30
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What Foundry does is Foundry enables organizations of arbitrary size to centralize all of their data in one place to create an ontology.

s31
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What that means is to create proper nouns out of their data.

s32
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So that instead of having, you know, table one, table two, table three, if you have warehouses, you have a single table that's the source of truth for warehouses.

s33
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And then on top of that, Foundry enables companies to build applications.

s34
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Okay.

s35
00:02:25.599 --> 00:02:36.080
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?

s36
00:02:36.080 --> 00:02:36.400
Right?

s37
00:02:36.400 --> 00:02:40.000
And and so that's that's kind of where it falls short if you're just selling technology.

s38
00:02:40.000 --> 00:02:52.080
Um and then the other piece that's kind of interesting, right, 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.

s39
00:02:52.080 --> 00:02:54.400
And so there's also a huge tax, right?

s40
00:02:54.400 --> 00:03:00.959
Not only are customers paying to invest in this platform, they are also needing to train up their people to get effective on it.

s41
00:03:00.959 --> 00:03:03.200
And then and only then are they able to build things.

s42
00:03:03.200 --> 00:03:05.200
That is a terrible way to do business.

s43
00:03:05.200 --> 00:03:12.239
And we soon realized that instead of selling just services or just products, you sell both.

s44
00:03:12.239 --> 00:03:19.280
Um, so it's one combined thing where the customer is neither buying a piece of software nor are they buying the time of someone.

s45
00:03:19.280 --> 00:03:21.280
They are buying an outcome, right?

s46
00:03:21.280 --> 00:03:27.040
You are sending over really smart people who will go and understand the nature of the customer's business.

s47
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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 a leader of industry right if you're working in CPG

s48
00:03:39.440 --> 00:03:50.400
you care about you know 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.

s49
00:03:50.400 --> 00:03:52.640
So where does this notion come from?

s50
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This ridiculous idea of like sending engineers to the forefront because I'm pretty sure of all the folks in the audience, you know, if you're familiar with software engineers, myself included, where we're some of the last people that should be customerf facing.

s51
00:04:03.840 --> 00:04:06.640
And so I want to make this like really really clear.

s52
00:04:06.640 --> 00:04:09.040
Okay, you can imagine this as a punit square.

s53
00:04:09.040 --> 00:04:15.680
Um it has to do with what it is you're selling and then who it is that's buying from you.

s54
00:04:15.680 --> 00:04:21.359
So if you sell a very technical platform or product, right, let's forget Foundry for a second.

s55
00:04:21.359 --> 00:04:29.440
If you sell a GitHub or if you sell um a data dog, it is a incredibly complicated piece of software.

s56
00:04:29.440 --> 00:04:35.199
However, your ICP, right, are going to be CTO, CIOS, and then your users are going to be software engineers.

s57
00:04:35.199 --> 00:04:40.720
They're going to be people who can take and absorb this complexity and use it because it's part of their job.

s58
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The other situation is you are selling something that's not that complicated.

s59
00:04:44.880 --> 00:04:48.000
Um, and your buyer is not that technical, which is also fine, right?

s60
00:04:48.000 --> 00:04:56.320
Say you have a tool, uh, something like a Rippling or something like a Jira or like a Slack, and those tools might be complicated, but they're configurable.

s61
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They're not meant to be developed upon.

s62
00:04:58.560 --> 00:05:03.040
And so, it's fine to be selling to a non-technical buyer.

s63
00:05:03.040 --> 00:05:13.680
You only need FTE if you are in this weird unique situation of Palunteer where you are having to sell something very technical to a non-technical buyer.

s64
00:05:13.680 --> 00:05:15.440
Now, historically, why was that the case?

s65
00:05:15.440 --> 00:05:18.880
You know, like, didn't Palanteer like to do things easier than that?

s66
00:05:18.880 --> 00:05:26.639
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.

s67
00:05:26.639 --> 00:05:33.919
Uh, Google, Meta, what have you, these days, the labs, they all have great software engineers and they can build whatever apps the organization needs.

s68
00:05:33.919 --> 00:05:43.280
Um, but when you're selling to say uh, you know, Fortune 500 client that works in oil and gas, they're not really going to have that kind of engineering depth, right?

s69
00:05:43.280 --> 00:05:45.120
Their pipelines are not data pipelines.

s70
00:05:45.120 --> 00:05:48.240
It's more going to be, you know, uh, fluorocarbons or something like that.

s71
00:05:48.240 --> 00:06:00.479
So, for them to really get full value of your platform, you could either trust that they'll spend the time to, you know, not only buy your platform and use it, or you could just say, "Hey, here's the setup.

s72
00:06:00.479 --> 00:06:06.160
We will loan you some really good engineers that you don't have to hire, recruit, manage or retain.

s73
00:06:06.160 --> 00:06:18.080
They will be trained in not only how to use this platform, but they will also, you know, 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

s74
00:06:18.080 --> 00:06:22.160
and they will figure out how to solve you the problem and then build you the software.

s75
00:06:22.160 --> 00:06:31.919
And so that ended up being the way that Palunteer went to market with the Fortune 500 um with the global Fortune 500 and and how has that turned out, right?

s76
00:06:31.919 --> 00:06:35.919
Because because there's no point in me just getting on stage saying, "Oh, this is so cool.

s77
00:06:35.919 --> 00:06:37.600
You know, here's the details, blah, blah, blah."

s78
00:06:37.600 --> 00:06:39.440
So, I'll give you some numbers.

s79
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If you look at the public SAS companies in the Fortune 500 and you measure them by ACV, average contract value, so uh you know of any given customer, how much money is that customer spending with that particular vendor?

s80
00:06:52.880 --> 00:06:56.000
Balance is first at 4 million uh last I checked.

s81
00:06:56.000 --> 00:07:02.160
Next biggest is Service Now at 1.2. Next biggest I want to say is workday at 600K.

s82
00:07:02.160 --> 00:07:07.120
And then there is not a single public SAS company that even cracks half a million ACV.

s83
00:07:07.120 --> 00:07:09.680
So just by these numbers I would say it works pretty well.

s84
00:07:09.680 --> 00:07:15.759
Um Palunteer is at some ridiculous valuation now uh and only at a few thousand headcount.

s85
00:07:15.759 --> 00:07:19.360
Um so okay what is this FTE thing?

s86
00:07:19.360 --> 00:07:20.319
What is this model?

s87
00:07:20.319 --> 00:07:21.520
What does this mean?

s88
00:07:21.520 --> 00:07:24.960
Um do we have any startups in the audience or anybody working early stage?

s89
00:07:24.960 --> 00:07:25.440
Yeah.

s90
00:07:25.440 --> 00:07:25.759
Okay.

s91
00:07:25.759 --> 00:07:26.639
Some hands.

s92
00:07:26.639 --> 00:07:30.160
So I'm sure you're familiar with the concept of a design partnership.

s93
00:07:30.160 --> 00:07:37.680
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.

s94
00:07:37.680 --> 00:07:39.520
Let me figure out what it is you need.

s95
00:07:39.520 --> 00:07:43.360
I will, you know, spend my time, my energy, my technology, my resources.

s96
00:07:43.360 --> 00:07:47.599
You just give me the context on what your problem is and I'll build you a really good solution."

s97
00:07:47.599 --> 00:07:53.199
That's generally how most startups at least in the B2B segment find product market fit.

s98
00:07:53.199 --> 00:08:01.680
Um FDE is basically taking this concept of a design partnership and scaling it up into enterprise.

s99
00:08:01.680 --> 00:08:01.919
Right?

s100
00:08:01.919 --> 00:08:10.720
That was the core assertion of Palanteer was that who said who said that design partnerships were only for the beginning stages of a company.

s101
00:08:10.720 --> 00:08:13.520
Why can you not just do that at scale at enterprise?

s102
00:08:13.520 --> 00:08:19.919
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.

s103
00:08:19.919 --> 00:08:32.399
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, you know, a a bunch of really shitty code and and no engineer is ever going to work for me because they can't maintain it and no one wants to learn 55 repos.

s104
00:08:32.399 --> 00:08:34.159
And you would be totally right.

s105
00:08:34.159 --> 00:08:41.120
If you were to implement an FTE function where each FTE is building entirely from scratch, my friends, you do not have an FTE function.

s106
00:08:41.120 --> 00:08:42.000
You have a dev shop.

s107
00:08:42.000 --> 00:08:43.200
Um, nothing wrong with that.

s108
00:08:43.200 --> 00:08:45.200
Of course, those are really profitable businesses.

s109
00:08:45.200 --> 00:08:52.240
But the thing that makes an FTE program different is that they are building on top of a platform.

s110
00:08:52.240 --> 00:08:54.399
They are never writing software from scratch.

s111
00:08:54.399 --> 00:08:54.640
Right?

s112
00:08:54.640 --> 00:09:06.000
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.

s113
00:09:06.000 --> 00:09:17.440
That is kind of 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

s114
00:09:17.440 --> 00:09:20.160
um if your engineers don't all quit first.

s115
00:09:20.160 --> 00:09:20.640
Okay.

s116
00:09:20.640 --> 00:09:22.640
Uh I feel like I just said a lot of words.

s117
00:09:22.640 --> 00:09:25.440
Do people have a general idea of what I'm talking about?

s118
00:09:25.440 --> 00:09:27.440
Yeah, some hands.

s119
00:09:27.440 --> 00:09:28.320
Okay, great.

s120
00:09:28.320 --> 00:09:28.880
Great.

s121
00:09:28.880 --> 00:09:29.760
Oh my gosh.

s122
00:09:29.760 --> 00:09:32.560
Um I'm above where I thought I'd be.

s123
00:09:32.560 --> 00:09:36.160
So, okay, you're now saying, Kevin, that's cool.

s124
00:09:36.160 --> 00:09:42.399
You know, you've just told the story, you've given some frameworks, but then I I'm not here to to listen to you talk, right?

s125
00:09:42.399 --> 00:09:47.279
I want to know how to apply this to my organization, to my business, how to bring this back to my team.

s126
00:09:47.279 --> 00:09:50.320
Um, so how do you go about doing that?

s127
00:09:50.320 --> 00:10:01.920
First and foremost, and this is the thing that I advise to everyone who's thinking through the concept of forward deployed engineering is really ask yourselves, do I need an FTE function?

s128
00:10:01.920 --> 00:10:03.600
Like, do I need one?

s129
00:10:03.600 --> 00:10:04.480
Not want, right?

s130
00:10:04.480 --> 00:10:06.320
It's easy to want things that are in vogue.

s131
00:10:06.320 --> 00:10:09.839
It's easy to want to do, you know, AI because that's what everyone else is doing.

s132
00:10:09.839 --> 00:10:11.360
But like, do I need one?

s133
00:10:11.360 --> 00:10:21.680
Do I have some corner case in my business where I must must GTM a technically complicated thing to a non-technical buyer?

s134
00:10:21.680 --> 00:10:26.000
If I don't have a situation like this, probably FTE is not the right fit.

s135
00:10:26.000 --> 00:10:33.519
There's a lot of great things you could do uh with Devril and building a great developer engagement uh team if you're having a technical go to market motion.

s136
00:10:33.519 --> 00:10:38.560
There's a lot of great things you can do with an SLG salesled motion if you're doing more traditional SAS.

s137
00:10:38.560 --> 00:10:38.959
Right?

s138
00:10:38.959 --> 00:10:41.200
It's only in this situation where you need FTE.

s139
00:10:41.200 --> 00:10:42.240
That's the first piece.

s140
00:10:42.240 --> 00:11:00.480
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 right no matter how tempting it is to uh have these engineers that can make you money if they are not building on top of a platform with some number of shared primitives

s141
00:11:00.480 --> 00:11:02.320
you are in for a very bad time.

s142
00:11:02.320 --> 00:11:10.560
I I just I could not begin to stress the amount of maintenance burden that will be on your team even if you have a robust platform.

s143
00:11:10.560 --> 00:11:12.720
Um, never mind if you don't have one.

s144
00:11:12.720 --> 00:11:28.800
And so these are the questions that I would really encourage you to think about from an FDE 101 perspective of do I have to sell something complicated to a non-technical buyer and do I have a platform on top of which my FTEEs can build?

s145
00:11:28.800 --> 00:11:33.839
Okay, now for the the AI piece because that's obviously happening in 2026.

s146
00:11:33.839 --> 00:11:52.560
Um what's changed since Palanteer uh came onto the market which I think was like 2004 or 2005 um and now is that uh artificial intelligence has made it really really easy to build really really easy to write code and also really easy to build sophisticated

s147
00:11:52.560 --> 00:11:55.519
customizable software for customers.

s148
00:11:55.519 --> 00:12:00.160
I mean, how many people in the audience are building agent for X, you know, insurance, legal, what have you, right?

s149
00:12:00.160 --> 00:12:02.480
Um, I don't even need to see the hands for this one.

s150
00:12:02.480 --> 00:12:10.079
But the thing that's changed is not that the world has suddenly realized Palunteer's FTE motion is a really good idea and they should do that.

s151
00:12:10.079 --> 00:12:25.279
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.

s152
00:12:25.279 --> 00:12:28.160
And that means nearly every platform is customizable.

s153
00:12:28.160 --> 00:12:35.120
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.

s154
00:12:35.120 --> 00:12:45.360
And if you leave the success or failure of your product to their hands and to their ability to implement, I I assure you this is not uh you know like going to be an easy

s155
00:12:45.360 --> 00:12:51.360
motion as you try and sell either into the up market or try and expand horizontally or vertically.

s156
00:12:51.360 --> 00:12:54.079
All right, I think that's enough words out of me.

s157
00:12:54.079 --> 00:12:56.560
I would really like to hear some questions from the audience.

s158
00:12:56.560 --> 00:12:59.920
Uh, anything and everything is on the table except my current work.

s159
00:12:59.920 --> 00:13:02.078
Thank you.

s160
00:13:02.078 --> 00:13:04.078
[applause]

s161
00:13:08.560 --> 00:13:09.040
Hands.

s162
00:13:09.040 --> 00:13:11.040
Yeah.

s163
00:13:12.399 --> 00:13:17.360
Can you give a little more detail like how atomic should these primitives be?

s164
00:13:17.360 --> 00:13:17.680
Yeah.

s165
00:13:17.680 --> 00:13:19.920
Just some example.

s166
00:13:19.920 --> 00:13:21.600
Yeah, that's that's a really good question.

s167
00:13:21.600 --> 00:13:22.320
So,

s168
00:13:22.320 --> 00:13:23.120
the question first.

s169
00:13:23.120 --> 00:13:23.680
Oh yes.

s170
00:13:23.680 --> 00:13:26.880
So the question was um talk about shared primitives.

s171
00:13:26.880 --> 00:13:29.519
How atomic should those shared primitives be?

s172
00:13:29.519 --> 00:13:30.639
What does that mean?

s173
00:13:30.639 --> 00:13:47.440
Um so okay if you are trying to sell a uh a a platform where you're building you know something that involves data models right um perhaps one place to start is is not having to you know define a data model from scratch.

s174
00:13:47.440 --> 00:13:54.959
Um, but I would say, you know, um, and this is a very lawyerly answer is that it depends on what it is that you're getting into.

s175
00:13:54.959 --> 00:14:02.000
Um, there's a lot of industries and a lot of situations where you can get away with having very robust primitives, right?

s176
00:14:02.000 --> 00:14:06.880
Where the app itself is like 60% built and then people are just customizing the other 40%.

s177
00:14:06.880 --> 00:14:18.720
Uh and then there are certain use cases in certain industries and spaces where that's really not appropriate and you you need extremely granular uh configur configurations and like extremely granular tooling.

s178
00:14:18.720 --> 00:14:24.160
Um a good example of a platform that I think all of you should be familiar with is AWS, right?

s179
00:14:24.160 --> 00:14:33.360
Um 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.

s180
00:14:33.360 --> 00:14:36.000
But who's really done that since you know the 1990s?

s181
00:14:36.000 --> 00:14:52.800
Um but like within AWS right they give you a shared set of primitives uh like DynamoB so you don't have to you know invent a database from scratch uh 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

s182
00:15:05.360 --> 00:15:05.839
Yeah.

s183
00:15:05.839 --> 00:15:09.600
So the question is on uh what is the collaboration mechanism?

s184
00:15:09.600 --> 00:15:14.959
Uh you know if two FDES or multiple FDs work on a project I I would say that's really encouraged.

s185
00:15:14.959 --> 00:15:23.440
Um that's a really good pattern because uh especially when you're doing custom work for a customer, the last thing you want is like a single point of failure, right?

s186
00:15:23.440 --> 00:15:28.160
Where uh one person knows all the information, they go on vacation and then you're kind of screwed.

s187
00:15:28.160 --> 00:15:29.040
And so

s188
00:15:29.040 --> 00:15:30.079
two different companies,

s189
00:15:30.079 --> 00:15:31.199
two different companies.

s190
00:15:31.199 --> 00:15:31.440
Yeah.

s191
00:15:31.440 --> 00:15:37.519
you go like let's just say to do a project you're going

s192
00:15:37.600 --> 00:15:52.560
like working on the same project like a bake off okay or like collaboration like like a partner uh yeah yeah that model exists as well um it's just no different than having a contractor right uh you you have to figure out who the contractor is in that situation

s193
00:15:52.560 --> 00:15:55.360
um but that's kind of the mental model

s194
00:15:55.360 --> 00:16:12.000
all right uh right there in the back that goes on That is a really good question.

s195
00:16:12.000 --> 00:16:21.279
The question is uh what engineering changes go onto the platform versus what uh engineering changes go onto the forward deployed side.

s196
00:16:21.279 --> 00:16:30.000
So anything that's bespoke and unique to a particular customer um is uh something that should really only exist for that one customer.

s197
00:16:30.000 --> 00:16:34.079
Anything that can be generalizable should be generalized in the long term.

s198
00:16:34.079 --> 00:16:49.199
Now, when you begin uh your FTEing, right, probably you're not going to have a lot of different primitives, but that's okay because FD 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.

s199
00:16:49.199 --> 00:16:50.959
Um, how we doing on time?

s200
00:16:50.959 --> 00:16:51.360
Good.

s201
00:16:51.360 --> 00:16:52.720
Oh, no, not good.

s202
00:16:52.720 --> 00:16:53.040
All right.

s203
00:16:53.040 --> 00:16:53.519
All right.

s204
00:16:53.519 --> 00:16:56.320
Last question right there.

s205
00:16:56.320 --> 00:16:59.199
What is the perfect profile?

s206
00:16:59.199 --> 00:17:00.880
Oh, this is so good.

s207
00:17:00.880 --> 00:17:04.319
What is the perfect profile of an FTE?

s208
00:17:04.319 --> 00:17:14.319
So, the the tagline that I will leave you with is that a FTE is nothing more than a customerfacing software engineer.

s209
00:17:14.319 --> 00:17:25.520
And so, um 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.

s210
00:17:25.520 --> 00:17:28.400
And then the rest you'll have to figure out as you go because we are capped.

s211
00:17:28.400 --> 00:17:30.632
Thank you so much.

s212
00:17:30.632 --> 00:17:32.632
[applause]

s213
00:17:46.352 --> 00:17:48.352
[music]