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

Look at public software companies and very few ever crack half a million dollars in average contract value, and that gap is where forward deployed engineering lives. Kevin Bai's 101 starts from the shape of the deal: when your buyer is not technical and the thing you sell is not a finished product they can pick up and configure themselves, you cannot just ship software and walk away. You loan them engineers who build a real solution on top of your platform, so the customer is neither buying a product nor a service but the outcome in between. That is the model Palantir made famous, and it is how you land Fortune 500 contracts a self serve motion never reaches. The trap is doing it as pure custom work. Build a bespoke thing for every customer and you reinvent the wheel each time; what makes a forward deployed program work is a platform of reusable pieces the engineers assemble against, not a pile of one offs. So starting one comes down to two questions: is your product complex enough to need hand holding into a non technical org, and do you have engineers who can carry that. What has changed since the Palantir days is that building is easy now and nearly everything is agentic, which pulls this once niche motion toward the center of how software gets sold. Speaker info: - https://x.com/zkevinbai - https://www.linkedin.com/in/zkevinbai - https://zkevinbai.com/ - find Kevin on FDE Pod https://fdepod.substack.com/ https://www.youtube.com/@FDEPod Timestamps: 0:00 - Introduction: what this 101 covers 1:47 - What Palantir does, and where FDE fits 3:14 - Selling a solution, not a product or a service 4:18 - When your buyer isn't technical 5:59 - The business case: landing large contracts 7:16 - FDE as a partnership on a reusable platform 9:48 - How to start: two questions to ask 11:34 - What has changed since Palantir 13:08 - Q&A --- Watch along with the corrected transcript, summary, timestamps and resources on this…