Companies use the term FDE (Forward Deployed Engineer) for two quite different roles that a lot of people misunderstand. It gets treated as the golden weapon to destroy any problem, but what’s missed is that it’s actually split into two different jobs. In my view, FDEs fall into two categories: - Type 1 FDEs build 80-90% of the solution with each customer. - Type 2 FDEs work on top of a product that already delivers most of the value, and bridge the last mile by connecting the backends and setting up the customer’s logic inside the platform. This matters for two reasons, it tells you: 1. Whether you’re building a product or a service business 2. Who you specifically need to hire, because each type needs a different profile. We wanted one platform where customers could build their own agents on top of it. That is a Type 2 model. A bunch of smart founders are hiring FDEs right now. But it’s important to know which type you’re hiring: Ask yourself how much of the solution exists before the FDE shows up. If the product already delivers most of it, it’s a Type 2. If the FDE builds most of it with the customer, it’s a Type 1. That decides how you build the product and which salespeople & FDEs you hire.

If anyone can build an agent, your edge is… - Deterministic boundaries on critical actions - Only the right context at the right moment - Guardrails that hold under pressure - Evals that define good before you ship - Successful agent-to-agent interactions - Authentication when calls are agent-to-agent - Dedicated capacity so latency holds at peak - Observability once agents are loose in production

A Harvard professor once invited some students over to dinner. I ended up sitting next to him, and halfway through the evening he told a story about a student he’d once wanted as a teaching assistant for his computer science class. The student said no. He had something important going on. So I asked who it was. He said the student was Mark Zuckerberg... That dinner was one of the most memorable moments that pushed my thinking of ambition. Anyone who makes an impact is just an ordinary human like you and me. So here’s what I do now: 1. I reset the bar the second we reach it. When we raised our seed at a $20M valuation, I told the team our next target was 50x. We hit the billion. Then I told them we’re aiming for $50B. 2. I hire for ambition over résumé. Grit, intellectual capability and ambition matter more than anything else. Experience tells you what a person has already done, but if the goal has never been done, my team needs something else. 3. I allow myself to break things that work. At the end of 2022, we had a product and customers, but we need to rebuild it on LLMs. So we took 95% of our engineers off the revenue-generating product and spent 18 months fixing it. 4. I’m always willing to dive deeper. You delegate ownership as you scale, but when something isn’t at the bar you believe it should be, go in yourself and reset it. Gets your hands dirty. 5. I ask customers about the impossible. I’m never asking about things we could ship in three months, I want to know what 10x solution would look like for them. Always aim for the moon. One of our core values: “If other people aren’t telling you that your ambitions sound crazy, you’re probably not thinking big enough.”

Being unfazed by rejection is one of the main traits you learn as a founder. During our seed round, we spoke to 40+ investors and we also got a life-changing acquisition offer. We could have sold Parloa. But we didn’t. On December 23, with two weeks of runway left, one investor said yes. It changed our company’s trajectory We’ve raised $550M+ since then and we’re building what we dreamed of back then. If you’re facing rejection, remember… it only takes ONE yes.